by Tim Lees
“Not at all.” He was sounding a bit brighter than before; he evidently liked this update.
I said, “It’s too easy.”
“French chap followed him. We circulated pictures and description, naturally. Claims there’s no doubt. He’s in a hotel in Pigalle. They’re watching it now. You know Justine Dignet, don’t you? She’s handling their end of it. If you’re lucky you’ll be there before the fireworks, eh?”
“Traffic’s bad,” I said. It wasn’t, but I didn’t want him hurrying me.
“You should have taken the train, Chris. Much quicker.” He mumbled something which may have been a swearword. Then he said, “I can’t stress the importance of this. If there’s anything you know about this Dayling chap—anything he said, or hinted at, or said as a joke, even, or—”
“Yeah. I get the idea.”
I’d spent the last ten hours going over what I knew about Andrew Dayling, and realizing it wasn’t very much. I’d thought I’d known him, but all I’d really had was an opinion of him, which was not the same thing. We’d worked together, kicked back afterwards. I’d thought him pleasant, but a little shallow, something of a play-actor. When he was drunk he’d talk about a girlfriend he’d once lost, the great love of his life, but it always seemed to me that he was mourning an asset, like a house he used to live in or a car he used to drive. The self-pity, though, was real: a streak of misery and maudlin sentiment that would attach itself like a barnacle to any passing topic. Invariably, if I got inquisitive and started asking questions, a barrier came up.
And then there were his arms. “Have you seen his arms?”
I’d stolen a few glances while we’d been in hot countries where long sleeves just weren’t practical. The scars were old, I think, most of them. They weren’t easy to see; but once I’d tuned in, I saw them clearly enough. Most were straight lines, very thin, extending several inches; others curved, or zig-zagged, so the effect was of some faded tribal tattoo.
I’d meant to ask him about them. I’d meant, I suppose, to ask if I could somehow get him help, counseling, whatever. That would have been a nice thing to do. Perhaps I’m unobservant. I don’t understand about cutting. I know that people do it, and do other things, and that it brings some kind of relief, perhaps due to the pain, or the endorphins released, or maybe it just takes their minds off what’s been bothering them. I don’t know. But in the end, I had the same reaction most people have to such things. Repulsion, or that weird fascination where you don’t like it but you still can’t look away, and then . . . detachment. And I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-this.
In my case, I was also thinking: do I want him with me on a job? Can I trust him? And I never said a word to him. I skated along on his cheery, confident self, which I now saw more and more must be a mask. The only time I challenged him at all, it was in an abstract sort of way, trying to broach a subject I could not, at that point, even put a name to.
I’d told him he’d no need to look so pleased each time I walked into the room. I was getting tired of his matiness, his endless cheeriness. I told him straight: I said it was an act.
He brushed it off. “We all put on an act, though, don’t we?”
I was younger then; I said I didn’t think we did. I got annoyed with him, yet he couldn’t see—couldn’t conceive—of a world in which people didn’t hide a part of themselves. And it may be he was right. I’m older now, less idealistic. The world’s a darker and more complex place, these days.
“What’s in here,” he said, tapping his skull, “I mean, what’s really in here—you wouldn’t let it out, would you?”
“Don’t see why not.” I nursed my beer, watching a TV screen across the bar.
He said, “Have everyone see what a petty, mean, fucked-up mess you really are?”
“You mean me?” I said. “Or just anyone?”
There was a hardness to his eyes I’d never seen before, but gradually it slackened and his face relaxed, and he was the old, amiable character he’d always been.
“Not you, Chris. Obviously not. Just—well, anybody, really. One, you know? Not you. Just one.”
Chapter 15
A Body on the Floor
It was a small hotel, a narrow structure jammed between two taller, broader buildings. It looked like “Mac” in the old Charles Atlas ads, squeezed by a couple of hunky bullies. Personally, I’d have told it to gamble a stamp.
I spotted the Registry man hiding in the shadows, gave him a little salute, and went in.
A large, sleepy dog lay in the entranceway. I stepped across it and it glanced up, twitched an ear, and settled back to sleep. Welcome, then. My French is strictly schoolboy, but Justine had already commandeered the tiny lobby and seemed to be giving the desk clerk a particularly painful third degree. Her rapid-fire French was much too fast for me, and possibly for him, as well. He was hunched down like a cyclist in a rainstorm, head turned away, one hand half raised like a shield. Justine Dignet had something of a way with words.
In appearance, she could have been a minor academic. She was small and thin, and tonight she had her hair tied back, emphasizing her long, slender face and pointed chin. She wore rimless glasses, a faded maroon jacket and designer jeans. There was a silk scarf at her throat, the one concession to ornament, but she meant business, nonetheless.
She nodded to me, as if we’d last spoken a minute or two back. In fact, I hadn’t seen her for a year.
“He’s here,” she said.
To the clerk, she snapped, “Le clef, monsieur, s’plaît.” When he didn’t jump to it she said something hard and fast, and flashed an ID that had him muttering unhappily and reaching for the passkey. She took it with a contemptuous little glare. She looked like she was about to lecture him on post-structuralist theory, or at least on how to conjugate his verbs.
To me, she said, “Stairs or elevator?”
“Lift. I’m tired.”
The lift was an old-fashioned thing with a cage you had to pull across and a handle you held down to make it move. It wasn’t fast.
I asked her, “What’d you say to him?”
Justine just smiled, reached into her pocket, and showed me the ID. “Public health. Not current, not my name. It doesn’t matter. Even if their place is clean, they know public health will tie them up for months in red tape. This is better than a cop’s badge.”
She told me, “We have two more ops downstairs. One at the front, one at the back. Your man is here, he can’t leave. But your Mr. Seddon insisted we wait for you.” There was a slight rise in tone at this, a certain criticism. She said, “I hope that we will not be long at this. I have a supper date I wish to keep.”
“Well. That gives us a time frame, anyway.”
At the fourth floor, we stopped. I slid the cage back softly as I could. It still scraped. Dayling’s room was in the rear. We lingered at the door a moment, listening. There was a sound from inside—perhaps a voice. I tried the door. Locked. Justine used the key.
It was not a big room. There were two single beds, a bureau and an upright chair. A window gave onto a view between the nearby buildings, framing a small mosaic of Paris rooftops. The onion dome of Sacré Coeur blazed white in the distance. A little closer, down between the beds, someone was lying on the floor.
He wasn’t dead, although he looked as if he ought to be. His clothes and a part of the floor-rug were already dark with blood. There was blood on his face. His hair stuck up in bloody tufts, making it hard to see how bad his injuries might be. He wasn’t very old. His hands were tied with packing tape; ankles, too. He wore a cheap black leather jacket, pulled halfway down his arms, and his T-shirt and the skin beneath had been slashed by something very sharp. I had no idea who he was. I pulled one of the beds out so that I could get to him. It looked as if the bleeding was about stopped. He was conscious but I didn’t think he’d
stay that way.
Justine took out her reader, turning slowly round the room. “There is a drain,” she said. “The energy is all gone.” She clicked her tongue. “This place is stripped.”
“Shit.”
We checked under the beds, in the wardrobe, the bathroom. Then checked again. I lifted the lid of the cistern. I checked the screws in the ventilation grill, so old and rusted they couldn’t have been moved in years.
There was no flask. There was no Dayling.
Just this unknown boy, here on the floor.
I rolled him gently on his side. He groaned. There was so much blood that it was hard to tell where he was cut. He had been trussed up quickly, carelessly, by the looks of it. Trussed and butchered.
I said, “Speak English?”
“Peu . . . little.” He sounded weak but co-operative.
“Dayling. The man you came to see.”
That got a blink that might have stood in for a nod.
“Where is he?”
He muttered, shrugged. His eyes stared upwards, and the pupils were too wide.
Justine took out her phone. I asked who she was calling.
“Medical.”
“No. Not yet.” To the boy on the floor, I said, “You’re bleeding. You’re in a bad way. Understand? You could die, you could bleed out. Hurts, too, I bet. Or it will. One call, you get an ambulance. Paramedics. Morphine. Alternately, we walk and we were never here. Got that?”
Blink.
“OK. The Englishman. Dayling. Tell me about him. Where is he? Is he hurt? Is he all right?”
“He—he cut—”
His fingers moved. I looked at the poor guy’s beaten face. I couldn’t picture Dayling doing that. I told him so.
“No. Try again.”
He began to cough. Justine said, “Let me. His English is not good. And,” she caught my eye, “he is bleeding to death.”
She took a pair of nail scissors from her bag and cut his hands free. Then they talked. I could follow most of it, largely because the young man pantomimed, stabbing, ripping motions with his arm. He coughed some more. At the end of it, Justine called for the ambulance.
“He says it was Dayling. The Englishman. He himself, he is working for another man. The other man—he says he does not know his name—offered him money to come here to collect a package.” Justine stood up, brushed down her jeans. “My view—I think he is nobody. An errand boy. I also think he is telling the truth.”
“That’s rough.”
I looked at the kid. His eyes weren’t moving. He was going into shock. Shit. He was in a worse state than I’d thought. I pulled the cover from the bed and laid it over him. I put a pillow under his head.
It wasn’t his fault. He’d just got in the way, that’s all, run up against something that he couldn’t understand.
God knows, I didn’t understand it either.
“All right. If your guys haven’t seen him leave, he’s still here. And we have the passkey.”
So we searched for Dayling. We searched for the flask.
We didn’t find either.
We were sworn at by a woman in a pink toweling robe, ignored by a thin man with a newspaper, and offered dinner by an African family on the top floor. There were empty rooms, where we searched in wardrobes, shower stalls, and under beds. We looked in broom cupboards and opened suitcases we had no right to open, and checked bathrooms and cupboards. We were quick, we were efficient, we were thorough.
We found nothing.
There were sirens in the street.
I said, “Let’s step away.”
Outside, and half a block away, I made my call to Seddon. He sighed, he tutted. I could picture him, pursing his lips, steepling his fingers, his white brows dipping in a long, unhappy V.
“I’d hoped to keep this all under the radar. Really, Chris. Did you have to call an ambulance? It makes me tired, you know. All these . . . complications. This injured man. He has a name?”
“Probably. But I doubt he’s the buyer. He’s a courier. Or a thief, maybe.”
The sirens were loud now, only a street away. No chance to find out more.
“You’re telling me—what? Dayling attacked him? Fought him off?”
“Can’t see it either way, myself. The guy’s a mess.”
“Then you’re proposing a third party . . . ?”
“I’m not even proposing a first. Dayling’s not here. This isn’t what he does, it’s not his thing. His passport’s with the desk clerk, and Justine swears they followed somebody who looks like him, and the guy on the floor seems to think that’s what went on, but . . .”
Somebody who looks like him. That brought back memories. What if he wasn’t who he looked like? What if he wasn’t Dayling after all?
“Well, Chris.” Seddon rallied himself. “If he’s not in the hotel, he must be somewhere else, mustn’t he? And I’d rather it were you who clears this up. Our mess, after all. It will make it easier to deal with questions later. Don’t you think?”
“Oh. I’m sure.”
The main question for now being, where to start?
“There’s a complication, too,” he said.
“Oh, great.”
“Great, Chris?”
“I’m being sarcastic.”
“Well, you can save that. But I believe that the Americans are sending someone out to see you. They were trying to catch you in Baghdad, but of course, that all fell through. Just be aware of them, will you? Remember they’re on our side. And do try to do your best. Mm-hm?”
Chapter 16
Churchgoing
“The entity. It is unusual, isn’t it? Strong? I heard you came here from Iraq, you and Dayling. Is this some kind of weapon?”
Justine, a cigarette in hand, confronted me.
I said, “It’s a flask. My retrieval. That’s all I know.”
She exhaled angrily, not trusting me. I said again, “That’s all I know.”
I looked on, past her, up the street. Shops closed, windows shuttered. Sacré Coeur, again, between the buildings. Dayling said he’d been a churchgoer, back in his teens. When things got rough . . .
“And the risk, m’sieur? To us, and to—” She waved her cigarette, to indicate the city round about.
An ambulance pulled up at the hotel, siren shrieking, lights ablaze. More sirens wailed in the distance: the cops wouldn’t be far behind.
Assume that Dayling got away. Assume that he was really Dayling. Assume that someone else cut up the guy in the hotel room. Or else . . . assume that Dayling wasn’t quite the wimp I’d taken him for. I didn’t know him anymore. Perhaps I never had. If he were desperate enough, maybe he’d fight, or . . . no. Those weren’t wounds from fighting. That’s what bothered me. Those were something else.
So maybe Dayling was hurt, too. If it was Dayling. If, if, if . . .
I paced back and forth, checking the reader. I was getting something, sure enough, but not the kind of thing I should have been. It was like a ping-back from an energy source, but the source itself just wasn’t there. As if you’d thrown a stone into a pond a long time back, and now the stone was gone, perhaps even the pond itself was gone, but the ripples kept on washing over me, and the lights upon the reader still kept jiggling, weaker every time. A half-life. The echo of a life . . .
“This man of yours.” Justine had her own reader in hand. “He is unstable? He has a history?”
Privately, I was pretty sure he had. Only I shook my head.
The reader flickered. One column of light, rising, dropping. Gone again.
“He is Field Ops,” said Justine.
“Was.”
She chewed her lower lip, nodded to herself. She pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Field Ops—you recruit unstable people. The English
I think are the worst. You have too much . . . reserve.”
“I’m Field Ops.”
“I know. Forgive me if you can, but I must tell you what I see. With Dayling—there will be signs. There will be clues. Things he’s said, things he’s done. Habits. You know him—”
“No. I don’t know him. I hadn’t seen the guy in ten years.”
At the same time, the bleached bulb of Sacré Coeur once more caught my eye. And if it had caught mine, then it had surely, beyond a doubt, caught Dayling’s.
“Church,” I said. I glanced around for a taxi. I told Justine, “Phone me. Now. So I’ve got your number. And let me know if anything happens. Phone me—every fifteen minutes. To check in.”
It took me half that time to find a cab. I had a feeling—it was scarcely more—that if Dayling had a flask, he’d want it in a place he thought appropriate. Suitably reverent. Sacred. And more than that: safe. Or so I reasoned it.
In the job, I’d learned to trust my instincts, go with what I felt, even when it didn’t make much sense. But this wasn’t like that; now I was dealing with a human being, with a person, and they’d never been my strong suit. Ask my ex-wife. As the cab turned, winding through the old streets, I had an awful doubt down in the pit of my stomach that I’d missed something somewhere, made a fatal move.
I stepped out of the car, asked the driver to wait. A cold breeze blew around Sacré Coeur, and the view across the city didn’t make up for my lousy mood. The place was closing up. That didn’t stop me. I barged inside, almost running, checking the side chapels, pew after pew, alcove after alcove. It’s a hell of a size, this great bell of emptiness that hangs over the city, and I knew, before I’d even finished searching: Dayling wasn’t there.
Justine called, the fourth or fifth time. They’d taken out the wounded kid. There had been a difficult exchange between Registry personnel and the police.
I said, “I’m coming back.”
I huddled in the back of the cab, feeling small and useless. The driver paid me no attention whatsoever, for which he had my gratitude. I’d screwed up, wasted time in a situation where time was crucial. I didn’t know what else to do, where else to look. But then, as we drew near the hotel, I saw something, and yelled for him to stop. Car horns honked behind us. I stuffed a wad of notes into the cabby’s hand, jumped out, and rushed across the road.