‘Shit.’ Dreadlock stood, pushed the Beretta into his waistband.
Clay looked down the beach. Two men were approaching. One was tall, fair, built like a rugby forward. The other was Red Shirt – Big J.
‘They kill me,’ whispered Dreadlock.
‘No, they won’t,’ said Clay.
‘What I do?’ Dreadlock’s voice wavered, cracked. It sounded like he was going to piss himself.
‘Just wait,’ said Clay. ‘Let them get close. Tell them you’ve got my body out on the boat. Show them my gun.’
Dreadlock shuffled his feet in the sand, raised his good arm, waved.
Clay moved deeper into the trees, crouched low, screwed a silencer onto the G21.
Big J and the white man stopped ten metres from the dinghy.
‘Where is he?’ said the white man. He had a big voice, a strong Boer accent. The bridge of his nose had been pushed sharply to one side of his face, as if the last time it had been broken he hadn’t bothered to recentre it.
Dreadlock pointed to Flame.
‘Why didn’t you bring him in?’ said Big J.
‘You run,’ said Dreadlock. ‘Leave me there.’
‘I thought you were dead,’ said Big J, glancing at the Boer. ‘I did.’
Dreadlock hunched his shoulders, pulled out the Beretta. ‘He broke my arm. But I got his gun.’
‘Well done,’ said the Boer. ‘Is that his boat?’
Dreadlock looked towards Flame, nodded. ‘My money?’
‘Our money,’ said Big J.
‘You’ll get it when I see him,’ said the Boer.
‘Why him get money?’ said Dreadlock. ‘Him no do fuck all.’
‘My boat,’ said Big J. ‘My contract. You work for me, idiot.’
‘You leave me die.’
‘Shut up, both of you,’ said the Boer.
‘What the fuck?’ said Big J, pointing at Flame.
‘What?’ said the Boer.
‘Look at that,’ said Big J.
Clay’s insides lurched, tumbled.
Zuz was up on deck, walking towards the cockpit, her nightdress fluttering in the rising sea breeze.
* 4 *
All It Took
It was the best reason not to have plans. They never came off the way you intended. Something always jarred them from their path, and almost invariably the destabilising element was human.
Clay checked his watch. If they hadn’t dismissed his call as a crank, the cops should have been here by now. He would have to do this himself.
‘What the fuck you bring her for?’ said Big J, puffing out his cheeks.
‘Who is she?’ said the Boer.
‘She de daughter.’ Dreadlock pointed at Big J. ‘Him kill de mother and son. De one Straker take up with.’
The Boer grabbed Big J by the neck. ‘I told you monkeys, keep it clean.’ He pushed Big J to the sand. ‘Fokken’ amateurs,’ he muttered, shaking his head.
Big J glared up at Dreadlock. ‘You dead, brother.’
‘You leave me there,’ spat Dreadlock, pulling out the Beretta. ‘You run. Leave for him kill me.’
‘Shut the fok up, both of you,’ said the Boer, looking back down the beach towards town. He grabbed the dinghy’s bow line and started pulling it towards the water.
‘You dead,’ repeated Big J, standing and brushing sand from his arms.
‘You want de money for you own self,’ shouted Dreadlock. ‘You leave me die.’
Big J pulled a knife and lunged at Dreadlock. They fell to the sand, Big J thrashing wildly with the knife.
The Boer paid them no attention, kept pulling the dinghy down the beach. He was almost to the water when a single shot pierced the morning.
Big J slumped to the sand, blood welling from a hole in his back.
Dreadlock was pushing his way from under Big J’s body when the Boer let the dinghy’s rope fall from his hand. Four uniformed policemen were running along the beach towards them.
‘Kak,’ said the Boer as he walked past Dreadlock and into the trees. He stood a moment under the palms, very close to where Clay crouched, hidden behind a clutch of closely spaced palms, G21 ready. Then he checked his watch and started running.
Clay stayed hidden. He watched two of the cops half walk, half carry Dreadlock, bleeding from several stab wounds to his abdomen, to a waiting police Land Rover. The other pair lugged Big J’s lifeless body along the beach and swung it into the back of the vehicle. One of the cops closed the rear door and the Land Rover pulled away, lights flashing.
Clay stayed put long after the cops had left, hoping that the Boer might return. He waited out the afternoon cloud bursts and watched the steam rise from the ground as the sun reappeared. The sky darkened and the first stars appeared, strobing on the horizon like time itself. He thought of Grace and little Joseph, robbed of this twilight, their dying screams echoing inside him still. He thought of Rania, married with a child, living her life. There was now no longer any doubt in his mind. He weighed the Glock in his hand, the sure dependability of the thing. The simplicity. So many times he had come so close, fractions of moments away, but each time something had pulled him back from the edge. Now he was sure. And if, as Rania believed, there was something afterwards, he would tell them all – everyone he’d murdered and caused to be killed – if he could, when he met them, how sorry he was for depriving them of the small treasure of years that had been their only wealth.
But before that time came, there was something he had to do.
He rowed back to Flame in darkness, the lights of the town refracting across the quiet water of the harbour. Zuz was asleep in the forward berth. He fired up the stove, dumped some tinned stew into a pan, boiled water for tea, opened a tin of peaches. When everything was ready, he woke her and helped her up through the hatch and into the cockpit and sat her down to eat. Clay watched as she ate. He imagined this was what Grace would have looked like at fourteen – the same eyes, the same delicate nose, the smooth copper skin.
These people he had been taught to think of as not quite human.
After she had finished eating, she asked him for a napkin. They were the first words he’d heard her utter since the killings.
‘Sorry,’ said Clay, ‘don’t have any.’
She gave him a sidelong look and then wiped her lips with her thumb and index finger. ‘The bodies are starting to smell,’ she said.
Clay stared at her in the near-darkness.
‘You didn’t lock the main hatch,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clay.
‘You say that a lot.’ She looked down at her hands, ran the palps of her fingers back and forth across her opposite palm, switching between left and right. ‘Who were those men?’ she asked.
‘They came for me.’
‘Why?’
‘Someone paid them to kill me,’ he said.
The girl sat a long while, looking down at her hands. After a time, she whispered: ‘Why do they want to kill you?’
‘A lot of reasons.’ Because he’d refused to cower, refused to be silenced; because, in the end, he’d decided to act, to do what was right. And now he knew that he would never be able to escape. That they would hunt him wherever he went, that there could only be one end to it.
‘It wasn’t you,’ she said.
‘Yes, it was.’
‘No,’ she said, looking right at him now. ‘It was me.’
‘It’s okay, sweetie. I know it’s hard,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said again. ‘It was my fault. I was angry. I was jealous of you. I missed my daddy.’
Clay said nothing, let her cry.
‘I told him,’ she said. ‘Mummy told me not to tell anyone, but I did.’
‘Who?’ said Clay. ‘Who did you tell?’
‘Francis. When I went back, that one time, for my last exam, a few days after you first arrived. I told him that you were staying with us on the island. A white man with…’ She looked at his stump. ‘With one hand.�
��
‘Francis?’ said Clay.
‘A boy from school.’
There it was. One conversation between teenagers in a schoolyard on an island in the middle of nowhere. Six weeks. That was all it took.
28th October 1997. Paris, France. 05:00 hrs
Chéri:
The thought that my husband and son might have been killed plunges me into a state of torpor. Nothing matters. I can neither move nor think. The smallest tasks seem impossible. I stayed in bed all morning. Allah, most merciful, protect them, bring them home to me.
‘Do not lose heart or fall into despair. You shall triumph if you are believers.’
I reread these words ten times, more, tracing the script across the page of my father’s Koran – the one I lost in Istanbul; the one you found and returned to me. I must not despair. I will not despair. Hamid needs me. Eugène needs me.
The police have not charged me, but the implication was clear: I am a suspect. How could they think I was responsible? I know they must investigate all reasonable possibilities, but it wounds me deeply. The young woman in the crèche must have been mistaken. Occasionally Hamid collects me from work in the car and together we go to the crèche for Hamid. The last time was the week before last. She has simply mixed up the days. Nevertheless, I know now I must take matters into my own hands, while I still can.
I’ve spent all afternoon and deep into the night going through Hamid’s study. I’ve gone through every business card in his catalogue, every paper in every file I can find. I’ve rummaged through boxes of warranty papers and expired passports, letters from an old flame (he told me about her before he proposed), envelopes full of faded photographs of his family holidaying on the beach in Lebanon, stacks of notebooks from his university days. I’ve done this as much because I miss them, as to find some clue to their disappearance. Just being here, surrounded by all of it, somehow makes me feel closer to them, wherever they may be.
I’ve tried getting into Hamid’s computer. I’ve tried every password I can think he might have used, without success. He has left me no choice. Earlier this evening, I telephoned an old friend. We did our training together, became close. I know he was in love with me. He even came close to telling me once or twice, but I managed to deflect him from something we would both have regretted. We were both very young, then. He is still there, at the Directorate, and is based here in Paris, working as a senior analyst and IT specialist. I haven’t spoken to him for years, since before I met you. He is on his way here, now, as I write this. He should arrive any minute. God bless him, he is a wonderful man.
The last big case Hamid was working on took him to Cairo at least a dozen times over the past year and a half. Some of the trips were short – a few days only – but several lasted longer than a month. I missed him terribly. I am a woman who needs a man in her life. I know it is not fashionable to admit this. But you will understand. It was always one of the things I loved about you, Claymore – your complete disdain for what one is supposed to think and say.
Hamid mentioned the case to me several times; never in any detail, just fragments. The defendant was an Egyptian engineer from a good family who had been studying Cairo’s chronic air pollution. He and a colleague were accused of treason, and ended up in jail and were being held without charge. Yusuf Al-Gambal was his name; he is the son of a respected High Court judge. He had been in prison for over a year when Hamid managed to bring the case to trial, and, spectacularly, won some sort of reprieve. I do not know any of the details.
I remember the day Hamid arrived home after the acquittal – if that is what it was. He was exhausted, as usual, but also different somehow – changed. At the time, it seemed perfectly natural to me. Intense experiences of that kind take a toll, sometimes in ways you are not even aware of. I know. That was four months ago.
Thinking back, the changes were subtle, and started long before the acquittal. We fought more, usually about the same old things, the simmering frictions about housework, about money (he thinks I spend too much on clothes and shoes), about his smoking. But new points of discord surfaced. Talk of moving to Lebanon so Eugène could be close to his grandparents (all of my family are dead, as you know). Arguments about Eugène’s education and future – Hamid seemed to have developed a deep distrust for the national educational system, and expressed concern over what he saw as increasing intolerance in France, particularly towards Muslims. I do not necessarily disagree with the validity of his concerns, and certainly as parents we should be thinking about them, but his tone had become increasingly strident. He began to dictate rather than discuss, something he had never done before. It did not happen often, a few times only that I can remember. But it was a definite shift. I can see that now. And it all started with that case. Something happened to him over there.
Something else changed, too. Hamid’s interest in Eugène started to grow. He wanted to know what food he ate, and how to prepare it. He had always tried to be there for bath time in the evenings, but now instead of going off to his study and leaving me to put Eugène to bed and read the bedtime stories, he would sit with us and watch. I was pleased, so I paid it no particular attention at the time. I just put it down to a father’s naturally increasing connection as the infant became a child. Hamid struggled when Eugène was a baby. I know he felt cut off from us, particularly with work taking him away so much. So, as Eugène began to walk and talk and become a little person, of course it was natural that Hamid should pay more attention, want to engage more. Was this all a precursor to what has happened? Am I reaching – reading significance into normal events? I need an alternative. I cannot accept that they are dead.
It is early morning. From the window I can see the sky paling over the city, the lights along the Seine. My friend has just left. He looks older than I remember. He is probably thinking the same about me. He got into Hamid’s computer easily, but the hard drive was full of encrypted files that my friend could not access. I suppose encryption must be standard practice in law firms dealing with confidential matters that may affect people’s lives. But still, it surprised me. Everything was encrypted. Everything. My friend has taken the hard drive with him and will work on it at the Directorate. He is taking a big chance, doing this for me. I am very grateful. And I know I can trust him.
Dawn comes. Lights go out. The city is shrouded in drifting smoke. I should go to the office, but I am very tired. Self-pity wells up inside me. I try to push it down but it comes nevertheless, thick, black, traitorous bile. I hate it, hate feeling it within myself, this weakness, this self-indulgence. This is not who I am.
But denial of the truth is an even greater sin. So yes, I admit this is exactly who I am. I am weak and I am alone and the tears come unabated. My husband and son have disappeared. They may be dead. Yet I am thinking about you, Claymore.
I try not to but I cannot help myself. I can only describe it as an emptiness, a void inside me that I can neither fill nor banish. My wickedness knows no limits. I dream of you, wake in my bed wet and panting. If you should ever see these words! I gasp at my shame.
I ask Allah to forgive me. How could He, so powerful and all knowing, have created such a weak creature, so lustful and deceitful, so full of selfpity and doubt? For more than two years now I have made love to my husband, and each time I have imagined that it was you, Claymore, who was inside me, kissing me, devouring me. God forgive me. Even on my wedding night, it was you I was with, in my mind. It was as if I could feel your big rough hands – hand, now, if you are even still alive – on my skin, your powerful arms enveloping me. After that first time, I was so shocked by the images my mind had conjured, that I promised myself I would stop. I would banish you from my thoughts and dreams, from my waking fantasies. For a time, I was successful. I blanked myself out. Hamid noticed immediately. I had become cold and distant. My husband told me he felt guilty coming unless I had also reached orgasm, and so he stopped, too. After a while we stopped having sex altogether. But I knew he was upset and hurt b
y it. I wanted to please him, to be a good wife. So, I let you back in. It was the only way I could reach orgasm.
I want to obliterate myself. I could never have imagined myself capable of such depravity. And now I know, deep down, that I am paying for my wickedness, for my betrayal. I have been unfaithful, I have debased myself, and in doing so have shown my disrespect for my God. And as punishment, Allah, most merciful, has taken Hamid and Eugène from me.
I pray to God, most humbly, to protect them. Please do not make them pay for my sins.
* 5 *
If You Could Live
Later that night they weighed anchor and slipped out to sea.
Soon the lights of Stone Town were nothing more than a glow on the horizon. Stars appeared. So many they could not count. Galaxies swam the dark waters, swarmed in the shallows. Nebulae swirled above them. And as they rounded the northern tip of the island and headed out to sea, it was as if they had tumbled off the surface of the Earth into some other, deeper ocean.
They had discussed it, Clay and Zuz, and they’d decided it was too risky to stay. By now, the Boer had probably learned that Clay was still alive. If so, he was still on the island, still hunting Clay. The local cops must have seen the Boer on the beach with Dreadlock and Red Shirt, and they would be searching for him – he wasn’t hard to miss. He may have decided to get to the mainland, but if he’d stayed on Zanzibar, he would be looking for Flame.
Zuz had also made the decision, on behalf of her mother and brother, that the bodies should be buried at sea. She’d seen a movie once where they’d done that – wrapped and weighted the bodies. And she remembered her mother saying that it would be a fine way to be put to rest – the ocean so big and deep and wide; to think that part of you might one day end up in Alaska or Europe as part of a fish or whale. Much better, she’d said, than to be held so tight and close in the same ground where you’d spent all your living days.
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