‘There was an old woman living in the ruins. She gave me water. The old woman had spent her entire life with her goats, moving west from Kabir across the rocky landscape. She said that her home was in her memory of her wanderings. She remembered the poet, the Polish slave trader, in the times when Abu N’af was a fort, a place for travellers to re-stock. The Polish trader would crucify runaways as a deterrent, she said. The orange sand was red sometimes.
‘He had met up with the poet in Casablanca and stolen the book from him and returned to Abu N’af to explore the network of caves beneath the Massif. It became a place for him to store the goods smuggled up from southern Africa on to Europe and the West Indies sugar plantations. By goods I mean his lootings, his cargoes of slaves. People. Women, children, young men. Everyone else usually butchered in the raid. He used mercenaries, ex-soldiers, killers. Men who always gravitate to places of darkness in times of violence because they hate themselves.
‘I saw that if I didn’t save Abu N’af it would be buried by sand. I held the book and I thought, What is the dream but the erased book, the book that wants to be written, the book waiting to be written?’
‘Do you have the book with the red cover?’ she said.
Yes, she thought she heard him say.
Now there was only his ragged breathing and scrabbling from the peacock outside. She bent over him, lifted an eyelid, saw only white.
She wondered whether she should search for the book. Maybe it wasn’t here. Maybe Stefano was stealing it at this very moment.
The knife lay on her palm, glinting in the light. It reminded her of the thin line of water leading into the blackness of the cave. She pressed her thumb against the blade, a slight movement. A thin wave of red rose up, a straight line. She turned her thumb and cut again so another line appeared at right angles to the first. A red cross on her thumb. She pressed her thumb against Pietr’s forehead. He didn’t stir.
She didn’t think she could look at him; she considered standing behind him. She imagined holding him around the neck, the raised arm, the sudden swing. Like cutting hay with a scythe at Koloshnovar. But she was worried that he would wake up; the pain would be too great. She decided that cutting his wrist would be best; he would gradually slip further into unconsciousness. The death of emperors.
His pulse was beating in her hand. She felt as though she was holding his heart.
‘I fled Him down the years,’ she said.
She took off his watch and pinned his wrist against the couch. She still didn’t know if she could do it. And then she remembered he had never asked her once about the men and women and children taken from their homes, bludgeoned into slavery. Her father’s voice echoed around the room; the bored tone darkened the crucifix shadows on the wall: The crying of the cargo kept us awake all night.
Fury flared through her; the sun exploded over the desert.
She was in blackness but it was where she had to be. She lowered the knife.
Stefano’s hand gripped her elbow so painfully the room turned white. Her fingers opened. He caught the knife and threw it across the room. His eyes dared her to go and get it.
He bent over Pietr, lifted an eyelid, checked the pulse.
‘It’s opium,’ she said, ‘to make him dream.’
‘He already has too many bad dreams,’ said Stefano.
He straightened, flexing his hands. She saw that he was deciding whether to kill her.
‘One day he will want to know about his father,’ she said. ‘And I am the only one who can tell him.’
‘You,’ said Stefano and spat on the floor. ‘I know your family.’ He raised a finger. ‘You’re all destroyers.’
‘It was my brother who died.’
‘An accident. The car fell into the lake.’
‘Murder.’ She stood, to watch his reaction. To show she wasn’t afraid. ‘He had a bullet in his head.’
He wasn’t surprised.
‘You knew,’ she said. ‘It was you.’
‘No.’
She was about to say the name. He said, ‘It wasn’t Rosita.’ And she saw that he was more concerned that she didn’t think Rosita was a killer. ‘She loved him,’ said Stefano and Agnieska saw how difficult it was for him to say it.
‘Who then?’
‘The fathers, the parents. They were already scavengers. They discovered he was rich, an heir to an estate. They forced him to marry her then they killed him and told her they would kill her.’ He flexed his hands again, made them into fists. ‘She went beyond reason when she saw his body.’
‘And then the village well was poisoned,’ said Agnieska slowly. ‘Everyone died. Except you. Except her.’
‘What did they expect?’ he shouted. ‘The things we saw during the war, the way they behaved. Children learn by example.’
‘She poisoned the well before she went to Poland.’
‘To be young, pregnant, misused. And then, at Koloshnovar – ’
‘They left her in the catacombs.’
‘Pietr’s uncles. Your brothers.’
‘My half-brothers.’
‘All from the same father. A murderer, like you.’
‘Yes.’ She said, ‘That is why his bloodline must end.’ She pointed at Pietr.
Stefano said, ‘You think Pietr is Czeslaw’s son?’
It was her turn to stare.
‘But he isn’t. He is mine.’ Stefano looked down at Pietr. His eyes were shining black. He said, ‘I’ve always tried to watch over him.’
Agnieska walked home through the city. The sky had tipped completely into its dark bowl. She took off her scarf; her hair was luminous in the darkness. She felt shadows behind her. Men standing in dark corners, staring at a woman alone. Men who prevented women from being alone in the landscape. Men who denied women contact with the great silence, the chance of the divine.
She walked and tried to imprint the streets in memories she could carry into the desert with her: the pink stone against the night sky. The lattices of shadows and vines. The broken pavement releasing cool secret air through its cracks.
Somewhere out there were Nitria and Scetis, the tomb of Saint Antony. Purgatory, she thought, the place of no place, the place of all evil and all hope of the divine. The place where Christ and Satan meet. Le désert absolu.
She reached the turn-off to Betsoul’s alley. Metal groaned a few metres away. An old man was backing away from her, dragging the door by its metal fist, closing this section of the city for the night.
She imagined walking down the alley, through the unlit street, eyes watching her through the shutters, knocking on the painted wood door, saying hello to Meersun, looking over the head of the scrawny girl-child with the grey eyes to the circle of women sitting on the floor. The flames would rise, the orange light would be loosed across the uneven stone, over the blood as thick as soup in the wooden bowl, over Betsoul as she watched, unblinking.
Stefano hadn’t bothered to replace the rug in her bedroom and it lay sprawled like a scarlet gash across the black hole in the floor. The book with the red cover was gone.
She took a hessian bag from her suitcase and filled it with a water bottle, a spare pair of sandals, the prints of Saint Antony and Smara. She left the black rose.
She looked for Arthur but he was nowhere to be seen. She went out to the courtyard. The turtle was drifting, its flippers moving slightly as though it was stroking the water. She wondered if she gave it to the ben Asoub boy whether he would take care of it. Unlikely – he would sell it at the first chance.
In the water, she saw the words. Matthew 11:7. What did you go into the desert to seek?
I go into the desert to make myself as blank as the page, as blank as the desert. To find and lose myself through self-abandonment to the needs of others.
But really all that is a lie, she thought. I fell in love with a book.
She stopped the turning wheel. The turtle sat on the bottom of the fountain, a shadow in the early light, and gazed up at her with grea
t dark eyes. She kneeled and thrust her hand into the still water and reached down behind the cherub. She lifted up the false plaster bottom and pulled out the object wrapped in plastic. She didn’t unwrap it. She knew exactly what was inside: the book with the black leather cover, the tissue-thin pages with the poems, the diary entries, the maps. The photo inscribed Les fugitifs.
She left a note for her neighbour, the drunken poet, asking him to take care of Arthur and the turtle.
Outside, the sky was the colour of milk. As she walked through the silent streets, the first call to the faithful began. She heard a lighter sound curled through the rising notes. She turned. Arthur was following her, his mouth open, mewling.
‘Go home, Arthur,’ she said in French. ‘Go home.’
But he came to her and writhed around her ankles.
She said, ‘Come as far as you want then.’
Even before the outer wall, she reached a place where the path was breaking up and crumbling. She put one foot in front of the other. A small wind lifted the sand; grains stuck between her toes. The wind was creeping inside the walled city. The desert was coming. But first she was coming to it. She put out her foot and started to walk.
MOROCCO, PRESENT DAY
‘DDevlin, you fuck,’ says Mitch. He climbs down from the helicopter. ‘We found the Baghdad figurine you hid at Hafid Street. What else do you have?’
A spatter of sand rattles against my toes; the helicopter shudders in the wind. Mitch bends and walks out from the black blades slicing the pearl and blue sky.
He is close enough to see what I am wearing. ‘Where the fuck is your tie?’
I look down at the robe Sister Antony has given me, the sandals on my feet. My briefcase sits nearby: alien, incongruous.
‘You look like a peasant,’ says Mitch. ‘Or a terrorist.’
The heat expands; the horizon sways in the early morning light. The shadow of Abu N’af seems to shiver on the ground. Or maybe it is the poison in my system.
I stare past the helicopter and the edge of the plateau, down the rough road and across to the Kabir Massif, squat and blue-tinged on the other side of the plain. But the woman didn’t go that way, Sister Antony had said. She went into nothing but sand rising and falling endlessly towards Algeria. Into the vast empty.
‘I always knew you were susceptible.’ Mitch rolls the word in his mouth like old Scotch. It is a crime, in his book, that a man would succumb.
More sand hits my foot. I flinch. There is pain in my tendon, below the ankle. Between the flashes of fire, my bones are turning to water. I need to get my circulation going.
Behind the Massif, the sky is a cupped shell opening along the horizon, veiling the burnt hole in its centre. The day is growing.
‘I fell,’ I say. ‘Willingly.’
Mitch stares. He senses some biblical reference but he knows I am an atheist. It had been an unspoken job requirement: not to care. But I can see that he likes the concept of falling. A man who is already falling will be much easier to push. And it will always be his own fault.
‘I’m here to clean up your mess,’ says Mitch. Behind him, the pilot sits impassive in black sunglasses, trying to pretend he isn’t listening.
Mitch says, ‘There’s nothing you can do to avoid punishment. So tell me where the woman is.’
‘I quit. Or you can fire me. I don’t care.’
‘Oh, we don’t want you to quit.’
More sand hits my foot, harder, scoring the skin. The helicopter rocks, the blades shudder. The pilot grabs the dashboard with both hands.
‘You’ve got to make up for Borneo,’ says Mitch. ‘For your father.’
I have an image of the dark house, the open door, the garden path hard beneath my cheek.
‘Borneo is the payment, Mitch. I don’t owe you anymore.’
‘Just give us the woman.’
‘She’s gone,’ I say, pointing. ‘Into the sacred empty.’
He takes off his sunglasses, squints to where the sun shakes on the horizon. Clouds of sand rise from the ground. The horizon is breaking up, becoming indistinct, like the blurred outlines of men in camouflage.
I put my hand over my watch, forcing myself not to look. My fingers tremble on the glass.
‘Your helicopter can’t fly in this,’ I say. ‘One grain of sand will bring down your fine machine.’
He is angry but he controls it. It is his most admirable quality.
‘We’ll get her eventually.’ He examines me. He can’t know everything – can he? – but he senses this is what I dread. The eternal wolves.
I take out the passport I had made in Casablanca and toss it to him. He catches it; his reflexes were always good.
He stares at the photo of the woman inside. The photo I know by heart now. He says, ‘Who the fuck is Anna Walenzska?’
‘That’s the woman we’ve been chasing. Pietr Walenzska’s daughter from his first marriage. It’s all in the files.’
He blinks. He is trying to remember the reports. But minor details aren’t his department. That is for grunts.
I say, ‘Sister Antony is convinced – ’
‘Sister Antony is a nut job. She’s Opus Dei or some camel jockey-version. She likes to whip herself.’
He is thinking, thinking. He is coming to believe that he doesn’t believe me.
He says slowly, ‘I think Anna Walenzska is dead.’
I pick up the briefcase. It is heavy in my hand – how had I carried it all these years? I remember flourishing it at Laforche as though he would be impressed by its titanium frame, its fingerprint-coded lock. Now, it reminds me of the beaten silver shell of Pietr’s house. The silver mask he had erected around himself.
Mitch has tensed. He is wondering where my gun is. Or if I have a needle: small, sharp, silent.
I walk forward, put down the case, retreat carefully.
I say, ‘You can see how alike the women are. Almost like sisters. But we’ve been following the wrong one.’
He frowns at the case but he doesn’t pick it up. He says, ‘Anna’s dead.’
I should have known he would remember my reports. I try to clamp the desperation in my voice. ‘What if the precious files are wrong? It’s only words, easy to change. How did the woman get out of Sicily? I had her passport.’
‘That fuck Stefano,’ say Mitch. ‘Tunisia is only a boat ride away.’
If I look at my watch, it will be a sign to him. It doesn’t matter of what; he’s trained to read everything into nothing. Devlin was anxiously checking his watch, he would say. Devlin was jittery, drunk, unstable, insane. Ask the pilot – he’ll confirm it.
Soon the sun would break free of the milky horizon and surge up, shrivelling everything in its path.
My hands are shaking. I shove them into the robe’s deep pockets.
‘That bitch has made fools of us – of you,’ says Mitch. ‘If you can’t finish it off there are plenty of Agency men who would love to take a crack at her.’
Maybe now is the time to bargain, to remind him about Hafid Street.
‘She’s an accessory,’ says Mitch.
‘She doesn’t know it all.’
‘She knows enough.’
That note in his voice again – something about this job makes him furious.
That mightn’t be such a bad thing.
I nod at the briefcase. ‘I’ve got Pietr’s confession in there. When I went back into the house, he confirmed his daughter Anna had been staying there too.’
Mitch stares at me. ‘But we never saw her.’
‘She’d had a nervous breakdown. More than one. She was engaged to the woman’s brother.’
He remembered that from the files.
‘She was in seclusion,’ I say. ‘I listed her in my notes.’
We look at each other. We both know he’s had people regularly hacking my laptop – in Venice, in Trepani. But he can’t admit that here. He can’t call me a liar.
He swallows down his protest. ‘So the woman . .
. ?’
‘Could be anywhere. Maybe still in Sicily.’
He contemplates the helicopter, the puffs of red dust swirling over the black metal runners. Now I sneak a glimpse at my watch. One hour gone since I woke, maybe two since she went into the desert. I stare down the pitted road. Twenty minutes to the plain; an hour, maybe more, to circle the plateau and reach the desert proper. But the scorpion’s poison in her system would have slowed her. She might have fallen. She might be crawling.
‘I think this is all bullshit,’ says Mitch. ‘But forget that. What else did Pietr say?’
I am back in Sicily, smoke and steam rising through cracks in the floor. I heard hissing: the earth disgusted. Apocalyptio.
Red lace over the blue-veined marble. Reflections trapped in the shiny wetness: my face, the raised hand of the man lying on his back on the floor. In his red tributaries.
I kneeled beside Pietr. He was still alive. The gun was in his hand. His lips were blackened. He had put the gun in his mouth.
I looked across to the small crumpled heap in the black dress next to the fireplace.
It had been hard to make out what Pietr had been saying. I had done most of the talking.
But at the end he had turned his face very slightly so he could see from the corner of his eye. Looking at the shape next to the fireplace, he said, I never forgave my mother. I never could. It was in the blood.
I held his hand. After a while, he said the woman’s name. He said, My wife.
We both felt my fingers tighten.
He said, I couldn’t change for her.
I know.
You can change for her.
No, I said. I don’t know if I can.
He coughed. His chin was shiny. He said – or was it me? – I was brought up to believe you had to be a bastard to get ahead. But ahead to what? All I had in the end was waking up in the middle of the night marooned on a white plain, a plain on which there were no footsteps other than my own.
I survey the desert. The sky is blown glass. Thunderheads distort the horizon, the sun flares in the red-grey mist. The land is rising to meet the sky.
Notorious Page 45
