Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  “Do you ever see him nowadays?”

  She finished the drink and set the glass down on the foldaway table in front of her. Her hair fell forward and I couldn’t see her face. “Never did see him again after I left home. My mom wrote me some years later and told me he’d suffered a fatal embolism and gone off to live with his Southern Baptist God. I just hope they’re real happy together.”

  She took a glass of wine from the stewardess and, after a few more minutes, leant back against the seat and closed her eyes. I gazed at her for a while as her chest rose and fell in the rhythmic pulse of sleep. I’d never seen anyone who looked so innocent, even though I figured she was really about as trustworthy as a fox selling life insurance in a chicken farm. It didn’t alter the way I felt about her or make it any easier to deny, no matter how much I might want to. In eight years, I’d not allowed myself to even contemplate the idea that I could ever again feel anything but friendship for a woman. Like a revelation, I saw how far I’d retreated into my solitude.

  ***

  Sometime when we were flying over the mid-Atlantic, I roused myself and decided to work through some on-plane exercises. Miranda’s eyes were still closed and her breathing was deep and regular. I slid a biro from my jacket pocket and, feeling my way with my fingertips, balanced it on the end of the bag that was tucked under my seat. Checking to make sure the pen couldn’t be seen from above, I stood up and walked down the aisle. I found a few square feet of space in front of a bulkhead and started to stretch my arms, back and legs.

  When I returned to my seat, Miranda’s eyes were still closed and her breathing was slow and steady. When I felt underneath my seat, though, the pen had been dislodged from its position on top of the bag. I looked at her for a while but she gave no sign of being aware of my scrutiny.

  I pulled the second of my books on Shakespeare’s life – I’d finished the first and left it at home – from the bag. One of this author’s contentions was that Will wrote his darker plays after his son died. The lesser-known play King John contained words thought to refer to the boy’s death:

  Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

  Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

  Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

  Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

  Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

  Shakespeare visited Stratford once a year during the period he was resident in London. His only memories of his son could be of brief periods, flashes of a life like night-time fields lit by summer lightning. I wondered how deeply he felt the grief and whether he felt guilt for being away for much of the child’s short life. I decided he would have suffered, both in grief and in guilt. It was impossible to read the man’s words and believe otherwise.

  It was a strange feeling, thinking of this man’s pain and anguish while flying towards a country that he could never have visited. Inevitably, my own dark side brought thoughts of my son, not so much older now than Hamnet Shakespeare had been when he died. I hadn’t seen the boy for many years and I’d long ago given up hope of ever re-entering his life. I wondered how much his mother and our respective families had turned his mind against me. Did he know me only as a criminal who had deserted him when he was barely able to walk? I felt a sudden sense of loss, crushing in its intensity. The world beyond this thin cylinder of flying metal was as black as a murderer’s heart and hopeless as a mother cradling a dying child.

  I re-read the words from King John. Something in the verse reached out to me across four hundred years of sadness. I felt a strange kinship with the poet: everything I had read about him, and especially the comments of his contemporaries, portrayed him as a noble man, witty and humorous, honorable and sincere. I wondered whether, had we been able to meet, we could have been friends.

  I sat alone with my thoughts until, finally, my ears popped and I strained to look from the window as we flew over the myriad islands and inlets of New York.

  Chapter 23

  Ghassan Salim’s driver picked us up at JFK and his Mercedes was soon speeding us northwards on the Van Wyck Expressway and then the various Interstates to Westchester. I’d never been north of the city before and I watched as the suburbs thinned and we passed increasing areas of greenery. The late sun came out as we drove over the Tappen Zee bridge and along the banks of the Hudson for a while until the driver turned inland. The countryside now was thick with trees, oaks and white birches, sycamore and willow, and looked more like England than I’d expected. Miranda told me we were passing through Orange and then Sullivan counties but it began to get dark and everything started to look the same.

  We were an hour north of the river when we finally turned onto a narrow, two-lane blacktop and then onto a track that, in the beam of the lights, was a green-walled tunnel through the overhanging trees. The driver murmured to us and pointed and, at the end of the track, we caught our first sight of Ghassan Salim’s American lair. The building looked ancient and its somber, dark stone had a sinister appearance even in the glare of the ground-level floodlights. Two stories high, it was long and squat. Its arched windows were topped by weathered carvings of Greek Orthodox runes, outlined in the shadows thrown up by the lights, and the ends of its red-tiled roofline were broken by concrete turrets. The whole place had a doleful and ominous appearance: it was a keep you could imagine being used by ancient Crusader robber-barons on a remote Cypriot mountain.

  We drove up to the first of two rows of barbed wire fence and automatic gates and a searchlight from one of the concrete turrets swept over our vehicle. The gates swung open and we drove through, past a fence that was hung every twenty yards with cameras and warning signs featuring stylized bolts of lightning. Inside the fence’s perimeter, savage-looking German Shepherds crouched and barked at the limo. As we drove through the second fence, I could see that the building’s windows were laced with steel bars: it had the look of a formidable stronghold. Or, I thought, a prison.

  I guessed that Miranda was thinking much the same thing. She turned to me and grimaced. “I think I went in a place like this once in Disneyland.”

  “It makes a change from Stratford-upon-Avon.”

  The car turned and came to a halt in front of the building’s arched front entrance. A red-uniformed footman hurried out to open our doors, beckoning a flunky to fetch our luggage. We stepped out of the car and looked around. The temperature was markedly cooler here than it had been at the airport. I could hear the hiss of water sprinklers and, incongruously given the lowering menace of this place, I could smell flowers from beds at the side of the drive. The dogs stopped barking just as a man clad in combat fatigues walked around the end of the building and rested his shoulder against the wall, an automatic rifle slung under his arm.

  The footman beckoned to us and we walked through the double front doors to find ourselves in a massive, air-conditioned lobby, the walls of which were hung with tapestries depicting medieval saints and martyrs. The broad staircase that ran up to the next floor was flanked by full-size statues of ancient Greeks and Romans, their hands holding scrolls or parchments, their heads turned sideways and crowned with laurels. To either side, glass display cabinets held collections of antiquities, glazed pottery jars and drinking vessels, clay figurines, worn coins. I guessed that some of the pieces would be more than two thousand years old.

  The footman stood to attention and then bowed to us. “On behalf of Mr. Salim, may I welcome you to his dwelling?”

  “Mr. Salim isn’t home?” asked Miranda.

  “He regrets that he is not here to welcome you.” He looked down and flicked his shirt cuffs, a gesture at odds with his appearance but not with his accent, which spoke of sometime schooling in England. “Urgent business called Mr. Salim to Washington,” he continued, “but he will return this evening. In the meantime, he asks that you treat his home as yours.”

  I looked around at the vaulted ceilings and somber wall coverings. “What was this place before Mr. Salim cam
e along?”

  “It was, at one time, a Buddhist monastery,” he told me.

  “Of course it was.”

  “The Buddhists sold it to a New Jersey industrialist who, in turn, sold it to Mr. Salim.”

  Miranda walked over to one of the display cabinets and, resting her hand on its frame, leant casually over the glass. “Kinda old, I guess?” she asked.

  “The house or the artifacts, Madam?”

  “Both,” she said.

  The footman sniffed. “The house goes back to the late nineteenth century. The particular artifacts you are looking at are Byzantine.”

  “I figured,” she said. “Around fifth century, I’d guess.”

  “If you say so, Madam.”

  “If you look around the house, you will find many other exhibits to interest you. You will also find that we have a filtered swimming pool at the back of the house and, in the east wing, a billiard room, a home theatre and an extensive library. Please feel free to explore but, if you are outside, please do not approach the fences.”

  Miranda was examining some of the glass-enclosed pieces with, I suspected, a less-than-casual interest. I thought I saw her back stiffen. “Are these all genuine?” she asked.

  The footman stared at her for a moment. “Mr. Salim invites you to join him for dinner at nine sharp. Dress will be smart casual. I have had your bags taken to your rooms, which I will now, if you will permit me, show to you. You may, by the way, call me Ali. I shall be at your service until Mr. Salim returns.”

  He turned and walked towards the staircase. Miranda grinned at me and did a fair impression of a hunchbacked manservant in an old horror movie as we followed him up the stairs.

  ***

  After I’d unpacked, I changed into chinos and a tee shirt and walked back downstairs and through to the rear of the house. Outside the back door, the night was warm and black-edged clouds crowded a near-full moon. I heard an animal screech somewhere off beyond the fences. I stood on the gravel path and looked around. The whole property was illuminated by floodlights and the double row of electric fences continued all the way around the house. Guard dogs prowled between the fences, several of them stopping and gazing in my direction when they heard my footsteps. I walked along the side of the house, past a glistening swimming pool and, further along, a helicopter landing pad. The whole area was laid out in lawns separated by colorful flower beds and shrubs. In contrast to the surrounding countryside, though, there were no trees. I looked around and saw a couple of stumps and guessed that whatever trees had stood here had been removed to give the house’s security people a clear view of the fences.

  When I reached the corner of the building, I was met by a man armed with an Armalite rifle. He stared at me expressionlessly until I gave him a half-salute and walked back the way I’d come. Given what I’d been told about Ghassan Salim’s history, the security around his home was no great surprise but I thought about the cost involved in its upkeep and stored the information away in my mental filing cabinet.

  I was about to walk towards the other wing of the building when Miranda strolled from the back door. “Nice yard,” she murmured. “They could use it as a model if they ever decided to turn Devil’s Island into a theme park.”

  I looked up at the building’s dark walls, noting the closed-circuit cameras under the eaves. “I think they’d have to tone down Devil’s Island’s fun image if they wanted to compete with this place.”

  “It gives me the creeps. You think they have a torture chamber?”

  “You want a tour?”

  “Maybe later.” She took a few steps onto one of the lawns, looked back at the house and shuddered. “Hey, Hastings, where are the papers?”

  “They weren’t in my traveling bag.”

  “You said they were! You lied to me.”

  “But you knew that already.”

  “Oh, you mean the plane? That wasn’t my fault. I moved my leg and it knocked your stupid bag over.”

  “And you just had to look inside.”

  “I wanted to make sure nothing had fallen out. So, you have them in your pocket? Where are they now?”

  They were, in fact, still in the money bag which was still around my waist, under my tee shirt. “They’re safe,” I told her. “You have no need to worry.”

  “Do you still not trust me, Hastings? Don’t you think a million bucks is enough for me? I’ve never been a greedy girl, you know.”

  I smiled at her. “I can tell you’re as trustworthy as a country vicar.”

  Chapter 24

  While I was changing for dinner, I heard the roar of a helicopter and seconds later the rotors thwacked over my room. I walked out onto the balcony in time to see a red commercial chopper land on the pad in the garden to the right of the house. Ali the footman ran forward to open the door and three men stepped out and crouched low beneath the still-spinning blades as they walked to the house.

  Twenty minutes later, I met Miranda at the top of the great staircase. She had changed into a long, gold-colored evening gown and the fresh/innocent look was back, her hair glistening with health, the skin of her face flushed as if with excitement. She lowered her head just a fraction and her hand caught that familiar lock of hair as it fell and pushed it behind her ear. I offered her my arm. She slipped a cool hand around my wrist and we trod the wide stairs like an earl and his lady in a medieval palace.

  Ali was waiting for us in the lobby and, bowing slightly, he led us to the dining room. I suppose I’d expected one of those cavernous rooms they have in movies, with a table the size of an aircraft carrier, but this room was much more intimate, about the size of the average lounge in a house in Britain, its walls all walnut panels hung with yet more paintings. In contrast to the entrance hall, these paintings were of English scenes from Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Amongst them, I saw a framed copy of Shakespeare’s will – the version in the books, not the one that I’d now moved from my money belt to the inside pocket of my jacket – and, at the far end of the room, a duplicate of the plaster bust of Will that I’d molested so shamelessly in the Stratford Museum.

  Apart from a servant, standing to attention in front of a sideboard loaded with fine china and serving utensils, there were two men in the room. To one side of us sat a small, delicately-built man dressed in something like a Nehru jacket. He had black hair, swept back above a narrow face and beaked nose. He looked up at us and then down at the linen table cloth, his hands fidgeting with the silver knives and forks of his place setting.

  The other man was larger, around my height, with a stocky build. He was as unmistakably Arab as his companion but, where the other man seemed nervous, he was composed and still. He had eyes like a shark, cold and expressionless, and a scar that stretched from the corner of his left eye to the bottom of his chin. He stared at my face for a few seconds and then switched his gaze to Miranda. Abruptly, he rose and, bowing extravagantly, kissed her hand like he was George Clooney on charm pills. Then he turned to me and shook my hand, holding it in a firm grip as he introduced himself as Ghassan Salim and his companion as Rashid al-Ahmad.

  Introductions done, Salim beckoned us to our seats, me at the opposite end of the table from where he was sitting, Miranda to my left. The servant wafted forward and set soup bowls in front of us and then filled our glasses with white wine.

  “The soup will be Brown Windsor, in your honor,” Salim said. He spoke excellent English, only the mildest inflection betraying his origins. He waved and the servant came forward again, this time carrying a steaming tureen of murky-looking soup. As he ladled the soup into our bowls, I caught Miranda’s eye and saw the shadow of a smile on her lips. I kept a straight face and waited until I’d seen Salim take soup from the same bowl and raise a spoon to his mouth before I followed suit.

  “Ah,” he murmured. “English cuisine. It is a rare treat, is it not?”

  “Very rare,” I said. “Most people in England don’t even know it exists.”

  He stared at me again.
“I was at Eton, you know.”

  “I think someone told me that.”

  “Oh, they did?”

  “I believe so.” I sensed Miranda looking at me, no doubt trying to remember if this was something she’d mentioned.

  “I also studied English Literature at Oxford.” Salim raised his hand towards Miranda. “What you Americans would call my ‘Alma Mater’. In later years, I was pleased to make bequests to my old college.”

  “How generous,” I said. In fact, the agency’s intelligence man, Thornton, had told me that Salim had been sent down from Oxford for cheating in his second year exams but I thought it would have been churlish to mention this as I was drinking his Brown Windsor.

  “And then I attended the American University in Beirut, where I took my master’s degree. It was at these great centers of learning that I really conceived my love for the Bard. A most un-English Englishman, I consider him. He had such passion and intensity… He should have been an Arab.” He finished his soup and waved for the servant to remove his dish. I pushed my own bowl away with the soup half-drunk and felt his eyes return to me, as if he’d interpreted my action as a signal.

  “But,” he said quietly, “you did not travel all this way to hear me talk about my life. You have, I think, a delivery to make to me.”

  I sat back in my chair, taking my time. Salim mirrored my casual attitude but al-Ahmad leaned forward, an elbow each side of his soup bowl, and watched me intensely. Miranda was equally alert, her eyes switching from end to end of the table like a center-court spectator during the final week of Wimbledon. Slowly, I reached the envelope from my jacket pocket and laid it on the table. al-Ahmad’s hand reached out and I kept my hand on top of the envelope for a moment before letting him take it.

  Eagerly, he opened the flap and tipped the contents of the envelope onto the table. Immediately, he looked up at me in concern. “These are copies.”