His lips curled. ‘There are established routes through the rocks that take you round the landmines, established rates for bribes to persuade our soldiers to turn a blind eye, and refugee camps on the other side where everyone can repent their folly at leisure. I have tried to dissuade them, but have not succeeded.’
‘That’s very sad, Dr Berhane. But you don’t need me to tell you I have no influence at the Immigration Ministry.’
‘I know that. No, the problem is that when our nationals cross over, the Darrar soldiers immediately take their ID and money. They do that to contain them in the camps, prevent refugees wandering around and peeping at their military installations. As far as they are concerned we are all potential spies. My friends will lose not only their passports but their professional certificates, which they studied so hard to win. They cannot enter Scandinavia without the passports and they cannot become accountants or opticians – or, more likely, underpaid assistants to Scandinavian opticians – without those certificates. They are desperately worried about this.’
‘And?’
‘They need a courier. This, too, is an established strategy, I’m told. Someone who will not be searched at the airport and can carry their papers and savings out of the country, then DHL it all to them. They will do whatever is necessary to make their way to Europe. They are resourceful men so that bit will be easy. You would be an ideal courier. You work for the Legal Office of the President. No one will ever search you.’
‘I see.’ Despite his careful priming, I was slightly shocked by the brazenness of the appeal. There was nothing half-hearted about the violation of professional ethics he was requesting: this was an offence that warranted a jail sentence.
‘OK. I’ll do it.’
My reply came so quickly that he was taken aback. He had been braced to cajole and persuade, to assure me of his friends’ trustworthiness and reliability.
‘You … will? Are you … are you sure about this?’
‘Yes. Look, you’re right. I’m the perfect courier. No one touches me. I work for the government. I’m always carrying files full of confidential information.’
My heart was pounding, my face flushing. I had a sudden sense of vertigo. For a moment I had a vivid memory of Jake staring at me through the lift’s metal grille on our first date, a man almost afraid of what was to come, then pulling me into his life. Someone else had just given my destiny a yank, and I had agreed without hesitation.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told Berhane. ‘It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
But I was lying. His request had exposed something treacly and dark inside me, flicked a provocative forefinger at a caramelising bubble of fury. It wasn’t panic I felt, but a surge of vindictive euphoria. I was going to enjoy sticking it to the fuckers.
On my desk the following morning I found a sealed package. Inside it was a chunky, leather-bound book – Gibbon’s Roman Empire, the volume Dr Berhane had weighed in his hands when I had admired his library. There was a Post-it note inside the fly leaf. ‘Tank Graveyard at 7 p.m., Wednesday. Corner of Giolitti and Vincent St. Mussie will be there.’
I guessed why Mussie had chosen seven o’clock when I got there. It was the moment just before the sun goes down, when what was harsh becomes soft, eyes no longer scrunch protectively against the light, and faces whose lines were drawn with the sharpness of a rotary pen mellow and blur. Whoever I met at this forgiving, shifting hour, I realised, I would struggle to identify again.
The evening’s cool was bringing out fragrances numbed by the sun. There was a waft of piercing jasmine, the smell of domestic cooking, and a deeper, earthier note of wet mud, tinged with decay – maybe rotting loam, maybe excrement. I took a breath and savoured it. A skinny black cat set off on its nocturnal adventures; a tethered dog whelped in a courtyard nearby. The valley below was a jumble of twisted metal hulks. I was early, so I strolled along the path that ran alongside the wreckage, tilting my head from side to side as I tried to decipher constituent parts. It seemed to be mostly made up of army trucks, first squashed and then stacked, like the bodies in the morgue. But I could also see armoured personnel carriers, jeeps and tanks, train compartments and shipping containers, machine-gun stands and multiple rocket launchers. Someone stepped from the shadows, moving more quietly than I’d thought physically possible.
‘Are you interested in geology?’ He was small and white-haired. In his fraying shawl and sandals cut from old tyres, I might have taken him for a goatherd, but his English was good enough to suggest a middle-class upbringing and education abroad. It made sense. Any contact of Dr Berhane’s would be a man of some sophistication.
‘Geology?’ I stammered, caught off guard.
He smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. ‘A geologist would love this place. It’s like a quarry. Our warmongering history caught in the sedimentary layers. Start at the bottom,’ he said, pointing at a pile of metalwork with one horny finger, ‘and go up. Every episode of foolishness is there. First the days of the Darrar empire. Lee Enfields, Schneiders and Winchesters. Above that, the Italian conquest: the Camionetta AS 42, with its Breda submachine-gun. The British occupation: howitzers, Matildas and Bishops. Courtesy of the Americans, we get the M24 Chaffee and the Walker Bulldog. And then, at the very top, thanks to our Soviet love affair, the BRDM, the T-34, T-54 and the ultimate in tanks, the T-55. There are even some downed MiGs in there, you know. And I suppose soon we will be adding the weapons Libya and Qatar have sent to the latest bunch of idiots running this country. I’m Mussie.’
‘I thought you might be. I see you are a historian rather than a geologist.’
‘Just an amateur. But I grew up fascinated by mechanical things, like all boys. And if you like weapons,’ he said, with a wry laugh, ‘this is a place of endless delight. But, here, I have something for you.’
He beckoned me forwards, twitching his scarf so it covered half of his face. Darkness had fallen while we were talking. He could simply have passed me the envelope, but instead he drew me under one of Lira’s few functioning streetlamps and riffled clumsily in it. He handed me two passports, some papers I guessed to be certificates, and a receipt. Then he extracted a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in a red elastic band, and started counting them with one shaking Parkinsonian hand. ‘One hundred, two hundred …’
‘It’s OK, I can count them later.’
‘No, no, you must be sure. I want everything clear.’ He continued counting as we stood amid a whirl of midges in the cone of light, two actors in a spotlit performance. I felt a crawling unease. Why was he making such a song and dance of it? Why choose such a remote spot for the handover, only to then put on such a public display? The man was being about as discreet as a hooker in a red-light district.
‘It’s fine. I trust you,’ I said brusquely. ‘Just give it to me and I’ll do what I can.’ I thrust the passport and dollars back into their envelope, lifted my shirt, and tucked the package into my belt. ‘Now, I have to go.’ But Mussie had already disappeared, his work done, a white-shrouded ghost dissolving behind the metal tombstones and mausoleums of the twentieth century’s armaments industry.
‘Come home, darling,’ my mother said between gulps over the phone. She had met Jake only once, but had decided to make this tragedy her own. Hogging all the weeping during our exchanges, she left nothing for me. ‘At times like this you need family. Come back to where you belong.’
I thought of her waterfront flat in Canary Wharf. The tatty souvenirs of my childhood, the well-sucked toys, scribbled drawings and photo albums, along with the relics of her unhappy marriage to my father, had been packed into plastic tubs and placed in storage after the divorce, stowed in one of those brightly coloured warehouses you speed past heading out of London. ‘No space in my new digs,’ she had explained, ‘and I’m going for a more streamlined look.’ So streamlined, I’d noticed on my last visit, that I might as well have been staying at a boutique hotel. The purple-tinted glass tumblers in the bathroom
matched the towels; the linen curtains went perfectly with the cream rugs. It was impeccably tasteful, stripped of all past associations and devoid of individual quirks. ‘No offence, Mum, but that doesn’t actually feel like home to me. I’ll stay here.’
Instead, I handed in my notice at Hitchens and asked my colleagues to relay news of any jobs available for someone with my experience. The looks they shot me were sympathetic, but I also detected a hint of relief. I had become a memento mori. ‘Where are you looking?’ a secretary asked over lunch.
‘Anywhere, as long as it’s not here. Short-term contracts would be fine.’ The forwarded adverts came flooding into my email inbox and I used the simplest of selection techniques, involving a map of the US, a stretched piece of string and a fingertip pressed hard on New York, to decide which ones to apply for. The longer the piece of string, the better.
All my life I’d been the queen of the radical departure. I wanted to go where the Wentworth name possessed no resonance, to work such long hours my skin would turn eggshell white in an office, any office, where my co-workers would be so frantically busy I would never have an intimate water-cooler conversation again. A three-month job at a commercial law firm in Chicago, doing due diligence on a major merger, fitted the bill perfectly.
There is a grim kind of relief that descends when the worst possible thing you could have imagined actually happens. Hope is such a strain on the nerves. The burden of anticipated happiness – a burden I had clearly never handled with the requisite care and attention – had now been lifted from my shoulders. Whatever happened in the rest of my life, I would never now count as normal. There was nothing left to plan. I was officially allowed to give up.
I packed anything I could not see myself using on a daily basis. As Laurel and Hardy nuzzled the cardboard boxes with tail-thumping curiosity, I wrapped up the Piazza Navona cartoon sketch of Jake, the silver bracelets and necklaces he had bought me one birthday in Istanbul, my books and CDs. I hesitated over the photos of the two of us together, then shovelled them into a brown envelope and slipped it into the side pocket of the bag I was keeping. When the storage van pulled away from the cottage, I controlled the childish urge to scrunch up the business card the driver had handed me and throw it away. It was just possible, I supposed, that I might one day want to reclaim my possessions. Possible, but unlikely.
I hoovered the rooms, poured bleach down the toilets, scrubbed the bath, mowed the lawn and went into the village to carry out all the myriad duties that effectively topped and tailed my life with Jake. On the last morning, I left the keys to the cottage and the Jetta in a drawer of the Welsh dresser for Sophie. I closed the cottage door softly on the latch, put my luggage on the front seat of the hire-car and coaxed Laurel and Hardy into the back – they always hated driving.
I suppose it’s a tribute to just how busy I’d been that I only registered my route would take me over Bear Mountain Bridge when I was already on it, and the buckled gap where Jake’s BMW had burst through the railings zipped by so quickly I almost missed it. There was a flash of flapping yellow police ribbon and curved metal flanges, grey tongues twisted as easily as strips of chewing gum. An image to be mulled over later, later, later. There would be plenty of time for that.
I headed south towards Peekskill, turning off the highway into the forecourt where Dr Fickling, the vet Jake liked to use, ran his clinic. I remember that an elderly customer, her mewling cat box on the counter, stroked and fussed over Laurel and Hardy at the desk, complimenting me on their beauty, as though the glossiness of their coats, the softness of their muzzles and the trust in their eyes were a credit to my care. They nuzzled her hands and kneaded the carpet with their paws, soaking up the attention. Dr Fickling gave me a discount on the lethal injections, just as his receptionist had said he would, because there were two.
32
So that was the answer to Dawit’s Frank Zappa question. That was how I came to be sitting in a Lira taxi, driving back from my airport encounter with Green Eyes at a time when most law-abiding citizens – I no longer came into that category, of course – were just beginning to stir.
I had a load I was in a hurry to shed, and I was starting to fathom how tricky this was likely to prove in a city where the head of state saw fit to comment on your choice of watering-hole and everyone knew your business before you did.
I trundled my bag as quietly as I could past Amanuel, a Michelin Man flexing gloved hands and stamping his feet as dawn took the bitter edge off his night shift. I slipped into the villa and immediately froze in the entrance. Making the most of my presumed absence, Steve and Sharmila were having a rambunctious bout of morning sex. To my jaundiced ears, his baritone grunts and her wails sounded a tad theatrical. I went into the sitting room, swivelled one of the armchairs so that its high back blocked the view from the front yard, hunkered down in it so that I was virtually invisible and wept: a release of self-loathing and fear.
By the time Sharmila descended the stairs, I had composed myself, the only give-away a raspberry blotching beneath the eyes. Her wrap flapped open, offering a glimpse of smooth stomach as she headed towards the kitchen, her hair dishevelled, expression languorous. She saw me, flinched, and pulled her wrap tight. ‘Jesus Christ! What the fuck are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in The Hague?’
‘Long story. I’ll explain later. Right now, I have to make some calls.’
Winston first. I knew exactly where he’d be. At his usual table in the Royal Delft’s restaurant, where he’d be sipping a cappuccino and expecting me to walk in off the street at any moment to join him for breakfast.
‘What happened?’ It was the first time I’d heard him sound genuinely disconcerted.
‘They wouldn’t let me get on the plane. I was detained overnight at the airport, then put in a taxi back to town. My passport’s been seized, too.’
‘The reason?’
‘None given.’ I would tell him the truth, but not on this phone line, not in front of Sharmila, and not until I was safely out.
‘Do you still have all your paperwork?’
Unfortunately, yes, rather more than I wanted. ‘It’s safe and well.’
‘OK, I’ll call Buster and try to sort this out. Don’t unpack. Let’s count on you being on tonight’s flight. Keep in close contact.’
So I waited, making myself as inconspicuous as possible while Sharmila and Steve, exchanging silent, eye-rolling glances, grumpily fixed themselves breakfast and finally left for work. Then I telephoned Barnabas, gave him an edited version of the night’s events, and asked him to go to the Ministry of Immigration, Room 805, to pick up my passport.
He called me back twenty minutes later, and he was talking so quietly, I could hardly make the words out. ‘Miss Paula. They have your passport here. But they are not letting me have it. They won’t say what the problem is. It is very strange.’
‘Sorry, Barnabas, but could you please stay there as long as it takes. Winston has asked Buster to sort this out. Any moment now, he’ll call them.’
‘OK, no problem.’
The confidence was entirely simulated. Could Winston actually sort this one out, especially when he wasn’t in possession of the full facts? For all I knew, my detention had been ordered by Buster himself.
The morning ticked by. The turquoise case sat in the middle of the sitting room like an interrogation mark. I still had no idea how to rid myself of its incriminating evidence. I wandered from room to room looking for an answer. Staring out of the kitchen window at the messy back yard, I spotted the rusting grill Steve had wrestled with at our Christmas party, the can of accelerant propped helpfully nearby. I unlocked the back door, shook the can to see how much fluid was left and inspected the grill, crouching to check sight lines to the surrounding villas. If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. But a fire in the middle of the day would undoubtedly draw the day-watchman’s attention. He’d smell it, even if he couldn’t see it. Did he clock off at lunchtime, abandon his perc
h to find a sandwich? I just didn’t know. I had never been at the villa in the middle of the day. I didn’t even know the guy’s name.
So, repeating Winston’s words to myself like a mantra – ‘Let’s count on your being on tonight’s flight’ – I pulled a spare holdall from underneath my bed and packed the few items I didn’t want to leave behind. Mostly photos: the sacred brown envelope containing the snaps of Jake I never looked at but couldn’t bear to throw away. And a more recent stack: Lira at sunset, Abraham in front of the IDP camp, the team on the last day of the hearing. A mini chessboard Dawit had given me on my birthday. Ah, yes, Dawit. I knew without bothering to dwell on the thought that I would leave without saying goodbye.
From my bedroom window, I studied the day-watchman. It was midday now, he must be starting to feel hungry. With a sinking heart, I saw him reach into one of the pockets of his huge overcoat and extract a small package wrapped in greaseproof paper. A packed lunch. Shit. Then the answer came to me. I ran out.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Yonathan.’
I thrust a banknote into his hand and mimed a puffing nicotine addict. ‘Would you mind buying me some cigarettes, Yonathan? I desperately need a smoke. I’d be so grateful. I’ve got so much work to do that I can’t go myself.’
Who would have thought my addiction would prove so useful? Yonathan gave me a complicit smile, shouldered his AK-47 and set off, perhaps grateful for the brief distraction. As soon as he disappeared around the corner, I ran into the villa and through into the back yard. How long did I have? It would take him fifteen minutes to get to the corner shop, I calculated. Five to ten minutes chatting to the shopkeeper, if I was lucky, fifteen to walk back. Forty minutes maximum.
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