Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  Scene: a young woman bursts out crying. A man sits down beside her and looks on in helplessness.

  Fade out.

  Madam Seng: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’

  The opium smell, strong in the room. Joe blinked; it seemed to take forever for his eyes to close and open.

  Joe: ‘You keep cropping up.’

  Madam Seng: ‘Like a bad penny?’

  Scene: a bat fluttering against a broken window pane. A shutter bangs in the wind.

  Joe: ‘Like a question mark.’

  Madam Seng smiled; this time it reached her eyes. ‘I have been taught they should be used sparingly.’

  Scene: two figures coming down a grand staircase. One is a man. He carries a lamp, held high before his face. He wears a black beaver hat and his face is deathly white and grotesque. There is something unearthly about his appearance. The woman beside him is similarly pale. As they come down the stairs the man in the beaver hat hands the lamp to the woman. At the foot of the stairs they separate.

  Joe blinked again; it took his eyes longer to open this time. ‘The opium,’ he said. Madam Seng nodded beside him. ‘It is both a blessing and a curse,’ she said. ‘Rest.’ She put her hand on his brow. Her hand was cool. She smoothed back his hair, gently. ‘It is a door one should not open lightly.’

  ‘Are you a Snake Head?’ Joe said. Chinese expression: a people’s smuggler. Madam Seng shook her head. ‘Not in that context,’ she said.

  What context?

  Scene: two men in a library, talking.

  Title: You mean a ghost?

  ‘Rest,’ Madam Seng said again. ‘You should not have come but now you’re here.’

  Somehow the words seemed to hold a deeper meaning for Joe. He raised his hand and it was like lifting a tremendously heavy weight from the depths of the sea. When he touched his eyes they were covered in saltwater.

  Title: Not a ghost. Worse—

  Joe’s arm dropped back to his side. Dimly, he felt himself sinking, the sea claiming him. Dimly, he heard Madam Seng whispering soothing words in a language he didn’t know nor cared to. She eased him down on the berth, arranged a pillow under his head, lifted up his feet.

  Title: MIDNIGHT.

  Fade in.

  Scene: a long-shot of a cemetery, twisted trees bare. Behind, a mausoleum.

  Joe’s eyes closed, the silent movie receding into nothingness, taking the opium den with it.

  Fade out.

  no place like home

  ——

  He was standing on Piccadilly Circus and the cars were wrong. They were like toy cars, like things that ran on batteries. The statue of Anteros still looked down with his bow and arrow. There were still tourists in the Circus but they, too, looked wrong. Strange haircuts. T-shirts advertising brands he’d never heard of, Gap and FCUK and something called Metallica. A guy with long hair, faded jeans and wraparound mirrorshades was strumming a guitar and singing about imagining all the people living life in peace, his voice reedy in the air.

  The pollution was worse.

  He looked up and the signs opposite were in neon lights and the images moved impossibly and the only name he could recognise was Coca-Cola.

  Samsung. Sanyo. Japanese names but not ones he’d heard of before.

  People had white-coloured wires trailing down from their ears.

  He crossed the road, thinking to go to his hotel, but the Regent’s Palace was covered in scaffolding, its windows empty. He walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and up into Soho and saw things like the beaks of cranes rotating slowly high above street level, glass lenses glinting as they caught the light, moving this way and that as if scanning for prey. On Old Compton Street there were shops advertising pornographic movies but there were no adult cinemas. There were hundreds of titles in the display windows. Boys on girls, girls on girls, boys on boys. The girls had breasts that looked like they had come from the future, they were as large and impossible as spaceships.

  A big poster on the corner, an enormous grey eye looking down on the street, a notice: You are watching Big Brother.

  Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?

  He walked back down to Shaftesbury Avenue. On the way he passed a group of silent dancers: they had gathered by the corner of the street and were dancing with no sound, with no order. They all had the same white wires coming down from their ears. A guy in a suit was playing a mute air guitar. When he came to Shaftesbury Avenue he saw a double-decker bus but it too was wrong, with no pole and open platform at the back, the only way in was through the doors in the front and they were closed and the bus wasn’t stopping. He crossed the road into Chinatown. No Edwin Drood, no Madam Seng, just a row of Chinese restaurants, red naked ducks hanging from hooks in the windows. He walked down Little Newport into Charing Cross Road. The bookshops were still there. He didn’t recognise the names. Up towards Oxford Street, meeting Shaftesbury Avenue for a third time. Large, multi-storey bookshops, but Foyle’s was still there, at least that was a name he knew. He went in. There was a counter to his right with the legend: Information.

  ‘Do you have any of the Mike Longshott books?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Osama Bin Laden?’

  The man behind the counter had a something like a television screen in front of him, and a plastic thing with keys. He tapped them, frowning. ‘We have a few,’ he said. ‘Let me print out the list for you.’

  He pressed more keys and a small box beside his television screen began to hum and a sheet of paper slid out from inside it and he handed it to Joe. Joe stared at the printed paper. ‘What is this?’ he said.

  The man barely glanced his way. ‘What you asked for,’ he said.

  ‘But this is all wrong.’

  ‘Complaints department is over there,’ the man said. Joe followed his pointing finger. It was showing him the doors.

  Joe shrugged, crumpled the paper into a ball, deposited it on the counter, and left.

  Up Charing Cross and across St. Giles’ Circus and into Tottenham Court Road which looked like something out of a science fiction paperback. There were rows and rows of stores with gleaming impossible devices on display. One store he passed was full of television screens in its display window, each tuned to a different station, more stations than he thought possible. A man in an office, dancing. Tiny insects, magnified, mating. Two policemen running from an explosion. A schoolgirl in uniform singing silently into a microphone, all the time staring out of her television as if looking out of a prison window. Gigantic spaceships exploding, men with laser guns firing, a monstrous alien blob with a human captive in a block of ice. Joe felt sick. He doubled back, ran down New Oxford, up into Bloomsbury, the air hot in his lungs, traffic lights blinking at him green and red and yellow, glass eyes above moving slowly to focus on him as he passed.

  The British Museum. A man selling sausages outside the gate, the smell of frying onions making Joe’s stomach knot up. Tourists milling about, cameras flashing. The cameras were odd; too small, he thought. As if they had no film inside.

  A man in a robot suit walking down the road, a sign above his head: Half-price tickets. ‘There’s no place like home!’ the man shouted. He stopped by Joe, handed him a leaflet. ‘There’s no place like home, mate. Get a ticket while they’re going.’

  Joe blinked, his vision blurred. The tin-man walked away. He’d already forgotten Joe. ‘No place—’

  ‘Joe?’

  He blinked and opened his eyes. Madam Seng stood above him.

  ‘You had a bad dream,’ she said.

  the man in the beaver hat

  ——

  His tongue was thick and unresponsive. He sat up and the room swam. Nothing had changed. The clientele was still arranged artistically on their cushions. The girls administered to their medicine. The film continued to play silently on the opposite wall.

  Scene: the man in the beaver hat sitting down with another man who looks dazed.

  Title: Have I been asleep?
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br />   Scene: close-up on the man in the beaver hat, his grotesque eyes and deathly pallor.

  Title: No, and neither have I.

  ‘I want to know your role in this.’

  ‘My role in what?’ Madam Seng said.

  ‘What was Mo doing here?’’

  Her eyes, expanding slightly. ‘The detective?’

  ‘He had your card.’

  She shrugged. ‘He came here a couple of times.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do any of you?’

  ‘No,’ Joe said. He shook his head and his vision swam. ‘He was investigating something. Some people. He came here… he must have seen them here.’ Her eyes regarded him calmly. He described the man in the black shoes.

  Madam Seng: ‘I don’t know why I should even talk to you.’

  Joe: ‘Why do you?’

  Madam Seng: ‘You remind me of a boy I used to know.’

  Joe: ‘What happened to him?’

  Madam Seng: ‘He…’ slight hesitation. ‘Went elsewhere.’

  Joe blinked, wanted to sneeze. Held his head in his hands — it felt like a lead weight. ‘Do you have coffee?’ he said.

  ‘This is an opium house, not a coffee shop,’ Madam Seng said, and Joe smiled. ‘Please?’

  She made a gesture to one of the girls.

  ‘So tell me about these men,’ Joe said.

  On the opposite wall the film stuttered slowly to a halt.

  ‘I am not a Snake Head,’ Madam Seng said.

  ‘But they thought you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did they want you to take them?’

  She shrugged. ‘Into fuzzy-wuzzy land.’

  ‘Did they find what they were looking for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What were they looking for?’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Lady, I just have a job to do.’

  She looked amused. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Lady.’

  The girl came back. She carried a silver tray and put it down on the low table beside Joe. Black coffee in a white china cup, a bowl of sugar cubes, a small pouring-jug of cream. She looked up at Joe and smiled. Madam Seng said something Joe didn’t catch and the girl left them quickly.

  ‘I’m looking for…’ he said, and then fell quiet, and stirred sugar and cream into the coffee, and took a sip; it seemed to set his brain on fire. ‘Osama Bin Laden,’ he said, wonderingly.

  Madam Seng slowly nodded.

  ‘I think that’s who they were looking for, too,’ she said.

  forget Chinatown

  ——

  He knew the way now. He retraced his steps for the third time, though one had been only in a dream.

  ‘Don’t come here again,’ Madam Seng had said. On impulse he had leaned towards her, kissed her on the cheek. Her skin felt cold. She pulled back from him and smiled. Her eyes were hidden behind mist. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can never go home again.’

  He nodded, once. She put her hand on his face, looked at him as if searching for something hidden, the lines of someone else in his face. ‘There is no path this way,’ she said. ‘Forget it, Joe. Forget Chinatown.’

  He turned his back on her. As he stepped outside the air was cooler, waking him. The door closed behind him without noise. The tableau of silent drinkers at The Edwin Drood was undisturbed through the grimy glass. He went down Little Newport and wondered if it had been named for a particularly small and agile chimney sweep. He turned left on Charing Cross Road, crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, saw Foyle’s in the distance. On an impulse he went in. Though the hour was late the store was open. There was a girl sitting behind a desk in the front. He approached her.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Do you have any of the Mike Longshott books?’

  ‘Mike Longshott…’ she said. ‘Hold on.’

  She reached for a thick folder and began leafing through it.

  ‘The Osama Bin Laden series,’ Joe said. The girl looked up. Closed the folder. A moue of distaste. ‘Oh, those.’

  ‘Do you have them?’

  ‘We don’t stock that sort of stuff here,’ she said. ‘Try further up the road.’

  Joe followed her pointing finger. It was showing him the doors.

  With a sense of déjà vu he left the bookstore and continued on his way, walking down London’s chartered streets, searching the faces of the night people out at this hour, knowing that he was being watched. He could have gone straight down Shaftesbury Avenue to his destination but he chose this route, willing them an awareness of him. There were no cameras in this London, but still there were secret watchers. He turned on St. Giles, away from gallows that weren’t there, walked along High Holborn, feeling in his back the intensity of the hidden watchers increase.

  There was no British Museum underground station.

  But there had been, once.

  Tracked them down to Holborn. Lost again.

  Where High Holborn met Bloomsbury Court…

  He’d looked it up on his way from the Dog & Bone. A trains and transport bookshop of the kind one can only find in London. A proprietor with hundreds of private notebooks stashed away, recording days spent on foggy platforms, recording times of arrivals and departures. There was no British Museum station there, but there had been, before the war. They said it was haunted, the proprietor said with a whisper, and laughed. They said there was an Egyptian mummy down there. They said there was a tribe of cannibals down there. It was an air shelter during the war. It was a military post. It was home to a group of refugees from a war no one had heard of. It was off High Holborn but the station building no longer existed. All that remained were the tunnels…

  The offices of a Building Society. A shuttered pub. Around the back, a small wooden door, locked and unremarked, grainy wood and peeling green paint. A little way away, a dark-blue police box stood empty, its light dead. Joe approached the door. The handle had been removed. He stared at it. He could feel the silence around him. What lay beyond the door. He could turn back, walk away. Answers were buried underground, in unmarked graves. He breathed in London’s night air, then kicked the door. The wood splintered, the door fell back, revealing the darkness beyond. He went towards the darkness.

  hell is an abandoned station

  ——

  Walking down stone stairs slippery with moss. His Zippo held up before him, illuminating crumbling brickwork sprayed with ancient graffiti. For a moment he thought of the man in the beaver hat holding a lantern, deathly-pale face coming down the grand staircase. Down and down into the ground. The weight of packed earth above his head. Down to a level surface: a platform. He had Mo’s gun, still. He held it in one hand now, the lighter in the other, the flame dancing, his shadow ending at the end of his feet. A voice, as cold as a subterranean spring, spoke through the darkness. ‘Mr. Private Investigator,’ it said. ‘You should not have come here.’

  Joe stopped, let the flame die. ‘I wish people would stop telling me that,’ he said. The unseen speaker laughed. Joe heard a rustling sound, and something brushed against his feet in passing. There were rats down there, he thought.

  Some even had four legs.

  ‘Those who go underground,’ the voice said, ‘sometimes never come back.’

  It wasn’t the voice of the gentleman in the chequered shirt. Someone else…

  Stealthy movement behind him. They must have followed him down the stairs, the ones who were watching above. Joe stepped carefully sideways, felt the wall against his shoulder.

  ‘Nice place you got here,’ he said.

  Someone spat. ‘You’re tenacious, Mr. Joe, I’ll give you that,’ the voice said. ‘A useful attribute in your line of work, I would have thought.’

  Joe edged forward, the gun raised.

  ‘And obstinate. Which is not so useful. Unable to see what’s in front of you…’

  Right then he could see nothing. He was going by sound. Two pairs of feet moving behind him, blocking
the way out. The voice in front. How many more? He stopped again. Speaking would tell them where he was, but…

  He said, ‘Osama bin Laden.’

  Someone swore behind him in the dark. He didn’t understand the words. ‘What do you expect to find?’ Joe said. The memory of his early morning conversation with one of these men came back to him. ‘A face in the clouds?’ he said.

  ‘We are trying,’ the voice said, and it was no longer cool. It was angry. ‘To find paradise.’

  ‘Don’t you have to die first to get there?’ Joe said.

  ‘Yes,’ the voice said. ‘That is, precisely, the point.’

  ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’ Joe said.

  ‘Not here,’ a new voice said, ahead of him. The man in the black shoes. It was hard to forget his voice. ‘I tell you before, you no make trouble.’ It sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘Why you make trouble? Now kill you.’

  ‘I’ll just be waiting ahead for you in paradise, then,’ Joe said. A word the girl in Paris used came back to him. ‘Nangilima,’ he said. It was the name of a land beyond this land — a word for elsewhere. He knew he wanted a cigarette and fought down the urge. The man in the black shoes said, ‘Why he is not here? Why he is not come?’

  ‘Keep quiet,’ the first voice said. But the other kept talking. ‘You, me, we go. We follow plan. But plan wrong. Where paradise? Why he is not come?’

  How many bullets? How many men?

  ‘Maybe hell,’ the man in the black shoes said. ‘Maybe hell is abandoned station.’

  ‘Keep quiet,’ the first voice said. And then, ‘Perhaps he is here.’

  Joe said, ‘Mike Longshott.’

  He inched forward. The voices were closer now. The two at his back hadn’t moved.

  The first voice said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could have found him for you.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ the voice said. And, ‘You shouldn’t have come down here.’

  ‘Yet here I am,’ Joe said.