The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  It had always been a source of anxiety to Collard that he would fail to recognize someone, even Charlotte. He experienced the same sensation looking at Nazir. It was the uncharacteristic expression of puzzlement, as though he was trying to work something out.

  Nazir had failed to anticipate the trap, far deadlier than Collard had allowed: the perfect ambush. Collard knew then that neither of them was meant to walk out alive. Churton’s talk of letting justice take its course was a smokescreen. Collard was the intended victim too, and men with firearms were hidden, waiting to kill. He didn’t know whether to turn and run, shout a warning to Nazir or stand frozen, hoping everyone else would too.

  Through steamed-up windows he saw the blurred group of teenage children about to enter the building. Any moment they would be among them. The door opened bringing with it a gust of noisy chatter, under which he heard a discreet noise like a polite cough in a public space.

  Nazir was taking his hands out of his coat pockets. He rocked gently then fell back into the plants which closed around him, leaving Collard with the memory of a neat hole in the man’s forehead, a look of silent surprise and a fine spray of blood as the back of the skull blew away.

  An altercation broke out among the children gathered by the door. Collard thought they must have seen but they were being brattish. The blood on the leaves washed away under the steady drip of water.

  Collard tensed for the second shot, waiting for it to drill into his brain. The alcove where Nazir had stood gave no sign of his having been there.

  Nothing happened. Collard left the way he had been told by Tranter, away from the main entrance. Then he turned back in case he walked into his own ambush and went the other way.

  Seconds passed in an eternity: crash time, he thought as he pushed through the crowd of children, careful not to hurry. The girl who had given him the finger stared at him with the same perplexed look he had seen on the face of Nazir.

  The New World Order

  Collard waited for the after-effect. No shock kicked in and no one came after him. He shivered in the vulnerable open of the park gardens after the sweat of the Tropical House. The only other person out was an old woman bent by age that made her look like she was inspecting the arse of her waddling Pekinese. Collard was rebellious at the thought of how much his escape would upset Tranter and Churton. Now they would come at him twice as hard.

  He followed signs to the main railway station, listening out for the sound of police sirens that never materialized. A bureau de change gave him marks and he bought a ticket to the airport. He ignored Tranter’s instructions to check the information desk. He wasn’t supposed to be alive anyway. Survival left him lightheaded. He celebrated with a drink. He told himself he was behaving normally. He traded the return half of his ticket for a flight from Köln to Gatwick, went back to the main station and took the next train, using up most of his marks. He concentrated only on the most immediate physical details and actions, refusing to ask why someone wanted him dead.

  No one stopped him leaving Köln and nobody waited for him at Immigration in Gatwick.

  He tried to use his credit card to draw sterling from an ATM in the arrivals hall but it was rejected. He must have exceeded his limit. His ordinary bank account would be in credit because his salary went into it so he used his debit card to request £50. It too was rejected.

  Every other machine at the airport refused him, whatever cards he tried. He attempted cashing a cheque at a bureau de change, which confirmed the bar on his name. The teller gave him a pitying look as she tore it up.

  Someone didn’t want him to access his money.

  He hadn’t been meant to come back. Now he had, a block had been put on all his accounts.

  They wanted to turn him into a non-person.

  He had ten pounds and some change, plus some marks, which he converted, giving him just under twenty pounds.

  It was enough to get him to Heathrow, where he retrieved his car from short-term parking with a cheque. The attendant took his card details and left it at that.

  The petrol gauge showed under half a tank. Collard watched the car-park barrier rise and thought how only yesterday they were going to drop him in prison for seven years, where he would have probably ended up writing mad letters to left-wing politicians accusing the government of conspiracy. Now they would simply remove him as effectively as they had Nazir. Whatever borrowed time he had would run out with the little money he had.

  A car hooted him from behind.

  His death would be backdated; that’s what they would do. They would turn him into a victim of 103 after all.

  He drove out of the airport.

  The symmetry was perfect: he would end up where he should have been all along. There would be no announcement: his name lost and buried among the list of the dead. So many fictions masquerading as fact.

  He drove into town, envious of how secure other drivers looked, even the miserable ones.

  He used a phone box in England’s Lane and called Round’s home. The answerphone was on. He didn’t leave a message. He tried and failed to track down Stack. He thought of asking Evelyn to lend him money and reached him at home but Evelyn was reluctant to see him, saying he knew about his affair with Stack.

  ‘It’s ancient history.’

  Evelyn was protective of Stack. Collard took that to mean he was jealous.

  ‘This isn’t about her.’

  ‘I suppose you had better come over.’

  Evelyn was wildly drunk when he answered the door. He raised his fist and shook with anger as he tried to punch Collard, only to fall against him and end up on the floor. Collard had to help him to his feet. Evelyn gathered what was left of his dignity and weaved his way stiffly towards the kitchen. By the time he sat down at the table he seemed to have forgotten the altercation.

  Collard asked if he knew where Stack was.

  ‘Gone abroad,’ Evelyn said airily.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Malta.’

  ‘What’s she doing there?’

  ‘Following a lead.’

  ‘What’s the point? Nazir’s dead. He was shot in front of my eyes and I’m probably not meant to be alive either.’

  Evelyn looked at him in slurred disbelief.

  ‘They’re trying to make out I was involved in Nazir’s arms deals and now my credit cards have been stopped and I can’t use my bank account.’

  Evelyn slowly shook his head. ‘I might be the only person you can trust. You’d better tell me what happened.’

  Collard did and sensed Evelyn was surprised by none of it.

  ‘Do you know Stack is a tame hack for the spooks?’

  Again Evelyn shook his head. ‘No, she’s not. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I need money so I can disappear.’

  Evelyn’s hand trembled. He looked in pain. More than that, he appeared in anguish.

  ‘There’s something we need to talk about first.’

  Collard waited expectantly.

  ‘Take me out and I’ll lend you whatever one of those bloody machines will give me. You can drop me off in town. I’m in a mood to return to old haunts.’

  They took Collard’s car. Evelyn remained silent and morose. Collard feared he was about to endure a forlorn declaration of the man’s feelings for Stack. Evelyn massaged his leg, which had developed a habit of going dead on him. A coughing fit racked his body, pitching him forward in his seat.

  ‘Is it about Stack?’

  ‘It concerns her indirectly. It’s about Churton.’ Evelyn was breathless. ‘I’ve known him a long time.’

  ‘Have you been informing on me all along?’

  It seemed so obvious Collard felt only embarrassment.

  He wondered what had prompted the admission: yet another secret that drew the strands tighter.

  Evelyn wheezed. His breathing sounded like an old saw. He was such a wreck Collard found it hard not to sympathize.

  ‘There’s no sign of financial benefit. You
live like a student.’

  ‘It was never the money. It turned into a pretty shoddy business, but it wasn’t always. I was a patriot, even an idealist. In today’s jargon that would translate into all the wrong words: racist, imperialist, bigot, misogynist.’

  Evelyn coughed again until his face went purple and Collard waited for his heart to explode. The fit subsided, leaving him gasping.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Not for your forgiveness,’ Evelyn said with some of his old panache. ‘I’m not sentimental about many things but I am about Stack. I don’t like you because of you and her but I’m trying to keep that out of it. You’ll get your comeuppance.’

  Sooner than you realize, thought Collard.

  ‘When I got sick Stack took over from me for Churton, on my recommendation.’

  Collard waited for a red light. He turned up towards the cricket ground and the park, wondering if that was what Stack fucking him had really been about.

  ‘Isn’t there anyone who isn’t in this?’

  ‘Spare me your anger. Stack’s a mole in a way I wasn’t.’

  Collard thought Evelyn was straying into make-believe, disguising the grubby transaction with fantasy.

  ‘Moles are blind.’

  ‘Suit yourself, but it’s true. I was the cynical, boozy foreign correspondent who turned into a cliché. Stack’s different. Stack’s gold. For years I wrote what they told me, all lies, fixes and backstabbing. I did for Scargill in the miners’ strike: all made-up balls. The Guildford bombers, a complete fit-up. Did anyone care?’

  ‘What did that achieve?’

  ‘Nothing, probably. It’s all a front to stop people asking the right questions or, rather, the wrong questions. I confessed to Stack after my heart attack. Mea culpa. She said she wanted to take my place.’

  ‘As your mole?’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  Having done Churton’s bidding for years, Evelyn now planned to bite the hand that had fed him. Stack represented his younger, more optimistic self and she had hardened his resolve to smash the rotten system.

  ‘No more secrets,’ he said, a wild gleam in his eye. ‘Secrets are the cancer of the body politic. It’s what the British do. Secrecy and smut. Oh yes, and irony. Stack’s a woman. That’s important. We’re hunters now. We’ll show up that bitch Maggie for what she is, drive a stake through her heart, and that shit Churton too. They turn to dust afterwards.’

  He was quite mad, Collard thought, almost admirably so. Evelyn giggled.

  ‘Don’t believe a word of what I say. In a world of secrecy there is no trust. Perhaps I can’t even depend on Stack. She might be working to her own order, using me, and I won’t find out until it’s too late. But I’ll still prove them wrong.’

  He seemed to be in the grip of psychosis, like Valerie Traherne’s description of Angleton.

  ‘Wait and see. It will be about a whole New World Order. It’s the end of an era. The ice pack isn’t holding and those nuclear submarines gliding in the deep are dinosaurs. The future will be no fun.’

  Collard drove on through the park over to Baker Street and into Mayfair. In the capsule of the car he felt like a time traveller lost in space.

  Evelyn said, ‘Look around you: signs of the boom everywhere. Boom means explosion too. It’s how planes go when they blow up.’

  ‘Is there a connection?’

  ‘Between boom and boom?’ Evelyn looked droll. ‘I ask myself every night when I say my prayers whether the whole thing isn’t about money. The root of all evil, old boy. Ideology, politics, fanaticism weren’t responsible for that explosion. It was money.’

  They stopped at a Barclays cash machine. Collard stayed in the car. Evelyn became timid when faced with the mechanical rigmarole. Even for someone who was drunk he took a long time working out how to get his cash. He came back with thirty pounds, saying it was all the machine would cough up.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll pay you back when I can.’

  ‘Take it. Feel free. It’s only money. Won’t get you very far.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere. I don’t mind. Just drive a bit.’

  They drove on. There was evidence everywhere of the changing face of Britain, transformed in the last decade to become flatter, harder and more primary. Collard had provided the security systems for the huge new temples to spending, the giant American-style supermarkets and the vast retail outlets. The scale of everything had changed: enormous space was needed to display the bulk buying that fuelled the spending. Over-slick presenters on television declared the British had changed from a nation of shopkeepers into one of shoppers. The blunt fact was the country had become more American, which in some ways he didn’t mind after the dreariness of growing up in the 1950s.

  ‘There is a price,’ he heard Evelyn’s tired voice saying. ‘What created and drove that boom was the indiscriminate sale of weapons. Remember Thatcher is a grocer’s daughter. She ran the arms business like it was the corner store: profit not scruples. Government, banks, business, the intelligence services all knew and all did it, gleefully, and it all links up from the retail counter to counter-terrorism. Iran. Iraq. You name it.’

  Collard drove down Piccadilly past Fortnum’s, where Churton had first casually mentioned Nazir.

  ‘If you want to know what Flight 103 was really about it’s what you see all around you and what really paid for it,’ Evelyn said. ‘We’re all implicated. The boom was created by those illegal arms sales and your business is nothing more than an extension of that: you contribute to the state’s security, which will only increase. The cynical view would be it doesn’t matter a hoot who put the bomb on board because the whole point was to find something bigger and more tragic and more headline-grabbing than the shit that was about to hit the fan.’

  ‘What shit?’

  Evelyn gave a wheezy laugh. ‘You should know. You’re in it.’

  ‘Arms to Iraq?’

  ‘Or Iran. Once the war between Iran and Iraq was done, the show was over. Questions were bound to be asked. The Yanks got stuck with Iran–Contra and we would have had the same, without the convenient distraction of that explosion. Good timing for a man like Churton, who would have stood to be exposed. Now they can lose all that under the carpet while searching for terrorists. Oh, there’ll be a bit of a stink but everything will be arranged to make it look like a few small fry, probably innocents like you, farted out of order. That’s what Stack and I are going to expose – the real stink.’

  Evelyn faltered like he couldn’t remember a word he had been saying. He fiddled with his cigarettes.

  ‘Take me home. It’s past a boy’s bedtime.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to go into town.’

  ‘Fuck the old haunts.’

  Collard thought of Round with his full diary, social and professional, the two rarely distinguishable.

  Evelyn said, ‘That strange, sinister noise you’ve been hearing is the shuffle of closing ranks. They’re dumping you to save themselves. That’s how it goes. It’s an age-old story and the only surprising thing is that anyone is surprised when it happens.’

  As they turned into Evelyn’s road he said with gloomy relish, ‘They will probably kill me for my heretic thought. They’d be doing me a favour. The body’s fucked as it is and my mind hasn’t been right since they put me on medication. Of course the doctors all work for Churton and their pills mess with my head, as you can probably tell.’

  Collard stopped outside the flat. Evelyn seized Collard’s arm with bony fingers that gripped with surprising strength.

  ‘They’ll find me dead, of course. I’ll be consigned to a bizarre and lonely death everyone will say was an accident. But you’ll know it wasn’t and don’t worry; I’ll find a way to keep in touch.’

  The earlier bravura was gone, replaced by a frightened, trembling man. Collard watched, in awful fascination, as a solitary tear made its way down Evelyn’s cheek. He sniffed and searched his pocket
s for a handkerchief, gave up and produced a crumpled notebook. Collard watched him flick through a mess of notes and scribbling. Evelyn tore out a page, folded it and handed it to Collard.

  ‘You’ll make sense of it.’

  Collard glanced at the jottings of a madman. He put the page away.

  ‘Don’t let anyone hurt Stack. It doesn’t matter what they do to me but make sure she isn’t harmed.’

  Evelyn stumbled out of the car. Collard drove away, watching in his rear-view mirror as Evelyn fumbled for his keys and dropped them.

  Collard drove back the way they had come, down to Knightsbridge and the river where the old money lived. The marble facades of the last ten years were to be found further east, towards the City.

  Evelyn’s fractured confession seemed in keeping with the opacity of everything: editions of the truth, liberal sprinklings of fear and fantasy. Evelyn’s paranoia had consumed him as Collard watched. He wondered if it was catching, like a virus.

  Traffic flowed. Lights were kind. More and more of the capital was illuminated, whole buildings lit up in useless display, saying Britain had money to burn. In Knightsbridge two minor celebrities were leaving Mr Chow’s. Pubs had been made over, turned from gloomy parodies of the Victorian parlour into bright cocktail bars for the new female clientele. Smart couples drifted past in foreign cars, staring ahead, not speaking. Once or twice the throb of a loud stereo invaded his sealed space. Signs of sexual availability were everywhere, in body language, on advertisement hoardings, in the gaggle of well-dressed drunken young women he stopped for at a pedestrian crossing; and deep in the cracks of the city, new breeding grounds for sexually transmitted diseases. He had taken no precautions with Stack, hadn’t discussed contraception. He had never used a condom in his life. The women he had known had all been on the pill. The first articles advocating condoms as a preventative against new fatal sexual diseases had surprised him. Now papers ran panic stories about bad blood in transfusions, giving the disease a vampire dimension. Collard thought of Evelyn’s ramblings: virtually a city of the undead, run by bloodsuckers; of financial and sexual rapaciousness; of Evelyn’s jealousy of his penetration of Stack and now Stack’s secret penetration, under Evelyn’s control, of the rotten order. Once he had been an ordinary man with dull expectations and ambitions. Since cheating death, he belonged somewhere else. Scarcely a minute passed when he didn’t remind himself of those last vital seconds, stretched to infinity.