by Lavie Tidhar
For some reason he thought about the cat. He had tried adopting one a few months before. It was a little stray kitten, dirty-black, with big round eyes and a skinny neck and a big belly, bulging from intestinal worms. It had come up to him outside the Morning Market, just like that, and put its paw on his foot, and looked up at him.
He took it home in a blue plastic bag and fed it tuna and held it on his lap. It was a little cat, two months old and comical with its loping, ungraceful gait and its enthusiasm. He called the cat Small One, because it was small, and one. There was a veterinarian clinic on Don Palang road, and the nurse came to the apartment and she said Small One needed an injection for worms and also for an ear infection, and she injected him twice. Joe had paid her and she left, and twenty minutes later Small One was dead.
Small One’s body could not take the injections. He ran across the room, faster than Joe had seen him move before, and then stopped as abruptly, and crawled under the chair, feet splayed, his body wracked with spasms. His eyes stared at Joe as he peed himself, lying there in his own pool of urine, unable to move. Joe had put him in his box and mopped up, not thinking, and then held Small One close to him, and felt him go, the body becoming limp in his arms and the eyes remaining open but no longer seeing Joe, and there was no heartbeat.
He hated the nurse for doing what she did but he hated himself more for not stopping her, not telling her Small One was too small, too fragile for the injections. He let her do it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and she did what she thought was right, too.
He had buried Small One at night. The moon was one day short of being full. He dug the earth and put Small One into the ground in his box, and covered him again.
‘TransContinental Airways flight to Paris now boarding at gate thirty-five,’ a woman’s voice said on the public announcement system. Joe stood up; he had been day-dreaming. It was the only kind of dreaming he did any more. He picked up his bag and looked up at the great departure board, where destinations and flight numbers on moving slats click-clacked into position incessantly, when he felt a hand on his arm and a voice said close by, ‘Please, don’t go.’
He turned, startled. A small, rotund Asian woman stood beside him. He had not heard her approach. She wore a baggy dress and soft-soled shoes, and her face looked up at him pleadingly with short-sighted eyes. Joe said, ‘I’m sorry—’ and the woman sighed and said, ‘I am sorry too. You are lucky. You can find your way. I am still looking.’ And her eyes left him and went to the departure board, and she sighed, and said, ‘It should be silent and shining with words of light. Not like this. It should be… it should be like the marker to paradise, I sometimes think. But I don’t know where my flight is. I don’t know which gate to go to. I’ve tried them all.’
Joe put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. He couldn’t say why he did that. He felt in himself something responding to her, sensing her pain, not a knowing but feeling, and it was strange to him. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Let me get you something to eat. Everything is better after you’ve eaten.’
‘On board meal,’ the woman said. ‘That’s all I can taste now. And apple juice. I never drink alcohol on flights. Only apple juice. In those transparent plastic cups with the wrinkles. Now I hate the taste, but it won’t go away.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said again. He didn’t know what to say. He felt powerless before her. The woman was still staring at the departure board. After a moment Joe removed his hand, gently. He thought she had forgotten he was there, but then he heard her speak. ‘Go,’ she said. She spoke very quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have come to you. But sometimes I get so lonely — where are we?’
‘Bangkok,’ Joe said.
‘Bangkok? I’ve never been to Bangkok before.’
He left her there. She never once took her eyes off the departure board.
— black hiking shoes —
The man was part Jamaican and part English, and close to two meters tall. He spoke with a South London accent, having been born in Bromley and educated at Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke. He had deep set eyes and thick black hair, and there were over one hundred grams of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate and Acetone peroxideplastic high-grade plastic explosives hidden in the hollowed soles of his black hiking shoes. His name was Richard Reid.
When Richard was born his father was in prison. By the time he left school at sixteen, he was already stealing cars like his old man. He did some time for mugging. “I was not there to give him the love and affection he should have got,” his father would later say. When Richard ran into the old man at a shopping mall some years after his first arrest, Robin Reid had a word of advice for his son. Muslims treat you like a human being, he said. And they get better food in prison.
Richard took the name Abdul Raheem after his conversion at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute. A few years after that he disappeared. His mother thought he was in Pakistan. Records obtained later suggest that he was trained in Afghanistan. He resurfaced in Amsterdam, where he worked in a restaurant. From Amsterdam he went to Brussels, and from Brussels to Paris.
December was cold and dark, and the days were short. It was on the seventeenth that Richard bought a round-trip ticket to Miami, flying with American Airlines. He spent his time in Paris around the Gare du Nord, not staying in a hotel; when he arrived at the airport on December twenty-first, he looked rough.
He had no luggage. French security personnel interviewed Reid, but they could not find a reason to hold him. Having missed his flight, he returned the next day and this time successfully boarded the Boeing 767 flight.
It was a Saturday morning. There were a hundred and eighty five passengers on board. There were, as mentioned, explosives, as well as a detonator, in the soles of Richard Reid’s shoes. Once the flight was airborne, and after the in-flight meal (which Richard did not share), the smell of smoke began to waft through the cabin. A stewardess, Hermis Moutardier, discovered him trying to light a match and warned him that smoking was not allowed on board. Reid promised to stop. He picked his teeth with the blackened match instead. He had a window seat, and no-one beside him. Moments later, Moutardier returned, finding Richard bent over in his chair. She thought he was smoking. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’ He did not reply. When she demanded an answer Reid turned in his seat, exposing the shoe now between his legs, a fuse, and a lit match. Moutardier grabbed him. He pushed her away. She tried to take hold of him again and he pushed her, hard, until she fell across an armrest in the next row of seats. Moutardier ran back down the plane, shouting, ‘Get him! Go!’
When Cristina Jones heard Moutardier, she ran towards the commotion. Reid’s back was turned away. Jones shouted, ‘Stop it!’ and tried to grab him. Reid turned and bit her left hand, his teeth fastening to the flesh below the thumb, not letting go. Jones screamed.
When he released her, Jones put up the tray table in the seat beside him. Passengers passed over bottles of Evian water to pour over Reid. They then used belts, headphone wires and plastic cuffs to tie him up. When, later, the FBI tried to take hold of him, they had to cut Richard out of layers of bonds.
‘I think I ought not apologize for my actions,’ Richard Reid said at his trial. ‘I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons… So you can judge and I leave you to judge. And I don’t mind. This is all I have to say.’
‘You are not an enemy combatant,’ Judge William Young said. ‘You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist … We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.
‘You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.
‘Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.’
‘On the Day of Judgment,’ Reid said as he was carried away, ‘you will see in front of your Lord and my Lord and then we will know.’
an emptiness of sound
——
> Joe put down the book and drank his whisky. A single ice-cube tinkled against the glass. The window shutters had gone down, and the plane was in darkness. Like the guy in the book, he had a window seat and no one beside him. Before and behind him, all throughout the plane, people were sleeping, like silkworm larvae in their soft cocoons. He could hear the sounds of their lives, the gentle snores and their bodies turning this way and that, and he wished he too could sleep. The books did not seem particularly conductive for airplane flights. They were full of exploding planes, exploding buildings, exploding trains, exploding people. They read like the lab reports of a morgue, full of facts and figures all concerned with death. He did not understand them. He thought about the words of the judge in the book. The judge said there was no war, or rather he said that the bomber, Reid, wasn’t a soldier: he was a criminal. But it seemed to Joe that, though he didn’t understand it, there was a war being fought in the book. He didn’t know why or what it was about, it was an ideological battle of which he had no conception, but not understanding it did not mean that it did not exist. Perhaps the judge, like himself, did not understand it, could not understand it, and therefore would not accept it for what it was. And yet, it only took one side to declare war.
He sighed and lit a cigarette, having booked a seat at the back of the plane, and when the ash grew long he tapped it into the arm-rest’s small, metallic ashtray. He wished he could look out of the window. It was dark on the plane, and quiet. He had headphones, but they carried only canned music through. Tomorrow he would be in Paris. He was travelling back through time on this flight, the hours falling backwards the further he went; it was like shedding old skin, emerging new again at the same point one started from. Today he would be in Paris. Yesterday, now.
On board the plane there was no time. Here, he existed in a bubble of stalled time, time halted, preserved, the hour of boarding contained within the self-enclosing metal all the while it was in the air. He shook his head. He was being fanciful. It was only the crossing of time zones that did this. Tomorrow he would readjust his watch, and it wouldn’t matter what the time was on the other side of the world. It seldom mattered what happened on the other side of the world.
He finished his cigarette, and his mouth tasted of ash. He finished the whisky, swirling it around his mouth with his tongue, running his tongue against his teeth, and swallowed, and his stomach felt hollow. He pressed the button that turned off the light and sat back, his head resting against the seat. The plane hummed all around him, and he let the sound close on him until he was completely alone, and the rest of on-board humanity had dwindled into a nothingness: an emptiness of sound.
PART TWO
DEAD LETTER BOX
everywhere’s a good place for a drink
——
Finding the fat man had not been easy.
He had landed at Orly; taken the train into Paris; checked himself into a small run-down hotel in the foothills of Montmarte. Orly was a concrete busyness. On the jetty as they disembarked a man slipped and fell, hitting his head on the ground. Outside the terminal building there was a statue of a French general: the small brass plaque read: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, Lille 1890-Algiers 1944. “Fighting France calls upon you.”
Sprayed against the concrete base was a faded inscription, partially covered in dried bird droppings. It read, France has no friends, only interests. CDG.
The trains were busy and the seats worn. There were sprayed messages against the sides of the carriages, and burn-holes in the upholstery. Joe’s hotel room was on the third floor, overlooking a narrow, climbing street. Just outside the hotel entrance there was a man with an upturned cardboard box offering passers-by a chance to find the lady, his hands moving incessantly as the three playing cards, face down, changed and shifted places. Joe stared out of the window and smoked. He felt restless, tired, but not able to sleep. The air was hot and muggy, a dirty Parisian summer beginning to angrily emerge from a winter’s sleep.
The first stage of the investigation had been easy enough. The address of Medusa Press was a post office box, followed by a numerical code. Consulting the local branch of La Poste, he found out that the code identified the location as set in the 8th arrondissement. ‘It is the old post office on Boulevard Haussmann,’ the clerk told him. The building number was 102. He was going to go there, but now it was most likely too late. He would set up surveillance tomorrow, early. He stood up. The room was almost bare, a narrow single bed, a grey blanket, off-white sheets, a dresser that was either antique or old rubbish, depending on one’s point of view, dirty maroon curtains, a picture on the wall of former French president Saint Exupéry against a blue background, a sink. There was a shower and bathroom at the end of the corridor. There was an ashtray on the dresser. There was a smell of disinfectant. Joe left the room and closed the door behind him.
He negotiated the stairs down to the ground floor, nodded to the Algerian man behind the counter, and strolled outside. Hats were back in fashion, he noticed. He passed the card tout and his small crowd of hopefuls, and in a street stall further down the road bought a black, wide-brimmed hat and put it on at an angle.
‘Ooh, very nice, monsieur,’ the large African woman standing behind her crude makeshift table of colourful cloth said. ‘Very good for the ladies.’ Joe smiled and paid her. He needed a drink. He needed to eat, too, but mostly he needed a drink. He walked down the Boulevard de Rochechouart, towards Place Pigalle.
‘Hey, you want company?’ a voice said. She was leaning against the wall, one leg lightly crossing the other, flashing him a smile. She had bleached blonde hair and long brown legs and her skirt was very short. She had a nice smile, but it didn’t seem real, somehow. She looked strangely insubstantial standing there, like a mirage on a city street, shimmering in the hazy air. There was a faint but lingering smell of booze.
Joe shook his head.
‘You don’t like girls?’
He shrugged and walked past. Behind him the girl called, ‘You like boys? I can find you a boy. Or we can party all together, what do you say? What colour you like?’
There was something her voice, a way in which it caught as she spoke the last words, a falling intonation that caught him off-guard; there was something lonely in there, and hurting, and raw, and he turned around. ‘I like the colour of whisky when the ice-cube is just beginning to melt in the glass,’ he said. ‘When you hold up the glass to the light and watch the drink through the underside, and it’s like the sky after it’s stopped raining.’
The girl laughed. ‘I like the colour of it neat, myself.’
‘Where’s a good place to get a drink around here?’
‘From where I’m standing,’ the girl said, ‘everywhere’s a good place for a drink.’
a warm, safe place
——
They sat in companionable peace on two stools beside the wide wooden bar. They were somewhere in Pigalle. The girl drank her scotch neat. Joe had his with a single ice-cube. He felt that separated him from the drunks. Putting that ice-cube there meant you were merely enjoying a drink. The girl had downed two shot glasses as soon as they came in. Strangely, she looked more substantial now, the hazy aura dissipating: she looked solid and very real and very close. She caught him looking and smirked. ‘I have to keep drinking so I don’t fade away,’ she said and raised her glass in a silent toast. They drank. Joe signalled for two more drinks.
‘I’ve not seen you around before,’ the girl said. ‘Are you new?’
It was a strange question, but he merely said, ‘I only just got here.’ The girl nodded and seemed satisfied. ‘Hard at first, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What a strange place.’
He looked at her again. Brown skin, long hair black at the roots. Large almond eyes looking at him soulfully. The girl hiccupped and burst into giggles. Joe smiled. He wondered where she was from. Her French was flawless. Algeria? Somewhere in North Africa, he decided.
The girl pulled a soft packe
t of Gauloises out of a hidden pocket and extracted a cigarette. ‘You want one?’
‘Sure.’
He lit both of their cigarettes with his Zippo. The girl arched her eyebrows and blew a smoke ring that hovered above the countertop. It was dark in the bar, and smoky. A fan turned lethargically over one end of the counter. There was no music.
‘It’s like a private space, isn’t it,’ the girl said. He wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or to herself. ‘Sitting in here, it’s like — I once had a mouse. When I was a little girl. I used to carry it in my pocket. Sometimes it would stick its nose out and sniff the air, but mostly it liked to stay inside, and I used to imagine what it was like in there, warm and dark and safe. Sometimes I feel like that here. When I can afford to.’
‘A pocket universe,’ Joe said, and the girl laughed. ‘A pocket universe,’ she said. ‘That’s funny.’
They sat, and smoked, and drank, and the world was reduced to a warm, safe place, and Joe held up his glass and watched the colour change as the ice melted and the girl laughed again. It could have been noon outside, or midnight, or all the hours in between, but inside, time was a contained thing, captive and still.
Joe didn’t know what made him mention the books. There was method behind it: a feeling first, that the girl would know, but also logic: that a publisher who specialised in a certain type of book may be known, here, in the area around Place Pigalle, which made something of a specialization itself with that kind of fantasy. So he said, ‘You ever read the Vigilante books?’
The girl’s eyes were very alive. She nodded, slowly, and sighed out a lungful of blue smoke. ‘Yes…’ she said.
He signalled for two more drinks. The girl smiled and stroked his arm. He was feeling light-headed, a cloud of smoke suspended in heavy air. He waited. The fan wheezed lethargically in the corner of the bar, and Joe watched the smoke wafting above the counter-top.
