Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  The spire was still again and he climbed the last five rungs. Jutting out above him was a ledge, eighteen inches square, a thick iron sheet that had once been the platform for the ring of candles and the lighthouse glass dome. It was also red with rust but it was firm, it would take his weight, and he stepped on to it. He leant against the slope of the spire and looked around. The entire Square was open to him and he could see clearly the flower pattern of cobbles fanning out from the circle of the hibiscus hedge and, in the centre, the stage. And everywhere red flags and scarlet bunting, covering the stage, hanging from the trees and lamp-posts, draped across shop-fronts, pinned to doors and window frames, everywhere red. The colour of revolution, the colour of the patch of cloth he always wore on his head.

  Still pressing against the green glazed tiles he carefully unstrapped his Kalashnikov rifle and lowered it on to the ledge by his feet. He did the same with the grenade belt.

  He could see one of his patrols on a roof a hundred yards away coming through the skylight, moving fast as they had been ordered to. Quickly they searched and then went back through the skylight to move into the next house.

  Then he saw the movement, a shadow on the roof just beyond where his patrol had been. His tongue went to his lips to lick away the sweat again and he leant hard against the tiles, perfectly still. The movement again . . . and there he was . . . there he was . . . crouching just left of a chimney stack, blond and young . . . the South African, it had to be. He watched as the man stood up very slowly and pulled a rifle to his shoulder. It was the South African . . . he had a heavy gun . . . not a Kalashnikov . . . the Englishman was carrying the dead soldier’s rifle . . . but this one had a sight . . . and a silencer, a professional sniper’s rifle.

  The black guy watched the South African keep the rifle to his shoulder. Ten seconds he waited, but he didn’t fire. The black guy then followed the line of the barrel across the rooftops to the other side of the Square and then he understood . . . Dear Mother . . . Dear Mother . . . he whispered to himself and leant forward to the green tile level with his face and kissed it. The South African hadn’t fired. He was still looking through his telescopic sight, but he wasn’t scanning. The rifle in his hands was still, because he was sighting on a known target. He wasn’t looking for the Englishman. He had already found him.

  The black guy looked across the Square again to the four open attic windows. The South African’s sight had been on one of them but from this angle it was impossible to know which of the four. He knelt and picked up the grenade belt. It would be so simple now. He needed only to let the South African close on his target, let him kill the Englishman, and then he would destroy the South African with a single grenade.

  The black guy quickly pulled six green tiles away from the roof and placed them carefully on the ledge, exposing the thick wooden rafters of the spire. He unclipped the webbing strap from his rifle, wound it twice round the rafter and clipped it together again behind him. Then he leant back, straining his weight against it, and was satisfied he would cope with the recoil from the grenade launcher. He tied the belt of grenades over the next rafter within easy reach. Now he would wait. He would give the South African five more minutes to get within range of the attic room with the open window. He looked at his watch. At twelve twenty-five, if the South African hadn’t fired, he would use the grenades on them both. He would take the South African first and then fire one into each of the four windows for the Englishman.

  He pulled the small khaki cylinder from his tunic and carefully screwed it into the muzzle of his rifle and snapped it tight. Then he pulled a grenade from the belt - eight inches long with a snub nose and white plastic fins - and pushed it down on to the launcher. Finally he cocked the rifle and eased into the chamber one of the special blank cartridges that could send each grenade two hundred and fifty yards across the Square or hit the South African in a second. He tucked the hard sponge recoil pad against his shoulder and rested the barrel for support on the curve of the tiles.

  The grenade was lethal and he would aim at the South African’s feet, that way the shrapnel would split him in two and then split him a hundred times again. The grenades, fragmentation types made in Yugoslavia, were superbly designed for anti-personnel use. He remembered in Angola, some years back, seeing a pregnant woman, forty yards from impact, but still the fragments had pierced through her heavy clothes into her stomach, through her womb and the water, right into her baby’s heart and lungs. Forty yards away. Nobody had thought it possible. He had thought it remarkable. It was like the new rockets they were using now, the 122s. Before, people could hear them coming so they’d lie down and the blast of the shrapnel would go over their heads. So the ballistics men had gone one better. Now, when the new ones land, the rocket casing peels open from the bottom like a banana so that the shrapnel is kept low and those fools lying on the ground take the full blast.

  He narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun. The South African was moving again, running almost, lost at times in the deep gulleys between the roofs, but he was going now in the direction of the opposite terrace, to the Englishman in one of the attics and still within a constant firing arc of the grenade launcher that was resting on the green tiles of the spire.

  22

  As he sat there waiting Pilger was overwhelmed with memories, all so sudden, and in so much detail. Smells, colours, perspectives, emotions, and for no reason at all they had all come tumbling back to him. How long ago now? Over forty years, but so vivid he could almost touch them here in the room.

  He saw himself as the little boy of six, with black curly hair, waiting for the photographer’s flash, standing by his father, holding his hand in front of the studio backdrop of a crudely painted English country scene.

  He remembered his surprise that morning so long ago when his father had announced, while they’d been eating their porridge, that they, just the two of them, were going to have their photograph taken. It would cost one shilling and nine-pence he said, but it had to be done. His mother had refused. How quiet she had been that morning, her eyes red. He remembered how his father had kept her hand to his cheek and gently stroked her long brown hair and said things softly into her ear that the little boy couldn’t hear and wouldn’t have understood.

  So they had gone together, he and his father, out of the house hand in hand and curtains moved ever so slightly at windows as his father made jokes of the old ladies who peered from behind them. How proud it all was, marching with him in his uniform, his soldier-father, to the photographer over the greengrocer’s shop in the Broadway.

  And they had come back for lunch and his mother’s eyes were still red and her cheeks were still wet and his father had stood the photograph next to the one of their wedding, coloured sepia in the tortoiseshell frame, on the upright piano in the small front parlour that smelt of lavender.

  They had eaten boiled ham and caper sauce, he could taste it now, and suddenly his father had lifted him out of his chair, so urgent it seemed now, looking back, with his mother standing by the window, her back to them. His father had held him so tight he could feel it for days after, and he wondered if he had really seen the tears in his father’s eyes as he had put him down. Then his father had walked with his small canvas bag out of the front door and not another word, out down the front path, past his prized rose-bushes and dahlias, and the little boy had held his mother’s hand as she sobbed and watched her man turn the corner without looking back, never to return to his house and family.

  They had gone to his grave, he and his mother, on his ninth birthday, three years later. She had saved every penny all that time to follow his route and to see how he had been looked after. It was a simple place with a simple headstone on a mound of grey marble chips, in a pretty village close to Cordoba where he had been killed. The village had been rebuilt from the ruins left by the German Dornier bombers and in so many minds since, it was seen as a memorial to all those of the Int
ernational Brigade who had died fighting Franco and his Fascist allies in the Spanish Civil War.

  They had eaten their sandwiches on the slopes overlooking the cemetery and she had spent the afternoon planting in the grass the dozens of daffodil bulbs she had brought from his garden. And that evening, as she had finished smoothing the marble chips again he saw her smile for the first time since that day of the boiled ham and photograph. She had touched her man. They had made contact again in that Spanish cemetery as the bells across the valley began to toll Sunday evening mass.

  They only stayed that one day, it was all she had wanted to do. And when they got back to Victoria station two days later, they saw on the London newspaper billboards that Hitler had just marched into Poland.

  A jeep passed noisily below in low gear and he stood up sideways to the window. Six Cubans were holding on to the sides of the jeep and jumped off as it reversed on to the pavement below the house. They all had rifles but many had belts of hand grenades, like bandoleers, strapped across their chests. He could see others, just as heavily armed, all around the Square. He looked at his watch. It was getting close, they must be taking up guard positions.

  He turned his back to the wall and sank slowly down to the floor again. He reached over and touched the Cuban’s rifle, though he couldn’t say why. Maybe the shock of what he was about to do was only just beginning to seep into him, the way bad news does. Remembering had made him sad. Odd he should be so suddenly full of these things, suddenly rushing back to him. Why now, with so little life left? It was almost as if he was presenting his credentials, on view to whoever was in charge, wherever he was going afterwards.

  He felt anxious now, and it was a new sensation. He pulled the rifle to him and laid it across his thighs. He unclipped the magazine and pressed out the sprung-loaded bullets for the fifth time in an hour, again he opened the breach and ran his finger along the gas chamber, felt its smoothness and the smell of oil. He pushed the bullets and the magazine back and saw the first bullet copper-coated in its brass casing waiting to pop into its groove at the head of the barrel.

  He had never expected to hold a gun again, had frequently prayed never to have need too. It should always here-after have been peace and love and fishing and sailing, chasing butterflies and drinking wine on warm nights with the red glow of the cafe lights panning across the decks.

  He had sat like this once before . . . alone and waiting to kill . . . in Rhodesia, when he had been hunting cattle rustlers and terrorists on Boss Lilford’s Estates - for his £2,000 bonus. A few minutes into curfew time, getting dark, the sounds of day giving way to the sounds of night, single sounds, alone sounds and so necessary with so much hostility surrounding him to know them apart. He had been settling down for a long night’s wait, covered in a blanket on a rock by the side of a known terrorist trail, his rifle cocked and ready on his knee. Then he had heard, fifty yards away, someone moving noisily through the bush, bumping into the msasa trees and cursing loudly. And singing, singing after curfew. He turned himself and his rifle around in the direction of the curfew breaker and waited for him to break cover. His finger went to the trigger as the black guy stumbled out on to the path, an old man, drunk from a wedding or a funeral or both, who had forgotten the time or couldn’t care. But a curfew breaker who could properly be shot on sight for excellent profit. An easy target too, swinging a little, but predictable. What was the song, though? What was the old lad singing? Not a tribal one, nothing Shona about it. No matter, he was in the centre of the sights and the forefinger began to feel first pressure on the trigger, a couple into the chest and the old fellow wouldn’t know a thing. He began to squeeze and then as the old man went into the chorus he recognized it. . . ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’. Unbelievable in the middle of the African bush, crossing the night paths of the security forces. Nationalist guerrillas, lion, leopard and buffalo and there he was ‘grunt-grunting here’ and ‘hee-hawing there’ and then he did a jig and began laughing at his ‘moo-moo’s’. And Pilger smiled and laid down his gun to let the old man pass below him, MacDonalding his way back to his kraal in the darkness.

  There were grenade explosions in the Square only a few houses away. He tilted his head over the sill and saw them running from house to house. Searching. For him? But they were working from the end of the terrace and they wouldn’t reach him in time, if it was him they were after. It was nearly twenty past and any minute now the Russian’s car would be coming into the Square. The patrols wouldn’t reach him in time, he was certain.

  Across the trees he saw a little of the sea, green blue, blue green, he could never make up his mind which, but the colour of her eyes and her mother’s. How beautiful they had both been, how beautiful it had all been, the succession of jobs and the failures and the loves and the pain and the ugliness but how marvellous. How glorious from that first day he had left his dreadful school dormitory to begin his travels. Shame it should end like this. On his own. It had been the only thing that had ever worried him, dying alone somewhere foreign, no one knowing who you were, shoving you on to a slab to be cut up and buried in sand. Anonymous. But now that it was so close it really wasn’t that worrying after all.

  He’d miss the yacht though. Sloppy, Liz had called her, but she’d moved well, given the room and some decent wind in her sails. If he had to choose one last memory it would be those evenings, sailing west into the sun, an enormous red sun, with a bottle of wine inside him, and his pipe bubbling and glowing with the breeze. He’d have his feet on the wheel and his head resting back and he’d watch the red flushed sky darken slowly and he would count the stars as they took their places in the indigo, and he would wish the earth really was flat and that any minute he would sail over the edge forever.

  Maybe that was how it would be. Even better in the Afterwards.

  Pilger stiffened, suddenly alert. Something, someone had moved on the roof of the right-hand terrace just over a hundred yards away. A Cuban? Had they sent their patrols up after him? He looked at his wristwatch. Any minute, any minute now and the cars would stop below.

  The Square was full of people. Men and women held red flags above their heads, motionless and silent, and their children stood at their sides or peered between their legs waving their flags, but not knowing why. Only the Cubans made any noise, and groups of mulattos with them, young men with wide red armbands, some with a strip of red cloth tied around their forehead like a sweat-band, distributing flags, propaganda posters and red streamers. Between the pavement and the stage, midway along the strip of red carpet, a dozen or so mulattos stood waiting, heads bowed, older men, remnants of the town band, like statues, shoulder to shoulder, their trumpets, cornets, horns and drums at the ready.

  Pilger could see him clearly now, openly crossing the rooftops, making no effort to hide himself. He knew he couldn’t be seen from the streets below, he was careful to keep back from the edge of the houses, making a line directly towards him dead centre of the rooftops. He was holding his rifle low across his stomach and he was crouched, but Pilger could see he was white and the sun reflected off his blond hair.

  A friend certainly, why else should he be hiding from the streets? But who? Pilger waved at him from the shadow of the room, a silly thing to do, he knew it wouldn’t be seen, but it was instinctive. It was too late for help now and God pray the cars would arrive before he got much closer.

  There, again, jumping a parapet, ninety yards now, and holding his rifle high for balance, a heavy gun with a silencer and sight, a hunting gun, a Magnum, or something like it. Maybe he was one of the tourists who’d got away from the hotel, feeling the same way, desperate to do something. Certainly he couldn’t be a local, he knew all the Europeans. And yet there was something faintly familiar about him.

  And then, as the man swung his legs over a low wall that separated one house from another, Pilger saw that he was wearing shorts and knee-length socks, and he knew who he was.

  The y
oung South African whom he’d met with Laurent

  several times. Had they sent him to help. With only a few minutes left, had the South Africans sent him to help?

  He wanted to stop him, tell him to get away, that he could cope on his own, that what he was about to do was suicide and that it was nonsense for the two of them to die. He wanted to stand at the window and wave at him to go back, but still he came zig-zagging through the line of chimney stacks, keeping low whenever he got close to the edge of the houses and then running openly as soon as the drop in the roofs gave him cover again. A rucksack bounced on his back.

  There were cheers and Pilger saw them rounding the end of the airport road, dots still, but the convoy for certain, car behind car, moving slowly, too slowly, towards the roundabout junction where the coast road joined the Boulevard Dr Clobert, and he could see, this side of the column of palms at the start of the Boulevard, two Cuban armoured troop carriers waiting to lead the delegation into town.

  He felt his chest tighten and his heart thump hard against it and he looked down and saw the pulse beating at his shirt. It wouldn’t be a still target but it would be close and there was nothing to block his view, no matter how many guards around him. And why should they bother? They weren’t expecting anything. There was another grenade explosion two houses along the terrace, and a short burst of automatic fire. They were still searching, but not for him, surely, just simply routine security, there was no way they could know about him, no one to guess what he intended.

  He would take the Russian as he stepped out of the car, let him get far enough away from it so that he couldn’t use it for cover, ten yards along the carpet and then let go on automatic. Thirty bullets in the magazine and only ninety feet away, the easiest target he’d ever gone for.