Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘Isn’t it odd,’ she says dreamily, ‘that at any moment of tragedy in the world, a horse is rubbing itself against a fence or sailors are looking the other way when Icarus falls from the sky?’

  ‘Don’t play the fool,’ I say. ‘You’ll only hurt yourself.’

  She is silent.

  ‘If you don’t tell us your movements on the last night,’ I say, ‘they will charge you. Someone disabled all the surveillance in the house.’

  ‘You,’ she says. ‘We both know why.’

  ‘Pietr must have told you something.’

  She closes her eyes.

  I say to Sister Antony, ‘You think all she’s facing is a slap on the wrist, some jail time. But if you don’t take my help now, Mitch will be here soon, tonight even. I’ll have no power then, do you understand? She’ll be gone, charged as a terrorist and gone to a CIA prison. Off the books: Poland, Afghanistan. It’ll be like she never existed.’

  ‘That’s like saying Saint Antony never existed,’ says the Sister, ‘because he tried and failed to build a community in the desert. Yet here I am.’

  I stare at them. ‘Don’t you see? She’s the woman at the centre of a web of survivals.’

  I say to her, ‘What have you been doing all these months?’

  She won’t open her eyes.

  ‘Who have you been seeing?’ The moment the words are out of my mouth I know they are wrong. They give too much away. Words destroy. I always knew it. They had ruined the two of us.

  The woman opens her eyes but she doesn’t look at me. She looks at Sister Antony. I feel some communication pass between them. The woman says, ‘I’ll never tell you.’

  The afternoon sun struggles through the clouds. The dunes fan out in wrinkles under the sullen sky. The ground is moving as though horsemen are rising out of the sand. The riders have been hidden in pits underneath, sand laid on cloth laid over branches. They will ride up the slope of the pit and attack the attackers. Victory by hiding yourself away; the way she has done for the last eight months. She has hidden but I am the one who is stuck in the pit.

  I say, ‘How did you come through the desert?’

  ‘I had Rimbaud’s diary,’ she says. ‘I followed the landmarks in it like a map.’

  I look at Laforche. He frowns.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I say to her. ‘The only diary is here.’

  ‘I had a copy, made thirty years ago.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s been given back to the last surviving relative of its last owner. It’s not part of your big conspiracy. You and Mitch will never get it.’

  The wind swells. Sand sprays onto the floor. Laforche and the Sister go to close the shutters. I glimpse the clouds wrenched apart, the moon rising like a half-developed photograph, an apparition sitting low over the horizon. A lightning flash tears through the image, more sand lifts, veiling the plain. Goats cry in the courtyard and dogs howl in the distance.

  ‘How much do you remember about your career as a spy?’ I ask the woman, leaning towards her.

  ‘My short and disastrous career as a spy.’ She is tracing the welts on her left hand with her right. I see the lighter line where the skin hasn’t been tanned, where her wedding ring had been. So she has been wearing it all these months. Despite her husband dying the day they got married.

  She says, ‘Your spy.’

  ‘But not my assassin.’

  She stares at me. ‘You think I killed Pietr?’

  I have to get my story right. I am exhausted by all these double acts. I say, for the witnesses, for Mitch, ‘Mitch says they found two bodies in the fire, both shot.’ I say, as though I don’t know better, ‘Maybe you killed Pietr in defence. Maybe Rosza was attacking you.’ Ambushing you, in the house I sent you to.

  She says, ‘I didn’t kill them.’

  ‘Evidence – ’

  She laughs, almost without sound. ‘I know what evidence Mitch can come up with. And if you lied about my brother, why couldn’t you be lying now?’

  I grasp the briefcase. ‘I’ve got photos, of Pietr.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t want to see.’

  ‘You don’t want to see what happened to your husband? Unless you already know what happened to him. To your husband.’

  ‘Yes, husband,’ she shouts. ‘Husband. That just kills you doesn’t it? I can hear it in your voice.’ She puts her hands over her face, says, low, ‘You’ve only yourself to blame. That I married him.’

  She lies back in the bed. Her face is tinged grey, as though swept by sand mist. ‘I have been dreaming about hearts,’ she says. ‘The worst thing about being medicated is that you feel as though you have no heart. The empty space fills up, first with water, then with clay, then glass.

  ‘I have been reading about poets and thinking about hearts. After Shelley drowned, and his body was washed up on shore, he was identified by a volume of Keats’ poetry in his pocket. They tried to cremate him but his heart refused to burn. Byron insisted it be taken out of the fire, out of his poor burnt body, and given to Shelley’s wife Mary. When she died, years later, they say she still had the heart, in a gold casket next to her.’

  ‘Drowning,’ I say. ‘You’ve been thinking about drowning again.’

  She looks at me steadily. ‘If you scar even the smallest part of the heart, you have a scar forever.’

  ‘You knew it was me the instant you saw me,’ she says. ‘Why are you even interrogating me? You’ll get your promotion.’

  I think of all the times I had told her she was just the job. I can’t speak.

  ‘He was frightened of what you had told us,’ says Laforche. ‘But it is too late now. His friends will be here in a few hours.’

  She turns dark eyes to me. ‘Mitch?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then you’re ruined,’ she says. ‘He’ll show no mercy. I told you that in Sicily.’

  I force myself forward. ‘Where are the two statuettes? Say it for the tape. Appear to co-operate.’

  ‘You want me to trust you?’

  ‘I – yes.’

  She blinks. ‘You’ll help me, even though you think I’m a murderer?’

  I hesitate. ‘You were the only one in the house.’

  ‘I went back to get Rimbaud’s diary,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t go into the house, I went up the tower steps. What about you?’

  ‘I know I didn’t do it.’

  Laforche stirs. ‘That’s hardly evidence, Monsieur.’

  ‘I needed Pietr alive.’ I hear myself: hesitant, resentful. Lacking conviction.

  ‘What about Mitch?’ says the woman.

  ‘Mitch wouldn’t – ’ I stop.

  ‘Of course he would,’ she says.

  ‘How do we even know this is the woman you’re looking for?’ says Laforche. ‘It’s only your word against hers. If we refuse to release her . . . ’

  ‘They’ll take her anyway,’ I say.

  ‘Not if we negotiate with them.’

  ‘To negotiate you must have something to trade,’ I say. ‘If she won’t swap information, what do you have?’

  ‘Her diary,’ says Laforche. ‘It has all the details does it not?’

  ‘Not what they are looking for,’ I say. ‘Not about the art.’

  ‘But it has other things,’ says Laforche. ‘Things we could trade.’

  ‘We?’ I look at them. Sister Antony folds her hands.

  ‘The diary is of more use than you think,’ says Laforche. ‘Why don’t you see?’

  ‘Stop it,’ says the woman. She looks at my open collar, my tie-less throat. She says, ‘Stop taunting him.’

  The clasps on the briefcase crack as I unlock it. I stare at my worldly possessions. Twenty-five years working and this is all I have. I feel nauseous.

  I lift up my files, the camera, the tape recorder. I see the inevitable absences. The diary is gone, and the gun.

  ‘He has a streak of cruelty in him, I see that now.’ Laforche’s voic
e rolls through the room. He is standing, bent over the book in his hands, reading from it. I see a flash of red. ‘Sometimes he will pin my wrist to the table in Café Flora, watch me with those black eyes, to see whether I will pull away. He is constantly furious, constantly talks about death and killing. Killing Pietr.’

  Laforche holds up the diary. The red ribbon is a flame between his hands, like Shelley’s heart in the hands of his wife.

  Laforche reads from the diary, ‘He sat opposite me in the café, this man with the closed face. He has the blackest eyes of any blue-eyed man I ever met. When I first saw him I thought he was ill. He is intensely angry at times; he radiates anger. I work from rage, he said to me. I work and work. I keep waiting for my life to start.

  ‘I know that I should say that his life has started, with me. I want to heal him, it would make up for everything. We are bound together by our individual guilt, I saw that the moment I met him. If he were whole . . . If I can make him whole . . . But I am angry myself, about his lies. I let him mark me, I want him to be guilty. He pins my wrist to the table, he leaves bruises on my inner arm, my inner thigh. Bruises hard to explain away, bruises he wants Pietr to find. He is a traveller in a strange country. He has never been in this place before and he is testing to see how far he should go.’

  ‘A cruel man,’ says Laforche.

  ‘A man in the conflict of inner darkness,’ says Sister Antony.

  ‘An enraged man,’ says Laforche, turning a page.

  He reads, ‘This man, the man who calls himself Devlin tells me, You know what the recruiter’s greatest tool is? Inspiring self-delusion in others. I never got you to do anything you didn’t con yourself into doing, he says, you believed what you were doing. You told me you would help me find my brother, I say to him. I’m not a kind man, he says. I don’t do anything for free.’

  ‘A manipulator,’ says Laforche.

  ‘A man not knowing whether he wishes to live or die,’ says Sister Antony.

  ‘A liar,’ says Laforche, turning the page. The next page is blackened; I smell fire. I am back in Sicily, running into Pietr’s house. I am calling her name, trying to part the smoke clouding the marble hallway.

  Laforche reads, ‘Whenever he talked about the past, his eyes refused to accept the light. He told me that his grandfather was an inveterate thief. He said that to compensate, his father Czeslaw wanted to be a monk. He told me he thought his grandfather, Czeslaw’s father, had endured a childhood so devoid of affection that he stole anything he could find; objects of beauty as nourishment. He said, My grandfather stole wherever he went: Poland, Italy, Africa. I asked him how he knew. He said it was because his childhood was the same.’

  ‘A thief,’ says Laforche.

  ‘That’s not me she’s talking about,’ I say.

  Sister Antony is silent.

  I say, ‘That’s Pietr, the man she married.’

  ‘The man she married instead of you,’ says Laforche. ‘You, the jealous man, the enraged man. The man who says – ’ he reads from the diary – ‘You make me feel like a beast. A man desperate for clues to himself, she says, for signposts, bearings. A man who admits: I tear open letters about you and lick the seal for any trace of you.

  ‘Tell me,’ says Laforche. ‘Why should we trust a man like this?’

  I want to shout at them to stop. But I can’t speak. Laforche reads on, remorseless.

  ‘The thing I always liked about him was that he had no honour. I am so sick of men talking about their honour. It always precedes some appalling act. Or a way to judge the world – women of course – by a set of rules they have made up. Like people who moralise about religious virtues because they have to keep reminding themselves. But he never had any honour, he told me. He always believed the worst. That is what I most like about you, I said to him.’

  ‘No honour,’ says Laforche. ‘A violent man. A jealous man, as we’ve seen. Who will the police believe?’

  ‘Police?’ I find it hard to process the word.

  Laforche says, ‘You are the only person saying who she is. Why couldn’t she be someone else? There is another woman in this story: the same age, dark-haired. Anna, the daughter of Pietr by his first marriage. Why couldn’t this be her?’

  I stand. Sister Antony rises slowly beside me.

  ‘I know it’s you,’ I say to the woman in the bed. I see her lashes droop against her smudged skin. I shiver. The temperature is falling. ‘You know how I know.’ I put my hand on her leg and look at Sister Antony. ‘You know how.’

  I throw back the sheet, looking for the photograph printed on her skin.

  ‘You devil!’ shouts Laforche.

  Even before the woman points her finger at me, I know what I will find.

  ‘I erased you,’ she says, low. ‘You deserve to be erased.’

  There is nothing, no mark on her thigh. Nausea wells inside me.

  She says, ‘The minute you lied about my brother, you went into uncharted territory. You took us both there. And Pietr.’

  ‘I never killed him!’ I shout, but the effort makes me sway and I have to lean against the wall.

  ‘He’s sick,’ says Sister Antony to Laforche. ‘You put too much in the sugar drink.’

  ‘He will survive,’ says Laforche. ‘Once she has gone.’

  ‘Where is she going? The desert?’ My jaw hurts. ‘She won’t last twenty minutes.’

  ‘She did before,’ says Laforche.

  ‘A fluke,’ I say.

  ‘Intervention,’ says Sister Antony.

  ‘Suicide,’ I say to the woman. ‘It’ll be – ’

  She says, ‘Like putting a scorpion on your face?’

  ‘You can’t leave me. I came all this way to find you.’

  ‘To catch me.’

  ‘No.’

  I see her eyes, as blue as the lake in Sicily. A current moves deep below. She is remembering those hours in the hut above the lake. For a moment, I have her between my hands, I am pulling her towards me, wrapping my arms around her, wrapping my leg over her leg, my hands at the small of her back, pulling her into me –

  I touch her wrist and she flinches. ‘You remember Sicily,’ I say as clearly as I can. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t.’

  She stares at me, her mouth open. I bend and kiss her on the wrist, let my head rest on the side of the bed. An enormous heaviness rolls over me. Her hand touches my cheek, her fingers travel gently along my jaw, my ear, trace upward, smooth the lines between my brows, slowly stroke my hair.

  Far away, I hear Laforche say, ‘He came here to catch you. Remember that.’

  I try to lift my head, to tell him he is wrong but it is too much effort. Her hand is still stroking my hair, my shoulders are dropping. The terrible burden I always carry slips away.

  ‘You were the only one,’ I try to say, ‘I could ever relax with.’

  She holds my face, her lips are in my hair. She says, ‘Sleep now.’

  The black sky is lit by flashes. Broken silver spears part the curtains of purple-black clouds and batt away the dirty yellow moon. The Massif is a frowning profile. Lightning flares over the plain like tracer fire: the smallest plants become gigantic black roses, hollows become lakes, stones grow to boulders. Shadows that might not be shadows move between the enormous cactuses. The barking of dogs is carried for miles through the racing wind. The air shudders and hums.

  A fine rain falls on my cheek. It burns me and it is cold. There is sand in my mouth.

  It is dawn when I wake. The shutters are open and a flat blue sky is growing. I feel salt on my cheek and a crick in my neck. I had fallen asleep with my head on my folded arms, leaning on the side of the bed. When I stretch out a hand, the sheet is cold and stiff.

  I sit up. The bed is empty.

  Sister Antony is standing by the window.

  I look around the room for a hiding place. It occurs to me that nobody had said she couldn’t walk.

  Sister Antony pushes back her hood and it is as though I finally see he
r clearly. She has a scar like a river of ill luck running down her left cheek. Her dark grey eyes are clear and hard, polished pebbles reflecting the light. Her hair is pure white.

  She says, ‘Jesus walked into the desert. It was a surrender in the tradition of the Desert Fathers. Like Saint Antony. Absolute poverty is absolute nothingness. You must make yourself as blank as the desert, as the page. To be written on, by God.’

  I heave myself up and stagger to the window, stare across the stony plain. The sun surges over the horizon, the dunes are blood red in the early light. I feel the heat coming.

  ‘She’s gone,’ says Sister Antony, ‘into the desert.’

  She comes to me, presses something into my hands. A sheet of paper.

  It is a note in the woman’s handwriting: When I look at you, I know the people I loved are gone. Five deaths are too much for one person to endure.

  I crush the paper between my hands. But even as I shred it and the fragments fall like snow, I am kneeling. I gather them up and hold them in my cupped hands and stand, looking at the desert.

  The land falls away, remorseless. The sun rises in the blue wall of the sky.

  I wait.

  It is only a little while before the black helicopter comes out of the west and swings in a low circle around Abu N’af. It beats its way past the windows, closer and closer, louder and louder. Mitch is sitting in the passenger seat.

  He sees me, raises a thumb and forefinger, aims them and cocks them like a gun, firing at me.

  The helicopter thuds past, the beat steadying as it drops to the ground. The noise slows, and stops.

  I put the fragments carefully in my pocket.

  I go out to meet Mitch.

  SICILY, 1952

  Czeslaw pulled out his map, wrote the day’s date – 19 August – in Polish at the bisecting co-ordinates of 13 degrees longitude, 37 degrees latitude. A guess, of course. He had no idea exactly where he was.

  Sicilie Pars, the map read, next to the black boot-shaped island below the Italian mainland. He spread his hand against the rich indigo blue of the Mediterranean. The grease in the cuts from yesterday’s breakdown made fine black rivers and tributaries across his palms. Sand grated under the sweat on his back and he was light-headed from fasting. He had only had bread and water today.