by Roy David
Later, after talking some more, Alex had her best night’s sleep for ages.
* * *
It was over breakfast the next day that she told them of the Kowolski business.
Reluctant at first, she gave her parents a blow-by-blow account of the events, at one stage unable to hold back the tears.
‘What a bastard,’ her father said.
‘Frank!’ Her mother gasped.
‘Well, what a snake, then,’ he said, admonished.
He got up and put his arms gently on Alex’s shoulders. ‘Never mind, baby. What do I always tell you?’
‘Something’ll turn up,’ Alex said, sniffing.
‘It will, hun,’ her mother said. ‘We’re sure it will – right, Frank?’
‘You bet,’ he said, reaching for the coffee pot and topping up Alex’s mug.
A little later, sitting in her father’s den catching up on her emails, her mother popped her head round the door.
‘Thought you might need that thing you sent me, honey.’
‘Thanks, Mom,’ Alex said, taking the memory stick and putting it on the desk. When her mother left, she sat looking at it, lost in thought. She didn’t have the time or the inclination to do anything with Aban’s material at the present. It would have to remain her ace up the sleeve. At one stage, she’d thought about telling her parents about the whole business, but decided against the idea. It would be unfair to burden them with something she alone must handle. But it wouldn’t do any harm to glance at the file again, remind herself of its bombshell contents.
She got up, gently closing the door, and returned to the computer inserting the stick. Tapping a few keys on the keyboard, she waited. Nothing. She swallowed hard. The stuff was on here – she’d checked, made doubly sure before posting it. Maybe she’d hit a wrong key. She withdrew the stick then reinserted it. Biting her bottom lip, she could feel the panic rising in her chest. Still a blank screen.
Frantic, Alex repeated the procedure with the same empty results. She asked her dad to help. He tried several times to load the stick, each effort unsuccessful.
‘Hope it wasn’t that important, Alex,’ he said, resigned.
Alex just shook her head, unable to comprehend what might have gone wrong. An empty feeling verging on nausea gripped her, spinning her inside out.
Then the sudden realisation of her own powerless insignificance; that she was but a mere speck in the momentous forces ranged against her. Something had happened beyond her control. She had no idea what. But her body still trembled with an overwhelming sinking acceptance of defeat. She stared helplessly at the worthless stick – the only copy she had made.
* * *
Alex headed for Manhattan late afternoon, her heart heavy, mood sour. Being around her folks had initially calmed her. Now, her thoughts in turmoil, she needed someone to confide in, someone with a sense of sangfroid, like Steve. Staring ahead at the rippling shimmer of brake lights stretching into the distance, all she could think was that she needed him.
Traffic going into the city crawled like cattle herded into a narrow corral. A late summer storm had dumped torrents of water on the road, which collected in deep pools on the underpasses causing motorists to meander from lane to lane. Her phone rang. She ignored it. Seconds later, its familiar alert tone told her someone had left a message.
It was unnaturally dark when she finally parked up. Great gloomy clouds threatened overhead and a smell of newly-drenched dust filled the air. Her phone beeped again, impatient to be silenced. Making sure the car doors were still locked, she reached for this nagging piece of technology, saw a voicemail beckoned, and called the service.
‘Hi Alex, it’s me, Greg. Listen babe, I don’t know how to tell you this… it’s about Aban… I’m sorry, but he’s dead. They say he had a heart attack while being questioned… I just don’t know any more than that – don’t know what to think. I’ve only spoken briefly to Farrah – she’s devastated. She thinks they killed him.’
The shock hit Alex like a tornado, the force lifting her aimlessly high into the air, battering and shaking her whole being, flinging her feelings in a crazy, haphazard maelstrom then hurling her down with cruel abandon.
Numbed to the bone, all she could do was to drop the phone – and scream.
17
The grief, the tears, and the desolation had begun to wane. She’d been tempted by the thought of alcohol over the last few days, but her resolve stood fast. Now, Alex felt consumed by an all-powering rage. Her whole being bristled with an intense loathing of Richard Northwood and his ilk. How could she make them pay for their contemptible blind loyalty to an administration such as this and for the consequences of such loyalty? Especially Northwood. He’d promised her Aban’s protection yet, obscenely, hadn’t lifted a finger. The poor man was dead because of him.
Fearful that her phone might be tapped, she’d spoken with Steve from a public pay phone that had cost her a small fortune. Urged to recall the minutiae of her movements, he’d asked her to accept that the CIA most likely knew about Aban’s email from the off and had placed her under surveillance.
‘The post office counter clerk, the blind guy – hey, do blind people walk round listening to music? Someone switched that memory stick, Alex and one way or another, they got you. Accept it, you can’t win them all.’
While relieved to have shared her worries, Alex was in no mood to let the matter lie. In fact she now found herself doubly determined to hit back. When and where, she couldn’t answer. She simply knew she must.
Alex was also wrestling with herself to call off the whole McDermott show. But her pictures were ready and, try as she might to ignore them, professional pride wouldn’t allow it. At least, she determined, she should go and view them.
Kowolski called her just as she was leaving for the lab in a supine fit of reluctance.
His voice was different, softer, much more subdued. ‘I heard about your friend – I’m so sorry. This thing’s getting harder for everyone out here. There isn’t a day goes by now without…’
‘You know they killed him,’ she said, her eyes welling up.
‘Alex, I don’t know that and neither do you. They say he had a weak heart – it could’ve happened any minute.’
‘God knows where they kept him, what they did to him. It’s what his wife is saying,’ she stormed.
‘You spoken to her?’
‘No, I can’t get through. It’s what I hear. I’ve arranged for flowers but I don’t know if…’ she began to cry, soon sobbing full flow.
Kowolski sighed, a long labouring breath. ‘Listen, I’ll see what I can do – I’ll recommend compensation for the family, see they’re cared for. I’ve already spoken with Richard Northwood – he’s as shocked as anyone.’
Alex glanced at the letter sitting beside her computer. ‘No he’s not. He’s just a cold calculating bastard. You all are.’
‘That’s not fair, Alex.’
‘And I suppose your plan to bolster the President is just an afterthought? I’m sick of it all, everything.’
‘Hey, hold on a minute.’ He hesitated a few seconds, his voice dropped a notch. ‘You remember when you got that picture published, the one of that poor mother with her dead son?’
‘Well?’
‘It had an effect on me, Alex, got me thinking – not that I expect you to believe me. Maybe I’m not as tough as you think. And, boy, could I do with a break from all this. But, remember how you responded when I bawled you out? You said, ‘‘It’s what I do.’’ Well, this is what I do, Alex. It’s a lot tougher than I imagined and I might not like the job as much as I thought I did, but I set out with a goal in mind and I have to see it through. I need you to understand that.’
She was stunned by his admission, not knowing how to respond. ‘I gotta go to work,’ she finally said, hanging up.
In the cab to the laboratory, Alex stared at the thick metal security grill separating the cab from the rear-seat passenger, a fact of big-city life
. You could see the driver, talk to him, but make no closer contact. Kowolski’s revelation sounded almost like a confession. So the war was getting to him. Shame others weren’t out there to taste the vile concoction they’d created. Perhaps she’d been wrong to sully him in the same breath as Northwood.
She’d always considered the space between them as opaque and impenetrable. To a large degree, she was sure this was still the case. He was still the enemy. But, were holes beginning to appear in the barrier between them like the mesh in front of her? Recalling his ranting at the time, she was amazed her picture had touched him. She only remembered his flashing, steely eyes and set jaw. There’d been no semblance of any feeling other than anger.
Kowolski was a loner, no family, no real friends. Why had he reached out to her? Had he just given her a glimpse of the real person? Did he feel some sort of bond between them? Perhaps there was a hint of humanity about the guy after all, she thought, as the taxi pulled up outside the photo lab. She pushed a twenty bill through the mesh and told the driver to keep the change.
* * *
The lab’s production people had assured her countless times they were in sympathy with her aims and would translate them to her satisfaction. Until she viewed the final product, however, she couldn’t be sure. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that she entered the building. Met by the company’s art director, a Slovak called Milo, she was ushered with great ceremony down a narrow hallway towards the main studio.
‘This is where we ask clients to close their eyes,’ Milo said with a fanfare as he opened the door.
‘Right, you can look now,’ he shrieked excitedly, clapping his hands in delight.
In front of her, suspended wall to wall, her montage. Measuring some 30 feet long, almost 6 feet deep, it thrilled her more than she’d ever imagined. From the planning stage to reality was sometimes a leap too far in her business. She’d known colleagues whose pictures had been annihilated in the lab. Shaking her head in disbelief, she scanned the work. Her face creased into her first smile for a long time.
‘Milo, it’s fantastic,’ she said, hugging him in delight.
‘Will look good on the stage, high up and behind your hero,’ he beamed.
‘Sure will,’ she said, moving closer to examine each shot in more detail. One of the photographs was of the Bradley squad, Bobby-Jo at the end of the group giving a thumbs-up.
‘This poor boy’s dead now,’ she said, gently running a finger to caress Bobby-Jo’s cheek. She gazed at the impish face staring out of the canvas and a shiver of remorse snaked through her.
‘You want to keep him in? I mean, we can take him out if…’
‘No, no, of course I want him in – he’s very important. They’re heroes, all of them,’ she said, the melancholy all too apparent in her voice.
‘I guess it’s tough out there, huh?’
‘It’s hell,’ she said firmly, ‘for everyone.’
Eventually, Milo gestured to another room. Here, her large monochrome photographs adorned the walls, laid out in smart recessed mounts with black borders, hung on portable screen boards ready for wheeling into the hotel foyer for her exhibition.
The art director stood back admiring the work. ‘You like?’
Alex put both hands up to her face, felt a tear trickle down. ‘They’re amazing.’
‘But we are merely the conduit. You are the artiste,’ he said, a note of deference in his words. After a few minutes, he took her by the hand. ‘Come, Madame, you can study them in greater detail later – we are not yet finished.’ He led her back towards the main studio. ‘I present to you the pièce de résistance.’ He rapped on the door. It was opened quickly.
Milo stepped to one side. ‘We cannot do it full justice here, Alex. But, on the side of the hotel and over several stories deep, I’m sure it will knock them dead.’
Alex’s jaw dropped. Hoisted up to the high ceiling, a giant canvas in full colour of McDermott and the toddler he’d picked up in the Baghdad street. Several assistants unfurled the canvas as best they could so it spread towards them on the floor. Now, Alex let the tears flow freely.
It was a remarkable picture; McDermott’s uniform and the glimpse of a gun barrel a stark reminder of the brutality of the conflict, the little boy in a red sweater with a worn pair of shorts displaying his little chubby legs. Alex had captured the child’s brown eyes looking up into the soldier’s face. And McDermott’s expression was one of almost sublime beatitude, one hand looming large in the foreground, protectively around the boy’s waist.
‘We put some colour in the hero’s face – it was a little too white on every shot,’ Milo exclaimed.
Suddenly, Alex was back on that dusty, debris-strewn street, the stench of raw sewage assailing her nostrils, the stultifying heat that elevated water over oil as Iraq’s most precious commodity. And, there, with trembling fingers and a deathly pale, McDermott and his mystifying reaction to an innocent child.
‘Yeah, it’s the intensity of the sun out there,’ Alex bluffed, immediately shutting the memory from her mind to concentrate on this surreal vision before her.
Later, she left the lab with her spirits raised, her immediate anger blunted. Her work had been polished so it shone like a beacon. Did she have the nerve to call everything off? She would speak again to Steve and tell him her dilemma. He was such a good listener.
* * *
‘Babe, you’ve just gotta do it.’ Steve was as enthused over her pictures as she’d been when describing them. ‘Forget about everything else for a while and just think about yourself, your career and all.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, only half convinced. ‘Be pragmatic you mean?’
‘You’ve had a rough time. I only wish I could have been with you, put my arms around you and given you a real Philadelphia squeeze.’
Alex laughed, a girlish giggle that tinkled in her throat.
‘So do I,’ she murmured.
There was a moment’s silence between them. She heard Steve’s voice waver a little.
‘Alex… I think I’m falling in love with you,’ he said, clearing his throat.
She pressed the receiver as close as she could to her ear.
‘What?’
Detecting a split-second hesitation, she heard him swallow hard.
‘I said I think I’m falling in love with you.’
Feeling her face flush, her words came out in a whisper. ‘So am I with you. There, we’ve both said it now.’
‘Alex, sweetheart, you’ve made my day.’ Then he roared. ‘No, not my day, my month, my year – my life!’
They both burst out laughing in a fit of relief and delight. She eventually hung up, her heart soaring. This was madness, exhilaratingly so. But wasn’t everything just plain senseless at the moment? Turning to the photograph of Steve at her bedside, she blew it a kiss.
‘Lovely, crazy guy,’ she said, turning off the light.
* * *
McDermott walked slowly along the hospital corridor, limping. Dressed in uniform, he held a walking stick in one hand and a small bag in the other.
Kowolski watched him approaching. ‘You’re doing good Lieutenant,’ he said, relieving McDermott of his bag. He’d hoped the soldier would have remained on crutches – so much better for the media. The doctors, however, were pleased with McDermott’s recovery and agreed with the physiotherapy people that a stick would be sufficient. Still, Kowolski mused, a walking stick was nearly as good. The sympathy when he met the press and TV would be nearly as emotive.
‘We got one of your buddies to pack your gear and send it on to the airport,’ Kowolski said, ushering the lieutenant into the back of a waiting SUV, sandwiched between a Bradley and a Humvee.
‘Sir, what time’s the flight?’
‘Whenever we’re ready, Lieutenant. This is a first-class trip.’
An army photographer met them at the airport, spending longer than Kowolski had planned taking his shots.
‘I don’t suppose we
could get you up on the Bradley, Lieutenant?’ the photographer gestured.
Kowolski cut him short. ‘Son, we got a prized cargo here and you wanna risk him doing his other knee? Go take a jump. Anyway, you’ve got enough – we’re outta here.’
The pictures would soon be on-screen on the army’s official website, married to a press release from Kowolski’s own hand. He thought it only fair to give the army first bite of the ripened cherry. He’d primed the prominent home media, of course, telling them to watch for the piece and take from it whatever they wanted as a teaser story for their own websites. By Kowolski’s reckoning, the President’s Silver Star hero would be on his way to full launch by the time they touched down on American soil, ready to face the waiting media pack.
* * *
Kowolski fastened his seat belt and braced himself for take-off. Fiddling with his hands, he rubbed one against the back of the other as if washing them, finally screwing his eyes shut as the plane reached critical speed. When he opened them, still flustered, he glanced at McDermott. The lieutenant was staring out of the window, seemingly unaware of Kowolski’s discomfort.
‘You like flying, Lieutenant?’ Kowolski said, shifting in his seat. ‘Makes me kinda nervous.’
McDermott fixed him with a strange smile. ‘Perfect love casts out all fear, sir.’
Kowolski raised his eyebrows.
‘John, chapter four, verse eighteen sir.’
‘Er, right,’ Kowolski said, bending down and opening his briefcase.
‘No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us,’ McDermott added.
Kowolski smiled thinly. This guy was weird, just like the lot of them.
He gestured with his head towards the window. ‘Not much love down there, Lieutenant… I see only hate, yes sirree, just hate and fear.’
Taking a sheaf of papers from the case, he handed a set to McDermott. ‘This is the itinerary – better study it. You know we’ve got a small reception tomorrow night, a sort of eve of the big ceremony. You’re booked in a real swish place, the Carlyle on Madison Avenue. White-gloved waiters everywhere. You heard of it?’