The false passports inside the Süddeutsche are really weighing him down. So is that little extra bit of money stolen from the reptile fund—except that if Mundy knows anything about Amory, he stole it from himself and not the reptiles. The Amorys of this world don’t steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else’s. So there’s another god for you that’s passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Amory’s religion.
No lights are burning in the windows, but that’s not surprising since Mundy didn’t leave any burning. On the other hand, those young surveyors might have decided to drop by and do some more surveying. But they’ve got flashlights. The gates squeak. Must oil. Tell old Stefan. In the darkness, the brick path weaves around and his big feet keep wandering off it into the long grass. I shouldn’t have had that last one. Mistake. Very quiet up here. Always was, come to think of it. But not as quiet as this, surely. Not on a Saturday night. Must be a big soccer match on television, except that I can’t hear anybody’s television set playing, or see any blue lights flickering in windows.
He finds the lock first time and stands in the darkness of the hall trying to fathom where the electricians put the new switches. Worse than Trotsky, I am with my geography, ask Sasha. Under the glow from the skylight, the shrouded pile of books looms over him like a spectral Grand Inquisitor at the center of the hall. Lot of interesting books there, by the way, Edward. You should take a look at them sometime. Good idea, Nick. Come to think of it, I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up with. He pats the walls, finds the switches but they’re not switches, they’re dials. Nothing’s simple anymore. The new lights dazzle him. He sits down on the stair, tries calling Zara again. Still no answer. Pouring himself a Scotch and water he moves to an old leather sofa in a corner of the hall and scrolls through his cellphone in search of her uncle’s farm, but fails to find it. Neither for the life of him can he remember the old boy’s name, nor the name of his farm. Too many c-cedillas and unintelligible spellings.
Take another pull of Scotch. Reflect. Ten thirty-five by the Major’s tin wristwatch. In Ankara it’s one hour later. Mustafa will be having the time of his life in that flash blue jacket. Wonder what old Jake’s up to. Bringing the rafters down at Bristol University Union. Last heard of, he was running for treasurer. Kate said she’d send me his cellphone number. Didn’t. Must have got stuck in the ministry’s mail room. Maybe if she’d marked it secret they’d have sent it quicker. Cheers.
“And cheers to all our listeners tonight,” he adds aloud, and raises his glass in tribute to the walls. “Marvelous chaps,” he adds. “And chapesses, naturally. Bless you all.”
This room would make a pretty decent mosque, he decides, remembering his instruction at the hands of Mustafa. It’s entry free, it has a wall that faces east. So it qualifies. Put a little basin over there in the corner for our ritual cleansing, your mihrab where the fireplace is, make sure it points to Mecca, portico there, pulpit here, get some tiles with geometric designs and beautiful calligraphy and a carpet with prayer mats drawn on it, put some kids’ rucksacks along the wall and we’re home free—how am I doing, Mustafa?
Never took him swimming. Damn. Promised we’d go before they left, and we both forgot. Note to self: swim the moment we get back.
He scrolls up Dina’s number in Munich and calls her. How’s old Mo doing, Dina? Pining, Ted. And no, Dina hasn’t heard from Zara either. But then she wouldn’t expect to, not unless something had gone wrong. They’re probably having a big party over at the farm, she says. Probably they are, he agrees, and transfers his thoughts to Sasha. So where the hell are you, you shit-faced poison dwarf? Late, Teddy. I shall be late. I have many fine academics to interview.
Well, what sort of late, for Christ’s sake? Late like midnight? Late like three in the morning? Why should Sasha care? How’s he supposed to know I’m sitting here like an anxious mother waiting for her fifteen-year-old daughter to come back from her first date? Hurry, you little bastard. I’ve got the passports. Hurry.
He gets up and glass in hand climbs the two flights to the attic just in case, by some miracle, Sasha has come back early after all and gone to sleep on his pile of improvised bedding, but no Sasha is secreted among the cushions.
He descends the curved staircase, very sober now, one hand for his whiskey, one for the boat. The shrouded heap of boxes observes his cautious descent. You should take a look at them sometime. Reaching ground level he continues to the library. Amid ladders, dust-sheets and paint pots, he locates a carpenter’s box. No padlock. A trusting fellow carpenter. Good chap. He selects a hammer and what Des called his Winston Churchill: a wrench with two fingers in a V. He returns to the hall and sets his whiskey on the floor beside the leather sofa. He removes his jacket but is careful to lay it sideways on the sofa so that the Süddeutsche doesn’t undress itself by mistake in front of the cameras.
Purposefully, almost vengefully, he drags the dust-sheets from the shrouded pyramid, rolls them up and slings them into a corner of the room. Take that. With the hammer in one hand and the Winston Churchill in the other, he selects a crate and begins prizing apart the battens. As he does so, it is his fantasy that he hears a gasp of alarm from his unseen audience. Or perhaps it’s a kiddies’ matinee he’s imagining, and they’re all yelling, “Don’t do it!” or “Look behind you!”
And he does indeed look behind him—but only at the window, in case Sasha’s taxi has pulled up. No such luck.
He has ripped apart the battens on two sides. Des would suggest a bit more science, please, Ted, but Mundy isn’t interested in science. Next comes a skin of thick brown paper joined with masking tape. The snarl it makes when he tears it off takes him by surprise. Inside it twelve cardboard boxes are stacked like bricks. Each crate has twelve boxes, each box has twelve books, he thinks facetiously: so how many boxes are going to St. Ives?
Consult the inventory, Sasha advised. Box One, Network Society, Manuel Castells. Box Two, the same in German. Box Three, the same in French. He labors through each box. He labors through all the boxes. He selects another crate, smashes it apart. And a third. Our front-runner tonight is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in nine languages, so let’s give a big hand to our Brother Frantz, who’s come all the way from Berlin to be with us here tonight.
He takes another look at the Major’s watch. Midnight. The soccer match must be running into a lot of extra time, because in three years of living in this place Mundy has never known a silence like it.
But perhaps that’s just fantasy too: When all your nerves are jangling, when one part of you is dog tired and the other part is witless with worry, when you’re sitting in a bugged house with a pair of fake passports and waiting for your infuriating friend to show up so that you can get him as far away as possible in the shortest possible time, it is only natural that noises—or more accurately the strident absence of them—should take on a supernatural quality.
At first he assumes it’s just a book packer’s stupid mistake.
He’s come across a few of those by now: a couple of Adam Smiths that found their way into the wrong box, a half-set of Thoreau squeezed in with Thorwald, and Doris Lessing mixed up with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Then his head goes a bit furry and he thinks he must be dealing with some sort of throwback of Sasha’s, even a joke of some sort, because he’s remembering how, long ago, when Sasha liberated his subminiature camera from the Stasi operational stores, he also helped himself to an urban guerrilla’s handbook that told him to put his exposed film in a condom and store it in ice cream.
But this isn’t the same handbook.
And it’s not just one random copy either.
Books that we anticipate will be heavily in demand are supplied in multiples, he hears Sasha intoning in his Party voice.
Well, this is
sixty copies if it’s a day. And they’re not talking about ice cream either—not even about photography, miniature or subminiature. Their preferred subjects are how to make bombs out of weed killer and how to kill your best friend with a knitting needle, or booby-trap his car or lavatory, or garotte him in his bed, or drown him in his bath, or smash the horns of his larynx, or send a fireball up the elevator shaft at his workplace.
Selecting his next box comes really hard to Mundy. He has a feeling that he mustn’t get it wrong in front of his many fans; of being a contender in a high-profile quiz program: screw this one up and you’re out of the running.
But when he looks more closely at himself he realizes he’s already doing the wise thing and ripping open the boxes one after another without being concerned whether they contain core works of counterculture or handbooks for aspiring terrorists or snug rows of gray-green hand grenades the size of elongated cricket balls, with puckered casings so that you can grip them in sweaty conditions, or what he assumes are timers for homemade bombs, because that’s what the enclosed instructions say they are.
So it’s not all that long before he’s sitting alone on the floor of the hall with every crate and box opened if not unpacked, and wrapping paper and straw all around him, and Mundy himself looking as bereft as any child on his birthday when there are no more presents to open.
And all he can hear in the unearthly silence is the sound of his own heart going whack, thump, whack, and Sasha’s absent voice pontificating at him through the throbbing of his eardrums. They are trying to put us into one bed. Liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, anarchists, antiglobalists, peace protesters: we are all Sympis, all pinkos. We all hate Jews and America and we are the secret admirers of Osama.
And after Sasha’s done lecturing him, he gets Rourke extolling the beauties of Heidelberg. If you want to blow America and Germany apart, Heidelberg’s not a bad place to make your point.
But then it’s Sasha’s turn to come back with an even better point:
The liberal left will be exposed as the closet fascist bastards they’ve always been, and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe will go crawling to its American Big Brother, begging it to come to its protection.
But the final word and the most authoritative must come from the savagely indignant Nick Amory this very afternoon. And when all these sibyls have said their lines and faded backstage, that’s Sasha’s cue to make one of his own inimitable appearances.
It can never be certain what prompted Mundy to go charging up the stairs to the attic again. After all, he’d been up there only an hour ago. Was it the rattle of automatic gunfire in the street? Or the mayhem inside the house that immediately followed it: the stun grenades, the smoke and smashing glass as a dozen men at least stormed through every door and window screaming at him in American, German and Arabic, ordering him to freeze, lie down, back up against the wall, show us your fucking hands and all the rest of it?
It’s generally accepted that people under this sort of attack go upstairs rather than down, so perhaps Mundy was simply behaving according to the standard pattern. Or was it some sort of homing instinct that caused him to rush up there—his memories of the Berlin squat, and the random impulse to return to it—perhaps in the confused expectation that Sasha will be there ahead of him, or at least know where to find him when he comes back from visiting his latest guru in Frankfurt or wherever, only this time it’s Hamburg?
Or was it merely to get a glimpse of what was going on outside?
Nor could Mundy be sure how long he’d been sitting on the floor surrounded by his toys before the shooting sounded and he started his ascent. It could have been minutes, could have been a couple of hours. Time, when you’re stringing together the net that has snared you, doesn’t count for much. Thinking is far more important. Comfortable ignorance, as Dr. Mandelbaum liked to say, is no longer the acceptable solution, however hard it is to face reality.
He hears the shooting, he sits up in slow motion and he says to himself, drowsily almost: Sasha, you’re out there and it’s dangerous. But when he thinks more about it, he decides that the car was starting to pull up before the shooting began. It was more like this: car, shooting, screech of tires. On the other hand, it could have been: shooting, car pulls up, screech of tires. Either way, he must obviously take a look.
The inside of the house is by now a deafening inferno of smoke and flashes and explosions and abusive screaming. Mundy’s own name, coupled with Sasha’s, is on the lips of every intruder. And what is remarkable to Mundy’s ears, and worth a moment’s thought outside the conventional borders of time, is that he’s heard a couple of these voices before, when not very friendly hands were loading him blindfolded into the van, and reloading him into the helicopter, and slamming him facedown onto the iron deck, before they took on human form and appeared tenderly before him bringing cups of hot coffee and Camel cigarettes and cookies and abject apologies, and calling themselves Hank, Jeff, Art and the like.
And is Mundy totally insane, or does he hear Jay Rourke’s voice screaming above the rest? It’s hard to tell because Mundy has never heard Jay scream before, but he’d lay good money that inside that space-invader costume of his, it’s the selfsame Jay Rourke whose dear father’s birthplace was just sixteen miles from my mother’s as the crow flies, if Irish crows fly straight, which Jay begs serious leave to doubt.
And on the subject of voices in the storm that all drowning sailors are supposed to hear as they go down, Mundy hears another familiar voice from his recent past that to begin with, for the life of him, he just can’t place at all, until after a mental stretch he gets it: Richard. Blond Richard, with the blue blazer and airline steward’s tie. Dimitri’s Richard, who gives a thousand dollars in cash as an appearance fee to all potential employees, whether or not the interview has a successful outcome. Who wonders aloud what money is beside a great ideal.
So there we have it, Mundy tells himself, falling back on Amory’s cumbersome dictum of this afternoon: two horses from the same stable, except that now they’re beating down the door. However, he has not been idle while he is having these thoughts. Somehow or other the erstwhile second-row forward with long legs is making his way up the wide oak staircase that he always loved, paddling himself Sasha-like in unequal bounds because one of the legs is acting up and he’s got a ton weight on his left shoulder where the ceiling hit it, but perhaps it was a flying object or one of those bullets they told him about in Edinburgh that are recommended for use on airplanes and in similarly delicate situations. They knock the daylights out of you and spread a pancake of molten lead on you, but they hardly penetrate the skin of a grape.
He makes it up the first flight and through the door to the old servants’ staircase leading to the attic. A shower of bullets and plaster and smoke and invective comes up after him, but he has his wits about him, he is climbing, and when he gets to the attic and discovers he is on his knees mosque-style with his arse in the air and his face in his blood-caked hands, he can still crawl to the dormer window and crank himself up high enough to see over the sill.
And what he sees is truly amazing, the sort of son et lumière show you’d travel miles for. He remembers very well taking Jake to one in Caernarvon—or was it Carlisle? They had cannon and pikemen and halberdiers and siege towers and chaps pouring very lifelike boiling oil from the battlements, and Jake had a whale of a time: a divorced father’s half-term to remember, for once.
But in its own way, this show is just as impressive: spotlights and floodlights and arc lights and searchlights, lights stuck up on cherry pickers and flashing lights on the police vans and grüne Minnas and ambulances drawn up at each entrance to the little grass square below the front gate: lights everywhere except in the blackened windows of the surrounding houses, because marksmen like their privacy.
And costumes? Well, if you don’t mind mixing ancient with modern, unsurpassed: frogmen rubbing shoulders with King Richard Crusaders in balaclava helmets, blackamoors with bat
tle-axes, maces and witches’ boxes lashed to their belts, West Berlin police in Prussian-style helmets, firemen dressed like Nazi storm troopers, paramedics in tin hats and laundered white coats with red crosses on, and any number of mischievous black elves and hobgoblins flitting from doorway to doorway looking to stir up trouble.
And for your sound effects, instead of the usual tattoo music and spotty rumble of cannon fire, we have the sergeant major from the parade ground at Murree, no less, barking unintelligible orders in English, German or, for all Mundy can hear, Punjabi. And at one side of the little square where the road goes by stands a brilliantly lit white taxi with all five doors open, and the driver kneeling next to it with two fellows in gas masks pointing guns at him—the driver being the same Herr Knau who delivered Sasha to the school a couple of days ago. Mundy remembered him as thin. Tied up he looks much fatter.
But the unquestioned star of the show, the man everybody has come from miles around to see, is Sasha without his Tarnkappe but carrying his Party briefcase, skipping down the cobbled road with one sneaker missing and waving his free hand in the air saying, “No, no,” the way a film star tells the paparazzi, please boys, not today, I haven’t got my makeup on.
The loss of one shoe, paradoxically, has evened him out. You’d hardly know he had a limp from the way he skips from side to side like a Kreuzberg kid in the last throes of a game of hopscotch. Are the cobbles red-hot? It’s probably part of the game to pretend they are. Then suddenly he’s outrun himself or he’s missed his footing, because the champion’s down, and rolling like a rag doll with no Mundy around to pick him up, and his arms and legs are rolling with him but it’s probably the bullets that are keeping him going rather than his own efforts, because the bullets are tearing round him as well as into him, they’re mauling him and disfiguring him, and even when he’s well and truly dead, they seem unwilling to believe him, but give him one last all-together-now-boys salvo, just for safety’s sake.
Absolute Friends Page 37