Bite

by Nick Louth

  It was our first proper break, and our hitherto stern captors laughed and joked among themselves. Sister Margaret probed Rambo-Rambo in French. They had no coherent knowledge of the KPLA’s strategy, except that it involved displacing a corrupt elite in Kinshasa and giving everyone enough to eat. They all conceded that a full belly and a promise of a smart uniform, clearly not yet fulfilled, was the main reason they had joined up. They thought the KPLA was a massive army, with tanks and aircraft and thousands of soldiers hidden around the country. Its leader, Brigadier Crocodile, was to them a modern-day Napoleon.

  Georg’s summary, given when we had first been captured, was different. The KPLA was probably the smallest and least powerful of four rebel armies in the country, and was unheard of outside the offices of regional specialists in western capitals. He thought they had fewer than a thousand troops, of which half had nothing more than a machete. He presumed their main aim was to wrest from government hands the alluvial diamond mine at Obtuvanna, just a hundred miles away. With the proceeds they could equip themselves with modern Chinese weapons. Only that, Georg said, would guarantee a place for them at the planned reconciliation talks.

  This afternoon I found a pool among rocks at a nearby stream, our first chance for a leisurely wash since we set off. I poked at the water with a stick and disturbed nothing more frightening than a small fish. I fetched Amy and Sister Margaret, who asked Rambo-Rambo not to let us be disturbed. He was relaxed about letting us stray, knowing we could not get far alone. I soon noticed Dakka skulking in the background, however.

  I waited for him to go as I set my diary and pencil in their plastic bag on a convenient rock. Still he watched us. I could not bring myself to strip in front of him, and entered the water before taking my filthy clothes off. Amy did the same. Sister Margaret had no such qualms, and stripped at the water’s edge. Dakka goggled at her strange matronly underwear and wobbly white body.

  The water was a wonderful temperature and we began to enjoy ourselves, splashing around and giggling like children. Then we did our laundry, laying it to dry on the rocks. I was up to my shoulders in water, and balling up my trousers when I felt a lump in the pocket.

  Tomas’s film! I leapt out of the water and cursed myself for the stupid, worthless bitch I had become. Sister Margaret covered her ears. A crushing guilt squeezed tears from my eyes as my wet hands fumbled to extract the plastic canister from the pocket.

  Mercifully, the lid was still intact and the film inside dry. I crouched down by the water’s edge, naked and miserable, and wailed uncontrollably. I don’t know whether I cried for him or for myself, but I felt more lost and miserable than I ever had in my life before. The others, still mystified, tried to comfort me. In the distance I heard Dakka, my lover’s murderer, sniggering.

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Janus Pretzik sat bolt upright in bed, the Browning GP35 already tight in his enormous fist. He had not dreamed the gentle tinkling that awoke him. Wind chimes from the shop. It was a cheap, foolproof security system. The way the draughts were down there, you couldn’t open a door or a window back or front without them sounding. He grasped the bedside clock, squinting into its luminous face. Just after 2 a.m. He hauled his four hundred pound bulk out of bed, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. From under the bed he pulled out a heavy torch and stuck it in his waistband.

  He parted the curtains. The street was deserted, a plastic bag cartwheeling in the wind, a drink can rolling beneath a bench. Janus moved rapidly across the room, avoiding every squeaky floorboard and slipped quietly down the concrete stairs into the stockroom at the back of the darkened store. Janus had dealt with burglars before, muggers and wise guys. That wasn’t what was making the sweat freeze on his skin, making his chest pound. That was a very specific, very recent terror.

  He kept the lights off to preserve his advantage. It was a big shop, three frontages onto the street, and its aisles were narrow and obstructed. Janus knew the location of every antique chair and table, the shelves of African wood carvings, the 1910 Olivetti typewriter on the floor, the heavy Singer sewing machine stand. Janus edged forward to look through into the shop. Silhouetted in the window, against the orange glare of the streetlamps were his two prized 1970s guitars: the Gibson SG and the solid-colour Fender Stratocaster. The shop door was closed, all the windows intact.

  It was silent. Janus exhaled lengthily, reached for the switch and flooded the room with light. Nothing looked to be missing. He playfully cuffed at the windchimes as he turned back to the stairs. They didn’t make a sound. He looked up and saw a piece of translucent leathery meat suspended by a cord between the three cylindrical chimes. Janus wailed at this dried human ear, because he knew then who had come back for him.

  Only one place he’d be safe. He ran back for the stairs, this time heading down, locking the basement door behind him. He stopped to rip the light fuses out of the junction box, plunging the shop back into darkness. The torch lit the big old cross timber supporting the house, and he ducked his six foot eight frame underneath as he descended the steep stairs to a narrow brick corridor. Ahead was a five foot high metal doorway like a submarine hatch, the three-inch thick door ajar and rusting under its flaking green paint, but still with iron enough to survive a thousand years of corrosion. The maker’s crest above its curved flange was Koninklijke Ijzergieterij en Staal Fabrieken 1876. The shop had been a bank until 1910, and this was the vault. Janus snatched the thick steel key from the lock, and threw himself inside, his body booming on the iron floor. The door had a thick chain leading inside the vault, so bank employees could lock themselves in the garage-sized space with their valuables. The door had not moved in decades and the foot-high hinges looked rusted solid.

  Still there was no sound from outside.

  Janus rested the torch so it shone on the doorway, braced his feet either side of the door and took up the slack in the chain. He wrapped the rusted links around his ham-sized forearms, pulling himself into a tight squat. Then he took a deep breath and bellowed as he drove his legs to their full extent. Janus had once pulled a sixteen-tonne truck for a TV show, but this was tougher. His face contorted as he heaved. The door finally gave, and boomed shut like the gate of Hell, catapulting him backwards on to his torch and, with a ping of a broken bulb, into total darkness.

  As the din in his ears subsided he heard his own ragged breathing and a curious echo of slow even breaths, coming from one of the vault’s high shelves.

  ‘Very strong, but very stupid.’ The voice was soft and low, proof that Janus had not shut his enemy out. He had shut himself in with him.

  ‘Please, God, no.’ Janus muttered.

  ‘You lied to me. It was some other woman lived there. I warned you about lies.’

  ‘No, no. I wouldn’t lie to you Anvil. That’s where she went. She told me herself. I was the only one, she trusted me, Anvil.’

  There was no reply, but the silent disbelief stretched out, until a soft resonation announced something heavy landing on the floor of the vault. Janus sobbed, and whipped the Browning from his waistband towards the noise. For the first time in his life Janus felt the grip of hands stronger than his own. The gun was twisted away and Janus’s index finger, trapped in the trigger guard, snapped like a twig. Two immense kicks: a kneecap exploded, a smashed jaw; and Janus lay on the cold metal floor, tears running into his ears, as he pleaded for his life through a gruel of broken teeth.

  There was a hissing noise, and the smell of gas.

  ‘Let there be light,’ said the low voice. A lighter clicked and the blow torch lit with a low whump, its flame sharpening into a hissing blue spike. Anvil’s eyes reflected in it, the colours of honey and splintered chocolate.

  ‘And there was light. And he saw that it was Good.’

  Then Anvil bent to his task.

  After four days we reached a small clearing with two contrasting buildings and a dirt road winding through. One building was whitewashed, had glass in its win
dows and a tall radio antenna on the roof. The other was long and grim, a windowless cinderblock structure. Two soldiers in fatigues with French-style military caps came up and greeted Rambo-Rambo with slaps and high-fives. They blindfolded us and led us across the clearing. Keys rattled, and then a creak. We were pushed into a hot, stifling darkness drenched with human sound, smell and sorrow. Herded along a narrow corridor, we heard murmuring, greetings, coughing and moaning. We felt the brush of fingers before they were rapped by the swish of the guard’s cane.

  More keys, more creaks. My head was pushed down and I was pitched into a hard-floored cell. The others tumbled over me. Then a clang. Someone shouted at us in French and Sister Margaret said it was a warning not to remove our blindfolds.

  The floor was chilly, the walls rough and unfinished. I felt along the floor and found Amy’s hand. I gave it a squeeze. Jarman cleared his throat and whispered something.

  ‘The blindfolds are excellent news.’ They were the first words he had spoken in many hours.

  ‘Why?’ asked Amy.

  ‘Dead men tell no tales. So there is no point in blindfolding them.’

  ‘You think it means they will release us?’ I asked.

  ‘They might not have decided, but at least it gives them the option.’

  After a few minutes I raised my head to peer out beneath the filthy rag tied around my eyes. All I saw was Sister Margaret opposite me, doing exactly the same. I risked lifting the rag, and saw the cell in its full glory. It was perhaps five wide feet by seven long, and made of cinder blocks, roughly cemented. The door was narrow and wooden, except for a small barred hatch at ankle height. The ceiling was a lattice of rusty reinforcing rods, the kind used for concrete. This was just four feet above the floor. It was impossible for any of us to stand upright. The floor sloped slightly away from the door, and there was a besmirched mouse-sized hole at the base of the outside wall. That was the toilet. Next to it was a filthy twig.

  There was another floor between us and the huge sheets of zinc fifteen feet above our heads. That floor had small windows, so a pale light filtered through to us but the angle was such that even pressing a cheek to the ceiling bars we could see not an inch of sky.

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Nothing much happens at Amsterdam RAI Congress Centre at five in the morning. Usually. Security Officer Jan-Erik Smit was playing the eighteenth game of Tetris of the shift as the first rays of summer light slanted through the windows across his coffee mug, newspaper and well-thumbed copy of Rustler. The coloured Tetris blocks were falling thick and fast down the computer screen, and however hard he worked the keyboard he hardly had time to manœuvre them into the available gaps.

  Smit certainly didn’t have time to look at the security monitors to his left. That is why he didn’t see the intruder at the other end of the fifty-acre complex descend the ramp into the basement loading bay. That is why he didn’t see a key slide into the lock on the staff kitchen door, and missed his last chance when the figure entered the kitchen and moved out of camera view.

  The intruder moved slowly along half a mile of corridors, knowing exactly where he was heading. At the conference organiser’s office he took a second key from his pocket and opened the door, flicked on the light. The office was stacked high with papers and brochures, the walls lined with filing cabinets, fax machines and photocopiers big and small.

  Inside, he closed the door and powered up a small photocopier. The drone seemed deafening in the silence of the office, but he knew it would not carry all the way to reception. The intruder went straight to a file drawer labelled ‘Parasitology presentation: Contributors R-Z’ and pulled it gently. The cabinet was locked as he knew it would be. This was one key he had not been able to get. But this was an office, not a bank vault. It took only a couple of minutes jiggling with a pocket knife and the cheap lock relented, the drawer slid open. He went straight to the paper he wanted. The copier clicked to ready, but the intruder could not resist reading each page first, etching into his mind this long-awaited piece of science before duplicating it on paper.

  The original was returned to its exact place, the drawer closed, the copier and lights switched off. The intruder grasped the copy to his chest and made his way back along the maze of corridors as if sleepwalking. He forgot to lock the outside door, and in a daze headed to the car park in front of reception instead of Wielingstraat where he had left the Bentley. But it was only when he was finally in his car, when he had put down his stick and eased his artifical leg into the foot well that the implications of Dr Erica Stroud-Jones’s work hit him.

  In under five years she had found a brilliant new weapon in the fight against malaria. In five decades struggle, he had not. She had been right, he had been wrong. She would claim the prize, his decades of service would be forgotten. For the first time in more than fifty years, Professor Jürgen Friederikson broke down and wept.

  That afternoon Max called the embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo and left a message for Minister Loebe. At seven o’clock exactly, while Henk was out, the minister’s bodyguard arrived at the apartment in a sharp dark suit, crisp white shirt and carrying a holdall. He introduced himself in heavily accented English as Leo. Nothing to do with lions, Max found out, he was just named after a Belgian king, Leopold. Leo looked up to the job and more. He was a slim six foot one, with an easy smile and wrists taut as whipcord.

  Once they were upstairs, Leo unzipped the holdall and offered Max a Walther PKK and two full clips of ammunition.

  ‘I don’t think we need it right now,’ Max said. ‘But if you want to carry it, go right ahead. If the cops are around they will be watching me not you, so you should split. Don’t hang around for me, okay? Just go.’

  ‘Okay. I agree.’

  Leo had been pretty well briefed about Erica’s disappearance, presumably by Loebe. Max had been happy enough to sell Loebe three heftily-priced sculptures. But this was a godsend. After three weeks of universal scepticism it was nice to be believed by someone.

  Max led Leo through to Amsterdam’s crowded central station where they boarded the subway back to Bijlmermeer. It was just getting dark by the time they arrived, but the air was still pleasantly warm. Max and Leo threaded their way through the walkways and landscaping of apartment blocks until they found where the fire had been. There was no sign of the motorcycle. The burned window was now boarded up and the crime tape removed. A bored security guard with a dog paced around outside.

  Max scanned the area for any of the kids who had confronted him earlier. He asked a woman about the teenager with a blade of orange hair. She smiled in weary recognition and identified him as Michael Korten, one of her neighbour’s sons. She asked Max whether he was in trouble again. Max shook his head, took the address and thanked the woman.

  Korten lived on the third floor of a neighbouring block. The rows of apartments shared an external concrete walkway looking over parkland and a raised subway line. Max and Leo made their way along the walkway, stepping over children’s toys and bicycles and squeezing past flower tubs and an empty pram. At his apartment they heard voices and the sizzle of frying. Max was ten feet from the door when it opened. He and Leo huddled in the doorway of the next apartment. Korten walked past, pecking his quiff in time to whatever he was listening to on his Walkman.

  Max turned and clamped his good hand over Korten’s mouth while Leo pressed the gun to his ribs. Only when he had promised to keep quiet did they move away with him, ducking into the communal garbage room and shutting the door behind.

  ‘We’re looking for a guy called Anvil,’ Max said.

  Korten’s eyes widened. ‘Who?’

  ‘You ride his motorcycle, butthead.’ Max crushed Korten’s carefully gelled orange spike into his scowling face. ‘I don’t like you. I remember you from Purple Haze. When there’s trouble bubbling, you’re always doing the cooking.’

  Korten’s fists tightened. ‘How’s your face Carver? Janus leave you any teeth?’

 
‘Enough to bite you real hard,’ Max said. On some imagined cue, Leo’s fist whipped into Korten’s belly. The kid folded up, coughing on the filthy floor, with Leo’s Walther hard against his temple. ‘Break dis boy down the rubbish shute?’ Leo asked eagerly, picking up the Walkman and stuffing it into his pocket.

  ‘Nice thought, but let’s hold off.’ Max was more alarmed by Leo’s ferocity than Korten seemed to be.

  ‘So what’s it to be Michael? You tell us where to find Anvil and tell us his real name or my friend here is gonna drop you, head first, three floors into the rest of the garbage.’

  ‘No-one splits on him. Cops can’t touch him. What makes you different?’

  ‘I don’t need a conviction, dummy. I don’t need witnesses. I’m judge and jury and my friend here is an enthusiastic executioner.’

  Leo pulled the belt out of Korten’s trousers and bound his hands behind his back. He opened the rubbish shute, banging Korten’s head twice on the metal edge just for fun. He didn’t murmur, but blood snaked down his scalp through the flattened orange stalks and down his ear. Leo seized him by the hair and pushed his face out into the stinking void, the updraught of stale cabbage and urine.

  Korten was trembling, finally scared, but his mouth still ran on. ‘You’re out of your depth, man. Way over your fucking head. You should get out while you can.’

  ‘All dis dat he say very boring, Max. Mebbe I just shoot him now?’ Leo put the Walther to Korten’s temple and tightened his finger on the trigger.

  Korten squeezed his eyes shut and started talking. ‘There’s a bar. Der Ridder.’ He gave them directions. ‘They know Anvil in there. His real name is Luc.’

  ‘Would that be Luc de Wit?’

  Korten nodded mutely. Slowly the connections began to solidify in Max’s mind. So Anvil really was de Wit, in turn the only registered director of Xenix Molecular. But in some ways that didn’t add up. Anvil was a thug. Perhaps more terrifying and smarter than most. But what on earth could he want with a laptop full of data about malaria?