The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  ‘Hell, I don’t know. I am.’

  ‘Oh. Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘So, what is it you find interesting?’

  Connor could sense Sylvie stiffening beside him. But he held the man’s gaze without flinching and shrugged.

  ‘I guess what mostly interests me is what kind of man it takes to murder and torture women and children and defense-less old men.’

  The man looked at him and Connor searched for the eyes behind the sunglasses but all he could see were his own staring back at him. Sylvie started speaking, still in Serbo-Croat, but her voice lower and more urgent than before and again he heard her mention Grujo. The man kept his eyes on Connor while he listened.

  ‘Give us your film.’

  Sylvie went on talking, calmly but forcefully, telling him she wasn’t going to and explaining why. He told her again to hand it over and kept on telling her and at last reached for her camera bag and Sylvie exploded, swearing at him in several languages and he shouted a command and all hell broke loose.

  They grabbed them both and shoved guns into their faces and pinned their arms behind their backs. Then they ripped off their cameras and their bags and took out every roll of film and smashed the cassettes under their boots and unraveled the film to the light and then opened their cameras and did the same again. And all the while Sylvie screamed and spat abuse at them.

  Then, at the man’s command, they were shoved forward and marched off down the road with guns sticking into the back of their necks, past the truck now stacked with bodies and past the orchard where the blossom now hung innocent and empty and with every step Connor felt more and more convinced that they were going to be taken behind a building and shot.

  But they were only taking them to the VW.

  The soldiers searched the car for more film but found none. They helped themselves to the cigarettes and gave them back their papers and their camera gear, including the tripod, and told them to get in and go. Sylvie turned the car around, keeping up her torrent of threat and abuse through the window. By now the men were all laughing and jeering.

  As they dropped out of sight into the forest, she slapped the steering wheel with the palms of her hands and threw her head back and started to laugh. She looked at Connor and he smiled but said nothing. He would have liked to share her exhilaration but he couldn’t. He was in shock.

  In his head he was still walking down that road, past the orchard and the burnt-out houses and the butchered bodies, certain that in a few moments he too would be dead. And what shocked him was the discovery that he hadn’t cared.

  They chose a different route back to Sarajevo but it took even longer. They passed trucks of dead-eyed refugees and the rub-bled remains of villages, shelled and burned and abandoned. There were many more roadblocks than there had been that morning and once they had to wait three hours while their papers were taken away and checked. Then they got stuck behind a UN food convoy, blocked in some kind of standoff with the JNA, the Yugoslav People’s Army. The UN soldiers were British and Sylvie and Connor sought out a senior officer and told him what they had witnessed.

  By the time they made it back to the Holiday Inn it was getting late. They drove down the ramp into the basement and parked and when they went upstairs they found the lobby and bar buzzing with news about Grujo and the Cobras and their latest spree of ethnic cleansing. A news agency guy, worse the wear for whiskey, was telling everyone in a loud voice that the area where it had happened was sealed off and nobody was allowed in. Connor and Sylvie didn’t say a word. They bought two beers and went up to their rooms to dump their gear.

  The lab she used was a short walk from the hotel, or rather, a short pray, duck and run across three streets surveyed by Serb snipers, who were probably all by now too drunk to shoot straight, but you never could tell. They processed the color first and then the black and white. The place was cramped and Connor perched himself with his beer in a corner and let Sylvie do most of the work. It was hot and they had taken off their jackets. Sylvie was wearing a flimsy sleeveless top and Connor couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She caught him looking once and didn’t smile, just went back to her work.

  She dried the negatives with a hair dryer she had brought along and laid the negatives out on the light box and the two of them had to squeeze side by side to view them. Many of the images were too explicit and horrific for most papers to publish and she seemed to know at a glance what was good and what wasn’t. Connor found it strange that it was harder to look at these images now than it had been to look at the real thing and when he told her this she shrugged and said it was simply a matter of adrenaline.

  The shots she had taken of the old man and the boy with the Cobra on the wall above them were much better than his and so were most of the others. But when they got to one of the black and white rolls that Connor had shot in the orchard, Sylvie let out a low whistle.

  ‘Which one,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The best shot, you mean?’

  She nodded and stood back to let him study them. There was a sequence of five frames in which the two women were partly in silhouette. He said it must be one of these and she nodded and asked him again which one was the best. Connor said he didn’t think there was a lot to choose between them and she said he was wrong and told him to make some test prints.

  Even as the image was coming through on the paper Connor knew which one she meant. You could see the girl was naked but, apart from their faces and arms, both she and the woman were discreetly veiled by shadow and somehow this made what they had so clearly suffered all the more appalling. The sunlight on the blossom behind them and above them where their wrists were tied was exquisite and shocking.

  ‘That is the picture of the day,’ she said. ‘Maybe even of the year.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Please don’t think I would bother to flatter you.’

  He looked at her and smiled. She finished off her beer. He was aware of her watching him while he lifted the print out and placed it in the fixer tray and started tidying things up.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go earn you some money.’

  They gathered the negatives and locked the place up and walked to the corner of the first of the three streets they had to cross to get back to the hotel.

  ‘This time we don’t run, okay?’

  Connor shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  She took his arm and they stepped out and walked slowly across. Their footsteps echoed in the darkness and Connor pictured himself in some young Serb’s nightscope and again it worried him that he didn’t care. They did the same on the next street, only slower. And again on the last one, slower still.

  ‘You’re not afraid?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe if I was smarter I would be.’

  ‘Some days you just know you’re not going to die.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’m certain. Look.’

  She made him stop. They were in the middle of the street. She turned her back on the snipers and kissed him hard on the mouth and then laughed.

  ‘You see?’

  When they reached the hotel they went straight up to her room and she took off her jacket and her boots and got out a bottle of whiskey and poured them each a glass. She sat cross-legged on the bed and lit a cigarette and asked him about his agency in New York. It was the same one that had sold his picture of the Yellowstone fire, but since he had been in Bosnia they had done little for him. Sylvie said they were shit and he should leave them. She reached for her satellite phone. She made a call to Paris and two more to New York and by the time she was through Connor had a whole new deal.

  They got out her scanner and her laptop and sat beside each other on the bed while they scanned the negatives into the laptop, some of hers and some of his, then sent them like magic over the satphone. She poured them another whiskey and they clinked glasses and Connor thanked her and she gave him one of those f
unny French shrugs of hers and said it was nothing.

  Then the hotel power crashed and everything went dark and Sylvie lit the three candles that were on the bedside table. For a while neither of them spoke, just sat and sipped their whiskey, listening to the distant thud of shells landing somewhere across the city and the lonely wail of an ambulance siren.

  She was leaning back against the headboard and he could tell from the look in her eyes what she wanted to happen next. She reached out and stroked the back of his head and his neck and for a while they stared at each other. His hair had grown long and she twisted it in her hand, almost hard enough to hurt.

  ‘I try to make my hair this color, but it never works.’

  ‘Your hair looks fine.’

  ‘We’re like twins.’

  He smiled. She put down her glass on the bedside table and he did the same and she moved across the bed toward him and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of whiskey and cigarettes and there was a kind of violent hunger in the way she kissed that almost unsettled him. She leaned back against the headboard and stretched her arms above her and he lifted her shirt and hoisted it over her head and pinned her wrists high against the wall with one hand while he kissed down the insides of her arms and her neck and under her arms where there was a dark stubble and the smell of her was strong and thrilling and then he kissed her small breasts with their hard, dark nipples.

  She was breathing fast and she lowered her arms and reached with both hands for the buckle of his belt. He raised himself to his knees and she opened his pants and tugged them down around his thighs and took him into her mouth and it was such a long time since Connor had been like this with anyone that he could only bear it for a few moments and had to stop her in case he came.

  She laid her head back on the bed and he pulled off her pants and her panties and then took off his shirt, watching her and noticing how the skin stretched pale and pellucid over her ribs to the rhythm of her breathing and how her hip-bones jutted like cliffs above her concave belly with its triangle of thick black hair. He was about to take off his boots and the rest of his clothes, but she told him not to and opened her legs wide and hoisted her hips at him and told him to fuck her, to fuck her now.

  She shouted so loudly as he went inside her that it almost unsettled him and she did it again every time he moved on her, but soon he was lost in the want and the feel of her. In a low and urgent voice she told him to fuck her hard and she kept saying it, louder, telling him to do it harder, to hurt her. And though he knew he fell short of what she wanted, Connor did as he was bidden and shocked himself that he could for he had never made love in that way before.

  It was only later, when they lay spent and sore with their mingled sweat cooled to salt upon them and Sylvie asleep, curled like an orphan across the tangled bedding and the gray dawn bleeding through the drapes, it was only then that Connor understood.

  It wasn’t love that they had made nor yet some deviant subspecies of it. It had been more a quest for affirmation, a kind of desperate animal craving. And although he sensed it in Sylvie far more powerfully than in himself, he knew its seed was in him and that it would grow. Having steeped themselves in death, they needed to exorcise it, to assert their aliveness. Pain was the province of the living and was thus part of the process. They had screamed with their flesh and whatever else they might be made of, though to whom or what beyond themselves he knew not, that somewhere, somewhere, amid the mayhem and the horror was a core of humanity that was raw and fierce and primordial.

  The picture of the women in the blossom found its way onto the front page of newspapers all over the world. Sylvie flew home to Paris the following week and then was sent at once to Africa. Connor missed her. He didn’t see her again until August when she came back to Sarajevo. But it wasn’t the same. She was cool toward him and a little aloof and he wondered if he had done something to offend her. Maybe she resented the success she had helped him have.

  The following week he caught a piece of shrapnel in the back of his right leg and was flown in a UN Hercules to a hospital on the Croatian coast. Sylvie had gone north for a few days and he never got to say goodbye. It was only a flesh wound but the doctors suggested he go home to recuperate and suddenly the prospect appealed. He flew to Frankfurt and while he waited for his connection in the sterile limbo of the transit lounge he tried to call Sylvie from a pay phone but got no reply.

  New York was hot and humid and everyone seemed mad or miserable. When he hobbled into the offices of his new agency, they greeted him like a war hero. He wished he could have felt like one, but all he felt was empty. One of the editors, Harry Turney, took him to lunch in the smartest place he had ever eaten. He was a tall man with gentle eyes and reminded Connor a little of his father. Connor ate like a starved wolf and still felt hungry. As the coffee was being served, Turney said he was sorry to hear about Sylvie. Connor asked him what he meant.

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘It was in yesterday’s Times. She was with a Reuters reporter somewhere up north, near the border. They drove over a land mine. Both killed outright.’

  16

  Julia took the steaks and the chicken legs out of the marinade and put them on the big wooden tray along with the salad and all the relishes. Donna Kiamoto had already ferried the rest of the food out onto the deck where they had set up the table. Julia could hear from the kitchen that she was having trouble guarding it from ever-hungry smoke jumpers. She could also hear Ed out there, making sure everyone knew the plan. He had been through it twice already as well as telling each one of them individually when they’d arrived, but he was doing it again just in case.

  ‘So, we’re all hiding out here, Donna’s behind the drapes over there, the front door’s open, the place looks deserted, in he comes. And Donna, be careful he doesn’t see your reflection in the glass, okay? As he comes into the living room, Donna gives the signal and I start to play. And you guys better keep quiet, do you hear? No more beer for anyone who giggles or breaks wind. Ve have vays of making you restrain yourselves. Hank and . . . who? Oh yeah, sorry. Phil. You guys unroll the banner - and make sure it’s the right way up, okay? He may not be bright, but he can read.’

  ‘Julia, how do you manage to live with this guy?’ Hank Thomas asked her as she came out onto the deck with the tray.

  ‘Earplugs.’

  She could hardly find her way to the table through the smoke. Chuck Hamer was supposed to be in charge of the barbecue and was making a pretty dismal job of it.

  ‘Hey, Chuck, I thought you were supposed to be a firefighter? What the heck’s going on here?’

  ‘Honey, I get paid to put ’em out, not start ’em.’

  ‘Baby, you can light my fire,’ Ed sang.

  Having lectured the troops, now he was fiddling with the amplifier for his electric guitar. Julia watched him for a moment and had to smile. He was in full buzz mode, happy as a puppy, and he looked boyish and cute in his baggy shorts and the yellow and black Hawaiian shirt she’d bought him for his birthday. He had wanted to frizz his hair into a Jimi Hendrix Afro but she’d managed to talk him out of it. He’d settled instead for purple shades and a bandanna.

  Poor Connor. He thought he was just coming over for a quiet supper with the two of them and Julia still wished he were. But Ed had insisted they lay on this surprise welcome-home party. Julia argued that having just been wounded, it was probably the last thing he would want, but Ed had spoken to him on the phone at his mother’s place and said he sounded fine. There were about twenty guests, mostly Connor’s old smoke jumping buddies and their assorted spouses and lovers. All had been strictly instructed to arrive early and park next door at the Robertsons’ place so that Connor wouldn’t see the cars.

  At least he was going to see the place at its best. It was a perfect September evening, balmy and clear, with just a hint of fall in the air. There were apples on the trees and the rambling rose above the deck had flowered a second time an
d was a blaze of yellow. Anyhow, she reasoned, it was the kind of party that would more or less look after itself. Entertaining smoke jumpers was more a matter of quantity than quality: a big steak and plenty of beer was about as sophisticated as it needed to be.

  Nevertheless, Julia had wound herself into a state of mild hysteria about it. She wanted everything to be just right. She had cleaned the place from top to bottom, put flowers in every room and spent far too much time and money getting all the food and drink. She had even bought French champagne and baked a cake and decorated it with a little toy camera.

  For days she had been worrying about what she was going to wear and then worrying about why she was worrying about it. What was the big deal? It was only Connor, for heavensake. It was odds on that most of the women would be in jeans and T-shirts, like the men. But for reasons she didn’t let herself explore, she wanted to wear a dress. Nothing in her closet seemed right so she ended up going into Missoula to look for something new.

  She found it right away in a store on North Higgins. It was a simple three-quarter-length shift in a shade of pale blue that flattered her tan. She tried it on and groaned when she saw how well it suited her. In fact, damn it, she looked fantastic. But it was a hundred and twenty dollars! Out of the question. Completely ridiculous. She didn’t need it. She thanked the assistant and walked out, got back in the Jeep, sat there awhile, got out again, went back to the store, dithered like an idiot for another fifteen minutes, then bought it, persuading herself that it was really an investment, a dress that would be useful for all kinds of other occasions, such as . . . whatever. She hadn’t treated herself in a long while, so what the hell.

  But she still didn’t tell Ed. Not because she thought he would mind. On the contrary, he liked her buying new things for herself. Earlier in the evening, when they were getting ready and he asked her what she was going to wear, she even lied, telling him the dress was an old one that she’d forgotten she had and found at the back of the closet. Touchy-feely guy that he was, he did, however, notice that she’d also had her hair cut and her legs waxed.