by John Sweeney
MANAUS, BRAZIL
The lobby of the Hotel Piranha had become an abattoir. The night porter, shredded with bullets, so much human Gruyère cheese; a hotel maid who had strayed into the firing line because she was looking for more toilet rolls got wasted with a single bullet; three kids from Alabama, touring the world, their brains splattered against a wall; a local cop, bent but not a killer, shot too; dead also was a taxi driver, enquiring about a fare; but the real kisser was the guy in the fancy purple robes.
‘Mãe de Deus,’ cursed Rubem Ribeiro, and – godless sinner though he might be – crossed himself. They’d shot dead the Cardinal Archbishop of the Higher Amazon on his way to bed his seventeen-year-old mistress on the sixth floor.
All of this killing might just have been manageable, in a kind of way, because the world had become bored with stories of mega-death from Latin America, had it not been that a number of stray bullets had clipped the hotel’s signature fish tank above reception, holding fifty piranha. Thrashing violently on the stone floor, they had spent their last moments of life eating the dead and dying: the staff, the guests, the cop, the taxi driver, and His Excellency too.
A large and fleshy piranha had its teeth clamped to the cardinal’s nose. Out of respect for the Church, Ribeiro shoved the fish with the toe of his shoe. The piranha was clamped on like a barnacle. All that happened was the fish, the nose and the dead meat rolled en masse an inch or two away from his shoe and then rolled back. From out of the cardinal’s oesophagus came a noxious burp and the stink of dead fish and dead meat. It was enough to cause Ribeiro to jump out of his skin.
The irrationality behind killing the cardinal troubled him the most. Of course, everyone who was anyone in Manaus knew that the cardinal was a swordsman, that he screwed any woman he could – the younger the better. But in this raw, Amazonian frontier town, the regional base for the mining and logging companies to rape the last true wilderness on earth, it was not a good idea to anger the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Eight people murdered in Amazonas – not a story. A randy cardinal shot, then bitten to death by piranha, was. Ribeiro was used to buying silence for the CIA. But there were not enough hundred-dollar bills in circulation for him to kill this story.
Ribeiro racked his mind, going through all the local psychos, drug cartels, bandits and rip-off merchants in town. None of them would have slotted the cardinal – or, if they had, not like this. This wasn’t local. It had to be outsiders.
Ribeiro had been CIA station chief in Manaus for longer than he could remember, sniffing out the Escobars and Co., profiling the major Colombian drug lords, the Mexican psychos, the drippy European and American money-launderers and the Swiss, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein bankers who popped up on his very local radar in the city. This was the first time he’d come across a mass killing without the smell of narco-dollars attached; and the first when, thanks to the piranhas, there weren’t many leftovers.
Tipped off by Langley, Ribeiro had arrived ahead of the finest detectives in the whole of Manaus. They were all on his payroll and he would, in the ordinary way, have feared nothing from them, but killing a cardinal was out of the ordinary; the piranha angle boosted it out of his control. So he examined and photographed evidence, but removed and destroyed nothing. Other than the dead and the piranha, the only items of interest, the only thing remotely unusual about the hotel and its guests, were two passports – one Irish, one Russian – in a drawer in reception.
Ribeiro pinged a short message: Eight dead, Hotel Piranha, including Cardinal of Amazonas. These passports may be of interest. He attached photographs of both passports in his message to Langley. Then he walked out of the building as he heard the police sirens draw nearer, crossing the busy road to stand on the embankment overlooking the Rio Negro.
A black vulture flopped lazily down through the morbid, sticky heat to land on the great river’s muddy beach closest to the city. In a rainbow-coloured puddle, slicked with oil, a dying piranha flapped its gills. The vulture pecked out its eyes first, and was filleting its throat when Ribeiro’s mobile phone rang. It was Langley.
‘Ribeiro?’ An American voice.
‘Sim.’ He deliberately didn’t translate the Portuguese into English.
Langley had a habit of demanding instant answers, as if Manaus was like the South Bronx – rough, but not that far from Manhattan. Ribeiro’s city was a deep-sea port, true, but one thousand miles from the ocean. The more Portuguese he spoke, the better Langley might understand that it was in another country.
‘Sim,’ he repeated, then reluctantly, in English: ‘Yeah, this is Ribeiro.’
‘This is Jed Crone, Deputy Director.’
In thirty-something years of working for the CIA, Ribeiro had never been honoured by a direct call from such a senior executive.
‘How can I help, Mr Crone?’
‘I want you to close this down. The eight dead, they’re not dead. The killings did not happen. I want that, and I want you to hunt down all possible leads to the Russian national Koremedova and the Irishman, Tiplady. Confirm that is your mission. Confirm now.’
On the other side of the street, three separate TV trucks had arrived, their satellite dishes already poking skywards. Ribeiro used his phone to take a photograph, pinged it to Langley, and then put his phone back to his ear. Crone was barking into it, barking that he should confirm receipt of his instruction.
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘The killers slotted seven people plus a cardinal, then everybody got chewed up by a fish tank full of piranha. No way I can close this down. I’ll keep a lookout for the Russian lady and the Irishman. All I saw were the passports, not the people. And, Mr Crone, I don’t know what the CIA’s priorities are these days, but whoever killed eight innocent people, that’s not good. Was this an Agency operation?’
Ribeiro could feel the frost down the phone.
‘No,’ said Crone. ‘But the tone and content of that observation has been noted – and, Mr Ribeiro, you should note that your contract extension is currently under active review.’
‘What’s that mean in English?’ asked Ribeiro.
‘In English, that means you’re fired.’ And the call was cut.
The worst professional day of Ribeiro’s life as a spy ended in a bar by the docks. He’d had one last piece of information to sell, something that he hadn’t got round to mentioning to Crone. The buyer was an absurdly young Englishman called Baker, a butterfly expert from the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Or so he said.
‘What might you have for us?’ asked Baker.
‘Why is MI6 pretending to be interested in butterflies?’
Baker repeated his question.
‘A cleaning lady at the Hotel Piranha, the supervisor . . .’
‘And?’
‘In the reception bin, one of her cleaners found an airmail envelope with a big stamp with the Queen’s head on it. It had been sent, according to the postmark, from Windsor.’
‘So the passports end up in Manaus, but not the people,’ said Baker.
‘Uh-huh. Who do you think did the Hotel Piranha?’ asked Ribeiro. ‘It wasn’t the Agency, was it?’
Baker shook his head. ‘No. Not the Agency. But something odd is going on inside Langley. We’re not a hundred per cent certain, but we suspect the people who did this have snow on their boots.’
‘What?’ said Ribeiro, not up to speed with 1940s English slang.
‘The Russians. They’ve lost something – lost something very precious to them – and they want it back. And they will kill anybody and anything that might be stopping them from getting their lost property back.’
‘What is it?’
‘That’s the problem. We don’t know.’
EASTERN UKRAINE
Twin lines of steel railway track, still cross-hatched by its wooden sleepers, floated above the early morning mist. A railway bridge over a motorway had been blown up, the concrete br
idge a mess of rubble below, but somehow the railway track, as skewed and twisted and wrong looking as a Möbius strip, hung in the sky. Nearby, a line of electricity pylons had been brought down and the great steel structures lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground, locked in a cat’s cradle of wires as if an invisible giant had been caught in their web of steel.
The convoy trundled past a petrol station; its roof had taken a direct hit from artillery, the shell smashing through the white plastic and steel structure as if it were something he’d made out of cardboard and glue when a boy at primary school.
The closer they got to the war zone, the more uncivilised everything became: the roads dirtier and grittier; the houses in the roadside villages empty, some half destroyed by stray shells. No children; cars drove maddeningly and madly fast; every now and then the air bristled with a far-off crump, crump of artillery.
On the edge of the small town, east of Donetsk, a play fort blocking half the road had been created by stacking ammunition boxes, breeze blocks and spare tractor tyres on top of each other. Daubed with a big fat skull and crossbones, and topped off with two flags – one the black, blue and red of the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DPR, and the other that of the American Confederacy – the fort was patrolled by seven men holding Kalashnikovs upright by their stocks and waggling them in the air unconvincingly, as if they had been invited to bring penis extensions to a swingers’ party but weren’t quite sure they’d come to the right address. The rebels were dressed in a drunk’s idea of what a Hollywood wardrobe mistress might come up with if asked to dress a rebel army in Eastern Ukraine: black bandanas; a mishmash of military fatigues; hunting caps.
The aid convoy of white trucks was guarded front and back by a brace of DPR police cars and was waved through the checkpoint without ceremony, at speed. That left the rebel guards with nothing much to do apart from fret about their loss of power and reflect upon their essential insignificance.
As Gennady’s load of grenades and Grad launcher missiles slowed through the chicane, a muscle-bound rebel with a forehead as narrow as a pencil case brought down his Kalashnikov, held its sight to his eye and fired. A stray dog yelped and flopped over onto its side, dead. Through his rear-view mirror, Gennady saw a pool of blood grow by the dog’s head. His right foot hovered over the brake pedal. In the old days, when he’d had command, he would have thrown such a man in the slammer for a month for such cruelty. But then he remembered the role he was playing – a driver-cum-mercenary – and his truck rolled on.
The bulk of the convoy headed farther west towards Donetsk, but Gennady’s rear section peeled off into a small town that had seen a lot of fighting. Their police escorts led the trucks through a series of side streets, past a great crater where a house had once stood – now filled with a sump of dirty brown water – to what had been, before the war, a soft-drinks warehouse.
Once inside the warehouse, out of sight of the Ukrainian Air Force, the ammunition boxes and Grad missiles were shifted by forklift trucks onto smaller lorries. Gennady’s truck was resprayed military green and got new, rebel number plates. It was staying. The ‘aid’ convoy commander paid him five hundred dollars in roubles, thanked him for his good work and suggested that he should return to Rostov and do the same thing again.
‘But the front, it’s too dangerous for an old man like you,’ he added.
Gennady smiled. This commander had been having his nappy changed when Gennady was catching haji bullets in his teeth and spitting them back in Jalalabad. But he said nothing, pocketed the roubles, nodded politely and went for a walk around town.
A stick of bombs had fallen on a long block of flats, carving two great holes, from roof to basement, in what had once been people’s homes. The rigid verticality of the holes told Gennady that this wasn’t artillery or tank fire – they would have come in at an angle – but from the sky. The rebels didn’t have an air force, so the civilians here had been killed by the Ukrainian-government side.
At the bottom of the biggest heap of rubble, an impromptu shrine had been created: candles and photos of the dead – old, young, one child; notes in ink, already blurred by the sleet and rain; some flowers, now soggy and bedraggled. The shock waves from the bombs had caused the weak, concrete front panels of flats, otherwise unaffected, to pop out and fall, exposing the innards of people’s lives to one and all, as if a giant hand had taken off the front of a doll’s house.
There was something both fascinating and obscene about being able to look at the entire sanitary system of a block of flats, exposed like an engine block in a museum, cut in half – there’s a cistern, there’s a waste pipe, there’s a bathtub hanging perilously over a cliff of broken concrete.
The wind blew in hard from Siberia, and Gennady screwed up his eyes to protect them from the dust. The last of the gust blew a large sheet of paper out from the flats; it corkscrewed down, edging this way and that, landing on some rubble near Gennady’s feet. A child’s drawing of the otherness of war: tanks crayoned in black firing red blotches; men in green dying, spewing blood; planes overhead dropping bombs. He glanced up at where the drawing had come from and walked back into the road to get a better view: a toilet, a half-filled bookcase, a children’s bedroom with a block of concrete the size of a beach ball in a cot, a kitchen table with a vase of red roses, a Batman poster, all on show; next to them, thin air.
‘The hohols, look what they did to us!’ yelled one man, the worse for wear from alcohol. He moved off, muttering to himself.
Another man, with a worrier’s face, somehow picked up on Gennady’s intelligent interest in what had happened.
‘Not just the hohols,’ the worrier whispered, and nodded towards a square, officious-looking building down the street and on the other side of the road – perhaps the town’s Communist Party headquarters in the old days. Gennady examined it briefly and saw his convoy commander leave it, going in the opposite direction, away from Gennady, along with three other men in green military uniforms but no evident insignia. Half a dozen rebel soldiers filed into the entrance that his commander had just left, then another dozen followed them.
‘The hohols were aiming at that,’ hissed the worrier through his teeth. ‘It’s the rebel military HQ – the big one, the biggest one in this part of the zone. But they missed. I was with these jokers to begin with. I don’t want to be ruled by a bunch of fascists from Kiev. But they’re thieves, scum, the worst of us. I used to drive a petrol tanker. Big money, sure, but a necessity for the whole community. They stole my tanker. I complained to the top commander in there. They locked me up, threatened to kill me, rape my wife. I went all the way to Donetsk, to City Hall. A whole day I spent in the anteroom, waiting to get to see the prime minister. Thing is, everybody else in the room, they had a Moscow accent. I waited all day and then eventually I got to see some guy in a suit, not the prime minister, and he told me to piss off.’
Gennady grunted an acknowledgement and moved away. He was here to find news of his daughter, not to fight a war – not even to listen to why fighting that war might be more complicated than what Russian TV told you.
Just before he turned the corner onto the main square, he looked back once more at the bombed flats and saw, by chance, a Ukrainian fighter-bomber zoom past at roof height. Only after it had gone did he feel the pressure wave, a great juddering in his ears, and only after that the scream of the jet’s engines. A dozen of the pirate-rebels loosed off their AK47s at its vapour trail, a precious waste of the ammunition that he had just brought across the border.
The bar in the centre of town boasted furniture with fake zebra-skin upholstery, a barmaid wearing a frock covered in leopard spots, and a clientele dressed in gunman chic, complete with headscarves, grenades, and chains of heavy-machine-gun bullets draped across their chests. The moment Gennady, evidently a stranger, walked in, the hubbub died and every single person stared at him.
In the far corner of the bar was a small shrine to a young woman, something of a beauty by the look of her,
a black stripe across her framed photograph, a single candle at its foot and a vase of red roses by its side. Gennady walked straight up to Leopard Spots and said in his deepest, most gravelly voice, ‘I am sorry for your loss. May I buy everybody a glass of vodka please?’
The wake continued as before. Amongst the mourners was a young woman with a camera with a fancy zoom lens around her neck. Some kind of journalist, Gennady reckoned – a foreigner by the look of her clothes. Gennady didn’t want to appear in photographs but she wasn’t taking any, just chatting to people.
He was in conversation with a soft-voiced, elderly man, plainly decent, plainly very angry with the Ukrainians for bombing civilians. He spoke about the dead woman whose funeral had taken place that morning. A mother, her poor five-year-old kid badly injured in hospital.
Gennady saw something pass the café on the road outside. He cadged a cigarette – Gennady hated smoking – and went outside into the crisp clear air for a better look. A low-loader pulled by, a white cab with a blue stripe, and halted in the main square, two hundred yards from the café. The low-loader’s red ramps were lowered and the engine of a squat, box-shaped vehicle on it was fired up, causing the square to be filled with a great puff of black diesel smoke. The squat box ran on its own tank tracks. They bit into and scarred the square’s cobblestones. On its roof was green camouflage netting covering four missiles.
Gennady was joined by the foreign woman with the camera, and the two watched with something approaching awe as the vehicle rattled past them, the pavement shuddering under its great weight. Immediately behind it were two army jeeps. The first stopped by them, and a young man in military fatigues, who carried himself like an officer but wore no insignia of rank, got out. Gennady took a long drag on his cigarette and inched back, keeping his distance from the woman with the camera.
The officer asked the woman: ‘Journalist?’
