Deadly Confederacies

by Martin Malone

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I will make the coffee.’

  Chibli dried his hands in a towel.

  ‘Chibli … ’ Salih said quietly, after peeping out, ‘… they have locked the door and turned the sign to CLOSED.’

  He had never seen these men before. They were slightly built, had light brown moustaches, and were dressed in mufti. Armed? He saw no weapons, but suspected they carried pistols, perhaps tucked in at the small of their backs. They stood. He wiped his hands in his blue slacks before shaking their hands. The younger of two gestured for him to sit. It was clear to Chibli that for the present the café was no longer his. The older man said his name was Khadum and his colleague’s Darwish. The men picked up their cigarettes from the ashtray. Chibli patted his shirt pocket and removed his own pack, putting it on the table. He felt too ill at ease to smoke.

  Darwish said, ‘You know why we are here?’

  ‘No,’ Chibli shrugged, ‘I have no idea.’

  Khadum said, ‘Don’t lie.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  Darwish pursed his lips. Khadum gave a tilt of his head, and his stare brought tears to Chibli’s soft brown eyes. Khadum averted his gaze and poured water from a jug into a glass. Then he mentioned a woman’s name and Doctor Hammed.

  ‘I know him, for sure … he is my doctor,’ Chibli said quietly over the hump of a small cough.

  Salih arrived with the coffee, a blue bowl of sugar, and the small red-rimmed glasses reserved for special guests, and therefore hitherto unused. Chibli watched the old man walk away. Yes. He had lost weight. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? Poor Salih, he cannot afford to lose any more: he could slip between the bars of a storm drain.

  ‘Have you paid him, yes?’ Darwish said.

  Chibli frowned. Was this it? He had forgotten to pay his doctor, and these two men were a reminder? Is this what things had come to?

  ‘I owe him some money for my last physical … and he is to run some more tests on me. But I’ve had to cancel several appointments because of the war situation, you understand?’

  Khadum said, ‘Let me be clear. You paid him to carry out the abortion.’

  ‘What?!’ Chibli said, looking from one to the other.

  Silence.

  ‘No, no, no … you are mistaken, my friends. Very much so. You have no idea how wrong you are.’

  ‘Chibli Mahmoud,’ Darwish said, ‘that’s you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In an instant, the two men had their pistols on the table, hands gripped tightly on the handles, their knuckles white.

  ‘How much do you think your life is worth?’ Darwish said.

  Chibli was unable to speak. His lips flagged several times.

  ‘This is how much,’ Khadum said, ‘ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘As Allah is my judge, I …’.

  ‘We’ll be here in the afternoon for the money, four,’ Darwish said, pointing at his watch.

  Chibli noticed the leather strap, brown and frayed, cheap. Dark forearm hair like wild grass grew across it, like weeds overrunning.

  They let themselves out. Chibli saw them flag down a military jeep, get in, and disappear around the corner.

  Salih came alongside his shoulder, ‘I heard.’

  ‘I …’.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s not true. I …’.

  ‘Salih, I know you know; my whole village knows.’

  ‘Truth doesn’t matter to them. They believe in the money, that you have it. Because your father had it.’

  ‘I am being very much wronged here.’

  ‘Go to the Imam, or their leaders in the city … you must. Now, before they return.’

  ‘Who is in charge? These men change so often.’

  At the Amal headquarters close to the sea, opposite the UN Custom Post, he met with people who half-listened and did not care a whit for his problem. Those who could sort the matter were unavailable. Even the Imam was absent from the mosque and his home behind it – he wondered if he should call round to the doctor. No, he thought, it would not be wise. If he had carried out an abortion he was in serious trouble. The men would not talk to him: they would kill Doctor Hammed on sight. The doctor was not stupid: he knew the risk he was taking by conducting such a procedure. He may well be as innocent of the allegation as I am of the one they’ve levelled against me. Perhaps he has refused to pay? Yes … it is in his nature not to; the doctor is a man of principles and very opinionated.

  There wasn’t an issue in getting the money, but not in the time frame they had given him. Impossible. And in the giving of it he would be bled of most of his savings; he had been left the apartment, the business, his brothers the bulk of his parents’ money. A sizeable amount. Enough to live well, if sensible. His brothers were sensible people. More so than me, he thought, sitting in his car outside his café. I should have sold everything and joined them.

  They had asked him for money very close to the amount he had on call in the Banque du Liban. Why not above that sum? How would they have found out his account detail? Easy: a clerk or the manager. They would know whom to bleed, and had passed on the information to people expert in how to draw blood. Paranoid! The whole country was infected with paranoia. Go to the bank? If he asked to withdraw his money and close his account, requested the sum in dollars – observe the response.

  Afterwards, he told Salih it was as though they had been expecting him. He had hoped for surprise, a flurry of questions, reasons, but the transaction was as neat as a cut from a surgical knife. Completed in less than fifteen minutes, sheaves of forms signed. The teller smiled, he smiled.

  In the end, he could not bring himself to close the account, for a reason he supposed came from his sub-unconscious: he simply did not want to leave; he knew he would not settle elsewhere; and also, now that they’d exacted their price, they would leave him alone. Like vultures, they would go to find fresh pickings. They had left him enough to keep his business afloat. These were far from stupid people.

  The café had been empty all morning, and had seen only a trickle of customers throughout the day. The two waited outside for the men to return. In the hippodrome the boy soldiers jogged around the track, carrying their AK rifles across their shoulders, chanting about Allah and glory. Clouds fringed the blue to the north.

  They offered no greeting to the men when they called. Salih stood but Chibli did not, not even when Salih nudged his shoulder – he counted the money under their scrutinising eyes, put it back in the white envelope and handed it to Darwish, the younger of the men, knowing the other would feel but not wear the slight. Fear churned Chibli’s stomach to ice, but there burned a flicker of fire in his heart. Snuffed by the siren of an ambulance, loud and diminishing, and then low and persistent when it reached its destination. He estimated its distance … the clinic? Eye talk from the men enlightened him. He sighed, and asked if it was okay by them for him to resume work, and did they want coffee.

  ‘No coffee,’ Darwish replied, fingers drumming on the table like he was bouncing thoughts he could not contain in his head. Relief and tension surged along Chibli’s veins as the men stood and pushed back their chairs. Relief only as they turned and walked out. He prayed to be trading in Café Phoenicia when peace arrived on the wings of white doves, when the land had been sated with blood, when the tourists returned. That would be his revenge: to have survived.

  Then, watching the men pull away in the jeep, he thought to ask Salih for the name of his physician.

  Wicked Games

  He slipped off the M50 onto a back road, and dipped his lights when he ran into patches of fog drifting from the pines like spasms of kettle steam. The road was one he had travelled many times over a five-year span a long time ago, when he was a kid, some years before his army days
– like people, roads change, so a couple of miles on he slowed down. He was looking out for a petrol station.

  The petrol station alive in his mind appeared on his left, and he swung in under the pumps’ canopy, cut the engine and took in the ghostly aura – a garish blue neon garage sign, amber street lights, a rat easing past a wheelie bin. Something straight out of a Stephen King horror novel. He was tired. Last night he had gone to see Louise, hoping to chat about what had gone wrong between them. He found her as he cut across the Ha’penny Bridge, linking another fella’s arm. She didn’t see him. He glanced to his right, caught the reflections of lights on the dark Liffey waters, the breeze that curled off its back and shaved his features. Yeah, well, she hadn’t sent him a Dear John so she could spend nights out with the girls – what did he expect?

  He considered himself fortunate that the break had been clean – there were no kids involved. The whole bloody thing could have been so much messier. So he’d seen her someone else; tall, broad-shouldered and obviously loaded. There are people who smell of money in the same way people smell of poverty.

  She didn’t want a scene when he came home, didn’t want him using his karate skills to mince her boyfriend’s bones. As if he would; the choice was Louise’s to make. She could have whom she liked on her arm; he didn’t own her. The wedding ring wasn’t a slave’s collar. After all, he had been as faithless as her – a belly dancer in Tel Aviv. Intimate of intimacies without so much as birthing each other’s name.

  Red-brick shop and offices. Double doors to a garage, a car on the ramp inside. CCTV camera wore a red eye. Charlie Berry, the owner, was a rich man who lived two miles farther down this road, on an estate bounded by old walls leaning with age. A long gravel drive crawled to a country house once used by the Martin family as a hotel.

  He rang the Berry place on his mobile, said he’d be a little late reaching there because of the fog. Mrs June Berry sighed.

  ‘You have Paul’s things?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes, I have.’

  It’s the reason I’m going to see you, he thought. Paul had been a close friend. Paul’s things that his Tara refused to take in – all she wanted was his watch, his poxy UN medals, his wedding ring, stuff for his kids – nothing else. Pop them in the post. She didn’t want army people stomping all over her house. One had been enough. Now that he was gone, she didn’t have to tolerate lowlifes on her floor. When she had said that, Myles lost his rag and had called her a bitch, and more, but she cut him short like a person well practised at cutting people off.

  ‘Good, well come along when you’re ready,’ Mrs Berry said.

  He bought a coffee to go along with his cigarette, and got into his Suzuki jeep to enjoy it. He dropped the cover of the glove compartment and settled the paper mug into its recess. Sorted out in his head the questions they would ask, the answers he would give: he wanted his answers to be closed avenues – he would say nothing that would lead him to lie about something else. He was never good at lying, or at keeping a secret for that matter. Eye contact, too. Dislike and disapproval must be held back; he needed to keep his expression neutral, so as not to spark suspicion in Mrs Berry, or alert Paul’s father that he knew him for being a terrible old fuck altogether.

  He started the jeep to breathe some heat into his bones. Myles sipped at his coffee, tasteless, listened to the radio, and took long drags on a cigarette for which he had no genuine appetite.

  It’s a Heartache came over the radio. Bonnie Tyler? Maybe, he thought.

  It surely is, he said, a right bloody heartache. He drove on, inching through the fog, determining not to drive back to Dublin in this weather. He would hole up in his jeep and wait until morning, when hopefully the fog would have cleared. There used to be a bed and breakfast around here, but the sign was down and the house demolished.

  Passing the first set of stone pillars, the ones Charlie Berry had told him about a week ago, which were being fitted with automated gates, he slowed almost to a stop. Meeting the bend and the second set of pillars, he drove through, the gates lying open for him as an expected guest.

  He pulled up in front of a series of broad semicircular steps. Paul’s oul’ fella had gone berserk when his son joined the army, ranted about loyalty to the family business (ironic for him to rant about loyalty), his temper worsening when Paul said, not without pleasure, that he had enlisted as an ordinary private and not as an officer cadet.

  Looking at the mullion windows, the in-year cars parked on either side of his 06 jeep, he saw at first hand the lifestyle Paul had denied himself. Was it worth it? Hardly, in light of what had happened.

  He rang the doorbell, heard the fall of feet on tiles, distinguished a woman’s figure through the stained red glass. She opened the door. She was old but dressed young, smelled of perfume, hair dyed black, and the corners of her eyes were as badly cracked as stone-damaged glass. She sized him up without moving her head, then the suitcase and rucksack that sat at his feet like obedient hounds. Something in her eyes fell back a step.

  ‘Come in, Mr …?’

  Annoyance rippled through him, but he tried not to show it – he’d told her his name by phone and email. Often enough for her to remember, if she wanted.

  ‘Myles. Myles will do.’

  ‘We’re in the drawing room,’ she said, leading the way.

  Part of the ‘we’, he understood, included Charlie Berry. Paul’s father sat in an armchair beside a flickering fire of artificial coals, the cast-iron fireplace adorned with embossments of flowers. Framed photographs of family and portraits of daughters were arrayed along the mantelpiece. The silver-haired man got to his feet, extended his hand, and said, ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Myles,’ Myles said, the other’s grip surprisingly strong. He had Paul’s eyes, except his were bluer and colder.

  ‘Sit, sit down, good man. A beer, what? wine?’

  Mrs Berry moved to the drinks cabinet and lowered its drop-leaf.

  ‘Beer’ll be fine, thanks.’

  ‘So, you served with Paul … abroad?’

  Nodded. Why was he saying this; he already knew?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll cut to the chase, then … I’ve read the MP Final Investigation Report, and I don’t accept its findings.’

  Myles had nothing to say. He hadn’t read the report.

  ‘Our boy had no reason to shoot himself. Now, I … I invited you here for you to tell us the truth. You won’t get into bother for doing it. I’ll take care of things for you … so don’t be worrying. Truth will always out.’

  Such an arsehole. And what are they implying? That someone else shot him?

  Charlie glanced across at his wife. Her face was blank, lips like tracings of red blood. An uneasy feeling came over Myles. He sensed that she had instigated this meeting just so she could examine her husband’s demeanour. Her eyes seemed to be spitting shards of her heart at the man – and he understood not a thing.

  Charlie Berry sighed, accepted his brandy without comment, and sat to the edge of his armchair. He had hooded eyes, like a hawk. Mrs Berry sat on the armrest beside her husband.

  ‘Your statement …’ Charlie Berry said.

  ‘I didn’t come to discuss the findings of the investigation,’ Myles said.

  ‘You’re toeing the official line?’

  ‘No. My statement is a true account of what happened.’

  Mrs Berry put her hand on Charlie’s shoulder, as though applying a brake to his words.

  ‘You see, Myles, we just don’t believe it. It wasn’t his … style,’ she said.

  ‘Suicide isn’t a “style”, Mrs Berry.’

  ‘He wasn’t like that,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Have you spoken with Tara?’ Myles said.

  ‘She’s a slut. I’ll fix her,’ Charlie Berry said in a low voice, the way people do
when they mean things.

  Mrs Berry said nothing, gesturing with a frown for Myles to do likewise – a woman confident that she could talk her husband into and out of doing anything. Especially doing stupid things. Myles understood that Charlie Berry wasn’t thinking clearly. He was a hard soul – the sort who would insist on his shops remaining open on the day of his own funeral – a hard soul and a disturbed one.

  He sipped at his beer, and drew the back of his hand across his lips. He wanted to say something, but didn’t know where to start. Should he tell them about Paul, the excellent soldier? The guy who was always eager to help others out and who thought no problem too big? Or about the Paul who conned everyone into thinking he was one happy-go-lucky fella? Mention the single shot, and how shocked everyone was when the latrine’s aluminium door was forced open and all saw Paul slumped, eyes open, jaw slack, the pistol lying at his feet?

  No, say nothing about the incident – around it, leading up to it, but not the immediate aftermath. He didn’t have to say anything, for Charlie Berry went over and started to surface his son’s things from the rucksack, going from it to the suitcase. Mrs Berry put her hand to her mouth.

  Shirts, army and civilian, underwear, letters bound with a rubber band, photographs in albums with motifs of cedar trees, one of the latrine he shot himself in. In the background, presents he had bought, a water pipe and cigars for Charlie, and a gold chain and cross he bought for Mrs Berry in Akko while on a sixty-hour pass.

  ‘Charlie,’ Mrs Berry said, quietly.

  She wanted him to stop unpacking their son’s gear, but wouldn’t say so outright for fear of being ignored, and also derailing some catharsis Charlie might be going through. Myles considered the notion that perhaps she waited hopefully for the slip of tongue from her husband that would cut his throat, yield her a sentence – words he could not rationalise away.

  He stood up from his son’s things and stepped backwards to his armchair, his eyes on the clothes he had removed, a pile of memories for the wash.