Charlie Johnson in the Flames

by Michael Ignatieff

  She curled her bare feet beneath her on the sofa and studied the picture he gave her for a second, biting a fingernail. She looked at Charlie but he didn’t see why he should give anything away. She didn’t ask where it was taken or why Charlie was interested.

  It was obvious she knew him. She said something to Buddy and then she looked at Charlie again and said ‘the Colonel’. She nodded noncommittally and took a drag from her cigarette. So now they were looking for the Colonel.

  She knew him, Charlie reasoned, because it was a small town, and a small unit, and at his level, he would be one of the kings.

  Charlie couldn’t figure out what else she might know and what she would be willing to say. There might even be something between her and the man himself. Or between her and Buddy. They were talking, not looking at him, and so anything might be happening. As she smoked and dropped the picture on the pile of newspapers in front of the sofa she might have been wondering what it would cost her to tell Charlie more. Such thoughts were passing through Charlie’s mind, though he knew he couldn’t really anticipate anything. Sustained attempts at anticipation turned out to be pointless or depressing or both.

  He wondered how far she could be trusted. He couldn’t make anything out from the way she moved the hair off her face and tucked it behind her left ear or from her thin smile as Buddy laid out his line of goods. In his business, Charlie was always trusting people. It was never exactly trust, of course, more a matter of playing the odds. She would be doing the same thing. If he was exposing her to danger so what? It wasn’t his business to protect anyone. They were all adults here.

  As the smoke thickened around the single light bulb above his head, and he watched Buddy talking to the girl on the sofa, Charlie had one of those moments of decompression when the point of it all – this journey, this story, whatever it was – seemed to be escaping him. What did these places mean to him now? These rooms with stained wallpaper, these local reporters and other people’s wars. He was sick of it. He studied the poster of some long-haired singer in front of him and the Nike one on the other wall that said: Just do it. What he wanted to do was to go home. But there wasn’t one to go to.

  These senseless and abrupt drops in his internal barometric pressure came and went without warning and they made him feel that whatever he was doing was an entire waste of time. When they were happening, he felt that he had been emptied out by a life of following stories. He had done all this too many times, working a source in a dirty room in some place he didn’t really care about. He felt all this but he also knew – this was the only benefit of getting older that he had ever noticed – that this moment would pass, and that he would recover momentum. Because momentum, after all, was all there was.

  ‘What do you want him for?’ the girl asked, in good English. She looked at him, evenly, drawing in the smoke, waiting to exhale.

  Buddy shrugged, as if to say, I tried explaining, but no good.

  ‘He killed a woman I knew. I want to talk to him about it.’

  He hadn’t meant to say it, or at least not yet. He had not said as much to Buddy. So it was Buddy’s turn to look surprised.

  The girl gave out a smoky laugh. ‘Just like that?’

  Charlie smiled back. ‘Why not?’

  Why fuck around with this? he thought. Why not just say it? It seemed to work.

  She uncurled from the sofa, slid her feet into a pair of mules, grabbed a coat and the cellphone in front of her and said, ‘Let’s go. I show you. We find out where he is.’

  The place they went to was the ‘cultural centre’ of the town, an old inn from the horse and cart days, with a stone courtyard and a dribbling fountain in the middle of it, trestle tables around about and a few blinking coloured lights around a small dance floor. It would have been fine, had there been any life in it. Apart from a couple of boys with close-shaven heads trying to make time with some girls in tight trousers and push-up bras, the place was empty.

  ‘It’s better in summer,’ she said and threw herself down at a table by the fountain, beckoning to the waiter. He brought them some beer and Charlie wondered what they were doing there.

  ‘He is sometimes here,’ she said. ‘It is his brother’s place.’

  So there was a brother. And if a brother, then there must be a blameless mother and a father and God knows who else, Charlie thought. These creeps had parents. He might even have a wife, and a daughter the same age as Annie, for Christ’s sake. A real human being, in other words. But why should he care about that? It was all just sentimentality. What kind of life had you lived if you were surprised that killers led lives just like you and me? What else was a man who set a woman alight supposed to be? He would be a human being like all the rest.

  Charlie peeled the label off his beer and Buddy and the girl watched him.

  ‘What kind of a story is this?’ she asked.

  ‘There might be no story at all,’ Charlie replied with an even smile. ‘I just want to talk to him.’

  ‘And why would he want to talk to you?’

  ‘Because if he doesn’t, he’ll go to The Hague.’

  This thought had not actually entered Charlie’s head until that moment. He had never taken The Hague seriously. But he was pleased to have improvised this threat and so he was smiling when she said, in a soft voice, ‘He will kill you first.’

  This also seemed to be Buddy’s opinion since he nodded and gave Charlie one of those looks that said, ‘Listen to her, even if you don’t listen to me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She chose not to answer and simply gave him a challenging stare: a twenty-five-year-old woman confronting a man twice her age.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘He won’t kill me. He doesn’t want witnesses around.’

  ‘What witnesses?’

  Charlie pointed at the two of them. He smiled. They didn’t.

  ‘Shit,’ Buddy said.

  ‘You don’t seem to realise …’ she began.

  ‘What don’t I realise?’

  ‘He did the ninety-two clearances down the Drina. The Omarska operations.’

  ‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Charlie said equably. They were in bluffing mode, and so he was bluffing. He’d had no idea, of course, that the Colonel had this kind of history, that he was a specialist, an old hand at the business. The Omarska operations had been really something: the dynamiting of the mosques, the mass eviction of the women and children, the men locked in that long cattle barn, the skeletal misery of those naked bodies, and the shaming fear in every man’s eye. Charlie had been there. With Jacek and Buddy, in fact. They had won a prize for the footage, if his memory served.

  ‘Leave him to The Hague,’ Buddy whispered. ‘Be stupid with your own life, Charlie. Not with mine. Not with hers.’

  ‘Fine. Leave. You’ve done your job. Now go.’

  But it was too late for that. She looked up and nodded at a man just coming through the door.

  ‘The owner,’ she said.

  He strode over to their table, and she rose and let him kiss her once on each cheek. He was a big man, in starched white shirt and neatly cut slacks, maybe forty. He was handsome in a muscular kind of way, with pepper and salt wiry hair and the healthy colour of someone whose circulation is good, who sleeps well, who skis in the winter and plays volleyball on the beach in the summer. He was talking to the girl for a moment or two, and Charlie didn’t know if it was business or something else, couldn’t tell what kind of tab they were running with each other. Then she intro duced them. Charlie could see that she was telling him that Charlie and Buddy were friends from the city and he could see that the owner didn’t believe a word of it. But his hand was out. Charlie shook it and nodded. Buddy spoke for both of them. The big guy smiled, but kept his eyes on Charlie. Obviously, Buddy wasn’t getting down to business, so after it went back and forth for a while, Charlie took advantage of a pause to say, very distinctly, in a way that formed a moment of silence around it, ‘I’m looking for your brother.’<
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  It struck Charlie that the big man didn’t need a translation, but he waited for one anyway. Buddy obliged.

  The big man surveyed Charlie, as if from a distance, and then he came quite close. He put his finger on a button of Charlie’s shirt. He didn’t pull it. He just rubbed the tip of his finger around it. Then he said something very softly. He stood back and smiled agreeably at the girl and Buddy and went back inside.

  ‘I don’t need a translation,’ Charlie said, as they stood up to go.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Buddy.

  They were under the street lamps outside the cultural centre. The music was floating through from the dance floor. The silver Merc they had seen before made another pass, slowing down as if the driver was taking a look, and then speeding away with a fluid change of gear. The girl looked at him and tossed her cigarette away.

  ‘His brother will kill you, if you ever come back here again,’ she said.

  ‘Well now we know,’ Charlie replied. It seemed clear to him that the girl was working for the Colonel or his brother and that Buddy had made a serious error of judgement. But who cared? They had got to the shooter first day, which wasn’t bad, compared with other stake outs he could remember. Now the question was: how long would it be before the Colonel made his next move?

  ‘Nice talking to you, whatever your name was,’ Charlie said to her in a hard voice. She gave him a long look and returned inside.

  Buddy and Charlie walked back to the Hotel Sport, through the deserted streets. It had grown cold. The plane trees were bare, the branches black against the light of the street lamps.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Charlie,’ Buddy said in a tight voice.

  ‘True enough,’ Charlie said. ‘I could say the same about you. At least we found the bastard. First time. I knew you could do it.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Buddy said cheerlessly.

  Charlie wasn’t happy that his humour wasn’t appreciated. In fact, he began to feel lonely as the silence between them persisted. It was then that he told Buddy the story, as they walked through the darkened town. There was nothing else to do, and Buddy was hurt and angry. Maybe frightened too, and Charlie, who wasn’t frightened, didn’t want him to be alone with his fear. He tried to take Buddy through the whole story. He tried to make the flick of the lighter as real as he could, the way the flames caught her clothes and how she began to run and the smell of her flesh and gasoline and weight of her body on his as they rolled on the ground. Charlie even showed Buddy the scar tissue on his palms, as if to prove that the event had really occurred. He wanted Buddy to understand what he barely understood himself, namely that she had impinged, penetrated, entered – perhaps the only one who ever had – the small space he kept between himself and the entire world.

  He tried to tell Buddy of the ridiculous hope they had entertained, Jacek and him, of saving her, of doing something right for a change, and how the crushing of that hope had set Charlie on this course. Though this wasn’t the only reason. The reason lay deeper, in how he had witnessed so much in a life of reporting and had done so little, how he had never saved any one, and needed to now. But saving wasn’t the right word.

  ‘So guilt maybe?’ Buddy cut in bitterly.

  Charlie shook his head. He didn’t feel especially guilty. The deepest feeling escaped words, and he fell silent, just walked beside Buddy. What he could not say was that his life had never been redeemed by a single thing, though where this yearning for redemption came from, he could not understand. Since when did life required to be redeemed? he might have asked at any other time, but not now. He wanted to convince some one, anyone, of the necessity of what he was doing.

  But Buddy was not convinced.

  ‘Do you suppose that this is only bad guy in my country? Or in world? Do you think that fixing him fixes everything? How stupid can you possibly be?’

  ‘I want to fix one thing.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know! Jesus Christ, Charlie.’ Buddy was disgusted and walked ahead on his own.

  Charlie usually knew what to say to anyone’s disgust, but this time he couldn’t find the words. So he kept quiet the rest of the way back to the hotel. All he could think about as he walked along was a film he had seen once, not a very good one, about this Greek guy whose father had been tortured and murdered when the military was in power. The son returns from exile twenty years later and he sets off to find his father’s murderer, on some picture-postcard Greek island. He has this idea that he is going to kill him, and he brings a gun along. All that Charlie could remember about the picture was a long scene, where the son climbs a blistering white road upwards to a house at the top of a village where the murderer had gone into pensioned retirement. He turned out to be an old man sprinkling goat manure from a red plastic bucket on some tomato plants in front of the house. It was the guy all right – his name was on the mailbox, plain as day. The son watched the old man watering his plants, watched him wipe his runny nose, and then he kept walking to the top of some cliff and threw the gun into the sea. The ending seemed fine at the time, but it wasn’t how Charlie felt about things now. He didn’t care about revenge. It wasn’t revenge he wanted. What he cared about was the burning woman and, for her sake and for his, going through to the very end, wherever it was, no matter what.

  And what did that mean, exactly? Where would it all lead? Charlie didn’t have a clue. Just a feeling that closed in upon a scene in which he and the Colonel were on opposite sides of a table, and the Colonel had to give an account of himself. A reckoning. That was what he wanted. Not vengeance, just a reckoning. So that the Colonel would understand what it really means to snuff someone out. So that Charlie would under stand. So that the distinctions, the clarity, that life requires would be restored. Something like that. And maybe more. He wanted the man to feel fear, wanted him to know what being burned would feel like. That was it. A laying on of hands. The flame of recognition and shame would jump the gap between one soul and another. Something like that. One way or the other, a kind of religious occasion, a righteous moment.

  He caught up with Buddy and tried to put his arm around him, but Buddy pulled away.

  ‘You are a danger to yourself,’ Buddy was saying. ‘And you are a danger to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a danger to you, Buddy,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I don’t need your good intentions,’ Buddy replied, flicking a butt into the arc of the street light by the entrance to the Hotel Sport. ‘I just want to get out of here.’ But it was too late to get out of there, at least that night. The next bus wasn’t until 7.30 the next morning. The bartender doubled as the night porter, and he handed them two keys.

  The rooms upstairs at the Sport were eloquent witnesses to the sexual life of a garrison town: from the stains on the orange carpet, to the hair oil on the headboards, the declivities in the mattress, and the holes in the curtain, half-hanging from its hooks, as if someone on her way down to the floor, in some biting and scratching mouth to mouth with a soldier, had grabbed at it to hold on, caught it and dragged it with her to their coupling on the floor. There was a rancid smell to everything, mouldy decay, deep in the fabric, sunk into the stained tiles in the bathroom. Buddy was at the end of the hall, and Charlie heard him visit the toilet on the landing, and then turn the key in his lock. Charlie opened the windows and kept his clothes on. He didn’t want his skin on these sheets.

  There was no phone in the room, so there was no one to talk to, and it wasn’t that late, so there was nothing to do but lie and watch the light of an occasional headlight playing on the torn, lopsided curtain. For the first time in weeks, it struck Charlie that he had been in the grip – like the guy in the bad Greek film – of an old myth. Telling the story to Buddy had broken the spell. He realised that he had been stupid to fall for it. All the redemption there could be was in a story, but it had to be a good one, a new one, and the one he had fallen for
was old and tired. Who believed in vengeance any more? Or reckonings, for that matter? Plenty of people did it, of course. Vengeance went on every day. But who actually believed in it? Who believed you could make the world right? To believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, you’d have to believe that there was an order out there, which it was your business to restore.

  Get serious, Charlie thought. Vengeance was just a dignified name for a crime and a reckoning was just a piece of righteous foolishness. The world was wrong and it was not your business to fix it. Knock it on the head, Charlie, he said to himself. Knock it on the head. Go home. See your daughter. Move out on your wife, if you have to, make a change or two. Keep on going. Find Etta. Tell her you are sorry. Tell her you were an idiot, out of your mind, loco. Bare your soul, or whatever can be found of it before it is too late. The woman on fire was dead. She had been remembered, which set her apart from all the other corpses Charlie had seen in his life. He would not forget her. He had honoured her in his way. He had tried. Jacek had tried. It was enough. Enough.

  He said the word aloud into the darkened room. ‘Enough.’

  He heard the door open, a subtle sound, the catch caressed back, by a fingernail smooth against steel. Charlie was reaching for the light but he didn’t get there in time, for the figures – there were two of them – had crossed to the bed, and lifted him, by throat and beltbuckle, to an upright position against the wall in one single, breath-sucking move. He couldn’t see their faces, and they might have been hooded, because in the split second that it took, their faces gave off no light or reflection. They held him off the ground, thumb in Adam’s apple, against the wall and then one of them struck him a single blow right in the centre of the stomach. The thumb against his Adam’s apple let go and he felt himself fall, the door slam shut, and a pain exploded from the centre of his guts in the interminable moment that it took for him to pull breath back into his tortured chest.