Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  The power of transience: in motion, you could be whoever you wanted to be. When had he learned this? On that solo Atlantic journey, with the label round his neck? Or earlier, at the age of three, watching his mother cadge cigarettes from different passengers or sailors, varying the details of who she was according to whether she was talking to a man or a woman, a sailor or a fellow passenger? Whatever lessons were learned then, chief amongst them was this: if you don’t want people to know who you are, keep moving.

  If you kept moving fast enough, you could be several selves in quick succession. If someone struck up a conversation with you on a plane, you could pretend to be from Macau and single and a brain surgeon – after you had assessed that the person you were talking to was neither from Macau nor a brain surgeon themselves, of course. In the taxi queue outside the airport, you could be a Spanish businessman, widowed with six adorable children. Later that same day, in a hotel bar perhaps, you could say you were psychic and that your mother had been mistress to a Persian king – you could claim you had a fatal disease and only months to live. The possibilities were endless.

  He was recruited by the Institute straight out of his military service and for the first couple of years, after his basic training was done, was sent on jobs that involved a lot of transience. It was mostly delivering packages to embassies or organisations, although he was too junior to know the contents. New recruits often spent a year as delivery boys before they returned to be based behind a desk in Amsterdam and learn more about the Institute’s work – they weren’t going to trust you immediately, after all. This suited him fine: he was in no hurry to get his feet beneath a desk.

  Travel of any sort was terrific training. Officials, for instance: there was a certain look that got you past those people – immigration or customs officers, ticket collectors; the people who wore uniforms that denoted status without any real power. This look could best be described as politeness tinged with boredom – a look that implied there was absolutely nothing at stake. That was the mistake that illegal immigrants or drug traffickers always made; either their rank fear showed or they were excessively friendly. The answer lay somewhere between the two: but a hint of boredom, that was essential. The person behind the desk in front of you was almost certainly bored as well, after all. You were in it together.

  Once he was settled in a seat in a departure lounge or railway station waiting room, he liked to do his homework. How readily people gave themselves up to his gaze. The families were straightforward, the women and men clutching children, exhausted by the endlessness of it all but mostly by their offspring’s obliviousness to their sacrifice. The businessmen always liked to sit a little apart, to indicate that they were only there because they were being paid to be there. Then there were the young couples, usually having stupid arguments, because all arguments were stupid between a couple at that age, everything freighted by the lifetime of disappointment that lay ahead. ‘So much for Things go better with Coke,’ he once saw a beautiful young woman wail at her unfortunate beau, who had trailed halfway round San Diego airport in search of a vending machine and then brought the bottle back without opening it. She meant, are you the one? Am I having children with you? Is this it? What she meant was, when you’re having trouble at work at the age of forty-five, will you be the kind of guy who lets his boss walk all over him and doesn’t get his bonus and can’t look after me and the kids? Because if you don’t have the initiative to open a bottle of Coke on the opener attached to the vending machine before you bring it back to me then how do I know you have the initiative to hold a good job down and to anticipate what I need when I need it? She didn’t know it, the beautiful young woman, but that was what she was asking. And the young man’s soft sigh – he didn’t snap back, just accepted the admonition – said, yeah, well, all that’s probably true but I’m easy-going at least and maybe that’s more important than you think and this is the guy I am so take it or leave it, hon. The helplessness of other men never ceased to amaze him.

  These were the times when he gave a shudder of gratitude at his observer status. Who would want to be part of that? The truth was, even though he was the same age as the young couple, his courier work made him feel a world apart from them, mature and powerful.

  When did he ever see anyone in any of these transitory places that he would have liked to trade lives with? Rarely, although it wasn’t unusual for large groups of people in motion to include one or two oddities like him. At an airport in Ceylon, on his way back from delivering a report for a British firm, he had seen one, another oddity, sitting amongst the people waiting to board one of the newly established flights. The airport had been an RAF station during the war and was only just being developed for commercial purposes. The cost of flights was prohibitive for anyone but government officials or the wealthiest of local families so the people waiting were all well dressed, many of them Indians returning home. Amongst them, clearly happy to stand out, was a white man, small, ginger-haired, tough as a little terrier, Harper guessed – he could always spot them. Ordinary people thought that the men to be afraid of were the obvious ones, the big men who shouted aggressively, the ones with uniforms and guns. Harper knew better by then. This man sat quietly in the departure lounge like him, dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt, his frame coiled and dense, his eyes watchful. He was playing the game too. CIA, Harper guessed – definitely American, in any case, on his way back from something, technically off duty but unable to relax. He must have been doing something in conjunction with the British as well, the Americans didn’t have that many interests in Ceylon. He was scanning each passenger in turn, just as Harper had. When his gaze reached him, Harper looked back, keeping his expression a professional blank as he and the other man took in everything about each other and moved on. Anyone watching them would assume they hadn’t noticed each other at all, whereas he knew this man had surmised in a second that he was a fellow professional, albeit not exactly his sort.

  In the far corner was an Indian couple in late middle age, sitting next to each other but staring straight ahead. The woman was wearing a knitted brown cardigan over her sari. Her husband had his hands resting on the top of his walking cane, which was upright in front of him. His mouth was slightly open. Harper knew that this couple, each in their own way, would do almost anything rather than spend another minute together. Two British girls sat opposite the middle-aged couple, embassy secretaries perhaps, fanning themselves against the exhausting humidity with magazines, prim in their chairs, legs tucked underneath and crossed at the ankles, exchanging glances from time to time. He guessed they had been sharing an apartment for a while. They were returning home with heads full of secrets about each other. One had flat, chunky-heeled lace-up shoes and the other, the one with money in the family somewhere, was in delicate blue pumps. Even though they hadn’t known each other before they came out here and had little in common, they were bound together now. Nearly everyone waiting for the plane was fed up or impatient. The travelling world was full of people who wanted to arrive so badly that that imperative stopped them observing their journey. If you didn’t want that, you were at a distinct advantage.

  If a flight was delayed long enough, then by the end of the wait, he felt he could write the biography of almost everyone on the aeroplane.

  As the group rose to board, the American in the open-necked shirt walked past where he was sitting. Their glances met again but they did not exchange a word, or even a nod. In that instant, Harper, new to his line of work, felt that although he was a man excluded from civilian life, with no real nationality or home, he was part of something else: a kind of brotherhood, an understanding that would only be acknowledged in the briefest of looks. There was a community of shadow men out there, around the world, in airports and railway stations – on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind, all ghosts, all invisible, all playing the same game. He had been inducted.

  Lots
of training, lots of games, lots of sex: that was how he remembered those years in Amsterdam leading up to ’65. He was a young man in his twenties and apart from a multiply-divorced mother who drank so much she didn’t know who he was sometimes, he had no ties, no obligations. He didn’t look like the people around him but he didn’t look definitively like anyone else either. Part-something.

  The trick to being unusual was learning how to milk it. He liked to use the geography of his birth to wrong-foot people, especially women he was trying to bed. He liked to choose exactly the right moment to reveal a little about himself – after a few drinks together, when their gazes had locked once or twice. Maybe there had been a light touch or two, a brushing of a sleeve, a hand resting briefly on a knee, although that would have been quite forward in those days. In the early sixties, as he remembered, a woman’s favourite way of inviting physical contact was to pick a bit of fluff off your suit jacket, often with a brusque, maternal swipe of the hand. After a certain amount of this, a certain amount of her batting him around like a small boy, came the point when he could start taking the initiative. These small physical gestures were only indicators, though. The real movement forward came when the talking started, when they began exchanging stories. That was when he knew he was home and dry.

  One of his favourite gambits was to ask her where she was born: always so much more tactful than asking a woman how old she was. You could get tripped up that way if you weren’t careful: they had a tendency to ask you to guess, a question which was surprisingly hard to answer to your own advantage. If you stuck to where rather than when, it was a neat and simple way into intimacy. You couldn’t say to a woman, ‘Tell me your unhappiest childhood memory,’ straight off, but when they told you where they were born, the conversation automatically became more intimate. The tragic detail from her childhood would be lying in wait at the end of that simple, factual answer. Sometimes there wasn’t one, of course – sometimes the story of her birthplace was routine, told with a self-deprecating laugh in acknowledgement of its ordinariness. And then, because she was a nice woman – he only went for nice women – she would ask back.

  The pause. The downward look. The soft voice that indicated this was not something that he usually confided in a person he had only just met.

  ‘I was born in a concentration camp.’

  The best bit was the steady gaze he received, tinged with confusion, as the woman he was talking to recalibrated what little she knew of him, this tall young man with brown but not-dark skin and thick but straight black hair, who looked definitively un-Dutch but not definitively anything else.

  Once, but only once, one of them said it out loud, sceptically, ‘You don’t look Jewish.’

  Was it Alida who had said that? No, Alida came later. Alida came after ’65. Alida was the one who looked for the scars on his back: the scars that weren’t there.

  Once, in a bar on Gravenstraat, a pale freckled woman with large breasts but unfortunate teeth came up to him while he was sitting on a high stool and stood next to him, waiting to be served. He wasn’t really out for the night, just having a beer after work, making the same one last until he was ready to go: Frankenmuth, brewed for modern American tastes. She stood a little closer than was necessary, considering the bar wasn’t all that crowded, she staggered a little – she was quite drunk, he thought – and put her hand on his thigh to steady herself, before saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and then snatching the hand away, as if his thigh was hot.

  The bartender came up to them and rested his wrists on the bar, looking at them expectantly, and the woman said, ‘Oh, it’s me now, thank you darling. Can you do a Pink Squirrel? Two of them.’ She held her fingers up in a V-for-victory sign.

  The bartender looked at them with such disdain that Harper wanted to say, please, the second one isn’t for me.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ she said then. ‘Two Old-fashioneds.’ She looked at Harper. ‘My friend’s in the corner there. She’s really nice.’

  They made small talk while the bartender mixed the drinks. Behind the rows of bottles on the wooden shelves, there was a mirrored surface that reflected the jewelled golds and browns and oranges of the various liquors. When he moved his head, he could glimpse different shards of their reflections; her hairline, an eye or ear, his nose. She turned her back to the bar, placing both elbows on it, and surveyed the room as if they were spies, before talking from the side of her mouth.

  ‘I’ve never met a neger before,’ she said. ‘Me and my friend are going to a party later, want to come along, meet my friends? They’re really nice people, they’d be interested to meet you.’

  Up until that point, he had been giving it some serious thought. ‘Thanks,’ he said, picking up the change he had left on the bar and pocketing it. ‘But I’ve already met more than enough white people.’

  *

  ‘Choose an Anglo name,’ his trainer at the Institute had told him, as they sat with clipboards in the meeting room and worked their way through the details of his new identity for travel purposes. ‘Something that’s easy for anyone to understand, something nice and neutral. Not Smith, for heaven’s sake. Barnhardt actually chose Smith.’

  Nicolaas Den Herder, born on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, to a white Dutch mother and an Indo officer in the Dutch Colonial Army, had already changed his surname to Luther, then to Aaltink, then back to Den Herder.

  He thought about it.

  ‘Favourite film star? Childhood pet?’ the trainer said helpfully.

  ‘My mind’s gone blank.’ How was it possible to name yourself?

  The trainer sighed, lifted a sheet of paper on his clipboard, looked down and said, ‘Walton, Fullerton, Jamieson, Johnson, Harper, Headley . . .’

  ‘Harper,’ he said to his trainer. Then, firmly, as if he had just put on a pair of shoes that fitted well, ‘John Harper.’

  Once his probationary year was over and he had Stage One security clearance, he was based in Amsterdam at the Institute’s head office. His training was twofold; the training for what he would tell people he did for a living and the training for what he would really do. Officially, John Harper was a researcher for the Institute of International Economics, Amsterdam. His job was to read the newspapers and make economic forecasts and write reports. The international companies that retained the Institute then used those reports to decide upon the wisdom of sending in staff or building factories or digging holes in whichever particular country they were interested in.

  Unofficially, there were the games. Maybe that was why he got into his line of work. Maybe that was why anyone got into it, because they liked playing games: well, that was why men did it, he presumed. Women didn’t seem all that bothered about playing games, let alone winning them. It was the watching – yes, that was it. Maybe women just weren’t voyeurs: too used to being the observed rather than the observer.

  During this secondary induction period, his trainer told him to go and sit in a doctor’s waiting room and stay there until he had worked out what was wrong with every single patient.

  ‘Why?’ Harper had asked. ‘And how will you know if I’m right?’

  ‘That’s not the point of the exercise,’ his trainer had sighed. ‘The point of the exercise is to get you used to looking at people and working out what their story is. I don’t want to know whether you are right or not. I want you to come back and tell me how you came to your conclusions.’

  In years to come, when his line of work turned into big business – it really took off in the eighties – there would be whole manuals on this stuff, training weekends, presentations on whiteboards with handouts in folders to take away and read at your leisure; graphs, statistics. Back then, in the sixties, the people who trained you more or less made it up as they went along: a little amateur psychology mixed with a whole bucket of intuition. Maybe it was easier, back then, when it was clear who the enemy was – and it was very clear.

  Despite what was going on in Saigon, Harper’s department, the
Asia Department, wasn’t really where it was at in 1964 – President Johnson wasn’t listening to de Gaulle, so what was new there? No, the best people were all in the Soviet Section, a whole separate unit staffed by people who had Russian or Eastern Bloc language skills: bunch of comedians they became round the office, once the guy with the eyebrows took over in Moscow, those Groucho jokes wore thin pretty fast. Other than that, there were certain countries that were hot for a while for one reason or another; the small South American desk got very excited about the coup in Brazil. There was Panama, Zanzibar, Cuba of course. The focus tended to change emphasis according to the State Department’s priorities. Even though the Institute was independent and nominally Dutch, the Americans were their most important clients – nearly three quarters of the contracts were coming from them. Company offices were going to open up in Los Angeles and New York as a result and they were already in partnership with a West Coast firm like theirs – later, there would be a merger. Harper was one of the operatives who applied for transfer there but the jobs all went to people with experience in the Soviet Section.

  Everybody wanted to be in America if they could, not Europe with its old, cold, bombed-out cities, their cheap concrete buildings flung up like dentures in a ruined mouth. There was going to be this big new skyscraper in New York, the world’s tallest building it would be. They’d been arguing about it over there for years but now it was going to be designed by some Japanese guy – how ironic was that. Harper had a debate about it with Joosten who said that the guy wasn’t a Jap, he was just an American with a Jap name, and Harper said he didn’t care, he thought maybe the guys who gave him the job had memories that were pretty short, like, er, Pearl Harbor, a load of aeroplanes came out of the sky one sunny day without warning, remember? He didn’t really mean it and Joosten knew he didn’t, being anti-Japanese was something he made a show of to remind his colleagues that not all brown guys were the same. It was just something to say while they sat in a bar after work. A moment later they were arguing about whether the A-11 would burn to a crisp at seventy thousand feet.