The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘The aerosol …’ Telemann prompted. ‘Anything fresh?’

  Benitez nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve traced it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Telemann leaned forward from the back-seat, his arms resting on the back of the driver’s seat, cradling his chin. Three days’ intensive work in Washington – page after page of eyes-only Intelligence clattering in over the secure data lines – had simply convinced him that the investigation was presently a matter of focus, of finding something tiny, something simple. Before he went to Tel Aviv, before he touched base again with his Mossad buddies, before he walked into the swamp, he had to make sure there wasn’t something far more obvious staring him in the face. He smiled, looking at Benitez in the gathering darkness, knowing at last that he’d been right. There was something far more obvious. The goddamn aerosol.

  ‘So,’ he said, remembering the colour prints faxed up from New York, ‘we have an aerosol. Supposedly full of shaving-foam. Actually full of nerve gas …’ He paused. ‘His? Or hers?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ Benitez was smiling now. ‘The aerosol was in the bathroom before they arrived. Along with the soap and the shampoo and the shower-cap. The hotel supply them. It’s part of the service.’ He paused. ‘Compliments of the management.’

  Telemann nodded. ‘So who services the room?’

  ‘Cleaning crews. There are three of them. We pulled in the one that did Room 937 the day our friend booked in. Woman for Queens. Hispanic.’

  ‘And?’

  Benitez looked at him for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Nothing. She says she did the room the same as always. Aerosols came out of a pack. Could have been any one of twenty-four.’

  ‘You believe her?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘She was the one who discovered the bodies next day. Right there. In the bathroom.’ He paused. ‘Would you do that? If you knew?’

  Telemann smiled, accepting the point. ‘So what are you saying? Someone swopped them?’

  ‘Yeah. After she’d fixed the room.’

  ‘Knowing Gold had booked in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  There was a long silence. Telemann was frowning now, his chin in his hands, propped on the back of his seat. The night the girl arrived from the agency, it had been late. Gold had already eaten. The paperwork from room service proved it. The girl had gone up there, the usual booking, an hour or so, and they’d fucked on the bed a little and maybe gone to the bathroom, Gold still eager for it, a variation or two, her call, or his, still time on the meter, and there on the shelf, the complimentary white aerosol with the red and blue logo, menthol-fresh. She would have reached for it, and gone down on her knees and given him a squirt or two, decorating him maybe, or scrolling some nonsense across his belly, the way he probably said he liked it, but instead of the blobby dots of white foam, and another half-hour or so of lazy screwing, there’d been a thin colourless mist and the far-away smell of rotting fruit, and quickly – in seconds – that long paragraph of symptoms Telemann had by now committed to memory. The nose beginning to run. The tightness in the chest. The bathroom going dim around them, the edges of the shower blurring, the light beginning to fade. Then the first real struggles to breathe, their mouths wide open, their lungs gasping for air. Pretty soon now, their bodies out of control, they’d start to vomit. They’d head for the door. They’d get cramps. They’d fall to the floor, totally haphazard, all control gone. There’d be piss and shit everywhere. Then they’d start to convulse. Time-wise, the literature was explicit. In a hotel bathroom, the door shut, their bodies touching, the sweet intimacy of heavy sex, they’d have been dead in less than a minute.

  Telemann nodded slowly, imagining it all, the most horrible, least graceful of ends. ‘So where did it come from?’ he said softly. ‘Who put it in the room?’

  ‘Kid from Housekeeping.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He had access to the room. He drew the key that day. Four o’clock. After the booking had come in.’

  ‘You talked to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘We don’t know …’ Benitez paused. ‘He disappeared the same night. Didn’t show next morning …’ He paused again for a moment. ‘One theory says he may have gone home. We’re trying to check.’

  ‘Oh?’ Telemann looked across at him. ‘Where’s home?’

  There was a long silence. Telemann could see the white teeth in the dark mask of Benitez’s face. The man was smiling again.

  ‘Baghdad,’ he said.

  3

  For the second time in a week, McVeigh picked up his son from school.

  He parked in the usual place, sitting in the battered old Escort a yard or so up the hill from the corner shop where Billy always stopped for crisps and a can of something fizzy. He’d already phoned his ex-wife, telling her not to bother with the school run, and they’d talked for a moment or two about what might be wrong with the boy. Billy had stopped talking. All the spirit, all the laughter had gone out of him. He was listless and disinterested. He was off his food. He’d even abandoned his nightly session in front of the television, feeding his library of football games into the video-machine, playing and replaying his favourite goals.

  His mother had tried to talk to him about it, hoping to fathom this sombre new mood of his, but she’d got nowhere. The boy had simply listened to her questions, shrugged his shoulders and gone upstairs. Three evenings alone had convinced her that something was terribly wrong. Now she wanted to know what.

  McVeigh, listening, had been tempted to tell her about Yakov, about what the Israeli had meant to the boy, but in the end he’d decided against it. One of the many reasons their marriage had finally disintegrated was McVeigh’s job, his involvement in a world she neither understood nor trusted. Any suggestion that this same world might somehow reach out for Billy, too, would simply compound the problem.

  Now, sitting in the car, McVeigh watched the first of the school-kids pouring out through the big brick gates. The school was private, a curious, off-beat little institution with a free-wheeling, progressive regime tailor-made for kids like Billy, with his father’s talent for failing exams. Private education conflicted with everything that McVeigh believed in, and the fees were costing him a fortune, but even he had finally accepted the obvious. For Billy, at least, the place was a godsend.

  The boy appeared at the school gates. He was alone. He glanced up and down the road, looking for his mother’s white Citroën. Not seeing it, he began to walk up the hill, towards the corner shop. McVeigh slipped off the hand-brake, coasting slowly down the road, hugging the kerb. On the seat beside him was a can of Lilt and a packet of Bovril crisps. Billy saw the car and a brief smile ghosted across his face. McVeigh stopped. The boy got in.

  They drove back along the usual route, Highgate Hill, Hornsey Lane. McVeigh asked him about school. The boy grunted, monosyllabic answers, the bare minimum. Outside the flat McVeigh stopped, killing the engine. Billy reached automatically for the door. The crisps lay untouched on the dashboard. McVeigh pulled him back. The boy looked startled for a moment, then resigned, already knowing what was to follow. McVeigh frowned, part-caution, part-irritation.

  ‘Your mother’s worried,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mum. She’s worried. She thinks you’re not well.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re right, either.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not. And I know why.’

  McVeigh looked at him for a moment, and the boy held his eyes for as long as it took to raise the colour in his cheeks. Then he shook his head, an expression of impatience or perhaps embarrassment. McVeigh leaned back against the car door, in no hurry. There was a dimension in this small moment of time that he understood all too well. Billy, his
Billy, the face at the bedroom door, the grin on the pillow beside him, had collided with real life. And real life, with its inexplicable aches, its sudden pains, their causes, their effects, hurt.

  Billy glanced across at his father, a hesitant, interrogative look, a question. McVeigh smiled, and reached for him, trying to put the answer into words. ‘Yakov?’ he suggested.

  The boy said nothing, just nodded, agreeing. McVeigh grinned at him, trying to turn the corner, trying to change the mood. ‘Want to know what I’ve done?’

  Billy looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ McVeigh frowned. ‘No?’

  Billy fumbled for the door again. McVeigh stopped him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because …’ Billy shrugged. ‘I dunno …’

  He trailed off lamely.

  McVeigh, genuinely confused now, bent forward across the car. ‘But, Billy,’ he said, ‘it’s important.’

  ‘What? What’s important?’

  ‘What happened. To Yakov.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then listen, son. Listen.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘No, I mean it.’

  ‘I know. I know you mean it. That’s why—’ He shrugged again. McVeigh, watching him carefully now, caught the telltale inflection, the voice still up, the thought stillborn.

  ‘Why what?’ he said softly. ‘Tell me. Why what?’

  ‘Why—’ Billy gulped, a symptom McVeigh was at last able to recognize. Guilt. McVeigh leaned forward again, determined not to lose the advantage. Billy looked at him, defeated. ‘Why I wrote the letter,’ he said.

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘To Yakov’s friends.’

  ‘What friends?’

  ‘At the Embassy. The place he works. They said it in the papers. They said he came from the Embassy. I looked it up. My friends helped me. I’ve got the address. I wrote to them.’

  McVeigh nodded, following it all now, understanding it. ‘And what did you say?’

  There was a long silence. Then Billy grinned at him, the first grin in days, sunshine after the dark. ‘I told them it was OK. I told them you’d find whoever did it.’

  McVeigh looked at him. ‘You told them what?’

  ‘I said you’d—’ he shrugged, delighted now, the secret out, his own little contribution, Yakov avenged ‘—I said you’d find the man, whoever it was—’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And kill him too.’

  McVeigh blinked and began to protest, to frame another question, but Billy wasn’t listening. He was out of the car and across the road, pushing in at the gate. He had the keys of the flat now, his own set, and he let himself in with another grin, tossed back over his shoulder, as his father locked the car and came after him.

  Upstairs, Billy was sprawled in front of the television, fingering his way through the channels on the remote controller, still giggling. McVeigh asked him twice whether he’d been joking. Both times he said no. He’d posted the letter yesterday. He’d addressed it to Mr Ambassador. He’d written it out twice, once practice, once in fair, best handwriting, joined-up letters. He hadn’t told his mother and he hadn’t meant to tell McVeigh, but now his dad had found out, so it didn’t really matter any more. The only thing that mattered was getting his own back on whoever had killed Yakov.

  McVeigh stood in the doorway, teapot in one hand, kettle in the other, trying to compete with the kids from Grange Hill. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have written.’

  ‘But I had to.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He turned round, stretching lazily, the old Billy again. McVeigh looked at him for a moment, wondering what the Israeli diplomatic machine would make of a letter threatening constructive homicide from an eleven-year-old, knowing that – yet again – the boy was playing the Good Shepherd, penning him in, making the decision for him.

  Grange Hill came to an end and the credits began to roll. Billy got up and said he was hungry. McVeigh returned to the kitchen. He had bread and jam, and half a packet of crumpets. Turning from the cupboard to start a question, he bumped into his son. Billy looked up at him, very close. ‘You will find them, won’t you? These men?’

  McVeigh frowned for a moment, still in a muddle about the jam, whether Marmite might be better. Billy pulled out a stool and clambered on to it. He put his arms round McVeigh’s neck, and McVeigh smelled the musty, slightly sour smell of the classroom. Billy asked the question, his nose touching McVeigh’s. McVeigh shrugged. ‘I dunno …’ he said.

  ‘No—’ Billy held his eyes, refusing to let him go ‘—but you will, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘And when you do?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Billy raised two fingers, pressed together, the shape of a gun, and held them to his father’s head.

  ‘Bang,’ he whispered, his mouth close to McVeigh’s ear. ‘Bang, bang.’

  *

  The fishermen finally deposited the small red drum marked ‘Poison’ on the quayside at Ramsgate, a cluttered little harbour on the eastern shoulder of the North Kent coast.

  They’d spotted it shortly after midnight, low off the port quarter, most of it submerged in the confused lop of the cross-seas in the lee of the Goodwin Sands. One of the hands on deck thought it might be a mine, but in the glare of the big overhead lights it was difficult to be certain until they were close enough to read the heavy black stencil.

  The skipper of the 40-foot trawler, a recent convert to ecological issues, supervised the capture of the drum. Lately, the Straits of Dover had begun to resemble the scene of a maritime disaster. Bits of rope, baulks of timber, assorted plastic debris, even whole containers came bobbing down the Channel on the flooding tide. At night especially, the larger objects could be lethal. When the weather and the trawl permitted, the skipper tried to do what he could.

  The drum was secured to the side of the boat with ropes and winched carefully aboard. When they berthed next morning at the fish dock in Ramsgate, it was the first object off. Midday, the night’s catch already en route to the London markets, the skipper walked the quarter-mile to the harbour-master’s office, reporting his find and staying just long enough to confirm that a reward was unlikely.

  Later in the day, the harbour-master studied the drum. It was red, a little sturdier than usual, with the vertical seam double-welded, and thick welts around the top and bottom. There was a black diamond enclosing a death’s-head on the side. Stencilled across the middle of the diamond, in heavy capitals, was the single word ‘POISON’. Detailed information was normally coded beneath the warning, in keeping with international regulations, but in this case there was nothing. No ADR panel, no numbers to identify the specific contents or degree of risk. Simply two words in German at the bottom of the drum, ‘Eigentum der …’, the rest of the sentence crudely painted over.

  The harbour-master, who’d never seen a drum quite like this before, returned to his office and called the local fire service. He explained the situation and said he’d be glad for someone to take a look. He could see no leaks himself, but he’d prefer to be certain. The duty officer confirmed the details and promised to send an appliance. The call was logged at 15.53.

  *

  The old man, Abu Yussuf, turned his back on the hot glare of the street and stepped into the darkness of the garage. The place stank of oil and the sour tang of exhaust. With the light still off, he might have been back in Ramallah. He smiled, switching on the light and hanging his cap on the back of the door.

  The tiny lock-up garage was three blocks from the tall row of Newark tenements that was, for the time being, home. He walked here every morning, already sweating in his overalls in the heat, soaking up time before he could start the new job in Manhattan. Quite why he’d been asked to secure the job, he didn’t know. It had simply been orders, another terse phone call from Mohammad Kabbaul, the Damascus Arab, the one
he’d listened to all those months ago back on the West Bank, the one who’d confirmed the way it had really been with his son, the one who’d promised him his very own helping of jihad. Holy war. Revenge.

  The old man reached for a length of waste cotton and bent over the open trunk of the car. He’d chosen the car himself, a month and a half back, from a dusty street-corner lot over in Brooklyn. Kabbaul had come with him on that occasion and they’d taken a cab from Newark. Sitting in the back of the rattling Chevvy, the old man gazing out at the Manhattan skyline, Kabbaul explained what was to be done. They needed something anonymous, he’d said, something reliable. They’d take the car back to Newark, to a lock-up garage Kabbaul had rented, and there the old man was to start work. He was to install special equipment in the trunk. There had to be room in the trunk for a tank of liquid, some pipes, a pump and whatever else the old man might need. Kabbaul had said he was no engineer, but he thought it would have to be a big car.

  It was. The old man had circled the used-car lot, looking at the models on display, the state of the tyres, the bodywork, the huge engines caked with oil under the propped-up hoods. Privately, he thought the prices outrageous, but Kabbaul had already told him that money didn’t matter, and so in the end he’d chosen an ’84 Oldsmobile for $2300, light tan, the long expanse of hood balanced by a huge trunk. It was the kind of car that littered the streets of Newark, or Brooklyn, or the Bronx. The old man had seen hundreds of them already, and knew it was perfect.

  They’d driven the Oldsmobile back to Newark, the old man at the wheel. The car handled like a boat, swaying and yawing and dipping on the pot-holed roads. By the time they’d crossed Manhattan, he knew there was a problem with the rear shockers and made a mental note to do something about it, telling Kabbaul there’d be more money to spend. Kabbaul had shrugged the warning aside. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he’d said. ‘You must make the car good for one journey. One journey only.’