by Adam Thorpe
‘Bob? Are you still there? Can you hear me?’
‘Loud and clear, as ever, Al.’
The guy knew the places to get the best hot chocolate in Paris, and he’d taken this with him to the grave.
9
SINCE HIS GAP year, mostly idled away in South America, David was bearded; at least, an irregular growth of dark hair fringed his jaw and chin. He also wore a shapeless hat. Now an earring had been added, and a silver piercing in the side of his nose.
‘Bet you a fiver you’ve got a tattoo.’
‘Can’t afford it. Next birthday present, if Mum lets me.’
‘Or Dad lets you.’
‘Yeah, well.’
Bob had nipped up in the Healey, or would have nipped if the traffic hadn’t congealed around Risinghurst. Manchester, he thought, looked more and more like a Lego version of Dubai. In the cheerful Thai restaurant, they were struggling. The move to Shropshire came up.
‘Even deader than Worcestershire,’ said David. ‘Average age about seventy.’
‘Have you met the art teacher yet?’
‘Her new bloke?’
‘Oh, she denied it,’ Bob said, crestfallen. ‘Just a friend.’
‘Dad, you’re so naïve.’
‘She seemed very sincere.’
‘Anyway,’ David said, ‘it’s nothing to do with me.’
Bob grimaced, staring at his giant glass in which a quarter of a bottle of red was nestling at the bottom. ‘Nor me, really. Except when he touches my things.’
‘Hands off my toys,’ said David, with a nervous smile.
‘You bet.’
Bob stopped himself mentioning the study, the bin bag, the African art. He’d flown with pilots who couldn’t resist telling you, and if you were flying Europe and doing all four legs with them, the same stuff would come round and round and in exactly the same order. Like being trapped in a bad marriage. He felt so cross about the fact that Olivia had lied to him concerning her lover but had said something else to their son – and Sophie too, no doubt – that he couldn’t actually speak. He was crosser about the lie than about the bloody boyfriend himself. It broke the rules. It was hidden stuff. He hated hidden stuff.
There was a silence. Bob looked up from his crab. David was frowning over his pak choi. Bob felt a pulse of love that cleared his chest, relaxed his vocal cords.
‘Any more news on Sharansky, David?’
David looked relieved at the change of subject. ‘Yeah, they’ve done the autopsy, according to his brother. Basically, judging from the tyre marks on his legs, they’re looking for a four-wheel drive. With a dent in the bonnet, where his forehead hit. He was facing the vehicle, they reckon, which is why his pancreas split open and he kind of jackknifed down face first. Maybe he thought it was someone he was supposed to meet.’
Bob pulled a face. It wasn’t quite real. David could only talk like that, paradoxically, because he hadn’t seen folk split open, bits cut off, all the rest. ‘The thing is, David, I had a brief and friendly chat with him, poor guy, and found he’d got it all wrong. He was investigating a flight that I had actually walked out on. I walked out on it precisely because the job was dodgy.’
‘Not evil?’
‘Dodgy and evil, I guess. Didn’t like the smell of it. Can’t say more. Anyway, I didn’t fly the plane on that leg. Snag is, it’s usually more dangerous to walk out than to stay in. You’re no longer in their debt.’
‘Were you ever bribed, Dad?’
‘What?’
‘He reckons you were bribed. To do certain flights.’
Bob smiled. ‘Wrong term, bad journalism. A pilot’s price goes up if the chance of his dying goes up. Fair enough. But I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. Seriously, I liked the guy. He’d have made a good future prime minister for Israel, in a nicer world.’
David nodded. He seemed uncomfortable.
‘The thing is, my campaign colleagues reckon you know who might have done him in.’
Bob frowned and shook his head. His son was looking at him furtively. Olivia’s clear green eyes. ‘David, I was a cargo pilot. I carried everything.’
‘A complete mixture,’ said David, miming quote marks with his forefingers.
Bob felt a rush of dismay. ‘Well, it was. Let me finish. If you’re a passenger pilot, it’s the same: you carry a complete cross-section of human society, good, bad and indifferent. Cargo’s what? Aardvarks to zips with mostly junk in between.’
‘Junk?’
‘Been shopping recently? OK, exaggeration, but a cargo pilot just carries cargo, full stop.’
‘Wow, Dad. That’s such breaking news.’
Why had he chosen crab? You had to concentrate, or you couldn’t extract the flesh from the fiddly bits. And it wasn’t even good crab, it was thawed out and tasteless. In his mind’s eye, he saw a huge bright-red crab being lifted from the belly of a pirogue in the Wouri estuary, the grinning fisherman in his loincloth, and remembered the spitting fire they cooked it on, that lovely burning stench of Africa that sits on the tongue.
‘You didn’t have to do all that stuff in African war zones,’ David said, who’d always had a tendency to read his father’s thoughts. ‘You and Al the McAl. Mum reckons he was a bad influence. I was too young to realise. Now I realise.’
‘Al was my flight engineer. Mum found him a bit large and rough, that’s all. He saved my life at least twice. Look, I loved Africa. Loved it, most of the time. Not all the time. But you can’t love anything all the time. It was grown-up flying. Remember what we called a long-haul passenger plane?’
‘A boredom tube,’ said David, as if bored.
‘Exactly. Actually, I never found it that boring. Other people like an office to sit in, I like a cockpit with nothing but sky outside. However, give me a bush airstrip of compacted earth that’s about 300 yards too short and a couple of mountains to chew on, and I’m really happy. I miss it. There were these cholera vaccinations that had to be got in kind of urgent and I put my hand up. That was well paid, but bloody difficult, fog and too many trees. Saved a few lives. Maybe thousands. The locals crowding round you. It’s whatever comes up. Sometimes of course it’s military.’
‘So you’ve always told us, Dad.’
‘But it happens to be true!’
The trouble with families is that they say the same things to each other over and over.
David looked up properly. ‘You know what you did say once, when I asked you what the weirdest cargo you ever carried was?’
‘Live dolphins swaying in that clapped-out DC-8 to Brazil? Those two little baby gorillas in a Seneca, really cute, and two years later I had to fly them back to Stuttgart, now full-size and grumpy, in a 747?’
‘It was only one gorilla going back.’
‘Of course.’
‘No. You said, I could tell you but then I’d have to shoot you.’
Bob chuckled unconvincingly. ‘Did I?’
‘Yup.’
‘That was just to impress your mates.’
‘I was on my own.’
‘I’m sure I said it with a smile. Aviation humour.’
‘Yeah, it was really joky.’
Bob abandoned his crab. The debris was about three times the volume of the original. He scanned the room: mostly the next table, very long, full of loud teenage girls apparently dressed for a Honolulu beach. He felt the weight of his Makarov under his shirt: he’d now got it holstered at the waist, but didn’t like the feel. At least he’d got it pointing away from his penis. You could never quite trust a pistol.
‘I’ve got another one, David. Bloke says to his wife, “Hey, do you know what the milkman just told me? He said he’s had it away with every woman in our street – bar one, of course.” “Oh,” says the wife, “that’ll be the old bag up at number seventeen.”’
David couldn’t help smiling. ‘Changing the subject, yeah.’
Bob sighed, leaned back, wiped his mouth. ‘Look, the irony is, I was trying to help him, o
ur over-keen Sharansky. The proof is on his mobile, which you said was missing. I was an idiot. I sent him a text, with names.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘Yup. That may mean I’m a target. For whoever wants this thing to go quiet.’
‘Seriously? You really helped him?’
‘In a minor way. I liked the guy. But what I would truly like, David, is for you to totally disengage yourself from this particular job. If you don’t disengage, I’ll be in far more danger. Never mind your good self. Like father, like son. Ten green bottles. Two down already.’
‘Two?’
‘One, the crooked agent overseeing that crap flight. Two, poor Matt Sharansky. Unusual, where arms deals are concerned, but this flight was not the usual arms deal.’
David’s eyes were shining. The wrong tack. He had no idea, not deep inside him, just how final death was. You didn’t get a second chance.
‘Dad, what was this flight really about?’
Bob waved a dismissive hand, immensely relieved: either they hadn’t yet got into Sharansky’s files, or the guy had been sensibly cautious with his software. ‘Just don’t go there, David. Look, they broke into the Dubai apartment and nicked my logbook and diary. The evidence, in other words. No copies my end. They pretended to throw me off my balcony.’
‘Seriously?’
‘That’s their style. Don’t tell Mum or Sophie, OK? But these guys were satisfied – they were leaving me in peace. Basically, that type understands that a cargo pilot is not very interested in his cargo, even when he actually flies the ops. All you need to know is some technical stuff. Whether the chloroform is in a proper medical pack. Whether the aerosols or the propane or the radioactive junk are all in separate sealed crates. Whether the tiger isn’t next to a ton of dry ice, which would kill it. Remember the hippo?’
David nodded. He used to be young enough to love the stories.
Bob leaned forward, dropped his voice: ‘But they’ve got Sharansky’s mobile. I’m compromised. Now, as long as your friends don’t stir, and they let the trail go dead, I’m probably OK. If they carry on stirring, the nasty guys are going to get fidgety again.’
‘I’m just a foot soldier: I’ve no say in the campaign directives. And I don’t suppose they’re going to let it go dead.’
David looked genuinely sorry. Or maybe alarmed. It was hard to tell behind his youthful mask, his scanty beard, his new piercings.
‘Thought so. One major request, though: don’t give anyone my Crowthorne address. Not ever. It’s below the radar, as you know.’
The candles were blown out and mobiles flashed. At least one party girl was filming. Bob discreetly covered his face. Next thing, he’d be up on Facebook, YouTube, visible to all the world. Everything porous.
‘You OK, David?’
His son was biting his lip. Unhappy about something. But then he’d been like that since puberty: thinnish, round-shouldered, did no exercise beyond the occasional kick-around. The glum waitress came and cleared away their plates. David took a gulp from his glass, his face tiny behind it.
‘Look,’ said Bob, ‘if you have actually gone and given your friends my address, please tell me. It’s OK, I’m not going to disown you. I don’t bear grudges.’
His son snorted, for some reason.
Bob frowned. ‘Do you think I bear grudges?’
‘Nope.’
‘But you snorted.’
‘I was thinking about something else,’ David said, turning his dessert spoon into a discreet drumstick, tapping his other hand, looking away at nothing. ‘Like, the kids dismembered by the landmines you flew from Serbia? Whether they bear grudges?’
‘Remind me which flight.’
‘Pod-something. To Berbera, Somaliland. With famous Al the McAl. The landmines were carried by truck into the main conflict zone in Somalia.’
Bob nodded, thinking a little before responding. ‘Sharansky told you? Yup, well, he had a thing about it. Podgorica in sunny Montenegro. The kit would have been done up in bubble wrap and crated, then winched into a huge container. All we’d have known was that the mixed cargo, tons of it, contained dangerous goods. Explosives for a mining operation, maybe. I probably flew similar stuff for the Brits, because back then landmines were legit cargo. Still are legit, if they’re for training. Somaliland was building its own state and security structures – heroically, I’d say. Maybe it needed landmines. The hold also contained lots of tents and medical gear.’
‘For the victims,’ David said, frowning at him. ‘In Somalia. Arms traffickers’ heaven. Matt acquired copies of the delivery papers in Mogadishu: not the safest job. He traced it from A to Z.’
Bob took a sip of his wine: violets, harsh back taste. ‘The Swiss make weapons. And the Swiss make medicines and they make raclette and they run the Red Cross. Life is a bundle of different wires.’
That Berbera flight had paid for a term at the twins’ school, but Bob didn’t tell him that. The girls were leaving; one stumbled against his chair and blew him a kiss.
‘Cocaine,’ David said, watching them prance off in a storm of laughter.
‘Really?’
‘The password was e-x-p-l-o-d-e-d, by the way. Brilliant, for a peacenik. Matt’s boyfriend finally remembered – there’d been some kind of joke about it. We received the files early this morning, by email. Lots of stuff about landmines, I’m afraid.’
‘He and I had a deal,’ Bob murmured.
‘Yeah. You said. But they want to put it up on the campaign’s online broadsheet, as a memorial. While the news is still hot. It’s what he’d planned, anyway. But it’s not exactly a scoop.’
Bob had to wave the waitress away – bad timing on her part. His heart was now being beaten by his own lead pipe. ‘Am I named, David? He said I wouldn’t be if I helped. And I was a major help.’
David looked away again, the spoon tapping faster. ‘I asked them not to. But there we go. I’m a tiny student cog in the overall machine. No one’ll read it, anyway. It’s kind of really exclusive? For anti-arms nerds only.’
‘But every time someone googles me, it’ll come up.’
‘It might. But that’s the Internet for you.’ He threw the spoon on the table, sat back and put his hands behind his head, clearly feeling awkward.
‘Hatches, matches and dispatches,’ said Bob. ‘Isn’t that what they call the births, deaths and marriages page?’
David shrugged. ‘No one’ll read it,’ he repeated, as the waitress began to clear the wreckage left by the birthday treat. ‘Seriously, Dad. Forget about it.’
‘I’ll try to. There’s never any nuance in these things. No time for nuance, not these days.’
They ordered coconut cake for both of them: Olivia’s speciality, once. Hers was so much better, of course. They agreed on that, and Bob did feel good, being nice about Olivia, the person who had thrown him out of his own home.
An idea occurred to him, in the same vein.
‘Hey, David. Let’s do a similar deal with your pals.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll help them. Consultancy work. This way I’m a bit more in control. You can send me what they write up, each time, and I’ll do a preflight checklist on it. Add info, if they want. I’ve a good power of recall.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘It’s me making the decisions. I choose what to add. And I don’t like inaccuracies. This way we’re part of the same crew. They won’t kick me, then. You don’t kick a member of your own crew. You can give them my email, but not my address or number. All they have to do is to remove my name from that report on the landmine flight to Berbera. Or add a line about me being ignorant of the contents. Which is true. Otherwise, no deal.’
‘Ah. Well, I’ll see.’
‘Tomorrow, David, if poss. Before I pass on from my temporary Gandhi phase into the Saddam period. Before the germ proliferates.’
‘Like weapons do.’
‘Meanwhile,’ Bob soldiered on, ‘you’ve got to prom
ise me to have nothing to do with the Turkmenbashi business. Nyet. Zero. Or you may well be attending my funeral pretty soon. That’s not a joke, by the way.’
David nodded, the bead in his nose flashing in the halogen spot that had revealed too much about the food. ‘You’re having me on, Dad.’
‘’Fraid not. Hear it from the source. The world out there is full of people who just want to pour acid into the spring water of life.’
The moment he got home, he cleared the laptop of anything potentially toxic: mostly emails referring to ops that smelt of illicit procurement or clandestine activities. Alerted by the Sharansky affair, HM Revenue and Customs might trawl through the machine, as was their right, and read ‘hunting-rifle sights’ as sniper scopes, ‘NGBs’ as naughty green boxes full of AK-47s, ‘DGs not quite as per CM’ as dangerous goods not quite as per enclosed cargo manifest, ‘SAS’ as second amendment science aka guns, ‘lambies’ as landmines, and so on and so forth. It was a freight dog’s ongoing correspondence, a mutual warning system, virtual close-protection work. He didn’t want to cop two years for export control violations, especially over that little rash of flights from Bratislava to Tehran in 2005, carrying 25,000 kilos of rotary drilling-rig spare parts and, he suspected, some sanctions-busting weaponry. Never probe, was his motto.
An email winged in as he was finishing: Timothy Sightly, AAW, Action Against Weapons, Manchester branch. Polite. ‘David mentioned … discretion … dodgy people … it’s a deal.’
Each such email from AAW would look good, Bob thought, if it ever came to it. It was a message from the big dice-thrower on high: turn over a new leaf, land somewhere new. No choice: you’ve only got one engine.
He saved all the toxic stuff on his memory stick and kept it on him. He did feel better after the hose-out. But he was worried about David. The young were so reckless.
And then, because the screen was lit and he was bored, he called up houses for sale on Scourlay, the Outer Hebrides, with ‘a real rarity’ in double quotes. It hit the target straightaway. Sherbet again tingled in Bob’s chest as he scrolled through the description, the photos. Ex-smuggler’s croft, he noted with a smile.
