The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  Under a still-wet mural of Victor Milne: World’s Greatest.

  The slot of a red pillar box was choked with weeds, the heavy iron structure too sturdy to be removed. Serval smiled a touch sadly; he nurtured a guilty fondness for memories of Empire. No shame there, his father would have boomed.

  A further anachronism was the language. Krio was sired by Mende and eighteenth-century English, lending it a quaint and piratical personality. Things didn’t happen often, but seldom; Serval encountered the phrase, ‘nefarious acts’. To say good morning one would ask, How de body? to which the proper reply is, De body fine.

  Serval checked into a hotel on the edge of Kroo Town, a fearsome slum running the length of the bay. His hotel used to be a hospital, built by the British, and here again Serval saw traces of the departed power. The cracked toilets were made by Royal Doulton and the iron lift (still functional) was stamped Made in Birmingham.

  Serval bought a beer and drank it on the roof, staring out over an oily creek that snaked towards the sea. Drank his beer and tried to quell the beating of his heart at what he had to do that evening.

  *

  Two squaddies guarded the shanty town’s perimeter.

  “I wouldn’t go any further if I were you, mate.” A Tyneside accent came through the facemask. “Not pacified yet. And a bit rowdy, like.”

  “Plus the Ebola,” said the second Geordie. “It’s in there, all right.”

  A definite sense of the virus as a living thing.

  “I can look after myself,” said Serval.

  The first soldier shrugged. “Suit yourself, mate. But just so as you know, if you get in a ruck we ain’t coming in for you.”

  Serval picked his way along the river bank. The smell was of cheap fuel, effluent and rot. Smoke rose from piles of burning rubbish; pigs snuffled at his feet. Only the rattle of a generator suggested habitation – and the infrequent oil lamps flickering in windows. Further inland the mountains were a patchwork of yellow and black, depending on which neighbourhoods had power that night. A pitch-dark alleyway led into the belly of the slum. Serval switched on his torch and took a few steps in.

  Two young men emerged behind him.

  They wore vests and baseball caps; muscular arms glinted in the half-light. Serval measured their tread behind him, refusing to increase his pace. When he turned a corner they followed.

  Next it was a tooth-whistle. “White man, white man.”

  Serval turned, appraising the pair who confronted him. One was tall and rangy with crazy teeth, the other short but heavily built, his arms like boa constrictors and carrying a machete. Serval reckoned he could take them, but it might get messy.

  “What you problem?” said the short one.

  “There’s no problem,” Serval replied evenly.

  “What mek you look foh fight?”

  The Englishman felt a certain exhilaration spill into his blood. So: this was why some people loved violence the way he loved the wild places.

  “I’m not looking for a fight,” he said. “I am going for a stroll.”

  “Him jus’ go look round!” the taller man told his friend, as though explaining something to a cretin. He handed Serval the machete. “Here be cutlass.”

  That’s when Serval realised: they didn’t want to hurt him. They wanted to help him, they were worried about his welfare. When he thought of that unfamiliar thrill at impending violence he was glad of the night, for his cheeks were burning with shame.

  “What are your names?” he asked by way of contrition.

  “Me nem Internet,” said the shorter one. “Him Action.”

  Serval went to shake his hand, but he paused.

  It’s in there, all right.

  Internet’s head fell. “Body no bad. Me feel well.”

  For a second time that night Her Majesty’s man in Freetown experienced a shadowing of guilt. He gripped Internet’s hand and shook it firmly, as Napoleon at Acre had once embraced troops with the plague.

  “Na wetin you de do?” said Action.

  What do you do?

  “Him doctor,” said Internet; he still had not released Serval’s hand.

  “Shut ye mout!” said Action. “Let ’im speak!”

  “No, he’s right,” said Serval. “I am a doctor. Are there sick people here?”

  Both men nodded.

  “Take me to them.”

  “For gif me cold beer,” said Internet. “You do me, I do you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  So they led him to the hut of the dying.

  Internet’s eyes were wide as he enunciated each horrific syllable: “Ee-bo-laaa …”

  Serval donned a plastic suit from his bag, along with mask, gloves and shoe-covers. He used surgical tape to seal the cracks. But their knocks were met by silence. Serval opened the door. It was humid inside. It smelled like bad cheese and the silence oppressed him. At first he thought the room was empty, but there were two shapes lying on foam mattresses, huddled under rags.

  “Sir? Madam?”

  Nothing.

  “Excuse me? Is anybody there?”

  The larger shape stirred. Serval lifted the rag and illuminated a face that was terrified and uncomprehending. The woman was very thin, her head shrunken and eyes jaundiced.

  Serval lowered the torch. “Sorry to disturb you, Madam.”

  “Me body.” Her voice was hoarse and she swallowed before continuing. “De ’urt.”

  It hurts.

  “I’m a doctor.” He raised a syringe.

  “Dis merecine?”

  Is it medicine?

  Serval shook his head. “I need to take some blood, madam.”

  “You wan’ do tes?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I want to do a test.”

  Her arm was thin as a snooker cue. Serval slipped the needle into a vein and the syringe filled with blood that glowed obsidian in the darkness. He injected it into a vial and cleaned its exterior with the solution his handler had provided.

  There was movement to Serval’s left, the lightest of sighs.

  “De pikin,” the woman whispered.

  The child.

  Curled up beneath a stained Mickey Mouse blanket was a little girl. Even in sleep her brows were dark and mischievous, and her hair had been plaited into six long thin antennae which sprang up when he lifted the cover. Four years old, he reckoned. Maybe five. She was ridiculously light. (He could have held her in the crook of one arm, run with her. Made her laugh.) The child’s head looked obscenely large on such a frame and her skin was mottled with white patches. She was definitely dying. Serval felt a lump in his throat, a prickling in the tip of his nose.

  “De pikin,” the woman mumbled again.

  “I need some blood from her too,” he said. “With your permission, of course.”

  The mother did not protest, but the child stiffened in alarm as the needle glided into her and all six antennae quivered.

  Serval stood up to leave.

  “What bout de merecine?”

  “I don’t have any medicine to give you.”

  “I got pain na me head,” she rasped. “Me wetin de pan.”

  I’ve got pain in my head. I’m wetting my pants.

  “I … I’m sorry.”

  “De pikin. Which hospital you gon’ tek her?”

  A fleck of saliva landed on Serval’s shin.

  “I’ve got to leave her here, I’m afraid.”

  The awful implications of this filled the stifling little hut.

  “I wish I didn’t have to,” he added. “I wish that …”

  The words trailed away.

  The mother whispered, “Me money done-done. I got notin’.”

  “I’ll give you money,” Serval said softly. “You can have some money.”

  He passed her a hundred dollar bill. But she barely registered the denomination, slumping into her rags.

  “Good luck,” he said, absurdly.

  Serval ran back to the hotel and showered inten
sively in a vacant room with the special shampoo his handler had given him. He got out, dried himself and showered again in a second room. He showered a third time in his own bedroom and caught a taxi to Aberdeen district, where the hovercrafts departed. The contact was waiting by the pier, shifting from foot to foot as if the plague rose from the ground, like they believed in the Middle Ages.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I skip shaking hands, now?” The Welshman laughed nervously, running a hand through long dank hair.

  Serval didn’t reply. That little girl. Her flaking skin.

  His colleague took the package with a look turned fearful. “Well, I’ll be away then. No sense in staying longer than necessary, is there? I’ve a flight to Heathrow to catch.”

  “No, there isn’t.” The words felt gruff in Serval’s throat. “Go on, go.”

  Only when he was stepping into the shower again did it occur to Serval: British Airways ran the only service to London, and it departed at noon. He smiled for the first time since the descent into Kroo Town. These MI6 types and their secrets!

  Later that evening curiosity got the better of Serval, and he looked up the schedules. Only more departure that day: his colleague was flying to Abuja.

  Why Nigeria?

  Suddenly Serval was tired. Tired of thinking about K2, tired of the look on Frederick Turay’s face as he overdosed; tired of all of this. Anyway, his was not to wonder why, his was but to do or die. He was only glad to be helping these people.

  13

  Here’s the funny thing: Jenny awoke from a blissful sleep. No fogginess of mind, no trace of a chemical hangover; she had never felt so rested nor so perfectly alert. If the drug they had selected was the first clue, the cell was the second, a cube of plastic illuminated by a high window. She had been abducted by a team that surpassed professionalism. These guys were absolutists. There was a basin, a lavatory, two wooden chairs that might have been pilfered from a church community centre. Clearly, the shaft of daylight was meant to suggest the possibility of freedom to her unconscious mind. The light was muted through a long thin tunnel, so she couldn’t guess the latitude or time of day.

  When she sat up there were hairs on her pillow (stress, it had to be). She was wearing a new tracksuit, although her own trainers stood by the bed. There was nothing to do but wait. Whoever came through that door would be a poker player of nuance and sophistication and she wasn’t going to surrender an advantage by banging on the door. Jenny stood on her bed and tried to peer through the porthole, but the window was three feet too high. A hatch opened – lunch was a cheese sandwich and an apple. Four hours later the hatch opened again. Another cheese sandwich, another apple.

  They kept her like that for two more days.

  On the third morning Jenny’s body language suggested the first encroachment of despair. Her facial muscles were slack, her legs splayed numbly across the floor. The shaft of light made its third sweep across the wall. That afternoon he came at last, and Jenny was unsurprised to recognise the taxi driver from Bangkok, wearing chinos and a sports jacket with an Ivy League haircut and rimless glasses. A vintage Omega was on his wrist; he resembled a newly-graduated financier.

  “Suvarnabhumi Airport, please,” she said.

  He giggled. “It’s a long drive from here. I’m Jamie Fung. Please, let’s sit down.”

  Her interrogator spoke like an International School student, the not-quite American English that rich kids talk from Havana to Hong Kong. If Jenny had to guess at his nationality she’d have said Singaporean. But he could have been from absolutely anywhere. They faced each other on the Church of England seating.

  “Who are you, Jamie?”

  “Hell, I’ll square with you. I’m your opposite number.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m not going to bother with any fancy ‘interrogation technique’,” he said making quote marks with his fingers, “or any of that crap, because you probably know it all already. I’m just going to sit here and talk with you until you tell me what I want to know. If that takes years, that’s my loss. But just so you know, that’s the score, that’s how we’ll do it.”

  Jenny looked away, exposing her neck. As in: here’s my most vulnerable point. I’m not afraid of you.

  “Do you want a coke or something?” said Fung reasonably.

  “Listen, buster,” she said. “If you’re not playing games, don’t pretend to be my friend. Spare me the meek and mild act. You’re not meek. You’re not mild.”

  Annoyance flared in his pupils. Almost indiscernible, but there. Fung received a text message and she watched him type in the pin number with open scorn.

  “I’m going to tell you what we want plainly,” said Fung. “The journalist, Jake Wolsey, your old lover. What did he know? MI6, what do they know? Your politicians – what do they know? Tell me all that and we can both go home.”

  Jenny glanced at his wedding ring. “She’ll be waiting a long time.”

  A wince of frustration at Fung’s temple.

  They talked for thirteen hours and she told him nothing at all.

  *

  Jenny was waiting for him at 7 am the next morning: leaning back in her chair, thumbs in her belt hooks and groin thrust forward.

  I’ve got the biggest dick here.

  Gladiatorial combat ensued. What really annoyed Fung was the way she stared at the bridge of his nose instead of making eye contact. That, and pointing out each psychological gambit he deployed as he tried it. She was undermining him, whittling him down. The beam of daylight travelled across the wall.

  At 2 pm came the first significant engagement. Fung was sitting opposite her with his hands on his knees, like a boy receiving a sermon.

  “Why are you using submissive body language?” asked Jenny.

  “I am not!” Fung roared. “I am not, I am not, I am just goddamn not!”

  The rage came from nowhere and Jenny’s eyes widened before she collected herself. But Fung had noticed the momentary loss of hauteur, and at 4.17 pm he struck again.

  Jenny was studiously ignoring him. Fung poured himself a glass of water, took a sip – and hurled the glass at her. The vessel exploded on the wall behind Jenny’s head, showering her with water and shards of glass. She screamed, only gradually reacquiring disdain.

  “That was bloody rude,” she said.

  Yet it did not escape Fung’s attention that for the next half hour Jenny sat very still, like an animal trying to avoid being seen. Something of the lost child had been brought out by the snap of violence. So he decided to punch her in the face.

  He was pacing the room, veering closer with each traverse. Jenny brushed her cheek with the tips of her fingers – a jerky movement – and she shied away from every pass.

  When Fung halted a new softness was in his voice. “We won’t actually hurt you, Jenny. You know that, right?”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Fung punched her in the eye, sending her sprawling off the chair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a lilt in his voice again. “I shouldn’t have done that thing, Jenny. That was against the rules.”

  She was lying face down on the carpet and a tremor went through her. “There are rules?”

  “Let me make it up to you,” he coaxed her. “Come and sit down. I’ll get a hot meal brought up.”

  “Like hell you will.”

  “Anything you want, just name it. No conditions. You’ve had enough cheese sandwiches, right?” His voice was sincere. “Look, I – I won’t hit you again. I promise.”

  “A salad or something,” she said grimly. “And a cup of tea.”

  “It’s yours. Just get up off the floor.”

  Jenny held her palm to her eye and inspected it before slowly standing up.

  He charged her.

  “No!” she shrieked, dancing back. “Please don’t hurt me …”

  The interrogator had her up against the wall. Her hands were against his chest, pushing him back. Fung went to headbutt her and
she flinched, letting go of his left lapel to shield her cheek.

  “Bitch!” he shouted again, right in her face.

  At this some inner resolve seemed to break and Jenny slid down the wall. Fung towered over her, out of breath, his eyes rolling like those of a strangulated bull.

  “Well?” he roared.

  “Ok,” she managed between sobs. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just – just give me a moment.”

  Strange, he reflected, that violence might be enough to break her. When preparing for the duel he hadn’t even considered it. He almost felt let down.

  She peered at him with a puffy eye; mucus bubbled from one nostril.

  “All right,” he muttered. “I’m going to fix a salad and a cup of your precious British tea. And when I return you’d better tell me everything. Or we’ll really get started on you.”

  He walked out of the room.

  Jenny stood up and turned on his mobile phone.

  14

  Night time on the beach. Jake idly flicked twigs and driftwood onto a campfire as it guttered and collapsed in on itself. He stared out to sea, watching the grey waves crashing in from the gulf and head nodding as he contemplated the Gordian knot of contradictions that was his life.