Charlie Johnson in the Flames Page 2

  The helicopter felt for the pad and settled down. The doors were pulled open and they had a gurney right up under the rotors. They lifted her on and a team raced her away along the tarmac, and two medics were holding him by the elbows, until he shook them away. Everyone left him alone after that. He said he would walk, and they left him to follow the team that was running the gurney into emergency. He could see the low caterpillar shape of the mobile naval hospital, the brown network of tents where they worked on mine victims and emergency medical evacuations from the zone. The air was cold and scented with jet fuel. The interdiction flights were running twenty-four hours a day. In the distance, at the far end of the runway, the Nighthawks were poised for take-off, their fantails glowing crimson. He felt the fear ebbing from him with every step he took. He could see the nurses just ahead, in the light of the halogen arcs at the admission bay of the hospital, taking her inside.

  He followed her down the low corridors, lit by sloping arches of 40-watt bulbs, conscious now, as he passed the young surgeons in their theatre scrubs and the naval orderlies in their browns, that he was dirty and blood-soaked and unwell. But they stopped him when the gurney was wheeled into the surgery bay, behind two plastic flanges that closed against him. Two medics sat him down, and a nurse poured sweet milky coffee down his throat, which stopped him shaking, and they attended to his hands. They laid him down on a bed and they put him on a drip, and a blonde nurse, with her mouth covered in hospital green, had his hands on her lap, cleaning them with swabs. Everything hurt, and he said so, and she gave him an injection and he felt nothing at all and lay on his back watching night moths slam their heads into the rows of naked bulbs that snaked down the apex of the tent. The heat ventilators were roaring and the tent flaps were billowing, and dust from the moths’ damaged wings filtered through the light and Charlie felt he had made it home and dry. He was lying back with his eyes open, when a young surgeon in scrubs came in. He wanted to know whether he knew her, and Charlie asked, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said that the female civilian was DOA – or shortly thereafter, he corrected himself – and that since he was going to have to process her, he had to know her name.

  ‘She didn’t have one,’ Charlie said. For the rest of his life he was to wonder why he had ever allowed himself to believe it would end in any other way.

  TWO

  Charlie was on the bed in the Esplanade, propped up on the pillows, wrapped in a towel. Etta was beside him. Her skin was damp from the shower and smelt of a face cream he didn’t recognise. ‘What is this stuff?’ he said, reaching up with his bandaged hand to touch her cheek. ‘Can’t remember,’ she said. She was in a hotel dressing gown and she had pulled up the pillows behind her. It was well after midnight. He had been talking from almost the moment she arrived. She said, ‘Go on.’

  Benny had driven the Jeep to the edge of the plateau where the long ravine down into the valley began. It was two in the morning, they had given the competition the slip, and if they did this right, they would be back in the bar for breakfast, with the other crews none the wiser. They left everything they could – lights, batteries, extra tape and medical kit – in the Jeep. The path, about fifty yards from where they parked, dropped steeply and they went down single file, listening to each other’s breathing and the sound of their boots on the stones. They couldn’t use any light, so they stumbled and grabbed for the low branches and swore. Yes, he had been scared and depressed as well.

  ‘Why depressed?’ she asked, reaching over to the cigarette pack on the night table. She didn’t smoke, but he did when he felt like this, and she lit it for him and put it between his lips and then took it away.

  Before the war began, when the border was patrolled by the international monitors, he told her, Charlie had seen pictures of one of the rebel incursion units that had walked into trouble, when they were infiltrating down into the valley. Some cold-eyed guy from the inter nationals’ forensic unit had taken Polaroid after Polaroid up close. Charlie had run through twenty-eight of the pictures, including one of a woman, good-looking in her camouflage, with brown hair and a shocked expres sion, as well she might have, since she had walked right into the ambush and would not have seen anything except some muzzle flash in pitch blackness before she felt her life fly out of her chest like a bird.

  So yes he was scared, and when he got scared, he got depressed. It was adolescent to court danger at his age. Danger had to have some necessity to it and there was no real necessity here. They were crossing the border, in the middle of a war, going down into the valley, just to file some tape showing that the border villages weren’t held by the other side, as they claimed, but by Benny’s people. It was a ‘good story’.

  ‘Good stories pay for my house,’ was Jacek’s line. The prince of cameramen, melancholy, withdrawn, with the loping gait of a hunter, and stringy blond hair like a dog’s ears that came down to meet the collar of that battered brown leather jacket. Charlie blinked: he knew he was not functioning properly if the thought of Jacek tore him up.

  So they were going down the ravine in the dark, on the wrong side of the border, because it was a good story, because all the crews at the refugee camp had been looking for a way to do it and no one finally had the balls to go for it except them. And yes, precisely because they were the oldest crew in the bar, the one with the most miles on the clock, balls had been allowed to decide the question. That was what he was trying to explain to her: from the night in the bar when he and Jacek had drunk too much and Benny had said, ‘You don’t believe me, I’ll take you,’ well you had to go.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Santini was in the bar too.’

  ‘So?’

  Her scepticism was unanswerable. Santini’s presence should not have made a difference. But it had. It was a case of animal dislike – of Santini’s custom-tailored safari jacket, his enraging neatness, and yes, let’s admit it now, his youth – making you do stupid things. Fear of being thought ridiculous was a major reason why men did ridiculous things. Charlie knew this and nonetheless had done something that had been a lot more than ridiculous. ‘You figure it out,’ he said. She said nothing, which was good, since he wasn’t in a mood to be told what a fool he had been.

  He put some blame for it on the American Bar. An absurd name for an absurd place. It stood a half-mile from the refugees’ tents and the stand-pipes and the women pulling up their trousers after a trip to the slit trench. The bar was down a stinking alley, and it had an improbable garden, someone’s idea of an oasis, laid down in crazy-paving, which they kept hosing down, and a little fountain, and heavy pine trees all around it shielding it from the squalor of the town. Strewn around the garden on those white chairs were the same foreign news crews night after night, drinking poison and not even pretending to know what they were waiting for. All the refugee stories, the heart-warming, heart-rending stuff had been done and they couldn’t cover the war because the war was all but invisible. You could hear the Nighthawks, and sometimes you could see the detonations and once or twice a week they’d be close enough to shake the ground, but otherwise Charlie thought he might as well be back at the bureau watching it on the monitors.

  The guy they called Benny hanged around the bar, fixing for the crews. It wasn’t his real name and he thought it was beneath his dignity, but everybody called him that. He had been a waiter in Dortmund and Charlie’s first instinct was that he was useless. He was always uncomfortable, boasting, trying to pretend he was a player. Jacek thought that he wasn’t useless, just someone who couldn’t bear to admit that he would rather be in Dortmund, where nothing happened, than here, where his so-called people were fighting for their so-called freedom. ‘He is embarrassed to be afraid’ was Jacek’s considered opinion and this meant that Benny was to be trusted simply because his failings were visible, ‘like the rest of us’, Jacek added, letting this Polish Catholic thought trail upwards into the pall of smoke which stayed trapped by the pines around the crazy-paved haven of the American Bar.
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  Benny had established his credibility with the fighters by smuggling in a couple of Uzis from Germany. He talked about his homeland down in the valley, but really, if he had been honest, home was in Dortmund. His German was perfect, and when he had drunk some, he told them about his German woman and their Kinder, the municipal Schwimmbad at the end of his street, and the good money he was going to make when he could open a place of his own. Or some such thing. They were drinking after all, and Charlie couldn’t remember all the nonsense they said, although now it seemed to matter, since it was in that bar that the decision was taken. After a week of Benny talking and not delivering, he came back one night whispering that the brigade commander had ‘authorised’ him to lead them down to ‘the command post’, four miles down the track at the edge of the first village in the valley.

  ‘God almighty,’ Charlie said, and Etta took the cigarette from his lips and stubbed it out.

  Charlie lay beside her, so close he could hear the intimate sounds her body made, the soft rise and fall of her breath. It was all very comforting and yet unsettling, since Charlie had taken a chance on her and they hadn’t ever been like this, and they should have been exploring each other’s every pore instead of lying side by side, presuming an intimacy that wasn’t there at all.

  He’d just phoned her. Like that. It was one more thing he’d done that didn’t make sense, but which seemed logical at the time. What made him go through with it was that she didn’t sound surprised. She hadn’t said Why me? Why there? Are you sure? She’d just said, I heard. Are you all right? And he had said, Why? Do I sound funny? You do, she said and he had admitted that he was not quite right.

  She’d flown from London to be there. That was something. He was grateful when she showed up in the lobby. When he said so, she replied, ‘I don’t like grateful. Makes me feel like Mother Teresa.’

  ‘Is glad better?’

  She kissed him in the elevator gently on his lips. It was the first time she had ever kissed him. She didn’t say anything about the bandages on his hands.

  He had stayed in the hotel about half a dozen times, and after his night in the Navy hospital it was where he wanted to be. It had Third Reich corridors, curving, carpeted, high-ceilinged and dim. There was some story about it being a German HQ during the Second World War. So it had shameful glamour in its past and the staff pretended they remembered him, and that was all Charlie wanted in a hotel.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Charlie suddenly asked her.

  ‘We’re just talking, Charlie,’ she said. Charlie thought that sounded all right. It struck him, while he lay there, that he knew so little about her, except that she was from that border region where Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia met and where there were, or used to be, Jews and Slovaks and Hungarians and Ukrainians all mixed together. That was what she said, leaving you to figure out which one she was. There was the accent, and the smell of her face cream, and the close-fitting cut of her suits, but nothing about her had ever come sharply into focus until that moment when he had checked himself in and reached for the phone, knowing that she was the one he had to call. She hadn’t asked the obvious questions like why he hadn’t gone home to Elizabeth. Her willingness to let obvious questions go had been impressive. Frankly, he just hoped that she would keep listening and not care whether this had any future. He didn’t want to rejoin his life. He hoped his life would stay on the other side of the rain that kept falling in the hotel courtyard and that it would keep raining, and that they could keep hearing it through the white curtains which rose and fell in the breeze.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  It had taken two hours in the dark to get down to the bottom of the valley. They broke the cover of the trees, where the path gave out on a dust-covered road that ran through the length of the village. There were maybe fifteen houses, although he couldn’t see them all because of the bend in the road. They climbed over some low stone fences and then ducked under a clothes-line. By the wall of the first house they stood stock-still, waiting for the sound of their own footfalls to settle, listening to the animals shifting in the straw behind the wooden staves of a barn. In an upstairs window, there was a flicker of someone moving, as if they had been seen. A quarter-moon scudded in and out behind dirty clouds. They heard the Prowlers and F16s above them and they hoped their thunder covered their sounds. Jacek was loping along, keeping low. They hadn’t blackened their faces – it wasn’t smart to pretend to be a combatant – so they shone like lanterns whenever the moon came out from behind the clouds.

  Benny was lost and was trying to pretend he wasn’t; straight down the lane, in plain sight. The rebel command post they were supposed to be heading for was nowhere to be seen and the lane was petering out, and they were losing the time they needed to get back up to the plateau before the first patrols.

  At the last house in the village – just before the woods closed in again – Benny stopped and they all stepped into the shadow by the barn wall and he tapped on the door. Unbelievably, he seemed to be asking for directions.

  That had been the basic mistake, Charlie thought, to have drawn them in, those two people whose names he never knew, to have drawn them into all the conse quences. It need not have happened.

  But you didn’t have time to think because Benny was beckoning through the open door and they blundered into the room, heavy figures taking up too much space, making too much noise. There were people there, but you couldn’t see them, and then hands – Benny’s maybe, maybe somebody else’s – were pushing you along a passage and down some stairs. The smell of earth and mould and damp told you it was the cellar. And you stayed there listening to the floorboards creak above your head, and Jacek’s laboured breathing and the thump of your blood.

  It was a rootcellar, not high enough to stand straight up in, dirt on the floor, and somewhere in the dark, onions. But they did not move, just stayed there, framed in dawn light from the window, listening to the noises overhead.

  Then they went still. No patrols till six had been Benny’s promise, and there it was in the lane, the blue half-track, at ten to five. You heard it before you saw it: a low engine noise, and then through the cobwebbed window, you could see the studded track of its tyres maybe fifteen feet away. You could hear boots stepping down from the half-track, footfall on gravel. So you stood still breathing in the acrid odour of Benny’s sweat in the darkness, watching while Jacek edged his face away from the window light into the shadow, then stood motionless, breathing in and out, praying to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

  Above you, stillness, not even the sound of weight being shifted from one foot to another. The people upstairs, waiting in the dark.

  Incredible mental alertness: you had time to think about whether your footprints were still visible on the dusty track, whether the militia had picked them up. You had time for all the possibilities – Benny has betrayed you, he has not; he will buckle, he will not. All the possibilities run through your mind, except of course what happens.

  Charlie got up in his towel, went over to the curtains, pushed them aside and watched the rain for a while. He came back to bed, lay down, leaning against her shoulder. She smiled but he had a bad feeling about it: what was he doing here? Why was he leaning against the shoulder of a woman he didn’t really know?

  ‘Go on,’ she said and Charlie shook his head.

  ‘It’s good to talk. But why exactly? Why is it supposed to make any difference at all?’

  ‘You asked me to come,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘I know you don’t. But it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Why are we doing this?’

  ‘Charlie.’ It was the way Jacek used to say it, just to shut him up. It worked this time. Someone had to help him stop these futile gusts of helpless self-recrimination. He came back to himself. He thought: she is all right. Isn’t investing too much in being here, isn’t holding her breath, doesn’t want anything from me.

  Would he have flown from London
to listen to this? Not without something in return. Like sloshing around in the bath together, like spilling the minibar over each other and licking it off. But there hadn’t been anything like that. In fact, there had been nothing at all. She took a shower. He took a shower. She re-bandaged his hands with the dressings the Navy had given him. She unpacked a small bag and hung a dress in the closet. She tossed his clothes into a hotel laundry bag, rang for service and told them to dispose of them and to send for new ones, same size, in the city. He watched all this with approval. She took charge. He liked that. The weather lifted inside him and he knew all he had to do was lie there with her and talk it out, talk it through until it was no longer weighing upon his chest.

  Etta was what he would have called an office friend, though he didn’t know what to call her now. She had been there when he took the job at the bureau, and for a long time he didn’t pay her any attention. She didn’t go out on the road. She was there when he came back. She was Etta the unit manager, famously efficient, famously unapproachable, famously gone at six sharp every evening. She had outlasted four editors, the smart boys, she called them. Charlie’s contempt for management was unruly and professionally suicidal, while hers had a queenly disdain which he came to admire.

  He had said to her once that she should be running a small country. She laughed and then said in her dark voice, ‘No, Charlie, it is enough to run you.’ So she stayed: they all got younger, except Charlie and her. He supposed they were about the same age though with women you could never be sure. She was the subject of much speculation, most of it sexual, because of the perfume and a couple of cream outfits that made even soundmen, the most boring train spotters in their business, sit up and sniff the office air like hungry dogs. But because she was Eastern European, and ‘kept to herself ’ and was older than most of the crews, nobody had tried anything, or come back to tell about it. She knew everything of course because she processed all the expense claims. What male sordidness was there in those piles of chits: trips to brothels, doctor’s bills for the clap, hard-core services of every description, which they dropped on her desk, followed by comical, bold-facing lying, about why none of it looked as bad as it seemed. Charlie had tried it on a few times himself, but she was never fooled. She listened expressionless and then tossed back two of his claims just to let him know that she was not taken in by his low-rent villainies.