“All of them,” she said. “Let’s get it done.”
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (“LASZLO”)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H.—CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE FILE: RE2768X
PART 3 OF 5
I left Ivan [Simakov] in New York. One day I was there. The next I was not. I didn’t explain myself. I didn’t write him a letter or give any reason. I knew that if I told him I was going he would try to prevent me leaving. Surprise was my only chance of escaping and making a new life. Sometimes I regret the choices I have made. I never regretted that choice. His behavior had become intolerable. He was drinking a lot. He cheated on me with other women. On one occasion, during an argument, he had hit me.
I did not feel that I could go to or contact . I didn’t trust anybody—even —to protect me. I had money, I had passports, some of which were known to you, some of which were not. I had enough knowledge of what the Service and the Agency were capable of in terms of trying to find me that initially it was not particularly difficult to vanish and to try to start again.
I went to Mexico, as you know. I always worked on the same set of principles: that it was better to be in cities, where a kind of anonymity was guaranteed, than to present myself in, say, a smaller community where I could be noticed as I tried to blend in. I found men. Not serious men, but lovers who would want me only for their own short-term pleasure. If a man began to expect more of me, I shut him off. I was ruthless. These men had apartments, houses, places I could go if suddenly I needed to leave wherever it was that I was staying. I lived in hotels, hostels, apartments—at one point in a cabin on a beach in Cancún. I never stayed in the same place for more than a few weeks. At first I relished this freedom. I did not miss Ivan or Resurrection. I felt that I had escaped from a prison of my own creation. I was a free woman—or, at any rate, as free as a person in my situation could ever be.
Then I learned of the deaths of the relatives of Resurrection activists in Russia. I read about Ivan’s family. I wanted to contact him, to reach out and to console him. I knew that it was the Russian method and—of course—it is noticeable that while Resurrection actions around the world have continued to increase in the last two years, in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in the Russian Federation they have come to a stop. Moscow got what Moscow wanted. If you do not care what the other side thinks, if you have no moral compass or sense of shared human responsibility, anything is possible. That is one of the lessons we have learned from the past few years, no? The liars and bullies of the alt-right, the apologists for the NRA, the gluttons of the corporate world, they found a new voice, a new encouragement from the mass population. They became energized. They thought: “We can do what we want. We can spread lies, we can spread hate, we can spread fear. We do not care about the consequences.” Moscow merely added a sadistic dimension to this: “We take pleasure in the destruction of our enemies and in the accumulation of power.”
When I heard the news that Ivan himself had been killed, I did not believe it. I screamed. I remember nothing other than falling to my knees and crying for hours. My grief was inconsolable. I knew that Ivan had become paramilitary, that he was planning attacks, bombings and so forth. I didn’t think that he would be stupid enough to try to create his own device. He had people to do that. People he knew who could facilitate such things. To be killed while in the act of preparing a homemade bomb, it was tragic and stupid and humiliating. So of course I blamed the Russians. I thought at one point that both the Agency and Moscow was behind it. The Agency or Moscow or even the Service. Who knew? Anybody in the secret world is capable of anything.
I wept also for Zack Curtis. We had worked together. I knew him well. He was a decent man with only good intentions. He was the best of us. There are things that I did, choices I made, actions I took in those early months of the movement which I regret. I was no angel. One of the newspapers compared me to Ulrike Meinhof, which was ridiculous and lazy journalism. I was never paramilitary. I never fired a gun or planted a bomb. But I was vicious, at times cruel. Zack was better than that. Purer. He had joined Resurrection because he believed in the power of individual action. He believed that one man can change the world by his deeds, however small.
Zack had a favorite analogy. He would say: “Resurrection will be like the effect of closed-circuit cameras on criminals. If a thief knows that his robbery of a convenience store or the mugging of a defenseless old lady is going to be recorded by CCTV and submitted to the police for prosecution, he stops robbing the convenience store. He does not mug the old lady. Suddenly he is accountable. He begins to think about his behavior and to reform.” That was all Zack wanted. Reformed behavior. A greater accountability. You’ll say that I was naïve, perhaps even deluded, but I really thought that in time Resurrection would bring about some kind of return to basic human decency.
We were talking about Kit. This I can tell you with absolute certainty. Before Marrakech, I had never heard of C. K. Carradine. I had never read his books, I had not seen the movie they had made of his novel. He used to joke that the film was “apocalyptically bad.” His work and career had passed me by. I knew nothing about him personally. That is the truth. I had had no contact with Robert Mantis for more than a year. You suggested that Mantis may have told me about him. How could he? How could this be possible? None of you had any idea where I was.
17
The festival organizers had sent Carradine the address of a riad in the heart of the old city. He was scheduled to stay for two nights. Though his taxi driver claimed to have been born and bred in Marrakech, it quickly became clear that he had no sense of direction and even less idea of the location of the hotel. Crisscrossing the Medina three times, Carradine eventually used his iPhone to pinpoint the riad to a building in the Kasbah. There was no air-conditioning in the car and he was soaked in sweat by the time he arrived at the address. A well-known American author was knocking on a nondescript wooden door half-hidden between a bakery shop and a makeshift stall selling cleaning products. Carradine settled the fare with the driver. He had barely removed his bags from the boot when the taxi screeched off, leaving him standing at the side of a noisy, dusty street in the full glare of the afternoon sun. Carradine crossed the road and followed the American into the building, closing the door behind him.
It was an oasis. Within an instant the clamor and heat of the Kasbah had subsided. Carradine walked along a narrow passageway toward a reception desk where a young male Moroccan was attending to a guest. Both were speaking in Arabic. On closer inspection Carradine recognized the guest as an Irish novelist, Michael McKenna, who had won a prestigious award for his most recent book. A genial middle-aged Frenchman with a trimmed goatee appeared from a side door and introduced himself as the owner of the hotel.
After five minutes Carradine had been checked in and shown to his room at the edge of a pretty, tiled courtyard with a fountain at its center. The only sounds were of birdsong and cascading water. He left his bags in the room and explored the rest of the building, passing beneath a series of exquisitely carved Moorish arcades offering glimpses into dark, secluded rooms furnished in leather and mahogany. A woman in a dark green bikini was sipping a glass of mint tea beneath a parasol at the side of a long rectangular swimming pool. The pool was lined on both sides by orange trees in full fruit. Beneath them, dining tables covered in white linen cloths had been set out in neat rows. Carradine felt as though he had been deposited in a travel brochure for the superrich.
“Enjoying yourself?”
He turned around. The question had been directed at another guest, a celebrity historian with a nest of peroxide blond hair whom Carradine recognized from the television. Behind him, standing in a small group at the edge of a tiled colonnade, were several other writers and academics clutching cameras and bottles of water. Carradine assumed that they had returned from a sightseeing trip. Under normal circumstances he wo
uld have approached them and introduced himself, but in the aftermath of all that had happened in Casablanca, he felt strangely alienated from his fellow writers. Writer or spy? He was neither one thing nor the other.
He walked back to his room and began to unpack.
* * *
He woke up half an hour later, fully clothed, having fallen asleep on his bed. He looked at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. He searched for a safe in the room in which to keep the memory stick and the package for Bartok but did not trust the small metal box in the wardrobe with only a simple key to secure it. If he was under suspicion, his room would be searched and the envelope discovered in a matter of minutes. Having taken a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes, Carradine instead took the package and the stick to the reception desk and left them, along with his own passport, in the hotel safe. A member of the staff gave him a receipt for the items which he placed in his wallet. He drank an espresso in the dining area before leaving the riad to explore Marrakech. He wanted to search for Bartok, even if his hopes of finding her were infinitesimally small. Mantis was banking on the fact that she might show her face at the festival, but there was also a slim chance that Bartok would go for a walk in the evening, when the intense heat of the Moroccan day had passed, and risk being seen as she searched for a place to eat.
As Carradine walked outside into the chaos of the Kasbah, he recognized the scale of the task facing him. There were hundreds of pedestrians in every direction; it was like looking out over a crowded railway station at rush hour. The pavements were so packed, the streets so jammed with cars and buses and bikes, that surely it would be impossible to make out Bartok’s face even if she happened to be in the Medina. Almost all the women Carradine saw—locals and foreigners alike—had their heads covered with shawls or hats. Bartok knew that she was being hunted and had perhaps chosen a Muslim country precisely for this reason; she could conceal her features from the lenses of distant drones and satellites, as well as from the prying eyes of those, like Carradine, who had been sent to look for her.
He walked around the Kasbah for more than an hour. He saw a veiled mother, her children in rags, begging at the side of the road, a sign propped up beside them on which had been scrawled in both French and English: SYRIAN FAMILY IN NEED OF HELP. He saw an ornate green-and-white painted cart being pulled through the clogged streets by a starving horse, a young couple kissing on the backseat. He spotted hand-painted teapots and wooden chess sets for sale, groups of women sitting on plastic chairs offering henna tattoos to tourists. What he did not see, however, was LASZLO.
Twice Carradine took out Bartok’s tiny, crumpled photograph to remind himself of her face; he had begun to doubt that he would recognize her even if she passed him at the festival the following day. At around half-past seven he gave up on his fruitless search and settled in a restaurant at the edge of Place des Ferblantiers, an open square to the south of the Kasbah filled with children playing in the last of the sunlight. He ordered spaghetti bolognese from the Italian page of a pictorial menu and did The Times quick crossword on his iPhone.
Just as Carradine’s food was arriving, an older couple settled at the next table, placing hats and guidebooks and a Leica camera on the seat closest to him. The woman, who was strikingly beautiful, smiled as she opened the menu. Her husband had gone to the bathroom and she ordered a beer for him. She took out a brochure for the literary festival and began to flick through it.
“Are you going?” Carradine asked, leaning across the gap between their tables.
“Excuse me?”
He put his fork down and raised his voice above the wail of the call to prayer. The woman had an English accent and was wearing a silk headscarf.
“Are you going to the literary festival?”
“We are!” she replied. “Are you?”
It transpired that the woman, who introduced herself as Eleanor Lang, was a retired lawyer from Canterbury who had been sailing around the western Mediterranean with her husband, Patrick. They kept a yacht in Ramsgate that was currently moored in the marina at Rabat and were coming to the end of a three-week visit to Morocco that had taken them to Chefchaouen, Fez and the Atlas Mountains. Patrick, who shook Carradine’s hand vigorously when he returned to the table, was at least ten years Eleanor’s senior and had the easygoing charm and worn good looks of a man who had probably made a great deal of money in his life and spent it on at least two wives. In appearance he reminded Carradine strongly of the elderly Cary Grant.
“Kit here is a novelist appearing at the festival tomorrow,” Eleanor told him. Carradine was tangling with his bolognese.
“Really? What sort of novels do you write?”
They chatted for more than half an hour, gradually pulling their chairs closer together and sharing recommendations on places to visit in the Medina. Carradine explained that he would be appearing on a panel at two o’clock the following afternoon. Eleanor declared that she would download everything he had ever written—“It’s so easy with my Kindle”—and promised that they would come to his event.
“You really don’t have to do that,” Carradine told her. “Thousands of better things to be doing in Marrakech.”
“Nonsense! We find it’s so hot during the days, don’t we, darling? It’ll be nice to be in the air-conditioning listening to some intelligent conversation.”
“She doesn’t get much of that at home,” said Patrick, reaching for Eleanor’s hand.
Carradine was reminded of his parents’ marriage. Every now and again he would meet a couple who seemed so content in each other’s company that it made him yearn for a relationship of his own.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“The Royal Mansour.”
He wasn’t surprised. The Leica was state-of-the-art; Eleanor and Patrick were wearing his’n’hers Omega wristwatches; their yacht, an Oyster 575, had been built on spec three years earlier. They could afford five hundred dollars a night at the Mansour.
“I hear it’s nice,” he said and listened as Patrick talked about his career in advertising and his “second incarnation” as a property developer. The conversation felt like the first authentic, relaxed interaction Carradine had experienced since leaving London. Initially it had occurred to him that they might have been Service personnel sent to watch over him and that the meeting in the restaurant had not been a chance encounter. Yet Eleanor and Patrick had seemed so relaxed and happy, and their legend so watertight, that Carradine had quickly set aside any doubts. It was almost eight-thirty by the time he had settled his bill and said good night. They swapped numbers and promised to meet after the panel the following afternoon.
“You can sign one of your books for my daughter,” said Patrick.
“Happy to,” Carradine replied.
“She’s single,” said Eleanor with a stepmother’s knowing wink. “Doctor, lives in Highbury.”
Carradine went out into the square. Darkness had fallen and swifts were swooping over the rooftops in the moonlight. He walked back in the direction of the riad, quickly becoming lost in the switchback side streets of the souk. Mopeds came at him from both directions, buzzing and weaving along the narrow alleyways. He learned to hug one side of the street and to trust that the drivers would steer around him, just as they steered around the other pedestrians wandering past the jewelry stores and carpet sellers and barbershops lining the souk. Men pushing metal trolleys piled high with boxes would appear suddenly from side alleys, clattering and bouncing along the uneven lanes. There was a constant noise of engines and conversation, smells of exhaust fumes and burning charcoal cut by mint and cumin and manure. Carradine studied the faces of passing women but saw nobody who resembled Bartok. Most of the Moroccan women were accompanied by men or part of larger groups; in an hour he saw only two or three female tourists walking on their own.
Eventually he came into a large open area lined on one side with brightly lit stalls selling orange juice and fresh fruits. Carradine assumed that
he had reached Jemaa el-Fna, the great square at the western edge of the souk which he had spotted earlier from the cab. A drumbeat was sounding beneath a black sky lit by the shard of a crescent moon; it was as though the thousands of people crowding the square were being lured to a feast or ancient festival. The central section of the square was crammed with outdoor restaurants serving food to customers at trestle tables under white lights. If Bartok was in Marrakech, this might be a place that she would come to eat, assured of relative anonymity. Each of the trestle tables was crowded with customers, some of them backpackers on a budget, others Moroccan families and groups of friends feasting on fried fish and merguez sandwiches. Carradine passed tables piled high with sheep’s heads and raw livers, booths selling snails drenched in garlic butter. To a soundtrack of ceaseless drums and wailing flutes he moved through the thick crowds, dizzied by the nighttime circus of Jemaa el-Fna, the glow from mobile phones and open fires throwing eerie light onto faces, the atmosphere acting on him like a narcotic dream. Ever since he had met Mantis, Carradine had felt transported into a parallel world, another way of thinking about himself and his surroundings; a world that was as alien to him as a chapter in the Arabian Nights or the Berber poem passed down through the centuries and now repeated by an old, bearded man, seated on a tattered rug in front of him, taking coins from passersby as he intoned his ancient words.
Carradine sat on a bench beside a wall at the edge of the Medina. He had bought a half-liter bottle of water from a stall in the square and drank it while smoking a cigarette. He looked at his watch. It was already ten o’clock, but the city showed no sign of slowing down. The pavements were still packed with pedestrians flowing in and out of the Medina; the traffic on the road leading north into Gueliz was almost bumper-to-bumper. He stood up from the bench, offering his seat to a frail, elderly man whose face was scarred and as dry as sand. As he walked along Avenue Mohammed V, boys as young as five or six, sitting alone on the pavement with no adults in sight, plaintively offered him cigarettes and plastic packets of Kleenex, begging for coins as he passed. Carradine gave them whatever change he could find in his pockets, their gratitude as wretched to him as their solitude.
The Moroccan Girl Page 12