“What, like now? It’s six o’clock in the fricking morning.”
“Yeah, like now. And it’s already six forty-two. You’re going to love working with me. Go and put the coffee on. And don’t wake Juliet.”
I turned back toward the bed and shrugged the day bag off my shoulders. The door clicked shut softly behind me. How Sonny Boy had ever laid out his six-foot-six length on that tiny single mattress was a mystery. I put the bag down and went to work. I stripped the bed and ran my fingers around the stitching at the corner seams. Nothing. I unfolded the black sprung knife and made a lateral cut the length of the mattress. Foam and springs. No clues.
Then I went clockwise around the room—starting at the headboard. Then the wastepaper basket, the wardrobe, desk, chair, mat. Nothing. Within a few minutes the room looked like it had been hit by a tornado. A cockroach bolted for the door. The drawer split apart with a sharp crack as the hardened steel blade cantilevered the wooden base upward. If that didn’t wake Juliet, nothing would.
But it was Roberts who walked in, coffee in hand.
“What the fuck are you doing? Dis is ma fuckin’ ’ouse, mate! Seriously!”
He was aghast, and scared.
“I told you what I’m doing.” I was on my knees, sweeping my palms under the carcass of the wardrobe.
And then I saw it.
“Give me a hand.”
Roberts waved the coffee cups around and then, failing to find a flat surface other than the floor, put them down on the smooth concrete. Together we lifted the iron bed frame and turned it over. Submission, not rebellion. Roberts was now an accomplice, part of the enterprise.
“Rest it on its back.”
The bed frame languished in the middle of the room, stranded like an upturned metal beetle. The mesh of springs spanning the frame sagged pathetically. I wondered if it had been defeated by Sonny Boy. The four legs pointed toward the ceiling. Three of them were capped with a disk of soldered metal. One had been sheared open, a dark eye socket staring blankly at the lightbulb. I took the torch out of my pocket and shone it down the tube.
Nothing.
I spat on my index finger and gently rotated it knuckle deep around the inside of the bed leg and then withdrew it slowly. Stuck to the pad of my finger was half a cigarette paper, damp with saliva. Shining bright blue in the glare of the LED beam was one word handwritten in Biro: Juliet.
I turned around. She was standing there, naked except for a pair of white cotton briefs and a silver pendant glistening at her neck. She covered her breasts slowly with crossed forearms and stared at me, mouth open, realization dawning. She was, simply, beautiful. Which—although it shouldn’t have—made everything that followed all the harder.
“Why are you here?” Her eyes darted around the room and then back to me. “What are you . . . what have you done?” She took a half step back into the gloom of the living room.
“Don’t run,” I warned her. I turned to Roberts. “Neither of you. Sit down. Both of you.”
“Or what, hard man? Eh? Man, fuck you! My house! In my house! No, fuck you.” Roberts’s eyes were wild, but he didn’t move. I handed him the cigarette paper. He looked at it and then at Juliet. “What the . . . ?”
“I said, sit down.” I scooped up the sheet I’d taken off the mattress and tossed it to Juliet. She kept one hand across her breasts; with the other she caught the sheet and pulled it across her chest. She sat down. Roberts followed suit. I squatted on my haunches in front of her.
“Sonny Boy, the man who was here, the big Irish engineer—he gave you something.” She broke my gaze and looked at the floor. “Look at me. He gave you something. You have to give it to me. Do you understand?”
She looked up, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I could hear Roberts’s breathing and the chirp and drone of distant morning traffic creeping its way into the bedroom.
“Now.”
She didn’t move. Neither did Roberts. I could feel the SIG in the waistband of my trousers. I contemplated pushing the tip of the silencer into the hollow between her breastbone and her trachea—but unlike with Micky, I couldn’t shoot Juliet, or even threaten to. I needed Roberts. And she wasn’t guilty of anything, except maybe infidelity.
Juliet moved her hands up, slowly, to behind her neck. The sheet fell away. Roberts grunted his disapproval. Looking neither at me nor at Roberts, she unhooked the clasp of the necklace and dropped it into my palm. I stood up and backed away from them and then turned the pendant over between my left thumb and forefinger. It was a plain, hinged silver locket, about an inch long, engraved with the initial J.
“He gave you this?” Roberts and I spoke simultaneously.
“You said it was from your mum,” Roberts continued. “What the fuck? It’s got your fucking initial on it. . . .” He ran both his hands down his face and then held them up as if in surrender. “Jules, baby . . .” He stopped and looked up at me and then at the floor.
“Calm down,” I said, fiddling with the catch. “It’s not her initial. It’s probably his mother’s, right?”
“Oh, that’s fine, then, yeah? Like totally fine. Like man-mountain Irish Romeo gives my woman his mother’s locket? Yeah, that’s great, fucking great.” He looked at me again. I touched the SIG behind my back and spoke to Juliet.
“Don’t run. Promise?” She nodded. Her hands hovered out in front of her, palms up, fingers apart. Tears dripped onto her breasts. I told her to cover up and she wrapped herself absentmindedly in the sheet, toga-style, wiping her eyes as she did so. She looked sad and alone.
The locket popped open under pressure from my thumbnail to reveal a recent portrait of Juliet, taken on the beach by their bar. She was looking into the lens, happy, her hair like a mane of fire in the setting sun. I opened the knife again and worried the tip under the photo. It popped out to reveal a piece of folded plasticized paper packed into the recess of the pendant. I handed the locket back to Juliet. She gripped it tightly. The silver chain looped over her wrist. She remained on the floor, but Roberts picked himself up. He was hesitant, calculating possibilities.
I folded the knife back on itself, pocketed it and unfolded the piece of paper that had been hidden in the locket. It was a three-by-two-inch photograph and showed a balding white man—a scientist, Micky had said—walking between two traditional round African huts. His face was deeply tanned. He was in his mid-sixties. There were other figures in the background, out of focus, some with black and some with white faces. In the bottom right-hand corner of the image was a red, burned-in date stamp: the photograph had been taken five days before Sonny Boy had been evacuated back to England. The image caught the man midstep, exactly between the two thatched rondels, walking left to right. He was looking down, as if watching his step, face quartered away from the camera toward the lineup to his left. His arm was crooked, as if about to deliver a salute. It was, unquestionably, the man caught on camera with Colonel Proshunin by the school in Kabala; it was, unquestionably, my target.
I turned the photograph over. By now Roberts was standing beside me, looking at the paper. Written on the back in a thin, spidery hand were the words: “Karabunda. Cód Súlúch.”
“Karabunda,” he said. “That’s way up north. My grandad used to hunt there when he was a kid.”
“What’s it like?” I asked. “The terrain, I mean.”
“Hot. Riddled with caves. It’s a million miles from anywhere.” He stretched a finger out and pointed at the scrawl. “What’s that?” he asked me. “Cod what? It’s not Limba.”
“Code ssoo-luke,” I said. “It’s Irish.”
The room was growing hot. Juliet had stopped crying. Beads of sweat swelled at Roberts’s temples. We were standing close to each other. He looked at me and asked again what it meant.
“Code Zulu,” I said.
“Right. Great. My missus has been havin’ it off with the Joll
y Green Giant and now you’re speaking gibberish. What does it mean, Max? What does it fucking mean?”
“Maraigh gach éinne,” I said. “It means kill them all.”
14
I crouched down on the concrete floor again and reached over for one of the coffee cups Roberts had carried in while I’d been dismantling the room. The harsh, bitter kick helped bring the room back into focus. There were only two cups. I offered the remainder of mine to Juliet, but she waved my hand away with a toss of her head. Roberts sat down again, too, and drank from his; we all lit cigarettes.
“Is that a gun?” Roberts said, looking at the bulge the SIG made in the T-shirt behind my back.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“So, what . . . if she’d run, would you have shot her?”
“Uh-huh.”
Juliet looked at me.
“I wish you bloody had,” she said.
“This is fucked-up”—Roberts moved to take a drag on his cigarette but lowered his hand—“properly fucked-up. First you fuck my head up in some weird rebel-cholera mass-grave mash-up, then you fuck my house up and now you’re fucking up my marriage.” I nodded slowly and sucked the inside of my cheeks. “Max,” he said, exasperated, “who do you think I am?”
It wasn’t time to speak yet, so I kept quiet and kept listening.
“All right, I’ll tell you. I’m a fucking shit-scared taxi driver posing as a translator; a professional beer-drinking, skirt-chasing beach brother who got lucky with the girl of his dreams and who’s just about holding it together with some magic cash from white boys in suits.” His voice was rising. His Adam’s apple started to flutter. “I’ve been scared my whole life, Max. I was a scared kid in the war and I was scared shitless by Ebola. I’ve lost everything, man, everything—over and over again. Mum, Dad, my auntie, my home. Even my fucking country. Everything. Everything except her. And now, and now . . . and now what, man? Now fucking what?” He was crying freely. Juliet was weeping, too. “I don’t want to be scared anymore.” He scraped the snot and salt water away from his nose and eyes with the back of his hand. “So tell me, man, tell me. Who the fuck are you? And why does your Irish mate want to kill everyone in Karabunda?”
Now it was time to speak.
“I’ve told you who I am,” I said. “My name is McLean. Max McLean. That’s the truth. I’m a medic.” Roberts looked at me blankly.
“Medic? Are you ’avin’ a fuckin’ laugh?” Then he turned to Juliet. “He’s ’avin’ a fuckin’ laugh.”
“No, Roberts, I am not having a laugh. My name is Max. I am a medic. I learned how to be a medic in the British Army with that big Irish lad. We’re soldiers. Sort of. Or at least Sonny Boy was. He died in England after he was flown home. I came here to do a job. I didn’t know Sonny had stayed here, or that I was finishing something he started. There’s a lot of this that I don’t understand, but this”—I held up the photo—“is helping to make sense of it.”
“Make sense of what?” Roberts croaked. “For fuck’s sake! You don’t know. You had no idea your mate was here. And you have no idea what that photo means, do you? What is it, a fucking treasure map? Show me, man, show me where X marks the spot where you vanish and I get my fucking life back.” He lunged for the photo. I jerked it out of his way.
“All right, all right. Let’s do this one step at a time, shall we?”
Roberts snorted.
“Let him speak, Robbie,” Juliet chided him. Roberts began to swear at her, but I cut across him.
“And let’s start right there. Roberts, you need to have a little more faith in your wife. Sonny Boy was many things, but he sure wasn’t a Romeo, and sure as hell not to your Juliet. He needed her to—”
“Did you fuck him?” Roberts cut me off.
“Man, calm. Let me explain.”
“How the fuck would you know, Max?” And then to her: “Did you fuck him? Did you? Here? In my house? In my bed?” His voice broke. The tears came again, hard and fast, pouring out of him. He loved her; of that there was no doubt. But he could no more express it than he could shake the uncertainty he felt about her affection for him. Perhaps that’s why he went with hookers: not from an absence of love, but in anticipation of the rejection he feared would come eventually.
There was quiet in the room. I didn’t know it was his mother’s locket, and I didn’t know Juliet and Sonny Boy hadn’t slept with each other. Stranger things have happened. But not very often.
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t fuck him.” Her tears had dried up. She was calm, matter-of-fact. I liked her for that. “But I did kiss him. Once, here.” She placed her right index finger high up on her cheek, and touched herself lightly. Roberts looked at her slack-jawed. Neither of us knew what was coming next. “He told me he was going north and that I wouldn’t see him again—he said it like he wasn’t ever coming back, like he thought he was going to die, I mean. He told me not to trust Micky, and then he gave me the locket. You’re right, Max: he said it belonged to his mother. I put that photo of me in there to disguise it, like he told me. He said it was funny that we both had the same initial, me and his mum.” She stopped and held my gaze, as she had done the day I arrived.
“Go on,” I prompted her.
“He said I’d know who to give it to when the time came. And I did, didn’t I? He gave it to me to give to you, didn’t he?” I nodded. Roberts breathed out a long, hard sigh of relief.
“Babes, I’m sorry. I . . .”
“It’s all right, Robbie. Really, it is. I’m sorry. I should have told you. He just looked so . . . sad. Giving me that locket, it felt like, I dunno, like leaving a suicide note or something. He said he was a soldier, and I kissed him good-bye is all. Isn’t that what you do when soldiers go to war? He was so funny and so kind, and all the kids on the beach loved him, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t be so sad if he took that kiss with him, wherever he was going.”
She stretched out her hand to Roberts, and he took it. They sat like that for a minute—neither of them speaking, just rubbing their thumbs across each other’s knuckles. I saw then that she had been crying not because she’d been caught out, but because she’d revealed Roberts’s own lack of faith in her. In the end Roberts blew his nose into the sheet that she was wrapped up in, and then they both laughed self-consciously.
The room was hot and stuffy. Sunlight trickled in through the doorway from the main room. We were wasting time. Nowhere was safe for them, least of all there. I tried to work out what to do next. But Roberts spoke first.
“What happened to Sonny Boy, then? How did he die?”
“I know how he died, but I don’t know what killed him,” I said. “Something fatal happened to him here; something up near Karabunda tipped him over the edge. It took a long time to play out, but by the time he got back to England, he was very, uh, disturbed. He didn’t last more than a month.”
I’d thought the nonsense he’d spouted as he tried to kill me had been his last message to me.
It wasn’t. The photograph was.
“Maraigh gach éinne,” I said again, out loud.
“Kill who? Why? Is it about what we saw in that village outside Kabala? What you saw?” Roberts asked, and then reassured Juliet: “I didn’t go in the hut. Max did.”
Juliet yawned and freed a strand of red hair from the corner of her mouth.
“Will there be another war?” she almost whispered, as if by saying it out loud, she might make it happen.
“No, there won’t be. Shouldn’t be. That’s why I’m here. Why Sonny Boy was here. There are rebels, soldiers anyway. Maybe from here, maybe foreign. My job is to kill their leader. You know, ‘cut the head off the monster.’ Whatever Sonny saw made him see it differently, though. He went solo, and I don’t know why.”
“Some fucking medic you are, cutting people’s heads off.” Roberts spoke to me, but had eyes only for Juliet.
“Sometimes the only way you can stop the infection is to kill the host,” I said. “I’m more of a cleaner than a medic.”
What had Sonny Boy seen that he wanted me to mop up? I looked at the photograph. I let them look, too. They were already fatally compromised, and their untrained eyes were fresher than mine. There were two traditional huts—brown thatched mud rondels. The huts went to the right- and left-hand edges of the frame. In between them, and slightly in front of them and striding left to right, was the white man. It was possible he was walking across the front of them, or he had emerged from the hut on the left and was heading toward the hut on the right. He was wearing gray cotton trousers, a short-sleeved gray shirt with a collar and no epaulets, no insignia. His hair was messy, his beard unkempt; his European skin was nut-brown and drawn tight on his arms and neck. He was what? Sixty-five? Seventy? I stared at the side of his face, as if by sheer force of will I could make his two-dimensional image rotate and reveal itself. It was just not quite possible to see it directly.
In the background a lineup of out-of-focus troops stood to attention. Was the man taking the parade, saluting the men amassed beside him? There were white and black faces. None was recognizable. Their uniforms were indistinct in the blur, and it didn’t matter anyway. You can buy a knockoff Russian uniform for fifty quid, or make a Sierra Leone Army uniform for pocket change in any Freetown sweatshop.
“Mercenaries?” Roberts asked.
“Impossible to say. Maybe. Probably locals under foreign command. Served any Russians in your bar lately?”
“Plenty,” Juliet grunted, “pilots and pigs, most of them. Robbie calls them ‘cabbage monkeys.’” I raised an eyebrow at Roberts. He managed a smile.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the foreground of the photo. I noticed that his finger was shaking. The actual photo itself was out of focus at the edges—more so at the left and right sides than at the top and bottom. I looked hard and angled the matte surface of the print against the dismal light from the bulb overhead. In the same, tiny scrawl at the bottom of the paper was written “300.”
The Break Line Page 12
