The Twisted Wire

by Richard Falkirk

  ‘You’ve got to help me,’ she said.

  ‘You look like a woman eminently capable of helping herself,’ he said. He put down his glass. ‘Good night, Mrs Bartlett.’ He walked out of the room.

  Helen Bartlett started to follow him but the doorway was occupied by the security officer. ‘I think you’d better leave, ma’am,’ he said.

  She nodded and felt the tears assembling in her eyes. ‘I’m going,’ she said.

  In the car chagrin joined her fears for her husband. She thought: The bastards can’t push me around like that. She drove towards Chelsea.

  By the time she reached Sloane Square she had decided that perhaps the Ambassador was right – Tom would phone his hotel when it was possible.

  She parked the car and had a drink at the Antelope. She noted a few glances of admiration from various men at the bar and wondered if any of them would try to pick her up.

  She ordered one more gin to go with the remains of the tonic. Who the hell was Miss Rabinovitz? Perhaps she was in the desert with her husband. She knew what these Israeli girls were like.

  She finished her drink and lingered a moment. But none of the men offered to buy her another. She then drove to the mews near Kings Road where Ahmed lived.

  He was just leaving with a girl with long fair hair and a silly haughty face.

  Helen Bartlett called out to him. He opened the door of his red sports car and popped the girl inside. He smiled and said: ‘Why, good evening, Mrs Bartlett.’

  ‘Ahmed,’ she said, ‘I must talk to you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

  It had begun to rain and a few drops sparkled on his black hair. He carried an umbrella and wore a white roll-collar shirt under a blue blazer.

  ‘I’ve got to speak to you, Ahmed.’

  He smiled again and walked round the car. ‘Sorry, Mrs Bartlett, can’t stop.’

  ‘But it’s very important. That … that little tart can wait, can’t she?’

  He stopped smiling. ‘Go back to your husband, Mrs Bartlett. Although I don’t know what he did to deserve you.’

  He slammed the door and the car moved off, sleek and aggressive in the thickening rain.

  Helen Bartlett cried a little; then returned to the Antelope where one of the men at the bar offered to buy her a gin and tonic. Later they went back to the apartment in Marylebone High Street.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Yamani kicked the door open and came in with a pistol in his hand. He looked at Raquel and the dead and the unconscious Arabs. Then Bartlett brought the butt of the Uzi down.

  But Yamani’s reflexes were lightning-quick. As the butt came down he swung up his arm defensively. His arm took most of the force of the blow and the pistol spun on to the floor. Then Yamani was out of the door again. Through the shell-hole they saw him running across the road towards the blazing building. Bartlett thrust the barrel of the Uzi through the shell-hole and pulled the trigger. The bullets kicked up a hedge of dust behind him.

  Then he was gone. Somewhere behind the flames. Bartlett sent another clutch of bullets into the flames, feeling the ugly power of the gun and smelling its smoke.

  He said: ‘I’m sorry.’

  She said: ‘It couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘He was very quick.’

  ‘You should have let me have the gun.’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  She smiled at him in the grotesque firelight. ‘I did not mean to criticise. It’s just that I learned how to fire one of those guns.’

  ‘I thought you were a policewoman.’

  She ignored him. ‘Yamani won’t go far,’ she said. ‘He knows he’s got to kill you because you know the contents of the map.’

  Bartlett laughed. ‘That damned map,’ he said.

  ‘What are you laughing about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. Right now I have no intention of letting Yamani kill me.’

  ‘We’ve got to get the map,’ she said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘The map. My map, in fact.’

  ‘You won’t let me have it?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘After all I’ve got the gun.’

  She stood up suddenly keeping away from the shell-hole. ‘Did Yamani have any grenades?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  She ran down a corridor, pulling his arm, and dragged him into one of the bedrooms facing away from the burning building. They fell across a bed which collapsed.

  The explosion from the foyer was as loud as a shell-burst. The blast charged down the corridor kicking open the doors. The bedroom was lit with orange light.

  Bartlett and Raquel allowed it all to subside, holding each other as tightly as the Uzi would permit.

  Raquel said: ‘Good.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, because he may think we’re dead and come out of hiding. Although I think he is a very clever man. Anyway we must go back to the foyer.’

  ‘Supposing he lobs another grenade in?’

  ‘He won’t. That one would have killed us if we’d been in there.’

  They went stealthily back to the foyer. The reception desk had disappeared and small flames were investigating the sofa. The wall that had been holed by a shell was bulging outwards and swaying. The bodies of the two Arabs had been torn apart by the blast. Bartlett looked at them and felt a surge of vomit in his stomach.

  He said: ‘You get back in the corridor.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do as I tell you.’

  ‘I’ve seen bodies before.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about tough Israeli womanhood at the moment. You just get back in that corridor. It’s no sight for a girl.’ He waved the Uzi at her.

  ‘All right, Thomas. But you must get to the shell-hole and watch for Yamani crossing the road.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. He stepped over the remains of the bodies, trying to control the nausea.

  The fire in the house was beginning to die. But the artillery duel wasn’t. The big guns pumped away at each other and earth and sky leaped with their thunder and lightning. The devastation of devastation, the acme of human folly.

  Bartlett crouched beside the shell-hole, waiting. Above him the bulge in the wall grated and murmured.

  The nausea subsided and he thought irrationally of Helen. If it hadn’t been for her he wouldn’t have been in Kantara because the trip to Israel had only been an escape. He decided, as he nursed a submachine gun waiting to kill a man, that he would never live with her again. The old Bartlett would have done: not the new.

  He thought he noticed a movement to one side of the subsiding flames and gripped his gun tighter. A rocket exploded nearby; the wall protested more loudly.

  This time there was a movement. Bartlett’s finger caressed the trigger.

  He saw Yamani as the wall collapsed. Raquel shouted from the corridor. He fired wildly and leaped backwards. The wall swung outwards and stood poised for a moment. Then crashed into the roadway.

  Raquel shouted again. ‘Run, Thomas. Run.’

  He stumbled back towards her. Together they ran along the corridor through a door at the end. Outside they crouched at the base of a ravaged palm tree.

  Raquel said: ‘He knows we’re alive now. He’ll be after us.’

  ‘Or we’ll be after him,’ Bartlett said.

  She looked at him in the radiance that was a fusion of moonlight, firelight and shellfire. ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just don’t mention that damned map, that’s all.’

  Bullets thudded into the palm tree two feet above their heads.

  They lay still. Raquel said: ‘We must get behind some cover. I think he’s only got a pistol.’

  ‘And some grenades.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Keep low. Be quiet. When we get behind that wall over there we must work out a plan.’

  ‘Good,’ Bartl
ett said. ‘As long as Yamani hasn’t got a better one.’

  On the other side of the Canal the Gruyanov barked erratically. Behind the machine guns the heavy Russian artillery kept up the barrage.

  As he dodged through the ruins on his way back to the Jeep Bartlett wondered what stage the United Nations ceasefire negotiations had reached. Calls to Tel Aviv and Cairo, calls between Tel Aviv and Cairo, then perhaps a break for rearmament.

  He found the Jeep where the Arabs had left it. The heavy pistol and ammunition were beside the driving seat. He headed back to the road separating Raquel from Yamani. He wasn’t too happy about his decision to give the Uzi to Raquel. But she was the soldier-policewoman: he was the geologist.

  As he ran, keeping low, he thought about the possibility of mines, Chinese mines, Russian rockets, French artillery, Belgian rifles, Scandinavian light machine guns, British and American tanks … the babel of armaments was hardly an inspiration for the United Nations.

  He cut through an unkempt garden and paused on the verandah of a bungalow. Through the glassless window he saw a cot containing a doll with no head. The doll appeared to move. Then he saw why – there was a well-fed rat in the cot with the doll. He raised his pistol to shoot it; but the shot would pinpoint his position. The rat stared at him for a moment, shell explosions finding red lights in its eyes. Then it jumped heavily out of the cot and padded off to the kitchen: a rat in full residence.

  He came to the road about a hundred yards away from the burning building. He waited for a lull in the shooting so that he would not be illuminated as he crossed. The Egyptian artillery sent over a salvo: the Israelis replied. Bartlett ran across the road and hurled himself behind a low wall skirting a yard.

  At the end of the road he could see the outline of the Coptic Church. He investigated the moonlit yard and exclaimed softly: beside him lay the skeleton of a donkey, its bones picked white and clean by rats.

  His heart was beating fast, too fast for a forty-year-old, out-of-condition geologist. He decided to rest.

  The Jeep skidded to a halt a few yards in front of him. He shrank closer to the wall.

  An Irish voice, Guinness-rich and potato-thick, said. ‘Come on out. We saw you go in there.’

  An Irish voice in a devastated town on the banks of the Suez Canal. Perhaps he was going crazy. Perhaps the whole succession of events had been a fantasy. An Irishman in Kantara. He grinned stupidly in the moonlight.

  The voice from the bogs spoke again. ‘Come on out of there.’

  Then Bartlett laughed aloud because he had realised who the Irishman was: he was a member of the United Nations. The combination was irresistible.

  The Irishman said: ‘What the hell are you laughing about, whoever you are?’

  Bartlett said: ‘It doesn’t matter. But I can’t stand up – I’ll get shot.’

  The Jeep backed into the yard and the Irishman said: ‘Get in now and keep your bloody head down.’

  Bartlett climbed in. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

  The Irishman who was wearing a blue steel helmet considered the question. Then he nodded at his companion, also in a steel helmet, sitting beside him. ‘Ask him,’ he said. ‘He got us out here. Personally I think he’s crazy.’

  ‘Not so crazy,’ Ralston said. He turned round. ‘Hi there, Mr Bartlett. Don’t we meet in the darnedest spots?’

  Bartlett said: ‘All right, Ralston, what are you doing here?’ He held up the pistol so that Ralston could see it.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Ralston said. ‘Right now I don’t think it’s too healthy around here.’

  As he spoke a rifle barked near the smouldering house. Raquel opened up with the Uzi on the other side of the road.

  The Irishman said: ‘Sweet Mother of God, what’s going on up there?’

  Bartlett told them. ‘And Yamani’s got grenades,’ he said.

  Ralston said: ‘This is too far for him to throw them.’

  Bartlett said: ‘Raquel isn’t too far for him. In any case I expect he’s coming down this way.’

  The black egg landed in the middle of the road about ten yards away from them. It exploded as they dived behind the wall. The wall bent and straightened itself. The Irishman swore and sat up clutching his arm.

  Ralston said: ‘How many grenades has this bastard got?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bartlett said.

  ‘We’ll have to get him from behind.’

  ‘That’s what I was going to do before you turned up.’

  ‘You stay here. I’ll go round the back.’

  Bartlett said: ‘No, I’ll go round the back.’

  Ralston said: ‘I can use a gun – you can’t.’

  ‘I’m tired of hearing people say that.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ralston said. ‘Don’t play games you don’t understand.’

  Bartlett jammed the pistol in Ralston’s ribs. ‘You stay here,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be crazy. This guy Yamani is a trained marksman. He’ll kill you and he’ll kill the girl.’

  ‘You look after the Irishman,’ Bartlett said. ‘In any case you can’t go shooting people in a United Nations helmet. You’re supposed to be part of a peace-keeping force.’

  The Irishman, young with a pugilist’s face which made no concessions to peace, was swearing and holding his arm. ‘The bastard’s broken,’ he said. ‘I wish to Christ I had a gun.’

  Bartlett said: ‘His arm’s bleeding pretty badly.’ In the moonlight the blood oozing on to his hand was black. Bartlett prodded the gun barrel in Ralston’s ribs. ‘Put a tourniquet on him. He’ll bleed to death otherwise.’ He was surprised at the authority in his voice.

  Ralston said: ‘For the last time, let me go. You do the nursing.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Bartlett said.

  Up the road Raquel’s Uzi sprayed bullets into the smouldering building. There was no reply from Yamani.

  Ralston said: ‘Maybe he’s getting low on ammunition.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bartlett said. ‘You look after the Irishman.’ He crept out of the back of the yard as a rocket exploded in front of the Coptic Church flinging metal and debris against its patient walls.

  Ralston said: ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Bartlett said. Fear, exaltation, bravado, perhaps, pulsed inside him. A kind of madness maybe. He could taste blood. He had to stop Yamani from killing Raquel. To hell with everything else.

  As Bartlett edged into the shadows beyond the moon-bleached bones of the donkey, Ralston said: ‘Hold it.’

  Bartlett stopped.

  Ralston said: ‘He’s running for his Jeep. Let’s go.’

  Bartlett jumped into the Jeep as it took off with Ralston at the wheel. Ahead of them Yamani’s Jeep accelerated towards the Canal.

  ‘The girl,’ Ralston said. ‘Why the hell doesn’t she shoot?’

  Raquel opened up but the bullets only flung up dust behind Yamani’s Jeep.

  Ralston slowed down and shouted to her. ‘There’s a man bleeding to death back there. Go help him.’

  Yamani’s Jeep rounded a corner.

  Ralston said: ‘Has he got the map?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bartlett said. ‘He’s got the map.’

  ‘Then we’ve got to stop the bastard.’ He rammed his foot on the accelerator.

  Bartlett didn’t reply. As the black and wrecked outlines of Kantara sped past Bartlett realised that the artillery duel had stopped. It was rearmament time.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ralston said: ‘Take a pot shot. Who knows, you might even hit him.’

  Bartlett leaned out and aimed the big pistol at Yamani’s Jeep. The gun kicked viciously in his hand. The Jeep sped on.

  On either side of them the remnants of the town rested after the bombardment. Dogs and rats foraged, walls creaked uneasily.

  Their Jeep bundled along the shell-pocked road, taking mounds of rubble as if they were miniature ski jumps. But they didn’t gain on Yamani.

  Ralston said: ‘I reckon the son
-of-a-bitch is heading for the pick-up point on the Canal. Yosevitz seems to have gotten himself an able lieutenant this time.’

  Bartlett leaned out and took another shot at Yamani. He missed.

  ‘I can’t make out what he’s aiming to do,’ Ralston said. ‘He’s got to stop at the Canal. Then he’s ours.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Bartlett said. He grinned, for no particular reason, into the silvered night; the slipstream whipped his hair across his face.

  Ralston said: ‘He’s slowing up. Keep your head down.’

  They were rapidly overhauling Yamani now. A hundred yards, seventy-five, fifty. Bartlett raised the pistol and took careful aim. As he fired their Jeep jumped a shell-hole and the barrel jerked towards the moon.

  Yamani’s Jeep leaped forward, accelerating with a rasp of gears. Bartlett saw the grenade first. He shouted to Ralston and pointed.

  Ralston swung the Jeep off the road. The explosion of the grenade hurt Bartlett’s eardrums. The Jeep rocked, almost overturned, then sank back on its wheels.

  ‘The bastard,’ Ralston said. ‘How many goddamn grenades has he got? He swung the Jeep back on to the road. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bartlett said. ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Yamani knows he’s got to shake us off to stand any chance of getting across the canal,’ Ralston said. ‘They’ll probably start another bombardment at a fixed time to distract attention from him.’

  The fleeing Jeep rocked round a corner and disappeared.

  Ralston said: ‘I wonder it there’s another grenade waiting round the corner for us?’

  ‘I wonder,’ Bartlett said.

  ‘We’ll just have to chance it.’

  Bartlett nodded with the fatalism that had become part of his existence.

  They rounded the corner. But there was no grenade waiting for them. And no Jeep either.

  ‘Where the hell’s he gone?’ Ralston said.

  The tranquility of the light from the moon and the thick stars seemed to intensify. A dog chased a rat down the road – or it may have been the other way round. The wall of a wrecked house swung gently outwards and fell to the ground. The rest of the house followed thankfully.