Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  I opened the envelope, pulled out the papers, and began flicking through them with the kind of rising dread I recalled from the days of adolescence and failed exams.

  “You have to believe me, I didn’t know.”

  Georgi was tapping the table with the tip of the gun. “Three million share …?” he said in a ripe voice so deep it sounded like it started somewhere around his thighs. “You have three million share in Caucasia Oil and Gas and you don’t know?”

  I looked at the copies of the share certificates in my hand, willing them to change. “A guy came and he said sign these papers and I signed the papers and—”

  “You have three million share? Three million?”

  “I know, I know, it’s a lot of shares and these are my signatures and that is my name there and there and—”

  He lifted the revolver and pointed it at me. “You are one of them. You profit from our injustice and you come here to make more money and—”

  “Georgi!” Ellen was up and leaning across the table, one hand gripping his thick forearm as if steadying herself. He looked at her, nodded slowly, and said, “I am only scaring.”

  “I think Mr. Basset is good and scared, Georgi. Good and scared.”

  I began going through the papers again, searching for something, anything, that might prove they were fakes, though I accepted that they weren’t. From the quality of the print I could see they were faxes. I looked to the headers for identifiers, an originating fax number or a date, but there was just a line of zeros. The sending machine was either new or had been reset. I put the papers down on the table and rubbed my sweaty palms on my trousers. It struck me that the best approach when faced by a large man with bad teeth and a revolver would be to throw myself at his mercy.

  “Georgi, I am guilty of stupidity. I didn’t look at what I signed, and I should have and I am so, so sorry, but at the time I didn’t know I was going to be apologizing to you and nobody—”

  “Your apology is worthless.”

  “I can see it might look like that. But maybe”—I was thinking fast—“maybe we’re both being set up here. Maybe someone is trying to sabotage our meeting? Isn’t that possible?” I was searching around for a way out now, trying to talk the evidence of these papers into submission.

  “Who? Who is this person?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if you tell me who gave you the documents …”

  He stared straight at me so directly that I was immediately moved to look to his left.

  “Ellen, did you give him—”

  “You know I can’t reveal my sources.”

  “This is a setup, Ellen. I didn’t know anything about this. I didn’t know I owned more than the one share I signed for this morning.”

  “You didn’t know you owned three million shares in Caucasia Oil and Gas?”

  “Jesus, Ellen, don’t you start. Just tell me who gave you the papers and—”

  Georgi silenced me by standing up, his wooden chair creaking with relief. “Enough,” he said. He shoved the revolver into the waistband of his canvas trousers. “We will see how much your rich friends want you back.” From behind me I could hear mutterings of furious indignation from the hostages, and I couldn’t blame them. I could see how it looked. This hadn’t been my finest hour. I was finding myself less and less impressive by the minute. Georgi walked toward the door and Ellen got up to follow. She stopped at my shoulder. “Sorry, Marc, just doing my job.”

  “Ellen, please believe me. I knew nothing about this.”

  “Whatever.”

  She went after Georgi and I turned around in my chair to watch them go. At the doors he stopped and said, “Sorry. You too.”

  She shrieked. “You what?”

  “You stay here too. It must be the way.”

  “Georgi, we had a deal. We had a fucking deal. We had a deal, a deal…”

  He shrugged as if to say: This is the way. Night follows day. The river runs down to the sea. I have a gun in my waistband. You stay here.

  Now the men who had been waiting in the trucks outside came into the barn, carrying blankets and metal cases marked with a red cross and half a dozen storm lanterns. They placed them in the middle of the floor and retreated back to their vehicles, leaving Georgi at the doors. He said, “A little longer, my friends.” He went out too, locking the barn behind him. We listened to the thick metal clunk of the truck doors closing, the throat-clearing of the diesel engines, and stayed silent in there as the sounds pulled away into the muffled distance of the track through the woods. I picked the papers up off the table once more, willing the contents to change, but they remained the same. When I looked up, every person in the barn was staring at me.

  I said, “Sorry?” They shook their heads and turned away.

  Thirty-three

  The situation might have been easier if the hostages hadn’t been broadly sympathetic to the cause of their captors. They too thought Caucasia Oil and Gas represented the ugliest face of ugly big business, and had passed most of their captivity as teachers or health workers serving the isolated Abkhazian villages of the northern highlands. They wanted to go home but were prepared to wait until a favorable deal was done. My contribution that day did not represent a favorable deal. They avoided talking to me and busied themselves instead with hanging the lamps and sorting out sleeping areas for however long we were to be here, in this dank barn in the middle of this dank nowhere, five hundred miles from the nearest good restaurant.

  Ellen talked to me, but it wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have.

  “You klutz, Basset.”

  “I wasn’t the one who gave him the documents.”

  “And I wasn’t the one who bought three million shares in the company.”

  “This is a setup, Ellen. Don’t you see? A setup. I didn’t know I owned those shares. If I had known—”

  “Yeah? So someone wants you to be taken hostage?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I don’t know. I—”

  “You’re a klutz, Basset.”

  I tried the sat phone, of course. I tried it for hours, but all I got was a long announcement in six different languages telling me no one was available and inviting me to leave a message. I left a message and then another and a third, each more frantic than the last. I tried Luke. I tried my mother. I even tried Lynne. But all I got was answering machines or failed calls as I screwed up the international dialing codes. When I called Jennie in Vienna I got the voice mail message again which only days before I had found comforting. Now her calm, measured tones infuriated me, for they were the sound of a woman oblivious to my predicament. Eventually, fearful that I might drain the battery and that nobody would then be able to call me back, I gave up.

  As night fell and the lamps were lit, creating pools of light and leather black shadows in the corners of the ancient building, the Red Cross crates were opened. We were each handed a small sealed foil package the size of a paperback book. It was marked with another red cross and the words Emergency Energy Ration. I ripped it open hungrily, but quickly dropped the package onto the straw-strewn floor and dropped onto my haunches, my hands over my eyes to hide the horror.

  “Not up to your usual gastronomic standards, Basset?” Ellen said, eating hers.

  “It’s chocolate.”

  “What were you hoping for? Roast swan?”

  “I can’t eat chocolate.”

  “Jesus, Basset, this is not the time to be a picky eater.”

  “I’m not being picky. I’m allergic to chocolate. There must be something else in the crate. I’m starving. There has to be something else …”

  But there wasn’t anything else. I took a blanket away into a corner by myself and curled up on it, my hands around the taunting emptiness in my belly. Somehow I fell asleep.

  I was woken in the early hours by the deepest of thuds that made the earth beneath me shudder. It was followed, as I came to, by a second and a third. Ellen was already awake and sitting bolt upright, not far from me, staring into
the darkness, chin up, mouth open, tip of tongue against bottom lip, like a cat tasting a scent on the air. I crawled over to her and whispered, “Thunder?” I looked upward at the great holes in the roof where the rain could come in.

  She shook her head and whispered back, “No. Not thunder.” There was another gut-shifting boom, louder and closer this time, and as I looked upward again, involuntarily, I saw a sudden flash in the darkness.

  She said, “Munitions.”

  “Bombs?”

  She nodded. “Aerial, I suspect.” There was a roar as a jet passed low overhead. She turned to me with the kind of expression I was used to seeing only on the faces of wine connoisseurs after they have correctly identified a vineyard and vintage. “See?” she said, as if it were a good thing.

  Everybody else was awake by now, and without much discussion, we moved to the corner of the barn that backed onto the woods, somehow believing it left us less exposed huddled there together. Throughout that night the air around us cracked with small arms fire and the fizz of bomb and blast, which made the old building shake on its meager foundations so that the lamps swung on their nails and the shadows danced on the walls. So this is how it ends, I thought. Here, in this barn, surrounded by people who hate me, in the backlit darkness with the air splitting open and the ground shaking and my stomach empty. This is where it finishes.

  But the dawn came again, and with it, respite. The bomb blasts mellowed and then died away, like thunderstorms that had moved far out to sea. We were left with only the rattle of gunshot, followed later by another sound which was so unexpected and so shrill that it took me half a minute to realize it was my phone ringing. I snatched it up.

  “Max?”

  “They’re coming to get you, kid.”

  “I’ve been taken hostage, Max.”

  “I know. They’re coming to get you. It will be okay.”

  “They had papers.”

  “We know. They told us.”

  “I don’t know how they got the papers, Max.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Calm down? I almost died tonight. I still might.”

  “They’re coming to get you.”

  “Did you know I had shares in Caucasia, Max?”

  “You’ve got a lot of investments.”

  “Did you know?”

  “Kid, did they say where the papers came from?”

  “Ellen Petersen gave them the papers.”

  “Petersen’s there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. She’s here.”

  “How did she get them?”

  “She won’t say. She won’t say anything.”

  “Was there anything on the fax header? Anything at all? A number? A code?”

  “No, nothing. There was nothing. It’s blank.”

  “Totally blank?”

  “A line of zeros. The fax machine had been reset. Or it was new.”

  “Was there a date on the header?”

  “I’m telling you, Max, there’s nothing. Nothing at all. There was …”

  I stopped and sat down on the floor of the barn, as if the air had been punched out of me. I closed my eyes to help me focus and said, “I didn’t tell you they were faxes.”

  He coughed, and croaked, “Hang on.” I heard him clearing his throat and inhaling deeply on the oxygen.

  “Max, I didn’t tell you.” There was silence from the other end, save for the rush and suck of his congested breathing.

  He said soothingly, “You’re going to be fine, Marc. Try to keep your nerve.”

  “Did you give Petersen the papers?” I listened to the howl of static, the sound of empty noise bouncing between satellites.

  He said, “We’re in the private sector now, Marc. There are so many things to consider.”

  “What things?”

  “Costs.”

  “What costs? Talk to me, Max.”

  “It’s always a balance. What’s cheaper, compensation or action?”

  I began pacing the floor, watched by my fellow hostages, each of them regarding me with disgust. “You made sure the militia would have to refuse my apology?”

  “Marc, it was a complex set of decisions.”

  “Did you know I would be taken hostage?”

  “We thought it possible. But we made arrangements.”

  “So that the Georgians could launch a military assault?”

  “And the Russians, Marc, and the Russians. They landed on the coast this morning at Sokhumi. It’s all with United Nations approval.”

  This, I think, was meant to be the clincher; if the United Nations were involved it all had to be aboveboard, but it wasn’t, of course. None of this could ever be aboveboard. At the time, though, hidden away in this locked barn, all I knew was that I was a victim, and that convincing others of my victimhood might prove difficult. Certainly Ellen Petersen was having none of it. I could see now that she really didn’t know the identity of the person who had faxed her the papers, and without knowing the source she was in no position to accept my innocence, whatever I said. However, in her book, A Very Sorry Affair, published nine months after the Abkhazian incident, she did at least manage to trace the sequence of events.

  For ten days prior to my arrival at Zugdidi, the Russians, acting for themselves and as proxies for the Georgians, had been secretly circulating a draft resolution around the United Nations Security Council. The resolution would sanction military action against the Abkhazian secessionist militias should my mission end in failure and the hostages not be released, although there was a general understanding that it would only be passed if I was under direct threat. Only if I too became a hostage would the Russians get the votes they wanted. It didn’t matter that I was no longer the UN’s Chief Apologist. As Petersen put it, I was “still family” and a figure of such renown that world opinion would swiftly swing behind any use of force. My fame, the fame Max had encouraged me to accept, had become the perfect excuse for starting a small war.

  In this deal everybody won, except for me and the Abkhazians. With the help of the larger, more organized Russian forces, Georgia would take back control of Abkhazia once and for all. Russia in turn would get a local supply of cheap oil. And Caucasia Oil and Gas and its Kremlin-friendly owners had quietly agreed to underwrite part of the cost of the invasion, the first private corporation to do so. Their contribution to the military bottom line, although huge, was still far less than any compensation they might have ended up paying had my apology been accepted. And if the operation cost less, thanks to ORB arranging for me to be taken hostage in an entirely deniable manner, then my company’s pay packet would only be greater.

  For now, though, Max told me none of this detail. He simply said, “Our fee will be much bigger, Marc.”

  “I don’t want the money, Max. And you don’t need it. You’re dying.”

  “Remember, Marc. Only losers die poor.” He laughed until he was coughing and choking down the phone at me. “Hang on again.”

  “Max? MAX?”

  “I’m here, Marc.”

  “The only thing I have is my reputation, Max. That’s all I have. You have destroyed my reputation. Ellen’s going to destroy me when she writes this up.”

  “Don’t worry, my boy. I’ll take responsibility. I’ll say it was my fault. That I should have remembered your shares. Mistake of a sick old man. I’ll resign from the company, make a statement, the moment we get you back.” He coughed some more, so that it sounded like his chest was trying to escape from his body. “And don’t worry about Petersen, either. I’ve set up a distraction for her. She won’t be interested in the Caucasia story. Trust me.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Trust me, Marc. It will all be fine.”

  I was shouting into the phone now, calling his name, telling him not to do any more, that he had already done enough, but the line was dead. There was another sound filling the barn. Everybody was on their feet now, watching the doors, as the noise of diesel trucks expanded into the space. Somebody was
coming.

  Thirty-four

  We heard a shout of “Get down!” and did as we were told, throwing ourselves belly forward onto the cool bare earth. There was a flash and a bang and a rush of white smoke as the doors fell in, so that a little pale daylight reached into the barn, only to be snuffed out again by a rush of men in black jumpsuits and bulbous night-vision goggles, pointing rifles at the shadows and shouting at us. I put my hands over my head and pushed my nose into the dirt.

  Lying next to me on the floor, Ellen shouted, “There are no gunmen in here, only hostages!,” like she’d done this before. And again: “Only hostages, only hostages!” But the chaos still had a distance to run. The men surrounded us, filling out the space with their barrels and their barked commands. Just as I was easing into the noise and motion around me, there was a shout of “Above you!” A thick volley of ear-punching rifle shots bashed the air, chased into the echo by a series of thuds onto the barn floor, each one marked by squeals from a few of my companions. Slowly, as the noise died away, I opened my eyes. Lying on the floor in front of me was a fat wood pigeon, the place where its head should be a bloody, awkward stump. The floor was dressed with dead birds.

  There was an embarrassed silence. Ellen stood up. “Well, guys, now that you’ve shot out the local wildlife, would you like to rescue us or shall we just stay here and pluck them?”

  I pulled myself unsteadily to my knees and then upward onto my feet. The man in front of me stared down at the floor through his goggles and nudged the pigeon with the heavy toe of his heavy black boot, as if checking it no longer posed a threat.

  “Believe me, it’s dead,” I said, inheriting a certain portion of Ellen’s clumsy sarcasm. The man looked up at me quizzically, his goggles still in place. Now he pulled them off and, in one smooth action, the black cotton balaclava that lay beneath them. I stared at him, as if unexpectedly spotting my reflection across a room and finding the familiar face hard to place.