I move closer, put the briefcase on the next bed. My fingers slip on the silver clasps. Another look at my watch. Execution hour. I open the briefcase, lift up the files on top, feel the micro-camera, the finger-thin laptop computer. The gun is there, next to the burnt diary held together by the red silk ribbon. I touch the ribbon and the gun and take out the tape recorder.
The woman lies on her back under the misty cloud of a tethered mosquito net. Her arms are by her sides, her palms up. I brace myself for the turn of the head, the sudden cry. But nothing happens.
Laforche beckons.
She is blurry – I think it is my eyes. But as I draw nearer, I see the figure is bandaged from her head to her palms. Welts creep like red vines from under the white bandages at her wrists. Her hands are swollen starfish.
I step closer still. Her entire face is bandaged, apart from gaps for her eyes and her parted lips. Her eyes are closed, lashes in a dark half-moon over purplish bruises. There is a low funnel of escaping air, like the sea turning over. Her nose must be so swollen that she is breathing through her mouth. There is a twig of some kind – lavender – pinned to the pillow above her right temple.
Closer. A light breeze strokes my cheek and a shutter rattles. At any moment she will look at me. Her face will change, contort. My career could be over in a few words. There will be a trial, a secret military court, no hope of escape. Prison. This is what I must focus on: everything I had worked for, gone. All the sacrifices. The loneliness.
After so many months, I can reach out and touch her. I don’t understand why she still has her eyes closed.
I take a deep breath. ‘Madame, I need to question you about Sicily.’ I sound tentative. ‘I must question you about your husband.’
Now. Now she would turn and look at me. I wonder what to do if she is angry enough to spill details in front of witnesses.
I know what Mitch would say.
The Administrator and the nun stare at me.
‘Madame . . . ’
‘She can’t hear you,’ says Laforche. ‘She’s unconscious.’
‘She’s faking,’ I say immediately.
Sister Antony holds the book before her – it is the Bible – and stands, her head bowed. She is tall and, with her back to the window, her face is an oval of darkness.
‘How do you know?’ Her voice is flat, clamping the faint accent. I visualise my files. We had focused on Laforche; there was only sketchy information on the rest of the staff and only hearsay details on Sister Antony: her arrival in Casablanca in 1959, the years of drug-taking, the break-down after the German boyfriend left, the volunteer work at the Catholic Mission, the disastrous interference with the young Arab girl, the withdrawal to the desert in ’78. I had searched her last home in Casablanca but her constant changing of names during the drug years made Mitch impatient. He stopped me investigating further; her life before Abu N’af was not relevant, he said.
I dismiss the files and point at the figure in the bed. ‘I know this woman,’ I say, trying to sound disinterested; a man married only to his job.
‘How do you know this is her?’ says the Sister. Again that flattening of the explosive consonants. Of the old Central European accent.
I look at the nun blankly. Her only adornment is a wooden cross strung on what looks like a long plait of camel’s hair around her neck. A slender gold crucifix has been nailed into the wood. The stem of the cross is rubbed down.
Laforche says, ‘Sister Antony has spent the most time with – what do you call her?’
The nun dips her head. ‘Madeleine, Monsieur.’
‘Monsieur Devlin thinks he knows who she is.’
There is a gleam of light as the Sister lifts her head but she is silent.
‘You undressed her, washed her?’ I say. ‘You found no documents?’
A slight hesitation. Sister Antony shakes her head.
‘And she has been unconscious all this time?’
Another hesitation. A nod.
I take out the diary with its pale scorched cover and its torn and burnt pages. I watch the nun carefully as I untie the red ribbon and select a less-singed page.
‘Do you recognise the writing? Has she written anything like that?’
‘No.’
A shutter rattles in the pause that follows.
‘I must question her. You know your government authorised this,’ I say to Laforche.
‘The same way you authorised me? I’m sure,’ he says. ‘But as you must oberve, she is not fit.’
I wave a hand. ‘I have something to wake her up.’
‘No.’ The nun’s voice is harsh, like dried twigs.
A curl of dark hair cups the woman’s ear, rising and falling with her steady breath. But I know she is awake. Watching me.
I want to look for the scars I know are on her inner arm but bandages hide the older misdemeanours. Useless to ask for a DNA swab or a hair sample; Mitch won’t give me the time to get them analysed.
‘I need to see her face.’
Laforche looks at the Sister. My fingers grip the ampule in my pocket.
The Sister’s gaze drops to my wrist. She crosses herself.
After a long pause, she steps forward, slips a hand under the woman’s neck, raises her head and slowly unwinds the bandages. The creamy cloth comes off, round and round, an endless white tongue.
The woman’s forehead is visible. I see welts as long as my fingers dissecting her cheeks from forehead to chin, shining like burns from the lotion. Her lashes tremble against the shadows under her eyes.
I stare at the smattering of freckles over her skin. The desert sun must have brought out the freckles. I tried to remember whether I had seen them in Sicily.
I replay scenes like photographs. No, I couldn’t remember freckles.
I look at her face.
For the first time in eight months. Thirty eight weeks. Two hundred and forty days.
I look at her.
And look.
Her eyelids tremble. She’s awake, I’m sure of it. But she remains still.
The Sister steps back. ‘You can make your identification now.’
‘I need to talk to her,’ I say. Laforche raises an eyebrow at the note in my voice.
The Sister says, ‘She is beyond sleep, Monsieur. The poison will soon make her skin hang from her bones like flags.’
I shrug and look to the door as though someone is entering. When the Sister and Laforche turn, I lean over the woman and break the ampule under her nose.
The bitter smell of amyl nitrate fills the room. Laforche curses and comes forward.
‘I’m authorised,’ I say to him.
The woman jerks like a marionette and her eyes open. I draw back out of her line of sight. She is staring at the ceiling. She shudders; her eyelids begin to close.
I wave the ampule under her nose. ‘Look at me.’ I lean over her. She is still staring straight up. I bring the ampule under her nose again but quickly; any more and she will be sick. The smell is making even me gag.
‘Look at me.’
Her eyes are all blue, like light hitting shallow water at noon, the pupils contracted from the pain. I want to tell her she looks like the heroin addict she once was. I want to remind her who’s in charge here, who’s in control. I know that fear is driving my anger. The pain is beneath my ribs again, the hollow feeling, the void needing to be filled.
Laforche throws back the remaining shutters to let the smell out. Light floods the room. The welts are livid, distorting her face.
‘Do you know me?’ I say.
She starts to shake her head, stops; it is too painful. Her eyes are a clear unflinching blue.
‘No,’ she says in a thickened voice. Then, ‘Police man. Government man.’ No recognition in the swollen features.
‘We’ve never met?’
‘No.’
She blinks. Her mouth relaxes. She is losing consciousness.
‘Wake up!’ I shout.
‘Move away fr
om the bed.’ Laforche stands opposite me. Any cordiality he felt – had begun to feel, towards me – has gone. He is furious.
‘It’s her.’ I can barely speak.
‘She says she doesn’t know you.’
‘Pretending.’
Laforche snorts. ‘Is she?’
It is too enormous a question to lie about. ‘I don’t know.’
The Sister slips past me, bends over the woman, listens to her breathing. ‘She’s unconscious.’
‘Faking,’ I say. ‘Lying.’
Laforche says, ‘For God’s sake, have some pity.’
I can’t meet his eyes.
‘There was – she made mincemeat of one of our men,’ I say. ‘In Sicily. A stupid man. There was an opportunity but she slipped away with crucial information. He let it happen. The stupid man.’ All I could think, once the words slipped out, was that I was under pressure, rattled, not my usual self.
Laforche looks at the Sister who places her hands inside her wide sleeves and withdraws into her oval of darkness.
Laforche says, ‘You can’t question her any more.’
I had been expecting that. ‘Later – ’
He glares at me. ‘Never. It is too much for her.’
The Sister says, ‘Monsieur Devlin should talk to her again.’
We both swivel to face her. Her expression is stern. ‘If Madeleine doesn’t know who she is, she needs to know before she dies. If she does know, then she should tell us.’
THE FIRST AFTERNOON
I trudge out into the gritty air to talk to the pilot, a stocky man with a moustache wider than his chin. He leans into the shade of the walls, flirting half-heartedly with a thin dark woman who oozes away when she sees me, her strangely marked heels kicking up small puffs of dust.
The pilot looks at me expectantly and taps his watch, a cheap stainless-steel knock-off. I tell him I have to stay the night. He breaks into a passionate speech about why we should leave immediately: a speech involving his family, his health, undisclosed tax reasons and the presence of too many amorous women barely contained by these puny crumbling walls.
I stare at the shadow of the rotor blades cutting like a crucifix into the hard ground and feel the machine’s metal body pulsing with heat.
The helicopter had been a mistake. I should have come by car, an old Jeep or trader’s truck. The time in Sicily turned me reckless. I should have kept my temper under control, been drabber, inconspicuous. My vanity made me wear my best suit – so she would wish she never left me. I should have worn jeans and a Hawaiian shirt; everyone thinks Australia is an outpost of America anyway. I should have been a walking cliché; clichés make people relax. They stop asking questions. They assume they know.
The pilot is trying to cross himself: he is a good sub-contractor and has learned gestures to please his Western clients, but his hands won’t stay straight and soon drift into the undulating gesture of the salaam.
‘May God be with you,’ I say sardonically; the Arabic equivalent of You’re fired. He deflates into a mumble.
‘Shut up, will you?’ I say. ‘I’m staying but you can go.’
In my experience, people never mind rudeness if you are telling them what they want to hear. In their relief, they often reveal more than you ever expected.
The pilot is no exception: the dark woman, he says, is called Meersun. She helped care for the woman after she was bitten.
I feel better. Away from the sick bay, the office, in fact away from everything inside the Asylum, I feel clearer, more in control. Energy surges back through me. One way or another, I will get results. I always do.
I am confident enough to take my first good look at the countryside. I see desolation. The fierce light bleaches the red sands into baked tan, a granite world. The sky faints into a leached blue, the sun reduced to pale yolk by its own brightness.
Lethargic clouds ridge the sky like a half-opened shell. The only sound is the wind’s breath, turning ragged now. Maybe there is the echo of far-off dogs. But that could be my imagination. I have developed a distaste for dogs ever since Sicily.
The Asylum’s road is just gravel overlaid on a scraping apart of the sand and rock. It falls down the hillside like an exhausted tongue, rolling out across the plain below, to the squat brown outcrop in the distance. The Kabir Massif.
I take out my binoculars. Primordial rock gapes through the deep grooves left by the retreating ice. How ironic that for most of its forty-million-year history, the Sahara was a place of seas. That what turned Europe into a wintry hell for a millennia made the desert cool and lush and green. Rain for a thousand years – until the dry spells became longer and longer. No wonder everyone in the desert talked in terms of water: a sea of sand, waves of dunes. A form of nostalgia, of dreaming.
I scan. The land is folded and squeezed into the distance. The heat haze makes the plain shimmer; the lonely road trembles. It doesn’t matter how much I adjust the binoculars’ lenses: the tough pale plants and small outcrops of grass stand in focus only briefly. Then the earth shifts.
I am not a fanciful man. The most logical explanation is usually the right one. But all this airy fairy talk about deserts is distracting me. It is impossible to get anything done – and I’m on the clock. It’s stress, I say to myself. And the sun. I’m used to the heat after Iraq and Borneo; but this air is too thin or dry. I think I see an immense beast with the head of a vulture and the paws of a lion, moving its slow thighs, shaking its head, beginning to rise from the sands.
I see black specks coming out of dust clouds. I see helicopters.
A sound claws into the great bell of silence. My watch is beeping. It is time to call Mitch.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ says Mitch, static eroding his words. ‘She’s obviously not sane. Wave more amyl under her nose. Find out where she hid the stuff.’
‘The Administrator – ’
‘ – can see the writing on the map. The desert is a busy place these days.’
I roll my eyes at the brown void below.
‘I know you didn’t want this job,’ says Mitch. ‘You must hate my guts for sending you . . . ’ He pauses expectantly.
‘No, Mitch.’ I grit my teeth. ‘I appreciate the opportunity – ’
‘ – the opportunity not to go to jail for letting her get away. So you’d better nail her good this time.’
‘Yes, Mitch.’
‘You’re on probation until then, you know.’
‘Yes.’
I stare at the gravel grimace, hear the endless silence. Always we try to make our little marks on this vast page, digging out roads, reshaping mountains. It is a compulsion, this constant remaking. Like reaching out in the middle of the night to cup a hand around a woman’s calf and, very softly and gently, move her leg a fraction.
I catch my breath.
‘What’s that sound?’ says Mitch.
‘The wind’s coming up. People go mad in the dust storms here, apparently.’
‘Madder,’ says Mitch. ‘Well, you’ve got one day – ’
‘Two,’ I say.
‘Dude, if you can’t get her talking by tomorrow night, dump her in the desert. We could pick her off from the air. Problem solved.’
Static eats the humour in his laughter.
‘Joke, Devlin,’ says Mitch. ‘Like your Hollywood name.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Joke.’
He says, ‘You field guys. You all think too much.’
Laforche had refused to wake the woman. Instead, he told me a long pointless story. An old tale of the desert, he said. Two friends are parted for years by various malign fates, the weather, new loves. Then, after many more contrived circumstances, one finally sends the other a letter which contains only the words, This morning I pruned my rose tree. After many more malign circumstances (bandits, failing carrier pigeons and so on), his friend replies, This morning I too pruned my rose tree.
Whole minutes went by while I stared in despair at the photo of the kiss in the café.
The wooden fan overhead creaked into my silence.
‘You see?’ said Laforche.
Now I am being given a guided tour of the property by Sister Antony. The condemned property. I wonder if Laforche knows. Maybe he thinks it will help, if he co-operates with us. Maybe he doesn’t care; it is another game to him. A game putting me behind schedule.
I am standing in the room where the woman slept when she first arrived. It is a windowless cell, one of the summer sleeping rooms burrowed into the earth, taking advantage of small caves and natural pockets in the rock. But even here, some indecisive murk of sunlight falls down the curve of the rubbed-shiny stone steps and sidles exhausted, the colour of grey felt, around Sister Antony, who waits for me in the cool corridor.
Dust is still itching my ear. I am annoyed enough to want to take off my tie and jacket but I refuse to lower my standards. I sit on the cot in the corner which, surprisingly, takes my weight without protest. A white sheet covers a lumpy pallet made from tough calico. I scratch a thumbnail against stubby stalks. The pallet is filled with straw. I feel the weight of the satellite phone on my belt, the solidity of my briefcase, the fine weave of my suit. Straw.
The nun is stationary, her face shadowed above her impossibly white pinafore. She is wiry and tough; a desert plant. But there is light below her heart. She traps light in her slender gold cross.
I contemplate her. I have already tried my panting-puppy routine, complaining about the heat, admiring her fortitude. I have grumbled about the Casablanca traffic on Haussmann Avenue, the endless parking notices – ‘To be paid in cash! Always worse on a Monday! Lottery night, it’s a scandal!’ – to show that I am on her side, an oppressed worker. But all she gives me is a tightening of those thin lips. The only time her jaw relaxes is when I slap the thick stone walls and, in a blurt about medieval architecture, praise the Church for maintaining buildings like these. For a moment I think she is about to speak but then she bows her head again.
Notorious Page 3
