by John Sweeney
‘Humfrey; it’s classier,’ he said quickly. He studied Joe for a long beat, took a sip of his drink and then said, ‘Clever Paddy. Is Jammy in trouble?’
‘Big trouble.’
‘I loved her. I let her down. I owe her one. So, what do you want to know?’
‘How come that story about what happened at the Oscars leaked to the scandal sheets?’
Humfrey sighed into his beer and started to talk, this time in his real voice, a mongrel accent, mostly Ozark, a little La-La Land, a little Essex English. ‘There’s a private eye who works the low-life beat in Hollywood. His name is Rocky Montefiore and he’s a snake. He used to be a gay-porn actor and he’s set himself up as the guy to go to if you heard that some big hotshot hetero male lead is packing fudge.’
‘So tasteful,’ Joe chipped in.
‘Yeah. Catch is, Rocky hoovers up the dirt, then sells it back to the star’s lawyer or the studio’s lawyer, or both, for double the money the National Enquirer will pay for it. Rocky picks up the gold and rats out the source to the lawyers, who close the story down.’
‘So?’
‘So, Paddy, I’m bi. Tommy Two-Ways.’
‘Of course you are. You’re Ronny Dymond.’
‘Ronny Dymond only slept with women.’
‘Fact?’
‘Fact,’ he said emphatically, sounding hurt on behalf of his porn pseudonym. ‘A month before I had my fling with Jammy, I got down and dirty with . . .’ And then he said the name of a Hollywood A-lister whose machismo was as bankable as a Goldman Sachs-backed IPO and then some.
‘I was broke. Worse, I had the bailiffs on my tail. So, being a naïf in this town, I hear about Rocky – remember, I’d heard the good news about him, not the bad – go to him, tell him the story and he says, “Great, I’ll get back to you.” And then all hell breaks loose. The star’s lawyer threatens to sue me back into the Stone Age. A big black van parks outside my condo, morning, noon and night. Jammy sees it, asks me about it. I tell her I don’t know. It gives me the creeps, man. Every script I’m working on, the money phones me and says, “You’re off the project.” I’m dead in this town. Then my sister Sally comes up from the Ozarks for a few days with her little girl, Clara. My niece is the apple of my eye and, for some weird reason, little Clara thinks the world of Uncle Dwayne. We go to the beach, park the car thirty feet from the sea. It’s a lovely day, not a cloud in the sky. I go to fetch ice cream. Sally is snoozing and Clara is running up and down in the waves. I can see them both but I’m around three hundred yards away. I’ve got three ice creams in my paws. Then, who bumps into me but Rocky. He says forget the story, it didn’t happen, play nicely and then everything will be reset. I tell him to go play with himself and remind him that I told him the story and him alone, that it can only be him that’s brought all this heat down on my head. “That so?” he says. “You sure you don’t want to think this over?” He gestures down the beach and there’s the black van, just by where Clara is playing in the sea. Side door opens and three men get out, the meanest mothers you ever did see. They start walking towards Clara, in step. Like they were synchronised, like robots. Clara’s gone even further from Sally, who isn’t aware of what’s going on. So I say, “Stop this. Stop this now.” Rocky says, “It didn’t happen?” “It, didn’t happen,” I say. And he makes a call and the three mothers stop and go back to the van and it drives past us, real slow, and later that day I sign a document saying there wasn’t a scintilla of truth in my sex story, blah blah blah, that I was led astray by the promise of money for falsehood, blah blah blah. But that’s not enough. Rocky wants blood. He wants something from me, something that can get printed somewhere, which suggests that I’m a moral retard, so that if it were ever to happen that I had second thoughts about naming and shaming my fudge-packing star friend, then I have zilch reputation. The something, by the way, has to be true. And I give him the story about Jammy giving me head at the Oscars. It’s not great for me. But it’s the end of the world for her. And about that’ – he turned to Joe and looked him directly in the eye – ‘I am truly sorry.’
‘And then?’
‘And then she walked out of my life and I never saw her or heard of her since. I hope she’s well and, if you see her, send her my most profound apologies.’
‘Have you ever heard of a Dr Dominic Franklyn?’
‘No.’
‘TMI?’
‘No.’
‘Transcranial magnetic invasion?’
‘No.’
‘Plugging-in?’
‘No.’
‘Fort Hargood?’
‘That would be a no, too. Do you want me to find out? To ask around?’
Joe told him that could be useful. Then he hesitated, thinking something through, before asking Humfrey the next question.
‘Go on. Hit me with it. You can trust me.’
‘I can trust a man who got into so much grief for ratting out his gay lover that he ratted out his girlfriend to make things better?’
‘They threatened my niece.’
‘You could have handled it differently. You could have gone to the police. You didn’t have to drop Jameela in it.’
‘True . . . But that was then. I’m a reformed character. I’ve been rebooted. You’re looking at Humf DeCrecy 2.0.’
Joe laughed out loud. But he had to ask the guy the one question that was troubling him the most. It was the whole point of meeting him.
‘When you knew Jammy, was she very religious?’
‘You mean, Muslim-wise?’
‘Yeah.’
Humfrey paused and thought about that for a beat, two.
‘Well, she didn’t eat pork. She drank – I mean, she drank alcohol – she snorted coke, she loved sex, she loved i—’
‘Yeah, I don’t want to know. Humfrey, I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to answer it honestly, and then you’re going to forget I ever asked it and if anyone ever asks you about this part of the conversation, it didn’t happen. Got me?’
‘Got you.’
‘Did Jammy ever strike you as someone who might join ISIS?’
‘What?’
Joe repeated the question.
Humfrey was incredulous: ‘You mean the psychos who kill people, anyone who doesn’t agree with them?’
‘Yes, them. ISIS.’
‘No way.’ He shook his head vehemently. Then he closed his eyes and held still for a mountain of time.
‘So?’ Joe asked.
‘I don’t believe it. I don’t think she would do that. But she was, she could be, kind of crazy. I mean, she sucked me off in the john at the Oscars.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘I’m answering your question, dude. It’s a heavy question. I said no way immediately. But if I think about it hard, then, I gotta tell you, she got off on risk. She liked the extreme.’
Joe stared at him. ‘So what’s the answer to the question?’
‘I don’t think so. I really, really don’t want to think so. But impossible? No. Jam in ISIS? It’s possible. Where is she now?’
‘Damascus, I think.’
‘You going there?’
‘Might be,’ Joe said.
‘Watch your head, Paddy-dude. Headless isn’t a good look, even in La-La Land.’
Joe scowled at him to shut him down, and reminded him of what he had agreed to. Humfrey swore he would stay mum, they shook hands, and he said he would try to find out what he could about Dr Dominic Franklyn.
Outside, the sky had baked a faker shade of bronze. Joe breathed in the never-that-fresh air of La-La Land. His head hurt, and not just because it always did if he drank alcohol at lunchtime. It hurt extra because there were way too many dots and, much as he tried, none of them joined up in any meaningful way. He liked Humfrey and, in a funny way, he trusted him, but he’d worn what Katya used to call his stone-face for one moment in the conversation. The film star Humfrey had slept with? That would be Luke McDonald, who’d almost r
un Joe off the road the previous afternoon, hightailing it on the way to Fort Hargood.
A call from a payphone in downtown LA to a number in Langley, Virginia.
‘You call too often. What do you want now?’
‘There’s an Irish PI working out of Hollywood, Joe Tiplady by name, who’s been asked to go to Damascus to get back a kid from a Syrian woman, Jameela Abdiek. The party who’s hired Tiplady is a Dr Dominic Franklyn. He’s big in TMI, whatever that is. You interested?’
A pause.
‘We’ll look into it. Phone this number back in twenty minutes.’
The caller did so. The party in Langley was interested; very much so.
TIRANA, ALBANIA
They never worked out how he did it. The muscle under contract – four of them, all ex-special forces, some ex-Delta, trained killers, hired by a front company and behind that another cut-out company and behind that the CIA – had a simple task. They had to look after one sixty-four-year-old man, slight, thin to the point of frailty, easily recognisable thanks to the gap in his teeth that made him look like a bit of an idiot, and an Abraham Lincoln beard hardly anyone else sported in the whole of Albania.
The cable summonsing Zeke back to Langley had been waiting for him the moment he returned from the meeting at the Albanian interior ministry. Zeke read it, sighed and found a seat in an empty briefing room overlooking the well-groomed yet morose shrubbery of the embassy garden.
The leader of the muscle was Francesco – Franco for short – 290 pounds of sinew turned to steel, crew-cut silver hair, originally from Hoboken, New Jersey.
After a time, Franco offered a polite cough and started speaking: ‘We’re here for your close personal protection, sir.’ Polite as he tried to sound, his New Jersey twang gave him a flavour of the mobster trying to impress a judge.
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ asked Zeke.
‘Pardon me, sir?’
‘That’s Latin for “I’m like King Midas in reverse, here. Everything I touch turns to shit.”’
Zeke’s delivery of the line was pitch-perfect, reproducing the cadences of the vulnerable New Jersey psycho mafioso so closely that if you closed your eyes you would have thought Tony Soprano was in the room. The other grunts rippled with laughter. Zeke excused himself and went to the bathroom for rather a long time, returned and explained that he had stomach cramps.
Franco said that if they hurried to the airport, they could catch the only direct flight to JFK that day. Zeke countered that he had rather too much baggage, some of it bulky equipment that was classified and needed to be bagged up, and he would never get it through customs in the time they had available. (Later, they discovered that this was nonsense. Zeke always travelled light.) Franco gave way on that, so they had twenty-five and a half hours in Tirana to kill.
It was late afternoon, the sun sliding down towards a bank of gunmetal clouds blocking out the horizon. Zeke worked the room, enquiring politely where each of the grunts was from. Philippe – bald, unusually tall, sunglasses even though it was gloomy inside the briefing room – was from Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. The moment Philippe confided this, Zeke was off, chatting away in Cajun French to which Philippe replied, enraptured. Ordinarily a terse introvert, the man that Zeke’s knowledge of Cajun had uncovered was a quite different human being. He signalled his transformation by taking off his sunglasses and referring to Zeke as ‘Le Patron’ from then on.
Nahui was from El Paso, short, swarthy, always a smile playing on his face, his eyes and thick black hair clearly showing signs of Amerindian heritage. Spanish would have been an easy guess, but Zeke plunged straight into Quechua, the lingua franca of the indigenous peoples of the Andes. Nahui, stunned, struggled to return serve against Zeke’s fluency in his grandparents’ tongue.
Miller was enormously broad, blond, sullen, around fifty years of age and the toughest nut to crack. ‘My ancestors spoke German, but I don’t,’ he said, closing down the old man’s presumed approach.
Zeke’s only request seemed hard to refuse. Zeke wanted to go to the main bookshop in Tirana and pick up a copy of The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare. Franco said he would send one of the boys to pick it up.
Zeke smiled his simple smile and said, ‘But Franco, I want to buy the Albanian edition, Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur.’
‘We can find that book for you, sir, no problem,’ replied Franco. ‘No reason for you to trouble yourself.’
‘The problem is, Franco, I’m looking for the unabridged edition, which was published at the behest of Kadare’s friend, Drago Siliqi, in 1963, during the Tirana thaw. Later editions of the book were heavily censored. They would be a waste of money.’
‘What’s the book about, sir?’ asked Franco.
‘It’s abou—’
Zeke’s cell phone trilled. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he said, and took a Nokia 1661, the lowest of low-budget phones, out of his jacket pocket. He hit answer and listened quietly and then, call done, he returned the phone to his pocket and continued where he had left off: ‘It’s about an Italian general who comes to Albania twenty years after the Second World War to try to find the graves of his countrymen slain here – the “dead army” of the title. He meets a German general doing pretty much the same job. It’s a gentle yet melancholy satire, a disquisition on the tragic foolishness of blind militarism.’
This hit Franco, fifteen years a Navy SEAL, like the slap of an Atlantic cod across his face, and he fell silent. Philippe and Nuhai nodded; only Miller indicated with a slight shake of his head that he was against the trip to the bookshop. Franco sighed, intuiting somehow that he might be making a grave mistake, but he said, ‘OK,’ and the close-protection team and its subject threaded their way towards the vehicles.
The party consisted of a ‘plain-clothes’ embassy Humvee, driven by a team of out-of-uniform embassy Marines, and a black Chevrolet Suburban with armour-plated windows and an anti-car bomb, inner Kevlar shell. Inside the Suburban were the four contractors, all packing heat, with Philippe behind the wheel, Franco riding shotgun, Miller and Nahui in the back, and the package, Zeke, in the middle. The package was both protected and prisoner.
They set off towards downtown, in the general direction of Skanderbeg Square, named after a local version of George Washington. Skanderbeg hadn’t defeated the British, but he had done something similar to the Ottoman Empire, for a while, in the fifteenth century. And so he’d ended up being the toast of a new, post-Versailles Treaty Albania and in time got his own statue, featuring a moustachioed brigand on his striding horsey. Back in the bad old days under Hoxha, you would have had no fear of being run over by traffic in Skanderbeg Square, because there wasn’t any. You could have lain down in the middle of the square and fallen asleep, hearing only the click-click-heeled footsteps of the Sigurimi, Hoxha’s secret police, coming to arrest you. On foot.
But that was then.
These days everybody who was anybody in Tirana got to prove that Hoxha had been an idiot by driving their own Mercedes or Fiat 500 from their house to the local coffee shop or launderette or office. The government was too busy lining its pockets to build a proper Metro or a tram network. Result: gridlock.
The Humvee and the Suburban inched forward through the constipated streets. Miller moaned, ‘I hate everything about this country, but most of all I hate the traffic.’ Zeke turned in his seat towards Miller, who was sitting diagonally behind him.
‘Your accent? You’re from Wisconsin?’
‘Uh-huh,’ replied Miller, as non-committally as he could without being overtly rude.
‘Best Green Bay Packers team was back in ’67, team that won the Ice Bowl. Coldest game ever played. Bart Starr suffered frostbite but won the game.’
‘You son of a gun,’ said Miller, his hard features now suffused with a smile. ‘Bart Starr is my uncle.’
Later, much later, during the post-mortem, they agreed that Zeke had somehow unlocked something in every single one of them, but he had d
one so in such a disarming way that his psychological manipulation had gone unnoticed. And this against four men hand-picked by the most well-resourced intelligence agency in history to notice and react to exactly that kind of thing.
It was Zeke who suggested it first, that it might save everybody a whole bunch of time if they walked to the bookshop. Franco nodded and said, ‘Miller, Nahui, come along.’
Leaving Philippe in the Suburban, and the other back-up crew in the Humvee glued in traffic, they were down to three close-protection officers and the package. The pavements were a little busy but not worryingly crowded. Zeke seemed happy to play his part, never leaving the centre of the loose triangle that Franco at the head and Nahui and Miller at the two base points created.
The bookshop was a piece of cake, or so it seemed at the time. Zeke spent a very long time chatting to a young female shop assistant, Ardita, at a desk at the back of the shop. She had close-cropped hair and blue glasses, and wore a sceptical frown that morphed into a beguiling sunniness when she was amused. Every now and then she would check the computer in front of her, clearly in response to Zeke’s requests. One time she jotted down something on a notepad; shortly after that she picked up the store’s phone, made a brief call, then put the phone down. The whole time, Miller stayed by the stack offering a view of the newest titles till he had them all committed to memory, and through the shop’s window, a view of everybody approaching the entrance; Nahui lingered by the romantic fiction section and, it just so happened, a rear exit for staff members only; and Franco stood his ground in the middle of the shop, keeping an eye on the students and literary types mooching their lives away. Had the three spoken a word of Albanian, they would have been more concerned.
‘I sheh tre gorillat qe erdhen me mua? ’ Zeke said, asking if she could see the three gorillas he’d walked in with.
Ardita dipped her head so subtly that none of the three watchers observed it. In Albanian, she replied, ‘The big German-looking guy by the door, the giant in the middle and the South American one by Romantic Fiction?’
