‘I told Pietr I wasn’t a kind man,’ I say. ‘I don’t do anything for free.’
‘That’s my boy,’ says Mitch. He takes out a slim silver flask from his pocket, raises it to his lips, watching me over the rim.
I say, ‘I presume the Americans aren’t interested in Saddam’s revolting collection of velour sparkle paintings and porn?’
Mitch lowers the flask, caps it. ‘We’re all on the same side here, Dev,’ he says, quietly, pleasantly. ‘You must have known we’d find the figurine in Hafid Street.’
‘The minor figurine.’
He isn’t surprised. I wonder if he has a briefcase of cash in the helicopter.
He says, still friendly, ‘What else have you got?’ We might have been old pals swapping golf scores.
I say, ‘Two pieces. The gold falcon from the Royal Palace of Ur and a miniature of the goat guardian at Tel Halif.’ I can almost feel the goat in my hands. It had been cut from the largest ruby I had ever seen, with beaten silver for a face plate and a rug of silver chain mail flung over the spine. The original was seven feet tall, created in the place where recorded history began. A place now sacked in less than ten years. Looted, vandalised, its excavation sites attacked with front-end loaders. Clay tablets taken from the museum of Baghdad: the first writings, many of them not even read yet. Civilisation unrecorded. History lost.
I say, ‘You can have them back.’
‘If we give up on the woman.’ He sees my face and laughs. ‘You’re so easy to read, Dev. We all know you couldn’t just fuck for your country.’
‘Maybe I don’t care about the woman,’ I say. ‘Maybe I just want to humiliate you.’
His face changes. This he can understand. This is what he suspected.
He says, ‘We’re trying to build goodwill here.’
‘You’re trying to reclaim moral ground after carnage,’ I say. ‘After looting by people who knew in advance. Who were tipped off.’
Mitch studies me. ‘Our job is intervention or non-intervention. There’s no middle ground.’
‘There should be,’ I say. ‘The results are bad either way.’
‘It’s all adults here. Everyone over the age of twenty-one deserves what they get.’
‘Not an entire people.’
He shrugs. ‘Don’t take it personally, Dev. Have some water.’ He throws me the flask. ‘You look parched.’
I am thirsty, I don’t stop to think. I raise the flask, tip my head. Fire roars in my throat.
He says, ‘Everything we do is for your own good, Dev.’
I cough and almost fall to my knees. The sky seems to darken, the sand is moving, shapes are rising on the horizon. A bird hovers overhead: not an eagle, a vulture. I squat and spit out the last of the Scotch.
‘What’s the matter?’ says Mitch. ‘Seeing monsters? Got the DTs?’ He picks up the briefcase. ‘You run away from everything.’ He comes closer. ‘Your father, Borneo.’ He stands over me. ‘You even went AWOL on the woman.’
I straighten and look down at him. ‘You’re Iago, Mitch. Filling your empty days with malice.’
He smiles. ‘Who’s this Iago, Dev? An informant? An imaginary character to justify being such a loser? You think she is on your side. But she left you, didn’t she? And now you can’t find her.’
The flask is cool in my hands. I pour a little into my palm and rub the liquid on my gums. I bare my teeth at him. ‘I can’t find her. And neither will you.’
He laughs. ‘You know it will go on. Even without Pietr. It’s too lucrative.’
‘History catches up with all of us, Mitch. The world is too small a place now.’
He isn’t listening. He has tucked the briefcase under his arm and is punching in a code on the locking panel. I watch him. It is the over-ride code. I know it well.
Nothing happens. He punches it in again. The locks don’t open. He thumps the briefcase. ‘Open it.’
I shake my head. ‘You’ll have to take it back. Get Grant on it. He’s good.’
‘How do I know you won’t screw us?’
‘Because I want you to leave me alone.’
His hands relax on the case. I know I have him. I look at my watch.
I say, ‘Both pieces are in a house on Rue Sidi Hmad. You’ll have to go in during work-hours, there are tenants. The falcon is under the floor in the bedroom, the goat is in a cavity in the fountain statue.’ I nod at the briefcase. ‘The address is in the laptop. And details of the rest.’
‘If we forget about the woman.’
‘If you keep after her, well, she knows about the rendition site at Koloshnovar. The black box cells. The water-boarding. Just let her disappear quietly, Mitch. You got what you wanted.’
He is thinking. He is tempted. I have to make sure. I raise the flask, I take another drink. I let the liquid run down either side of my mouth. I see my face in the mirror in Borneo as the phone began to ring. I see Mitch’s reflection in the mirror and I think, I hate you.
I say, ‘Maybe I should be the hero here. Maybe I should use the insurance Pietr gave me.’
‘Insurance?’ His hands tighten on the briefcase.
‘Pietr made his own tapes of what the CIA did in the holding cells at Koloshnovar. He was paranoid, apparently, after what happened to his father.’
Mitch says, ‘You’ll be crucified in a military court. Closed.’
I raise the flask in a salute. ‘As you always say, you can’t expect a drunk to behave rationally.’ I tilt the flask over my mouth.
‘Wait,’ he says. He shakes the briefcase. ‘It’s all in here?’
‘Plus a copy in safe hands. They know what to do if anything happens to me.’
‘They?’ He doesn’t like the sound of that.
I want to say, Even you can’t wipe out an entire village. But I don’t. Just in case.
He thinks for a moment. ‘You be where we can find you.’
‘Sure, Mitch.’ I drop the flask in the dust. I think of one last thing. ‘Be careful of the old turtle in the fountain. It bites.’
I walk down the rutted road, his shouts folding into the dust behind me. I walk on and on, down and down. The last thing I hear as I pull the hood over my head is his voice. ‘You’ll kill her the way you killed your father.’
Or maybe it was, ‘Everything we do is for your own good. You fuck.’
Sister Antony is waiting at the base of the plateau. She comes out of the entrance shadows, holding a backpack. When she sees me, she sets it down and says, ‘Did he believe you?’
I have to rest against the rock. The trembling in my legs seems worse. Sister Antony gives me a bottle of water. I pour it over my face. I can still smell the Scotch.
I think of Pietr gasping out the co-ordinates of the safe in the basement office. ‘Mitch wants to believe,’ I say. ‘But it doesn’t mean he won’t hunt for scapegoats. You, Laforche.’
‘Laforche told me he can pay off his gambling debts now.’ She doesn’t sound surprised.
‘You should leave with him.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know they are closing this place down.’
‘Yes.’ The rock’s shadow doesn’t dim the hard grey polish of her eyes. She says, ‘There is a place I always wanted to visit. The ghostly ruins of Smara.’
‘At least you have the book. The magic book in your jewelled casket.’
‘The book is the jewelled casket.’ She raises her hand, flexing her fingers.
‘Is it real?’ I say. ‘Is it by Rimbaud? Or by someone else?’
She turns her wrist, easily. ‘There is always a book behind the book. Until eventually behind all the books in the world, we come to one man or one woman writing the book.’
‘That’s not enough,’ I say loudly. My voice echoes against the black rock.
‘Why not?’ she says. ‘We are the story being written. We don’t know how it ends. That is why we keep looking. That is why we go out into the desert. We go into the white pages and look for traces beneath
the black marks left by the noon-day sun.’
There is pain behind my eyes, the old anger. The old disbelief. I say, ‘But the reality is the retired jeweller in Casablanca who says he sold you a box of nineteenth century parchment. Maybe your book is a fake.’ I point out to the horizon. ‘All of this is a fake.’
‘Does it matter?’ she says.
I drink some water and peer through the sandy mist to the shimmering folds of red earth. I see the tough pale plants, the lacework of low flowers, the cactuses burrowing under each other for protection, the broken question mark of a scuttling scorpion. It is familiar to me now.
‘She preferred to go out into this,’ I say. ‘Instead of staying with me.’
‘She was driven,’ says Sister Antony. ‘By lies and betrayals.’
‘My lies.’
Sister Antony shakes her head. ‘She was grieving. That is why she placed the scorpion on her face.’
‘My betrayals.’
‘She thought she had lost her life twice over.’
‘I’ve failed at it all. It’s been a nightmare, living this half-life.’
‘Remember,’ she says, ‘Adam found Eve after a dream. Shared dreaming is the essence of humanity.’
‘Shared.’ I can’t breathe. ‘We have nothing to share.’
The Sister steps closer. ‘Stop looking in the book of limits, the book of margins.’ She takes my hand. It is so unexpected I can only stare at her.
She says, ‘You need to look in the unwritten book.’
She gives me the backpack. ‘Water. And a compass. You probably don’t need it with all your fancy equipment.’
‘I need it,’ I say. ‘I’ve left all my fancy equipment behind.’
I grip the backpack. ‘I’m worried.’ There is a tremor in my voice. I swallow. ‘I’ve failed before. Everywhere I go there are – calamities.’
She touches the scar on her cheek. ‘You will grow into speech through loneliness and suffering. Jesus began his work from solitariness.’
I can hardly process what I am hearing. ‘But you can’t think – I’m not Jesus, the woman is not Jesus.’
The muddy light coats her eyes now. Mitch could be right – her neighbour in Casablanca, the teetotaller poet, had said she had a taste for self-punishment.
She says, ‘In the loneliness of the desert, we are visited by angels. I gaze out and see an immense flowering in the desert.’
‘Do you really see it?’
‘I see a silver lake and roses reaching up to the blue sky.’
I put my hand on the cool dark rock. ‘You live in a tomb in the earth. Maybe what you see is a mirage of death.’
‘You’ll see it too,’ she says. ‘You will see lions in the desert. An eagle hovering overhead, protecting you like its young.’
‘The only thing I’m likely to see is Mitch in his helicopter with machine-gun blazing.’
‘You don’t believe.’
‘I – look, I’m sorry, but there are no lions in the desert. Wolves, I can believe.’
‘You will see them.’
I heft the backpack but I don’t put it on.
‘You don’t want to go out there,’ she says.
‘I may be a drunk but I’m not stupid.’
She watches me carefully.
I say, ‘I don’t know how much Laforche knows . . . ’
She places her hands in her wide sleeves and stands, still and listening, in that way she has. I feel compelled to go on.
‘There were incidents,’ I say. ‘Failures. One with my father, another in Borneo.’ I find it hard to speak. ‘There were deaths involved.’
‘You drank firewater.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘It burned you up.’
‘Yes.’
‘You want to make amends.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you should go out into the vanishing point of absolute poverty,’ she says. ‘There will be pain. At first your body will be defiled. You will be alone. The desert will look on. It will not help you but it will not stand in your way.’
She hands me a square object; it slides through my hands like moon water. I catch it, remove the ivory silk. It takes me a moment to realise what it is.
‘Rimbaud’s book.’ I visualise the bold inked writing. ‘You can’t give this away.’
‘Yes. When you find Madeleine you will take her to the caves under the Kabir Massif. Use the caves that run under the plain to the Massif. She knows the way. You will give the book to a Moroccan woman called . . . ’ There is a long pause before she says the name: ‘Betsoul.’
‘Isn’t this part of your plan to save Abu N’af?’
‘My plan was wrong.’ Her face is shadowed. ‘It is my fault,’ she says and for the first time I see uncertainty in her face, anxiety in the hands clenching the cross. ‘I needed to pay penance and I had given everything else away. Don’t you understand? I had nothing else to give.’
‘Why must sacrifice always come into it?’ I say. ‘What is it with you women?’
But she isn’t listening to me. She has an expression of horror, seeing some horizon I can only imagine. ‘I think I have done a terrible thing.’ Her voice is a whisper. ‘I saw a chance to wipe away my father’s sins. My sins. Madeleine came to me for sanctuary. She needed to be hidden – ’
‘From me.’ I can barely say it.
‘When Stefano told her about me, she brought me what she thought was the real book, the book with the red cover that Pietr took from me in Casablanca. But that book was a copy I had made. Madeleine brought me the book to stop Rosza using its desert maps for looting.’
‘Why didn’t you put fake maps in the copy?’
‘All I cared about was being left alone, with the real book.’ She shivered. ‘I betrayed Madeleine. I stole from her.’
‘Stole what?’
‘A new book – ’ Her voice cracks and she opens and closes her mouth as if she can no longer talk.
‘Too many books,’ I say, impatient. ‘Too many lootings.’
She bows her head.
Sister Antony watches me as I place Rimbaud’s book in my deep pocket. She says, ‘Give the book to Betsoul. Tell her it is payment for the past week. Tell her she must give back what she stole from the woman.’
She holds out a dark wooden object. ‘Give Betsoul this also.’ It looks like a painted fang.
‘I told her a lie,’ says the Sister, ‘because it was the only way to start a new community in the desert.’
‘Lied to who?’ I ask, not thinking, focused instead on what is ahead of me. ‘This Betsoul?’
Sister Antony shakes her head. She says, ‘First you dream, then you die.’ She opens her hand. On her palm is a small wooden hair comb shaped like a butterfly. As I thrust it deep into my pocket, my fingers brush the torn-up fragments of the note the woman had left me. She had written, When I look at you, I know the people I loved are gone. Five deaths are too much for one person to endure. And she had fled into the desert.
I am drowning in desolation; I can barely hear what the Sister is saying.
‘I was right about the book,’ says the Sister. ‘It is God’s word. It created a community. I brought the book to the desert and people came and the desert flowered.’ She closes her eyes. ‘But I am not God.’
The sun sidles upwards. I am on the last stony piece of ground before the red dunes. Sand clumps around tough tufts of grass and dry squares of low-slung plants and squat bushes so faded they seem to lack all sap. I nudge a crouching cactus and white fluid spurts out from its thorny spine. The liquid disappears into the ground; within moments there is nothing but a white shadow on the rocks.
I walk on. Scorpions back away from me, their tails up. The further I walk the slower they are to move. A small dust-coloured lizard raises itself on stubby back legs and hisses at me. Its mouth is black as coal and its eyes are blood-red. It flicks its tail and disappears into a dust cloud of its own making.
My lips burn; I taste
salt. I drink the water Sister Antony has given me and look back. There are no footprints yet I sense the ground has been altered, rocks moved, the air displaced. Those capable of reading such signs can follow me. But not Mitch. Not even Sister Antony, I think.
The land changes again. The rocks shrink to gravel, the plants descend into the ground. An occasional sand viper skitters in front of me but all life is disappearing. The dunes are tantalisingly close. For some reason, I am convinced that when she reaches the beginning of the dunes proper, she will stop. She will climb to the top of the first dune, to see the light on the horizon. All the paintings she loves have light on the horizon.
Sand is rising. An eddy dances on the same spot, turning and turning. The hot wind swings through the sandy mist, hitting my face, heavy with grit and salt.
A peculiar sighing rushes past me; the ground is breathing out. A long silence follows yet I feel rhythm in the silence, as though a pulse trapped in an invisible body is rapidly approaching.
I think: Now I am hearing the real silence of the desert. A silence filled with a thousand echoes: everything from the wind’s idle stirring of a few grains on the top of the dunes to the distant whine eating up the side of the Massif. I hear the click of the beetle’s barbed legs as it dives down through the sand. I hear drums, and yearning notes from a gramophone on the peaks. Is it Beethoven? Yes, poor Beethoven, trapped in his well of silence and trying to speak to God through his music. More voices, some from caves, some from tombs. Streamers of sound which float over the desert. And bells, I am sure I hear bells. And Laforche’s voice: Mapmakers, criminals, suicidal poets, he is saying. Desert travellers are never city dwellers but nomads, ascetics. Behind him, Edith Piaf turns in mourning circles. And other voices: In the dark, I wake on the white page of the desert . . .
Laforche is saying, The desert is peopled with madmen, loners. The lost and those seeking to be lost.
I am all of those, I say to him.
You’re a romantic with a streak of masochism, says Laforche. You always take the hardest way.
I am driven by self-disgust, I say. I refused her call and now all I have is the void.
Notorious Page 46
