Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He clung to the shoulder, hung on to it as a blind man would. Never before, not as a child had he felt bad fear… and he thought the man came after him, dripped blood and followed him. He strained to listen for the footfall behind him but in his ears was only the ring, the clamour, of the gunshots.

  'I screwed up,' Polly said. 'I screwed up big.' She sat hunched, her chin on her knees and the phone pressed to her face. 'I can't believe it, how pathetic I was.'

  The darkness enveloped her, clung round her. He'd answered her call, now Gaunt's silence echoed back at her.

  'I gave him the party line. I called it the big picture.

  What I'm saying, Freddie, is that I thought he'd accepted it. You know, his little concerns outweighed by the needs of the masses. He didn't argue. Three shots were fired somewhere out in this bloody place -

  God knows where – but I'd given him the instruction.

  No intervention. Sit, watch and report. He listened, seemed to swallow what I gave him, then quit on me.

  I don't know where he is… Freddie, it is so damn dark here you can't see the end of your nose, and I don't know what he's going to do. I'd given him a gun

  – pretty damn stupid, you don't have to tell me – but he chucked it back at me, like he wouldn't be needing it. What's in his mind? I just don't know.'

  She was the daughter of schoolteachers. It had been drilled into Polly Wilkins that to admit failure, own up to error, won its own rewards in heaven. Most colleagues who had shared desks with her at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, she thought, would have wormed, wriggled, from admission of failure and error. The response in her ear was a long, measured sigh – she reckoned it not of anger but the sadness of disappointment.

  'I will, of course, do what I can to give due warning of any pickup. I have to say that a lift off the beach will not be fun. It's a foul evening and it's not changing…

  What's worst, Freddie, I miss him. It was sort of good having him here. What I realize, he's not missing me, just dumped me, a bloody used fag carton… I don't know where it's going… Nothing much else to say.'

  'I won't be here myself, but calls to this number will be routed to the necessary people… Thank you, Wilco.'

  He knew what she meant. Frederick Gaunt could empathize, knew what it felt to be a bloody used fag carton and dumped. He rang off, pressed the button that deactivated the phone's scrambler. He sensed that Gloria hovered behind him and thought her mouth would be slack with astonishment. It was, he believed, a defining moment of his adult life: I won't be here myself. He could have reflected on other such moments of importance that had fashioned his career and domestic existence – a loveless marriage, the bitter process of divorce, children taught to reject him, the first night of utter loneliness in an old man's bach-elor apartment – the initial occasion when the WMD report had been smartly returned to his desk for re-appraisal, the meeting when he had been lectured on the requirement of politicians to find meat and not scrag ends in the Iraqi desert, the summons to an office on an upper floor, the averted eyes and barked voice telling him that Albania was his new area of interest, the last session in the pub with his old team before they were scattered to the winds. He could have reflected on any of them and could have claimed each of them as a defining moment. Top of the heap, and he knew it, was telling pretty little Polly, frozen half to death on a God-awful beach, that calls to this number will be routed through to the necessary people.

  He heard her clear her throat, a brief cough, to demand his attention.

  'Did you mean that?'

  He said peevishly, turning to face her, 'If I said it, Gloria, I expect that I meant it.'

  Her face was wreathed in bewilderment. She stuttered, 'It's coming to an end… It's the last hours…

  It's what you've worked for.'

  'And it is not, my dear, in my hands.'

  'You owe it to Polly to be here.'

  'I owe very little, not even pocket change, to anyone.'

  Lines creased her forehead and mouth. 'But the threat… What about the threat?'

  He stared into the confusion of her eyes. 'Someone else's problem now. Polly's problem, a crisis committee's problem, but I fancy not mine… I have, Gloria, carried the problem of the bloody threat too damn long – it's been a lifetime of carrying it. Cold War threat, Irish threat, Iraq threat, al-Qaeda. threat.

  You name i t… Don't you understand that the threat has buckled me? Every day, every night, the threat is on my shoulders. Well, not any more.'

  'I never thought I'd hear it, not from you.'

  He grimaced, then shrugged. He saw her turn on her low heels and she clattered out. The door was slammed, which would not have been accidental. He went to the wardrobe against the wall, slipped off his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened his tie.

  The man, Malachy Kitchen, was without corporate baggage and was not answerable to a crisis committee, or to the 'party line' peddled by Polly

  'Wilco' Wilkins. Gaunt dragged his laces undone and kicked off his shoes, dropped his waistcoat on to them, unhooked the braces and let his trousers fall. He opened the wardrobe's doors and took out a hanger – which carried the name of a Singapore hotel from where he had appropriated it a dozen years before – and put his suit on it. He took another hanger, from the Inter-Continental in Helsinki, for his shirt. He remembered what the old lady had said, as he had taken tea with her, of a man who did not boast and did not go after trophies, who faced challenges, each of them harder than the last, to claw back his self-respect, and she had said, If you ever see him, you give him my love, and he remembered what Bill, who had the rippled muscles of Special Forces training and who arrogantly wore a shapeless cabled sweater, had demanded of Wilco: And tell her to keep old White Feather clear – not that he sounds like a hero – right out of it. He realized he rooted more for the man, the free spirit, than for the big picture – and it was better he was gone, and soon. From an old rucksack on the wardrobe floor, he took a shirt, trousers and sweater – all caked in dried mud – boots and a rainproof coat that had over-trousers folded into an inner pocket.

  He dressed, hitched the rucksack on to his shoulder and went out through the darkened outer office, past Gloria's cleared desk – and past the phones from which Polly Wilkins's next message would be routed to the crisis folk. Gaunt had the look of a jobbing gardener on his way to an allotment plot as he made his way to the lift, and he imagined the pleasure ahead of him and did not know, or care, of chaos left behind him.

  Oskar left behind him the ducks, his true friends, safe in the darkness from predators.

  He crawled on the track. He had set himself a target that he must reach and the pain that had overcome the shock of numbness was alive in the three wounds on his body, but he welcomed it. If there had been no pain, only exhaustion and weakness, he would have felt a clinging urge to settle in the mud and reeds beside the pond and sleep, and if he slept he would not achieve his target… First he had lain in the scrub and had heard voices and crashing movement around him but a thin torchlight had not pierced the depths of the thorn bushes that had been his immediate refuge.

  They had gone. They had blundered away, and then he had moved. Sometimes he had been on his stomach, but a few times he had been able to stand, sway, stagger, and he had known that when he was on his feet he lost more blood, and with each step the pain was more acute.

  He thought the pain was his penance. He thought the blood he lost was contaminated by an old atrocity.

  He thought he deserved the pain for the evil done by a man whose blood he shared. He thought he had cleansed himself by breaking the light set in place by the strangers who had come and threatened paradise.

  Oskar had no clarity of thought because the pain destroyed it.

  He had told the ducks, in a reedy, bubbling whisper, that he would not be back.

  Now he did not have the strength to stand, to walk.

  He might have the strength, if God were with him, to crawl part of the way to his target on
his knees and elbows, but first he would wriggle on his stomach and lever himself forward. He prayed that the strength, little of it left, would last him.

  Above him the wind sighed and the rain spattered down and he writhed on the path, made slow, agonizing progress, and left behind a trail of poisoned blood.

  Ahead was a distant light, his target if his strength lasted.

  He sat on the bench in the cell. His belt and shoe laces had been taken from Timo Rahman. He sat because if he had stood and paced the cell he would have had to hold up his trousers or let them slump to his ankles. A light, protected by wire mesh, beamed down at him from the ceiling.

  The cell stank of old faeces, urine and vomit. It was cold, bitterly so, because the high, barred window was open to the wind and rain dripped from its aperture on to the prisoner on the bench bed.

  He was offered no respect, no deference.

  His lawyer had sat beside him in the interview room. He had been shown a preliminary report from a police doctor that listed his wife's injuries on half of a single sheet of paper. The lawyer, German, gross and expensive, had read the report first and Timo had seen him wince. He had known then that the man – on his payroll for nine years – would have little stomach for a fight in his defence, and had not challenged the right of Konig to put his questions… only three of them. Had Timo Rahman, himself, attacked his wife?

  If he had not, himself, attacked her, had he authorized the scraping-off of skin from her body? If he had not, himself, authorized the attack, did he know who was responsible for the assault? He had been told that his housekeeper and chauffeur were in custody and would subsequently be interviewed, and that their statements would be matched with his. He had not answered any of the three questions. If they had given him the respect that was due, he would have expected Johan Konig and the woman officer with him to demonstrate frustration, but the coldness he had seen at his home was still alive in their faces, and the contempt. His lawyer had fled the interview room after leaving him little hope of bail.

  Isolation settled on him. Timo Rahman did not think of the island, or of the man he had been paid to ship across the water, or of Ricky Capel who, he now realized, had lied to him, a lie he had taken in, a lie that would destroy him. He thought of wolves.

  In his mind were the wolves that came down, long ago, from the mountains. Emaciated, foul-breathed, bare to the skin at the haunches and tail from mange, and they circled a failing fire. Corralled inside the fence were goats with kids and ewes with lambs. He sat with his father beside the fire and darkness masked the high ground above the village near Shkodra. Across his knee, held tight, was a loaded single-barrel shotgun, and his father had an old German rifle, and they could hear the wolves and smell them. When the wolves were closest and the smell was bad, when they were boldest from the hunger pangs of winter, the wolves came right up against the fence and then his father would hurl at them the branch from the fire that burned brightest and they would scatter, but they would return.

  Always a dog wolf led.

  There had been a year when the high snows had lasted into spring and beyond the time that the kids and lambs were born, and starvation had been the enemy of the wolf pack. The pack leader had not been driven back by fire. His father had shot it, as it prepared to launch at the fence, with his Gewehr 98

  Mauser rifle, and it had fallen dead with a head wound. The goats and ewes, the kids and lambs had stampeded and screamed with fear. His father had gripped his arm, had pointed to the downed pack-leader, face alive with excitement. Father and son they had watched. First the wolves had fled to the darkness, then had been emboldened, had circled in the shadows and scurried forward – many targets, but his father had not fired. The wolves had torn apart th( carcass of their pack leader, had fought to eat, rip swallow, savage it. Timo, the boy, had watched power gone and when nothing was left on the ground beyond the fence – not a bone or a meat scrap, no fur not a morsel of skin – the wolves had retreated to the night's safety.

  He had never forgotten the sight and sounds of the destruction of a fallen pack leader.

  That evening they would be circling. Wolves would be abroad, would be coming near to a mansion in the Blankenese suburb, would be edging closer to casinoe and shops, bars and brothels in the Reeperbahn would be marching on more casinos and more shops more bars and more brothels in the Steindamm. He had done it himself. He, a leader of a wolf pack, had buried Germans and put Russians into the trunks of cars. Word would have spread. If it were tax evasion or the corruption of local officials, living from the rewards of vice or sex-trade trafficking, or involvement with an Islamic group for which he was investigated, then his lawyer would have fought, tooth and claw, to win his freedom. But he was investigated for the peeling of live skin from his wife's body. Who would stand by him? Who would believe he could return to a pre-eminence of power? He saw wolves. Wolves were on a cell-block landing when he returned from exercise in the yard. Wolves moved into casinos and shops, bars and brothels. He seemed to feel the heat of wolves' breath and the smell of it – because he had believed a lie. And they edged nearer and their teeth were bared.

  Timo Rahman screamed.

  He was not heard. The cell's walls closed around him.

  A Europol advisory landed on Tony Johnson's desk.

  He had his coat on and was preparing himself for the evening struggle on a commuter train when the clerk brought it to him. It already had a half-dozen sets of initials on it but – what else to expect in this perfect bloody world? – it would end with him and he was to field it… His eyes scanned the single page, and he gasped, shook, and flicked it into his in-tray for the next morning's attention. Then he punched the air.

  For a detective sergeant with a reputation, deserved, for carrying equally weighted chips on each of his shoulders and for spreading contagious gloomy defeatism wherever he walked, his stride down the corridor was emphatic with cheerful energy. That morning he had repeated his refrain at the weekly meeting of colleagues to hack at current problems that drugs and organized crime, and their effect on the great mass of the capital city's punters, were on the back-burner, ignored and victim to the swollen resources pushed at the War on Terror. At the ground-floor lobby, swiping his card, he blew a kiss at the lady on Reception, and saw the shock wobble on the face of the duty guard beside her.

  He went out through the swing doors and on to the street, imagined he heard the guard's question, 'God, what's the matter with that miserable beggar?' and imagined he heard the lady's answer, 'Must be that he's got hot flushes, or he's on a bloody good promise, or it's the lottery.' What he could have told them was that a Europol advisory had reached his desk and stated that police in Hamburg had arrested the Albanian national, Timo Rahman, on charges of grievous bodily harm and wounding, and that officers on the case urgently requested co-operation from European colleagues on all links between Rahman and criminal organizations for immediate investigation while Rahman was in custody, and vulnerable

  … What he could also have told them, on the reception desk, was that he had contributed – damned if he knew the detail of how – to the life of an untouchable going into the gutter.

  On the pavement he turned heads as he laughed to himself like a maniac. 'You done us proud, Malachy. I hope you've a drink in your hand because that's what you deserve. You've done us proper proud – I hope it's a damn great drink and then another.'

  Malachy had rainwater in his eyes, ears, nose, had it weighing down the clothes on his back and his legs.

  He quartered ground, was inland from the highest dunes. He moved, alternately slow and fast. When he went slowly it was to listen, because he could see so little, and then he shook his head hard. His fingers went into his ears to gouge out the wet, but he heard only the wind's bluster and the pattering of the rain.

  When he went fast, he held to what he believed was the line towards the source of the gunfire and often he thought he had lost it and that his instinct failed him.

  Going fast,
on a track, his shoes, with their worn tread, slid from under him.

  He fell, went down. The breath squeezed out of his chest and his hands flailed. When they hit the mud it was not tackiness they found, but something slicked, wet, but not like mud. Malachy felt the surface of the path, realized its smoothness – as if mud had been pressed flat by a solid weight and then the slick had been left. He could not see more than the outline of his hands but there was darkness on his palms. He believed that it was blood and that the mud had been smoothed by a man's body. He thought, where he was, a wounded man had rested, then crawled forward. But Malachy did not follow the trail, and he tried again to find his line.

  He came to the pond. A little of the reflection of the water shone back at him through the reeds. He saw, as a silhouette, the shape of the viewing platform where he had put his shoulder against a support post… In a crash of noise, and he froze, ducks fled – splashed, beat their wings, screamed – and he could smell the body of the old man, as he had done at the platform.

  Malachy had warned her that it was a crime to involve others and risk hurting them. She had involved the old man, had picked at his isolation with honey words and pleading eyes, and he had been shot and crawled towards a refuge. She had rounded on him – what did he think she had done with him, if not involve him? He had said: I'll pick up my own pieces. He would. She – sweet girl, warm girl with a taste of sadness – did not own him; nor did those who controlled her.

  In his mind, he adjusted the line.

  He came to a hollow. He found a plastic bag caught on thorns and near it a Cellophane packet that would have held a shop-bought sandwich. Maybe it was because the cloud weakened in its density and a trickle of the moon's light came through, but small shapes gleamed and then their brightness died. He picked up three discarded cartridge cases. On his hands, on his knees, feeling with his fingers, he found the trail they had used and the indents in the mud.