The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  Next would come famine, said the local doctor who showed Angleton Sheehan’s corpse, freshly dead, naked on a dirty mattress in a concrete room with a single high window. His heart had been cut out, with his liver, penis and testicles, taken as delicacies by those who had killed him. The doctor said Sheehan had been a willing donor.

  Extras

  Collard found them in the seaside town of Essouira in Morocco where hundreds had gathered to play extras in a multimillion-dollar American film. Collard got hired for a big battle scene. Most of the day was spent sitting around in the heat, waiting for the shots to be prepared. Collard was given a uniform. The extras covered a couple of acres. It looked more like a music festival than a film set. They did their take twice and had to do it again because wristwatches were spotted. The scene seemed chaotic to Collard, with none of the extras much interested or motivated. An assistant director addressed the crowd through a megaphone in English and French, asking for more energy. The next time, as he faced the charging crowd, Collard believed he had been transported back to the actual battle. Skirmishes became real. Two hooded figures threw themselves on him. He brushed them aside, moving deeper into the battle, with his fake rifle and bayonet, his blood up. He made to stab a figure crouched over a fallen soldier but his shadow gave him away. The figure turned to find him poised, bayonet ready. They made eye contact. They were both the same, but changed. It was like looking at Nick but Nick as someone else. About himself, he couldn’t say. They were just a couple of extras, as they had been when it had all started in Frankfurt.

  Nick moved quickly, feinting and running off in the other direction. Collard let him go.

  That night he saw them sitting at an outside table in a crowded café. Nick’s hair was very short, making him almost unrecognizable. Collard asked if he could sit at their table because there was nowhere else. Nick made no show of recognizing Collard, who was in his own state of shock, less from seeing Nick with the girl in the Polaroid than from the infant in her arms.

  Collard sat down as a stranger. He asked Nick his name. Finn, said Nick. They talked about the filming.

  Nick was gone for ever.

  The girl asked Collard if he had children.

  ‘I have a boy named Nick. He’s a good son. I love him very, very much.’

  He asked the name of the child. It was the same as his.

  Collard paid for the two beers and a bottle of water, leaving the money and the bill on the table, with Nick’s Polaroid of the girl slipped underneath.

  ‘Maybe we’ll meet again.’

  ‘We’re here for a while,’ the young man answered. They were two strangers exchanging pleasantries. ‘We could eat together one night.’

  ‘I would like that,’ Collard said.

  Nick smiled and looked him in the eye and in that look Collard recognized the dream he was in and his 46.5 seconds were about to begin – he had been the one, not Nick, on that flight all along.

  The Nervous Passenger

  December 21 1988

  Angleton was back in the Frankfurt terminal, on the day, and forewarned but lost in a fog of his own making. He recognized Barry only in terms of trying to remember where he had seen him before. A spy to the last, Angleton censored his betrayal. Nobody had learned his secret.

  Angleton could see the boy was the future, with his girl waiting at Heathrow. Whenever he pursued the line of their story he saw flailing limbs as they were ejected side by side into the night, the tiny embryo in her womb condemned with them.

  He was not a sentimental man but he decided he would take their place on the doomed flight, the last gallant gesture of an incurable romantic, which would also perform the task of getting him out: a piggyback into oblivion. He feared the end: one of the finest minds of its generation snuffed out (but so wrong so often). The Cold War stood as an empty joke. The future would be terrifyingly different, determined by the disenfranchised mass, poverty and repression the breeding ground for terror motivated by a hatred its victims would fail to comprehend. All the useless baubles of the marketplace, the great slide of consumerism, predicated on the understanding that everything was replaceable and you could never want or get too much, as Evelyn had worked out. It made sense only as a gigantic devouring conspiracy.

  Angleton tried to reach the boy, to tell him to flee for valid reasons; he wanted to warn of the girl’s father. Angleton was jealous of their youthful physical passion, something always missing in his life, with its higher, misplaced calling. As for the unrequited Valerie Traherne, her affair with Hoover had affected him as badly as Evelyn had been by Collard’s brief encounter with Stack. Had he ever been young?

  The boy’s worship of the girl and their future made everything else superfluous. Angleton would explain the terms of their contract: if it were broken everything would be undone. The boy would find he was back on the plane, his future nothing.

  Whatever Angleton said to him, he fucked up and the boy looked at him like he was crazy and (worse) a bore. He had failed, as always.

  In transit at Heathrow, Angleton saw the boy again, in urgent discussion with his father, saying something had come up and he needed to delay his onward flight.

  The father sounded concerned and understanding. He offered to stay too if needed but the boy said he could take care of matters. He would bring the girl with him to New York, if that was all right. The father said yes, and they agreed he would fly on in order not to disappoint Charlotte.

  A detail of coincidence: Angleton recognized the father’s tie; the same as one of his.

  Angleton sat in departures next to a very drunk American Indian who was way too gone to fly. He saw Sheehan make a couple of passes through the lounge, frantic, searching in vain. He listened to the Indian snore and contemplated the boarding card clasped in the man’s hand. He felt so tired. Angleton’s hair was long now, like an Apache, tucked up inside his homburg. The presence of the slumbering Indian encouraged him to let it down. He rocked rhythmically as he recited the Apache death chant under his breath before removing the Indian’s boarding card and joining the passengers as they crowded in an impatient shuffle through the umbilical tube that connected the terminal to the fuselage. Welcome aboard, said the stewardess.

  ‘You bet,’ Angleton said, frisky for the first time in years.

  He turned right where he once would have gone left into business and first class, glimpsing Barry who had got an upgrade.

  It took a long time to get to the back of the cabin, past the settling passengers who blocked the aisle. The pressurized air reminded him of old soda siphons, with torpedo-like tubes to inject fizz.

  There was a muddle over his seat. The boy’s father was sitting in it. They examined boarding cards. Through an administrative oversight they seemed to have been issued with the same seat. They shared a joke about airline inefficiency and introduced themselves.

  There was plenty of room and Angleton sat down next to Collard, leaving a space between them out of politeness. He said he recognized Collard’s tie. On such small coincidences life turned.

  ‘Sapiens qui prospicit.’

  Collard looked surprised to be reminded. They talked about their days at school. Angleton thought: Perhaps it would not be such a bad flight after all.

  The captain sounded reassuring on the intercom, in the way airline captains always did. Angleton had never met anyone off an airplane with the same tone, combining boredom, reassurance and an absolute faith in the ability to defy the laws of gravity. The captain announced a delay while they awaited clearance for take-off.

  The cabin staff went through their safety exercises (for the very last time), ‘in the unlikely event of an emergency’. In the unlikely event of a fucking emergency! He wanted to stand and shout, make a public exhibition, demand to be let off; always a second from panic, always a nervous passenger. So much he had flown from.

  Most passengers ignored the cabin crew’s rigmarole. There was no sense of forewarning in anyone’s voice or action. Angleton was reassure
d by the banality of it all and decided his fears were groundless. So much humanity going about its humdrum business would prevail: the folded coat on the empty seat would be there in seven hours’ time, undisturbed. His eyes misted at the thought of all the mistakes he had made, a fine catalogue of errors. Lee Harvey Oswald. That was one secret he would take with him.

  Angleton asked if Collard was a nervous flier.

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man’, Angleton said. ‘Was that your son I saw you with earlier?’

  They talked of Nick, who had been unable to join Collard at the last minute.

  ‘He’s having some trouble with a girl. Not trouble, exactly. He seems very devoted to her. They have to sort some things out then they’ll fly out and join us tomorrow.’

  Angleton sighed and thought it would be nice to be young enough again to have girl trouble.

  At last the big jet swung on to the runway.

  Here we go now, Angleton thought, listening to the captain’s voice smooth away the last of their delay, preparing for take-off.

  KISS, Angleton thought: keep it simple, stupid. Well, quite simple. Sheehan fed a bomb into the Frankfurt system for Barry to discover. Barry defused it and added it to his evidence, contained in the several bags he personally loaded onto the plane, believing his mission accomplished.

  But Sheehan wasn’t done.

  Glorious, inefficient Heathrow, where baggage handlers wandered off for official forty-five-minute tea breaks, leaving containers on the tarmac prior to loading, where conditions were so chaotic and insecure that for a man like Sheehan, dressed in a Day-Glo coat, it was a piece of cake to walk the case across the tarmac and load it on the abandoned container, positioning it where it would achieve maximum damage. Maybe he thought twice, given his daughter. Exquisite dilemma: family or country. Fuck family; Angleton would have. Not even a complicated device, like they would try to claim in the evidence, just a regular ‘ice-cube timer’, favoured by terrorists from the Middle East, a device not that reliable but usually up to the job, primed on the ground and activated seven or eight minutes after take-off by the drop in air-pressure and set to detonate half an hour after that. Two bombs on board below them, then; one inactive, one not.

  A basic lesson of counter-intelligence was that any given event was open to every possible interpretation. Few thought to consider the obvious.

  Angleton remembered his last great personal and spiritual crisis, prompted by the man sitting down the front of the plane, upgraded to first class. He had encouraged Barry with the best of intentions but with the diagnosis of his final illness he realized what untold damage Barry could do to the country and institutions Angleton held most dear. He was dying and Casey was dying too. He confessed his plot to Casey and returned to the fold. He was Barry’s betrayer. After that Sheehan ran Barry and knew his moves. Mea culpa.

  They hurtled down the runway and then they were up in the air. Angleton watched the last of the dark ground rush away. It had all gone so fast.

  Officially he had been dead nearly seventeen months. He would sit and watch it all fall apart and Cocteau’s outriders would bring his coffin with them (that single coffin!) and he would dine that night with Marie Cesares, star of Orphée.

  The plane climbed steeply into the night skies.

  Collard listened to the old man humming. One for the money. Two for the show.

  Half an hour later he looked at his watch. It was coming up to seven o’clock on the evening of December 21, 1988.

  ‘What’s the movie?’ Angleton asked a passing stewardess.

  Collard settled back and dreamed vividly of a strange encounter with Nick in which they seemed not quite to recognize each other. There was a baby and the young mother he knew only from a Polaroid. Collard surfaced from the dream, aware he had barely dozed, struck by the clarity of it.

  He opened his eyes and thought: Without hope there is nothing.

  Read on for an exclusive extract from Chris Petit’s gripping new novel,

  PALE HORSE RIDING

  Available in eBook and print 16th November 2017

  I

  The commandant rode the white mare drunk. These dawn rides happened most days, hanging on for dear life, still plastered from the night before.

  The endless paperwork taken home took until past midnight, drinking all the while, followed by more drink, smoking and the gramophone, in the futile hope of relaxing. Most nights he collapsed on the couch or the floor.

  He showered before riding and changed into a fresh uniform; standards to maintain. He left through the garden gate in the wall that led directly into the garrison. That morning he staggered more than usual on his way up the main street to the stables. The clean smell of the stalls, dry hay and the compact aroma of horse manure never failed to reassure, compared to the general stink.

  The mare stood patiently as he clumsily saddled her. He could have got someone else, except he didn’t want to see anyone and didn’t wish to be seen in an unfit state.

  The mare’s shoes sparked on the cobbles as he rode out into the last of the night. Usually their ring was a first sign to sober up, prelude to the gallop to come, close to 50kph, shaking the drink out of him. Some days he was too drunk to saddle up and rode bareback. Lately he had taken to using the western saddle, with its long stirrup and exquisitely tooled leatherwork, given as a birthday gift so he could think of himself as riding the range. That morning the western had been too heavy to lift and he took the ordinary saddle.

  At the gate the guard raised the barrier. The commandant didn’t return the salute and kicked the mare into a trot. After the river, he spurred her and rode fast through misted countryside, close to the mare’s neck, anticipating the transition from drunkenness to clarity. It was the reason to drink, but too often now he experienced none of the pleasure of the blur of animal grace, the magnificence of the beast beneath him, pounding speed, sky, weather and landscape. Instead everything he had been drinking to forget came crashing down.

  Once, half-blinded by a hailstorm, he had achieved a glimpse of what he considered the equivalent to sainted revelation. His anointed task took on a sense of divine mission – as others more elevated than he must see it – rather than the usual endless, uphill struggle.

  He spurred the mare on, leaning forward, using the whip, mesmerised by the ground rush beneath, mud kicked up. Racing through shallow water, it splashed his face. Let the mare decide their course. She fancied to have a mind of her own that morning and they could have ridden on forever, away and away. As she raced like a beast possessed, his stomach rebelled at the previous night’s drink and he turned his head and spewed, watching silver spittle and vomit taken off in the slipstream. Done now, catharsis achieved. For a delicious moment he thought of nothing. Forgot about his wife, her coldness, and his hopeless infatuation for her seamstress that ran through him like a dark river. Forgot about the colossal difficulties of the job, the endless feuding, the cretins he had to carry out his orders, dross that mocked any notion of elite, the daily mountains of paperwork, impossible logistics, disease, squalor, and an unsympathetic superior command that issued no helpful or clear instructions, interpreting only in terms of what he could not have, what was not available, answering every complaint by telling him it was his to solve as he saw fit. Nine days a week would not be enough to accomplish half what needed to be done. He had never dreamed he would preside over something of which he was so secretly ashamed.

  He had no mind to go back, but duty called. He slowed to a trot, became aware of the bedewed morning and cloudless sky above the mist.

  He saw himself from a heavenly standpoint, a creature lost.

  He recalled hair-raising bareback rides and how such moments of solitary risk, in which he entrusted his safety to the mare, provided the only pleasure in life. First light. Every day a brand-new morning. Wildness of thought drove him where others saw only the obtuse bureaucrat. The sun pierced the horizon. He must have had a skinful. Usually
one stiff gallop was enough to clear the head. He breathed deep and surveyed the land: paradise lost, his bitter thought. Not his fault it had turned out that way. His kingdom still; vanity perhaps to think of it as that but he had forged it with his bare hands, through the power of his will. Did anyone thank him now for managing the arsehole of the world?

  He wept at his dedication, reduced to the administrative equivalent of janitorial duties.

  The bell-jar of intrigue. His world on the point of penetration. The constant threat of outside interference. Unthinkable!

  He stared at the rising sun, returned its merciless gaze. In the white inferno a darker shape appeared to hover, he could not make out what, but it spooked the mare, causing her to rear. Her frenzy spun him and the world spun too. She gave a bellow of fright, more human than animal. As he felt himself start to fall, he saw the shape was familiar, not something he ever expected to see in his lifetime even with all the terrible things he had witnessed.

  He lay spread on the ground, arms outstretched. His brain felt loose in its pan. His body shook, the mare’s terror transmitted; she, docile now, grazing to one side.

  He staggered up, shaken, and stumbled to the mare. Already he doubted what he had seen, but his visions in drink had hitherto revealed nothing like that. He feared he might be spiritual after all, however bitterly he fought against it, feared too the priests were right, saying give them the child for its first seven years and it was theirs for life. For all his fanatical dedication, he remained susceptible to the lapsed state.