Solomon's Keepers

by J. H. Kavanagh

  Eva is back in the living room again. She checks herself around the middle and feels for the injuries. She feels horrified and strangely elated. The relief stays but all the pain has gone. She looks at her small pink fists. Jake is smiling. ‘You dropped him over the side yet?’

  It takes a moment before she can speak. ‘Jake, I can’t believe this isn’t real. This is all an act, right? The shooting, the…brutality, that guy they…that I…that whoever it is beat up. It is all an act, isn’t it?’

  Jake shrugs. ‘I wasn’t there. You tell me. Sure hurts when the bastard hits though, doesn’t it?’

  Eva is silent again. Jake gets to his feet. ‘I need another drink,’ he says. ‘You know, there’s a trick if you want to resume where you left off. You just hold the Start button down for a count of two. Go on, chuck the bastard over.’

  ‘What do I do to skip that bit? I don’t think I want to go back there…ever.’

  ‘Four and Start will take you to the next. That’s it on that routine.’

  Eva thinks about holding the baby again but presses Four.

  Welcome back. You know, whatever else we experience in life, whatever takes us up or brings us down, we always come back to love. As long as we are flesh and blood we can’t get along without it. With KomViva you can experience more highs and lows in an hour than some do in their whole lives. So naturally we bring you the most sensational lovemaking too. After all we’re only human. So get ready for a little lovemaking…KomViva style. Here’s a taste of what we mean. You’re reminded that this experience is for adults only…

  Firelight lapping painted cave walls and gleaming in the nap of fur spread wide and flat. A girl with long dark hair moves deep shadows as she comes towards you across the bed on her knees. She sweeps her arms around your neck and kisses you greedily. Her hands find your naked back, dig nails in your skin and then reach hungrily between your thighs. She whispers: ‘Please now let’s do it,’ turns, arching her back down and her buttocks high, spreading her thighs with little steps of her knees. Then you’re standing against her, reaching around hips, fingers delving. You plant your hands on her hips and push home. The firelight skims across your skin. The spread fingers plumping perfect flesh. The scar stands out in profile on your right wrist; the raised line along the inner forearm, unmistakably, the lizard scar.

  She lets the helmet drop to the floor. She doesn’t speak. Jake thinks he understands, watches the upturned helmet rocking but lets her be. Judging by the time, she hadn’t got to the worst of it, the best of it, rather. Must be funny for a woman too. Maybe better. Sooya certainly didn’t complain.

  After a bit he asks if she wants anything. A drink? Another beer? She says yes please distractedly. He thinks something is wrong but gets the drink anyway. She hasn’t moved when he comes back. ‘Fucking hell! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Only then does she look up at him. ‘I think I have,’ she says.

  He says something else but she is lost in thought and doesn’t catch it. She feels the universe collapsing, the stars rushing in like birds coming home. A myriad tiny familiarities suddenly cohere as one. It can’t be true. But it is.

  Thirteen

  Eva drives fast, as though to outrun the bewilderment and anger and shake loose the seed of elation that sticks in her heart. What’s the explanation? Was it a trick? Some kind of overlay from her memory? Was that possible? But many of the sensations which confirmed who he was were not memories; they were a calculated recognition of something familiar from another perspective, from his perspective. The anger is an authentication all of its own. She’s pissed off because she’s been duped. She’s not sure by whom, but duped in a big way. There’s a betrayal in there alongside the sense of intrigue and a renewed, audacious thrill. The world is not the same place, she is not the same person and the future is not the same as it was.

  Nothing makes sense. Everything has been manipulated to make a fool of her. How do you make sense of losing your man in a war and finding him again in the embrace of a woman? She manages a wry smile at the thought that she could not conceive of a worse scenario. Except that she can of course. The one she has lived with.

  She parks the car on the street outside the rented apartment and takes her bee swarm thoughts inside. In matters of the heart there is a contract of intensity and nothing said or not said can overrule that. He would never have abandoned her deliberately whilst alive. Once inside, she lets the tears come unquestioned and slumps on to a settee. None of this makes sense. It is mad and unfair and…ridiculous. Ridiculous to make such a discovery whilst so engrossed in that act. Even now the delicious anarchic novelty of it all is contriving to make the real world seem the less real, to mock the serious decisions she needs to make. If it is an infidelity then is she not complicit? Is it mitigated or made worse by the passive participation of so many others?

  The fundamental fact is that she knows he’s still alive. Even though her rational mind won’t stop offering explanations, in the end thinking is only thinking but knowing is knowing. She reached so deeply, so willingly and invested so much in this. There’s some payback due. She has given an advance on all this. It owes her. She’s going to collect.

  All that advice about letting time be a healer was precisely wrong and a waste of life. Those phoney words: celebration, hero. They’d used them at the memorial service. Celebrate his life. Verbal looking away. She doesn’t want to look away any more, she needs to look into the mess and divine what she really feels and what to do. Now it doesn’t feel like there’s been any healing of the heart; immersing herself in family and work has been worthy, necessary, but it isn’t enough. It feels like watching the decorators bustling into the empty apartment above hers with their dust sheets and radios and their vans in the street outside. The activity only underlines the emptiness, the fact that the life that belongs there is elsewhere.

  She resolves to act swiftly to catch up. Is she about to compound one folly with another? Who cares? She fixes herself a sandwich and pours a glass of cold white wine. She’s ready to think about what to do. She has to do something. She plays with the fantasy: Young scientist researches mysterious reappearance of dead lover. This isn’t a story; this is her life. She pictures herself wandering into a police station to report a found person to a burly sergeant leaning over the counter. Right then Madam, better take some details. The name of the undeceased gentleman? Age? Occupation? And, if you don’t mind, what were the circumstances of his um…? I see Madam. Is it possible that…? Oh fuck off.

  But research is her profession and getting to the purpose and the essence of things is something she understands. She finds out why things are as they are, how they should be. If it feels different when it’s her own story, her own man, nevertheless there is a certain comfort in the resolution to act. She has allowed him to escape once and had thought him dead. But this return is for a reason. It must be destiny. A part of her might even call it divine. If her career and his had been incompatible before then that incompatibility no longer counts. There have to be new rules now. Now he’s a legitimate target. She is going to find and confront him. The feeling is too strong to ignore. For all the grieving and the time that’s passed it is only now that she knows. She has a second chance and she’s not going to miss it.

  René never made the Solomon programme. After the final selection he had moved on. But he still had the same mobile number that Eva had once texted him on. She still had the number. She tries the Black Lamb, quizzes the landlord about the names of the characters she’d heard about and never met, including a ranger called Tyler. She calls one of the soldiers, Piers, whom she had met for the first time and spoken to at length at the memorial service and whose number she had taken but never expected to use. The service came back; a parish church and a small knot of family and local residents, elderly farmers mostly with workaday stoops in their best clothes, two young soldiers towering above the throng, taut and bright like planed wood. His mother had apologized, inexplicably, for
not knowing more about Eva, for never having met her, for knowing only that her son had put her name in the ‘other contacts’ section on an official form. She had heard lovely things about her in ‘email letters’ and had been looking forward to meeting her. She doesn’t want to risk an emotional scene and so speaks in tidy phrases which have been prepared for delivery over many hours of worrying. At one point she says ‘I can see why he thought so much of you.’ Eva can see how the emotions have already been harvested and carefully preserved for another season. There are tears in her eyes, a lingering look to gather something from this brief opportunity, to capture something from a future that is already a ghost.

  His father is dignified and distant. He acknowledges Eva but seems uncomfortable and is soon at a loss for words. After the service when they return to the bungalow he spends most of the time talking to the young soldiers, his tall spare frame drawn to their kindred postures, listening and nodding at their stories, matching something of their present with memories of his own past, drawing a new warmth from those memories as though from a rekindled fire. For Eva, there isn’t much to be said beyond small talk. She doesn’t know any of them but wears the knowing looks when introduced by his mother as a ‘friend’ and later works around the room with natural charm. It’s a muted affair and there’s a sense that too little said could so easily become far too much. The priest leans in to say how sad it is for the family to lose both sons. Eva leaves as promptly as seems polite.

  She wants to talk over events and would like to ask some questions of someone who knew the team. She says it is something she needs to do. She asks if there are any grounds for believing that her man is still alive. She knows as she does this that it will come across as strange but she needs to hear someone on the inside tell her that there is no way Rees is still alive. She needs to measure her conviction against it. She asks them how she would know if that were the case. Piers tells her she wouldn’t know, but he would and she’s mistaken. Everyone tells her they can’t say more, not because there is more but because the terms of their contracts forbid it. They know and she begins to understand that Solomon is secret and friendship only allows a tiny stretch of the rules of silence. She’s only there because he broke them with her. But time has gone by and eroded the emotional leverage she might have had. She knows nobody will tell her any more details. Maybe one or two would confide that there were special circumstances. But they don’t know themselves. They tell her there is nothing to be gained. He’s gone, they say, let it rest.

  When friends won’t listen any more she calls the liaison officer at the base who had called her with the terrible news he was tasked with passing on to the named ‘close contacts’ on the forms Rees had left. They’ve already heard something. At first they fend her off. No more we can add. It is a very sad loss…always a place on the roll of honour. But she won’t be deterred. She asks directly if there is any chance that Rees could be alive and on a secret mission. What assurances can be given? What law governs this issue? Who is the most senior officer who is prepared to put it in writing? They’ve seen something similar before. People react in different ways. It isn’t uncommon for a reaction to spring up long after a serviceman has been lost. Sometimes it takes years. There is counselling available. There is considerable discretion as to how to allocate funds. Families are supported by charities that also act as conduits for government money. The aim is to minimise publicity and to obviate any stories that would smack of neglect. There have been abuses and so Eva meets with caution at every step. She is not a spouse and so there is no entitlement. But she is a named person on the records and she has to be taken seriously. They don’t know what she knows. When she makes clear she isn’t interested in money they check her out and find she’s published investigative scientific research and blogged about unethical interventions in nature. The shutters come down. She gets her letter from a regimental commander. Deeply regrets. She quotes the Speicher case, the only serviceman classified as killed in action ever reassigned as a missing in action. Could it happen again? They say no. The body was recovered and has been cremated, they tell her. Parents have scattered the ashes. They question who can benefit from this sustained enquiry. Still she is not deterred. She begins to change her mind and to believe that the military doesn’t know. A Brit assigned because of a special project into an American action is uncommon enough to be a story in itself. Maybe there are unfamiliar rules. She is good at research, and when the trail leads to America she calls all the way up to the Chairman of the Senate Democratic Oversight Committee. He is the first one not to assume she is informed only by grief and to ask her why she is convinced Rees is alive. It is a measure of her frustration that she tells him. She has concluded she has to. I have seen him she says. And you can too. Unaware of the chain of events it will unloose, she tells him how.

  Fourteen

  ‘The only thang you need to be is ga-aarn,’ sings Patti Frane. The last syllable stretches and finally breaks and the sounds of the electric slide spill out like silver water. The bobbing couples circle steadily on the dance floor, as though in a whirlpool, under the gaze of their fellows who sit eating chicken-fried steak and drinking beer at the wooden tables on the shadowed side of the room. Patti is a home-grown favourite at The Broken Spoke in Austin and her clever cross-over mix brings out a typical Texan crowd; genuine and would-be westerners in their buckles, boots and Stetsons mix with polo-shirted geeks from the high tech hinterland; Middle America with its hair loose and its best faded denims on. When a number stops they cheer Patti’s smiling face and outstretched arms and bang on the tables.

  Lieutenant John Shaw likes it more than he’d admit. As a much-moved Northerner he likes as much he mocks the bumper sticker Texan pride and the hold that the place has on his wife, Sal. He has spent much of his young life adjusting and fitting in to new environments and his schooling and his career have taught him the value of change in providing opportunities for a bright young man to get inside and get on. But the army and the law have also taught him the value of long traditions. He likes their celebrated past, the comfort of black and white heroes looking down from walls, their continuity. He likes that here too. He likes it when Sal pulls him on to the dance floor, after a couple of beers to warm up. He likes the fact that there are accepted steps and a route to follow, old fashioned moves which easily became familiar, old fashioned moods that make him smile. Tonight Sal has offered to drive and he is feeling slightly drunk and a little detached. He is drunk enough to dance unselfconsciously and to succumb to the further intoxication of the movement. He looks at Sal and she sways and mouths the song along with Patti. ‘Don’ need to act the hero, don’ need to say so long. The only thang you need to be is ga-aarn.’ They exchange a smile.

  The phone in his shirt pocket is discreet but the vibration is insistent. Sal’s shoulders stiffen and she pulls away. He feels the accusation in the way she looks at his shirt pocket first and then blanks his eyes as they pull apart. It’s late on a Friday night and he’s promised too many times not to let cases interfere with their already sidelined social life.

  It’s his secretary Amy, her breathless voice.

  ‘John, I’m sorry but I’m the duty scooper tonight and I’ve just had a call from General Dooley, THE General Dooley. It won’t wait, just to forewarn you. He’s going to call. Can you…’ He loses her as he walks to the lobby, picking her up again once the music is behind doors at his back and he has just the sound of the crickets in the night air and his footsteps across the car park. ‘I gave him your personal cell, sounds urgent so I said I’d pull you out of whatever. He’ll be on .’

  He thanks her and cuts her off to take an incoming call.

  ‘Shaw, this is General Dooley and I run the Special Operations Unit up here in Belvoir. I realise what time it is and where you are so I’ll get to the point. I’ve a job that’s urgent and I’m told you’re the man I need. It’s Friday night and I’ve got one out of the shitter for you; I’d like to give you a heads up on it
before Monday.’ It’s the kind of voice that is all phlegm and whistles and is evidently saving its mid-section until it shouts. Shaw says ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Lieutenant, there’s a protocol for what I’m about to do and in the interests of time I am going to break it. I have evidence that indicates someone is pissing on a very private patch of my territory. The nature of this particular intrusion is disturbing on several counts I won’t go into here and I need someone smart who can figure out what is happening and take some very swift steps to stop it – without making waves. Curtis tells me you made quite a name for yourself on Jackson, tells me it took all the hours God gave to get done and you stood up to a lot of crap from a certain southern Senator who spends too much time in the media. You kept your findings under the radar. He also tells me that you deserve to be on leave, that you ought to be doing something entertaining right now – but I’ve leaned on him and instead you’re listening to my profanities and wondering who the hell I am and what the hell I want.’

  Dooley’s introduction pauses.

  ‘I know who you are, Sir.’

  ‘I need to get you a confidential briefing. We don’t have a lot of time. I’ve got the army, the CIA and Homeland telling me I’m on the wrong track, which, on the basis of history may not be a bad place to start. I need someone open minded, smart…and on Monday.’

  ‘Where do you want me to be on Monday, Sir?’

  ‘Get to 81st Airborne for seven-thirty. They’ll be waiting to fly you up here and we’ll get you briefed and take it from there. You talked to Curtis yet?’

  ‘No, Sir. I believe he’s in transit. I’ve got a message to call him later tonight.’