CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  They were all top of the ladder. He didn't know their long-term histories, but each one of them would have had the break far back, hooked into it, started climbing. He didn't reckon to waste his last evening as an independent.

  He had the Embassy driver take him out, again, to 28th October Street.

  He told the driver that he would find his own way back.

  He started 011 the left side of the road.

  Some of the gates were electronically controlled. He had to identify himself from the pavement. "I am Bill Erlich, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States of America.

  I would be most grateful if you could spare me a few moments of your time." One gate that he could open himself let him into a front garden patrolled by two Dobermans, but he was okay with dogs because there had always been dogs at his mother's home, and at his grandparents' home. He could talk his way past dogs. Some of the villa front doors were wide open to him. He talked to maids, struggling with his limited Greek, sometimes doing better in Italian, and to the camp boy servant of an old woman, he talked to wives and husbands and teenage children.

  Some gave him their answer at the door, others invited him inside and sat him down to ask his question. To a few he was a nuisance, to most he was merely a curiosity. As each door opened to him, he made the same statement. "A colleague of mine, an American official of our Embassy, was killed here yesterday morning. Did you, or anyone in this household, sec anything of the incident?"

  Some gave him their life history, then came round to saying that they were in bed, in the back of the villa, in the bath, already gone to work. Some were brusque. They had seen nothing, they knew nothing. It was dark by the time he had finished with the left side of the road. He thought that none of those he had spoken to could have told him anything of the killing. He believed their denials.

  But there was fear there, shrouded by some with belligerence, hidden by others with courtesy. It wasn't any different from what it would be back home. None of them wanted trouble. Erlich had been on his last months in Washington when he had read the lesson, digested it, that safe folks crossed the road from danger, and didn't mind who they turned their backs on. He was in Washington, and Mrs Sharon Rogers was living her life out in San Diego, California.

  Trouble was that Mrs Sharon Rogers' husband had been commander of the U.S.S. Vincennes. Down in the Gulf, the Vincennes had blown an IranAir jet liner out of the skies and killed more than 250 people. The hit squad blew her vehicle off the road, and she was lucky to have jumped clear before the main explosion. How did the good citizens of San Diego react? Erlich would not criticise a timid woman or a timid man in the Kifisia suburb of Athens . . .

  The parents of the kids at the school where Mrs Rogers taught had her barred from the school, in case the hit squad came back for a second try. If Americans didn't stand up for Americans, why should Greeks stand up for . . . ? He worked his way down the right side of the road.

  Of course, he remembered the front gates. The front gates Were across the road from where Harry had died.

  The flowers were still there. The rain and the wind had done them damage.

  He walked through the gates.

  He felt a stabbing pain at the back of his ankle.

  A Pekinese had hold of his ankle. He kicked hard with his free foot. He heard the dog whimper. His trouser was torn, and there was blood on his fingers when he rubbed the wound, and he wiped it away on his handkerchief. He rang the front door bell.

  "Good evening, ma'am. Do you speak English?"

  It was the woman who had brought the flowers to the pavement.

  He could sense her fear. She stood with her hands on the door latch, as if she were ready to throw the door back in his face.

  " M y name is Bill Erlich. I am an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the United States. Yesterday morning, an old friend, an Embassy officer, was shot dead in this road . . . "

  " Y e s . "

  " I t was very much appreciated, your flowers . . ."

  "It was nothing."

  She wore good jewellery, and her hair was freshly made up.

  She was not attractive, her jaw was too prominent, and her eyes too close set . . . Steady, Bill . . . It was the 28th house he had called at. The pain had gone from his ankle, but a throbbing replaced the pain.

  " I ' m looking for an eyewitness, ma'am."

  "Somebody who saw . . . ?"

  "Somebody who saw my friend killed."

  " I s that not the job of our local police?"

  "Indeed it is, but it is also my job."

  He saw that she hesitated. She wavered. Perhaps she recognised him from yesterday. The dog was at his ankle, and wary of passing him. She must have looked down at the dog, and seen the blood stain and the tear on his trouser. She must have understood why the dog hung back.

  " I s it important to you, to find an eyewitness?"

  " Y e s . "

  "Would you come in, please, Mr . . . ?"

  "Erlich, ma'am Bill Erlich."

  She opened the door fully. He walked into the hall, and brushed his feet hard on the mat. This was money, serious money. He could see the money in the paintings and he could see also the alarm wires leading to them. Money in the drapes, and in the pottery that had a shelf to itself by the wide, dark wood staircase.

  Money in the rugs over which her slippered feet moved. She didn't take him to one of the two formal reception rooms opening off the hall. She went ahead of him into the living room. A television set was playing Indiana Jones. The dog slunk past him and settled in front of the electric fire and growled back at him.

  He saw a child's head peer round the wing of the comfortable chair, the child from last night. She switched off the film, she waved for him to sit down. She motioned for the child to sit on her lap. Erlich thought the boy was about eleven, could have been younger. She spoke quietly in Greek to the boy, soothing his annoyance at the turning off of the video.

  " M r Erlich, more than forty years ago my country was divided by civil war. My father took one side, perhaps it was the right side and perhaps it was the wrong side. He was killed by the Communists. Mr Erlich, no one came to ask in that village for eyewitnesses . . . "

  She held her child against her.

  ". . . He is a bright boy, Mr Erlich. We had an English girl as a nanny for three years. Andreas learned good English from her."

  Carefully, no sudden movements, Erlich took from his inside pocket his notebook, and removed the top from his ballpoint.

  The boy talked.

  It was before he had gone to school. He was in the front garden with the dog.

  He had seen two men walking in the road. He had seen them through the gates.

  A car had come fast behind them, a silver-grey car, and it had braked sharply.

  A man had climbed out of the car. A whitc-faccd man, with fair to golden hair. The man had in his hand a gun with a long and fat barrel.

  The man had held the gun out in front of his chest with both hands, away from his body.

  The man had shouted. In front of him the two men had separated, reacted to the shout, and then to the sight of the gun.

  The firing of the gun, a soft thudding. The smaller man was hit first, and then the taller man had seemed to move across to him, and then he had been hit.

  The man with the gun had stopped, stared. And the driver had shouted. The man with the gun had run back to the car.

  The car had turned and driven away.

  That was it. The death of his friend, told in the simplicity of a child's-eye view.

  "What were the shouts, Andreas?"

  " T h e driver of the car, he shouted 'Colt'."

  " Y o u are certain?"

  " C o l t . "

  "Couldn't have been anything else?"

  " C o l t . "

  He believed the boy. The belief was instinctive. He wrote the word " C o l t " in his notebook, and each time the boy spoke the word Erlich underlined it again.
>
  "What sort of age?"

  " O l d . "

  " H o w old?"

  The boy turned to his mother. " A s old as Nico."

  She said, smiling, "Younger than you, Mr Erlich, perhaps 25

  years."

  " H o w tall? Heavy or light built?"

  The boy's response was immediate. " N o t fat, just ordinary height."

  " H a i r ? "

  "Fair, like Redford, but shorter."

  Erlich paused. He let the words sink, and he wrote sharply, and his eyes never left the boy.

  " T h e other shout, the shout of the man with the gun?"

  " I t w a s ' H e y , there

  " H o w did he say it?"

  The boy shouted, " H e y , there."

  Erlich tried to smile. " D i d he say it like Harrison Ford would have said it?"

  "English, not American."

  " Y o u know that difference?"

  " L i k e Nanny Parsons would have said it, English."

  "Andreas, this is really extremely important . . . "

  "It was English, Mr Erlich."

  "I could waste an awful lot of my time . . ."

  "English."

  The words " H e y , there" were underlined and across the top of the page he had written in bold capitals E N G L I S H .

  He apologised for his intrusion. The boy had been good. He had no doubts about the boy. Because he had taught school before becoming a Fed he had some experience of kids. Erlich helped out with the Little League team in Rome that played and practised at the American School on the Via Cassia most Saturday mornings. When he was in Rome, when Jo was off somewhere, he enjoyed being one of the helpers. The coach liked having him there. The coach was an Embassy staffer in Rome and said that it was twice as good having helpers who weren't parents. The Little League baseball squad was fine relaxation for Erlich. It had given him the chance to go on talking to and getting to know children and he was sure he would know if a boy was telling him the truth. He said no to tea, thank you, or a scotch and soda. He walked down the driveway to the main gates of the villa. He crossed the road. He bent by the flowers, and tidied them.

  He went down the road to the junction to look for a taxi.

  3

  "That's all you've got, Bill, the testimony of an infant child."

  Don was a Fed from his shined shoes to the loosened necktie at his throat. Old guard, old school. Don had led the "rotten apple"

  investigation five or six years back. The arrest of that worm had been the greatest cross Don had ever had to carry, the most dangerous traitor ever in the history of the government's security service. Erlich remembered his face from the network news, bleak and uncompromising and shamed, when the announcement was made. Don pushed away the breakfast plate and lit his pipe.

  "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a kid will tell you what he thinks you want to hear," Vito said.

  Vito was too sharp a dresser to look like a Fed. Gold bracelet, sports shirt, and a small crucifix dangled from a 24-carat chain round his throat. The soybean sting in Chicago had been his.

  Fantastic to have run two agents inside the sealed world of the soybean futures pit. It was said in Washington, at the level that Erlich had worked, that Vito could tackle anything, other than Mafia. He'd have been good there, with his background, but his wishes were respected.

  " Y o u take the kid's word and you're going down a tunnel, might be a wrong-way tunnel," Nick said.

  Nick, the Greek, was first-generation American. His parents had left a village in the mountains near the Albanian border just after the Civil War. He had the language. More important, he worked on Counter-Terrorism programmes specialising in the Middle East. In '87, Nick had been in Athens as one of the team k

  that lured Fawaz Younis to a boat out of territorial waters, and put the handcuffs on him, and read him the charges of Air Piracy and placing a destructive device aboard an aircraft and committing violence aboard an aircraft and aiding and abetting a hijacking.

  Nick was wearing yesterday's shirt and the damp smell round the breakfast table told Erlich that Nick had washed his one pair of socks the night before. Nick wouldn't be contributing much that morning, he'd be out buying his changes. " I f it's a wrong way tunnel," he said, "we start burning up man hours."

  " T h e boy is telling the truth," Erlich said.

  " Y o u ' d go to the wall for the boy's story?" Don said.

  " Y e s , sir, I would, and before you dismiss that story, I'd like to take you out there to hear it for yourself."

  Don's eyes seemed to devour Erlich's face. They would have been told, all of them, before they left Washington that he was a friend of Harry Lawrence. Vito was eating, he'd left the decision to Don. Nick had his back to them, was trying to attract the attention of the waitress for his third can of Coke.

  "Suppose we go with what the kid says, what do you see as the next step?"

  " W e have a physical description, we have a name or a nick-name, and I believe he's English. We have to start asking questions in London."

  Don said, " S o go to London . . . "

  Erlich took his hand, shook it. " T h a n k s . "

  " N i c k , take him to the airport, give him what you can."

  And they were gone.

  Vito had raised his dark brows in question.

  Don said, " I f he's right then that's the best. If he's wrong, so what's an air ticket? Catch on . . . Lawrence was his friend.

  I don't want anyone with personal feelings stumbling across my path. Feelings is for Rita Hayworth, that's what I used to get told."

  They drove north out of the city, the guard, his sleepless ever-present shadow, at the wheel. The road took them between the old splendour of the Khulafa and the Gailani mosques, and across the railway track that wound half the length of the country to Arbil, and out through Housing Project Number Ten, and through the concretescape of Saddam City, the Chairman's way of marking the end of the Iranian war.

  Colt had heard it said that after the war the country's debt was 80 billion dollars. Now, that was a sum of money to be reckoned with. Eighty billion dollars was a little more than the mind of Colt could cope with. Never mind the debt, the slogan seemed to be, get the show on the road. The show was all around, as far as the eye could see, any direction. New hotels, new fly-overs, new housing, new monuments to the Fallen Martyrs.

  Back home, in a small Wiltshire town, dear old Barclays was nursing an overdraft in the name of Colin O. L. Tuck, which was £248.14 at the last count. You'd have to add interest, of course, but even so he would take his hat off to a man 80 billion in the red who never stopped spending. On the other hand the great portraits of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council were way over the top by Colt's reckoning. Usually he was in camouflage smock and holding an A . K . at the hip, and would probably have knocked half his pelvis off from the recoil if he had fired at that angle. Sometimes he was in the robes of a desert prince and the headdress of Joe Arafat, riding a white horse. Sometimes he was in a City of London pinstripe and showing off his new dentures. Colt didn't hold with the personality bit, but he knew enough to keep his opinion to himself. Not least because - although Colt didn't suppose that the Chairman had an inkling of his existence - Colt owed the Chairman his liberty certainly, possibly even his life.

  When they were clear of the city's traffic, Colt eased himself back in the seat and lit a small cigar.

  He wore erratically laced army boots, and olive-green fatigues, and a heavy-knit dun brown sweater.

  His eyes were closed. It might get to be a bit of a bastard, the next few days, and then it might just get to be amusing. But then, Colt liked fun, fun on his terms, and he'd give the bastards a run. It would be the third time that he had taken part in the escape and evasion exercises of the Presidential Guard.

  He was one day past his 26th birthday. In two weeks' time it would be one year since he had first come to Iraq.

  Colt would have liked his father to know how he was spen
ding the next few days. It would give the old man pleasure.

  At the village of Al Mansuriyah, below the escarpment of the Jabal Hamrin, as the sun climbed, they were met by a jeep. Colt was given a rucksack filled with a sleeping bag, field rations, water, and a first-aid kit. He was given a map, compass, and binoculars. He was shown on the map the village of Qara Tappah.

  T w o of the Presidential guardsmen were giggling as they pointed to the name of the village that was his target.

  He told the guard, his minder, to get back to Baghdad. He told the troops to go and scratch themselves somewhere else. In the centre of the village was the square, dominated by a portrait of the Chairman. Colt sat at a table outside the cafe that saw everything that moved in the village. He asked for coffee and fresh cake. He put his feet on an empty chair. He closed his eyes.

  He would move at the end of the day. He was that rare person.

  He was the person, taught by his father, who preferred darkness to light, night to day.

  She was hurrying that morning. There was little enough in her life that she could honestly say was exciting, but that morning she was a little nervous, and, yes, a little excited. She wanted to get all of the washing out, then cross her fingers for a dry day with a bit of sunshine and a drying wind.

  "Morning, Mrs Bissett."

  Little Vicky, and she'd be standing on tip toe to see over the fence, and not even dressed yet.God alone knew what the girl did after the golden boy had gone off to sell his 57 varieties, heaven only knew why she couldn't get herself dressed before ten o'clock.

  She had a mouth full of pegs. "I've told you, Vicky, I don't answer to that."