by Peter May
The Berlaymont stood in the heart of the commercial sector of Brussels, a massive building shaped like a star if viewed from above, towering over the city skyline, great walls of window curving inwards. The outer wall of each office was glass from floor to ceiling, so that looking in from the outside you felt that half the building had been cut away, like a half-demolished tenement, and you at once had a private view into every room or office where people worked and fought and hatched plots. Out front was the Métro. Across the boulevard the lesser white-stone office block that housed the Council of Ministers.
The press briefing was still in progress. The five men of the Porte Parole sitting along a table at the top end of the Salle de Presse addressing a clutch of fifty or more reporters in French. The journalists were arranged along five rows of benches set in a semicircle around the top table, like a mini-conference chamber; microphones at each place, headsets linked to translation booths in galleries set high up along either side. They were empty. The journalists asking questions all, it seemed, fluent in French.
Bannerman came in at the back of the room and moved around to a bar on the right-hand side where he ordered a beer. A number of reporters were seated on stools drinking beer or coffee, chatting quietly or reading papers – Le Monde, the Guardian, La Belgique Soir, Die Welt, La Stampa, The Times. Very few of the newsmen seated round the benches seemed to be paying much attention. There was an oddly casual atmosphere. Of informality, or perhaps indifference. Two secretaries moved constantly between the rows delivering press releases in various languages. Bannerman leaned against the bar, sipping his beer. He had picked out the thin figure of Slater with his distinctive red beard. He had only once met the man, several years before when he worked on the Evening Times. That was before Slater had been sent out to Brussels as the Post’s EEC correspondent. He had aged considerably, Bannerman thought, his face pale and drawn. The long thin nose more pinched than he remembered.
The briefing broke up, and as the journalists gathered into their various nationalities, Slater caught sight of Bannerman and made his way to the bar. He was unsmiling and seemed distracted. ‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘You can buy me a beer.’ He risked a smile. ‘The bar’s subsidized.’
Bannerman leaned across the counter. ‘Deux bières,’ he said and pushed a fifty-franc note at the barman. He turned back to Slater. ‘Much doing?’ Green eyes in a pale freckled face avoided his.
‘Not this week,’ Slater said. ‘The only real topic of conversation is the British election. The Germans and French are worried shitless that the government’s going to lose. If the opposition get in the opinion here is that the European Union will take another backward step – not that it takes many forward.’
Bannerman sensed a hostility in Slater that made him uncomfortable in the man’s presence. He thought, and I’ve got to live with you for the next month. Slater lifted his beer. ‘Cheers.’
They were joined by two reporters that Bannerman had seen drifting slowly towards them. One had a tanned, creased face, about sixty, dressed in a neat dark suit. The other was younger, less formal, a shock of fair hair falling over bland cherubic features. He patted Slater on the back. ‘Waste of time today, Tim. Get anything to interest you?’
Bannerman smiled. It was the game that reporters played. Seeking reassurance that they hadn’t missed something. Years ago when Bannerman was starting out he had very quickly learned that reporters did not compare notes for the sake of accuracy. The instinct was to hunt with the pack rather than rely on your own judgement. As his own self-confidence had grown so he had taken cruel satisfaction in leaving the pack in confusion with a parting ‘Bloody good story’, while they had been busy reassuring each other that there was ‘nothing in it’. Nothing was better designed to ruin their day, especially when there really had been nothing in it. But Slater just said, ‘Not a thing,’ and then reluctantly made the introductions. ‘This is Neil Bannerman, the Post’s investigative reporter. Jim Willis, Evening Standard, Roger Kearney, Euro-News.’
Kearney, the fair-haired one, said, ‘Ah, yes. Know you by reputation, Bannerman. What brings you to Brussels?’
‘I’ve come to rake a little muck,’ Bannerman said. ‘If there’s any to be raked.’
Willis laughed. ‘Fertile ground for you, my old son. The place is alive with corruption. You want to take a look at the EEC system of awarding grants to the Third World. Some fantastic rip-offs there. Large backhanders to Commission officials from some of these tinpot dictatorships where half the country’s gross earnings are spent on royal palaces and luxurious watering holes for the leadership. It wouldn’t take much to dig something out there.’
Kearney took a slug of beer and pointed a finger at Bannerman. ‘And there’s the allocation of contracts to companies in member countries for infrastructure projects. There’s almost certainly fraud involved. Why, for example, does France get more Community money for road building than any other member country, when a godforsaken place like Ireland gets fuck all?’
‘And agriculture’s another rich source of fraud,’ Willis said, ‘if you care to do a bit of digging.’
Bannerman made no attempt to disguise his contempt. ‘Then why the fuck do some of you people not do the digging yourselves?’
Willis frowned. ‘Oh, piss off, Bannerman. This is where we make our living. You don’t shit in your own back yard.’
Bannerman snorted his contempt. ‘Call yourselves newspapermen? You’re on a right cushy number here, aren’t you? Everything laid on. You should try making a living in the real world.’
Slater was eyeing Bannerman with distaste. What was his game?
‘You can fuck right off!’ Kearney’s voice rose angrily and some heads turned in their direction. ‘All right for you, floating in here, stirring the shit then buggering off. You’ve got no pitch to queer. Smart-arsed bastard.’
Bannerman raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Struck a sore point, have I?’
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Slater took Bannerman firmly by the arm and steered him away from the bar towards the door. In the corridor outside he stopped him. ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Bannerman?’
Bannerman shrugged. ‘Just pricking a few reporters to see if they bleed.’ He looked at the distraught Slater, a small man – five feet eight or nine – painfully thin, curly red hair and beard, an open-necked white shirt, its collar out over a faded blue denim jacket. And he relented a little. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m just a bit pissed off at being here at all. How about lunch?’
CHAPTER FOUR
Kale got his holdall down from the rack and pulled on his coat as the train braked coming into the Gare du Nord, drawing up alongside great long trolleys that stood on the platform piled high with mail bags. A sullen youth who had sat smoking Gauloises all the way from Ostend, and a fat ruddy-faced Belgian peasant woman whose knitting lay in a shapeless grey heap on her lap, both watched him curiously. He was a foreigner. They knew that, even though none of them had spoken through the hour and a half to Brussels when darkness had fallen over northern Belgium. A wordless communion had passed between the youth and the old woman, two Belgians in a railway carriage with this stranger who carried about him an air that was more than just foreign. Both felt something akin to relief when Kale slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor. A strange tension that had been a presence among them, like the clicking of the old woman’s needles or the impatient tap of the youth’s foot, seemed to blow away with the cold rush of air that swept into the carriage with the opening of the door. The old woman smiled at the youth, who shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and lit another Gauloise, turning his sullen stare out of the window.
Kale shivered in the cold night air and walked the length of the platform. He seemed to be the only passenger to alight here. A guard nodded and the railwayman at the barrier waved him through. Down steps into a shopping concourse and out through glass doors into a great empt
y marble hall, his footsteps echoing back at him. He followed a sign out into the Rue du Progrès and headed north along the dark, cobbled street past crumbling tenements with steel-shuttered windows and doors. A tram emerged from an underground tunnel that led to the prémétro and rumbled past below the railway line that ran along the top of the embankment. Three scruffy kids on bicycles raced past in the opposite direction.
Along this street one window was lit below a neon BAR sign. A hefty middle-aged woman in a short, low-cut dress from which she bulged at all points sat in the window looking bored and smoking a cigarette. She raised a semi-hopeful eyebrow when the figure of Kale passed, but it fell again into its set boredom when he did not stop. At the end of the street the lights from a café spilled out across the pavement. Kale pushed open the door and stepped into the smoky warmth.
Working men in grey jackets and cloth caps looked up from their beers and eyed him suspiciously. He was not a regular and nobody but regulars drank here. Kale drew up a chair at an empty table and dropped his bag on the floor. The crude wooden table rocked unsteadily, one leg shorter than the others. The barman came out reluctantly from behind the counter. ‘Monsieur?’
Bloody foreigners, Kale thought. Why can’t they speak English? ‘Bière,’ he growled and lit a cigarette. The barman poured a half-litre of draught Stella and sloshed it down on Kale’s table. Kale looked at the beer that had spilled across the wood and then turned his gaze on the barman. The Belgian hesitated a moment. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered. But there was something compelling and slightly sinister in the stranger’s dark eyes. He took a cloth off the counter and lifted the beer to wipe the table and the bottom of the glass before replacing it on a cardboard beer mat.
‘Trente-cinq francs.’
Kale remained impassive and made no move to pay, and the barman shifted uncomfortably. Finally he took out a pad and scribbled 35F and tore it off the sheaf, laying it down in front of the stranger. Kale looked at it, nodded, and peeled a one-hundred-franc note from a wad in his wallet. The barman took it and counted the change from his pocket. The half-dozen other clients in the café watched in silence, a silence that grew increasingly obvious. A younger man turned his gaze away from Kale and began playing the pinball machine. Subdued conversations were struck up, but the atmosphere was laden and frequent glances turned toward the stranger.
Kale was oblivious. The beer tasted cool and good after the long eight-hour journey from London. It was impossible for him now to fly anywhere on a job. International airports were all equipped with sophisticated anti-terrorist equipment through which it would be impossible to carry his hardware undetected. Fuck the hijackers, he thought. He could not understand men who would risk their lives for political ends. And they had only made life more difficult for him.
It had been a dreary trip. The ferry from Dover to Ostend full of winter tourists heading for ski resorts in Germany and Switzerland and Austria. A girl with long dark hair and a careless laugh. Perhaps she would spend the cold winter nights in some ski lodge drinking schnapps with friends round a log fire. For she was sure to have friends. A girl like that. She had not noticed him sitting in a corner on a lower deck, listening uncomfortably to the innocent ramblings of an elderly German lady who remembered days in Paris after the war, and the death of her husband nine years earlier on holiday in Majorca. She had not been aware of his invasive presence as others always were, as maybe the girl had been and pretended not to notice. Kale had gone up on deck to escape the old lady’s innocence. There was no place for innocence in his life. It troubled him.
There had been few people on deck and it suited him better. White paintwork streaked with rust, the flaking varnish on the empty rows of wooden deck benches, the lifeboats that had never left their cradles. The cold, clean air had been good to breathe, the wind stiff in his face, the strange warmth of the sun on this unusually mild winter’s day. Seagulls cawed and wheeled overhead against the palest of blue skies. The wash of the sea was green in their wake, England having faded from sight, the Belgian coast not yet in view. He had remained there, huddled in his coat, a solitary figure among the empty deckchairs, away from the warmth below where children wailed and ran between the benches, where their parents drank duty-free spirits and smoked duty-free cigarettes, and young people laughed carelessly, like the girl, and talked earnestly about life. His exile from life, their life, was self-imposed, he thought with some satisfaction, and for always. That way he could be almost at peace with himself in his empty existence.
He finished his beer and left the café with all its staring eyes, turned hard left into the Rue Masui, and walked another hundred metres to the dark little hotel where he had booked a room. The streets were as familiar to him as if he had lived there all his life. Every area of operation in the city had been studied carefully on the town-plan map. Each street and alley he might use was painstakingly etched in his memory.
Kale dropped his passport on the reception desk and watched as the clerk took him in and then glanced at the document. It had been forged by an expert in London. A small, bespectacled jeweller near Leicester Square who was one of the few remaining artists of his profession. Utterly discreet. Kale would have trusted no one else.
‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Ross,’ the clerk said, studiously avoiding eye contact with the foreigner. ‘Sign here, please.’ Kale signed the form and the clerk copied details from the passport before handing it back with a key. ‘Room twenty-two. Second floor.’ Kale crossed the dark hall to the old-fashioned elevator and pulled open the wrought-iron gate. The clerk watched him disappear as the cage moved slowly upwards, and he shivered. Perhaps it was the cold air that had come in with the stranger.
Kale’s room was drab and bare and smelled stale. The short narrow bed sagged in the middle. He dropped his bag by a cracked porcelain washbasin and lay back on the bed, lighting a cigarette.
He closed his eyes and smelled again the cordite and the dust that had stung his nostrils that scorching day on the Arabian Peninsula so many years before. The sergeant, a heavy ignorant man, shouting above the bursting of shells – a vivid image that had recalled itself often. The soldier beside Kale was dead, a man whom he barely knew. Soon the flies would settle on the body, feed on the wounds in the heat of the sun. Kale was sweating, pricked by fear and by heat. The whitewashed walls of the village had been reduced to rubble by the shelling from the rear. And still the rebels refused to move. Ragheads with Russian rifles. Kale crouched in the crater, his eyeline at ground level, trying to pick out the surviving figures in the smoke and dust that billowed out from the destruction. Five men from his unit had already moved a hundred yards out to his left and were trying to circle the north side of the target. The clipped tac-tac-tac of a machine gun came from not too far ahead and Kale saw two of the soldiers fall. This time the shots had not come from the enemy marksman who was so successfully keeping them pinned down.
‘For Christ’s sake give the bastards cover!’ the sergeant was bawling. Kale moved up, head and shoulders above the crater, his mouth dry. Again the machine gun sounded and this time Kale saw the rebel, moving through a gap in the wall to his right. He sighted fast and fired. The figure dropped in the dust. The gap had been no more than three feet, maybe two hundred metres distant. Almost at once a bullet struck the rim of the crater and threw up dust and rock splinters in his face. Kale pulled his head down sharply, blinking furiously as the dust stung his eyes. ‘Get that damned bloody sniper for Christ’s sake!’ the sergeant was shouting further along the line. ‘We can’t move till we get him.’ But he was not firing himself.
Several rifles were cracking around Kale now and the soldier on his left fell suddenly across him, half of his head torn away. Kale kicked the man off him and watched the thick, sticky blood staining the khaki of his shirt. The shelling had stopped to allow the troops to move in, but no one stirred from his cover. The five men who had moved out earlier were all dead. And now the slightest mo
vement brought the crack of a rifle from somewhere up ahead. Almost without fail the marksman was making a hit. Kale shifted his position slightly and picked up a dead soldier’s helmet out of the dust. He threw it along to the sergeant. ‘Stick that up on your bayonet so he can see it,’ he shouted.
The sergeant glanced grimly at him and saw that there were only the two of them left alive in the crater. The others were sheltering behind a wall away to their left. ‘Who’s giving the fucking orders here?’ he growled. Kale said nothing and the sergeant spat and then hooked the helmet over the top of his bayonet and pushed it above the level of the crater. Almost as soon as it appeared a bullet spun it away behind them and the sergeant heard a second shot from only a few feet away as he pulled himself tight into the rim. Kale had caught only the briefest glimpse of the sniper as the man shot at the helmet. But it had been enough. Enough for him to get in his shot and feel a tight satisfaction as the sharpshooter toppled from his cover at the end of what had once been the main street of the village. Two more figures moved in the shadows. His rifle cracked again, twice, and both fell. ‘That’s some bloody shooting, Private Kale!’ The sergeant grinned momentarily and then thought better of it. ‘You can hang in here and give us cover when we move in.’
Kale had been as accurate in training, but it had meant little to him. Strangely now there was something precious in the skill. When he saw how he could cut men down. The sergeant noticed the curl of a humourless smile on Kale’s lips and frowned. What the hell was there to smile about? But in these last minutes Kale had discovered a sense of purpose. In the final event it was the only thing the army had given him. It had led him to find in himself this cold, calculated ability to kill. An ability that transmuted all his crippled bitterness into a perfect and tangible expression. Out of all those long, hot days under the relentless Aden sun, the endless, cramped, unsanitary nights among the cockroaches and the sweating bodies, had emerged a vocation, and with it an inner confidence that had finally enabled him to stand apart from a world he despised.