by Adam Thorpe
He ascended in the lift alone. Its merciless mirror showed a grim, pale face that he temporarily adjusted with a smile. In some ways, he had been waiting for this episode from the moment he’d walked out of the deal in Istanbul, a couple of years back. Instead of going straight to departures, he’d visited the Topkapi palace, something he’d always wanted to do. Jewels and gold leaf and harems and scimitars: what else powers the world? There was a crush of tourists around the bigger jewels; none of them knew what this tall well-built man among them had done – or rather, what he had not done. He had not taken a brown envelope containing $90,000 in cash, to be divided among a three-man crew, in return for a simple ops. He took off his shoes and walked into the Blue Mosque: you could fly a Cessna up in its dome, if you banked tight enough. Glittering, resplendent walls. Something, some divine hand, then patted him on the head and said, ‘Good work, Bob.’
You bet. He’d hopped out of a window at Istanbul Airport, hailed a taxi and escaped some grumpy men with visible shoulder holsters. A few days later he’d emerged spluttering in a pool in Dubai, city of tomorrow’s today, where memory’s an unwanted guest and the past is sand.
He stepped out of the lift and was quietly relieved not to find someone waiting for him. The corridor to his apartment was as quiet as ever, its tiles gleaming from the attentions of the scrupulous Filipina maids. Maria, who always dealt with his mess, brought a dazzling shine even to the waste drain in his bathroom basin, let alone its taps. The doorknob had received a particularly eager polish. His key slid in and he opened the door with a caution that struck him on the one hand as sensible, on the other as silly.
The apartment itself was as still as a grave, only animated by the frenzy of Dubai’s lights coming in through the glass. It really did not feel crouched and waiting. It even felt a little bit like home.
Nevertheless, he touched no switches. The flat’s glassed-in walls were visible from myriad vantage points in the vista of bunched skyscrapers – from right out beyond the marina, if the observer was using binoculars powerful enough to pick out his particular strip. So he moved straight onto the terrace with a splash of whisky, tipped out three weeks’-worth of sand from the lounger, sat back and reflected. Sharansky might well turn out to be a minor dealer in rosé wines, or a recruiting sergeant for the local amateur dramatics. The cranes were swinging through the air, lights ablaze, all distant booms and crashes. Since he’d been away – less than a month – the forest of towers had been stretched by at least five storeys. In fact, he could have sworn an entire new ziggurat-like structure had gone up in what he remembered as a wide gap. And when Bob had first arrived, just two years ago, there was desert. Black air at night, and stars. An unadulterated wind. He’d loved looking out at the desert, marred only by the slow wink of climbing and descending planes.
He thought about calling Greg ‘Drip’ Tennyson, his immediate boss, to double-check his dismissal, but decided to wait. He didn’t much like Greg: too full of himself, with a tendency to go on about aims and objectives, ticking boxes, flexing one’s approach, all that. His nickname was nothing to do with his macho persona but because he’d always be telling you to ‘light up and smell the coffee’. Bob would never forget the first time Drip showed them round His Excellency’s DC-10.
‘In terms of conversions,’ he said, ‘this is the dog’s bollocks.’
François raised his eyebrows, asked what that was.
Greg pulled a face: ‘Don’t you know that expression?’
‘Well,’ said François, ‘I can visualise it …’
Right now Bob’s skin smelt faintly of jacuzzi – not chlorine but some musky scent the prince had sprinkled in. He would miss the dog’s bollocks, but not the prince. Middle Eastern bad-ass. Wrong. He’d met bad in his time, on the job: they can really hurt you. This one was just a fat-ass. With spare cash. Bob would always try to see the best in people, a dangerous trait. And it wasn’t always easy: he had a very good nose, both literally and figuratively. Luke, for instance. He’d always found Luke the masseur a living proof that manure has intelligence.
He toasted the view and considered Leila. She was a petite big-busted twenty-five, he was fifty-one. He could almost make his thumbs and forefingers meet around her waist when she breathed in hard. The relationship was come and go, as she put it. They’d go their separate ways for a while – easy in Dubai if you don’t mind glimpsing one another in clubs, bars, gyms; now it was come-together time. He phoned her number and left her a message.
He enjoyed the first splash too furiously and poured another, the ice sticking to his fingers. He had never flown with a drop of alcohol in his body, but off duty was different, even in the Emirates. The whisky soothed him: he no longer imagined every rustle as a chap in a frogman’s outfit swinging in over the balcony with a knife between his teeth. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
The ring of the fixed phone startled him. He hesitated before picking it up, then reckoned it might be Leila. It was Greg Tennyson, confirming the dismissal.
‘Past catching up with you, Bob? That’s the trouble with freight dogs. You never know where they’ve been.’
‘I didn’t. I chose not to go. I walked out of a deal. That’s why I’m in trouble. Maybe Our Excellence didn’t bother with the detail.’
Greg Tennyson never listened. It was too much trouble to listen; he just got on with his own thing. ‘Anyway, Bob, I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve enjoyed working with you.’
‘The dog’s bollocks, was I?’
‘A change strategy, that’s what you need now.’
‘I think it’s called coping with involuntary redundancy. Not nearly as pleasant as involuntary emission.’
Greg sportily chortled, then snapped into his suit-and-tie voice. ‘You’ll have to pass by with all the relevant paperwork, of course. Your files, keys, badges and so on. You know the drill.’
‘Yup.’
‘Terrific.’
‘The cat’s pyjamas. Into the valley of death rode the five hundred.’
‘Come again, Bob?’
‘Learnt it by heart at school. A poem. By your namesake. A famous poet. Always wondered whether you were any relation.’
There was a momentary pause. Puzzlement. Bob felt triumph brimming over inside him.
‘Actually,’ said Greg Tennyson, ‘he was a cousin of my great-grandfather, was our Alfred. Our Alfred Lord T.’
‘Oh. You never said.’
‘Didn’t reckon you’d have heard of him, to be frank, Bob.’
‘Wrong there, Greg. Well, that explains it.’
‘Explains what?’
‘Your way with words. Inherited. Y’ know – flexing your approach, smell the coffee, move the change forwards to another peg.’
Another pause, a touch heavier.
‘Bob, want to know what your prospects in the executive-jet line are?’
‘Not really.’
‘Mush.’
‘Well, better than the rock at the bottom.’
It didn’t pay to upset Greg, but he’d done it. So he left it at that.
He thought about Leila as he went back in to shower and change, defiantly flicking the lights on. He felt a dark shaft of apprehension as he did so, but he was tired and slightly drunk. He planned to have a bite at the nearby Indian, fit in his thirty lengths in the apartment block’s ten-metre pool, nick a lemon from one of the waterside trees in their great earthenware pots, fix up an ice-crammed vodka and tonic, then pack, then sleep – assuming Leila didn’t get back, offering the comfort of her warm velvet skin, her sheltering inlet. He shaved, just in case. He looked raddled. Mirrors are spiral staircases, he thought, once you reach a certain age: clang clang clang, down we go.
There wasn’t much kit to cram: most of it was still in storage after he’d been refused re-entry by Olivia (the gun had been a bad mistake), plus a few bits in the Crowthorne flat. Up to now he had always avoided any professional bother; or rather, up to the moment he’d walked away from the deal – whic
h wasn’t his deal in the first place. It never was. The agents, the brokers, the governments, the rebels – one great mish-mash in which the pilot stayed a pinhead, doing his job. But since that rashly sensible moment in Istanbul, followed by an unpleasant phone call, he’d half been expecting a spot of bother, as you do when you play truant. Now it was here, potentially, all he could feel was the Glenmorangie sliding down his throat, easing him up.
Then, padding towards the bathroom, he noticed how the tiles didn’t shine.
The apartment had been cleaned by Maria; he could tell because she had placed his cutting boards in descending order of size, polished the knife holder as well as the knives, washed his long-dead mother’s tea cosy so that its greyish purple was now bright red, and left a spiral of green cleaner in the toilet bowl. Nevertheless, there was a fine flouring of sand on everything: the tiles, rugs, covers, the tops of picture frames, the giant fridge, the TV, the hi-fi, the leather sofa, and the family photos – mostly of Sophie and David from babyhood to teens – that were ranged on his desk. Except that a couple had fallen flat, as if the maid had tried to open one of the sticky drawers. The picture of Olivia laughing in his arms on their wedding day was still defiantly standing, if a touch faded. He stood the two upright again.
It reminded him of Glencore’s copper mine at Mufulira: white powder from the slurry blowing all over town, dusting his face, a gauze over the rising sun. That taste of sulphur. Here, it was 100-per-cent natural. When the doors and windows were closed, there was no sand: the desert flowed around the glass tower like one of those films he used to watch in school physics. On the balcony, yes, it would pile up in folds against the corners, shift over the tiles, lightly coat the loungers, the metal chairs and table. But not inside, unless you left something open.
The millimetrical thickness of the sand meant that the doors had been open at some point for a few hours. That was something the maids would never do: it let the cool out, and the heat and sand in. It was like shouting in church. The prince, who owned the building, made sure his manager made that clear in print, along with numerous other stipulations (no barbecues, no alcoholic shenanigans on the balconies).
Yet the sliding glass doors were locked when he’d arrived: only a cat burglar with a head for heights might make it over from the neighbouring balcony. A James Bond extra, a stuntman. He’d wanted to be a stuntman, long ago.
The bedroom door was open. He hadn’t yet looked in the bedroom. It had a French window and its own little perch of a balcony no bigger than an aircraft’s galley. He went to the safe in the hallway wall and took out his Makarov with the notched wooden grip, eased off the safety catch, switched the bedroom light on. The French window was closed. The drawers of the bedside table were shut, its five unread books piled in descending order of size, the double bed neatly turned back in the American manner, and absolutely nothing looked amiss.
Yet, unless there was a secret fissure, an unseen crack, someone had been in here since the maid had cleaned, and for more than a few minutes. An hour or two, say, with the balcony doors slid back – maybe only a little. He looked for spoors or fingerprints, but the sand-dust was so fine that a mere breath would shift it: even the air conditioning’s unfelt eddies. All he could see was his own trace here and there, especially around the fridge.
He opened various drawers and felt that someone had rifled them, although there was no tangible proof. The whisky was making him feel reckless, and recklessness is very bad news for pilots, unless – like his dear-departed father – you were strapped into a Spitfire at a time when recklessness was indistinguishable from bravery. But he wasn’t his father: nothing like. He sat on his white leather sofa – a sofa he disliked, along with most of the furnishings – and checked the pistol was fully loaded. This was sensible, he thought, not reckless.
And then it occurred to him, and he felt relieved: if anyone had somehow found their way in, it would be the left-wing journalist. Left-wing journalists were not dangerous, or not directly. They stirred stuff up that might lead to a spot of bother, but they wouldn’t hurt you or shoot you or throw you in jail. However, left-wing journalists weren’t necessarily adept at breaking into a twenty-fifth-floor luxury apartment and leaving no trace. Anyway, there was not much here to find. Most of his papers were in Crowthorne, apart from his logbooks and various post-freight documents. A brief spasm of worry about Olivia and her foxy solicitor vanished with the last of his second top-up. No one had been in here. The wind had been particularly strong when he’d landed the beast, the air cloudy with sand. He wondered whether November, the start of the cooler season (cooler meaning slightly less oven-like), was a particularly bad month for sand. He felt very tired suddenly.
Nevertheless, just to make sure, he levered himself off the sofa and went to his desk beyond the rubber-tree plant. He kept the logbooks – three of them, he’d been flying that long – and all relevant papers in the bottom right-hand drawer, unlocked since he’d mislaid the tiny key.
There were two logbooks, the corners bumped and the covers scuffed. Two instead of three. He checked every other drawer. Then he checked them again: he knew that whatever you’re looking for – sunglasses, keys, Sellotape, wallet – has magical powers, can turn invisible. He sat in his swivel chair and put his head in his hands. This was what Olivia would have called an ‘oh shit moment’ with her lovely, nervous laugh.
One of the logbooks was missing: the last logbook, recording all his flights up to the Dubai job. He’d started a new one for Dubai, since he was no longer in freight. It seemed right. His logbooks went back to 1985, when he started with Sabena. The reason he wasn’t screaming and shouting, apart from having an experienced pilot’s resistance to screaming and shouting in emergencies, was that he’d photocopied every page in all three logbooks some nine months ago. This followed an incident when he had taken them down to the pool for perusal and returned without them, distracted by an exceptionally lovely pair of coffee-brown shoulders. Fortunately, they were found by a cleaner, but not after the hard covers had been pummelled by the fists of a very strong sun. Copies were essential, and he’d left these with other copied documents in his flat in Crowthorne on his next trip to England. He’d assumed that Mossad, or whoever it was, had not sufficient nous to raid, let alone trace, his second address.
He checked every single drawer in the suite, having a vague recollection of showing the books to skinny, desirable Leila; he virtually ransacked the place, looking for it. But it was gone. It had been taken. He had walked away from a deal, but the record of that deal (or the Deal) was in the missing logbook. Not the cargo, not the kit, but the time, the places, the company, the crew, the lot. And after it he’d put: SECOND LEG REFUSED.
He’d often wondered how he would react, coming out of low night cloud in a full 707 and seeing the surface of the ocean no longer tens of thousands of metres below but close enough to spot the dark swell roll, the foam glisten and fleck and disperse.
Right now he felt as though he was in a similar flat dive, but not yet realising it. The night and the clouds were still thick.
Of course, it didn’t have to be a cat burglar. He thought: anyone who’s important enough can walk their way into anywhere in this country. Vakim would not say, ‘No, sorry,’ to certain important people, especially if they proffered a brown envelope. He had even seen one important person – not the prince – walk airside right through the police control and customs without waving a thing.
They had come up here, or just possibly risked their necks, and searched his rooms with a window open or the balcony door slid aside. That was presumably in case they were surprised by his premature return. But if they’d entered via Vakim’s trembling keys, such an escape was unlikely to be necessary. In fact, the whole business struck him as unlikely, except that it wasn’t. He’d been bothered enough times in his career to know that it wasn’t. People could get very anxious, and very angry, when you got in their way or refused to obey an order.
He very much hoped
it was the left-wing journalist who’d pinched the logbook, and not those he was set to make an enemy of. After all, Sharansky had talked to Vakim. Maybe Vakim had covered himself by telling him a white lie. But the more he considered this, pacing up and down the living room and muttering aloud, the less likely it seemed. Surely a journalist’s job was to talk and persuade, not steal. Then a dreadful thought came to him: the only evidence of his knowledge of just what this deal entailed was not in the logbook but in his private thoughts – and these were on display in his half-a-page-a-day diary of that year: nothing elaborate, just curt scribbles, keeping track of his hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, between lists and appointments.
He kept these (uncopied) diaries under the bed, along with a batch of Clipper magazines in a tatty Pan Am shoulder bag with a difficult zip, the legacy of a long-ago fling with one of the World’s Most Experienced Airline’s sky-blue crew – not Olivia, who started with Pan Am but who came into his life a bit later, but a girl called (if his memory was serving him correctly) Nikhil.
He sprang to the bedroom and yanked the bed to one side, slipping on the rug. The strap of the shoulder bag was showing. Relieved, he hauled it out and it came too easily, precisely as light as the blue canvas it was made of. It was empty, apart from a biro, a paper clip and a courtesy sweet from a Bangkok hotel.
The zip had evidently annoyed them, because the opening was a long and jagged tear, made by what he supposed was a serrated combat knife.
Maybe they were just Pan Am souvenir nuts, he thought, before pouring himself a third whisky with a hand that was trained to be shake-free, but was having a day off.
3
‘NEVER PRETEND YOU are anything more than a flying truck driver, the pilot of a whispering warehouse. What’s in the cargo bay is not your business, and, until it’s being loaded, you’ve no idea anyway.’