Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read online

  Next morning, when Buddy couldn’t get an answer he put his shoulder against the door and it flew open and there was Charlie propped up against the wall, a spewed trail of vomit on his clothes. Charlie’s head was nodding against his chest and when Buddy knelt and took his face in his hands, Charlie opened his eyes but he couldn’t talk. Buddy cleaned him up, and pulled away Charlie’s hands, held claw-like against his guts, moved back his shirt and inspected the spreading blood bruise on Charlie’s upper stomach just below the diaphragm. Charlie looked up at him and tried to speak. Buddy said, ‘Charlie, shut up.’

  Buddy heard the bus roll into the hotel courtyard, and he reached down and tried to get Charlie to stand, but his legs were rubbery and he just sat down on the side of the bed. So Buddy put Charlie’s arm on his shoulder and his hand around Charlie’s waist and pretty well carried him down the stairs to the front lobby. The guy behind the desk – the same one who would have let the goons in – rose and gave Charlie a quick look that expressed more satisfaction than was wise. He was also foolish enough to say that there was a night’s bill to pay. At this, Buddy reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol. The guy behind the desk rather comically raised his hands as if the gun required them both to pretend that they were in a cop movie. Buddy, with Charlie under his arm, slipped the pistol back into his inside jacket pocket and they made their way out of the hotel to the bus. Buddy lowered him gently into a window seat, while the baffled passengers looked on. He paid the driver and then sat down, and as a final flourish, gave a little wave to the guy at the hotel who was standing on the steps.

  The bus was rolling, and it didn’t make any sense to keep pretending to be Buddy’s idiot brother, so Charlie just whispered, ‘A gun?’ Buddy nodded and said, as if he never went anywhere without one, ‘A 45-calibre Glock.’ He kept looking out the window. Of all Buddy’s miracles, this was the greatest. Charlie, in a delirium of pain and relief felt like kissing him. A gun. And more than a gun, what the gun meant. Buddy had known all along what they were getting in to, and while the gun hadn’t exactly been of much use, it had saved them from at least one hotel bill, and most of all, it proved that Buddy was in for the long haul.

  That wasn’t the only surprise. Buddy waited until the sight of one man lifting another into his seat had worn off on the rest of the bus and everybody went back to looking out the window or listening to the radio, and then he said, very quietly, ‘He is in Belgrade. She phoned. I can’t figure out why.’

  But Charlie knew. She had done it for the same reason as Buddy. So that the woman on fire would get respect. So that one guy, just once, would understand what it means to treat someone like garbage. She had known this. She had seen it in Charlie’s eyes. Charlie could see her now – she had finally come into focus – with her bare feet, nails painted purple, the smoky complexion, and that clear questioning look as she let the photograph drop on to the table between them. Why had he ever thought she would do anything different? People were amazing. It was a sign, definitely a sign, though Charlie realised, as the pain in his chest took over, that he was not really in his right mind. He closed his eyes. Buddy sat looking out at the dark and newly turned furrows in the fields.

  ELEVEN

  When he got off the bus, Charlie was pleased to discover that he could walk. In fact, he and Buddy walked the whole way up the hill to the Moskva. It was a bright and cold afternoon and Charlie liked the smell of coal and cigarettes in the air, liked how a woman ahead of him was moving inside a long black leather coat, and the way her calf muscles contracted and tightened as she ascended the street. He still hurt, but the pain was in retreat, pulling back from the whole of his body to the fist-shaped bruise below his diaphragm. Buddy was smoking, and he pulled the smoke into his lungs as they climbed the steep street. There was something remote and calm and clear about him. Because of the Glock, because of everything, Charlie thought that Buddy was the greatest guy in the world.

  Buddy did not share Charlie’s euphoria. He took the blow to Charlie’s middle for what it was: a final warning. He also took it as a sign that he would have to think for the two of them, since Charlie didn’t seem to understand the kind of danger he had put them in. What was it about Charlie? It would be pleasant to suppose that he was simply fearless, but this was not the case. He had seen Charlie afraid. The new fact was his appalling lack of interest in self-preservation. Some of the cunning and, watchfulness essential to survival had gone missing and, as a result, Charlie was a danger to himself and to anyone else in his vicinity.

  Buddy didn’t say any of this, but Charlie sensed what he was thinking from the bruised sort of silence he maintained the whole way up the street. When they reached the hotel, they repaired to the bar at the back and the flame-haired barmaid of a certain age who’d been there since Charlie started coming to the Moskva brought them an espresso each and a glass of plum brandy. It was just the thing for his stomach, fire that went all the way down and burned away the big knot inside. He had another.

  ‘So now we go for him,’ Charlie said.

  Buddy downed his brandy with a shake of his head.

  ‘I am going to put you on a plane,’ Buddy said emphatically. ‘It is not possible to have you running around this town. You are just crazy.’

  ‘I won’t go,’ Charlie said, smiling.

  ‘I will have you sedated. I know guys. You will be carried on to plane, and you will return to wife and child and all will be well.’

  ‘I won’t go,’ Charlie repeated, with his most engaging smile.

  Charlie could tell that Buddy was going through the motions, doing due diligence in case anyone blamed him afterwards. Charlie was not fooled. After the gun Charlie knew it was a sure thing. Buddy was his. Buddy even smiled to acknowledge honourable defeat.

  ‘You are going to your room and you are sleeping,’ Buddy said. ‘All day.’

  ‘You’re giving the orders?’

  Buddy nodded.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I make phone calls.’

  Charlie didn’t believe he would sleep, but in fact he fell asleep in his clothes, out cold on his back. He woke, sore and dry-mouthed and lonely. His watch said 10.45 p.m. He’d been asleep about five hours. Some body was knocking on his door.

  They had a passkey: two men were in the room before he got down the stairs from the loggia. A third stood waiting in the hall. The one who did the talking had thin blond hair, a slight trim body inside a suit and a face that was impossible to remember except for watery grey eyes. Charlie didn’t like standing there in his socks, with his hair mussed up on the back of his head.

  ‘You will come with us,’ Watery Eyes said in English.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ Charlie had been in these situations before. It always paid to spin things out, even when it was obvious that he didn’t have any room to manoeuvre.

  ‘Visa problem.’

  ‘What about my visa?’

  ‘You are journalist, but you enter as tourist.’

  ‘For this you wake me up at night?’

  ‘Shoes, please.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  ‘You might be anybody.’ Which was true in this town. Federal. Secret. Militia. Private. Who knew? Charlie studied his possibilities. Flight was not one of them. Resistance wasn’t either. Yet he knew that they didn’t want him struggling in the corridors. There were a few other guests, after all. So they wanted it done quietly.

  Watery Eyes kept his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Shoes,’ he repeated. ‘Pack everything.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are leaving.’

  Charlie pointed up to the loggia where the bed was. ‘Shoes,’ Charlie said. One of the men followed him, and the other one waited downstairs.

  So he had hit pay dirt, Charlie thought to himself. The Colonel had the connections to get Watery Eyes into his room, just five hours off the bus. Not bad, when he thought about it. Charlie even felt a faint stirring
of journalistic pride. He had got close enough for the whole system to stir into life, for it to close around him like some ocean-floor bivalve closing around its prey.

  Charlie packed his bag and sat on the side of the bed and took his time lacing up his shoes, while a man stood over him to make sure he didn’t have anything interesting in mind. Charlie had nothing interesting in mind. He felt dead tired and overwhelmed with the pointlessness of his situation. They would have his passport, and they had him. It was over. He knew who did it and it didn’t make any difference. It was over. Charlie wasn’t the kind to take satisfaction in having tried. In his business, you either had the story or you didn’t. You either aired it, or you didn’t. E for effort wasn’t worth a thing. Getting kicked out of the country wasn’t even a good career move. For he had been fired. Or suspended. Or whatever.

  And there was the woman on fire, dead and unre deemed, killed not just by the Colonel himself but by everything you could see in Watery Eyes’s expression, the same sort of predatory indifference. It occurred to Charlie, as he contemplated journey’s end, that she was the one person he really cared about. As he tied the last shoelace and stood up, while the hood picked up the bag and gestured for him to go down the stairs, he wondered whether he might still have a card left to play.

  The possibilities were to get out into the hall and start yelling in the hope that some foreign passport would hear, or that Buddy – if he happened to be there – might do something. But if you started yelling, they might just hit you and carry you down the back stairs. And Buddy might not hear. Then again, Charlie thought, rapidly revising his earlier idea, Buddy might have had a hand in this. The thought was depressing, but Charlie wasn’t so sentimental as to be taken by surprise. People thought he was one of life’s hopeful fools, and he had gone a long way exploiting this mis per ception. But Charlie could easily envisage how Buddy would rationalise a deal with Watery Eyes. Buddy would think it was in Charlie’s best interests to be bundled on to the plane or the bus with a mug on either side to keep him from moving and then be dumped on the border. Buddy had to live with these people. Charlie didn’t, so what Buddy did to keep alive here wasn’t his business. Still, the idea that Buddy might have set him up made Charlie sick.

  As they marched him along the corridor towards the fountain that disconsolately pissed away, all night and day, by the second floor elevator, Charlie noticed that the usual working girls had been cleared off the chairs where they lounged by the elevator door. So the corridor was empty. But he drew comfort from one thought. By coming quietly, he had lulled them into making a mistake. Instead of taking him down some freight elevator at the back, they were taking him right down the main steps to the lobby.

  This was how, when Charlie reached the lobby and crossed it and was walking, framed by mugs on each side, and Watery Eyes following behind, holding the bag, he managed to trip on the second of the grey marble steps leading up to the street-level entrance, where their car was waiting. It was an innocent-looking mistake, and he didn’t make a production of it. He only went down on one knee, but it caused them to make a second mistake, which was to lift him up by the arms so that anybody could see he was being bundled out of the hotel by force. Charlie didn’t know whether anybody had caught his signal, but as it happened he had created just enough disturbance at the door for three people sitting at the rear bar drinking at a table with a view of the lobby to see what happened. One of them was Buddy, and the other two were Etta and Jacek.

  They were smart enough to remain motionless, though it was hard, especially for Etta, to sit perfectly still, after the glass entrance door swung closed behind Charlie and they heard car doors clunk shut and the black BMW drive off. They finished the brandies, took an elaborate amount of time paying, so that the flamehaired waitress wouldn’t feel inclined to report on their interest in the recent departure from the hotel.

  ‘I’ll get the embassy,’ Etta said when they were outside.

  ‘I’ll go to the headquarters,’ Jacek said, knowing where it was, since he had been questioned there once himself. ‘You stay out of sight,’ he said to Buddy, who nodded and disappeared.

  Etta found a urine-soaked phone box and managed to push enough change into it to make it work. The night guard at the embassy answered on the fifteenth ring. She talked him past the procedures in his binder, the ones that ought to have had him hanging up. It was her job getting people to do more than they were authorised to do. When the third secretary, dragged from sleep, came on the line, there was a lot of ‘Can it wait till tomorrow?’ but Etta said it couldn’t. She knew how to lean gently but unrelentingly on officials, until they could begin to see the cost of hanging up and doing nothing. The cost, Etta implied, was being fired.

  She walked the steep hill down to the headquarters, past the Defence Ministry, past the sentries, feeling the police cars slowing down to observe her. She had a map in her pocket, so she knew where she was going, and she put her faith in her basic meticulousness, which included having studied the streets of a city she had never been to, on the flight from London, so that she could find Charlie if she had to. Of course she was frightened. Why not? she said to herself. What else should she be? That was how she dealt with fear. It was a matter of saying, ‘Why be surprised? Why not admit it fully?’ Then you wouldn’t think it was weak or ignoble. You would just think, this is how it is.

  The right thing to do here, she reasoned, was to make a lot of noise, make it costly to deport a foreign journalist. The more noise, the better. Like the Plaza de Mayo women banging their trash can lids with spoons in front of the President’s palace in Buenos Aires. She’d seen them on TV and she’d always admired those women, who campaigned to find out where their sons and daughters, husbands and lovers had been taken, how they had made noise, day and night for years, enough to reach through prison walls, enough to make the world notice. She wanted to believe in the power of noise and she began humming to herself, ‘A People United Will Never Be Defeated’, something she chanted in a demonstration once, until it seemed ridiculous and died in her throat. As she came to that cheerless granite pile squatting on the height looking down on the highway to the airport, she told herself that she and Jacek were not playthings here. They had options, cards, chances. She told herself that it was a third-rate dictatorship, brutal but not classy, and that she didn’t need to be afraid of these guards in the sentry boxes. But she was also a child of socialism – a Young Pioneer herself – and she had memories of the times when these places had real menace. She couldn’t quite overcome those feelings that came from a Communist childhood of being intimidated into silence by the brutality of buildings like this one.

  They weren’t going to let her in and the stiff in the guard-post was pretending he didn’t even see her media pass till Jacek, who had got through, came down the steps. They made a fuss, they held her back, but Jacek just took charge, and there was something implacable about him that made the guard think it would be easier to let them deal with this lunatic inside.

  Inside the state security office Etta and Jacek sat together, side by side, on a bench against a wall, beneath a fly-spotted bulb, and looked at the dreary paraphernalia: posters with official regulations, tacked to the wall oppo site, the corners torn and curling; the dirty linoleum floor; a series of unmarked doors, and a high counter behind which sat a sergeant in uniform who surveyed them without interest. It was cold and she shivered and pulled her coat around her.

  Jacek went up to the counter and tried it a number of ways. Etta could see that he had been trying for some time. His language was passable and so he said ‘Are you deaf?’ then ‘Are you stupid?’ ‘We know he’s here, so let us see him’, all of which were met with the same reply. The sergeant was neither deaf nor stupid, but intelligent enough to see that a game was being played and that he had a part too – which was to insist that a journalist, named Charles Johnson, from London was not in their custody.

  Etta watched Jacek with fearful admiration, wishing that she co
uld be left to persuade the sergeant in a softer, yet more effective way. But she deferred to Jacek’s scornful fearlessness, and the way in which he managed to turn something risky into a game, which allowed both the sergeant and him to keep it all from getting out of hand.

  Eventually, Jacek came back and sat down beside her and they waited.

  ‘We wait,’ Jacek said to the sergeant.

  ‘So I see,’ the sergeant replied and went back to his paperwork, with a small smile.

  Stand-off. If they stayed there, it might be difficult for them to move Charlie. If they stayed there, the embassy might show up.

  They didn’t speak, and they didn’t have to, even though today was the first time that Etta had ever seen Jacek face to face. It had always been on the phone before – the booking, contracts, equipment rental, flights – and occasionally Jacek would pass her on to Magda, because Jacek could be vague on details and Magda never was.

  He looked older than his years, and the lines on his face and the tiredness that came over him in repose tightened her heart, because it made her think of Charlie too, how they were old men, getting older, in a young man’s game, and how they knew this but kept trying to exploit the diminishing advantages of experience, knowing all the while that those were diminishing, and that one day, they would be old and sidelined, full of experience that no one would want.

  She could see what Charlie liked about Jacek: no wasted words, no unnecessary forms of politeness, self-containment and quiet when at rest, fierce econo mical action when in motion, and all the while this wolf-like gaze, taking in the seedy desolation of the room as if he was framing it up in his viewfinder.