In the Evil Day

by Peter Temple

  ‘Good.’ Without thinking, he touched her shoulder, pulled his hand away. She showed no sign of taking offence. He thought he saw the embryo of a smile on her lips.

  At his desk, Anselm worked through the files, made notes for operators, dictated instructions for Beate. Alex was always at the edge of his thoughts. She came to mind too often, he thought about what she might be doing, what her day-to-day life was like. The apartment full of chairs. The ex-husband in America. Alex when she was waiting for him at the car, flushed face and neck: pink, sexual pink. She had prominent collarbones and a deep hollow between them.

  The internal phone rang.

  Inskip.

  ‘I’ve got something.’

  Anselm went back to the blue room, to Inskip’s station. He sat on the chair next to him. Inskip pointed at his main monitor. A column of names, one highlighted.

  ‘Here’s a Martin Powell on a list. The date on it’s 1986.’

  He scrolled down the column.

  ‘It’s alphabetical,’ he said.

  ‘I see that.’

  ‘Here’s the list that follows, dated a month later.’

  The new column had names with figures beside them, amounts of money in rands, the South African currency. Inskip scrolled down it. R10,000 was the smallest sum. There was no Martin Powell.

  ‘List number two,’ said Inskip. ‘Some kind of payroll. Notice that this list is mostly alphabetical. Five names from list number one have gone and in their places are five new ones.’

  ‘Mostly alphabetical,’ said Anselm. It took him a second to grasp the meaning. ‘The new names are all in the alphabetical positions of the missing ones?’

  ‘You’re quick, Master. That’s right. My assumption is that whoever made up list number two changed names but didn’t bother to re-sort alphabetically. Just cut and pasted in the new names.’

  ‘Payments,’ said Anselm. ‘Could be the five used false names on list number one, assumed names, but were then paid in their real names.’

  ‘And Martin Powell is gone.’

  Inskip selected a name. ‘And in his place is this man.’

  The name was: NIEMAND, CONSTANTINE.

  Anselm was staring at the screen. ‘What’s the year?’

  ‘1986.’

  ‘Go to the top and scroll.’

  Anselm looked at the names. He knew what the lists meant. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. ‘These people are mercenaries,’ he said. ‘This is the gang assembled for a coup in the Seychelles.

  Organised in England. The South African government backed it, then they betrayed it to the Seychelles government. Paid off the troops.’

  Inskip turned his shaven head, blue in the light. He raised his eyebrows. ‘How do you know that?’

  Anselm got up. ‘I know it because the world is too much with me.

  As for you, this is bonus-quality work. But there isn’t a bonus.’

  ‘Your approval, I’m content to bask in that.’

  ‘While you’re warm, run the Niemand name.’

  Anselm went to his office and rang the number in London.

  ‘Carrick.’

  ‘W and K.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Clicks.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘We have something.’

  Anselm told him.

  ‘Your operator’s very good,’ said Carrick. ‘We need that name checked. Soonest.’

  Inskip, holding up a notepad. His eyes were bright.

  ‘Hold on a moment, please,’ said Anselm.

  ‘Got him,’ said Inskip softly. ‘Got Niemand.’

  Anselm said to Carrick, ‘We have something on Niemand. I’m putting the operator on.’

  Inskip came in, took the handset, cleared his throat. He looked at his notes. ‘A man and his wife and a security guard were murdered by black burglars in a house in Johannesburg four days ago,’ he said. ‘Another security man killed the attackers. His name is given as Con Niemand. His firm says he’s an ex-soldier.’

  He listened. ‘No. This is from the Johannesburg Star. British. The name is Shawn.’

  Anselm was looking at his desk, sightless. He didn’t register immediately.

  ‘S-H-A-W-N,’ said Inskip. ‘Brett and Elizabeth Shawn. Ages forty-seven and forty-one.’

  Sitting in the Mercedes with Tilders, Kael and Serrano on the ferry, the voices from the crackly bug:

  Well, that’s something. Shawn?

  Shot by blacks. So it appears. The business is strange. Werner, the question is what do we do now?

  49

  …HAMBURG…

  Towards home in the cold night, late, Anselm walking, the far shore’s lights lying broken in the lake.

  Reading the names on Inskip’s list, he had felt a sense of recognition and it had come to him: the farcical plot to stage a coup in the Seychelles, he had found out about it in late 1986. He remembered going to London from Paris, staying at the hotel in Russell Square. He’d stayed there often, he knew it well: the cramped bedroom, the tiny floral wallpaper pattern, the corner shower that steamed up the whole room, the small dining room where only breakfast was served, always eggs, bacon and sausage, pigeon-sized eggs cooked hard, bacon that was mainly fat, a single sausage like a pygmy’s little finger.

  He talked to the man in a pub, it was winter, December, near Christmas, the pub wasn’t far away from the hotel, on a corner. They sat at a table in a corner of the saloon bar. The man wanted revenge on people, his superiors, he was sixtyish, bland-faced, a thin scar beneath his right eye. An accident in childhood, perhaps. Struck by a swing.

  Anselm tried to remember whether he had written a story about the Seychelles business. The clipping would be in the cartons sent from San Francisco at Lucas’s instructions. Some time in the first week, he had cut the tapes on one. Grey-blue document boxes, stacked neat as bricks. He remembered opening one and reading a clipping with his byline datelined BOGOTA, TUESDAY. It had meant nothing to him; something written by a stranger from a place he did not recall. He sat there for a long time, blinking away tears. He did not open the boxes again.

  Two people were coming towards him: men, one medium, one shorter, they moved apart, he felt an alarm-they wanted him to pass between them. He moved to his right, the right-hand man shifted.

  Guten Abend, and they were gone. The taller man was a tall woman. Her perfume brushed his face like a cobweb. He carried it a long way, he knew the scent, he knew it well. For a few moments, he wanted desperately to know who wore it, tried to will his mind to tell him.

  The pulse in his throat quietened. He could not remember ever going to Bogota. He remembered his first trip to Beirut…since when did he remember that? Sleeping on the floor of the Dutch photographer’s small apartment in Ashrafiye near the Place Sassine. The bakery called Nazareth. Henk introduced him to the crepes, the cheesy crepes. He remembered the impossible traffic, the insane driving, cocks crowing from gutted buildings, vegetable patches in the ruins, the feeling of people pressing upon you.

  He could probably always have remembered his first time in Beirut. He simply hadn’t thought about it. You didn’t know what you remembered until you thought about it.

  Nonsense.

  Why were so many things coming back? Was everything going to be restored? An unbroken thread? A complete chronology? Would he remember his life again as one piece? Would he be whole again, remember people now unknown to him-people he had loved, people he had slept with? Were they all going to appear without warning, rise silently through the black mud and matted weed like peatbog men?

  The thought made him uneasy. Perhaps it was better to be without the memories. What did it matter? What did holes, gaps, matter? Life didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t a story, it wasn’t a journey. It was just short films by different directors. The only link was you. You were in all of them. You missed a plane and your life changed. You misheard a place name, went to the wrong bar and then you spent two years with a woman you met there. You were leaving
for Europe and the agency rang and instead you went to Colombia. The difference was five minutes. Kaskis rang and then you almost drowned in the Caribbean. Kaskis rang again and if you’d been in Bogota you wouldn’t have spent a year lying in holes in Beirut and you’d have missed the experience of a red-eyed teenager recircuiting your brain with the butt of a Kalashnikov.

  Enough.

  Shawn.

  Waiting to cross Fernsicht, he thought about the man called Shawn murdered in Johannesburg. Kael and Serrano had some connection with him. And Lafarge in London were looking for a man called Martin Powell, whose real name was probably Constantine Niemand, and who was probably on the scene when Shawn died. Niemand, an ex-soldier who killed Shawn’s killers.

  Anselm thought that he was at the intersection of these things and he had no understanding of them. There was a film involved, Kael had talked about a film.

  Kael: …Can you grasp that? If this prick’s got the papers and the film, whatever the fucking film is…How did Lourens die?

  Serrano: In a fire. Chemical fire. Not even teeth left.

  Kael: Well, at least that’s neat. Shawn?

  Serrano: Shot by blacks. So it appears. The business is strange. Werner, the question is what do we do now?

  His street was calm and wet, the traffic noise muted here, most of the leaves down now, the tree limbs silver in the light from streetlamps and front porches, their shadows on the ground like dark roadmaps of densely settled places.

  The laundry had been delivered, neat packages on the porch. In the house, the answering machine’s red beacon called to him as he passed the study. He poured a drink first, whisky and mineral water, not too strong. He was trying not to have three or four neat whiskies when he came home. It was a fight. He craved the quick hits.

  He put on the heating and took the clean, ironed sheets upstairs and made the bed. Then he went down and made another drink, took it to the study, switched on the desk light, sat down in the leather armchair and pressed the machine’s Play button.

  John, Lucas. I’ve had a call from a woman, a journalist. She’s been trying to find you. Says it’s very urgent. Life and death. Her words. Persuasive woman. Something you wrote in, hold on…it’s called Behind Enemy Lines. One of your left-wing rags, no doubt. Her name’s Caroline Wishart. W-I-S-H-A-R-T.I told her I’d pass on her number. It’s a direct line, London… Anselm found a pen, played the message again and wrote down the number.

  Life and death. A figure of speech.

  Behind Enemy Lines? It meant nothing. Probably after 1989, that was where the major fault line seemed to run. There seemed to be bigger gaps after 1989. How could the brain be so arbitrary? He drank whisky and said the name over and over. Nothing.

  Ring Caroline Wishart? About something he’d written. He hadn’t written anything since Beirut.

  Who would say the words ‘life and death’? Journalists. Journalists would say them. Say or not say. They would say or not say anything. It was a trade of omission, implication, suggestion, allusion, half-lies, other fractions of lies. The challenge was to find a way to get people to tell you things. It was just technique-that was what he had said to himself then, in that life.

  Lying even to himself.

  The sound of water in the drainpipe outside. When the rain was steady, the house’s drainpipes made special sounds, irregular, surging sounds. The gutters seemed to hold the water, then let it go. Silence, then a rush. You could count the time between flushes if you said and between each count. Three, sometimes four seconds. He had first noticed this when they came to Hamburg for his grandfather’s funeral. Lying in the bedroom upstairs, in his father’s childhood bedroom, in his father’s childhood bed, Lucas asleep across the room-Lucas went to sleep instantly, anywhere-he had fallen asleep counting the pauses. How old? Ten or twelve.

  The house had its own life, its own ways. When he came from Beirut, it was mute. He heard nothing, no sounds, a silent house. Then, gradually, it seemed to relax, accept him. One by one, sounds appeared. The house began to groan and creak, it moaned quietly in the wind. There were sounds of friction in the roof, strange rubbing sounds. Pipes began to choke and hammer, the heating whispered, the stair-treads released squeaks in descending or ascending order seconds after his passage.

  Caroline Wishart.

  He dialled W amp;K. Wolfgang answered.

  ‘Anselm. Herr Inskip, bitte.’

  ‘Inskip.’

  ‘Anselm.’

  ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

  ‘I’ve done that. Now I’m bored. Run a Caroline Wishart, will you? A journalist. London. Nothing fancy.’

  He spelled the name, waited. He heard keys clicking, the humming of the blue room. He finished the whisky. Only the second drink of the night. Remarkable.

  ‘She’s a hot new talent,’ said Inskip. ‘An expose person. Exclusive. Minister Buggered Me Says Rentboy. Pictures.’

  ‘Is that a complaint?’ said Anselm. ‘I thought rentboys understood what the job entailed.’

  ‘He could be referring to the Minister’s stamina. It could be a compliment.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you and goodnight.’

  Anselm fetched another whisky. He vacillated and then he dialled W amp;K again, Inskip.

  ‘Put this through for me, would you?’

  He would be giving her his number if he dialled direct. He put down the phone. It rang within seconds.

  ‘Caroline Wishart.’

  ‘John Anselm.’

  He heard her sigh.

  ‘Mr Anselm, I’m so pleased you’ve called. I’d almost given up hope.’

  It was an upper-class voice.

  ‘It’s about what?’

  ‘You wrote a piece for Behind Enemy Lines in 1993. Called “And Unquiet Lie the Civil Dead”? Under the name Richard Monk.’

  Anselm didn’t say anything. The title meant nothing to him. Nor did the name Richard Monk.

  ‘I’m trying to follow up on something in it about a rumour that a village in Angola was wiped out.’

  Blank.

  ‘What makes you think I’m Richard Monk?’

  ‘The person the publisher paid for the article was John Anselm. A cheque was sent to him to an address in San Francisco.’

  San Francisco?

  ‘What address?’

  She told him.

  Kaskis’ apartment.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘The publisher’s friend told someone who told me. Robert Blumenthal’s friend.’

  He saw a man with hair like a dark, curly frame around his face, bright brown eyes. The look of an intellectual lumberjack. He remembered a voice, low, husky, quick speech.

  That was all he remembered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm. ‘I had an accident in 1993 and my memory’s bad. I can’t recall the piece. Not at all.’

  She was silent. She doesn’t believe me, he thought. Well, a person who seeks out rentboys who say they were fucked by a British Cabinet Minister, she’d probably be of a sceptical bent.

  ‘Mr Anselm, it’s terribly important,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t being melodramatic when I said to your brother it was a life and death matter.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  She made a small sound. Not a cough, a sound of embarrassment. ‘I’d really like to say more,’ she said, ‘but I’m…I’m not comfortable speaking on the phone. You’ll understand, I think.’

  Anselm thought he heard something in her voice. Truth, you sometimes knew it when you heard it. Truth and fear and lies, they had their pitches and cadences and hesitancies.

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit desperate. Very. I’ve probably bothered you for nothing. Wasted your time.’

  Anselm looked at his drink. Bob Blumenthal? How did he know him, know his face so well? What short film was that? Did he like or hate the Bob Blumenthal whose face he could see.

  ‘I’ll call you again,’ he said. ‘Give me some time.’

  ‘Tonight?’


  ‘I don’t know. Possibly.’

  ‘Please. I’d be…it’s…well, it’s not a story I’m chasing, it’s something more. Anyway, I’ve said that. So…’ ‘Yes. Goodbye.’

  Anselm sat for a while, smoked a cigarette. The room had warmed. He sipped the whisky, finished it, went to the kitchen and poured another one. People interested in his past, things he knew. Alex, this woman. Sniffing around him. He was a source. A repository of something. They thought he had something they could use.

  But why did that make him uneasy? He knew about cultivating people, getting people to trust him, to tell him things.

  Forget Caroline Wishart. She wanted something and there was no knowing what it was. It was unlikely to be what she said it was.

  The life of question and answer. How had he fallen into it?

  You’re got an inquiring mind. Not many people have. Consider yourself blessed. His mother had said that to him. He couldn’t recall anything else his mother said. So, from all the years together, all the nurturing, he came away with three sentences.

  No.

  He remembered something else. Her telling him, in this house, that she was leaving his father. He was seventeen. On the terrace of this house, sitting in the wicker chairs, losing their paint even then and never painted again.

  The chairs were still on the terrace, the exposed surfaces bare of paint. His father had remembered them from before the war, before he was sent to America.

  The last Anselm to sit in the chairs, look at the garden, at the canal. He would be that one.

  The day she told him, it was autumn. He remembered the big drifts of leaves lying in the garden, in hollows, at trees. Leaves liked to cluster.

  He had trouble recalling his mother’s face. In Beirut, in the coffin for two, her smell had come to him in dreams, lingered in his nostrils when he woke as if it were actually in the air. Not a perfume exactly, cologne and something else, a talcum powder perhaps. The smell had filled him with a sadness and a longing so unbearable that he would gladly have died to extinguish it.

  That day on the terrace, she said, she had a matter-of-fact way, she said: Darling, your father and I are getting on each other’s nerves. We’re going to take a little break from each other. A sort of holiday, really. It’ll be good for both of us. Don’t look at me like that. It won’t change anything. And you’re both grown-up now.