by James Meek
Before he could put the receiver back the tank fired again. Kellas saw it rock on its suspension. His mother was saying something and when the shell landed the mujahedin cheered again and Mohamed and the commander cried out something like the Arabic praise for God. This time the smoke did not blow away. Some source that kept gushing black smoke had appeared in the desert. Kellas counted the trucks. One was still moving. The other was not there. The shell had struck one of the trucks and set it on fire. Kellas swore. He saw the turret hatch of the tank open and Astrid haul herself slowly out. All her energy had left her and her face was bloodless white. She glanced up at the platform and began to walk towards it with her head hanging down.
The commander shouted and laughed and said something to Mohamed while his eyes flicked towards Kellas.
‘Adam!’ said Mohamed. ‘The commander says: two for one! Look!’
‘Adam, tell me what’s happening,’ said Kellas’s mother. ‘I heard another bang. Is everyone OK? What happened to the people in the truck?’
‘Wait,’ said Kellas. The burning truck, like a gash through which darkness was pouring out into the sunlight, was broadening. Two dots detached themselves from it and moved away.
‘It’s OK,’ said Kellas. ‘There was an accident but it’s OK, they got out.’
He lifted the binoculars. Now he could see that the two dots were burning. They were men on fire, burning like candles. One of the men was lying on the ground, no longer moving. It looked as if he had already burned to death. The other was still running, strands of smoke coming off him twisted together with licks of flame. Kellas couldn’t make out features, only the black lengths of his body and limbs and head. The survivor fought for a while, then fell to his knees, then collapsed and didn’t move again. The two of them must surely have screamed as they ran in flames out of the burning truck and their skin was burned away but at this distance there was no way to hear them. It played out clearly and silently and quickly. Kellas heard the binoculars drop onto the floor of the platform after they slid out of his wet hand.
‘Adam?’
‘I’m still here, Mum.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m all right. It’s not me.’
‘Who? Who’s not all right?’
‘There was a mistake.’
‘Not a mistake!’ shouted Mohamed. ‘Taliban!’
‘Adam, please tell me what’s happening. I know you don’t want to.’
‘The men in the truck.’
‘Are they going to be OK?’
‘No. They’re not going to be OK.’
‘Are they dead?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum. They were Taliban.’
‘Not while we were talking? Did you know them?’
‘Adam! Two with one!’
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
One of the bodies was still burning. A man’s fat was his own wick.
‘Were they people you knew?’ His mother’s voice was trembling.
‘No. They were just people, poor people, Taliban, Mum, people who just died just now, unfortunately.’
There was a rustle over the PA and all the movies froze. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ announced the chief of the cabin crew. ‘We are now beginning our descent into New York.’
8
The immigration officer found the old Afghan visa in Kellas’s passport and asked why he’d been there. Kellas said he’d been covering the war for his newspaper.
‘What war?’ asked the immigration officer.
‘Your war,’ said Kellas.
‘My war?’
‘Not you personally. America’s war. After, you know. The…’ He held his left hand up vertically, side-on to the immigration officer, and softly drove his horizontal right hand into it.
The immigration officer’s eyes narrowed. He closed the passport. Instead of handing it back, he stood up and flapped it rapidly to and fro, like a wet print, looking around the booths and queues in the hall, as if he would see something there to help him. He shook his head, laid the passport down, stamped it and gave it to Kellas. He held up his left hand vertically, side-on to Kellas, and softly drove his horizontal right hand into it.
‘I wouldn’t do that again while you’re here,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your visit.’
Kellas walked into the United States. He withdrew three hundred dollars from an ATM, bought a copy of the New York Times and went outside to the taxi rank. The cold air frisked him and he closed the jacket and turned the collar up and hugged the bulk of the Times to his chest. He needed winter clothes. Good that he’d arrived rich and not like a poor immigrant. Good that the people in Europe were paying him the best part of two years’ salary for his work imagining a future war between this side of the Atlantic and theirs. He got into a cab and asked for 19th Street and Park Avenue South.
It was overheated in the car, and gloomy in the low, deep, black seats, the partition up against his face. The sky was a fathomless grey. They were fast on the expressways through Queens and hit traffic on the approach to the bridge. The grimy painted wooden slats on the walls of the small houses backing onto the road, the screen doors, the scruffy verges, the brake light in front brightening scarlet under a silver sign that read ‘Cadillac’, triggered in Kellas unmixable sensations of the alien and the familiar. He was undergoing the only experience an American born in the USA could never have. Their movies and TV and songs were a fake version of the real thing to them, and they knew this. They grew up with both. For foreigners arriving here, America was a marvel harder to believe, infinitely more wondrous: a real version of a notorious fake. It was a visitation of the legend played across their eyes in two electric, high-contrast dimensions, of the myth lining their ears note by note, since before they could remember. What a sound! What a sight! Like a long-lens paparazzi shot of Jesus on the beach, paler, flabbier, shorter, with less holy eyes than the icons had it, staggeringly real. Here it was, known, recognisable, and so much lumpier, grainier and messier than the exported songs and stories, and impossible to simply hate or love; with its unfinished parts, and its wide streaks of dullness, and its immense tracts of quietly getting on with things, and parts with a savagery or beauty or down-to-the-atom peculiarity that could not be National Geographicised and sold abroad. That first minute in America is the minute of the European shiver, when America’s smells are first smelled, and the realisation breaks that America is no exception to the iron rule that every country, seen from outside, seems to know itself, and that no country, seen from inside, ever does.
‘This time of day, it’s usually clear,’ said the driver. They were stationary. ‘It’s never like this.’
‘Maybe somebody broke down.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said maybe somebody broke down!’
‘Yeah, maybe. I think maybe it’s to do with the sales. Everybody’s here for the shopping.’
‘I need a coat.’
‘You need one here, mister. Is that the reason what for you’re here, shopping?’
‘I’m visiting someone.’
‘A female acquaintance?’
‘Yeah, a female acquaintance.’
‘Where d’you live, if you don’t mind me asking? London?’
‘Yes.’ Kellas looked at the driver’s badge. His name was Vitaly Morgunov.
‘She must be special for you to have come so far.’ When Kellas didn’t reply, the driver looked in the rear-view mirror at him and spoke again. ‘Did you meet her on the Internet?’
‘No.’
‘Because these Internet dating agencies, they’re a big scam. This friend of mine, he paid thirty bucks for letters in English from a beautiful girl in Czech Republic. It was her picture on the Internet. Then he finds out she’s sent the same letters to thousands of guys all over America and Europe. And she didn’t write them, either, and she’s not beautiful. I don’t even know as that she was a girl.’
A horn sounded behind and the driver moved the car forward. Kellas picked up the
Times and began working through the sections. Murders in New York were down in 2002 compared to 2001. To be precise, 503 people had been murdered, as of mid-November. The deaths in the World Trade Center weren’t being counted in last year’s total. Something different, that must have been counted as, of a more noble category, not regular joe murder. Six people had been murdered over the weekend, one shot dead in the Bronx after refusing to hand over his leather jacket. United Nations inspectors in Iraq suspected that the US and Britain weren’t telling them all they knew about Iraq’s secret weapons projects. The Times quoted a story in its London namesake claiming that Saddam Hussein had ordered hundreds of Iraqi VIPs to hide parts of weapons of mass destruction in their homes. In Australia, the prime minister said he was in favour of attacking countries that harboured terrorists before the terrorists showed their hand. In Kuwait, the foreign minister said there needed to be regime change in Iraq in order to pull Iraq back together. In Israel, at the funeral of two boys killed in a suicide bomb attack on a hotel in Kenya, one of the mourners said: ‘It’s better to have a war. Better war than a drop here, a drop there. Better for them, too. What we have now is worse.’ The Times had chosen it as its quotation of the day. A shopper coming out of the Rockefeller Center was quoted as feeling let down because the cashmere sweaters at J. Crew weren’t reduced in the sales; but there were good deals to be had at Banana Republic. Sharper Image’s top seller was an air purifier at $249.95, with a second at half price, and a free third one for the bathroom.
The parents of the bus driver Robert Mickens were interviewed. They said they’d warned him before about his Taliban jokes. Mickens had driven a Greyhound bus for five years between Philadelphia and New York. Before that, he’d worked for the parks department in Brooklyn. On Saturday he’d been taking thirty passengers to New York when he’d hit heavy traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike and tried to get around it by taking a short cut near Hightstown. He didn’t tell the passengers what he was doing and, as he drove through the unfamiliar small towns of Manapalan and Freehold, the passengers began to voice their anxiety. As they drove into Marlboro, with the passengers demanding to know where he was going, Mickens lost his temper and called out: ‘We’re going to the Taliban, don’t worry about it.’ The passengers used their mobiles to call the police. A few minutes later, the bus was hemmed in and forced to stop by a dozen police cars. Mickens was taken from the bus at gunpoint, handcuffed and charged with disorderly conduct.
Kellas looked through the glass at the questing face of a girl in a red scarf, stepping past the green neon cross in a pharmacy window, and a fat man in a beret with two chihuahuas on leads. He read snatches of songs in the junctions, in white letters printed on green signs where Delancey Street met Clinton Street. His mind snapped at lives it couldn’t reach. He would rather even have been in the Leonard Cohen song, where there was music on Clinton Street, all through the evening. It was cold in New York, Cohen sang, but he liked where he was living. There was warmth in that song. The hero had lost his wife to junk and a friend, and he forgave the friend, and he forgave the wife. The song was full of friendship, regret and craving. Of all the characters in the song, Kellas most envied the heroin. To be craved! Craving was the sort of breach in Astrid’s singleness large enough for him to pass through and in his bloody hotel den the night before he’d seen the breach open up on the screen of his netmail, when he’d been most longing to believe he was craved. That’d been the madness of injury and broken glass and darkness and the longing to escape. The first gust of freezing American wind at the sliding open of the terminal doors had uncovered the frailty of his hopes.
They were a few blocks away from the publishers’, he reckoned. He would take refuge in the deal. There was solace in money. He had Astrid’s postal address. He would hire a car and drive there. Buy himself some nice clothes, so she could see he was doing well. A black sheepskin coat and some good Italian boots. It would show her that he had nothing to worry about except her. He’d tell her what had happened at the Cunnerys’. It could be made to sound like an episode in the biography of a famous dead writer, one of those monstrous acts of selfishness and savagery that come to seem an ingredient in their genius, comforting the consumers of biographies simultaneously in their own timid virtue and their own squalid, secret transgressions. Kellas could afford to arrive in Chincoteague bloody, but not ragged. He took out the pen and the page of his manuscript and sketched little sums in a blank space. He had no money now; in fact, he was overdrawn, and since he’d resigned from The Citizen, there would be no more salary. Once he signed the contract for Rogue Eagle Rising, he’d get two-thirds of the advance, about £66,000. Minus the agent’s percentage, minus tax, he’d probably be left with £35,000. Minus the five thousand he’d just spent on a six-hour trip across the Atlantic. If Liam Cunnery cashed his blank cheque, he could be down another five. How easy it had been to spend ten thousand pounds in twenty four hours, smashing things, shouting, drinking champagne, pursuing women and sleeping. He would make a fine rich man.
Kellas paid Vitaly Morgunov off with a showy tip and pushed through a stiff revolving door, its heavy glass panels framed with thick strips of tarnished brass, into the lobby of the building where Karpaty Knox occupied three floors. The lobby was warm and light and faced with pale stone. As he walked towards the lifts, Kellas began to smile. The comfort of associating with book people; an organisation waited for him. Even though he despised the book he had written, he was succoured by the prospect of receiving the compliments they were obliged to pay.
A sharp voice cut through the quiet and the pleasant smell of the lobby, calling ‘Sir!’ The man called again, and Kellas looked round. He saw that a security guard in a coffee-and-chocolate coloured uniform, with a tin eagle pinned to the front of his hat, had got up from his desk and was coming towards him. He was carrying a clipboard. He asked Kellas what his name was. Kellas told him. The security guard ran his forefinger down the list of names on the clipboard, didn’t find Kellas, flipped a page, and found him halfway down.
‘Kellas, Adam?’ he said, looking into Kellas’s face.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re down to see Madeleine Baker-Koontz.’
‘She’s one of the editors, yes.’
‘Can you come with me, sir?’ The security guard crossed Kellas’s name off the list and led him back towards the desk. Instead of stopping, he put the clipboard down, and went on through to the street. He looked round to make sure Kellas was following him. He stood on the pavement with his hands on his hips and waited while Kellas came out. Kellas put the collar of his jacket back up. He’d left the newspaper in the cab. He began to shake with cold. The deep horn of a truck sounded from a block away and a medley of car horns answered. Two men in overalls, gloves and hats were hefting crates of beer bottles from a parked van and stacking them outside a restaurant next door to the Karpaty Knox building. The guard leaned forward and put his hand on Kellas’s shoulder and raised his voice to make himself heard over the din of crashing bottles. ‘If you’d like to go across the road to the diner opposite, right over there –’ he pointed to a red illuminated sign ‘—grab yourself a coffee and wait, Mrs Baker-Koontz will join you shortly.’
Before Kellas had finished uttering the first word of his first question, the guard had his hands held out and his chin up, stopping him. ‘Sir – sir – sir – please. Those are the instructions we’ve been given. I don’t have any more information, and I can’t let you wait in the lobby. No, Mrs Baker-Koontz is not inside the building. Please. Sir. Please.’ His hand on the shoulder; a little pressure, now. ‘If you’d just like to go over to the diner and have a coffee, or a tea, whatever, and Mrs Baker-Koontz will be with you. That’s all I’m authorised to say. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Please go, sir.’
Kellas crossed the road to the diner, found an empty booth and ordered a coffee. He clasped his hands around the glossy white sides of the thick china mug. He needed the heat more than the drink.
Something landed on Kellas’s table with a heavy slap. It was a padded yellow envelope. A woman in her forties, wide, big-bosomed and agile, had dropped it there. She was taking off her handbag, coat and scarf, and while she did so, she was staring down at Kellas, as if he knew very well what was going on and she was interested to hear from him how it might be his fault. There was pity in her eyes, and anger. She checked his name, introduced herself as Madeleine Baker-Koontz and shook his hand when he got up. They sat down facing each other. It seemed to be an effort for her to fashion a screen of gentility over her face. She forced a smile, picked up the menu, opened it, closed it and put it down.
‘You’re not in a hurry, are you?’ she asked.
‘No. Are you?’
‘No!’ She laughed. The information that she wasn’t in a hurry filled Kellas with senseless fear, the kind that rises out of banal, harmless words in the last nightmares before sunrise.
‘We haven’t met,’ said Baker-Koontz. ‘We exchanged emails.’
‘About a promotional trip next year.’
‘Right.’ She nodded, and laughed again. It wasn’t only that she found this funny; to her it was hilarious, too, that things she’d taken seriously before had turned into jokes. She was high on irony. ‘Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not going to happen.’
‘The trip.’
‘Not just the trip. We’re not publishing your book. I should be—’
‘In America?’
‘Anywhere. France, Britain, America – we’re not publishing your book, period. I should be saying “they”, not “we”. I don’t work for Karpaty Knox any more. I quit a few hours ago. So I shouldn’t really be doing this, meeting you, giving you the bad news. It’s not my job. But I thought, poor guy, he’s flying into New York City from London, he’s going to step off the plane, get to the office and nobody’s going to tell him anything.’
‘Thanks for the pity.’
Baker-Koontz laughed again. Kellas realised that he had just used his teeth to pull a strip of skin off his lower lip, where it had puffed up and hardened in the cold of the street. ‘They said “Sure, go ahead, but take it outside.” They made me clear out my desk first.’ She looked with curiosity at Kellas. ‘You’re taking this pretty well. You’re not a weeper.’ Kellas shook his head. ‘You know, this would all have been much easier if you’d seen your emails today, or answered your phone. I’ve been calling you for the last couple of hours. What do you have a cellphone for, if you don’t switch it on?’
