Firefly

by Henry Porter

  ‘Great. There’s one other thing: I want you to open an account at a particular bookmaker in London under your name and make the bet on that account.’

  ‘Is this some sort of sting?’

  ‘No, it’s exploiting a market. The bookmaker I have in mind has probably already laid off the bet I made, and he will do the same for yours, so he won’t be exposed.’

  ‘Very well. You’ll give me the details by email?’

  ‘Of course. It’s important you do it today.’

  ‘Fine.’ He swirled the brandy glass that had just been handed to him then raised it to Samson. ‘Here’s to our bet. Here’s to Aysel’s bet.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Samson liked Denis Hisami and admired his cool and his good manners.

  ‘It is I who owe you, Paul. I’ll enjoy watching how this works.’ He paused, and his expression grew serious again. ‘I want to keep in touch with you about Al Kufra. You may be able to help me with one or two things. Mr Harp gave me your numbers.’ He rose and winced as he downed the cognac.

  ‘Call whenever you need,’ said Samson, getting up and taking Hisami’s hand. ‘And good luck!’

  ‘The same to you – it’s been a pleasure.’ He gave Samson a slight bow and left the lobby, his men following him.

  *

  Vuk Divjak appeared half an hour later, clutching a map marked with the exact spot where the women had found the off-duty police officer on the road, about thirty kilometres east of the highway. He’d learned that the police had been actively searching for their colleague’s car over the last twenty-four hours. Although they had kept watch on the highway and all roads north to the Serbian border, there was no sign of it.

  An attack on a policeman provided a considerable incentive for his fellow officers to seek out the perpetrator, but in this case Vuk sensed a strange lack of enthusiasm for the investigation. Although the officer had claimed a migrant thug had stabbed him and taken his car, it turned out that the women who went to his aid reported they’d seen a young boy driving an Opel with a smashed windscreen. There was something in the man’s past that suggested to his colleagues that maybe he’d got what was coming to him, but of course they could not ignore the incident because of the publicity surrounding it. Migrants were hardly flavour of the month.

  Samson left the hotel in his new parka, noticing that the surveillance detail appeared to have gone, and drove south then east. He found the place, parked the car and walked until he came across a few blood droplets on the road. He followed the trail until he reached a farm track on his right, where he found more blood and pieces of windscreen glass. He continued walking until he came to an abandoned stone farm building and saw tyre tracks on the damp soil in the shade of the building. The impressions were very clear and there was no doubt in his mind that the same car had reversed alongside the building at least three times. Whether this was on separate occasions or all on the previous day, he could not tell. He also noticed the car had been driven erratically around the sun-baked mud of the floodplain.

  But this all interested him less than the building. He went inside and saw a dirt floor, a table, chair, coiled rope and some wire, an oil lamp, plastic tablecloth and various farm implements. While the place was uninhabited, it was clear that it had been organised and that someone visited regularly, for there was a tin can on the table containing butts of the same brand of cigarette, some empty wine and beer bottles and a tumbler with the dried residue of red wine. He walked round to the back of the building and noticed that a little way up the wooded bank there was freshly turned earth. Someone had tried to conceal the diggings with turf and clumps of weeds that had been moved from elsewhere. Branches had been laid across the earth and he wouldn’t have noticed anything but for the angle of light slanting through the trees and illuminating the patch of ground. He looked back to the building. On the roof tiles, which could be easily reached from the bank, lay a spade and a roll of plastic sheeting. He shook his head grimly. He was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this place and, now he came to think about it, there was definitely a rotten presence in the air on the bank that was familiar to him from his trips to Syria – the smell of decomposition.

  If Naji had been here, he had clearly managed to escape, but had there been others? He took a few photographs with his phone, returned to the road and sent them to Vuk. A few minutes later, he called and found him drinking in a bar, waiting for further instructions from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

  ‘You know that place on the map?’ said Samson. ‘Close to where the policeman was picked up? I went to it and found an abandoned building that I think you should tell your friends in the police to investigate. There may be a body buried there. I’ve sent you photographs.’

  ‘Body that is dead!’ Vuk exclaimed.

  ‘I’m not certain, but someone should take a look. Maybe that man who tried to abduct Naji used it regularly. Feels like there’s something bad there.’

  Vuk’s speed of comprehension was not at its best. ‘A body that is dead?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying,’ said Samson, beginning to lose patience. ‘Make an anonymous tip-off, if you’re worried about it. I think the man who picked up Naji maybe has a lot to hide, but I haven’t got time to look into it any further.’

  ‘Okay, boss,’ he said, and abruptly hung up.

  Samson drove north, investigating every turning and track and as much of the scrub as was accessible to a car. He moved very slowly through the empty countryside, with one thought in his mind. The women who had seen Naji on the road said he was driving very poorly – that’s what had made them look to see who was behind the wheel. They thought it was possible that the kid had never driven before, which led Samson to think that he might not want to go very far, especially as the Opel’s windscreen was smashed. Also, Naji would appreciate he stood a very good chance of being picked up if he kept the car. He had, after all, stabbed a man.

  It took two hours before he came to the village on the bank of a river that meandered through heartrendingly beautiful countryside. He only noticed the heap of hay and fencing posts after he had spotted tyre marks leading from the road down to the stand of poplars. The tracks were fresh so he got out of his car and investigated. He found the Opel and looked back to the road, wondering how it had come off the bend, ploughed through the mown hayfield and come to rest at the base of one of the trees. Naji had obviously got out unhurt and covered the car with hay – quite effectively, as it happened – and continued on foot. But someone else had been there before Samson – someone in a vehicle with large, wide tyres – and that person had uncovered some of the front of the Opel so that the metallic blue paint of the bonnet and the smashed windscreen were just visible. They had also opened the driver’s door, because the hay was brushed aside. Traces of the larger vehicle’s three-point turn were visible in the flattened grass.

  Samson opened the door and looked inside. There were no signs of blood, not even on the windscreen glass, which was everywhere. He noted that there was no phone in the holder, but a charger lead was still plugged into the cigar­ette lighter and there were some papers in a bulldog clip on the back seat. From these he deduced the name of the owner was Captain Ylyo Nikolaivic. He closed the door, noticing one or two scrapes in the paintwork, then circled the Opel, looking again, with a certain amount of awe, at the path it had taken once it had left the road. Naji had again escaped with his life. Not long before he crashed the stolen car, he had probably been in even greater danger and he had managed to defend himself by stabbing the predatory policeman with the knife he’d stolen from Anastasia’s room. Samson had no exact theory about what had happened at the deserted stone dwelling, but the place had stayed in his thoughts for the last couple of hours. Sooner or later, this kid’s luck was going to run out.

  He also pondered the tracks of the vehicle that had drawn up alongside the Opel. It seemed odd to him that its occupa
nt had taken the trouble to investigate the suspicious mound of hay and fencing posts, yet hadn’t done more to uncover the car: that would be the natural reaction of the inquisitive passer-by, surely. Instead this person, or persons, had left the Opel and gone on their way.

  He returned to his car and looked at the map. He reckoned that Naji was about sixteen hours’ walking time ahead of him, which might be twenty kilometres or more. It was impossible to know whether he had followed the course of the river, on which lay one or two settlements, or had taken a road that veered away into the wild country, which, at some stage, he would need to cross to reach Serbia. If he had followed the road, Samson thought he might well find him by the end of the day.

  Eleven

  Ifkar was the most singular – and handsome – person of their age that Naji had ever met. He didn’t seem to worry about anything: whether he had food or a place to sleep, where he was going or which country he hoped eventually to settle in. None of it seemed to matter to him. He told Naji that he had been wandering in Bulgaria and Macedonia for several months without the faintest notion where he was. He was just happy to be free and travelling with the dog he called Moon, which he told Naji he’d taken from a cruel shepherd three months before. The dog had been tied to a tree on a short rope and the shepherd was laying into her with a stick. Ifkar watched for a while, expecting the man to stop at any moment, but he kept on beating the dog, and Ifkar knew that if he didn’t intervene he would kill her. He approached the shepherd and spoke to him, hoping that the man would understand that it was wrong to go on punishing the dog. The shepherd did not even lift his head, so Ifkar tapped him on the shoulder and, when the man looked up, delivered one big punch to his chin, which knocked him out cold. He untied the dog and bathed her wounds with water and gave her some food. Eventually, the shepherd began to come round. Because Ifkar didn’t feel he could strike the shepherd again without killing him, he got up from the dog’s side and began to walk away. And Moon limped after him.

  Ifkar said he knew what was in the dog’s mind because he had been in a very similar situation when he lived with an uncle who beat him for reasons that were still mysterious to him. One day he decided he would rather starve than accept these beatings and he upped and left and went in search of a new life, which turned out to be a good decision. Within a few months, his homeland had been overrun by ISIS and many thousands of his people were killed or taken as sex slaves by the men who wore black turbans and headscarves. This appalled him but, as he pointed out to Naji, if he had not suffered the terrors of those early years at his uncle’s hands, he might very well have stayed in his village and ended up being slaughtered with the rest of the men. Furthermore, he had taken all his uncle’s money and valuables on the night that he made his escape, and these would have ended up in the enemy’s pockets. So, that, too, was evidence of the exceptional inner wisdom that occasionally spoke to him.

  At the end of this speech, Naji looked Ifkar up and down and asked why someone who was as strong as he would put up with years of beating. Ifkar said he had sometimes wondered that himself, though he had to confess that he had become much stronger as he’d travelled through Turkey and Bulgaria during the last year. He’d made a point of doing exercises every day, no matter how tired and hungry he was, just to make sure that no one would ever take advantage of his peaceful nature again. He showed Naji his flexed biceps, which Naji agreed were enormous, and said that he was now working on his chest and on his thighs, which he felt were undersized.

  These exchanges all took place in their first hours together as they walked along the river, chatting like old friends and stopping to peer at interesting things on the way. Ifkar had a very quick eye. The slightest movement of a tiny speckled fish in the river, or the iridescent glint of a beetle in the grass, was enough for him to drop to his knees to peer at or closely inspect whatever had caught his attention. He had time to investigate the wonders around him and follow his curiosity wherever it led because he had no particular place to go. He told Naji he was working on a plan, but that it had not advanced very far, so he was just waiting for his inner wisdom to speak to him again. Meanwhile Moon, so called because of her pale yellow coat, which was almost white now that Ikfar washed her regularly, seemed very much to share his relaxed attitude. When he stopped, she immediately sat down, glanced at his face, then followed his eyes to the thing that interested him.

  About two hours after they’d met, they came to a place where the river widened and there were two shallow pools beside the main current. Ifkar claimed he spotted the movement of a fish that was quite a bit larger than any he had seen before. However hard he tried, Naji simply couldn’t see it. They sat down on the bank and waited. Presently the fish showed itself by nibbling at the dozens of black flies that struggled on the surface. Ifkar left the bank and went and found a tree and cut some sticks, which he bunched together at one end and tied tightly with a twisted plastic bag. When he’d finished it looked a bit like a big fan. He told Naji to go to the top of the pool, enter the water and wade downstream. Ifkar would approach with Moon from the side and they’d hope to push the fish back to the gravelly shallows where there were just a few centimetres of water. Then he would use his scoop to flip the fish onto the bank.

  Naji felt this was all extremely optimistic and he complained bitterly about the sharp stones hurting his feet and the chilly water making his legs ache. Ifkar told him that he was a whining Arab and he needed to shut up so that he could put all his concentration into stalking the fish. Very slowly, they persuaded the fish to drop back rather than make a dash for the fast-moving current in the middle of the river. Ifkar cornered it and eased the scoop forward in the water. The fish had nowhere to go and started darting back and forth in panic. Naji couldn’t see what was happening, so Ifkar gave a blow-by-blow commentary on the fish’s huge size and stupidity. Finally he got the fish exactly where he wanted and lifted the scoop, but it immediately disintegrated with the weight of water. The fish, however, was thrashing about in the tangle of sticks. Moon pounced and Ifkar flung himself onto the fish. Grabbing hold of it, he struggled to his feet, shouting with the shock of the cold water. They hit the fish on the head and stared down at it in the grass, marvelling at its size. Ifkar said that it was least two kilograms, which, from Naji’s experience in the fish market at home, seemed generous, but he knew it would be enough food for all three of them. They took a photograph of the fish and themselves with the fish and Moon.

  Then they took their catch to higher ground because Ifkar said that the coldest air rolled down from the mountains at night and lay in the valleys. They made a shelter about a hundred and fifty metres up the wooded hillside, placed boulders in a circle and built a fire at its centre. Moments of joy on Naji’s long journey were very few, but sitting there while his new friend delicately cooked the fish on a stick, was a happy time. He reflected that the day, which had started out at the service station and included three episodes of sheer terror, as well as the new experiences of driving a car and catching a fish – or at least being part of the team that landed it – had been one of the most scary, exhausting and interesting of his life.

  Ifkar pronounced the fish cooked, divided it up with Naji’s throwing knife – which, despite being washed in the river, may still have had a little of the policeman’s blood on it – and gave the head and a lot of the back end of the fish to Moon. He opened a can of beer and they took turns with it as they ate chunks of white meat in their fingers. It felt like they had been travelling together for months.

  At length, Ifkar rolled a couple of the boulders on the outside away from the fire so he could warm their sleeping bags before they got into them.

  ‘Who gave you the red bracelet?’ he asked when they were settled with two of the chocolate bars that Naji had lifted from the service station.

  Naji told him about Hayat and her cousin and how they had helped him escape from the compound in Greece by giving him their clothes, th
en how he’d bumped into them in Athens. He said that he might have fallen in love with her but that he hadn’t thought of her recently so now he wasn’t sure.

  Ifkar asked him about his family and where he came from and Naji began to tell his story in fits and starts. He was aware of Ifkar and Moon, who lay between them making contented whimpers, but it was as if they weren’t there and he was just talking to himself.

  ‘My mother, she didn’t tell us much when my father was arrested by the government, but Munira – that’s my older sister – found out from a girl in her class in her school. We didn’t understand why they would take our father, because everyone knew he was a peaceful man and a good teacher. Many people were taken – the boys who protested, their parents, too – and we never saw them again. My mother told me not to go to school any more because she thought I would be arrested as well. I was young and I didn’t know anything. I was just a boy then.

  ‘I wasn’t at school and we had no money and there was little for us to eat, so I went with a friend and we took a handcart to the edge of town, where we bought fruit and vegetables, then brought them back into town and sold them for more because there were no stores open. One day my friend who helped with this business vanished. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe a bomb killed him; maybe the police . . . They tortured people, you know that? Even kids.’ He stopped to put the last piece of the chocolate bar in his mouth. ‘Then I got into shoes.’

  ‘How was that?’ asked Ifkar.

  ‘I found this guy who was dead who was wearing these perfect new Nike trainers – size 44. I took them and I sold them from the handcart, and then a man asked me to sell the shoes of his dead brother because he needed money, and that is how I got into buying and selling shoes. Even in the bad times, people pay money for shoes. And women wanted fancy shoes, and they paid for them because they still had money. I sold maybe ten to fifteen pairs a week. One week I sold eighteen pairs, including a new pair of Vans SK8-Hi sneakers – you know, the canvas ones. I made a hundred and fifty Syrian pounds on that deal.’