Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Is this Matt Sharansky?’

  ‘It is. Hello, Captain Windrush. Great name.’

  ‘It’s Winrush. Win-rush. I’ve lost my job because of you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad. How come?’

  ‘My boss got scared. Are you scary?’

  ‘Not at all,’ laughed Sharansky. ‘He was pretty scary, though.’

  Bob couldn’t help smiling back. ‘He’s very rich. That’s the scary bit.’

  ‘I guess so. Can we meet? I have a few questions.’

  ‘I’m not going to answer them. I’m never going to answer them. I know nothing about whatever you might be interested in.’

  ‘That’s too bad. I’ll be in Virgil. You know Virgil? If you fancy a free breakfast.’

  ‘Of course I know it. But I’m not answering any questions.’

  ‘Because it has to do with a deal that defies all geopolitical realities?’

  ‘I wasn’t part of that deal.’

  ‘I know you were. Strictly in confidence. If you don’t help me, I’m obliged to mention you by name. And where you live. When I write my article.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat, Mr Sharansky.’

  ‘It’s good journalism. Virgil. In about an hour?’

  ‘If you bring my logbook.’

  ‘Logbook? What logbook?’

  There was a brief silence in which strange clicks could be heard. Perfectly ordinary clicks, of course.

  ‘I’ll be wearing a cream jacket,’ said Sharansky before Bob cut him off.

  Virgil was a wholefood joint about a mile from his building, at the peaceful end of a mall containing the biggest aquarium in the world, where sharks lived mysteriously at peace with thousands of succulent titbits that rippled prettily over your head as you shopped. The café overlooked a concrete pond pretending to be a lake, and had good roasted coffee.

  He stood in his bathroom and wrapped his pistol in a handkerchief and hid it in the inside pocket of his jacket. The gun’s bulk looked obvious in the mirror, so he put it back in the safe and set a new combination: the twins’ birthday date, backwards.

  He felt a touch rough, but decided to walk it. The streets of Dubai worked better when you lacked sleep; it was that sci-fi, surreal look, slightly crazed. He could never quite work out why desert air could feel humid, but that morning was damp, the fumes circulating along his sinuses. It was too early, thank God, for the cruisers in their sports models, although he counted five Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggeras pretending to be on their way to work, booming out Shababi. His shirt was clinging to the tighter areas within minutes, and he took off his jacket, thumb-hooked it over his shoulder: it always took a few days to adjust to the sauna effect, even in the cooler season.

  It was, as usual, chilly inside. Apart from an obese couple working their way through the Big Breakfast, there was a young man with dark curly hair, his brow beetling over intense eyes; his wide nose shadowed either unshavenness or a scanty beard. His rumpled cream jacket was too broad for his shoulders; he would have looked more comfortable in the olive T-shirt underneath.

  He glanced up and saw Bob, immediately raising his hand. Bob settled into the colonial-style wicker chair opposite, the table uncomfortably small.

  ‘I don’t like being threatened, Mr Sharansky,’ Bob said, refusing to shake hands.

  ‘Call me Matt. Hey, I’m just giving you an opportunity to remain anonymous.’

  Bob smiled, despite himself. ‘Most grateful for the opportunity, Matt. Have you seen the sharks?’ he added, waving airily in the direction of the mall.

  ‘Of course. But I could only picture the glass breaking.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re not the only one.’

  The waitress came up and they ordered: the left-wing journalist, to Bob’s surprise, requested a hot chocolate with whipped cream. He had a notepad in front of him, and a tiny Sony Dat recorder.

  Bob said, ‘I don’t like to be recorded.’

  Sharansky shrugged, putting away the recorder in an Eastpak shoulder bag that had seen better days. ‘Pencil notes OK?’

  Bob nodded. ‘Can I ask you a question first?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘How did you know where I lived? Via Sheikh Ahmed or his secretary?’

  ‘I have to protect my sources.’

  ‘Was it my son David?’

  The striking hazel eyes, burning through surrounding lines of weariness, moved down to the paper. ‘Sorry, I can’t say.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, does the name Bensoussan mean anything to you? Evron Bensoussan?’

  Bob kept expressionless. It was the reason he’d walked away from the deal. ‘Of course. Major arms trafficker. Would sell his old granny for a fiver.’

  Matt Sharansky nodded. ‘His nickname’s Dutch. I mean that’s what it is. Dutch. Evron “Dutch” Bensoussan. Either in honour of Dutch Schultz, the infamous New York mob boss, or because he once flattened a rival under a freight truck’s tyres, over and over, until most of the guy was stuck in the treads. Holland’s flat. Geddit? Anyway, take your pick.’

  ‘Maybe both,’ said Bob.

  ‘He’s certainly not from Amsterdam or Utrecht. In fact, he’s from Bethlehem. And not the one in New York State. He has knees that look like a pair of gonads. Horrible. They were smashed up when he was in special operations on the Golan Heights some forty years back. But he generally wears shorts. He walks a little stiffly.’

  Bob nodded, trying not to smile. Once, walking out to the plane in a hot dry place, he had seen Evron Bensoussan outside a shed, ten yards away: a paunchy sixty-year-old in shorts and flowery shirt-sleeves, face shiny with sweat, knees strawberry-red, smoking furiously and yelling into his mobile at the same time. The floweriness was a mistake: huge carnation-type blooms taking him over. Bensoussan was too busy to do more than nod in Bob’s direction: he was not carrying the man’s cargo, but still. The wader-in-blood was still yelling into his mobile when Bob took off, the plump little form jellified by the heat shimmers off the asphalt before Chad’s shrivelled lake took over with a tinfoil flash under the starboard wing.

  Breakfast arrived – muesli and yoghurt, the hot chocolate with its piled-up wig of whipped cream, Bob’s frugal coffee – and there was a brief hiatus. This time Sharansky noticed the waitress, and she clocked him with a smile.

  ‘Check out that bomb,’ Sharansky nodded, his eyes following her across the café.

  ‘Yup, she’d melt the frost off a cold-soaked wing,’ said Bob.

  ‘Hey, don’t look at me like that. It’s my chocolate. You know why I’m not drinking coffee? Because that’s all people do in my country. You know the joke? Why did we take forty years wandering in the desert? We kept stopping for cappuccino.’

  Bob smiled. ‘I always found Israel very appealing,’ he said. ‘Although I’d only stay a couple of nights, mostly in my passenger days. His Excellency prefers to avoid it.’

  ‘That’s because he hates Jews.’

  ‘Beats me why.’

  They began to eat. Matt Sharansky’s spoon hunted for the hot chocolate through the whipped cream, which he seemed to begrudge.

  ‘It’s presumably down there somewhere,’ said Bob. He felt benign towards the young man, surprising himself.

  ‘I guess so. Everything in this city is extreme superfluity. It’s pure surplus. For the rich, the whole world’s a whorehouse, but this is the big couch. I can smell it’s going to be degraded cocoa powder. Paris is good for hot chocolate – I know the places. And the cafeteria of my old university in Jerusalem. I don’t know why it was so good in there, but it was.’ There was a pause. The journalist picked up his pencil. His voice went lower.

  ‘These are the facts, Captain. Just over two years ago, a converted Boeing 727 left Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with a cargo of so-called medical supplies. In reality, these were mainly AK-47s and a helluva lot of ammo. It stopped in Istanbul for a fuel-up and some more military hardware, including a jeep, then flew on to Turkmenbashi airport, Turkmenistan. Everything’s called T
urkmen-something in Turkmenistan. Did you know Plovdiv is the oldest city in Europe?’

  He glanced at Bob, who nodded as if on his own train of thought.

  ‘OK,’ Sharansky went on, tapping his pencil on the pad. ‘From reliable sources, we know the guys who paid off the cockpit crew were the Taliban. So far, so not very interesting. What makes this pure dynamite is that the broker of this deal was Evron Bensoussan, the man with the testicular knees. I don’t whether you knew that, seeing as each layer of the flexible export market in weaponry or narcotics remains hermetically sealed from the one above and the one below. Finding their air tubes is truly a challenge.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Bob fibbed.

  ‘This key player in the global war economy is my fellow countryman. He is also a close friend of several of our ministers, including the current prime minister of Israel.’

  ‘Whose name I can never spell,’ Bob said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘This seems incredibly unlikely.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just.’

  ‘And where do I fit in?’

  ‘You were the pilot.’ He took a sip, eyes on Bob over the rim. ‘Yay, as I foresaw, it’s low-grade powder, sub-Starbucks even.’ He grimaced, leaving behind a frothy tidemark on his scanty beard, but none on his nose.

  ‘There you’re wrong,’ said Bob.

  ‘Hey, Bob, I’ve been in Israel since the age of six. I love my country. It’s not like other countries; it’s quality. It’s deeper and it’s special. You know a quarter of our population is Arab? Nobody questions that. So don’t get me wrong: I am actually a Zionist, or maybe a post-Zionist. I’m no transnational freak, anyway, I leave that to the neo-fascist capitalists who run the world. They’re mostly idiots with receipts, like Evron Bensoussan. But I feel an outsider because I am not a caffeine addict and I hate military hardware and I have some tedious notions of civil rights and pluralism and Palestinian nationalism and so forth. But, because of my views, I am hounded. When I was called up, I told them I heard voices to avoid the army. It worked, can you imagine? But the whole country hears voices! They belong to Adonai, apparently. That’s God, to you. Good old God. We reckon we have him by the balls.’

  Bob said, ‘Or by the knees?’

  Sharansky gave a loud laugh, like a yelp. Others looked.

  ‘I’ve not got all morning, by the way,’ Bob added.

  ‘Sure. What I am saying is that I don’t rely on some abstraction; I rely on concrete evidence. Especially written. Not that you can trust words, either. Not all words. But some are irrefutable. So that’s why I’m figuring that my assumption is ontologically correct.’

  ‘What assumption?’

  ‘That you were the pilot.’

  Bob ate his muesli and pretended to cast his mind back through thick mists of forgetfulness, clacking mentally through countless flights like an old-fashioned departure board. This young man was exhausting him with his prattle.

  ‘Well, Matt, yes and no. I did fly from snowy Plovdiv to Istanbul just over – well, crikey, two years ago it is. I think it was in a 727. But I’ve never had the privilege of touching down at Turkmenbashi. And I didn’t get a dirham for my efforts, by the way.’

  Matt Sharansky’s eyes narrowed. ‘But the plane did arrive, for sure. We’ve acquired the amended flight plan and the shipper’s declaration. You are definitely marked down as the captain. Words. Irrefutable, in this case.’

  ‘That shows naivety.’

  ‘Sure, flight plans can be cooked, but we use the originals. And this one was not falsified, except of course for the nature and quantity of the goods, which were most certainly not medical supplies. The flight hours are consistent with a 727 cruise speed and the cargo’s declared tonnage. Why would they change the crew list?’

  Bob sat back in the wicker chair and wiped his mouth on his napkin. The female half of the obese couple was pointing her camera at something on the artificial lake: a wind-up swan, maybe. A few other customers had come in, including a pair of squash players. None looked dangerous, but looks can mislead. A pumpkin seed had caught in his teeth.

  ‘Take dictation, Mr Sharansky. Pencil sharpened? Right. I flew that first leg to Turkey, walked out of the deal, got threatened via my mobile in Istanbul, kept my head down for two years here in sunny Dubai flying a poverty-challenged sheikh around – and now just when I need clear water in the glass, given some serious personal issues to do with my marriage, you’ve made it go cloudy.’

  Sharansky began to speak. Bob leaned forward again, raising his hand. The squash-playing pair looked like a comic routine: one tall, one short. ‘At some point over the last few days, my apartment’s been broken into. My logbook and personal diaries have been borrowed, I guess permanently. I would like you to return them, please, or I’ll mark them as overdue.’

  ‘OK.’ The young man nodded, looking impressed rather than shocked. ‘We didn’t take them, by the way. That’s a promise. I wish we had. A pilot’s logbook is the kind of thing that makes us unable to retain our waters.’

  Bob nodded. He believed the man. ‘OK, then I suggest you drop the matter. For your own safety. And mine. No blab. My lips are sealed tighter than a camel’s ass in a sandstorm, as they say round here. And that’s it. That’s really why I agreed to see you. To tell you to back right off.’

  Sharansky looked pained. ‘Did you record that particular flight in the logbook?’

  ‘I recorded all my flights. It’s part of the job. We landed on runway 24. Atatürk. The following leg I marked as REFUSED.’

  ‘So someone wants to kick ass. Our world gets smaller and smaller. This is cool, Bob.’

  ‘No,’ Bob said. ‘Evron Bensoussan is not cool. Business before pleasure, each and every time. Iranians selling arms to the Taliban, that’s business as usual. A highly connected Israeli selling guns to the Taliban? Surprising, but again, that’s business. I’m afraid you anti-arms campaigners are throwing sponges at a giant concrete bunker called naked greed.’

  The other snorted. ‘Not greed. Politics. One of a series of mechanisms designed to keep most of humanity superfluous and dirt-poor, using the tools of mas-cu-lin-i-sation.’

  ‘In plain English?’

  ‘An AK-47 is a jumbo prick extension.’

  Bob was beginning to find Sharansky’s youthful enthusiasm irritating. ‘Sorry, that doesn’t explain this particular deal. Money does.’

  ‘OK. Put it like this, Bob. The best enemies to have, as the saying goes, are those who are busy killing each other. Say, in this case, Muslims killing Muslims, taking the West’s eye off the ball, off Gaza, off the world banking conspiracy, you name it. Elementary tactics. You’ve just got to keep stoking it with weapons, and don’t let them run out of bullets.’

  ‘On that happy note.’

  The journalist leaned forward with a slightly manic look in his hazel eyes. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

  Bob pulled a face. He was the one who now felt naïve. He should have spotted that equation earlier; it sounded convincing. But pilots are famous for being naïve. Head still in the clouds when they’re down on the ground. Always thinking a few hundred nautical miles ahead, even when trundling a trolley down the supermarket aisle – or eating breakfast downtown.

  ‘You’re not convinced, Bob.’

  ‘Quite. But not entirely.’

  ‘OK, how about this hot shit?’ Sharansky glanced around, eyes taking in the café’s sanitised colonial look, its benign-seeming customers, with the flickery movements of a bodyguard’s. He half-whispered, so that Bob had to lean forward, head cocked: ‘We’ve a hunch, based on visual evidence from an informant, that the plane came back with a few kilos in its belt of Afghanistan’s main cash crop, helpfully refined by the Taliban.’

  ‘Heroin?’

  ‘Possibly. Perhaps even probably. Or for damn certain.’

  ‘The return flight could’ve been for another client.’

  Sharansky spoke from under his hand, as if afraid of
lip-readers. ‘The big B was obliged to return the aircraft home, back to Plovdiv. Officially empty. Just the crew and a lot of space behind their heads.’

  Bob shook his head. ‘Your informant needs new lenses. With the notable exception of Monzer Al-Kassar, I’ve never personally known arms and drugs to mix, not in the freight world, and especially not with Bensoussan.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate that type. He has mafia links. There are eighteen mafia families in Israel. They breed like rock rabbits. They keep blowing one another up in their cars.’

  ‘So you don’t know about Bensoussan’s daughter?’

  Sharansky’s eyes narrowed. He looked piqued. Bob told him what was public knowledge: Bensoussan’s daughter, an ex-model, was in a wheelchair. She’d lost both her long and beautiful legs in a car crash in Tel Aviv. The driver tested for coke and heroin. He’d hit the accelerator pedal instead of the brake and demolished a wall.

  ‘So Bensoussan is very, very against narcotics. And where I’m concerned, drugs are also a non-starter. If I know we’re carrying an illicit substance, I’ll refuse to fly.’

  ‘So that’s why you refused the second leg.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know about the return snow in the hold, how could I? I refused for the reasons I’ve given.’

  ‘Ignorance is easy, Captain Windrush.’

  ‘It’s Winrush, but never mind. Without the d. Sorry to interrupt.’

  Sharansky scratched his broad forehead. ‘It’s called looking the other way. When my grandparents were dragged out of their Warsaw flat in 1943, by their hair, every fucking neighbour looked the other way. And now Gaza’s so close you can throw a frisbee into it.’

  Bob stared at him rather crossly. ‘It’s a personal issue. I won’t carry drugs. Drugs are evil. That’s one thing Evron Bensoussan and myself would agree on, if I ever had to meet the guy.’

  ‘And weapons are not evil?

  ‘Guns are neutral, like an animal’s claws. My father flew Spitfires. He was tall, like me, and had to crouch a bit in the cockpit. Once he pulled out of a steep 600-mph dive and fainted for a few seconds. You know what his motto was? Take your time, but punch hard. He got five confirmed kills, lost all his friends, lost a leg, didn’t look the other way, helped save the world from Hitler. I really don’t want a philosophical discussion.’