Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘I turned it off,’ says Devlin. He looks up the mountain. ‘That’s why the chopper can’t find you.’

  ‘Dev – ’

  ‘When I switch the tracker back on, they’ll think it was a malfunction. Hopefully.’

  ‘Dev – ’

  ‘You need to go now.’

  I see the shadows around his mouth, the grey skin under his eyes. He is drinking himself into illness.

  I say, ‘Pietr offered to help me get the bracelet off.’

  ‘He won’t be able to,’ says Devlin.

  ‘At least he offered.’

  ‘That’s his job.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You can’t play both sides,’ says Devlin. ‘You’ll have to choose.’

  After a moment, I say, ‘Pietr wouldn’t put shackles on me.’

  He turns away. ‘Go home then.’

  FRIDAY

  I must have caught a cold because I wake sneezing the next morning. I am still sneezing at breakfast when Rosza gives me what she says is a lemon drink but which has a sour smell of spices. A shiver of nausea runs through me with the first mouthful but after that, it seems to taste better.

  ‘It’s the mountain air,’ says Rosza, ‘and everything else.’ She watches me finish the drink. ‘Did you have troubles getting home?’

  I shake my head.

  She picks up my wrist. The panel on the bracelet glows green.

  ‘It came back on halfway across the plain,’ I say.

  ‘And the ofanculu helicopter?’

  ‘It flew over me. Maybe it was a coincidence.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She doesn’t sound convinced.

  The clouds hold back the sky, filtering in another day of low light. I go to find Pietr. Crossing the courtyard to the guards’ quarters, there are more reflections in the slicked wet ground than profiles in the sky. The secret world above revealed only in reflections.

  Pietr is standing by the workbench in the garage. A large stainless steel box is in front of him; straw packing trailing from it. I think I see the metal-grey outline of a gun beneath the straw but I am distracted by what is in his hands.

  He turns when he hears me and puts down the object with just the right degree of casualness. If I hadn’t been looking I wouldn’t have seen the way his fingers linger on the gold base as though he can’t bear to let it go.

  ‘The days are darkening.’ He moves so he is between me and the object. But I see it reflected in the steel side of the box: a rectangular bird, about a foot high. The great image of the Arabian desert. A falcon.

  ‘My mother said you weren’t feeling well,’ he says.

  ‘She gave me a drink which tasted horrible but it did the trick.’

  ‘That is my mother’s way. Unpleasant action which always works.’

  He turns. I look at the statuette. I had done a paper at university on the classic Sumerian falcon, from the Gilgamesh era. This object has the cracked and shabby aura of the well-travelled artefact. I tell myself it must be a copy. I try not to think of my father.

  Pietr is swivelling. ‘You’re admiring my bird?’ he says, picking it up. My nails dig into my palms as I fight not to snatch it from him.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, holding it out. ‘Have I been swindled?’

  ‘Oh, it was always more of a hobby. I scraped through my PhD. Daddy pulled strings, you know.’

  I take the bird as casually as I can. It is so heavy it almost plunges through my hands. I imagine it buried in sand, carried secretly in the robes of monks and holy men, passed from father to son, for four thousand years. But even all the erosion and mishandling through the ages can’t blur the deep eye rolling back to look at me.

  ‘Is it Sicilian?’ I say. ‘Something local?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he says, watching me carefully. ‘Gold plate of course.’

  I automatically heft the bird up and down, weighing it. ‘A lead shell?’

  He nods. ‘To make the tourists think it is the real thing.’ Thingk.

  The bird is growing warm in my hand. It has absorbed heat from somewhere – from me – and it is burning. Fire and ice.

  Pietr says, ‘They make them here in the winter months. Write stories of a magical falcon to sell on carefully faded bits of paper. You know the sort of thing: two lovers cursed by an evil magician, he turned into a wolf, she a falcon. He doomed to the icy ground, she to the desert air.’

  ‘Why is the woman never the wolf?’ I can’t resist running my thumb over the curved beak, the hunched shoulder, the graceful lines etched into the wings. I have an image of a grey-haired woman standing in a long hall, the shattered and empty glass cases around her. I think, This is the first time that Pietr has lied to me. That I know of.

  ‘Men prefer to think of women in feathers, not fur,’ says Pietr. ‘Cleaner somehow.’

  ‘Radiant women, on pedestals.’ The grey woman is screaming as black-masked figures run from the hall. ‘Yet we’re not like that at all.’ I see myself watching the woman on television, see myself with tears in my eyes. Maybe I am imagining the tears.

  ‘I never felt quite clean as a teenager,’ I say. ‘I felt messy, untucked. I wasn’t radiant.’

  ‘A baby wolf.’

  ‘Yes.’ I put my hand over the golden eyes.

  He takes the bird from me. ‘It’s worse living with real wolves.’

  I watch him pack it away. ‘It’s a good copy. The weight makes it real. Most souvenirs are too light.’

  ‘It’s not especially dignified,’ he says. ‘But I keep telling myself that it’s better than doing . . . other things.’ He fits the lid onto the box.

  ‘What other things?’ My hands feel cold.

  His lips press tightly together, the cords in his neck are rigid. I think of the grey-haired curator screaming at the looters running from the museum in Baghdad.

  ‘You told me I wasn’t responsible for what my father did,’ I say. ‘That was good advice. For everyone.’

  His hands rest on the box as though he can’t bear to let it go. Outside, the sky has a purple tinge. It reminds me of the days after my brother disappeared. Days like blue cylinders.

  ‘I never wanted to lie to you.’ He slides the box across.

  His fingers are still resting on it. I think of the images of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, two days after the American invasion of Iraq. The dark hooded figures running down the shattered hall, the anguished cries of the curator. Systematic looting, the news reports called it. Looting. Always such an ugly word. Whole cultures appropriated. Systematic looting: not random but planned and organised. The vultures already there, helped into the city by the advancing army. Old connections, old friendships. A century of deliberately orchestrated plunder, the prosecution had said at my father’s trial. Illegal smuggling, beginning in Africa one hundred and twenty years ago with the most heinous of trafficking. The connection to Poland particularly lucrative for all involved.

  I touch the steel box. His grasp tightens.

  ‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘it is enough that you know I have it.’

  I walk with him across the courtyard. The sky has an unsteady look, as though it is rising and falling in a bowl of dark ice. The trembling is reflected in the wet cobblestones and in the droplets of mist drifting through the archway. Reflections endlessly escaping into the distance. The clouds clasp and unclasp, birds fall down the mountain, the trees quiver. A whole other world on the other side of the dark bowl. The world endlessly repeated.

  Stefano is bent over one of the Mercedes, polishing a side panel. He glances at us and keeps working in tight, rhythmical circles.

  ‘I could have left years ago,’ says Pietr, ‘but I wanted to find out what happened to my father.’

  ‘Stefano doesn’t know?’

  ‘Stefano is totally loyal to my mother. He would never do anything to hurt her.’

  ‘Would that be hurting her – to find out about your father?’

  ‘I always feel Stefano is looking for something in me,�
�� says Pietr, ‘that he can’t find.’

  ‘You’re the only blond for five hundred miles, Pietr. It’s probably follicular jealousy.’

  He smiles.

  I say, ‘Your father was the good man.’

  ‘Maybe goodness is the delusion. A man who constantly wants to save the world either has no problems or has problems he is not facing.’

  I stare at Stefano. I could swear he was watching us over his shoulder as he worked. I think, He must be around the same age as Rosza.

  I say idly, ‘You could look up the autopsy reports.’

  Pietr frowns. ‘The originals were lost. They only had typed copies.’

  ‘Then the ambulance report,’ I say. ‘The driver must have had to file something. Some of the drivers might still be alive. Talk to them.’ I touch the box. ‘You could give them a souvenir.’

  I tell Pietr I am going for a walk and go and stand by the lake. It is so quiet I hear a train going past, the long note of the horn barrelling into cold morning air. The lake has lost its blue purple. It is the colour of ashes reflecting the sky now. I taste frost on my tongue.

  I drift towards the dark, squat outline of the hut. Nothing stirs, just the shifting trees, the splintering ice.

  No sound behind me but I know before I turn that Devlin is there. He nods and awkwardly climbs down the muddy slope. He has the hip flask out before he reaches me.

  ‘Happy hour’s started, I see,’ I say.

  ‘What’s happy about it?’ he says, looking around for somewhere to sit before wedging himself against a tree. He looks greyer than yesterday.

  I say, ‘We’re not scheduled to meet.’

  ‘I wanted to see whether you were okay after your little jaunt.’

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  ‘All thanks to me. I convinced them it was a malfunction.’ He grimaces. ‘But Mitch is coming down from Rome – to put me off the case. What a stupid expression. I’m not just put off. I’m fucking put out.’ He takes a drink. ‘Anyway, now is your chance to bargain.’

  ‘Will I find out what happened to my brother?’

  He takes a step away from me; another towards me. I watch him. He is never this aimless. Finally, without looking at me, he says, ‘Whatever you suspect is bad enough.’

  ‘So you’re not with me, Dev.’

  ‘Stop calling me that. I know you think it’s cute. It’s not.’

  I am tired suddenly. ‘No, it’s not.’

  He caps the flask, puts it away and says, low, ‘I’m offering to help.’

  ‘You’re against me.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he shouts. ‘I’m giving you a pass out of here.’

  ‘Why should I trust the guy who put this – ’ I jerk the bracelet up and down my burned wrist – ‘on me?’

  Under the ashen sky the marks are livid flames. Devlin reaches out and holds my wrist in both hands. I am so taken aback that he has touched me that I am still. His fingers are cold as ice. His face seems to fall in on itself. He drops my hand. The disappointment is a bitter tide dragging beneath my heart.

  ‘I thought if we knew where you were, we could protect you.’ He sounds uncertain.

  ‘You could have asked me.’

  He shrugs. ‘It was above my pay grade.’

  It is the casual dismissal which does it. And what I say next. Later I think, That is when it all started to go wrong. The ground began cracking under our feet, we began building to the words which would hang like black birds in grey air, never to be unsaid.

  I should have stopped. But of course I didn’t. It was always my fault as much as his. Maybe more.

  I say, ‘And you wonder why I prefer to stay here with Pietr.’

  He uncaps the flask again but he doesn’t drink. He stands there, swinging the bottle from side to side. He says, ‘I’ll tell Mitch you’re refusing to work unless you find out about your brother. He half expects it anyway. Maybe he’ll pack you off home, blame it on me, clean house. Mitch likes cleaning house.’

  ‘I won’t go.’ I start climbing the slope.

  ‘If I say you go, you’ll go,’ shouts Devlin.

  I stop next to a clump of slender pine trees shuddering in the cold. Tears are burning behind my eyes but I keep my voice steady as I say, ‘You tell Mitch I know it’s about Iraq. Those old smuggling routes Pietr’s grandfather set up. It’s all about the Americans.’

  The colour seems to be back under his skin. Now he knows I am staying.

  ‘I like it here, Dev,’ I say. ‘I like the cold. I can breathe, after years.’

  ‘You like being here with Pietr.’ From the way his eyes narrow, I know he regrets his words the way I do mine.

  ‘Think what you like,’ I say, trying to match his earlier dismissal. Trying to hurt him as much. ‘You know, it’s ironic. Everyone is always so busy telling me that they never ask me.’

  ‘Ask what?’ he shouts.

  I start climbing.

  ‘Ask you what?’

  I don’t stop until I have almost reached the ridge.

  ‘About Koloshnovar,’ I shout down. He moves restlessly at the name. ‘No-one ever asked what I saw at Koloshnovar.’

  SUNDAY

  Both Pietr and Devlin think I have forgotten about my brother. But often at night I stand in the corner of my bedroom where the shadows are deepest. The lights lining the walkway send beams through the clouds of mist. I see faces there: at first it was only Devlin’s because I was always looking to see whether he was watching me in the forest. Sometimes I see my mother; not very often, my father. Lately, it has been my brother. Never clearly, always out of the corner of my eye. Always leaving me. As the clouds twist and turn like wringing hands, I slide into the deepest shadows. I want to ask someone, If you can’t see me does that mean I am invisible?

  I wander the house at night. Rosza’s hot milk isn’t always enough to send me to sleep. I go into the small sitting room next to the back terrace to look at the bare ground running down to the forest. This is Rosza’s favourite room, she says. It is quite different from the rest of the house. Three whitewashed walls with a feeling of stone, not steel, behind them; tapestry rugs on the polished wooden floor, two broad well-sprung sofas facing the bay windows. Crocheted cushions, a knitted rug over the back of the sofa, assorted boots and raincoats in the wicker basket by the terrace door. Photographs on the walls; some are duplicates of the ones in the album: the happy couples, gleaming cars, tennis players prancing on velvet lawns. I still haven’t seen any photos of Rosza’s family. All these are from Czeslaw’s home. Koloshnovar.

  The room has the warm smell of Rosza’s black cigarettes. Sometimes I find her sitting, looking without blinking at a roll of pages elaborately inscribed in ink, their parchment edges curling. The title deeds to Koloshnovar, she tells me. She likes to hold them. ‘If you’ve ever known real poverty where you eat anything you can – rabbits, dogs, wolves – then nothing matches the triumph of owning your own land.’

  There are things left absent-mindedly – discarded balls of wool, half-finished knitting – and others left maybe not so absent-mindedly: loose papers, notebooks, a pile of Rosza’s accounts. I never touch those, I never even try to look at them. In the first days, it was because I suspected a trap: special powder to stain my fingers, a hidden camera to film me. Later, it was because I was ambivalent about my role in the house. Now it is because I don’t care enough to look.

  I sit on the padded seat next to the window, hug my knees to my chest. Ice-crusted rain has been falling all afternoon and the ground is patched in grey slush. Every now and then, a snowflake finds another in the swirls of mist. They make a join-the-dots shape, a tiny grey figure moving through the air.

  Stefano tells me the house has a ghost that arrives with no warning and goes through and wrecks the place: tosses books off the shelves, cushions off sofas, leaves doors ajar. An angry spirit. Stefano says it only happens when Rosza is away.

  I wonder.

  I hear the wind punching the steel
shell above me. It scatters the grey slush like wet, shredded newspaper. A brief rain of pebbles clatters onto the terrace, a smell of salt and sulfur creeps in through the cracks in the glass. The mist scatters. There is a moon after all, lighting the grey patches on the ground.

  I wonder what it would be like to sleep under snow. Animals do it. It must be warm enough, under the mulch, the dead leaves, the flaking logs with their little heaters of mould.

  A figure moves where the bare ground falls into the darker pool of the forest. Somehow he can see into the darkness in the room. He raises his hand, beckoning.

  This can’t be Devlin. Devlin is off the case, fed up with me, sick of the whole thing. Maybe he has already left.

  I pull on a pair of boots from the wicker basket, put the shawl around me, a raincoat. I ease the door open. Too late I wonder about an alarm. I have never asked. But it seems obvious, in the Triangle of Hunger. I freeze but all I hear are the trees, sighing like the sea, shaking their fringes of leaves. Maybe nobody dares to rob Rosza. Not with the lake nearby. Not with her history.

  I go across the back terrace, feel my way down the stairs and the path, clinging to the lamp-posts. The moon is dodging behind streamers of mist and cloud. There is enough light to see outlines but not details. No faces. The man moves slowly out from the trees and stops, watching me approach. The moonlight hits his hair. It is pale, much paler than Devlin’s, but not as blond as Pietr’s.

  There is only one other person I know who has that colour hair. Had that colour.

  The path has steepened or maybe the slush is thicker. My legs are growing tired, there is pain in my jaw. Please let it be him, I say to myself. The man hasn’t moved. He is the right height, almost exactly the same as Devlin. That was the first thing I did – compare Devlin’s height to my brother’s. As a way of choosing whether to trust. Stupid when I think of it now. Just an excuse, I suppose. There was only ever one thing uniting us. Guilt.

  I slip and almost fall, stop, start again. The man approaches. The moon is emerging from its shield of clouds. The light is streaming down brighter than I would have thought possible.