Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read online

  He might be thinking: What exactly is she doing here? but she didn’t care, or didn’t care to explain. What she was to Charlie was her business alone, and she was part of the story now.

  The embassy showed up about forty-five minutes later in the form of a small, dishevelled woman in her early thirties with round glasses, who came in with a file under her arm, and one card outstretched for the sergeant and another one for the two of them. It said that she was a third secretary, political. Etta was glad about that. Political had more muscle than consular.

  It was rather impressive, Etta thought, how this small woman managed to embody a government and to initiate a formal demand for access to a detainee, according to such-and-such a convention guaranteeing consular access to all detainees in a signatory’s power. She cracked the words out in the sergeant’s language, but with an official cadence that, even if it was the mumbo-jumbo of sovereignty, carried a certain auth ority. They could make out that she was telling the sergeant the government was unhappy, the ambassador was unhappy, the country would be unhappy, the whole world would soon be unhappy. It was a good show, all round, especially coming from a tired, anxious woman impersonating the authority of Charlie’s home and native land. Even Jacek seemed to enjoy the way this flow of words caused the sergeant to rise from his seat and disappear through a door into a back office, carrying the third secretary’s card.

  ‘That was good,’ Jacek ventured.

  She did not reply, just sat down beside them and they waited in silence. Her distaste for journalists, for the mess they got into, the mess they left behind, the mess she had to clean up, was so palpable that neither Etta nor Jacek bothered to say another word. Etta listened to the sounds of the building, the surge and rattle of the water in the pipes, the clank of doors somewhere, a garbled voice behind a door, then long silence when she could only hear the blood in her ears. He would be down below them, and she tried to imagine the cell, but only the usual images came to mind, a spy hole, whitewashed walls, a single chair, all under fierce light, and none of it, she knew, his cell, the particular place they were keeping him.

  It was a lesson she had learned somewhere in her life, to fight free of any images she had of a thing – in this case a jail cell – because it would make it impossible for her to know the thing itself. She wanted to listen to the way Charlie would tell it – and he would tell it, she fiercely believed, he would tell it, and she didn’t want anything to get in the way of his telling, and her listening.

  When she looked up, a compact athletic man in a suit was standing in the far doorway behind the counter, looking at her with watery grey eyes. He had been there for some time. Etta felt herself being inspected and she did her best, with the return of her gaze, to deny him any satisfaction. His gaze moved from her to Jacek and then to the woman from the embassy.

  ‘In here, please,’ he said, gesturing to the third secretary.

  When the door opened again, forty minutes later, she was in the lead, with Charlie just behind her, carrying his bag. When he saw Etta rising from her seat, pulling her coat around her, with her mouth opening into a smile, and Jacek breaking into a grin beside her, he shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘I’m getting too lucky,’ Charlie said, and he meant it, as he kissed Etta and smelt the fragrance of her skin and hugged Jacek. He was too lucky. It couldn’t go on like this. He ought to be in the cells or on the plane out of here, and he wasn’t, because they were there, because they had raised the alarm. It just couldn’t go on like this. And Watery Eyes had made another mistake, which was releasing him at all.

  When the third secretary had them out in the street, she said, curtly, ‘See you at the airport tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock.’ And she took his passport out of the file. ‘I will hold on to this until then, if you don’t mind.’ Charlie nodded and with that she got into the embassy car and drove off.

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Charlie said.

  Etta said, ‘It’s over, Charlie. You must be on the flight.’

  ‘Sure,’ Charlie said. ‘I need a drink.’

  They were back at the Moskva just in time, for the first chair was going up on the tables, but Jacek managed to persuade the flame-haired waitress that they wouldn’t be long, only one drink. Charlie didn’t want to talk about what had happened, not there, and all he said was that they hadn’t laid a finger on him. But it wasn’t strictly true, Etta could see. Something had happened down there. You could feel it in the way Charlie drank and the way he looked at her, with a kind of empty desperation and even shame, and then looked away. He said that Watery Eyes kept asking him what he was doing down south and Charlie had said that since they knew what he was doing it didn’t make any sense to keep asking him.

  When he said this, he smiled, but when Jacek asked him what he wanted to do now, Charlie said, looking at Etta, softly with the sound dropping down to nothing, ‘Kill that son of a bitch.’ As he said this, he had the look of a man who first wanted to take her upstairs.

  Etta saw that he was slipping away into that hard, exalted place where he did harm to himself. She could see it in his eyes, in his brittle amiability and his reluctance to keep still. She could see it in his longing for her too, since it was wild and had more to do with fury than with desire.

  Charlie was just enjoying the last burn of the alcohol down his throat when Buddy walked in. Charlie assessed him, the short beard with the strands of grey, the old leather bomber jacket, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the neat flannel trousers which didn’t go with anything, and he thought it wasn’t possible, no it wasn’t possible that Buddy would be working for Watery Eyes. In fact, he concluded that Buddy hated Watery Eyes just about as much, if not more, than he did and that Buddy was looking for the same shot as him.

  He got up and took Buddy outside. ‘I’ve got six hours.’

  ‘It is enough. Address is not far,’ Buddy said and pointed to a small black car parked across the street. Charlie had just got in, when Etta ran out after him. She had thought Buddy would stop this, and for some reason Buddy wasn’t stopping anything.

  ‘Charlie, for Christ’s sake.’ She reached through the window and grabbed his hand. Jacek was behind her and Charlie knew he thought the same thing as Etta.

  ‘I just want to talk to him,’ Charlie said and he covered Etta’s hand with his own.

  ‘Charlie, don’t be ridiculous. There will be police there.’

  ‘We’ll find a way.’

  ‘It is not good to be arguing like this,’ Buddy said evenly from the driver’s seat, looking about to see who might be watching them.

  Charlie looked at Etta, at her face in the car window frame, and he said, ‘Etta, I’m tired of being fucked around. Do you understand?’

  He could tell she did understand. He could also tell that it didn’t change her mind. He pulled his hand free, and the car drove off.

  TWELVE

  The address that Buddy had was on the other side of the river in one of those apartment towers built when there was a country and it had a future. Buddy was driving towards it with intensity, both hands on the wheel, the smoke from his cigarette blowing into his face. Charlie sat hunched up in the front seat and took the cigarette out of Buddy’s mouth, ashed it in the buttfilled tray and then stuck it back between his lips. The car was Buddy’s mobile office, as he called it, with back issues of some review he had edited in the old days when there was a culture and he was an intellectual and everyone was young and had books all over their back seats. The car was a pretty good image of where they stood with the competition. Watery Eyes had his BMW, and all they bloody had was a Lada, short one windshield wiper.

  Watery Eyes would do his job, Charlie was sure. So the Colonel would be waiting for them. Fuck it, Charlie thought. After those hours in the basement interrogation room, he was glad to be in the car, in the dark, with Buddy at his side. There hadn’t been any rough stuff, just the same old questions, for which they already had answers, and the unspoken inference that in
this fluorescent basement, with a water bucket, a tap, a drain in the centre of the floor and two figures in the back ground whose faces never came into the light, anything could happen.

  Except that it hadn’t. Watery Eyes hadn’t reckoned on Jacek, on Etta, on Buddy and on the third secretary from the embassy. Thanks to them, Charlie had a few hours of grace. What he understood about grace was that you never deserved it. It wasn’t a reward for his lunatic obstinacy. It came upon you unbidden, like the light of the moon. So here he was on a clear, still night in a sleeping city, having been mysteriously granted enough grace to reach the end of the road. For that was what it would be. The hunger would be sated and he would never pursue anything again with the same all-sacrificing intensity. For the first time in his life, Charlie found himself reconciled to the future and to the path his life had taken. He sat hunched up in Buddy’s Lada, feeling something between elation and contentment. He had gone the limit. ‘Que sera sera,’ he said. In his mind’s eye, he could even see Doris Day herself, in the grainy black and white television of his childhood, singing the song with her witless and touching good cheer. It was laughable, and Charlie did actually laugh, softly to himself, a low chuckle that made Buddy look over at him and shake his head in disbelief.

  Buddy’s mood was different. It registered in the way he gripped the wheel, the way he smoked. He seemed furious that he was locked into Charlie’s fate and that Charlie didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  ‘I am doing this, Charlie, so that you will never say I was coward.’

  He said this with such uncharacteristic solemnity that Charlie smiled. Cowardice had never figured in Charlie’s view of Buddy. He felt a surge of tenderness for his ruined face, and the moustache yellowed with tobacco, and he wanted to tell him that he trusted him and knew him to be courageous. But he didn’t say it, because he wasn’t sure that it was all true. What was true was that Buddy had the Glock in his leather jacket pocket, and, like the true professional he was, the butt handle was sticking out for all to see. Charlie reached over and pushed it down out of plain sight. Did Buddy actually know how to use it? It didn’t matter. It could make a noise. It could scare somebody. That would be enough. The gun was in the category either of a comfort or an embarrassment, but either way, it was coming along.

  ‘You’re OK, Buddy,’ Charlie said.

  Over the bridge, down the ramp, off to the right, Buddy drove down into a parking lot at the foot of the block where the Colonel lived. ‘A lot of officers live here,’ Buddy said, surveying the building. So it was a real hive of wasps, Charlie thought, and if their wasp needed help, the others would come swarming. Finely splint ered auto glass crunched underfoot, and black audio tape, torn out of somebody’s car deck, drifted across in the breeze, picking up a sliver of light from the moon. Some lights of the ten-storey tower were still on, while from others lower down, the blue flicker of televisions glowed. It was cool, and Charlie’s hands felt cold. He put them into his pocket and he gripped his tape recorder.

  They weren’t exactly sneaking up on him so there was no point, in Buddy’s words, playing Jemsbond. The Colonel’s name was on the board by the doorbell and so they rang it. Buddy went to the intercom and said his name, but whoever was on the other end did not answer. Instead, the electric lock on the glass door clicked open.

  It had been too easy, and both Buddy and Charlie found this unnerving. On previous assignments, they had staked out guys for days and had never managed the slightest breach in the wall. There would be dogs, or cops, or disinformation and all trails would go cold. All the way through this one, there had been a strange lack of resistance. True, he had been knocked around and arrested, but he and Buddy had kept on coming, and now the Colonel was apparently letting them come the final distance. He had been released, Charlie believed, on the Colonel’s order. So he was walking into some kind of a trap, but he reasoned it couldn’t be much of a trap if he knew that it was. Anyway, if it was, there was nothing he could do about it now. He couldn’t turn around, walk to the Lada, shrug and say, Buddy take me back to the Moskva, take me back for one more night with Etta, take me back to my life. That was the sort of sensible behaviour Charlie knew he would regret for the rest of his life. He knew exactly why. They had made a mistake. They had fucked with him. They had misunderstood who he was. Now they had to find out who they were dealing with.

  Buddy and Charlie both reached for the elevator bell at the same time and thought how stupid they must look. They listened to the machine’s sepulchral rattle as it descended from the upper floors, and then felt it settle with a crunch, and open, waiting to take them upwards.

  They ascended in silence, not wanting to look at each other, knowing it wasn’t even worth planning what to do. They simply had no idea. ‘You cover the door’, ‘I’ll do the talking’, anything they would have said would have come from some cop movie, and was too stupid to quell the fear that had taken hold of both of them.

  When the elevator juddered to a stop on the tenth floor, and they stepped out, light was coming from a door ajar at the end of the corridor. They went towards it, single file, and Buddy crossed the threshold first. Charlie, still in the hallway, heard a voice stop Buddy in his tracks.

  ‘The gun,’ the voice said. ‘Empty the chamber and put the gun on the floor.’ Buddy did as he was told, letting the bullets drop on to the polished wood, and then dropping down himself and giving the gun a little push so that it spun away. The voice said something else and Buddy repeated over his shoulder, ‘He wants to see you.’

  As Charlie came around the door-frame, he heard the man say, ‘Empty your pockets,’ and when Charlie stepped into view, he could see that he was armed, framed against the picture window which glowed from the lights of the city. His face was backlit and in shadow, but it was the man all right, legs apart, gun pointed, taking the measure of Charlie. So Charlie said – because he knew the safest way was to avoid any unannounced gestures – ‘I am going to reach in my pocket, and I am getting my tape recorder. I have no weapon. OK?’

  ‘OK. Then sit down.’

  ‘Where?’

  Charlie said it as challengingly as he could, because an instinct told him to push back a little, see whether there was any give, any room to manoeuvre. There didn’t seem to be any.

  ‘On the floor, there, where you are standing.’ The English was good, and it made Charlie rush to fill in the blanks – an embassy posting, a spy job in London or Washington – but the blanks stayed blank and Charlie knew he was in a room with a man he knew next to nothing about, except for that gesture with a lighter, that casual flick of the wrist, the backward glance, the walking away, the unreachable, unteachable disregard.

  Charlie considered turning the tape recorder on before he slid it across, but he discarded the idea. It had a tell-tale red light and made a sound, and this guy wasn’t exactly stupid. So Charlie pulled it out and as he went down on his knees he shoved it across the floor.

  ‘On your face,’ the man said, getting up from the chair.

  ‘Why?’ asked Buddy.

  ‘Why not? What choice do you have, gentlemen?’

  This was true enough. They lay face down on the floor. He approached, tapped the hall door shut and stood over them. Then he patted them down. Charlie felt thick fingers running across his body, snaking along the rim of his ears, spreading out through his hair, down between his legs, calves, ankles; even his shoes were given a feel. From where he lay, Charlie caught his first real sight of the man: forty-five to fifty, big, muscular, a plain white T-shirt, running trousers, bare feet, salt and pepper hair, like his brother, trim gut, and a service revolver trained at Charlie’s head while the free hand patted him down. Their eyes met: and whatever Charlie had expected – fear or anger or even triumph – was not there. The eyes that took him in, face down on the floor, were neutral, professional and entirely unafraid.

  He was doing it right, Charlie could see, confident enough in his ability to take on two strangers at night. Even wit
h a warning, even with preparation, he was doing well. But there was a puzzle here, Charlie realised. He could have left everything in the hands of Watery Eyes. Most of them did. You never got close to war criminals. They let the police handle the foreigners, and contract killers handle the domestics, like Buddy. So Charlie was uncertain about his luck, but it did occur to him that the Colonel had planned this all along.

  The Colonel stood back and said in a calm and uninflected voice, with a tinge of irony, ‘So you are a journalist. Interview me.’

  Charlie and Buddy turned and sat up. He was motioning with the gun towards a sofa behind them.

  He was smiling.

  Which was a mistake since the smile was too perfect: too intelligent to be a smirk, but too pleased with itself to be anything other than a display of infinite self-regard. It was a mistake because it restored Charlie’s self-possession, enabled him to think again, to feel what it was that had brought him here.

  ‘Could we get some light in here?’ Charlie said, as he sat down on the leather sofa.

  ‘No,’ said the Colonel, taking his seat, revolver on his right knee, legs apart, body straight, looking at them.

  Behind him to the right were bookshelves and there was a hard line of light underneath a door leading to another room, a military shield or unit emblem, perhaps, hanging on the other wall. The apartment seemed spacious and spartan and there didn’t seem to be any female touches about. But you couldn’t be sure of anything. There could be someone else in the other room behind the door. Charlie couldn’t tell. The only light came from the moonlit sky, still hours from dawn, and from the glow of the city across the river. Just behind the Colonel, there was a glass door, left ajar on to a balcony, and cold air from the outdoors streamed around their ankles. The Colonel was a few feet away. You could hear him breathing.

  ‘Are you the Colonel of Second Army Corps, Special Operations?’ Charlie began.