There was a moment’s silence. Nat was about to move away when the man called Sulamani continued:
‘I understand from Salif that you had him tortured.’
‘An absurd suggestion, which I note he is not here to repeat. I dare say you are upset that he has deserted you—’
‘This has nothing to do with Salif,’ his interlocutor cut in icily. ‘It is intolerable that you should expose us to such uncertainties. What is to stop your Englishman from reporting that he witnessed a Taliban-style execution on Polisario soil? In speeches to the UN, the Western Sahara is routinely referred to as the new Afghanistan.’
‘Nobody listens to the Moroccans on this subject. The chamber empties the moment it is their turn to speak.’
‘It is not just the Moroccans. The Security Council will not allow another cradle for Islamic fascism to emerge in the Western Sahara, however weak the evidence. Let King Mohammed have his bit of desert, they will say. These shameful activities of yours, which you still decline to explain, hand the Moroccans a far more potent weapon than all their tanks and guns.’
Nat heard footsteps in the entrance hall, coming her way. . . She retreated into the doorway of the room opposite. Under the sinister influence of the conversation she had overheard, she felt a strong impulse to conceal herself. She tried the door behind her. It opened and she stepped into the room. The shutters were closed and thick drapes hung over the window – all she could see was the greenish glow from a monitor with a pattern of Microsoft logos chasing around its screen. It smelled peculiar, plastic and antiseptic mingled with a sweet, chemical whiff that tightened her throat. She pulled the door shut and listened.
A knock on Zender’s door.
‘Entrez,’ said Zender.
She heard the door open and a woman’s voice, too quiet for her to make out what was said. Then the door clicked shut.
A slow, crackling exhalation of breath behind her. Nat spun round and peered into the gloom. A luminescent face with no eyes or mouth shone from the far corner, bobbing and nodding like a balloon suspended in a draught. A whimper issued from her throat. She swallowed, tasted in her mouth the sickly odour that haunted the air. There must be a light switch. The hand she moved towards the wall beside the door was heavy with dread. Her fingers scrabbled over the square of plastic, found the switch.
The buzz and flicker of a striplight. A body laid out on a wheeled hospital gurney. The plump white bag of a medical drip hanging from a steel frame.
My God, Niko!
Nat ran to her brother’s side. He was unconscious, naked but for a towel folded over his groin, his face sunken and grey. She laid her hand on his chest. His skin was hot and yielded like putty to the pressure of her palm. His heartbeat was sluggish and lumpy. She looked away for a moment, tears stinging her eyes, then saw the yellowy pink flesh of his leg puckered around an eight-inch gash cut on one side of his knee, the skin and muscle peeled back to the bone like an anatomical model.
‘My darling Niko, what have they done to you?’ she whispered. ‘My poor angel, don’t worry. It’s me, Natalya. I’ll take care of you now.’
She smoothed a few dank crinkles of hair from the furrowed skin of his forehead. His breathing was shallow, interspersed with sudden gasps and long, laboured exhalations such as the one she had heard earlier. She cast about for some way to bring him relief – a damp cloth to wipe his face and chest. Then she noticed that his wrists and ankles were strapped to the frame of the gurney. Quickly she unfastened the buckles and brought his arms up to rest on his chest. Like that, he looked as if he had been laid out for burial. She felt herself begin to sob, tried to check herself, then brought his hand up to her cheek and allowed the tears to come.
‘A morbid infection. I think now we see improvement.’
Natalya swung round, releasing Nikolai’s arm, which fell down beside the gurney, tugging the dripline and causing the bag of solution to swing on its steel hook.
‘Be careful!’
A small, white-coated woman had appeared in the room as if from nowhere. She had a square face, a thin, taut mouth, and protruding eyes beneath neatly plucked eyebrows. Her mouse-brown hair was cut off abruptly beneath the ears and a straight fringe ran high across her forehead. Her face was expressionless and her eyes as empty as a snake’s.
‘What have you done to him?’
‘I have treated him for his wound and the infection. It was so bad. I had to cut it open to let the air in. He has taken half our supply of antibiotics. You are his sister, I think.’
Nat didn’t reply. The little doctor moved to the gurney, replaced Nikolai’s arm, checked the needle taped to the back of his hand and the flow control half way up the dripline. Moving to the desk, she pulled latex gloves from a pack beside the monitor, snapped them on, and returned to the gurney, hands held up stiffly in front of her. Then she bent over Nikolai’s leg and prodded the skin around his knee.
‘The wound has dried and the swelling has receded.’ She brought a gloved finger up to her nose and sniffed. ‘The smell has almost gone – it was so bad! I will suture tomorrow. First the muscle, then wait to be sure the infection does not return. After, the skin. The knee is forever damaged, I think. But he is on the mend.’
The chirpy English colloquialism sounded creepy as a lullaby on the lips of a paedophile, and Nat thought this woman would just as soon cut her brother’s throat as stitch his wound. Now, she was re-fastening the buckle at Nikolai’s ankle.
‘Leave that off,’ said Nat sharply.
The doctor ignored her. Nat came round to the end of the bed and faced her.
‘You will not tie up my brother.’
‘It is for his own good,’ the woman said angrily.
‘Fuck that.’
Natalya reached over, seized the doctor’s wrist and pulled her away from the gurney. It seemed to take no effort at all to move her, but suddenly she was only inches away and bringing her knee up fast into Nat’s midriff. The blow doubled her up, but she didn’t release the woman’s wrist and they hit the floor side by side. Nat felt wild with fury. She grabbed the doctor by the hair, swung her head up and banged it back down to the floor, then clawed at her face with her free hand, fingernails gouging her cheek. A vicious pain lashed Nat’s forearm and blood spattered onto the floor. She drew back sharply and saw the curved blade of a scalpel protruding from the doctor’s fist. The fist arced up and Nat jerked her head back just as the sliver of steel whirred past her nose. She rolled away, but the doctor was already up on her feet and moving in. Nat looked up and saw in her eyes an absolute and unequivocal desire to cut her again. She scrambled across the floor to the desk, blood from her forearm smearing the grey tiles, then reached up and hurled the chair in the direction of the white-coated figure now almost upon her, eyes bright with impatience.
The door burst open and a tall man in army officer’s uniform ran into the room. He came up behind the doctor, seized her by the wrist and forced her down to the floor, where he anchored her with a large boot in the armpit. One by one, he unclamped her fingers from the scalpel. She cursed and spat. Natalya sat on the floor, legs stretched out before her, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her forearm by clamping it against her T-shirt.
Claude hurried in. ‘My dear Natalya. . . ’ He brushed past the officer and the prone doctor and knelt at her side. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I am fucking hurt, yes. That bitch. . . My brother. . . ’
The pain made her gasp. Her T-shirt was sopping with blood.
The tall officer wrapped the scalpel in his handkerchief and dropped it into the pocket of his shirt. ‘What would you like me to do with her?’
‘Lock her in the conference room, Sulamani, if you wouldn’t mind.’
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Natalya screamed into the thick flesh of the face bowed over her. ‘My brother’s half dead on a stretcher and I’m cut to shreds by this. . . ’ Nausea swam in her throat and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘What are you doing to me
?’
‘Be calm, I beg of you, Natalya. This should not have been allowed to occur. I will find something for the cut.’
He fetched hydrogen peroxide, a roll of bandage, swab packs and dressings from a steel cupboard by the door and started to tear them open with clumsy fingers.
‘You may as well use gloves,’ said Nat weakly.
‘Of course.’
He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and continued. When Nat pulled her arm away from her shirt, blood cascaded out. Claude tipped the bottle of peroxide and Nat yelped as the stinging fluid sluiced the long cut. She held a dressing in place while Claude wound the bandage over and over. You’re not good at this, thought Natalya. As he bent forwards, she saw him stiffen and noticed the bulge of the dressing over the wound in his side – the wound from the bullet that she now thought had been intended for her. His face looked more discomposed than she had ever seen it before, and he seemed grateful for the need to concentrate on this unfamiliar task, exchanging only the necessary words. How is it that I still feel compassion for this man? she asked herself, disgusted at the confused emotions that were tumbling inside her.
Zender swept the debris into a pedal bin and stood helplessly surveying the blood-splodged floor.
‘Never mind that,’ said Natalya. ‘Get the boy to bring my bag. And tea and water, and a mattress or cushions – something to sleep on.’
‘Surely it would be better if I were to help you to your room. It is unpleasant in here.’
‘Fucking unpleasant, but I’m not leaving Nikolai with Madame Mengele on the loose.’
‘Oh yes, very good – I’m delighted to see that your sense of humour was not damaged in this deplorable attack.’
‘Ha fucking ha. Are there painkillers in that cupboard?’
‘We needed a doctor here, it was not easy to find someone—’
‘Another time, Claude.’
He found codeine and gave her the bottle, then hurried out. Nat lay back against the wall. Nikolai. Still alive. Just. What had she got them into? What had she overheard? Zender had ordered an execution. I did not specify that it be done in such flamboyant style. An Englishman had been tortured. A spy. . . I’m too exhausted to think, she decided. Zender returned, with Adel carrying the things she had asked for. She arranged a makeshift bed and sat on it, sipping the hot, sweet tea and contemplating the glass of wine he had poured for her.
‘A Lezongars, 2002 – not a great wine in the classic sense, but—’
‘Give me the key and get out.’
He detached it from a ring and put it in her hand, then left, looking chastened. Natalya crawled over and locked the door, leaving the key sideways in the lock so another could not be inserted from the other side. She crawled back to her makeshift nest, took four codeine, knocked back the glass of wine, lay down, arranged her aching forearm, and passed out.
At dusk the sky turned swollen and purple, the sand a muddled grey. The sun lowered itself slowly down behind the Wall of Shame, its face, so blindingly ferocious by day, now filtered by a screen of fine dust that rose up from the desert floor. The wall meandered away into the darkness to north and south, while directly ahead of them the Moroccan fort stood silhouetted in the distance like an upraised thumb. They shared the remaining water, then James buried the Parker Hale in a depression on the other side of the road.
‘You, go there,’ said Salif, indicating that James should walk behind him as they entered the litter of shapes and shadows that lay between them and the Moroccan fort. James’s knee was no longer a joint but a throbbing tube of swollen tissue, and he was feeble and clumsy with hunger. His memory had helpfully presented him with the army slang for an anti-personnel mine: toe-popper. He limped along in Salif’s footsteps, trying not to stagger off course when his feet met uneven ground.
They didn’t talk. When they were less than half a mile from the Wall of Shame, a searchlight flicked on and an oval disc of brilliant light raced over the sand towards them. James shielded his eyes. They heard the percussive hiss of a loud hailer and a voice that sounded shockingly close:
‘Face down, donkey-fuckers!’
They obeyed. After a minute, the oval of light swept off into the desert. The air had cooled but the sand beneath his chest was soft and warm as the pelt of a snoozing beast. James felt an unexpected sensation of lassitude. A few hundred yards away was something akin to safety. The desert has kindly moods, he decided, and one might as well enjoy them.
He could see the Wall of Shame properly at last: a thick ridge of bulldozed rock and sand, ten or twelve feet high, that looked to be in a state of constant decay – at several points the crest of the ridge had collapsed and cascaded down to the base, and there was evidence of numerous repairs. It was hard to believe that a structure so crude and transient could extend to more than two and a half thousand kilometres – perhaps they’d forgotten to tell the men building it when to stop. The fort, built directly behind the wall, was a single-storey concrete building, no more than twenty feet across, with no doors or windows on this side. From the centre rose a five-metre, flat-roofed tower, on top of which were mounted the searchlight and a heavy machine gun. There were three men up there, their heads intermittently suffused with amber as they passed round a cigarette.
‘They look for other men,’ Salif hissed. ‘Then come for us.’
They lay there for ten minutes before the soldiers grew bored. The narrow column of light angled down on their prone bodies.
‘Stay down!’ said the loud hailer.
They heard a scuffling on the wall to the left of the fort and the top rungs of a wide wooden ladder appeared. A soldier clambered into view, hauled up a second ladder, and lowered it on their side. Two more soldiers crossed the wall by the ladders and the three of them ran over to where James and Salif lay.
‘We have run from a gang of thieves,’ said Salif in Arabic. ‘We need to get into Morocco, where it is safe.’
The soldiers did not reply. One of them gave James a speculative kick in the stomach. A reaction seemed to be required, so James groaned. The soldier knelt on James’s back and searched him, then attended to Salif, pulling the Beretta, the knife and roll of banknotes from various pockets of his overalls.
‘Up!’
They were taken up and over the wall, then led across an arc-lit concrete apron to a steel door at the base of the fort. A generator chuntered in the background. The apron was fortified by mounds of earth and rock on either side, ending in a gap that gave on to a track leading west. An ancient 4x4 and a small bulldozer were parked up on the far side. The soldiers hustled them in through the steel door.
The room inside was a bare shell crammed with narrow bunks – enough for maybe thirty men, though it was obvious that only a few were in use. There was a cooking stove, a wooden table and steel chairs slung with canvas, and a set of shelves with a dismal collection of cooking pots, catering-sized cans and jars, tin cups and plates. The smell could not have been more fetid if there’d been a dead dog in there with them. Two men lay on their bunks, a third sat at the table – a sergeant, judging by the chevrons on his shirtsleeves. One of the soldiers who had brought them in – he was younger than the others, couldn’t have been more than seventeen – put the cash and Salif’s knife and gun on the table. The other two went and lay on their bunks to watch.
‘Bienvenue, Polisarios,’ said the sergeant at the table, leaning back in his chair.
‘We’re not Polisario,’ said James in French, feeling that the words might choke in Salif’s throat.
‘No?’ The sergeant laughed sharply and looked at his men, who obliged with an assortment of derisive grunts. ‘On this side, Moroccans. On that side, filthy donkey-fucking Sahrawi.’ He stared at Salif.
‘We just want to get to Smara,’ said James placidly.
‘Français, English?’
‘Je suis Anglais,’ said James.
‘Why are you in the Free Zone?’ he asked, switching to Arabic and staring at James, obviously a
ssuming that he would not understand. He was wrong, but James thought it prudent not to enlighten him and looked blankly at Salif. The Moroccan sergeant was a scrawny, pale-skinned man with a shaved head and close-set eyes. His voice was thin and wheedling, as if he were used to making excuses. If he wasn’t running this little outfit, jail would be a good place to keep him, James thought.
‘We have money,’ said Salif.
The sergeant unfolded the notes and counted them, then tucked them into his breast pocket. ‘You want to buy your way to Smara with this? Maybe I’ll kill you and keep the money anyway.’ He picked up the Beretta and pointed it at Salif. ‘And this. Who gives a fuck? Je vais vous tuer!’ he said for James’s benefit.
The soldiers stared at James. Salif looked down at his hands. The uniformed men suddenly seemed very close. James turned round, but saw no hostility in their eyes. They’ve seen this all before, he told himself again, it’s a little power-play, a rite of passage.
‘If you kill us, who knows what will happen next?’ he said in French, keeping his voice calm. ‘Could be nothing. Could be trouble? Who knows?’
The sergeant swung the gun round and pointed it at James.
‘Look what I found lying in the desert, a big Englishman and his donkey-fucking friend. They’ll make me a captain and give me a fancy hat.’
‘They’ll ask me why I came here to cross the wall,’ James said. ‘I could cross anywhere, so why here? What will I tell them?’
‘This gun is shit,’ said the pale man bitterly.
James shrugged. ‘You have anything to eat?’
‘You think this is a café?’ He put his feet up onto the table, the soles of his boots pointedly facing Salif. James wondered how many more insults his companion would endure.
‘I’ve been out in the desert all day,’ said James. ‘I could eat a horse.’
‘We got a horse?’ he asked his fellow men, reverting to Arabic. They laughed. ‘No horse.’ He stood up. ‘The Englishman can fuck off. This Polisario with a face like a goat’s arse, I’m giving him to the police. They like to play with Sahrawi. They put wires on their dicks and make them dance.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 23