Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  The words were jammed in Devlin’s throat. ‘How – many?’

  ‘You want to know the consequences of your actions?’

  A hiss sounded in the dappled light behind them. Devlin felt the heat of bodies pressed into the shade. He could already imagine the blade at the base of the neck, the arrow in the back.

  ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘It would be a relief.’

  Kenje raised the machete. Devlin saw his father, his face red, throwing a beer bottle at him, shouting, ‘You’ll leave the army over my dead body.’

  The blade was cold against his throat. Devlin closed his eyes, felt the blade turn to scorching steel. The naming of the parts: this is my cowardly neck, this is my betraying mouth, this is my black heart.

  Kenje took the blade away. ‘If they were really dead,’ he said, ‘we would have left you in the cage. The crocodiles had Jakarta takeaway dinner, not Dyak.’

  Devlin opened his eyes.

  ‘You told me to read your mail, John Devlin,’ said Kenje. ‘And so it was only logical to bug your office. Geigerstadt 1000, accurate to five miles. We bought it off the internet.’ He admired his reflection in the metal. ‘It was in the wooden fish.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Devlin. He put his head in his hands.

  Kenje rested the wooden handle on the back of Devlin’s neck. ‘We don’t cut today,’ he said. ‘But my relatives still think you unlocked the gate. They are not happy.’

  He took the machete away.

  Devlin said, not raising his head, ‘I can’t remember.’ The shame was fire in his mouth.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kenje, ‘a lazy white bastard went to sleep by a rock pool and was clubbed unconscious.’

  Devlin looked at him. ‘I don’t know, Kenje.’

  ‘You have to go,’ said Kenje. ‘That’s your punishment, for doing nothing. You have to leave this sleeping place.’

  ‘I’ll never find it again,’ said Devlin. The dark bowl pressed down. He said, accepting it, ‘I’ll never find it.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll find it in a person,’ said Kenje. ‘The garden you want, where you can dream.’

  It was the morning of the twenty-sixth. Devlin stood in the doorway of the office, stared at the opened boxes, the overturned chair, the soiled towels, the buckets filled with coils of oily black and brown. He moved his foot and the empty Scotch bottles clinked.

  The clock ticked over. He went down to the gym. A small wind was blowing up the cleared hill and the smell from the tailings dam stung his nostrils.

  There were two digger drivers inside, doing reps and lines of speed in front of the scratched and grimy mirror. They loaded up the weights and offered him a line.

  ‘I’m cleaning up,’ said Devlin. ‘I’m off the booze.’

  They laughed, not unkindly. ‘This time for sure,’ one of them said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘This time.’

  He started bench pressing, saw himself in the mirror. I hate you.

  He had lost weight. Where did the stocky recruit go? That fleshy young guy. He’d been stripped away years ago.

  ‘We hear you’re the man to get things,’ one of the drivers said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  The driver said something about an electric grill, how they were sick of the cook’s greasy breakfasts. Devlin couldn’t be bothered with the details.

  He said, ‘Leave a list on my desk.’

  He got up. He couldn’t bear to look at himself anymore.

  He checked his watch. He visualised being at the rock pool, swimming through the blue-black coolness, the latticed light lifting off the water in scales of silver. The image got darker and darker and finally disappeared. All he had was the job. Again.

  A tinny sound broke the silence. The phone ringing and ringing. It stopped and someone shouted, ‘It’s the Embassy.’

  SICILY, EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

  MONDAY

  The front door of Café Flora bangs open, bringing in a flurry of winter air. Two men with parkas over their dark suits nod at the small fair man opposite me. They sit at the end of the bar, near the stairs.

  I touch the typed pages of Devlin’s file. ‘Is this faked?’

  ‘No,’ says the American. ‘But don’t worry, he comes to his senses soon.’

  ‘What a shame.’

  A car stops outside the café, its exhaust smoke scattered by the wind.

  I say, ‘So Devlin disobeyed orders in Borneo?’

  ‘Don’t sound so admiring,’ says the American, turning his signet ring. ‘He never made it. He passed out by the river. The villagers were removed.’

  ‘He tried.’

  ‘He failed. You don’t seem to be getting the real picture.’ He reaches, flips over the pages. He leaves his hand lying next to mine.

  I look at the photo in front of me. It is a copy of the picture I had seen on Devlin’s laptop.

  I say, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Don’t play coy. We know you went through his briefcase.’

  ‘I couldn’t crack the password.’

  ‘We assumed Devlin gave it to you. When he was drunk.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can see what it is though,’ he says. ‘There’s the tunnels, there’s the cages. There’s the people.’

  ‘Where’s the American flag?’

  ‘Ha, ha.’

  ‘And this is where?’

  He gives me a disgusted look. ‘It’s Koloshnovar – where you were picked up trespassing. Like sister, like brother.’

  He moves his hand closer. I feel the heat from his fingers.

  ‘Devlin knows all about it,’ he says. ‘So don’t go thinking he’s some kind of hero. I’m surprised you’re not furious. And ashamed.’

  ‘Why should I be ashamed?’

  He blinks. ‘What you did in the hut. How you – gave everything away.’

  I lean forward. ‘Say it: how intense it was. How it blew your mind.’

  He withdraws his hand. ‘We had a good laugh about it. We were surprised the old man could – well, you know. After all that booze.’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ I say. ‘You don’t think you could ever get a woman to feel that.’

  The first faint colour washes under his skin.

  I say, ‘You’re the one who gets his jollies perving on other people. But is it me or Devlin you liked to watch?’

  The red flush highlights the texture of his skin. It isn’t as smooth as I thought. It is dry in places, scaly.

  ‘By the end of all this,’ he says, ‘you’ll be begging me. On your knees. Bent over.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s your preferred position.’

  ‘It is for whores.’

  ‘Trust men like you to have a whole vocabulary of disgust for other human beings. It’s projecting the disgust you feel inside.’

  ‘Skanks,’ he says. ‘Sluts. Cunts like you.’

  ‘I know why you bend them over,’ I say. ‘So you never have to see their faces. Their looks of revulsion.’

  The colour dies away. He smiles but I think it is an effort.

  ‘You’ve already lost,’ he says. ‘You just don’t know how badly.’

  The door bangs again. Stefano is standing there. I rise. The man opposite pulls a page out of the file and tosses it at me. ‘Devlin’s report. That’ll put you straight.’

  I focus on the white square lying on the table.

  He says, ‘You won’t be seeing Devlin again.’

  ‘So I’m done? I’m out?’

  He laughs. ‘You’re in for as long as we say. You’ll do what you’re told. Beginning with reporting to me.’

  ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Sure you do,’ he says. ‘You know my code name. Mitch.’

  Stefano starts the engine without comment as I get into the car. We pull away and something rolls out from beneath the seat. It is a familiar shape: a thin leather roll tied around the middle. I imagine the needle inside, the small plastic bag of dirty cream powder. The spoon; the tourniquet.
Later, I wondered whether Stefano was deliberately trying to ruin me, make me fall. But I don’t think so. I think he was too distracted by Pietr’s distress. Stefano had returned to his former dabblings; like me, he is already plummeting.

  I let the leather rest against my foot as I read the page from the file. I see my father’s name, my brother’s. Koloshnovar. My heart starts climbing into my throat. Extraordinary rendition. Torture. Non-American soil.

  I read it twice before I look at the name typed on the bottom.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I say to Stefano.

  He turns the car off the road. I half-fall through the door and throw up in the snow, retching even after my stomach is empty.

  Above me, the sky is an empty bowl. I think of how convinced I had been when Devlin told me all he wanted to do was kiss my shoulder in the moonlight.

  I retch again, so violently I fall to my knees.

  The wet ground is eating through my jeans when Stefano gives me water to wash out my mouth. On the hard glittering earth, a slowly inching snail is leaving melting snow in its wake.

  I spit out the last water and stand. ‘I need something,’ I say. I stare at the snail’s slow trail of passion, at the abandoned drops of water which hold the light in milky pearls. The snail continues on. There is a dusting of snow on its grey shell.

  ‘I need to feel – ’ I say.

  ‘Better,’ says Stefano.

  TUESDAY

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ says Pietr. ‘But I would like to know what’s making you look so white.’

  I think of yesterday: the rain against the windows, the beating of the windscreen wipers, the car rocking in the wind, Stefano with his hand braced against the roof, lying back in his seat, his eyes closed.

  I remember the exhilarating rush when the needle went in: that warm blossoming inside, that familiar feeling that was always on the edge of being the greatest feeling there ever was but which never became it, that always teetered but never delivered, always promised to be the most sexual experience of all, but never was.

  ‘It’s poison,’ I had said to Stefano.

  ‘They can never prove it,’ he said. He didn’t open his eyes, his voice was slurred. He said, Sophia. I knew where he was: falling backwards on a rush of something that is always heavier than water, warmer than air. A rush of blood.

  But this time, I remember thinking even before the black stars flared that I had made a horrible mistake. It wasn’t Devlin inside me.

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ I say to Pietr.

  WEDNESDAY

  The next day in the sitting room he says, ‘You’re ill.’

  I try to say as lightly as I can, ‘It’s punishment.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he says. ‘That’s how I felt about Anna for years.’

  ‘Pietr, you don’t have to feel responsible.’

  His face is grey in the cloudlight. ‘If I hadn’t met your father in Morocco . . .’

  I wonder whether it was on the trip we had taken when we first got rich. I had been eight, still furious at being removed from my old public school, already fighting with the girls at my posh new school. All I remember of Morocco is the zebra light in the narrow passageways of the old medina, the smell of spices, the incense, the faint music behind closed shutters, the cats’ piss in the gutters. The antelopes’ heads nodding in a line on the hot stone in the souq.

  ‘It was hot,’ I say. ‘I didn’t like it.’ I study his fine cheekbones, the silver hair. ‘I can’t remember you.’

  ‘I remember you,’ he says. ‘I thought even then you were going to be hard to control. And your father wasn’t a family man.’

  ‘My father needed his children the way an axe needs the turkey. He’s beyond forgiveness. I don’t forgive him.’ I look at Pietr. ‘My wild colonial ways offend your European sensibilities.’

  He says, ‘Sometimes, extremes leave the truest marks.’

  The blur of pain lifts and with it the shroud of regret which fell over me every time I thought of Devlin. ‘God, it’s such a relief to have a conversation which doesn’t consist of shouting.’

  ‘Is that what you have with Devlin?’

  ‘That’s the non-cursing version.’

  He gets up and stands at the window. The light picks out the blue ice of his eyes.

  ‘I thought you might be homesick. You might need another Australian here.’ He says, very evenly, ‘I could get Devlin for you.’

  I wrap my shawl tighter around me. ‘He gives me no comfort.’

  Pietr sits next to me. A spasm curls through my stomach. He says, ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

  I think of the typed report with Devlin’s name down the bottom. A wave of nausea runs up me, I hunch.

  He says, ‘You need a doctor – ’

  ‘It’s not – it’s withdrawal. I lapsed.’

  There is a moment’s silence. His face is drawn, shadowed.

  ‘I know you don’t believe me but it won’t happen again.’

  ‘If you tell me,’ he says, ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Devlin would believe the worst.’

  ‘Well, I won’t say the obvious,’ he says. ‘But tell me if it doesn’t go away. You might be having a reaction to the water. Some of the springs travel over volcanic rock. The carbon in the water can disagree with visitors.’ He plays with the fringe on my shawl. ‘You could tell Devlin’s people about the jewels downstairs. It might be enough to distract them.’

  ‘I can’t give you up to save myself.’

  ‘It would be a relief,’ says Pietr.

  I stare at him. ‘You men. You all want to be caught. You want to go to prison.’

  ‘I wish,’ he says quickly then he laughs. ‘Don’t paint me a martyr. They’ll never punish me publicly. I know too much.’

  ‘About Koloshnovar?’

  He says, ‘Koloshnovar is just a way station. My grandfather used it to smuggle exotic animals up from Africa and through Sicily to private zoos in Germany and Austria. He had special quarters built.’ His head is bent over the fringe on my shawl. I think of the cages I had seen in the underground tunnels. Cages tall enough for a man to stand upright. Pietr says, ‘We leased the land and outhouses to the Americans for a while. They were moving suspected terrorists through Europe. They wanted the airfield to refuel.’ He glances up. ‘They said it was legal but I took precautions. Hidden cameras.’ He straightens and says, ‘Do you want to know about your brother?’

  I am overcome by panic. ‘I think the worst,’ I whisper. ‘I have nightmares.’

  Pietr holds my hand. ‘Unfortunately, in this life, the ugliest answer is often the truth.’

  A cramp grips me. ‘Sometimes I think that my brother discovered . . . obscenities . . . at Koloshnovar.’

  Pietr says, ‘But that’s not your question.’

  ‘I think he was killed for it.’

  Pietr is silent, waiting. I say, ‘Did my father know?’

  After a long while, Pietr nods.

  Another spasm coils through me. I am afraid of what is inside me. Everyone is so sad now. I don’t want to know anymore. But I have to go on.

  ‘Maybe it was an accident,’ I say. ‘Maybe it wasn’t for business. For money.’

  Pietr is silent.

  ‘Was it on my father’s orders?’

  Pietr looks out the window. The clouds have made the sky fleshy, pulsating. His hair is dimmed in the low light.

  Finally, he says, ‘Yes.’

  Spasms of revulsion run up my throat.

  ‘The money was a curse right from the start.’ I hold my hand over my mouth. When I am sure I can speak I say, ‘Did he do it himself?’

  Pietr shakes his head but I know it isn’t a denial. It is an attempt to clear the shroud of black air which swirls around us. Everyone is so sad now. He says, ‘I don’t want to be the one you’ll remember forever saying the words.’

  ‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I say. ‘Do you know how guilty I feel? I cou
ld have tried to find out years ago. I told everyone I was going to find out. I wrote it in my diary. But in reality, I did nothing. I let myself believe what I was being told. I got to Paris and I kept on partying.’ I draw a breath. ‘Now I need to know.’

  Pietr turns my hand over and bends and kisses my wrist. Then he says the one word that for three years I have never wanted to hear.

  TUESDAY

  I am lying in bed. Rosza keeps bringing me hot milk. I imagine she thinks I am de-toxing. I force the milk down but the shuddering inside doesn’t stop.

  At night, when the clouds clear, enough moonlight floods the room to read by. The swaying branches stir the black milk lapping across the heated floor, making every object in the room tremble, as though Stefano’s ghost is back but in a quiet mood, moving the furniture a few inches at a time. Maybe it is me. Sometimes I sit down in one chair and when I swim back to the surface, I find myself in another chair.

  It is soothing now to sit staring through the window. People drift in and out, scrutinising me. Just like Anna, I hear someone say, and it seems to me that Pietr wears the same white look of shock for the rest of the day.

  Later, an explosion of rage drifts down to me. I get out of bed carefully, my legs shaking. Pietr is arguing with Stefano, shouting on the walkway above my room. I have never seen him so angry. They go into the glass tower. The door is shut, the anger cut off.

  Lying in my bed, I can’t see the deserted ruins of Santa Margherita but I can imagine them: the broken buildings, the lonely graveyard. The planes landing at night, the wolves running up the hill.

  It rains in fits and starts; the ashen sky shudders in the cold breeze. When I stand on the back terrace looking for Devlin, I smell smoke. Maybe it is fire caught in the broken stones on the jagged hill across the plain.

  I wait for Devlin, but he doesn’t come. There is no letter, no phone call. No message smuggled in. I am permanently cold, walking doesn’t seem to help. I want to go to the hut but I am too afraid that the surveillance equipment is still there. I try to read poetry but the words are remote. They give me no consolation. Images of Devlin distract me, make me more nauseous. I say to myself, No coward soul is mine. I am still cold. Still afraid. I sleep a lot. I presume it is a result of the withdrawal. I am sluggish, disconnected. I tell myself that I don’t mind that Devlin has gone, I don’t miss him.