The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  I see, she lied. And tell me, Mr. Vagar… what’s it good for?

  No malice in her question, nothing but genuine concern and interest. I opened my mouth to explain, to talk about outcomes and opportunities, models of human behaviour, and found my words had run dry.

  The next evening after the table was cleared, she nudged her husband, subtle as an orca, and winked at me and said, “Do you play cards?”

  I did.

  She dealt three hands, an old game, a game of pairs and additions, and her husband took his cards in shaking hands and played each one slowly as if the little squares were almost too heavy to hold, as if frightened he would drop them, and he won—resoundingly, he won—though his breath wheezed in his throat and his eyes drooped as his wife wheeled him up to bed—and at the moment of victory I thought I saw a thing in his eyes that I had seen a thousand times before.

  Not merely joy. Not merely satisfaction at a victory.

  I saw in him, in his face like dried seaweed, power.

  Power over the game.

  Power over the world that was within the game.

  Power over the players that he had defeated.

  Power over this moment, this second of triumph.

  Power over himself.

  Our eyes met as he was turned away, and for the first time that evening, he smiled.

  Two days later, lying on my belly on the single bed in my little room, a small, spotted, brown lizard edging ever closer to my right elbow, its curiosity aroused by my stillness, its tongue licking pinkly at the sizzling air, I saw my own face on an Interpol wanted list.

  It had been a while coming—a big move, an obvious move, but more importantly, a move that demonstrated again the extent of her power.

  I hired a boat and sailed south across a still, grey sea.

  Chapter 9

  Resources launched against Interpol; not an all-out assault, merely a little prodding around the edges.

  Through an officer of the Bundespolizei, I requested more information. What was the crime of this unnamed criminal who had my features?

  Theft, came the answer. Terrorism. Arson. (Did it matter?)

  And what were the leads?

  The criminal was probably in Europe. Links to cyber-terrorists. Links to paramilitary groups. Assumed dangerous.

  And where had the request come from for his arrest?

  Bulgaria, came the reply.

  He’s wanted primarily in Bulgaria.

  That was unwelcome news. Did the Gamesmaster own a piece of the Bulgarian mafia as well as a shard of Interpol? That applied pressure from both the legal and illegal ends of the spectrum of professional body-hunters.

  I rifled through my memories, lists of contacts, names, gathered down the centuries in expectation of this moment. My resources in Bulgaria were thin but I eventually settled on a senior civil servant who had bet his all—his life, body, soul—with the wild overconfidence of a man who was never going to win and who, when the umpires came to collect, had kissed my shoes and cried out for mercy, and who had received back from me his life and his body—but not his soul.

  “I can’t do it!” he hissed down the satellite phone. “I can’t ask those sorts of questions!”

  “You can,” I replied calmly, feet dangling over the side of my boat, sun hot on my skin, salt in my mouth and on my tongue. “You will.”

  Three days later, I docked in the village of Palmarin on the Senegalese coast. The water was the colour of oceans on maps, a perfect pale blue where the eye skimmed over it, fading to clear as you looked down to the sandy bottom below. On the beach, three boys in baggy shorts watched me approach, prodding the sand with long sticks, huddled beneath the shade of a palm tree, and when at last their patience broke they ran all at once, like a river through a dam, to dance around me and holler, “Money? American? Money?” and hop and pull nervously at my sleeves until their mother, swaddled all in blue, tushed and tutted and chased them away and called them vile creatures and said their father, God rest him, would be ashamed.

  They laughed at that and ran back to the shade of their tree to watch for the next stranger with the stern intensity of a lighthouse.

  “You’ll like it here!” exclaimed the woman who led me to the best supply store in town, owned, though she did say so herself, by her cousin who was the only honest trader I’d find in these parts. “We have sun, we have the sea, we have fresh fish and good drink—not like other places, not like Dakar or Mbour—there they only have noise and bad people.”

  Her cousin, for all that he wore mismatching flip-flops and grinned as if tetanus had locked the muscles in place, was an honest trader who sold everything at a price barely above what it was worth, and threw in four bottles of clean water when I was done with a cry of, “Take, take; you’ll need it!”

  At sunset I sat on a wicker chair by the sea, and drank palm wine and read a fourth-hand thriller which had sat on the counter of the store between the tins of dried fish and the stack of bicycle tyres, every size, and which quite possibly hadn’t been for sale were it not that the enterprising owner would have sold everything he could, even his mismatched flip flops, if there was some profit in it.

  Goddammit, exclaimed the text in my lap, you tell those goddamn CIA punks to get their house in order!

  I laid my book aside and watched the sea. The stars began to grow in the sky. I tried staring into the darkest part of the darkness, but the more I looked, the more stars I could see there. The wind turned cold off the water, and I enjoyed its touch.

  My phone rang and I found myself briefly annoyed by the sound.

  I let it ring nine times, then answered.

  A voice, speaking fast in Bulgarian: my civil servant.

  “Damn you,” he rasped. “Damn you, now they’re after me, damn you to hell!”

  “What have you learned?”

  “That you don’t fuck with the fucking mafia! That you don’t fuck with the fucking mafia-run police! That you don’t fuck with the minister of the interior or senior judges; that you don’t fuck with this fucking stuff!”

  “Tell me what you’ve learned.”

  “That you don’t fuck with the SSLP! They’ve put a fucking hit out on you, straight from the top this comes, ten million euros to the first fucker to pick you off and you know, when I started asking… I think they put a hit on me too. I’m leaving. I’m fucking getting out of here before they get my wife and kids, fuck you, Silver, fuck you!”

  He hung up on me before I could say anything more.

  Twenty-two hours later, he was dead.

  Chapter 10

  An inspector in the Istanbul police (“win some, lose some”) filled me in on SSLP.

  “Security Solutions and Life Protection,” he explained cheerfully down the phone. “Shit name for a bad insurance company. They’re mafia through and through. Joined the market few years back: money laundering, protection rackets, drugs—the usual. Recruited a lot of its muscle from old rivals, but also did a neat number with the kids. Opened wrestling and boxing clubs across the country, survival courses, community meetings, that sort of shit. Tea and cake for the mums, one-oh-one on how to fuck people over. Nice, traditional Hitler Youth stuff—get them young and they stay loyal till they’re old. That’s the theory at least—first generation are hitting their thirties about now so I guess we’ll see how good ‘loyalty’ is in a psycho!”

  I pictured him, my hard-won piece, sitting with his feet up on his desk, a tulip glass of cool Turkish tea in his hand, rocking gently back in his chair, and in my fantasy he rocked now a little too hard and fell backwards, spilling both his tea and his casual attitude towards the people who’d put a ten-million-euro hit on my head, across the floor of his too-tidy office.

  “Who runs it?”

  “Georgi Daskalov, but he’s untouchable.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not Bulgaria—shit, you think a guy like that would stick around in his own country?! Italy somewhere. Up by a big lake, you know the
kind of thing. Hell, I’d like to live by a lake in Italy, but I guess some of us have to suffer for our sins.”

  A secretary in the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (“whatever debts my husband owes, you forgive them; my skills are more useful to you than his”) confirmed Daskalov’s location.

  “We all know who and what he is,” she sighed. “But even if we could prove it, what good would it do? Bulgaria would request his deportation and he’d be free within a week, or he’d just bribe or shoot his way through judges until someone stupid enough came along to let him go. You don’t get to touch men like Daskalov—the best you can hope for is damage limitation.”

  “What would happen if I did take him down?”

  “Maybe the whole thing would collapse. Maybe things would get better. Maybe someone else would take his place, and it’d just carry on regardless.”

  “He’s a powerful piece in my enemy’s hand. Removing him might open up the board a little bit.”

  “He’s a murderer, a human trafficker, a dealer in vice and drugs,” she corrected. “All the rest is talk.”

  I set sail the following morning, heading north towards the Mediterranean.

  Chapter 11

  On my third day at sea, an email arrived in capital letters, marked “urgent.” It came from the Swiss cyberwarfare experts I’d acquired over a game of Diplomacy (seventeen months of hard play and at the end, as it always seems to, the game came down to an artillery exchange over Grozny and an ignominious retreat for my opponent into Siberia, surrender finally agreed six hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean after I’d sent in tanks).

  It read:

  At 22.33 GMT, your laptop was compromised. Destroy and evade.

  The time was 23.08 GMT.

  I threw my laptop overboard, made one phone call before throwing that into the water too, ripped out the transponder from my boat, shut down the radio, killed all running lights and made a sharp turn east towards land. From beneath a bench I pulled out three lifejackets and a box of emergency supplies, lashing them together with rope and throwing them, still tied to the ship, over the side into the water.

  At 00.12 the first plane flew over, slow and low, its engine groaning like an overweight bee exhausted from the toils of life. It circled me once, twice, its lights popping in and out of thin cloud as it nailed my position, before it drifted upwards, out of earshot. At 00.32 two fighter planes took its place. I jumped overboard when I heard the jet engines, cutting the rope that connected my floating bundle of boxes and lifejackets to the ship with a knife and, clinging to this makeshift raft, kicked away from the boat. It seemed to take the fighters an inordinate amount of time to circle round for the kill. When the missiles struck, I was nearly two hundred yards away, but that was near enough for the heat to singe the back of my neck, for the force to slap me under, for the shockwave beneath the ocean—moving slower than the air—to then pick me up and spin me round, my tightly shut eyes burning against the half-glimpsed sight of burning fuel on the water, my mouth full of sea, my nose full of sea, my head full of foam. I clung to my raft and kept kicking away, and when the fighters circled back once, twice, three times, strafing what little remained of my boat, I pushed myself under my raft and held my breath until my eyes were going to burst from their sockets and my lungs were two shrivelled vacuums in my chest, and then I surfaced, and coughed and gasped and dived again, the busy world under the ocean illuminated by cobwebs of fiery light which drifted into the sea from the remnants of my boat until at last, their job done, the fighters turned away and the night was silent again.

  I was in the water for eleven hours.

  I didn’t move, but let the ocean do what it would with me, carrying me with the broken remains of my boat. A little bubble of warm formed around my submerged legs and waist; my arms shivered and shook where they clung to my raft of lifejackets. Above, the ocean stars turned, beautiful, a sight just for me, just for my weary eyes, a universe that no one else could perceive. In a little while, I felt burning across my back and shoulders, and for a moment the salt water where it seeped into my wounds was agony, and I screamed into the silence, until the antiseptic touch of the water against my skin was in fact a blessing, and the cold was a blessing, and the heat was a blessing, and all things at once seemed to me a blessing, and I closed my eyes and thought how nice it was to be blessed and dozed a little, and woke dreaming of drowning and found my nose slipping beneath the water, and I thrashed and gasped for breath, and wondered if I was going to die in this place, and if she would miss me when I was gone.

  Probably not, I said, and then:

  That’s not what you’re playing for, I replied.

  What are you playing for? I asked.

  Vengeance? Pride? Justice? Love?

  I laughed at that.

  You’re so funny, I said. You’re so funny I could die.

  The sun rose quickly over the ocean, and there was no land beneath it as it climbed into the sky. How fast it went from a blessed relief to a torment, too bright, too pervasive, no shelter from its glare. Hell was an ocean, I realised. Hell was an endless sea. I wondered if there were sharks in this water and having wondered, imagined teeth tearing at my feet, my legs, my blood calling to them, no game yet invented which could tame Mother Nature.

  “This is a check,” I said. “You are a king and she has put you into check, nothing more.”

  “Nothing but the sea and the sharks,” I replied.

  “Where’s your wisdom now?” I asked. “Where’s your wit?”

  “Keenness and quickness of perception,” I intoned through broken lips. “Ingenuity. Humour, finding humour in the relationship between incongruous things. Wit: a person of exceptional intelligence.”

  “Tell it to the sharks,” I replied. “Tell it to the seas.”

  When the boat came, I thought it was a product of my laughing, bewildered mind until they called my name from the prow and I remembered that I had summoned it, the last thing I’d done before throwing my treacherous mobile phone and laptop over the side.

  They sent a diver into the water to help me onto the palette which they lowered over the side. Once on deck, they carried me, still in the orange litter, to their infirmary where an officer all in white, accent as tight as the little black hat on her head, asked me my name (which I could not remember), what day it was, if I knew what had happened.

  Eventually, I remembered the name by which I had summoned this boat, and how I had won it (a game of Monopoly—I bought the utility companies; she bought the high-end hotels, and utility companies, it turned out, were the better investment as tourism fluctuated in southern Florida) and drank the water that I was given, and lay on my belly while the medic dressed the burns across my neck, shoulders and back, and asked how I had received them.

  “Two fighter jets blew up my boat,” I replied. “I think it must have happened then.”

  She tutted and sighed and said, drink more water, and gave me something else to drink besides which made the world—for a little while—seem more peaceful than it had been in the morning.

  Chapter 12

  The boat was a cutter with the British Royal Navy and it deposited me in Gibraltar some ten hours after it had picked me up in the sea. I had no passport to be checked at customs, nor no contacts or proof of identity.

  I asked permission to phone my lawyer to see if he could get the relevant documents faxed over, and when they said yes, I dialled the piece in the admiralty who had so obligingly secured my rescue, and told him to get me freed, and that for this all debts were paid and his game was done.

  He nearly sobbed with relief when I said as much, and thanked me, thanked me, thanked me, and got it done.

  Alone, empty-handed, bandages on my back, I walked along the seafront of Gibraltar, a place that was neither one thing nor the other. The streetlights were pure English seaside, wrought black metal. British flags flew in the shops which sell obligatory sand buckets and bags of dried starfish; the Lord Nelson pub
smelt of beer and chips, yet the Anglican cathedral had something of the Moorish about its curved arches and white walls, and the hotels that lined the seafront and chic marinas were pure Mediterranean slabs of functional tourism, square and turned into the sun. I walked until I found a tourist office; they stared at me, scalded skin, cracked lips, salt-washed hair, but politely directed me to the banks and buses.

  Only one bank in Gibraltar carried any resources that I could use, and those were limited, planted some twenty years ago when I was passing through in expectation of this day. My signature on the account got me access to the bank manager; my fingerprint permitted me into the vault. My safe deposit box hadn’t been updated for seven years—sloppy on my part, but I hadn’t pictured myself shipwrecked in this part of the world, let alone so early in the game. The passports within were all out of date, save for a Swedish one which was two months from expiry. The five thousand U.S. dollars and five thousand euros within were still in currency, and the gun, I was relieved to find, hadn’t rusted inside its padded box.

  I bought myself a new laptop and three new phones, and took the ferry to Tanger-Med that evening.

  Tanger-Med is a half-excuse for a port in a half-excuse for a place. Billboards and helpful public information posters declare that soon—very soon—this place will be the greatest cargo hub on the Mediterranean. Tired men in grubby uniforms sit around on empty public benches smoking thin cigarettes, the ash flicked onto the empty marble floors of the empty passenger terminal. By the great wharves where the cargo ships dock, cranes crawl back and forth, yellow lights flashing, and lorries wait to be loaded by the fluorescent-clad labourers, but the cruise ships do not like to stop here, and the men and women who crawl off the passenger ferry in the small hours of the night have the looks about them of lost tourists, or itinerant workers who know that this is merely a place that is a stop on the way to somewhere better.