by John Connor
He apologised in English as the first one got close to him, coming from behind, then started speaking to the second one. But the second one was shaking his head too. They might be nothing but contraband cigarette shuttles, but there was a system – the clean car was first. Carl took his wallet out, handed ten euros to the first guy, apologised again. The man took the money but kept arguing. Carl got Rebecca’s hand and turned his back to him, looked past the second driver at the Astra, tried to guess what it might sell for. Certainly not more than a thousand euros. It was a car from the early nineties. ‘My car,’ he said to the driver, ‘my car is over there.’ He pointed back towards town. ‘It’s inside the police cordon. I can’t get to it.’
‘I can’t take you through there,’ the guy said, immediately. ‘The roads are closed.’ His English seemed good enough. Carl tried to look disappointed. Behind him the first driver was still muttering on, but starting to move away. ‘I have to get to Malaga,’ Carl said, as if the guy hadn’t understood properly. ‘Right now.’ He pointed at Rebecca. ‘Her brother is sick, in hospital there.’
‘Very expensive,’ the guy said. He pulled a face, like a wince. ‘I take you Malaga for two hundred.’ From behind them there was a huge shout from the crowd. Carl turned to look – everyone did. But all he could see was people running across the road, police chasing them. They weren’t coming towards him. He turned back to the guy. He was babbling something in Spanish to the first driver now. The first driver had lost interest – he was watching the distant unrest, leaning on his car. It was like a riot was a form of entertainment.
‘I want to borrow your car,’ Carl said to the second guy.
The man turned his head from the noise, frowned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Borrow it. I want to drive to Malaga in it, come back tomorrow.’
Beside him, Rebecca said something quickly in Spanish, a translation.
The guy started shaking his head, laughing.
‘It’s very urgent,’ Carl said. ‘Her brother is in hospital.’ He looked down at Rebecca. ‘Tell him that as well,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’ She spoke again but the driver was hardly listening. He started shouting something to the other driver.
‘I’ll give you one thousand five hundred euros if you let me borrow the car,’ Carl said. That shut him up. Now Carl had his full attention. ‘I’ll give you one thousand five hundred now, you give me one thousand back when I return the car tomorrow. That’s five hundred euros, plus a one thousand deposit, to have the car for twenty-four hours.’
He watched the guy computing it in his head, working out, most likely, how he could keep the other one thousand. ‘Show me,’ he said, finally. ‘Show me the money.’ He grinned, showing a mouthful of dirty teeth, then took a drag on the cigarette, stepped back, sceptical.
Carl counted one thousand five hundred from the wallet and handed it over. The notes were one-hundreds, which he thought might be a problem, but the guy took them, counted, dropped the cigarette on the ground. ‘One thousand for the car,’ he said. ‘Five hundred deposit.’
‘No problem,’ Carl said.
‘OK,’ the guy said, grinning again. ‘The car is yours.’
It was over as suddenly as it had started – the crowd dispersing like a miracle, scurrying back into the streets behind with the police in pursuit. One or two men tripped and were set upon by the police. Julia watched the brutality in horror. Two police vans followed the line of riot police and a second serial of men ran to arrest those the first wave had caught. She watched it all from the same spot in the road, blood streaming from her nose, her knee pulsating with pain.
Molina arrived within minutes, helped her to stand, let her lean against him. He had ordered an attack, he said, to try to save her. She started to cry, trying to talk and sob at the same time. ‘I’ve lost her,’ she kept saying. ‘She was there and I lost her.’
Carl took the car back along the road by the coast, away from the border, driving steadily, carefully. Police cars came past going in the opposite direction, lights and sirens on. Then an ambulance.
‘We’re not going to the border?’ Rebecca asked, from the passenger seat.
‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘We’ll get out of this area in this rust heap, find another car then head west, towards Portugal. I’ll call my brother and he can arrange something else.’
19
Carl had been working for Viktor’s people for nearly a year when he met her. Initially, he’d been attached to Viktor’s New York office, because Viktor had thought that would be the best place to get his English up to speed. He had lived in an apartment belonging to Viktor (in as much as anything belonged to Viktor at that point) on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River, directly under the Queensboro Bridge, and travelled every day to the downtown offices to do various security tasks, mainly involving computer work. Viktor hadn’t been there and he had known no one. The job had been very easy, but mostly he had hated his time there. He had been only twenty-three years old.
He came to London in the summer of that year, for a four-week period, when Viktor had just started on a Polish project that meant he was never in the London house but still kept some staff there. When Carl arrived there was only one person in the house, a chef de partie called Liz Edwards – the assistant to Viktor’s boss’s personal chef, who usually followed the boss. Viktor had told him nothing about Liz, except that his job was to provide her with ‘general low-level protection’. Carl had suspected an interest on Viktor’s part, but since Viktor hadn’t spoken about her he assumed it wasn’t significant. There were always women on the fringes of Viktor’s life, they were always attractive, but they never lasted long, and it was seldom the case that there was only one at a time. It wasn’t unusual for Viktor to want to protect his belongings – whether they were people or objects – so Carl worked on the basis that if there was a more specific threat he would have been briefed.
Because he thought of her in this stock, degrading way, the first meeting was destined to be awkward. He could remember it with painful clarity. It was the first time he had been to the house, he had just arrived from Heathrow, but Viktor had given him the keys and the alarm codes, so he had let himself in without ringing. The house was part of a terrace about seven storeys high on a square surrounding a little public park in the Bloomsbury area of London. There was a garden to the rear, but it was about the size of a bedroom, and enclosed by very high walls. Someone had tried to plant herbs there but the rest of it was overgrown. Viktor didn’t bother with gardens and, aside from his place in Helsinki (maybe the only place that was really his back then), not much with houses either. Whoever actually owned the London house clearly had it as an investment, and there was nearly always some improvement programme under way, with builders hammering and drilling and trailing in and out.
When Carl got there that day there was a skip full of building rubble on the street outside, but no builders. It was a hot Saturday in July. There was a big stairwell with mahogany rails rising the full height of the house from the entrance hall. He had stood at the bottom listening to the cool silence above him, decided there was no one in, then started to take a look around.
He got as far as the third-floor landing when she appeared, coming down the stairs from above. She was just out of a shower, it seemed, with wet hair, a long towel bathrobe wrapped around her, not expecting to see him standing there, blocking her way. He started to apologise even before she saw him, clumsily introducing himself, saying he would have shouted but hadn’t heard her. She stopped, holding the bathrobe in place, frowning at him, then stepped quickly forward, blushing terribly. She held out a hand for him to shake. ‘Viktor told me to expect you,’ she said. ‘His little brother.’
He shook her hand quickly and for a moment they stood staring at each other. ‘We’re only half-brothers,’ he said.
She was almost exactly his height (almost exact
ly his age, he discovered later – they had birthdays one day apart), with red hair and masses of freckles. He could see the freckles where they spread out from her nose, across her face, down her neck and onwards. Her shoulders were covered with them. The hair wasn’t so obvious – a light red (‘strawberry blonde’ she told him later, joking) – not bright ginger, or dark red. When, out of embarrassment, he looked down at the floor, he saw there were even freckles spread over her shins and feet. He could remember staring at them, as if mesmerised, feeling something odd starting. There were pleasant, floral fragrances hanging in the air around her and drips of water falling to the parquet floor from her wet hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just out of the shower.’
‘No. My fault. I should have rung the bell.’
‘Your English is good. Better than your brother.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry. Half-brother.’
He nodded and began to feel very awkward. Partly, obviously, it was that she was only in a bathrobe. But there was something else too. At the time he had no idea what, because it definitely didn’t feel like he fancied her. He wasn’t even sure she was attractive, if he thought about it – at least not in the way that usually appealed to him. In terms of meeting Viktor’s various women, that was unusual – normally they were tall, blonde and conventionally stunning. This one was none of that. But something was going on.
He cleared his throat, let his eyes come back to her face and fix again on the freckles. They were incredible. The concentration on her shoulders peculiarly and immediately reminded him of the pattern he had seen on very dark nights, far to the north, when you could see so many stars the sky looked almost white. He couldn’t recall ever seeing anybody with so many freckles. He had an urge to tell her that they were beautiful, that he’d never seen anything like that before, except in a black night sky full of stars, but didn’t have a clue how to put that sentence together so it didn’t sound rude and idiotic. He wanted to reach out his fingers and touch them.
He got his eyes off them with difficulty and met her gaze. She was still frowning, watching him. Could she tell what he was thinking? He cleared his throat again, shifted from one foot to the other, couldn’t think of anything to say. He could feel himself colouring, feel the heat rising up his neck.
‘I’ll get dressed,’ she said. ‘Show you round.’ She turned and walked back up the stairs.
After that it had only got worse for him. Crippling, childish embarrassment when he was near her. He hadn’t even been like that as a teenager, and until now had no problems speaking to women, even women he was attracted to. It caused him enough discomfort for him to think a lot about it, when by himself, because he couldn’t work out why he would be struck so stupidly dumb when he was certain that he didn’t want anything more to do with her than the contact that Viktor had required of him. If he had wanted more he supposed it would have been simply a matter of asking Viktor for it. That was what usually happened. Problems wouldn’t arise because neither of them were ever that interested in the women, and Viktor had never been averse to sharing with him. Paying women for ‘favours’ was the order of the day. Indeed, the provision of protection was already a kind of favour. So Carl assumed, in those first few days, that if he wanted to sleep with Liz a call to Viktor would bring that about, one way or another. But he didn’t want that. The thought of it seemed demeaning. As did, increasingly, the idea that Liz might fit into that pattern, might just be another one of Viktor’s temporary, kept amusements – a cook he could also screw.
But at that time she wasn’t doing any cooking – she was on leave – so the contact with her required by his work mostly consisted in accompanying her when she went shopping. In the first week he drove her – in Viktor’s Merc – to wherever she wanted to be then just stayed in the car and watched from afar. If she went inside somewhere big he followed at a discreet distance, trying to do it so she wouldn’t know he was there, keeping his eyes on her, but also scanning around her. It wasn’t work he’d ever done before, so he was making it up as he went along.
He found himself doing it badly, because it became hard not to just watch her as she moved around, often unaware, for the first week at least, that he was there. He got to know the way she moved very well, got to recognise various facial expressions as she was thinking – the tight frown as she listened to someone saying something to her, a habit of chewing at her lip as she walked along, the way she frequently moved hair out of her eyes. She had something against clips and hairbands. She had a selection of them – he saw her take them out of her bag, fix her hair back, put up with it for a few moments, then pull them out as if they were an irritation.
Moving so often behind her, he had plenty of time to scrutinise the freckles running up the backs of her calves when she wore short dresses – which, in that heat, had been often – noted that they stopped at the place behind her knee, then started again on the lower thigh. He began to feel like a sad, twisted voyeur. It got so uncomfortable he decided to tell her what he was doing. He waited until she was back in the car one day, then told her Viktor had asked him to watch her.
‘Watch me?’ she had asked, clearly surprised. ‘What does that mean?’ She sat in the front seat when he drove her, so it wasn’t quite like he was her lackey, but so far she had rarely said anything to him on their trips. Quite often she had earphones in and he could hear music. She hadn’t seemed to notice his unease with her, hadn’t seemed to notice him much at all.
‘I mean watch over you,’ he said. ‘Protect you.’
‘From what?’ She started to laugh, like it was absurd.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s nothing to protect me from.’ She laughed again, then her look soured and she stared out of the window. ‘Unless it’s from your half-brother himself,’ she added, more quietly.
The steady, percussive clatter of a helicopter engine got his thoughts off her. He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in a small room with easy chairs, low tables strewn with magazines about mining and copper, a soft drinks and snacks machine – a waiting room. They were at a private helipad in hills near a place called Nerva, on the edge of a mining area his brother must have had some connection with, because it had taken him less than an hour and a half to get back to Carl with this alternative. By then Carl had been on the motorway to Seville, still in the rusting Astra.
Until Viktor called back and gave him the details about Nerva he had been considering dumping the car in Seville – if it got them that far – and hiring a decent vehicle to get up to France the following day. The car had something wrong with the differential – Carl could hear it grinding as he decelerated – plus a transmission problem that made it jump out of gear as he shifted down. However, it ran fine at about ninety, on the motorway, so in the end he had driven it all the way here. It was the safest option because he couldn’t imagine the owner reporting it missing.
He had driven for nearly three and a half hours without a break, except to fill the tank near Jerez, without being stopped once at a road block, without even seeing a police car, once they were clear of La Linea. That had brought them nearly two hundred and fifty kilometres, according to the satnav, across Cadiz and into Huelva, the last province before Portugal. They had driven in darkness, in the end along a twisting single lane road, into low hills which were only visible as darker shadows above them. They had found this place, left the car outside and walked through the chill air to be met by a Spanish man who introduced himself as a friend of Viktor’s – Raul Nuñoz.
Aside from the cover story Viktor had suggested, Carl had tried to say very little to Nuñoz, and after a while he had given up with small talk, got someone out of bed to open up this place, lit the pad like a beacon and left them to it, in this room, with inadequate heating and travel blankets. By then it was 2.30 in the morning and Rebecca was walking with her eyelids drooped, stumbling up steps, silent. Now it was past three and she was in the chair
next to Carl’s, her head resting on his arm, very asleep.
He listened to the helicopter approaching and when he was sure it was coming for them put a hand down to shake her gently.
Caught in a cross between a dream and a nightmare, Rebecca could feel something biting her leg. When she sat up she could see a mosquito sitting there on her skin, but as she raised her hand to swat it, her mother was right there, talking gently to her, telling her it was only a fly, to let it live. But she wanted it to stop biting her, so squashed it anyway, whacking the palm of her hand onto it. There was a bright trickle of blood running from under her hand, spattering down onto the bed. She sat staring at the mess.
Her mum was sitting beside her on the bed, holding her hand, so she turned to ask how there could be so much blood running out of her, but saw then that her mum was crying, tears running down her face. ‘What’s up, Mum?’ she asked, and immediately felt awful about killing the mosquito because her mum had told her that you shouldn’t kill anything, unless you absolutely had to, or there was a very good reason.
She lay her head on her mother’s arm and started to go back to sleep, with her mum still crying quietly and the tears dropping down onto her face. Then she woke up again, and it all started afresh, with the mosquito back where it had been, the sharp pricking in her leg. And each time she couldn’t stop her mum crying, couldn’t even work out if she was to blame.
Then she woke properly, into reality, a man’s face right above her, his hand on her shoulder, shaking her. ‘Rebecca,’ he was saying. ‘Wake up.’ There was a deafening clattering noise coming from behind him somewhere. She got up immediately, startled, pushing herself off a seat and standing in front of him. She could feel a pain in her leg where the edge of the chair had been sticking into it. She had no idea where she was.