Three Great Novels

by Henry Porter

  ‘Okay. Mujahadin. Come.’ Zek, who was a wiry man of about twenty-five, motioned for them to hurry. Khan got up and shook himself free of their grasp. He didn’t know what they wanted, but since they had tossed his gun away he had to go with them. They walked to a hollow, about fifty yards from where the others were sleeping, and he was prodded roughly down the slope. Khan thought he knew what they were going to do. What they planned to do afterwards was anyone’s guess - shoot him and say he had started the fight, or simply throw him down the ravine they had skirted a few minutes before entering the forest? He raised both hands and made as if to welcome the idea by reaching out to touch Zek’s shoulder.

  Zek told the two younger men to hold Khan over the tree, and started unbuckling himself to reveal a rank pair of undershorts. With an interested glance Khan again tried to show that he was more than happy about the situation and indeed enjoyed the prospect of indulging them. He even made to undo his own trousers. But they turned him and forced his head down violently on the tree trunk. The smell of resin and forest mould reached his nostrils. He glanced under the young man’s arm and saw the guard behind readying himself. Lust had drained all meaning from his expression and he hissed for his two accomplices to hurry. Khan placed his feet squarely apart, to appear cooperative, and wiggled with a little coo of excitement. The young man holding the gun to his head sniggered, relaxed his grip and swapped hands to free himself to help yank Khan’s trousers down. This was the opening Khan had waited for. He slipped from under his captor’s arm and jabbed his left elbow back twice into his face, grabbing the barrel of the pistol and sending him to the ground. The completion of the movement brought him face to face with Zek, whose expression flooded with consternation. He smiled awkwardly just before Khan butted him once in the forehead, then knocked him cold with a second blow from his forehead delivered as he grabbed the man’s shoulders and held him.

  He spun round, but there was no need to attack the third boy, who had jumped away, raising his hands with a sly smile as if to say the whole thing had been a bit of harmless horse-play. Khan arranged his clothing and walked to the top of the hollow where he found Vajgelis contemplating the scene. He held Khan’s AK47 under his arm, his hands tucked into the waistband of his chocolate brown corduroys.

  ‘These men shit,’ he said, his chin jutting with contempt. ‘These men, they fuck pigs. I sorry for these hospitality. These men…’ Words failed him, he shook his head and held out the machine gun for Khan, at the same time reaching for the pistol that Khan had taken from the young man. As Vajgelis took hold of it, he snatched the machine gun back from Khan’s grasp. ‘You walk with me now, Mujahadin.’

  A minute or two later the two injured men staggered up from the hollow with blood over their faces. Zek’s nose was split and ballooning. They went to Vajgelis and Khan understood they were pleading to be allowed to kill him, but the request met with a tirade of abuse from Vajgelis, who tweaked Zek’s ear and cuffed the younger man around the head.

  A few minutes later they set off, Vajgelis at the head of the column and Khan just behind him with two older men now appointed as his minders. For four or five hours they walked along the parched tracks. As the sun sank behind the mountains they came to a lumber road littered with bark. The mules were tethered to the trees where they hung their heads and steamed and stamped their hooves. The men stood around smoking and glancing down the mountain.

  Shortly, Khan saw truck lights slash through the trees and heard it grinding up towards them with many changes of gear. The men began to loosen the straps on the mules, but were told to stop by Vajgelis. He ordered them into the middle of the track with their guns showing. The truck appeared a few minutes later and pulled up. About a dozen men, all armed to the teeth, scrambled down from the back and flashed torches across the faces of the men in the road. Vajgelis moved forward. Recognising the driver of the truck, he signalled for the mules to be brought up and unloaded.

  Long before this moment Khan had suspected that Vajgelis’s band was involved in drug smuggling, not insurgency, and as the first tightly filled sacks were deposited at the tailgate of the truck, he wasn’t in the least surprised to see the driver slit one open with a knife and taste the contents. Each time a mule was unloaded he sampled at random.

  The time came for departure and the men from both sides lined up to face each other. Vajgelis pointed to a man in the line opposite and beckoned him across the track. Khan realised they were exchanging hostages. Now it was the driver’s turn. Vajgelis moved closer to Khan, laid an arm round his shoulder and moved him back out of range of the truck lights. The trick worked perfectly. The driver walked over to them, placed his hand on Khan’s other shoulder and steered him to the truck. Vajgelis laughed and murmured, ‘Mujahadin is shit also.’

  Khan was thrown in the back and nobody took much notice of him as the truck made its way down the mountain and then bumped across a flat plain to the coast. A couple of hours later, the truck suddenly turned off the road, careered down a rutted track and juddered to a halt. The men tumbled out, unloaded the sacks and bore them off to a jetty where a powerboat was tethered. Khan could make out its shape in the dark and he heard the engine’s exhaust spluttering in the gentle swell.

  They set off back up the mountains and after a couple more hours came to a small, almost derelict village. They pulled up in some kind of farmyard or compound. Cats darted from the lights of the truck and some dogs barked. Here the remnants of an old agricultural living were jumbled with the trophies of drug trafficking. There were animal stalls, a collapsed cart and a hay-rick, but also a large satellite dish and a pair of identical black SUVs chained by the fenders to a metal post. Khan was stiff from the ride and moved gingerly into the light. When the men saw his face for the first time there was a sudden uproar, and he was pulled from one man to another, spat upon, kicked and rifle-butted. There was no doubt in Khan’s mind that these were his last moments on earth. But their anger subsided and the driver who had picked him from Vajgelis’ group walked up and looked him over, muttering imprecations under his breath and asking questions. All Khan could do was smile idiotically and shake his head saying, ‘English? I speak English only.’

  ‘No ingleesh,’ said the driver. ‘No ingleesh.’

  He was taken to one of the stalls and tied to a beam, while they made a cursory search of his possessions. At length someone was fetched from a neighbouring village to interpret. He was a mild, emaciated man in middle age, wearing mittens and a scarf wrapped around his head though the night was warm. He introduced himself to Khan as Mr Skender. He had once been a waiter in London, he said, but returned to his village after developing tuberculosis. To Khan he looked very sick indeed.

  ‘I have to hear some things from you,’ said Skender, rubbing the circulation into his hands and wiping a runny nose. He gestured to the driver. ‘Mr Berisha wants to know why you are working with Vajgelis. Tell Mr Berisha who you are.’

  Khan gave his name and said that he had come overland from Pakistan, looking for work in the West. All the time looking directly at Berisha, he said he was from a high-born family but that he was without money. He had rich friends in the United States - one who was like a brother to him. This man would reward handsomely anyone who helped him now, in a way that was beyond Mr Berisha’s dreams. He added that they should take no notice of his present appearance.

  Skender gave a brief translation to the driver, who called for a table and chairs. More lights were brought. Berisha sat down and poured some konjak for Skender and himself.

  ‘Mr Berisha thinks you are terrorist,’ said Skender.

  ‘Then tell Mr Berisha that I’m not a terrorist,’ said Khan. ‘All I want is to find work and continue my medical studies.’

  ‘You are a doctor?’ asked Skender doubtfully.

  ‘I studied medicine in London and I plan to return there to continue.’

  At the end of the translation Berisha stroked his chin and growled a few sentences.

  ‘
Mr Berisha wants to know why a doctor, an educated man, is in the mountains with Vajgelis? He is a very dangerous man, this Vajgelis. You are fortunate to be alive. He trusts only his own people.’

  Khan told him about the killings on the road, his flight from the Macedonian security forces and how he’d met Vajgelis’ group on the border. Berisha sat with his lower lip hanging and his foxy little eyes darting around Khan, as if this would somehow prise out his secret. Skender explained that Berisha was a very clever man: Khan’s presence there was like a philosophical problem to him. He might be a Muslim terrorist, or he could be a Macedonian agent who’d been sent to infiltrate the network and report back to the authorities. Maybe he was a plant from the Vajgelis clan to see if his part of the network could be taken over. The very thought of this prompted Berisha to get up and prowl around the stable stabbing at his imagined foes in the dark.

  ‘Mr Berisha wishes you to know that he is strong and will not tolerate a challenge to his authority in this part of the mountains from Vajgelis. He will cut Mr Vajgelis’ testicles and feed them to his dogs. He wishes you to tell this to Vajgelis if you are allowed to live long enough to see him again.’

  To emphasise this point, Berisha opened a door and allowed two fighting dogs to bound into the stable and sniff around Khan’s feet.

  Skender went rigid. ‘Mr Berisha will discover the truth of your mission if he has to rip your testicles off with his own teeth.’

  ‘I can see that Mr Berisha is a man of standing,’ said Khan, making sure that he did not give the dogs the slightest provocation. ‘But tell him I could not be a plant because he chose me. Mr Berisha walked to the line and chose me himself. Vajgelis could not have engineered that.’

  ‘Mr Berisha believes he was tricked by Vajgelis to think you are important to him,’ said Skender with a note of sympathy entering his voice. ‘He says you are worthless. Now he is having to pay money for his cousin who is with Vajgelis and that makes Mr Berisha very angry. He says he may kill you now because you are a worthless piece of shit. Forgive me, Mr Khan, this is Mr Berisha’s words, not mine.’

  ‘But it is obvious that I am worth more alive than dead.’

  Skender tried to translate this but was suddenly silenced by a dusty cough that rose from the depths of his lungs and convulsed his whole body. At one point Khan thought he’d pass out from lack of oxygen but Skender eventually managed to recover and drank a little of the konjak. Then he wiped his eyes and nose with his shirt-sleeve, throwing Khan a glance of terrible resignation.

  ‘You should see a doctor.’

  Skender shook his head and inhaled gently so as not to aggravate his lungs again.

  ‘Tell Mr Berisha that I will only talk to him if he pays for your medical help.’

  ‘I cannot tell him this,’ Skender looked shocked. ‘You do not bargain with Mr Berisha. Mr Berisha is the boss here.’

  The driver made them go back over the ground they’d covered while he finished the bottle. Then his head began to droop. He got up, ejected the dogs and announced that he would decide what to do in the morning. In the meantime both Khan and Skender would sleep in the stable under guard. Skender seemed to have expected this and, without complaint, lay down on a rough blanket and wrapped the free side around him. Khan was cut down and his possessions thrown at his feet. He pulled them into some order but instead of laying out his bed-roll, he propped himself up and tried to block out the smell of drains that seeped from under the wall. Any fears he had about falling into too deep a sleep soon vanished with the sounds that came from the house, the unmistakable noise of a woman being beaten and taken by force.

  Khan looked over to Skender who raised his hands above him hopelessly. ‘In what neighbourhood in London you were living?’ he asked by way of distracting them from the murderous noises next door.

  Khan replied that he had shared an apartment in Camden Town with some students.

  ‘I am living in Hoxton,’ Skender said. ‘ There was I happy.’ His cough began again, with a more rasping note.

  Khan listened for a while then reached down to the bottom of his trousers and silently made a little opening in the seam. From the cavity in the material he withdrew a roll of money slightly thicker than a cigarette. He got up, crab-walked over to Skender and placed the four twenty dollar bills - half of what he had left - in the palm of his hand. ‘This will buy you a visit to a doctor and some medication. It seems that I may not need it now.’

  Skender shook his head but his hand closed around the money. ‘Thank you, Mister Khan.’

  ‘I want you to do something for me in exchange. Do you have a pen?’

  He produced a stub of pencil from his pocket and handed it to Khan, who quickly wrote a message on one of the three remaining postcards.

  ‘I want you to send this to America by airmail. If I am killed, please write separately to the address and tell them how and where I died. You understand? Tell him what is happening to me.’

  Skender took the postcard and slipped it into his clothing. Khan scuttled back to his bundle to await his chance to escape, reflecting that he had never been in as wretched and menacing a place. Berisha was, he thought, probably mad. He felt that anything could happen to a human being who came into Berisha’s orbit. For a time he listened to a young woman’s voice alternately wailing and remonstrating until the volume of the TV was turned up and a soccer game drowned her words.

  Next thing he knew it was daylight. He woke to see Berisha sitting not far from him, holding a cup. He was dressed in sports kit - trainers with a gold Nike flash and an outlandish American football jacket with a dragon emblazoned up one side. Beside him stood Skender and two men in uniform.

  ‘Mr Berisha has made decision,’ said Skender apologetically. ‘You must go with these men from police.’

  Isis Herrick was met at Newcastle station by her father, who had bought himself a new car, a replacement for the dark blue Humber Super Snipe that had met with an unspecified end a month before. The Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire was older and less sedate. Herrick eyed it with little enthusiasm, but the journey to Hopelaw village fifteen miles over the Scottish border passed without incident and the car did seem to make her father happy. As they climbed through the moorland, upholstered in the soft green of new bracken, her spirits lifted and she told him that she was coming round to the Siddeley.

  They didn’t talk properly until after lunch, when they took a walk up to Hopelaw Camp, an iron-age fort above the house. They reached a flat rock pitted with ancient cup and ring carvings and sat down. The discussion was new for them: they had never spoken about her job, let alone discussed individual operations, and she thought they would find it awkward. But he listened to her acutely, gazing south, his eyes watering slightly in the breeze, occasionally pressing her for detail.

  ‘When your mother died,’ he said, ‘I thought the best thing I could do was to keep you out of this business. But it wasn’t my choice, was it? You did what you wanted and you never asked my advice.’ He searched her face. ‘But at least you’re doing so now.’

  He picked up a field snail’s striped shell and examined it carefully. She knew it might appear in one of the paintings her father had been producing on and off since he was required to find himself a convincing cover during World War II in the Pyrenees. Herricks were now more sought after than ever; they fetched thousands of dollars in America and on the continent, although his work was generally disdained by art critics for the simple reason that they missed the point of minutely recorded still lifes. One said that they were just ‘quotations’ from nature.

  He peered at the shell again. ‘It’s the surface of things that’s usually important. Most people don’t understand that everything is staring them in the face. They just have to look a little harder than they are accustomed to. Here, have a squint at this.’ He handed her the shell and a magnifying glass. ‘You’ll see that there’s a yellowish varnish that’s been worn away in some parts by the sun, and beneath that there are little rippl
es made as the snail secretes the substances that make the shell. From the top you can see the black stripe achieves a more or less perfect spiral, yet there are flaws in the design that remind you of the miracle of its creation. Here you have all you need to know about the snail, but it’s remarkable how few people are willing to spend time looking closely at anything.’

  She had heard the lecture before. She handed the shell back to him. ‘It’s lovely. But what do you think about this operation?’

  The old man looked across the hills, and she wondered whether she should be bothering him with it. ‘Intelligence work contradicts my view about the surface of things,’ he said, ‘I think your operation is probably destined to failure because of that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because you can’t get an idea what these people are planning from simply watching them. Before the attacks on America in 2001, I understand various security agencies had those characters in their sights. The cell in Germany was under surveillance and I believe someone in the FBI had noticed that they were taking flying lessons. They were looking but they didn’t see.’