Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read online

  ‘You know this already,’ he said.

  ‘Were you in the Drenica valley a month ago?’

  ‘You know this too.’

  ‘Prijedor? The Drina valley back in ’92? I am told you were there too.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Yes or no.’

  ‘We are not in The Hague here. All this “yes or no” is for prosecutors, and you, Mr Johnson, are not a prosecutor.’

  Again, that smile, a glimpse of white incisors in the gloom.

  ‘What kind of a story are you writing, Mr Johnson?’

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘There is no story,’ he said.

  ‘Forget stories,’ Charlie said. He didn’t want to play around any longer.

  ‘So what are we doing here? And you, Mr Savic, what are you doing with this man?’ the Colonel said.

  ‘He is my friend,’ Buddy replied.

  ‘And why the revolver?’

  ‘Because I wanted to kill you,’ Buddy said.

  The Colonel laughed softly. ‘Belgrade intellectuals,’ he said. ‘For possession of this weapon, you will do three years.’

  ‘You will arrange this personally?’ Buddy said.

  The man nodded and shrugged, as if to say: ‘Yes, if it gave me pleasure. If I wanted to.’

  Buddy, on the sofa beside him, felt Charlie’s body stiffen and lean forward. He was as tightly wound as a hunter with his prey in plain sight, just there, through a clearing, waiting for a clear shot.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Charlie said. ‘There was a woman. In the Drenica. A month ago. I was there with a crew. We have tape.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Johnson, I saw your report.’ And the Colonel gestured into the gloom as if to say that he had sat there one evening in this very room, watching the nightly atrocity footage, lifted off the international network feeds, only in this case it had happened to be his unit and his atrocity, him in body armour and holding a cigarette lighter in his hand.

  It had been one of Charlie’s hopes that he would surprise the man. But there were no surprises after all. The Colonel knew everything. It didn’t seem to matter that it had all been seen, that his secret was known and that Jacek’s images had captured it all. There was something in the face in front of him that told Charlie the Colonel was even glad to have his very own home movie.

  Charlie had been wrong about everything. He had thought the Colonel would have forgotten the woman, among all the others who must have passed through his hands or the hands of his unit in the years of war. Charlie had come to make him remember, and he remembered everything. You could see it in the face in the darkness. So now he had to feel it. He had both to remember and, for once in his life, to feel it.

  Charlie’s voice did not rise, it fell to a whisper. Every word came out with a pause between. ‘You. Set. Her. On. Fire.’

  The face across the darkness was without expression. The gun on his knee did not move.

  ‘So what I want to know is why. I’m not a prosecutor. I don’t give a fuck about justice. You’ll never go to The Hague. But me, I just want to know. Why.’

  Again, the man in the darkness did not move or speak. A silence ensued. There was the murmur of traffic noise from the open door of the balcony.

  Charlie could wait. In the instant he had said the word why, he had felt everything come clear, the whole insane exercise making sense. Why. He wanted to know why her life turned out not to matter at all.

  ‘You think she was garbage?’

  The Colonel said nothing. Instead he reached down to the floor, all the while covering them with the gun, and picked up the tape recorder. With his free hand he pressed Record, and placed it on the floor between the two of them. Now there was a tiny red operating light and a new sound in the darkness: the slithering of audio tape through its silver gate.

  ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘You ask why?’ He smiled again. ‘Because she was sheltering you.’

  She had given them shelter. Except that she wasn’t offered a choice. They had burst through the door and into the rootcellar, before she even opened her mouth. They had never exchanged so much as a word. But that wouldn’t matter. She had not betrayed them, and for that she had paid.

  ‘You torch her for this?’ Charlie was leaning forward.

  ‘So the others learn from her example, Mr Johnson.’ He said it quietly, as one professional to another.

  Charlie said nothing. Her example. The others. The way he said it stopped all thought.

  ‘The unit you were with sent a signal. We picked it up. You made an obvious mistake, Mr Johnson.’

  Buddy couldn’t understand the look on Charlie’s face, its utter blankness. It seemed to Buddy that Charlie had not anticipated this questioning and that now he was staring down into an abyss.

  ‘And what were you doing there, anyway? When I saw your report on the television, I laughed. You proved that the terrorists had a base four kilometres inside our area of operations. You risk your life for this? You risk her life for this?’

  You risk her life for this. It is not what you intend. But it is what results. No one ever intends the conse quences, especially when the intentions are good.

  The Colonel said one more thing, quietly, as if stating a mere matter of fact, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, a statement that could not admit of contradiction.

  ‘Collateral damage. She was what you Americans call collateral damage.’

  Charlie saw her face, her eyes, her mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, soundless: save me. He felt her breath on his face, her hands gripping his shoulders, the palms and fingers of his hand fused into her burning flesh.

  ‘You talk about her like this?’ Charlie whispered. He was so close now that Buddy could see the two men were within touching distance. He thought they might be there for a long time just breathing, and so what happened next was the last thing he ever expected. Charlie rose with a roar in his throat and lunged across the dark space, catching the Colonel’s neck with the force of both hands. The two bodies crashed backwards against the glass door, on to the balcony. The glass shattered as it swung back and Charlie fell on top of him with his hands around the Colonel’s neck, roaring between his teeth, making the sound of an enraged and tortured animal.

  Buddy was on his knees, looking for the revolver, when he saw the Colonel bring his knee up, lifting Charlie’s body into the air, while his hands chopped Charlie’s grip off his neck. Buddy’s hands found the gun just as the Colonel pushed upwards with his legs and vaulted Charlie’s body up on to the waist-high railing of the balcony. Buddy was raising the gun when he saw Charlie, on his back, his head tipped backwards into space, his legs and trunk balanced on the railing, his hands struggling to right himself, like a bug on his back. He was gasping for air, looking up and Buddy was shouting but it was too late. The Colonel gave one last kick and without a sound, Charlie pitched wide-eyed into the void.

  The Colonel stood up on the balcony, his white T-shirt spotted with blood, but the smile on his face was telling Buddy that really he shouldn’t pull the trigger. Watery Eyes had entered the room and had his gun at Buddy’s back. Then everything slowed down, in the long viscous time of afterwards. Buddy could hear the city sighing in the distance and at his feet the tape still slithering through the gate. The red light glowed. The Colonel bent down and turned it off. Watery Eyes reached out to take it, but the Colonel handed it to Buddy. ‘Take it. It’s your interview.’

  THIRTEEN

  One minute Etta was in the car park wrapping her hands around her elbows to keep warm, while Jacek was loping towards the building, the next she was running in the direction of the sound and the stillness that followed it. Afterwards it seemed a mercy to her that he had fallen feet first so that his head had been spared, as he lay there broken like a doll, eyes shut, unscarred and dead. She was kneeling beside him and her finger was still on the place at the base of his neck where she had felt for a pulse when Watery Eyes and his men came up and Jacek lifted her to her feet and
took her away.

  She did her job, as she always did, clearing the body from the morgue, working with the embassy to get the paperwork done for the flight back to England. She was the one who, with the help of the third secretary, did the deal with the authorities. Buddy would be released and allowed to return to the United States, it being understood that he would not discuss the case. Otherwise, of course, his ex-wife and his ailing mother, both obliged to remain, would face consequences too obvious to discuss. Buddy did not object and neither did Jacek, and so Etta was the one who let the ground swallow up Charlie’s quest. She conspired in the embassy’s official story that there had been a tragic accident, and it did not surprise her that the local journalists did not dig further.

  She accompanied the body home on the plane, watching how the plain box was loaded, and then unloaded at the other end. At the airport, she delivered it into the hands of Shandler and the others from the office who came out to take over. Elizabeth was there, composed but red-eyed, and in an airport lounge Etta gave her an account of what had happened and handed her Charlie’s bag, the one he had left behind in the Moskva.

  She did not attend Charlie’s funeral because she had no standing there. It was a family affair. She did not want to see Charlie’s daughter, and she did not want to see Elizabeth again. She did not want to listen to what others would say from the pulpit about him, neither their tenderness nor their valedictory lies. Jacek said he would go for the two of them. This, she said, was fine with her.

  After the ceremony – a south London cremation – which she spent in her apartment, seated at the kitchen table, staring out through the blinds into the grey blankness of the London sky, Jacek rang. He said he did not want to intrude, but he was at the airport, and the flight to Warsaw was not full, and if she wanted to come, Magda and he would like her company.

  She was there within an hour and sat silently beside him throughout the flight then drove with him through the dark Polish countryside, until the lights from the car picked out Magda in the drive of their farmhouse. Etta got out and allowed herself to be embraced by a woman she had never met. They stood in the darkness and thanks to the warmth in Magda’s body, Etta managed to strangle the cry in her throat.

  They put her in the same room that Charlie had used and she went to sleep looking up at the night through the skylight. She stayed for three days, quiet, replying when spoken to, obviously wanting to be there, but not wanting to speak, and since they didn’t want to speak either, their silence was companionable and unquestioned.

  Magda worked at her translations at the table with the view of the garden, and Etta sometimes sat nearby, reading and then putting her book down and staring through the window. It was May, and there was green grass and the beginning of leaves. The air was moist, cool and smelt of tilled fields. Their pigs were birthing.

  She went out into Jacek’s workshop and sat on a stool and watched him clean his cameras with the air hose and the fine brushes. It wasn’t clear whether he was just going through the motions, or preparing for another assignment. But Etta didn’t ask him, because Jacek might not have been able to tell her if she had. Jacek said Charlie had done the same, sat and watched him work by the hour when he stayed with them, and Etta received this news without expression. They did not have to say that he was still there, a liminal presence like the echo that remains when a gun has been fired.

  He had chosen his redemption, and there was nothing to regret about that, she thought, except that it was also an act of desertion. One night, she stood alone in the bedroom, in her dressing gown, and she reached down and undid the belt, as she had once done, to fold him in, and then since the room was empty, as all rooms now were, she felt the full weight of her desolation.

  She was leaving the next day, going back to work, she said. Dinner was over and they were all seated around the table in front of the fire when she said finally – without any preliminary – that she thought Charlie had been an innocent. Magda asked her what she meant, and Etta paused and looked at her wine glass, and pushed a strand of her blonde hair off her face and said that when she was eighteen, in her country, she had been raped. A family friend, she said, with no particular emphasis or irony, correcting herself, not a friend, a member of the family. Her mother’s younger brother, Uncle Janos. Out of the blue, as they say in English. He still lived in the town where she grew up, and her parents never knew, and life went on as if nothing had happened. But that was why, she added, she left home, and why she had begun again. Magda reached out her hand but Etta gently shook her head as if to say that she wasn’t looking for consolation. She looked at Magda calmly and said in that thoughtful and slightly accented voice, ‘I do not want you to misunderstand. It was an experience that taught me that we live in a world where there are people who do this. Whether they understand what they do or not does not matter. Why they do it is not an interesting question. What matters is that they do it.’

  Charlie, she said, was an innocent because he never lost his surprise at this fact about the world. He should not have been surprised. It was a mistake, she said, looking out of the window at the reflections of their faces and the black night behind.

  Neither Magda nor Jacek said anything, though Magda put her hand on top of Jacek’s as if to shield him from what was being said, as if she feared that Jacek might be a prisoner of such innocence himself. Whatever he thought, Jacek let her hand rest there, his eyes staring at the littered table.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ Etta repeated, ‘to be so hopeful and therefore so angry when it happened.’

  ‘What happened was wrong,’ Jacek said.

  ‘Of course,’ Etta replied, looking at him with tenderness. ‘Of course. But that is not the point.’

  ‘Why did Charlie believe he could get an explana tion? Why did he feel the world, this’ – and her hands moved and made shadows through the light of the lamp on the table – ‘should owe us any explanation at all?’

  Jacek said that it was not the world that owed us an explanation, but men. One man in particular.

  And here Etta rose from her seat and went to her room, returning with something in her hand. It was Charlie’s tape recorder – just as Buddy had given it to her – and when she clicked Play, a red dot of illumi nation came between them on the table.

  Of course she had saved it. What else could she have done? Return this monstrosity to a grieving and uncomprehending widow, these sounds of her husband’s final seconds alive? Or jettison it, throw it into a bin at the Moskva, so that nobody would ever have to hear what she heard the night she played it alone? No, she could not do that either, for it would have betrayed Charlie, who, whatever else was wrong about him, had died for a certain truth.

  So she had to play it, and she could only play it for Magda and Jacek because they were the only ones who would understand why listening was a necessary office of friendship and an act of witness to the love they had all felt for the man whose face, voice, touch of hands, smell of skin, was fading inexorably from their memories.

  What they heard was this: the scrape of Charlie’s shoes as he shifted position, the sound of the Colonel’s bare feet, Buddy, Charlie, and the Colonel breathing, city noise in the distance through that door opening out on to the balcony and human voices muffled, off-mike and distant as if under water. They had expected, Etta especially, that the tape would be a confession. They had not realised it only contained an accusation, the claim that Charlie had brought the whole calamity, the whole catastrophe of the woman’s death upon himself. They heard the voice of the man who had escaped all judgement and they heard the calm certainty with which he pronounced his own self-exculpation, his ingenious escape from the trap of guilt and the accusations of memory. What they heard was an infamy and since infamy is mysterious, they listened in the rapt silence reserved for the greatest of mysteries. None of them believed the accusation, and none of them ever would, but the truth in it still carried, as the Colonel himself must have hoped, all its capacity to wound.

&nb
sp; Jacek rose from his seat, shut the tape off violently at the point where the speaking stopped, and went out into the night air to be alone. This left two women, one who had loved Charlie, and the other who had tended his wounds, to switch on and hear for a last time, before Etta reached over and threw it into the fire, the final seconds of the tape, the avenging roar from the depths of his being, that was Charlie Johnson’s last word.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen