She rested her hand on the back of his neck, fingers half in his hair.
“What happens to the body now?”
“I imagine they’ll put him in one of those gravesites on the side of the mountain.” Not that there’d be a rush of volunteers to handle his body to get him there.
“Is there any way I can get him back to the States? His family. They’ll need closure.”
It would require a coffin. A real one. Geoff’s remains would have to be flown out on the airlift. “It’ll cost a fortune,” she said. More than he had left in his wallet.
“Who do I ask?”
“The concierge.”
Just as he inquired, the man in question, one of the few fat men in Kavsak, waddled through the dining room entrance. She got up and held her hand out to Daniel. “Give me your wallet,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”
“I can do it.”
“I’ll get you a better price.”
She rifled through the Euros, took a few and handed back the rest. She’d make up the difference privately. No need for him to know she was subsidizing the transport of a man she despised. This wasn’t for Garrett, it was for Daniel, to help him retain some sense of decency.
“Christ. What am I going to tell his family?”
“When you get to Ancona, have Garrett’s body cremated. Ship the ashes, along with a nice letter to the family. Put down what you remember about Garrett before you saw him this time.”
Hope they don’t call you and hear your honest voice and realize it’s all a lie.
After Brenna made the arrangements and Garrett’s body was removed, Daniel got his room key from the front desk, then took the stairs to the third floor with her. She pulled the landing door open, and they emerged onto a narrow, dimly lit corridor. Two doors down, she stopped, her key in hand. “Your room is just beyond here, on this same side.”
He hung back, reluctant to part, not sure what he could ask of her, where their relationship was, exactly. “Bren—”
She hesitated, unlocked her door, and pushed it open for him.
He entered. Waited while she lit the lantern.
Noticed she left the door open.
Two mattresses stood on end, protectively leaning against the windows. Her bed was neatly made, a down duvet folded at the foot. In the closet alcove, a handful of cargo pants and jeans and long-sleeved shirts—almost all of them black—hung neatly on hangers. No silky dresses or sexy pumps. A pair of boots on the floor, running shoes beside them. A red toolbox. A couple of SLR cameras and a selection of film, videotapes, and lenses were neatly arrayed on a small table, along with a box stuffed with assorted cables and connectors. The long countertop on the dresser had a camp stove sitting on a brick, plus a small pot, bottled water, and purification unit. Chicken noodle soup envelopes, a few tins of tuna and corned beef, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of crackers.
He ambled further in. This was her private world. He wanted to see it, to learn everything he could about her.
He glanced into the bathroom. It was just as tidy as her room. A towel and facecloth were neatly folded over the towel rack. A short stack of lavender soap, still in boxes, stood on the vanity beside a bottle of shampoo. Her toothbrush was white, aligned by the toothpaste at the edge of the sink. The tub was stoppered and filled with water. A reservoir, he figured, refilled the rare times there was running water. A small bucket sat on the floor beside the toilet, for flushing.
The sight of the modest belongings saddened him. Everything was so utilitarian. What a far cry from Aya’s vanity-top. Hers had always been so effusively feminine—the little pots of face cream and makeup and perfume always overflowing to his side. Brenna’s whole life fit in one hotel room, devoid of light, music, color, living things.
Brenna leaned against the wall, her hands behind her back, her photographer’s eyes reading him.
He returned to the narrow entryway and leaned against the wall across from her, mirroring her posture. “I noticed you didn’t actually promise Jasha you’d leave Thursday.”
“Thursday’s an eternity from now.”
“I want you to be on that Herc with me.”
“I could go out for—”
“I mean leave and not come back. Be done with this before it finishes you off.” He pushed off the wall, closed the gap between them and took her face in his hands. He wanted to join himself to her, body and soul, make it feel like a promise of something better. His fingertips strayed down the hollows of her neck toward the rise of her breasts. “Bren—” Come back with me and let me court you. Let’s see where this goes.
She put her hands on his chest, holding him off. “You can’t stay tonight,” she said.
“Because—?” he whispered, leaning in, caressing her.
“Because if I made love to you tonight and you were killed tomorrow,” she said, catching his hands and stilling them, “I would permanently lose my mind.”
He straightened, shocked. She was right. He’d seen her this morning, so lost. Mariana had been clear. Brenna was in precarious condition. Her apparent ability to rebound didn’t reflect underlying robustness.
“So let’s stay in tomorrow.”
“There’s a nursery across town, an orphanage of sorts. I’ve arranged—”
“No.”
“Yes. Children are the biggest losers in Kavsak. It’s key. We still need the footage to show that.”
He dropped his hands. “Jesus Christ, Brenna. Do you want to die?”
“I want to finish this story.”
“Dammit,” he growled. “You’re the most stubborn woman I ever met.”
She patted his chest. “Tenacious,” she said, gently pushing him out to the hallway. “Not stubborn. Whole different trait.”
No, he thought, as she firmly closed the door on him. Stubborn.
Brenna woke countless times that night, tossing and turning, reorienting herself to her room by her dim night light. She pulled the bedclothes around her, sealing out a chilly draft on the back of her neck. Her body hurt tonight, the bruises on her hips swollen and tender. Every muscle she’d strained and challenged in the past two days was protesting its abuse. Profoundly tired, she needed sleep, but couldn’t surrender to it.
As usual, although she was under the blankets, she was fully dressed—ready to bolt if she had to. Only her boots were off, set neatly together beside her bed, in easy reach.
The ceaseless barrage of artillery was unsettling her tonight. She’d lain here the night 3,777 shells had blasted off the mountains to this side of the river, counting the booms like sheep to lull herself to sleep. But tonight there was a vehemence, a particular brutality stalking the city. She could feel evil in the air. A growing sense of dread was wrapping itself around her, deepening each time she awoke. Something dreadful this way comes.
She toyed with the idea of going to the lobby and finding out what that was. But what was the point? This time, she wasn’t here to report breaking news. She was shooting a documentary about the effects of breaking news. Those would be there come morning—and long after. She closed her eyes and tried to doze. She wasn’t worried about being hit. She gave that up long ago. It wasn’t anything she could control or avoid. She only hoped that if she were hit, it would be direct and instantaneously lethal.
She lay in the dark for what seemed an eternity until finally, bored by her fruitless effort, she threw the covers off, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and padded to the window in her socks. Standing to one side, she inched one of the mattresses aside. There were no streetlamps, of course, no buildings twinkling with lights. The sky was ‘Kavsak Red’, ablaze with tracers and incendiary bombs. The brilliant successive flashes looked like dance-floor strobe lights.
Her room faced north, but she could still glimpse the western suburbs of the city. Jasha’s mom, whom she affectionately called ‘Dr. J’, lived out that way, near the airport. The nursery, run by a woman called Roza, was located just beyond her. In the distance, flames rose fr
om a half-dozen burning buildings, blotting the sky with billowing smoke. That’s where she was going, come daybreak.
She leaned against the window frame, feeling the cold air sheeting off it, seeing little.
It was insane, of course, to even contemplate going into that fiery maelstrom. If she were a rational woman, she would run the other way. But—to what? To be whom? She was empty inside, a placeholder for a real woman, devoid of all purpose except this one. Everything she once thought real was shattered. Family. God. Country. Even love was suspect. Her life was filled with questions, doubts, uncertainty.
How had all this come about? Why had Ari died? Because some Palestinian woman’s husband, believing just as firmly in his cause, left her bed in the middle of the night and disappeared for days at a time? Because she, like Brenna, hadn’t insisted her husband resign from his military? Had that woman’s husband been a good man, too? Had he loved and laughed and composed soaring music like Ari had? How could two good men kill each other? Were they depraved? Were they brutal? Had she, Brenna, fallen in love with a savage man?
Some men’s motives could be explained. They were greedy. Ruthless. They craved power, like Cavic. They sought wealth. The Ukrainians and the Kavsak mafia illustrated that clearly enough. But what about the men in the middle, the Aris who risked their lives without getting rich? What made a normal man—a husband, a father—fire mortar shells into a defenseless city? What made a sniper shoot a three year old? Was it hatred? Sure. Some men’s hearts were that hardened.
Hatred, at least, was simple.
It was the role of love that troubled her.
Ari loved his people. He’d dedicated his life to the safety of strangers. He committed hideous acts at his government’s request. She didn’t know what they were, but she knew he had. Why else did he come home so distraught? Why else did he writhe with nightmares? Had he been misguided? Used? Indoctrinated—obliquely, at the behest of those same greedy men who had the most to gain by his enlistment? Could love be implemented on a national scale? Or was its honest form really an individual one, meant to be expressed one-on-one, within a family, between friends, with neighbors? Had man’s capacity for love been co-opted by governments and religious institutions and twisted to serve its own purposes?
Because of her love for Ari—in her desire to let him define himself as he wished—she hadn’t insisted that he resign. Had she abetted the behavior that finally killed him? Had she been complicit in his death? Had she betrayed her own core values?
Before all this, she had been a pacifist. A naïve idealist with no concept of how the real world worked, her father dismissively labeled her. She had believed there was one overarching moral guide that transcended time and culture and history. Morality could be tested with one simple question: Was this act kind? If the answer was ‘no’, then it shouldn’t be performed.
Could human conflict be resolved with so simple a tenet?
She wasn’t so sure about pacifism now. History was full of examples of loving, harmless people being exterminated, sometimes millions at a time. She abhorred violence. But why should a good man turn the other cheek? Shouldn’t he fight back? Martin Luther King, Jr. said: ‘All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.’ She knew he espoused peaceful resistance. But were there times when nothing else but taking up swords would do? And didn’t that lead right back to the biggest evil of all?
War.
She sighed, exhausted by her spinning brain. Tired of standing, she returned to bed. She sat on the edge, stuck her feet into her boots and laced them up. All these months in Kavsak, she kept thinking that if only she could assemble her experiences into some cogent whole, then answers might reveal themselves, and she could reconstruct herself again. Scooting backwards, she lifted her dirty boots onto the bedcovers, laced her hands under her head, and watched daggers of light slash her ceiling.
Perhaps it was too late. She was already infected. Without her story, she was empty. She needed this war. It gave her purpose. It defined her.
Chapter 13
The sky gradually lightened.
Brenna woke with a startled cry, and sat bolt upright, gasping.
Day three.
She glanced at the window. Muted gray daylight. Great for pictures, she thought automatically. No harsh shadows. She kicked her boots free of the tangled covers and staggered to the bathroom, feeling the same dread soldiers felt as their tours neared the end. Something awful was going to happen just as she closed in on finishing the documentary—just when she finally felt a tiny ember of hope warming her heart.
Daniel.
She rushed through her morning wash-up, shivering as she worked the cold wet washcloth over her body, first to soap, then to rinse. The goose bumps made the fine hairs on her arms rise like plumes from tiny volcanoes. She toweled dry, checking her hair in the mirror. Not great. Maybe she should shampoo. God forbid, she thought sarcastically, that she die with chaotic hair. She picked at errant tufts with her fingertips. What a mess. Her hair. Her life. She stopped in mid-action, gazing at her reflection.
She looked like a ghost, a phantasm of who she once was. Whole sections of her former self had gone missing.
Crazy, messed up woman. What did Daniel see in her?
She didn’t shampoo. She wanted to get out before he woke and insisted on going with her. No way she was taking him out in this. Kavsak was her obsession. He was the innocent bystander, producing this story because his wife had wanted it and for some reason he thought it was important to finish it for her. Whatever that reason, however, it couldn’t possibly justify his walking into the hell she knew awaited.
Nothing short of lunacy warranted that.
And she met the criteria.
Mariana said so.
She picked her panties off the top of the neat stack of folded clothes on the toilet lid and pulled them on, followed by her turtleneck and fresh cargo pants. Transferring the contents from the pockets of the old pair to the new, she pulled out her great-grandmother’s tortoiseshell comb and thoughtfully ran a finger over its smooth surface. Four generations in her family had used it. Surely, she’d live to pass it on.
“No,” she told herself firmly. “No hocus-pocus talisman stuff.”
She had work to do.
In the bedroom, she collected all the Euros and U.S. dollars she had squirreled around the room in case she needed to bribe her way through roadblocks. She divided the bills and stuffed them into different pockets so she could pull out a wad and say it was all she had. As always, her passport and traveling papers were in her cargo pants. She filled a backpack with baby formula, pablum, baby wipes and other supplies she’d set aside from the crates. A guest never arrived empty-handed. Her mother had taught her that much.
She hitched the pack onto one shoulder. Jasha had her camera and gear bag. On her way out, she stood by the door surveying everything she had. She lived like a queen, compared to the Kavsaks.
Brenna opened the staircase door to the lobby and stopped. It looked like the trading floor on Wall Street during a selling frenzy. Every journalist in the hotel was downstairs, shouting, milling, panicky. Fixers were organizing rides, grabbing bags, shouting out their destinations. UNHQ and Separatist HQ news conference for talking heads and press releases. Hospital, old town, and western suburbs for the real world.
On the sidelines, Vivian Kazanowski was doing a live shot for CNN, holding a mic with one hand, pressing her network feed earpiece to her ear with the other to hear above the din. BBC photographer Nick Collins knelt on the floor, gear spread around him, stuffing his work kit. There would be photo opps galore today. In the France 24 news bureau—one of the plastic-covered shanties piled with editing equipment—she saw a tech editing footage of Pierre St. Germain doing yet another of his stand-ups from the hotel roof while tracers crossed the night sky behind him. Ho-hum. The man never left the premises. His real focus was the bar. Hard-drinking, womanizing, and cynical, he was taxiing down Geoff Garrett’s
runway.
Peering between scurrying waiters, she looked for Jasha.
A barrel-chested man wearing a straw plantation hat fell into step beside her, P. Hunter Foxworth IV. The Americans had dubbed him ‘Beau’ because he was from Atlanta, old world. A seasoned New York Times military and political analyst, he had taken pity on her when she arrived in Kavsak. Taught her how to read a war, how to distinguish news from bullshit. He should have retired years ago, but she was glad he hadn’t.
“Cavic’s First Brigade breached Separatist lines last night,” he said without preamble. “Two fronts. Cutting the city in half. Southern armored column rolled in from the istocni district and is pushing the Separatists at the bridge. Western column is squeezing the suburbs surrounding the airport—”
“Is it still open?”
“The airport? They’re glaring hard at your friend Luc and his tiny band of Merry Men. But they’re holding. Remarkably disciplined, those Canadians. Wouldn’t catch me looking down the turret of a T-55 with orders not to shoot—but I digress. Other news. Your father arrived in Vienna last night. His meetings with Cavic’s people will be much more interesting, now that your negative review has made world headlines. Congratulations, by the way—damned fine footage you got at the market.”
“Did he make any statements? My father?” She wondered if the U.S. would intervene now that her footage of the General’s massacre had been broadcast around the world.
“Sure,” Beau nodded, making his hand talk. “Yadda yadda yadda.”
Her heart sank. She’d risked her life to get the market footage, pressured Luc into risking his career, and her father still hadn’t publicly decried the General. What more proof did the man need? When would the world help these people?
Beau stopped, tugged her elbow so she would look at him, and gave her a paternal look. “Cavic has brought engineers this time, sugar, and infantry.”
Engineers cleared road blocks, she knew, and infantry—foot soldiers—meant house-to-house combat. Her heart spiraled into free fall. “He’s occupying the city,” she said in a scratchy croak.
Day Three Page 19
