Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  She glanced up from her pile of bent piastres; for an instant something glowed and shifted in her face, as if she were in the grip of an emotion that had the fierce mutability of a fire burning out of control.

  ‘All right!’ she said, and took my hand.

  I had expected more of a reaction, but perhaps she too had known it was inevitable.

  The young girl’s song was ending. She swayed under the necklace of light bulbs that illuminated the stage, her hands describing delicate passages in the air, not a drop of blood spilling from her pierced cheeks, singing of how Muhammed returned to reign in Mecca and the blessing of Islam spread throughout the infidel world and flowers bloomed in the desert. All around me, wreathed in hashish smoke, old men were nodding, weeping, speaking the name of God. That was what I most loved about the Arabs of the bazaar, their capacity to cast aside the duplicitous context of their lives and find within themselves some holy fibre that allowed them to reduce the pain of the world to an article of faith. I shed no tears, yet I felt as one of them, wholly embracing a glorious futility, given over to the thunderous joy of belief, though I realized that the truth to which I had surrendered myself was meagre and blighted and could not long sustain me.

  Two nights later as we approached our rendezvous point, which lay less than a kilometre from the abandoned Palestinian village of El Malik, I began to smell perfume. I pulled Abdel’s jeep onto the shoulder, in among some thorn bushes. Kate asked what was wrong, and I told her, Nothing. But perfume was often used by smugglers to disguise the scent of opium, and I was afraid that we had been set up. The cushion of the back seat was drenched with attar of roses. I sliced the upholstery with my pocket knife, groped inside the cushion, and along with wet stuffing and perfume vials and broken glass—apparently the last pothole had done the damage—I felt thin, hard cakes wrapped in paper. Opium. And not a little of it.

  Somewhere out in the darkness, among the barren hills that bulked up against the stars, an engine kicked over; I had to assume that the Israelis had spotted us, were puzzled by our having stopped, and were coming for their goods. A chill bloomed between my shoulder blades, and my legs grew feeble. I could feel the great emptiness of the Sinai solidifying around us, as malefic as a black tower in whose keep we stood. That no one had told me about the drugs made it clear that my survival was not a fait accompli. Rollo had viewed me as an impediment to his association with Abdel; alone, he would be able to manipulate Abdel, and he might have arranged to have me eliminated by the Israelis. An overly imaginative scenario, perhaps. But I had no desire to test its inaccuracy.

  I listened to the approaching engine. Judging by its sound, the Israelis were driving something far more powerful than the jeep. We would not be able to outrun them.

  ‘Get the guns,’ I said to Kate; I dug out some of the opium and stashed it in my pack, along with several dozen of the vials, thinking I could use them for currency. Once again she asked me what was wrong. I shoved her aside and fished the guns—Belgian SMGs—out from beneath the front seat. I tossed one to her, said, ‘Let’s go,’ and set off at a jog into the hills.

  She caught up to me, grabbed my arm. ‘You goin’ to tell me what the hell’s goin’ on?’

  Until that moment I had controlled my fear, but her touch broke my control, and I was galvanized with terror, furious at her for having led me into this mess, at myself for having followed, for letting her so distract me that I had neglected to take basic precautions. ‘You stupid fucking bitch!’ I shouted. ‘You’re so hot to die, stay here. Otherwise get your ass moving.’ Her face was pale and stunned in the starlight. I felt a flicker of remorse, but only a flicker. ‘You wanted this,’ I said. ‘Now deal with it.’

  We had climbed about a third of a mile, I’d guess, when small arms fire sounded from the road. But no bullets struck close to us. After a few more bursts, there was a loud explosion and a fireball at the base of the hill. The jeep. Shortly thereafter I heard the Israelis’ engine roar away. As I had hoped, they were satisfied with the opium and not sufficiently zealous to fulfil their part of what I assumed to have been a contract. Nevertheless I continued climbing toward El Malik, which offered decent cover and where I planned to spend the night. The next morning I intended to hook up with my own Israeli contacts and negotiate our passage back to Cairo.

  The moon was rising as we came into the village, descending a slope strewn with boulders, and in that milky light, the whitewashed houses with their vacant black windows and walls gapped by Israeli artillery looked like the shards of enormous skulls. From the eastern edge of the place we gazed out across a valley figured by the lights of Israeli settlements, the formless constellations of a lesser sky. There was a heady air of desolation, a sense of lives violently interrupted yet still, in some frail, exhausted way, trying to complete their ordinary tasks, souls perceptible as a faint disturbance that underscored the silence, a vibration unaffected by the gusting of a cold wind.

  We sheltered in a house with a packed dirt floor that offered a view of a public square and a ruined fountain. Kate, who had spoken little during the climb, sat against a wall and stared at me despondently.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a while. ‘This is all my fault.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ I said, dropping beside her. ‘Anyway, the worst is over. Tomorrow, if we’re careful, we should be able to get in touch with friends of mine. They’ll help us.’

  She said nothing for almost a minute, then: ‘I’ve got to be crazy. To want this, I mean.’

  I chose not to absolve her of insanity, but I put an arm about her. I believe I felt then what she wanted to feel. To be in that gutted doom of a place, lent a memorial beauty by the moonlight, all its ruin seeming to turn white and bulge with living shadow; to have survived folly and betrayal—and I was not concerned that what had happened would hurt my business, I was simply interested in paying the betrayers back in kind; to be in the company of a woman who, though I did not love her, had put a lover’s charge in me, a woman with whom I could practise a perfect counterfeit of passion; it was as if the events of that night had exposed a romantic core in me, and I was now entirely in the world, alive as I had not been for years.

  She glanced up at me and said, ‘You look happy.’

  I laughed and kissed her. The kiss deepened. I touched her breasts, startled to find that anything could feel so soft and luxurious in this harsh, empty place.

  Kate pulled back and gave me a searching stare. The vitality had returned to her face. After a second she jumped to her feet, backed away until she was standing in the chute of light spilling through the door.

  I came to one knee, intending to go after her, but she held up a hand to ward me off and began unbuttoning her shirt. She smiled as she shrugged out of the shirt, and watching her work her jeans down past her hips, eyes focused on the dark tangle between her thighs, visible through the opaque material of her panties, I felt heavy in my head, thick and slow, full of a red urge, like a dog restrained from feeding by its mistress’s command.

  I saw the man behind her a moment before he reached the doorway, but I was so stupefied, I was unable to react, only registering him as a slight figure holding an automatic rifle, wearing jeans and a windbreaker. And a mask. He shoved Kate toward me, sending her toppling, and we fell together onto the floor. By the time I managed to disengage from her, he had been joined by four others, all masked. They were evil-looking things, the masks: curved sheets of white plastic with mouth slits and eyeholes, adorned with painted symbols and religious slogans.

  ‘Tell the whore to clothe herself,’ one said in Arabic.

  They watched without comment as Kate dressed; she stared back at them, not defiant, but cold, measuring. An admirable pose, but I had no urge to hand her a medal. We had, I believed, come to the end of it. The men who held us captive had lost everything, and their sole remaining ambition was to go down in flames while exacting a terrible vengeance. Oddly enough, at that moment I thought of Claire.

  Th
ey collected our packs and guns and escorted us to the ruin of a small mosque, where another seven or eight masked men were assembled. Moonlight streamed through rents in the domed roof, applying a design of sharp shadows and blazing light to the floor tiles; the same fierce slogans decorating the masks had here been painted on the walls. A cooking fire burned in a shell crater. The men stationed themselves along the wall; then another man, unmasked, a sharply featured individual dressed in a striped robe, stepped out from a door at the rear of the building. He had a bronzed complexion and a neat beard salted with grey and one blind eye, white as marble. He was carrying a long, gracefully curved sword. He took a position at the centre of the room, directly beneath a gap in the roof, so that a beam of moonlight, separate and distinct, shone like a benediction upon him, and stared at us with disdain. I could feel the fanatical weight of his judgement as surely as if it were a form of radiation.

  One of the others handed him my pack, whispered in his ear. He inspected the contents, removed a vial of perfume. He moved close to me, smiling, his blind eye glowing like a tiny moon. ‘Thief,’ he said in a voice like iron, ‘my name is Mahmoud Ibrahim, and I am he who prepares the way. Thou hast stolen from me and given nothing in return. Yet because thou hast been touched by the city of Saladin, I will spare thee everything but pain.’ He opened the vial and poured the contents over my head. He took out a second vial, a third, and repeated the process. I shut my eyes. The oily stuff ran into my mouth, thick and bitter, trickling cold down my cheeks, drowning the stink of my fear in a reek of flowers and humiliation.

  Mahmoud took one of the cakes of opium, pinched off a substantial fragment. ‘Eat,’ he said, holding it out. I let him place it on my tongue like a communion wafer.

  When he was satisfied that I had swallowed, he smiled, nodded. Then he gestured at Kate and handed his sword to the man who had brought him my pack. ‘The woman first,’ he said.

  Kate shrieked as three men threw her onto the floor and positioned her right wrist atop a block. Another stood by with a torch, while the man wielding the sword laid the edge of it on her wrist, then lifted it high. The traditional Arab punishment for stealing, the lopping off of the right hand—I imagined it sheared away, blood spurting, and perhaps in her fright, Kate had also forgotten the prosthesis, for she twisted her head about, trying to find me, screaming, ‘Danny! Help me!’ But I was targeted by seven rifles, and I could only stand and watch, the scene burning into my brain—the stark shadows of the ruin, the men in their strange white masks, the calm prophet with his glowing eye, and Kate writhing, her face distorted by panic.

  Then, with a windy noise, the sword flashed down.

  As the blade bit into Kate’s prosthesis, slicing through plastic and microcircuitry, there was a sizzling noise, and a rippling blue-white charge flowed up the steel, outlining blade and hilt in miniature lightnings. Sparks showered around the man holding it, and there was so much confusion and shouting I am not sure whether or not he screamed. He stood for a second or two, shivering with the voltage passing through him; smoke trickled between his fingers. Then he fell. The sword flew from his grasp and went spinning across the floor to my feet.

  It was reflex that moved me to pick up the sword, and it was dumb luck that Mahmoud had recoiled from the electrocution and wound up beside me. But I did not waste the opportunity. I slid the blade under his neck, making a yoke of it, and dragged him toward the rear door. Kate was sitting up, dazed, her prosthesis dangling horribly from a spaghetti of charred wires; but when I called to her, she got to her feet and came weaving toward me. More than half the men had fled, terrified by the witchery of her hand, but the remainder were closing on me. I pulled the blade tight against Mahmoud’s Adam’s apple, making him stiffen and gasp.

  ‘Emshi!’ I shouted, and his men backed away.

  With Kate at my side, I guided Mahmoud through the rear door into a small room whose back wall had been obliterated. Three cars were parked outside. Kate leaned against the wall beside me; her face was empty, slack.

  ‘Keys,’ I said to Mahmoud.

  He groped in the pocket of his robe, fingered them out. ‘The Peugeot,’ he said, gritting out the words.

  ‘Can you drive?’ I asked Kate.

  She did not answer.

  I kicked her hard in the calf. She blinked; her head wobbled.

  ‘Drive!’ I told her. ‘Take the keys and drive.’

  Though the men harassed us, aiming their rifles, threatening us, we made it to the car. Mahmoud and I taking the back seat. I sat turned toward him, barring his throat with the blade. Then we were bumping along the cratered streets, jouncing over potholes, past the last houses and out onto a rocky, precipitous road that wound down into the moonstruck valley. No headlights showed behind us. Once the land began to flatten out, I removed the blade from Mahmoud’s throat. His men would not risk confronting the Israeli patrols. I was shaking, rattled with adrenaline, yet at the same time I felt woozy, drifty, as if a cloud were building in the centre of my brain. I remembered the opium.

  ‘Shit!’ I said.

  Mahmoud seemed as calm and content as a hawk with a dead mouse. Kate was staring straight ahead, her good hand clenching the wheel; her skin was pasty, and when she glanced back I had the impression that she looked like she might be going into shock.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She muttered something; the car swerved wildly onto the shoulder.

  It was definitely the opium coming on. I was having trouble feeling the tips of my fingers, and my head was turning into a balloon. Everything I thought left a vague colour in the air. Smoking opium was a fairly smooth sail, albeit a long ocean voyage; eating it, however, was a rocket to the moon. I was still lifting slowly from the launch pad, but in a minute or two I was going to have all the physical capacity of a cantaloupe. Or maybe a honeydew. I couldn’t decide. Something round and gleaming and very, very still. I had intended to turn Mahmoud over to the Israelis; I was sure they wanted him, and I hoped that his capture would help them overlook our illegal entry. But now, with the opium taking control and Kate on the wobbly side, I could not chance having him along.

  ‘Stop the car,’ I said.

  I had to repeat myself twice before she complied, and by the time she did, I had almost forgotten why I wanted her to stop.

  ‘Get out,’ I said to Mahmoud. That blind eye of his had acquired the nacreous depth of pearl, and I was beginning to see things in it. Beautiful things, amazing things. I told him again to get out. Or maybe I didn’t. It was difficult to distinguish between speech and thought. Everything was so absorbing. The dark, the distant lights of a kibbutz. The attar of roses smell that clung to me. I could lose myself in any of it. Then something touched me on the brow, leaving a cool spot that went deep inside my head.

  ‘From thy poison I have made thee a vision of the time to come,’ Mahmoud said. ‘What thou will have of it, I know not. But it is a gift of the Prophet, may His name be praised, and he planteth no seed that doth not bear fruit.’

  In the interval between these words and when next he spoke, I heard a symphony compounded of breath and night sounds and metallic creaks that implied an entire secret history hitherto unknown to man. Then there was a whisper, as sinister as a violin tremolo in a minor key: ‘Thou will not evade my punishment this night.’

  I thought I heard the car door slam shut.

  ‘Kate,’ I said. ‘Can you get us somewhere? A town. Some place…’

  I never heard her reply, for I was walking along the crest of a green hill shaped like a dune. A verdant plain spread in every direction, picked out here and there by white stone houses formed into elaborate shapes, and by deep blue lakes along whose edges flamingos stalked and lions with men’s voices took their ease, and by white cities where no one cried for meat and in whose highest tower lofty questions were put to a wonderful machine that had summoned and now embodied the soul of the Prophet. White clouds the size of small kingdoms floated overhead, and flying among them were
golden shining things that whirled and darted like swallows, yet were made of metal not flesh. At long last I came to a pool shaped like a deep blue eye, almost purple, that lay in the midst of a bamboo thicket, with the ancient statue of an enthroned pharaoh at one end, worn faceless by the wind and the sand. I made to drink from the pool, but when I dipped my hand into the water, it began to stir and to ripple, and strange lights glowed beneath the surface illuminating an intricate thing of silver fibres and rods and other structures whose natures were not clearly revealed, and I heard a voice in the air, the voice of this silver thing, saying, ‘I am the Oracle of the Past. Ask and I will tell thee where thou hast been.’

  And I said to her, for it was the voice of a woman, ‘Of what use is this? I wish to know the Future.’

  ‘Truly,’ she said, ‘the Future is already known. This is the time of Paradise long prophesied, the time without end when all men live as brothers. Only the Past remains a mystery, and indeed, it has always been thus, for no man can know himself by knowing his future. It is from the Past that the greatest wisdom derives.’