by Mark Dawson
“The tattoo,” he said, pointing, “on your arm. You told me that was for your daughter, Isabella. Do you remember?”
She stood up.
“What happened to her? Where is she?”
“We’re finished,” she said. “Don’t try and find me again. I don’t want to be found. Do you understand?”
She stalked away from the table without a backward glance.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
HE STAYED at the table for thirty minutes, smoking a couple of cigarettes and worrying about the content of their conversation and how weak and ill she had looked, and how little he had achieved. He was about to settle the bill when Anna arrived. Her eyes flashed with fury; with him, and, he guessed, with herself. He had played her very well yesterday, persuading her that he was warming to her to lower her guard just enough that he could put her out of the way for a few hours. He had brought it to an expert conclusion at dinner. He knew that she would feel embarrassed; she had offered herself to him and he had not only rejected the offer, he had turned the tables completely and used the detente between them as a means to incapacitate her. She was a beautiful girl; he doubted that she was used to being treated like that. There might have been some consolation for her if he had admitted that he found her almost irresistibly attractive, but he did not. He guessed, from the steeliness in her eyes, that she would have hit him. He would have deserved it, too.
“You’re going to have to get over it,” he told her. “It was necessary. She would never have come out if we were here together.”
“What? You met her?”
“Yes,” he said. “Forty minutes ago.”
The anger drained out of her. “And? Will she help?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, no. She’s not in the best shape, Anna.”
“That’s not good enough, Milton. You can’t give up.”
“Who said I was giving up?”
“Where is she?”
“I can guess,” he said. “I’m going to go and see her now.”
“I’m coming too.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not.”
“You’re forgetting…”
“She’s been hiding here for the best part of a decade, Anna. She’s paranoid. And you should remember what she used to do before she came here. How do you think she’ll react if she thinks Russian intelligence have started to follow her? No, don’t answer, I’ll tell you—she’ll shoot you, and then she’ll likely shoot me.” She started to protest again and he held up a hand to forestall her. “I’ll go and speak to her again. I think I can persuade her, but you are going to have to trust me.”
“After what you did?”
“Even after that. If I can get her to cooperate, then you can meet her. That’s the only way this is going to work, Anna.”
#
HE DIDN’T NEED to follow her; he knew where she was going. He got lost amid the commotion as soon as he reached the ground floor and only found the familiar corridor an hour later. The same man was behind the desk, an illegal feed of Premiership football on the television. Milton gave him another hundred dollars and went through into the corridor that led to the rooms.
Beatrix was lying on the bed, breathing almost without sound. She was covered with a single sheet, the shape of her gaunt body visible beneath. The room was smokey and smelled sickly bittersweet. There was a joint in an ashtray, almost burned down to the filter, and it sent languid smoke drifting up to the ceiling. She was deep in sleep and yet she did not looked relaxed; her face was troubled and, as he watched, the muscles in her cheek started to twitch, the sudden jerk reflected and amplified by an unconscious spasm in her right leg. The air conditioning unit coughed and spluttered, gobbets of water falling from it and splashing against the wall and floor. The door was open and cold, harsh light from the lobby leaked inside.
Milton stepped all the way inside; the room was so small that he had to squeeze right up against the bed before he was able to close the door. He knelt down. There was an ivory pipe on the bed next to her head: the long bamboo stem was decorated with Chinese inscriptions along its length and it was fitted with a blue and white porcelain bowl. Milton picked up the pipe; the bowl was detachable and, as he unscrewed it, he saw a congealed brown paste gathered inside. There was wooden layout tray on the bed next to her knees complete with a funnel-shaped lamp made of nickel silver, a spare pipe and two extra pipe bowls. A small folded paper envelope was on the tray. Milton picked it up and opened it. There was half a gram of brown powder inside with the consistency of ground cinnamon. His stomach plunged. He had been to the East more than enough times to recognise opium.
Now he knew why Beatrix looked as bad as she did.
He knew why she had chosen to live in a place like this: you could find anything you wanted in Chungking Mansion, legal or not. Finding someone with opium to sell would be a simple matter indeed.
He took the tray from the bed and placed it quietly on the floor.
He let her sleep. It was another three hours before she finally awoke. She stirred, turning over so that she was facing him, and her shallow breathing altered a little. He saw her eyes open, staring right at him.
“Bella?” she said in a quiet voice, and then she closed her eyes again.
She woke properly twenty minutes later. She opened her eyes wide and gave a shudder.
“Beatrix,” Milton whispered. He put his right hand on her shoulder.
Her breathing accelerated and her right hand flailed, searching for something. It stabbed under the pillow and, when it emerged, it was holding a small pistol.
Milton reached down and caught her wrist in his hand. She was weak and he pressed her arm gently down against the mattress. “It’s me, Beatrix. It’s John.”
Her whisper was so quiet that he had to strain his ears to catch the words. “I told you,” she said. “I can’t help you.”
“That’s fine,” he said, his hand still on her wrist. “I won’t ask again. I’m here for you now. I want to help you.”
She laughed, weak and bitter, the noise tearing into a ragged cough. “You can’t.”
“Tell me what’s happened.”
“Leave me alone, Milton. It’s pointless. You can’t do anything.”
“Just tell me. Maybe I can.”
She shook her head and was silent for a moment. Milton thought that she had gone back to sleep again when she gulped and he realised that she was crying silent tears.
“Beatrix, where’s Isabella?”
Chapter Thirty
SHE GRADUALLY regained her strength and when she did, he helped her to stand so that she could go over to the cupboard. She was naked apart from her underwear but she was too vacant to be shy; she had lost so much weight that her ribs showed clearly and, as she turned and bent down to pull up her jeans, he could see the individual vertebrae in her back. He saw the tattoo with Isabella on her right arm and, as she turned, he saw more ink: eight bars of solid black, one after the other, running down from underneath her arm down towards her waist. She opened the door, picked out a clean t-shirt and put it on.
“You got any more smokes?”
He took out the packet and gave it to her. “Keep it.”
“I just want one.” She fingered one from the carton and lit it.
The atmosphere in the room was still heady and Milton felt the beginnings of a headache. “What do you say we get some air?”
She shrugged limply. “I don’t care.”
She put on the t-shirt and a jacket and allowed him to lead the way down to Nathan Road.
“There’s a bar I know around the corner,” she suggested.
“I don’t do bars. Somewhere else?”
“You don’t want a drink?” she asked. “I want a drink.”
“It’s not that I don’t want one … it’s just that … well, I don’t.”
“At all?”
He nodded ruefully. “You’re looking at a new man,�
� he said.
“You were a soldier, Milton. I’ve never met a soldier who doesn’t drink.”
“Long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.” They were passing a coffee shop. “How about here?”
She shrugged and they went inside. Milton ordered two strong coffees and two apple doughnuts. Beatrix had found a table at the back of the room and had taken the seat that was facing out, into the street. She was extremely careful, Milton thought. Old habits died hard. He took the coffees and the doughnuts over and sat down opposite her.
“Get this down you,” he said, sliding the plate across the table.
She picked it up and took a big bite.
“What’s going on?”
She stopped for a moment, as if hesitating at a crossroads, considering each possible choice and the consequences that might flow from it. Milton waited, listening to the sound of cutlery ringing against crockery, the low buzz of conversation and the electric hum of the city outside.
“What Shcherbatov told you. About the operation. It’s true.”
“How do you know that?”
“There was a briefcase in the car after we hit it. It was just habitual. I saw it, I took it. I went back home before we debriefed and I opened it there. Those things you said: the photographs, the flash drives. They were in the case.”
“Did you look at them?”
“Just the photographs. They were enough for me to know something was wrong. Control is not a field agent, Milton. In all the time I worked for him, the only time I saw him away from his desk was for that job. I’d certainly never seen him meeting a target before. That didn’t make any sense at all. I knew that something was wrong.”
“What did you do?”
“I copied the flash drives and hid them and then I went in with the photographs. I asked him to explain them. He couldn’t, of course. He tried, but it was all bullshit. I was about ready to quit before that assignment, like you, and that was just the final straw as far as I was concerned. I played along with him, gave him the answers that he wanted to hear, and then I went home.”
She paused and swallowed, her skinny neck bulging once and then twice.
Milton pressed gently. “What happened?”
“He’d sent five agents. They were waiting for me. They had my husband and daughter. They had a gun on my little girl.” She looked down, her eyes closing. She stayed like that for twenty seconds, her chest rising and falling with each deep lungful of breath that she took. When she looked up again her eyes glistened with tears. “I knew if I didn’t do something they’d kill all three of us so I waited for my chance and went for them. My husband was shot, I got a round in the shoulder but I managed to fuck one of them up pretty good. I don’t know. If she wasn’t dead she’d be smoking these”, she held up the cigarette, “through the hole I put in her throat. The other one got my daughter.”
“Got?”
“Grabbed her. They—”
The words choked in her throat. She stood up and went to the counter for more cigarettes. Milton remained at the table, staring at the half eaten doughnut, unsure quite what to say.
She returned, tossing the cigarettes onto the table. There was fresh steel in her face.
Milton started, “You don’t have to say…”
“It was a stalemate,” she said over him. “I had a gun on them, they had her. What was I going to do?” She tore off the cellophane wrapper, opened the carton and took out a cigarette. Milton lit it for her. “The only thing I could do was run. I got on the Eurostar, went through the tunnel and then kept going. Got on a plane in Barcelona and came here. It seemed as good a place as any to stop. That was nearly ten years ago. Been here ever since.”
“Where is she now?” Milton asked. “Your daughter?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They emailed a picture a week after it all happened.” She took a slim wallet from her jeans pocket, opened it and took out a photograph. She laid it on the table and Milton took it. The girl had a happy, open face, a ready smile and a cascade of brown curls that gathered on her shoulders. The picture had been taken in an anonymous room, the little girl sitting in front of a large TV with beige walls in the background. She was playing with a doll. “She looks fine but I know that was a reminder. A warning. Control will have her in care somewhere. She’ll be alive. He knows that as long as he has her, that’s the one thing that’ll stop me coming back and tearing his throat out.”
“The tattoos on your ribs,” he said, pointing to his own trunk. “That’s one for every year, right?”
“That’s right. Eight years. It’ll be time to add another one next month.”
“But you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
He leant forward and spoke urgently, “Because I found you. Shcherbatov knows where you are. If I can’t persuade you to help them he’s not going to give up. He wants what you have about Control. He’ll just send someone else who won’t ask as nicely.”
“You didn’t find me, Milton, I found you. And that threat doesn’t work if you’ve got nothing left to lose.”
He pressed ahead. “What about Control?”
“What about him?”
“If he finds out where you are, you know what will happen. He’s still there. He hasn’t stopped.”
“Look at me, Milton. You’re not listening. Do you think any of that frightens me? Shcherbatov. Control.” She shaped her fingers into the shape of a gun and pressed the tips against her temple. “You think the gun’s for defence? You know how many times I’ve wanted to put a bullet in my head and lost my nerve? Every day.” He felt his stomach turn and he reached across and took her wrist; there was no resistance in her arm as he gently lowered it and held it against the table. “I can’t even do that. I’m fucked up. They come over here and do it for me, I’m telling you, they’d be doing me a fucking favour.” She sucked down on the smoke and gazed out into the street. “My life is over. My husband is dead. I lost my daughter. I’ve got no money. I’m a drug addict. I’m done, Milton. Finished. How do you think this is going to end?”
“There must be something you can do.”
“You got any ideas? I’m all ears.”
“Something, anything. It would have been better than coming here to all … this.”
“This?”
“The opium, for a start.”
“I don’t need your morality,” she said, glaring at him. She took another cigarette from the packet and lit it.
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” she snapped. “It helps me forget how I’ve fucked up my life.”
“It doesn’t work, though, does it?”
“No? I don’t think about very much when I’m high. You should try it.”
“I have tried it,” he said. “That’s the reason I don’t drink any more. It works for a while until it doesn’t. And then it’s much worse.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re in a program?”
“A.A.” Milton said. He smiled wryly.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’s the first time I’ve admitted it to anyone who wasn’t already in the Rooms.”
“Yeah? Well, good for you, but I still think it’s bullshit. There’s no point trying to persuade me to do something stupid like that. The first thing you need is to want to stop, right?”
Yes…”
“I don’t want to stop.”
“You’re not…”
“There’s something else, Milton. The other reason I do it.” She took a deep breath and laid her hands out on the table, palms down, fingers splayed. “It’s a palliative.”
“For what?”
“I have cancer.”
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I told you. I don’t need your sympathy.”
He shifted uncomfortably; the conversation had veered hopelessly away from where he thought it might go. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. Breast cancer, stage four. It’s in my liver and my
lungs. I found out three months ago.”
“Have you had treatment?”
She shrugged. “What’s the point?”
“So you haven’t?”
She waved a hand disdainfully. “There’s a doctor I know, discreet if you pay him enough. He’s given me two rounds of chemotherapy. I might’ve had a third but I’ve run out of money. Don’t do anything stupid like offer to pay for it. I’m alright with it. We’re all going to die, Milton, especially people like us. I just know I’ll be sooner than most.”
“How long do you have left?”
“He can’t say for sure. All they can do is manage it now. No more than twelve months.” She smiled bitterly. “So I eat like shit and I smoke and I drink and when the pain gets too much I smoke heroin so I can’t feel it any more. And one day, when I can’t take it any more, I’ll shoot up enough to bring an end to it. You think about it from my point of view, it’s not a bad way to go.”
Milton laid his hands flat on the table. “What about your daughter?”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t.”
“You don’t want to see her again? Before…”
“Before I die? Yes, Milton, of course I do. I want that more than anything. But if Control gets even the slightest hint that I’m in the country again he is going to think I’m coming after him; and if he thinks that, she isn’t safe. I can’t take the risk. I can’t go back. You see, Milton? This can’t be fixed.”
He stared right into her face. “No. You’re wrong. Everything can be fixed.”
“Not this.”
“What about if I said I could get her back?”
Chapter Thirty-One
THEY TALKED FOR another two hours. Milton didn’t have a plan and so they worked it out on the fly.
“Where are the flash drives?” he asked her.
She paused.
“You have to trust me. I’ve got almost as much of a reason to bring down Control as you do. And this won’t work if you don’t.”
“I know. But… I don’t really know you, Milton, and that’s my only leverage. If I let you have it and it goes wrong…”
