‘Michael is a man,’ the priest said quietly. ‘You made him so. He must make his own decision. I made decisions for him in his childhood and you made decisions for him in his youth. This decision he must make for himself,’
Chapter 2
‘I know you,’ Michael said. ‘You are the woman on the wall.’
She smiled. A smile on the face of a skull. He knew that she was only thirty-eight years old, but he was looking at an old woman. A woman with no hair after weeks of chemotherapy treatment. A woman whose yellow cheeks had vanished into a face of skin stretched over bones. But he could recognise the face that he had seen almost every week of his younger life. A then beautiful face, framed by long black lustrous hair. When he was very young it had been the face of a young woman, almost a girl. Over the years as he grew up the face had aged imperceptibly, but had always remained beautiful. Now it was the face of death.
‘You sat on the wall,’ he said, bemused. ‘Every Sunday, when we went to church at eleven o’clock in the morning you were always sitting on the wall across the road from the orphanage; and when we came back from church an hour later you were still sitting there. We used to watch you from inside the orphanage, wondering who you were. You always left at exactly twelve-thirty and walked down the hill to the harbour.’
She smiled again.
‘Yes, to catch the one o’clock ferry.’
‘Why?’
‘I came to watch my son . . . to watch him grow up.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’
‘I could not. I had given you to the priests. I could not take you back.’
‘Why did you give me to the priests?’
‘I had no choice. No choice at all.’
He pulled his chair closer to the dying woman. His voice became hard. ‘Tell me why you had no choice!’
Chapter 3
There were two prostitutes, the old, stooped priest and Michael by the side of the grave. The two grave-diggers wearing denim shorts and dirty white T-shirts lowered the coffin into the grave. The prostitutes crossed themselves, the priest intoned prayers and Michael threw a lump of earth onto the coffin. Then they went away; the prostitutes to Gzira, the priest to his church and Michael to Gozo.
‘Count me out,’ Creasy said.
They were sitting under the vines and mimosa, eating a hot lamb curry. Creasy had cooked it two days before and it had matured into a rich, tangy example of the quintessential Indian speciality. There was a wide variety of side dishes and, of course, papadums. Creasy prided himself on his curries. Michael was an enthusiastic consumer.
Michael crunched a papadum and then forked some banana into his mouth to take away the heat of the curry. He said, ‘I thought we were a team.’
‘Your natural mother was a whore,’ Creasy said. ‘Face up to it. She abandoned you the day after giving birth. Any woman who can do that is no human being in my eyes.’
‘She had no choice.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
Michael took a sip of cold beer. He was not frightened of Creasy, nor was he in awe of him, even though Creasy was the hardest man he had ever known or would probably ever know.
‘You taught me about vengeance,’ he said. ‘You taught me about justice.’
Creasy sighed.
‘OK, so she told you she was forced into prostitution. Forced into being a drug addict and forced to give you up. That was twenty years ago and even if it’s true - and I doubt it - what can you do? By nature prostitutes are notorious liars.’
Michael was looking down at his plate. Quietly he asked, ‘Is Blondie a notorious liar?’
Creasy sighed again and shook his head.
‘No, Blondie always tells the truth. If you talk to Blondie she will tell you to forget the whole stupid idea.’
Michael finished the last of the curry and said off-handedly, ‘By the way, my father was an Arab. He was the one who made my mother an addict and sold her off to prostitution.’
‘She told you that?’
‘Yes, and much more,’ The young man looked up. His eyes were defiant. ‘She came to see me every week . . . every Sunday. She sat on the wall near the orphanage and watched me go to church and watched me coming back.’ Emotion crept into his voice. ‘It must have broken her heart not to be able to talk to me.’
‘She was a whore.’
Emotion left Michael’s voice and it took on the edge of a razor blade. ‘Blondie was a whore and still owns a whorehouse; but Blondie is a great friend of yours and you admire her.’
‘Blondie is different.’
Michael stood up and stretched his frame and then began stacking plates. ‘Maybe so,’ he said. ‘But tomorrow I go to Brussels to talk to her. She’s been around a long time, maybe she knows something. Maybe she can point me in the right direction.’
‘Maybe she’ll tell you not to be a stupid idiot. Maybe she’ll tell you that there are whores and different whores . . . and that a whore who discards her child the day after its birth deserves no thought or compassion from that child nineteen years later.’
Michael gave him a belligerent look. A look that made Creasy realise that he was not talking to a child; he was talking to a nineteen-year-old man, made wiser far beyond his years. Creasy also realised that he could not let Michael just blast off alone on some crazy path of vengeance. It also entered his head that he himself had used Michael, and in a sense created Michael as an instrument for his own vengeance. He took a decision.
‘OK, Michael. You want to be an idiot and expurgate this so-called duty . . . then I go with you and hold your hand.’
Michael reacted very quietly. ‘I don’t need you,’ he said. ‘You trained me well. I can do it myself.’
Creasy looked down at the rough wooden surface of the table. His face was sombre, and that mood was reflected in his voice. ‘Michael - in a way I feel a great guilt. You had no childhood. I plucked you from an orphanage and made you a soldier. You were seventeen. You should have been able to live like any other teenager, but you never had the chance. Now you’re nineteen years old and seem like you’re forty . . . So that’s past . . . Nothing to be done. But maybe you’d let me help on this stupid thing you’re doing? Anyway it will be good to see Blondie again, and Maxie and Nicole . . . and I guess I need to be a chaperone between you and Christine.’
Michael smiled at him with an edge of affection.
‘Somehow I don’t see you in the role of a chaperone. Yes, come with me . . . but Creasy, understand that this is my show.’
Creasy sighed and nodded.
They landed at Brussels airport at eight p.m. They only had hand luggage and within fifteen minutes were striding out of customs. Michael looked infinitely older than his nineteen years: six feet tall, jet-black hair, cropped short; a long, lean face above a long, lean body. He wore black jeans, a cream open-necked shirt and a black leather bomber jacket. Beside him Creasy moved along with his curious walk; the outsides of his feet coming into contact with the ground first. A bear of a man with his cropped, grey hair and scarred face the colour of pale mahogany. He wore dark blue slacks, a light Oxford cotton shirt, a black cashmere sweater and a tweed jacket. An observer looking only at his clothes would have deduced that he was an English or Scottish country gentleman; but one look at the face would have dispelled such thoughts. This was a hard man in a bad mood.
As they came out towards the line of taxis Creasy suddenly stopped with a sharp grunt. Michael turned to look at him and saw the pain on his face. It was not the first time. Over the past months that short, sharp pain had recurred several times. Each time Creasy had brushed it aside, muttering something about indigestion.
‘Are you all right?’ Michael asked.
‘Sure, let’s go.’
They climbed into a taxi and Michael told the driver, ‘The Pappagal, Rue d’Argens.’
The driver twisted his head in surprise. ‘You know what that place is?’
‘Yes, a high-class brothel.’
Michael grinned at Creasy, then turned to look out the window, taking in the scenery, remembering the last time he had been in Brussels, almost two years ago, sitting in a taxi on the same route. At that time he had been with Creasy and Leonie. The memory of Leonie brought a sick jolt to the pit of his stomach. He had loved her as a mother. He remembered the tears he had shed when she had been killed. He remembered Creasy tossing him a handkerchief in the room at Guido’s pensione in Naples and telling him in that flat voice, ‘Dry your tears. You’re a man now. It’s time for vengeance.’
Half an hour later Michael pressed the doorbell of a discreet building in a discreet side-street only a few blocks from the EC headquarters. They heard the click of the tiny shutter set into the door and knew they were being examined from the inside, A few seconds later the door opened. It was Raoul; tall, skeletal and with a face dark enough to frighten strong men. He moved past them and looked carefully down both sides of the street, then nodded. They strode into the plush, carpeted hallway, dropped their bags and shook the tall man’s hand.
‘How long will you stay?’ Raoul asked,
‘A couple of days,’ Michael answered.
Raoul picked up their bags. ‘Blondie’s in the bar, I’ll take your things upstairs.’
They walked down the corridor, opened a door and went through. It was an opulent room: deep-pile maroon carpet, crystal chandeliers, velvet walls, a small mahogany bar, deep leather settees and armchairs. There were four very beautiful and elegantly dressed young women sitting in the armchairs. Sitting at the bar was something entirely different. An old woman in an ankle-length gold brocade gown. She had ebony black hair, a face thick with pancake make-up and a red slash for a mouth. She had blue-white diamonds at her ears, around her neck and around both wrists and on every one of her fingers. Her age was indeterminate, but Michael and Creasy knew that she was in her mid-seventies.
The red of her mouth widened as she saw them. She slid off the bar-stool as though she were an eighteen-year-old coquette; her arms opened. First embracing Creasy and then Michael, who could feel the stiffness of her corset. She held Michael at arm’s length, looking up at his face, and brushed a hand down his cheek, saying in her heavily Italian-accented English, ‘You have become beautiful . . . Before you were . . . just handsome.’
Creasy chuckled. Michael smiled and felt slightly embarrassed under the interested gaze of the four beautiful young women.
‘Business seems slack,’ Creasy commented.
Blondie’s smile waned.
‘It’s not great,’ she answered. ‘But the night is young. What will you have to drink?’
As they eased themselves onto the bar-stools Creasy again gasped and his left hand moved to the centre of his chest. Blondie and Michael glanced at each other.
‘What is it?’ the old woman asked sharply.
Creasy was shaking his head dismissively. She looked at Michael who shrugged and said, ‘He’s been getting those pains over the last few weeks . . . Says it’s nothing, but they’re getting more frequent.’
The atmosphere changed immediately. Blondie’s face had turned very serious. She spoke to Creasy rapidly in French. He nodded reluctantly. Michael could not understand the language but he saw the genuine anger and concern on her face. Abruptly she turned to Michael and spoke to him in English.
‘It has happened before with this fool who would be your father. He has so much metal in him it could be recycled into enough tin cans to supply a baked bean factory. Sometimes that metal moves.’
Suddenly she became a mother, mistress, manager and cyclone all in one. She snapped her fingers and Raoul passed her the phone. She dialled a number and spoke rapidly into it. Creasy tried to remonstrate but she cut him short with a look that would have withered an oak tree. Michael looked on in amazement. Blondie hung up the phone, turned to Michael and gave him his instructions.
‘An ambulance will be here within a few minutes. You are to make sure that Creasy gets into it together with pyjamas and whatever else he may need in hospital. A top surgeon is waiting for him in a private hospital . . . It is comfortable with pretty nurses. That surgeon will take out the piece of shrapnel that is working its way to that idiot’s heart.’ She gave Creasy another laser-sharp look. ‘I can never understand how a man of your intelligence and knowledge of wounds can be so stupid when it comes to your own body.’
Creasy coughed irritably and said, ‘You know I hate hospitals.’
Blondie smiled. ‘I told you . . . this one is exclusive, and the nurses are cute.’ She turned back to Michael and her voice was tight with authority. ‘So you get him there, Michael. And instruct that surgeon to X-ray Creasy from his toenails to the top of his head. If he finds any metal in there which needs to be taken out, he should do it now.’
Creasy coughed again, looked at Blondie and said, ‘You’re sure this guy knows what he’s doing?’
She smiled at him sweetly. ‘They say he’s one of the best in Europe.’
‘Must cost a bomb,’ Creasy muttered.
She smiled and shook her head. ‘His wife died five years ago. He compensates his grief by hard work. He does not contemplate replacing his wife, but he is a virile man. He comes here usually once a week. All my girls love him.’ She gave a very Italian shrug. ‘And in his way he loves them too . . . His name is Bernard.’
Bernard Roche was a good surgeon. He had been ten years in the French army and had done his apprenticeship in Algeria during the war of independence. He recognised Creasy.
He looked at his face, straightened in his chair and said, ‘First REP . . . I set a broken arm for you about two weeks before you guys blew up your barracks and marched out of Zeralda, singing Edith Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien.’
Creasy looked at him with suspicion and said, ‘You must have been in nappies.’
The surgeon smiled. ‘Just out of them. I was twenty-three years old. You were a legend. When I put that plaster on you my hands were shaking. You had a friend then . . . an Italian called Guido something . . . He told me if I didn’t put you back into perfect condition he’d bury me neck deep in the desert and train a camel to piss on my face every day for the next thousand years.’
Creasy smiled at him. ‘The arm turned out fine. I’m getting pain from an old wound.’
The surgeon stood up. He said to Michael, ‘Go away and have a drink and come back in an hour.’
Michael drank half a bottle of red wine in a small bistro across the road from the hospital that looked no more than a large private house. On his return, the surgeon’s face was sombre.
‘It was close,’ he said. ‘The legend could have died within the next week or so. Why is it that such hard men are so frightened of hospitals and doctors?’
Michael shrugged. ‘Have you operated?’
Bernard shook his head. ‘No, in about two hours. Come and have a look.’
They walked over to a wall which held a series of back-lit X-rays. Bernard pointed to the first one. Pointed to a small, dark shadow. ‘A grenade fragment,’ he said, ‘collected at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in the early fifties. It spent three decades working its way through muscle to the heart. We’ve caught it just in time.’ He pointed at the next X- ray and another dark shadow, ‘The fragment of a bullet . . . Apparently received in the Congo . . . very close to the spleen . . . I’ll take that out as well.’ He pointed at the next X-ray, Another dark shadow. ‘That’s a steel pin which some Italian doctor used to connect a small bone in his shoulder to his collar bone . . . That was in Laos. That pin should have been taken out about six months later but somehow it got forgotten . . . I may as well do it now . . . I may have to replace the pin, but I won’t know until I see how the two bones have fused.’
Michael had been listening carefully. He asked, ‘Maybe leave that one well alone?’
Bernard shook his head. ‘It will give him terri
ble arthritis later in life. Better it comes out now.’
Michael smiled as though to himself and then said, ‘I agree. Do it all at one time. How long will he have to stay in hospital?’
Bernard thought for a moment and then said, ‘At least ten days.’
Michael nodded in satisfaction. ‘That’s perfect.’
‘Do nothing until I’m out of here.’ Creasy’s voice was emphatic,
Michael shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll just make some enquiries and sort of mosey around. I mean, you’re going to be out of it for at least ten days and there’s no point in my sitting on my ass doing nothing.’
Creasy gave him a very narrow look. He said, ‘Put the mother situation on hold for a while . . . at least until I get out of this place. But try to find out what’s bothering Blondie.’
‘Blondie?’ Michael asked curiously.
Creasy nodded.
‘Yes. Something’s worrying her. I’ve known her many years and I can tell. I don’t think she’ll talk to me about it. She likes to be independent . . . But something’s wrong. Hang your ears out and try to get some kind of message.’
Blondie smiled at Michael across the kitchen table and said, ‘So Creasy is locked up in hospital for a few days . . . It’s about time.’ She leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘So tell me. Why are you here?’
He took a sip of his wine and answered, ‘I came to ask for your advice and perhaps your help.’
‘Tell me.’
So he told her. She knew the bare bones of the story and had been part of it, but he fleshed it out and went all the way back to the beginning: his adoption by Creasy and the dead English actress, Leonie, whom she had met and liked. Their revenge against the terrorists who had planted the bomb on Pan Am 103; his in-built hatred of the unknown natural mother who had abandoned him only one day after his birth. He explained about Father Manuel Zerafa telling him about that natural mother who was dying of cancer and wanted to see his face. He told her of his decision to see her. Told her of the woman with the ravaged bald-headed face lying on the hospital bed. Told her of the woman who had sat on the wall every Sunday during his childhood. Finally he told her of the reason why the woman on the wall had no choice but to abandon him the day after he was born. Then he told her what he planned to do, and again asked her advice and possibly her help.
The Blue Ring (A Creasy novel Book 3) Page 2
