A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  This was worse than when I was cowering in the rocks after I’d escaped. But my room was now returning to some sort of natural focus, one of the breaks between attacks. And I knew I needed to get out again, just to keep moving, away from a floral bedcover and the drugstore print of the ruined temple at Eritrea. I composed myself, taking control. I leaned on the desk and looked at myself in the mirror. I was a bit older now. But the eyes – is that how I looked at other people?

  I sat on the lav and emptied myself. There was that faint but persistent tinnitus in my ear again. I started to look around me, as if it was all new. The tiles were black, cool to the touch. My knees were more pointed than I’d noticed before. Everything was surprising me. The fan sucked air out and a cobweb that the maid had dislodged swung like seaweed in a current before it. Terms of reference were returning.

  Again I picked up my phone. My hand was steady, though still cool with sweat. I needed to be among people, lost among them.

  In the lobby, it was strangely serene. I sat cross-legged at the end of a sofa, by a huge pot plant, needing no magazine. I watched hotel guests arrive and leave and declined the offer of a drink from a waiter with a wag of a forefinger.

  I rotated the gold band on the finger of my left hand, recognising with detachment that I was still married. I thought briefly of Adrian, wondering less where he was than whether he really existed anymore. It had never occurred to me to contact him. Why would I? Why would he contact me? I pondered this while I stared at the suited ankles and black heels of two men checking in.

  One was Arab, already showing rich, dark stubble on a face that had been shaved that morning. The other was European white, with a slim valise, no real luggage. Perhaps it had gone up before him. He strolled from the concierge desk, shaking his head. They had been checking out something for him that was wrong, I thought. He was smiling with that self-assurance that everything could be so much better if only the world was run by his executive colleagues. He walked to nearly in front of me.

  “Hi.” American. “Never book through Amex.”

  I half-shook my head, indicating that I maybe knew what he meant, but also that I didn’t care.

  “You staying here?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Like it?”

  “It’ll do, I guess.” Oh, there you go, I’d started talking American already.

  “Been here long?”

  He was sitting now, on the padded armrest of the sofa opposite me.

  “Rather too long. Unexpectedly.”

  I wasn’t looking at him. I sounded irritated and I didn’t mean that, and actually it was helpful to have some human engagement. I just couldn’t let him in my bubble.

  “Miss a flight? I tell you, the organisation here is third world. Our major market in the Middle East and it may as well be South-east Asia.”

  I said nothing, but feigned a half-smile. If I was polite perhaps he’d go away.

  “I’m here maybe four, five, six times a year and I have more trouble here than in any other developed region we travel to. It’s not just the security at Ben Gurion – Abu Graibion, I call it – it’s the whole financial services thing. Trouble is, it’s run by Arabs and Israelis. No one knows what they’re doing. How was it when you were banged up in your little room, missy, playing checkers with the brown boy?”

  Now I was looking in his face. He was leaning across the aisle, smiling.

  “What did you say?” I tried to sound calm, but I stammered.

  “Only I wouldn’t let my staff here, because you have to know their ways, don’t you? But actually I love it here for all that. Have you eaten in the Armenian Quarter?”

  “What did you say to me?” I repeated. His smile flickered.

  “You can eat best, I think, in the Armenian Quarter. If you know where to go. But I guess it’s hard to eat when you’ve ripped a kid’s throat out as you fucked him.”

  Everything now was moving slowly, really slowly. I heard my own words echo in my ears, down a cavern.

  “Who are you?” I sounded calm and I was surprised.

  I wasn’t scared, even if he was going to kill me. But if he was, he wouldn’t be talking, he’d be killing. What occurs to me now is that I was mildly excited, comforted even, that apparently someone knew what had happened to me, that someone had at last come for me. Even if he was what Hugh would have called a potty-mouth. I smiled at that thought.

  “My name’s Jim. I’m from Connecticut originally. What’s your business here?”

  “I assume you know that.”

  “Oh,” he said, leaning back and pausing. He looked at me harder now.

  “Oh,” he said again in a more knowing way. “Are you looking for work?”

  “Why are you saying these things?”

  He just sat and looked at me.

  Eventually he said, “Maybe we could get a drink later. Get to know each other a bit better. We’re gonna make you pay for what you did to our friends, you bitch.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m happy to pay to be friends. I’m rich.”

  You clever bastard.

  “Excuse me,” I said and jiggled my mobile at him.

  “Sure, do what you have to do. I’m in Room 305.” But already I’d left him.

  I walked down a pebble-dashed corridor with jewellery cabinets, away from the lifts, towards a dining room. There must be toilets, I thought, but there weren’t. Two girls were stripping blue tablecloths from long tables. I sat for a moment, shaking, and pretended to check something on my mobile. I forced myself to think in an ordered way.

  Had to find Toby again – should never have left him. I called his number. It rang, then there was that longer tone that indicates a switch to another extension. A woman’s voice answered.

  “Who am I speaking to?” I said and, absurdly, thought I should have said “to whom”.

  “This is the British Consulate in Jerusalem.”

  “I thought I’d phoned Toby Naismith’s extension.”

  “Toby Naismith doesn’t work here any more.”

  I paused to absorb this information.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure. Would you like me to put you through to that department?”

  “No. Yes. Please.”

  Another pause. Another, younger woman.

  “Is Toby there?” I tried to sound everyday and sing-song. Like an aerobics teacher, maybe.

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “It’s Nat.” What the hell.

  “From?” Damn, she was good. Or maybe she hadn’t been briefed. How very British.

  “Connecticut,” I said.

  “Toby Naismith doesn’t work here any more.”

  “Oh?” Pleasantly, as if we hadn’t been in touch for a while. “When did he finish?”

  “Ooh, I couldn’t say.”

  “And where did he go?”

  “I don’t have that information. You’d need to speak to his department. Can I put you through?”

  “No, not to worry, thank you.”

  There are revelations you can’t approach because of their scale, we were taught at college. You simply concentrate on how they “form” you. It’s a type of obedience, I suppose. The Yank sent to rattle me in the lobby, who pretended he thought I was a whore. Toby wasn’t working at the consulate. These were not to be examined or questioned. What they did to me was what was important.

  Breathing was coming hard again and my hairline cooled with sweat. The beast was returning and it was going to be a bad one. I stood and one of the waitresses moved as if to help me. No no.

  I made the lift and my room before my arm shook too much to handle the key card. And I lay on the bed. Maybe this time I would die, maybe this time my heart would stop. My knee was moving up and down and I couldn’t bear the repetition. I stood and considered the window again. So easy and it would be over.

  I was clutching at the window handle, whether to get air into me or me into the air
I’ll never know, when I heard the lock on my door lift with a clunk. I turned and moved into the short passage before the door.

  “Who is it?”

  But the question was lost in the crash of the door bursting open. Something, someone dark and huge, swung me and pinned me to the cupboard door. I wilted in the embrace. I was done. It’s finished. Take me.

  Another huge figure passed into the room and I heard a shouted single word. What was that language? My head was too fevered to process it.

  A man’s face withdrew from next to mine. Slavic features. Dark, kind eyes.

  “Sorry,” he whispered and smiled slightly.

  His colleague was closing the window, a semi-automatic weapon slung at his waist. The man who had been holding me had one too. I was shaking properly now.

  But there was a third person, to my right, standing in the door. Leaning on a stick.

  It was Sarah Curse.

  16

  High ceilings to stare up into, with dewdrop pargeting. Cream and gold upholstery with silk throws. Double doors topped with marble, Moorish ogees. Embroidered wall drapes of Ottoman warriors. Pale brown marbled floors with Persian rugs. French windows to a terrace, with the longest net curtains I’d ever seen, furling like smoke in warm night air.

  I was in an enormous velvet recliner, where I’d slept for I don’t know how long. Sarah was beside me, holding a straw from a cool yoghurt-tasting drink to my lips.

  I’d stopped shaking.

  Sarah was stroking my hair from my forehead with her other hand. A smart, wiry young man stood behind her.

  “I’m so sorry, Nat. I never in a million years meant this to happen.”

  I shifted slightly in my sit-up lounger and felt the tug of a cannula on my forearm. There was a clear bag hanging from a metal stand next to me. Sarah followed my eyes.

  “It’s saline,” she said. “We’re flushing you out.”

  “What was it?”

  “We don’t know yet. The toxicologist can find out. But from your reaction, Alexei reckons it was maybe a bastard cousin of phenothiazine, maybe mixed with opiate. Massive delusions, hallucinations, altered reality. Most people die when they think they can fly.”

  The young man looked up. This was Dr Alexei.

  “What a junkie I’ve become,” I said, and closed my eyes again. I thought of the American guy in the lobby, probably telling his mates about the mad chick he’d met. “Did you pay my hotel bill?” And I heard her breath as she smiled.

  Sarah had spoken with a quiet urgency in that hotel room, taking control as she always did.

  “Nat, listen to me. Look at me, Nat. You’re in huge danger but I can protect you. But we have to go now, this instant, do you understand? We have to go right now. Let me take you somewhere safe.”

  She threw a rug from somewhere around my shoulders and she loped as I stumbled with the big men out of the hotel, like I was some kind of protected celebrity. Down the corridor and through a fire door and down a metal staircase. Through a backyard belching steam from kitchens. I heard someone say in Arabic that I was ill. Outside there was a huge silver 4x4 with black windows.

  More men. One of them tried to help me in by guiding my head.

  “No!” I shouted and kicked out.

  “It’s OK,” said Sarah, who had swung in the other side. “It’s OK.”

  I collapsed into her side and gave in to the shakes and sweat. My arm was lifting up and down of its own will. Sarah reached around my shoulder and held it firmly.

  “I’ve done terrible things, Sar. I’ve done such terrible things,” I gibbered.

  “It’s OK, we’re safe now,” said Sarah and kissed the top of my head.

  “I’m going out of my mind.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  We drove out west from Jerusalem on the 386, apparently, in to the hills and glades and out beyond the moshav Even Sapir, one of the Israeli agricultural cooperative experiments, then up through woodland on some kind of private road and eventually through guarded gates.

  There were tended lawns and views out across the plain. The house was dazzling white with a Palladian portico into whose shade we drove. And Sarah took my hand and led me to the sanctuary of pillows and cool sheets. They gave me something and I slept.

  When I was stronger, I left my recliner and the intravenous drip, and was shown to a guest bedroom on the first floor. A small balcony and a wet room. It was like a Dubai hotel. Then I looked for Sarah outside, where I could hear calm voices in the still air. The colonnaded terrace had huge, throne-like wicker chairs, and beyond there were steps to the lawn. It swept down with palm trees to a lake. There were swans. A classical statue of a goddess.

  Sarah walked up the lawn with her available arm outstretched. The other held a light wooden stick, not the big metal one with a forearm-support that she used in town.

  “Look at you,” she said.

  “Yeah, look at me.”

  We sat on the terrace and avoided questions. I ate the mezze that the staff brought, and when a bottle of white Burgundy shedding chilled tears of condensation hovered over my glass, I instinctively looked to Sarah. She nodded and we sipped.

  Emboldened by the hummus and wine, the time had come for questions. The elephant on the terrace could no longer be ignored.

  “Where are we, Sar?”

  “It belongs to the Russia Centre,” she said without a pause, as though rehearsed.

  “Does that mean it’s a safe house?”

  This time she did pause.

  “Well, you’re certainly safe here.”

  “What happens next?”

  “We need to get you safely home.”

  We walked and talked in the sunshine some more, resuming the avoidance strategy. We spoke of Israeli agricultural policy, of rush plants and the expense of tending a grass lawn in the desert.

  At early evening, we went through different French windows off the terrace into a library, or perhaps a large study. There was dark wood here as well as marble, bookcases with Russian titles on the spines, between them paintings that may have been by Impressionists.

  “This is where a lot of the networking is done for the Centre’s investment in the peace process,” said Sarah, as if she was a tour guide.

  I picked up a small vase with an Egyptian frieze.

  “By that I take it you mean that this is where your boss manipulates the Zionists,” I said.

  “Damn,” said Sarah. “I suppose you were never going to be an easy house guest.”

  I didn’t wait and spoke firmly without looking at her.

  “Thank you, Sar. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I know you’ve saved my life. Thank you and I love you.”

  But I didn’t move closer to her.

  “’sOK,” she said eventually with a girly little shrug from a perch on the end of a chaise longue.

  “This is Sarapov’s home in Israel, isn’t it,” I said, looking at the vase again.

  “If you like.”

  “I do like. Very much.” And I laughed a little to release the tension.

  “I married him, Nat.”

  Now I looked at her.

  “I married Sergei,” she added, as if I’d asked for clarification.

  “That’s not the sort of thing to tell me when I’m holding a three-million-dollar vase,” I said and put it down.

  “It’s not worth anything like that,” she said.

  “Whatever—”

  “He’s not the enemy, Nat. We’re not the enemy.”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said. “When’s supper?”

  We sat on the terrace, listening to cicadas grinding their legs in the gloaming, while kufta kebabs were brought to us from a barbecue.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to me?” I asked when we’d eaten.

  “I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

  I sat back. Go for it, girl.

  “I was taken to a settlement north of Nazareth where I was a prisoner. They beat
me and made a hostage video, which they never showed. I murdered my two guards to escape.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nat.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. And it doesn’t matter what happened. What matters is what happens from here.”

  “No. I need to know what happened, Sarah. I need to know who did this to me, and I need to know what made me do what I did. Or I’ll go mad.”

  “We had nothing to do with it, Nat.”

  “Nothing to do with what?”

  “You being taken, your disappearance, or whatever happened to you.”

  “But you knew about my job, right? You knew what I had to do over here?”

  “The intelligence exchange. Yes.”

  “So you set up the envelope switch. You set that up and that set me up.”

  “We had an interest in the exchange of information. But we didn’t set you up.”

  I wasn’t dry-eyed, but I was calm.

  “What was in the envelopes, Sar?”

  “Don’t be angry with me, Nat, but it really doesn’t matter.”

  “It bloody well matters to me, Sarah. I was banged up, bloody near murdered, and I had to shag and kill my way out. So don’t bloody tell me it doesn’t matter.”

  My voice was raised but lost in the silken dark of that place. The staff at the barbecue didn’t turn or look up. I wondered if they spoke English.

  Sarah looked like she was going to make a concession in the face of this emerging rage.

  “I don’t know, Nat. That’s the truth, Nat. You were just meant to make the exchange. We’ll find out.”

  But I wanted as much as I could get.

  “Who was Toby?”

  “Don’t worry about Toby. He’s a drone. They wouldn’t tell him what’s going down.”

  “Why didn’t they just round me up when I got back to Jerusalem? They could have just. . . taken me out, or whatever they do.”

  “They were gaslighting you, Nat.”