Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘Yes,’ the voice said again. ‘A pity.’

  Joe crouched, gun held in both hands. He heard a scrabbling sound ahead, something heavy being pulled.

  ‘Kill him,’ the first voice said.

  A click.

  Yellow lights came alive, blinding him, and he fired without looking, going by sound.

  The sound of gunshots, not his. He rolled, turned, fired again, once, twice. Something hit his arm, throwing him to the ground. Blood pounded in his ears.

  Something metallic falling to the ground. Joe opened his eyes, blinked tears against the glare of light. He was lying on the platform and ahead of him one man was slumped against the platform’s edge. As Joe watched the man fell slowly forward, towards the ancient rails. As he hit the track his body seemed to disappear.

  Joe blinked, his eyes getting used to the light. His arm hurt; he couldn’t move it. He touched it with his other hand and his fingers came back covered in blood. Ahead of him, a man in black shoes, the prone feet vertical. Joe pushed himself up on one arm, stood, retrieved his fallen gun. He walked to the man in the black shoes. There was a hole in the man’s chest, pumping out blood. The man was breathing hollowly. Joe crouched down beside him, put his hand on his forehead, smoothed back the sweat-soaked hair. The man’s eyes opened, focused on Joe. His mouth moved, shaped itself into a smile. ‘I wait ahead for you,’ the man in the black shoes whispered, ‘in other paradise.’

  Then he was gone, and Joe stood up and turned and, for just a moment, before the lights faded and died, saw two more empty pools of blood ahead where the silent watchers had been.

  Then, ignoring the pain, he pulled out his cigarettes, shook one out, one-handed, and put it in his mouth, letting the rest of the pack fall to the floor.

  In the darkness of a tomb his lighter flicked into being, the tiny flame of light dancing.

  He lit the cigarette, blew out smoke. For a long moment he stood there, seeing nothing. Then he began to edge his way forward, towards the stairs and the clean lighted night.

  the colour of a bruise, blue against black

  ——

  Street lights, casting fates along the dark asphalt. Bloodied entrails, animal bones in curious shapes, rattled and scattered, predicting the future. Clouds above, no stars, the moon invisible. Down these streets a man must go, Joe following a trail of entrails, the scent of old blood, his mouth flavoured rust. Above-ground, breathing clean air. In his head: planes crash into buildings, buses explode, trains scream to a halt, an entire public transport network of death.

  His arm felt better up here. He looked at it in the light of a streetlamp and almost laughed — the bullet had merely grazed it. He tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied it around the wound. It had seemed worse down below. The pain wasn’t bad. What was bad was everything else.

  Four men left behind. Need: a drink. Need: sound, music. Need: lives around him. Instead he wandered through a world in black and white. Shadows criss-crossed his face. The stench of blood in his nostrils, clogging.

  At St. Giles Circus, almost no traffic — he thought he could see the ancient corpses swinging. Soho Square silent, empty, tall hushed buildings looking down with indifference in their windows.

  Joe lit a fresh cigarette, leaned against a dark tree, listened to the silence. Somewhere in the distance, a light, beckoning, the colour of a bruise, blue against black. Four men left behind. Fog: in the street, in his mind. A dank sweet cloying smell. Man in the beaver hat carrying a lantern in the dark illuminating nothing but himself. The blue light beckoned: Joe followed.

  Through empty streets. Night is the time of the dead, a graveyard shift. The trains lope home along the tracks, the fog caught in their fur. The lampshades glare. There is respite in quiet night, for restless shades and homeless strays. There is a living coldness in the winds at night, the streetlights mark the passage of the years.

  He breathed out a shuddering stream of smoke. Four men left behind. But you are not there. They seek you, seek you everywhere. You are the hand well hidden, and the scalpel that ensures the tumour is removed, the skin is parted so, the ill is healed, the wrong is righted, the world is once more set on course.

  Four men left behind. One man ahead, always ahead. The blue light beckoned, not far. Joe thought: God lives in the clouds like smoke, he has a long grey beard.

  Not feeling right. Loneliness is magnified at night time. He thought of the long Arctic night, Icelandic suicides, shivered. Pulled out Mo’s notebook: last note, page seven, near the top. Found them. Joe pulled out a pen, crossed it out.

  The light ahead, like a police-box calling out safety. He didn’t know where he was, somewhere in the maze of nameless streets. To one side a dirty books store, on the other a bottle store, both shut, Closed signs in the windows coated in dust. A closed door, the blue light above it shaped into a musical notation, the name underneath like a period at the end of a long sentence: The Blue Note.

  The card in his pocket. The girl — his employer. A matching card in Mo’s coat, a scribble in his notebook: Joe knocked on the door.

  refugees

  ——

  A grille in the door slid back. Eyes regarded him from inside. He could hear the faint notes of a jazz tune. A voice from the darkness: ‘What you want?’

  Joe: ‘A drink.’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘No reason why you should.’ He blew out smoke, into the grille. From inside: ‘Fuck!’ — coughing sounds.

  ‘Are you going to let me in?’

  ‘Members only. Scram.’

  Joe — Mo’s notebook — recollection: Met R. At BN. He said: ‘I want to see Rick.’

  Silence, a sigh. The voice: ‘Everybody comes to Rick.’

  Joe — what-fucking-ever.

  The grill slid shut — the door opened. Joe stepped through.

  Beyond the door: tables, a long bar, a small stage. The lights dim. A piano player pounding keys. The tune familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to it. Chairs around the tables — occupied. It was hard to make out faces in the gloom.

  The voice resolved itself into a shape. ‘That wasn’t nice, blowing smoke in my face.’ Big face. Deep-set eyes. Looking down at Joe, reproachfully. ‘I’m asthmatic.’

  Joe: ‘You’re in the wrong line of work.’

  The man coughed, put his hand on Joe’s shoulder, squeezed. Joe clamped his teeth shut.

  ‘Nobody likes a smartass.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

  ‘Do.’ The hand released him, slapped him on the back — the impact propelled him forward and into the room. ‘Rick’s in his office, he’ll be down soon. Get yourself a drink in the meantime — show’s about to start.’

  Joe muttered, ‘Thanks.’ Walked to the bar. Silent figures sitting at the tables: drinks, cigarettes. Waiting.

  Passengers in an airport lounge, going nowhere, he thought. There were no clocks in the room. It felt as if time had stopped and been preserved there.

  At the bar: a tall thin man. ‘Help you?’

  ‘Whisky, double shot. Neat.’

  ‘You look like you need it.’

  Joe let it pass. ‘And a café Américain.’

  Bartender: ‘That’s just black coffee, isn’t it?’

  Joe, tired. ‘Just do it.’ He laid cash on the counter. The bartender made it disappear.

  The whisky burned through Joe like lit oil on the surface of a sea. The coffee was black and bitter: oil again, slick and dark, made from the decayed bones of mega-fauna dead long before humanity was born. ‘You could power cars with this shit,’ Joe said, pointing at the coffee. The bartender, grinning, a slight Russian accent: ‘Let’s not fight over it.’

  Joe shrugged, turned away on his seat, scanned the seated audience.

  Impressions: dummies in a store window. No, that wasn’t it. But there was something about them that didn’t read right. Bars of shadows fell on raised, expectant faces. The sense of a lingering wait, the eyes that stare into a fa
rtherness. Clothes that did not quite fit. The thought of a tree felled, the roots torn out of the ground — helpless in the air. Expectant people — they looked like they did not belong, not here, not anywhere.

  He thought — refugees.

  The piano-man, singing about love and glory — the singing stopped, piano keys jingled into nothingness. The bartender: ‘She’s coming on.’

  A hush at the Blue Note. Lights dimming further, a single projection — a cone of light catching the stage.

  Joe said, ‘Keep them coming—’ gesturing to the whisky — more money on the counter, but the bartender wasn’t listening.

  The piano picked up again, stilled.

  Joe, waiting.

  A single note on a guitar, lingering in the air.

  over the rainbow

  ——

  A fine haze, a mist fell down on the stage. Nozzles in the ceiling, opening like flowers. The falling water — a drizzle, a shower. The light picked out every drop of water, glinting in hundreds of tiny rainbows. He saw her.

  She came on the stage, all big eyes and brown hair and pointed pinned-back ears, and there was a silence at the Blue Note like that of an empty and expectant grave. The girl didn’t look at the audience. A stool materialised like magic on the stage. Joe watched her through the mist and the beam of concentrated light, and something hurt inside him, and he reached for the shot glass and faltered. The girl sat down. The guitar was a light colour. She plucked some strings. Someone at a nearby table sighed.

  The girl sang. Afterwards, Joe found it hard to recall her singing, the words, the music that seemed to wail and gnash its teeth and mourn, in a way that sent tiny men with tiny knives into his guts to work him over. She sang about a place over the rainbow; fingers teasing sadness from the strings though there was no need: it was in the audience that night, touching chill fingers to the napes of émigrés and one alone detective with his hand suspended in its reach for the glass. She sang of a place where the clouds were far, and when she sang she opened her eyes and looked towards the bar, and she saw Joe and he saw her, and the tiny men with tiny knives worked him harder inside, jabbering and mumbling as they cut him up. She sang of a place beyond the rainbow, a place she could not go, or could not come back from. She looked at Joe through the film of water, and her fingers on the strings were an intimate recollection he knew without remembering. She sang of a place over the rainbow, a place far-away and yet so close, so close you could almost touch it. She sang — he thought she sang — for him, asking him to find her.

  When it was over the silence draped over the audience like a net rising from the depths of the sea, hauling its catch of mute, silver-scaled fish with it. The girl let her hand fall, and the last notes of the strings hung in the air, unfinished for a long moment. Then she stood and disappeared back-stage and the artificial rain ceased falling and the lights came back on and Joe’s hand completed its journey to the glass, grasped it, and he downed the shot in one and felt his eyes burning.

  A voice behind him said, ‘So you are the detective,’ and he turned.

  ‘I’m Rick,’ the man said. He wore a white evening jacket, was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I’m drunk,’ Joe said, and the man laughed. ‘Did you enjoy the show?’

  ‘No.’

  Rick nodded. ‘Joie de vivre is something lacking in these parts.’

  ‘Do you enjoy living, Mr. Rick?’

  ‘I did.’

  The piano player picked up again. Conversation resumed, what there was of it. The bartender brought over a bottle and a glass and placed them beside Rick without comment. Rick refilled Joe’s glass, filled his own.

  ‘What do you know about Mo’s death, Mr. Rick?’

  No reaction from the man — a slight smile, a shake of the head. ‘I told him to back off, he wouldn’t listen. Dead once, dead twice — who cares.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then you’re a fool.’

  Joe had no answer, let that one pass. ‘What do you know about Snake Heads, Mr. Rick?’

  ‘I know they don’t exist.’

  ‘Not even Mike Longshott?’

  A hit. Rick’s smile fading like Mo’s corpse. ‘Forget it, detective. Stop chasing rainbows.’

  Thinking of the girl, wanting suddenly to see her with a desperation that ached. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You said that awfully quickly.’

  ‘It happens to be the truth.’

  A hunch, Joe playing it. ‘But you tried to find out.’

  ‘I stick my neck out for no one, detective.’

  ‘What did you find in the Castle?’

  Visible reaction — Rick holding the shot glass too tightly. Ash from his cigarette shuddering down to the floor. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What were you hoping to find?’

  ‘What do you want, detective?’

  Joe said: ‘Answers.’

  Rick raised his glass, regained his smile. ‘To answers, then’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Joe said, after they’d drunk.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why all this?’ Gesturing with his hand, the movement taking in the whole of the Blue Note, the bartender, the piano, the clientele. Rick shrugged. ‘Everybody needs something,’ he said. He stood up to go. There were loud bangs on the door, from outside. Rick tensed. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  Joe trailed him to the door, felt a hand on his shoulder, stopped.

  He could barely see her. An outline, the suggestion of a shape. She said, ‘Joe…’ and nothing more.

  He said, ‘I’m trying.’

  For a moment she seemed to smile. She leaned towards him. The suggestion of lips touching his — he closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was gone.

  Banging on the doors. People stirring. Rick striding to him. Rick: ‘You’ve got to leave.’

  Joe — ‘Why—’ question uncompleted.

  Rick: ‘CPD. I don’t want them here.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  But he knew the answer already.

  Rick: ‘You.’

  Another hunch, playing it straight — ‘You have an arrangement with them.’

  Rick, angry. ‘I’m just trying to get by.’

  Joe: ‘I know. You stick your neck out for no-one.’ A slight smile. Rick hit him.

  Joe fell back, tasted blood. Rick: ‘Get out. There’s a back way. Come on. Quickly.’

  Joe followed. A small door past the bar. Through that: a narrow corridor, empty. The only light coming through from streetlamps outside, bars on the windows, a criss-cross of shadows falling inside. Another door, a room as empty as the corridor, a back-stage to the bar with no props and no actors. Another door, another corridor — a final door opening on an alleyway outside. Trashcans with no trash, graffiti on the walls — We’ll meet again some sunny day.

  ‘Go,’ Rick said. Joe turned, saw him framed in the doorway. ‘They’ll be through soon. I can’t stop them. Make sure you’re a long way away.’

  Joe: ‘Why are you helping me?’

  Rick shook his head. ‘I don’t want trouble. This way is easiest.’

  Joe: ‘You’re not being sentimental, are you?’

  Rick: ‘Get out, and don’t come back.’

  Joe left at a run. The moon cast his shadow on the dirty-grey walls.

  assault on 22 Frith street

  ——

  He had to know, and he had a plan. It was not a well-formulated plan but it should work — he’d had some experience already that day. It had the benefit of being simple. He had the benefit of Mo’s gun, the muzzle still smelling faintly of gunpowder. He came to Frith Street — eventually, getting lost in the maze of dark streets, but Old Compton Street and Frith Street were still lit and there were people sitting outside drinking beer and coffee and listening to music. There was laughter, which came at Joe like an alien sound. He walked up Frith Street and turned at the door to the castle and pressed the buzzer and waited, staring at th
e same blue plaque about the inaugural television broadcast.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mike Longshott,’ Joe said.

  ‘Just a moment, sir.’

  He waited out the moment. The door opened. The same bruiser as before, in a too-expensive suit, the bulge for a gun under the jacket - ‘Thought I made it clear enough last time that you’re not to—’

  Joe kneed him, once, twice, brought out the derringer, smashed the man’s nose in, eased him down to the floor. ‘You thought wrong,’ he said. He stepped over the man, said, ‘Try to breathe.’ Walked inside.

  Upstairs to the guests’ dining-room. Downstairs to the library, smoking lounge, and postal room. A girl behind reception, rising, looking alarmed — ‘Don’t move.’

  She followed the movement of the gun. Joe checked behind her — an unmarked door made to look like a part of the wooden panelling of the wall — ‘What’s behind there?’

  ‘Kitchen and service area,’ the girl said.

  ‘Open it.’

  She went to the door, pushed it open. ‘It isn’t locked.’

  ‘Get inside.’

  He followed her through. A utilitarian corridor, stained walls, smell of garlic wafting through, a bucket of dirty soapy water standing forlorn outside the first door.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Cleaning supplies.’

  There was a key in the door. It was dark inside, smelled of cleaning liquids — no windows, a single chair. ‘Looks comfortable,’ Joe said. He pushed the girl inside, not hard, heard her begin to say, ‘Hey, what—’ and locked the door behind her. He didn’t have long and this was wasting too much time. There was nothing elegant about his plan. Perhaps he could change that.

  He found a hidden cupboard behind the desk and dressed himself. A jacket and a tie — dashing. The doorman was coming around. Joe was tired of hitting doormen. Still. He hit him on the back of the head with the butt of the gun, pushed him out with difficulty, closed the door.

  He went down the stairs. Down there: wood, plush velvet, soft lighting. A man in uniform, ‘Sir, this is a members only—’