Blood Rules

by John Trenhaile

  “You promised.”

  “I can’t go through with it.”

  “Although earlier today you went through with the wedding. Yes. A deal’s a deal, poppet. We’ve done our bit, now it’s your turn. Change your clothes.”

  She put all the mute appeal she could muster into her gaze, but he was no longer a lover; he was cold right through to his soul.

  “Grandfather Ibrahim died because you let his murderer into the house,” he said. “You disobeyed orders. Nobody ever asked you to pay for that until you were grown up, and even then no one asked you to pay. But when you wanted to marry Colin, it was too much. So you made a deal.”

  “And now I’m breaking it.”

  “And now I’m going down the passage to murder your husband, okay?”

  His bright smile never faltered as he went across to the bedside table, took out a SIG-Sauer P226, checked its magazine, and made for the door. She grabbed him, spun him around, tried to grapple for the gun, but he held it above his head, an indulgent brother teasing his kid sister into a game, while his smile, that fine dazzling display of teeth, became one long taunt.

  She stopped struggling. She dropped his arms and turned away, shielding her eyes. She was sobbing, but he did not care. She knew he did not care.

  “Poppet … poppet! Why do we need all this hysteria, this brouhaha? Mm?” He spread his hands wide. “It’s so simple, so safe! What am I asking you to do? To take part in an amusing little charade, that’s all.”

  Her gaze came to rest on the blouse. Rayon. Plain, simple. Funny, she had not known before today what murderers wore, Woman’s Realm no help there. They wore white rayon.

  She picked up the clothes and ran into the bathroom.

  When she emerged ten minutes later—it took so long because she had to put her hair up underneath an official-looking cap—Halib subjected her to a thorough inspection before proclaiming himself satisfied. He handed her the briefcase. She took it without a word. They went out. They took a back staircase, emerging into an alley behind the hotel. By now darkness had fallen; the alley was deserted. London smelled of rain and damp garbage, its traffic a rough but distant sea. When a horn sounded somewhere in Park Lane she thought, irrationally, how nice for the people in that car to be going out to a good dinner.

  Talking of cars, hers was big and black, and it stood parked a few yards away, its nearside wheels on the pavement. As they approached, the driver started the engine. Halib handed his sister into the back seat, along with the briefcase. He closed the door. He bent down to blow her a kiss, although Leila, staring straight ahead, did not see it. He tapped the car’s roof with the flat of his hand and waved, before returning to the hotel via the front entrance, keen to be high-profile visible, alibi perfect.

  Leila’s drive was a short one. She found that maddening. She wanted the journey to take all night. All year. In the event, it lasted five minutes.

  They pulled up outside a house that was illuminated from top to bottom, great wedges and shafts of light buttressing out of it onto the pavement. Leila sat immobile. Five seconds passed. The chauffeur turned his head slightly. She was aware of him studying her in the mirror. Halib’s man. His eyes reminded her of a bird’s. Underneath those eyes you’d find a vicious beak, to rend and tear.

  As Leila got out, a stopwatch clicked on inside her mind. She caught a glimpse of a gilt chandelier inside a ground-floor room, and oil paintings hung from oak panels. Voices, loud and bibulously cheerful through the glass. Music. Five seconds gone, never to return.

  She straightened her shoulders and climbed the steps to the front door beneath the portico. Five more seconds lost forever. The door opening, to reveal a butler, the real thing, one hand straightening his lapel. Lights, camera….

  “Yes, madam?”

  Action.

  “Foreign Office,” Leila said, pointing to the black-and-gilt badge pinned on her breast. “I’m carrying a memorandum from the Foreign Secretary to His Excellency Nasser al-Qotbzadeh. It concerns their meeting tomorrow. I’m to await a reply.”

  The butler glanced down at her briefcase. “I will tell the ambassador, madam. Do you wish to step inside?”

  Leila nodded and crossed the threshold. The hallway was wide and long, with an imposing staircase of shallow semicarpeted steps leading up and around to the first floor, whence came the sounds of revelry. Somebody’s wedding reception, perhaps? The butler floated up the stairs, disappearing around the bend at the top. Shortly afterward a crowd of girls came down in a haze of tattle and giggles. At least two of them were Jewish. This particular Arab ambassador was known to have a yen for the Nobel Peace Prize. Halib claimed actually to like the fellow; but, as he said with a shrug, business was business.

  Two minutes and forty-five seconds, read the stop-watch inside her skull, when a tall Arab came scurrying down the stairs with a worried look on his face and the butler in tow.

  Leila fingered the official badge attached to her jacket, pressing a concealed switch. There, she’d done it; the radio signal was sent. Outside, in the street, the driver would have received it. He’d be getting out of the car, going around to open the rear door for her….

  “I told you, ask me first before letting anyone in,” the Arab yapped at the butler. He turned to Leila. “Yes, miss, what can I do for you? I am his Excellency’s secretary.”

  Leila repeated the story about a memorandum for the ambassador. The Arab looked at the briefcase suspiciously. “Open it, then, open it.”

  “The communication is confidential; his Excellency holds the key.”

  “What? Nonsense, I never heard of such a thing.”

  Leila gawked at him. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Halib had told her the briefcase would be taken in as a matter of course.

  “I’ve got my orders,” she said weakly. “I’m sure if you consult with the ambassador—”

  The doorbell rang. The butler went to answer it. On the step stood a uniformed constable, who said, “Who’s with the Foreign Office car outside?”

  “I am,” Leila said. Her heart was racing. Not more difficulties; this whole thing was falling apart.

  “It’s blocking the street. You’ll have to move.”

  She couldn’t believe this was happening. She was trapped between the policeman and the ambassador’s secretary; they wouldn’t accept the briefcase, they wouldn’t let her go; part of her was glad, but she didn’t want to die.

  “I’m here with a message,” she said to the policeman. “A message for the amb—”

  “I don’t care if you’re signing the ruddy Treaty of Versailles, I want you to move that car and I want you to do it now.”

  Four minutes exactly since she’d left the car. Leila’s palms were dripping sweat. She couldn’t go on, it was all going to fail and fail disastrously. Help me! she cried silently.

  “Tell my driver,” she retorted. To her astonishment her voice sounded firm and under control.

  “He says he won’t move without your say-so.”

  Four minutes and twenty-five seconds.

  Leila shot a look of appeal at the Arab. “I’ll be back at once. I must wait for a reply. But it’s urgent, and I can assure you that the Ambassador does have the key. Excuse me.”

  She put down the briefcase and went out while the policeman continued to harangue her unpleasantly. She approached her car and bent to speak to the driver, who became aggressive. The policeman began to shout. The driver grumpily put his car in gear and moved a few yards at a snail’s pace, with the policeman still resting one hand on the window ledge.

  They had reached an intersection. Leila glanced back to see that the front door through which she’d just emerged had closed, the portico was empty.

  “Now!” said the policeman, and she gazed at him vacantly. Five minutes.

  While she was dithering, the constable grabbed her arm, wrenched open the rear door with his free hand, and thrust her inside, following with such speed that he sprawled over her lap. The car leapt
forward, cornered on two wheels, and there, ahead of them, were the lights and fast-flowing traffic of Park Lane.

  “You’re … you’re not a policeman?” she said, feeling stupid. The constable just laughed.

  She heard horns tooting, the noise of cars, all the usual London things. Then, suddenly, without warning, a second of silence. Simultaneously the car’s interior was illuminated, but poorly, as if a handful of candles had been stuffed through the window and instantly withdrawn. The noise followed an infinitesimal time afterward, a ripping down of the world from top to bottom, the thunder that would accompany the Last Trump.

  Another turn, and two more in quick succession, before the car slowed to a sedate twenty miles an hour, even pausing responsibly at the next crossroads to let the first of the fire engines through, its bell clanging madly.

  “Quick,” the policeman said with an admiring nod at the fire engine. “Bloody quick, that.”

  He’d shed his helmet and was already half out of his uniform jacket. Leila stared at him. But before she could speak, the car had pulled into the curb, they were back where she’d started less than half an hour ago, and Halib was already gliding from the shadows like the devil’s maître d’hotel to greet her.

  She got out, somehow. The night was alive with bells and sirens. At the end of the alley she glimpsed the flashing blue light of a police car as it sped by on its way to the scene of the event, as they would have called it in Beirut. It was so much easier to cope with “events” than with murder, death by burning and explosion, terrorist atrocity.

  “Did you like my police officer?” Halib murmured. “Neat, yes?”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” She was too exhausted to vent anger.

  “Because if you’d known what to expect, you might have seemed too relaxed and given the game away. Sorry, poppet.”

  Halib took her up by the back stairs and into his room to change, again meeting nobody; saw her into her room, where Colin still snored on the carpet; produced as if by magic a fresh bottle of Laurent Perrier’s 1964 vintage champagne with its elegant oval burgundy-colored neck label and distinctive gold lettering; opened it, poured most away; bade her good night with a kiss on her sweaty cheek.

  She did not undress. She lay down on the bed with her back propped up against its headboard and her arms stiff by her sides. Colin found her like that next morning, her eyes wide open and unblinking. He made a joke of his hangover, although she could see from his face that it was no laughing matter. What drug, she wondered, had Halib put into the first bottle of champagne? She had to have a cover story for still wearing her day clothes, and she chose the most obvious: she’d been too angry to put herself properly to bed because she couldn’t forget how he’d fallen down dead drunk in a stupor on their wedding night, and it was an odd thing, but as she spoke the word “dead” she burst into tears. Colin comforted her. But nothing he said or did was right, so in the end he left Leila to herself and went for a long cold shower.

  And today was the first day of their honeymoon. They were flying to Paris: wonderful, wonderful. They went straight to the airport. Neither of them could face breakfast so the newspapers came to her after take-off on an empty stomach, which was as well, because the minute she clapped eyes on their headlines she had to go to the toilet, where she crossed the Channel doubled up over the basin and retching.

  She just made it back to her seat in time for landing. While the aircraft taxied she was able to pick up a paper and digest the names of the twelve people she’d killed the night before. This was the price of her marriage, the cost of happiness. Some must die that she might live, and be happy ever after.

  The alphabetically ordered list of dead imprinted itself on her memory. Years later she would be able to remember each name, could have told you without hesitation, for example, that between Nagma Sayyar and Peter Walters came Sara Sharett.

  23 JULY: EARLY EVENING:

  AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN

  “Dad, nothing’s as bad as Beirut.”

  “No.”

  “You got us out. ‘Nothing is going to be as bad as Beirut ever again'; isn’t that what you always told us?”

  “That’s right.” Colin knew that his son was mouthing phrases, anything to keep him on the road, but the words did help. He uttered a strange noise, half laugh, half grunt. “I was still trying to pay my father back, in those days.”

  “Pay him back? Why, what had he done to you?”

  Colin’s face tensed. He shook his head and muttered, “Perhaps they’ll feed us again soon. I’m feeling—”

  “You never talk about your father. Why? After all, he was my grandfather.”

  “Look, son, do me a favor, will you? I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “But—”

  “All right?”

  “No, it bloody well isn’t,” Robbie flared. “Christ, you think this is some wonderful time to start being moody?”

  “Moody? You can talk!”

  “Why did you want to pay him back? What had he done wrong?” “I never said that.” “Tell me!”

  “I owed him a debt, you stupid—” “That’s not what you meant.”

  “That’s exactly what I meant.”

  “It’s what you said, but not what you meant. All right: what debt, what kind of debt?”

  “If you’d just be quiet for one—”

  Colin stopped in mid-sentence. A cool, hard ring had come to rest against the side of his head. Fouad stood there, holding his gun against Colin’s neck, and his eyes were speculative, as if he were considering which of the many exotic techniques at his disposal might most rapidly dispel ennui.

  “You,” he said, in a voice devoid of emotion, “make too much noise.”

  All the saliva drained from Colin’s mouth. He had brought this on. And how rich that the argument should have raged around debts owed by sons to their fathers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t Robbie’s fault.”

  Fouad studied him for a long moment. Then said, “She wants you. Not you"—Robbie had already half risen, the expression on his face changing from guilt to exultation, but Fouad nodded at Colin—"just him.”

  Fouad thrust Colin through the curtain to find Selim standing by the doorway with a pistol held at chest height, covering someone hunched forward in the seat nearest him, someone whose face was averted. Then Leila rose up out of the seat across the aisle and turned to face her former husband.

  “I am abandoning this operation,” she said. “Many people must die. Many, many, many. But I mean to start with two.”

  She nodded at Selim. He came forward and jerked Raful to his feet, pushing him to the doorway and holding him there with the muzzle of his gun jammed against the man’s throat. Fouad went aft, buttoning the curtain behind him.

  “You are going to have to die, Colin; die before you can destroy my child’s love for me.” Leila spoke with rough rapidity. “Then I shall comfort him. I shall console him for the loss of a much-loved father. I will become everything to him, as I was everything before.”

  Colin looked into her eyes and shuddered.

  Outside, the rotors of the helicopter coughed into life. It was time for the evening run, transporting the next batch of film. Leila glanced back at Selim. She spoke a few words and he made a signal to the camera crew on the ground, that they should wait awhile, but the rotors continued to turn.

  “No hypocrisy,” Leila said. “I shan’t pretend I’m sorry.” She went into the cockpit, locking the door behind her.

  For a moment, Colin felt nothing. Then the truth rammed into him and he staggered, as all the strength in his legs drained away. These were the last minutes of light he’d ever see, his last sounds were coming up, the number of breaths he could take was finite. He’d always tried to accept that the end of every human life is death, always tried to be ready, in a detached, intellectual kind of way, but this was real and it was happening now.

  Before, when he’d stood in the aisle between the g
unman and Robbie, his blood had been hot, he’d lived only to save his son. Now was different. To die in cold blood…. “No,” he gasped. “No!”

  He heard the swish of the curtain, but it came to him muffled. Everything inside him, each one of his senses, was now focused on the ultimate reality. Death. The end.

  “Dad,” said a voice, but he scarcely heard it. Selim was going to shoot him dead, in front of his son. There was so much left that he wanted to do, places he yearned to see, and they were going to kill him seconds from now; him and “many, “ she had said, “many, many.”

  Selim stepped back, raising his gun. Raful put one hand in his pocket, took out something that glinted in the sunlight, a cigarette lighter; he put his hand up to cover his mouth and nostrils, he closed his eyes, all this in the few seconds it took Selim to retire a few steps and check his weapon; then Raful spun the lighter’s wheel, but no flame appeared.

  The strange thing was that Colin understood all this. Because he was on the point of death and he didn’t want to die, because the totality of his nerves and muscles and tendons and blood and the whole of his brain were dedicated to self-preservation, he could interpret whatever happened with miraculous accuracy. Raful was going onto the attack.

  As Raful held up the lighter Colin raised himself on tiptoe and spun around. His fist smashed into Fouad’s cheek, whiplashing the man’s head back against a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall. Fouad staggered but did not go down. Colin was already lifting the extinguisher off its bracket. He gripped it by its bottom, like a stubby baseball bat, and hoisted it high above his head. Fouad raised an arm, lashed out with his other hand to grab hold of Colin’s shirt. Colin swung down hard. The crack delivered itself the length of his arm and he dropped the extinguisher, red it was, red the color of the blood gushing from Fouad’s fractured skull.

  The high-pitched wail of a whistle screamed through the plane. Raful, yes, a signal, of course. Colin grabbed Robbie’s arm and yanked him forward. He absorbed everything in a flash: Selim lying on the floor, his face a mask of torment, feet still kicking; Raful disappearing down the emergency chute…. Shots in the cabin behind, running feet, louder and louder, thump, thump, thump! Colin, still clutching Robbie, bent double and hurtled for the doorway; next second the two of them were sliding down on their stomachs, trying to keep their faces off the rough, rubbery surface, to land in a tangled heap on the desert floor.