Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read online

  So Charlie looked at the girls walking by the café and thought how glad he was to be back in Belgrade, while Buddy called his guys on his cellphone. Charlie didn’t know the language, but he could tell that Buddy was getting somewhere.

  Buddy was thin, withered even, and older than Charlie, with the air of a lapsed or defrocked professor. Once, years earlier, they had talked late into the night, and Charlie remembered that it was all Gadamer this and Marcuse that, and Buddy seemed to shed years and become the type of eager, hopeful Marxist who used to meet foreigners in the ’70s and talk about socialism with a human face. Now all that was gone and it had left nothing behind besides good diction and a choice use of language. Somewhere along the line, after the wreckage of an academic career, he had spent a few years in New York, in Brooklyn to be exact, but exile had not suited his nature. ‘In shit is better’, is all he would say about why he came home, although Charlie believed he had gone with every intention of staying and had been defeated by ordinary things, like living in a language that was not his own. And there had been some business with a Suzanna, if Charlie’s memory served, who was much younger and got into Fordham Law School, so the story went, while Buddy languished at home in Brooklyn, listening to short wave radio. So Buddy came home, speaking perfect English, a little more mournful than before and a good deal older, just as his country took its suicidal plunge. ‘Timing was perfect,’ he said once. ‘I leave and country is fine. I come home, and we are conducting experiment in mutually assured destruction.’

  The one unreconciled resistance to English in Buddy’s syntax was the dropping of definite articles. It was always ‘problem’, not ‘the problem’. Otherwise his accent was New York perfect. Indeed it was a little too perfect. It didn’t seem entirely trustworthy to be so fluent, to pass in and out of another language and leave so little trace of your own. He even asked Buddy about it once. ‘Why is my English perfect?’ Buddy pondered the question. ‘Because English is primitive compared to our language.’ Then he smiled and showed that amazing row of long, yellow teeth. Still, perfection raised suspicions in Charlie’s mind. People who were perfect in English usually turned out to be spooks. But it would be pretty imaginative recruiting if Buddy turned out to be one. As he watched Buddy with the cellphone cupped to his ear, nursing the cigarette that hung from his lower lip while his eyes scanned the crowds, Charlie thought he was wrong not to trust him. Or rather, he could trust Buddy as far as he could trust anyone. He felt dangerously detached, looking at the girls in jeans strolling by as if they were all on celluloid in some dull late night movie, rather than in the sizzling sulphur light of the street lamps. He didn’t like this feeling of detach ment, and he wanted it to stop, but like a state of advanced drunkenness, it wouldn’t go away when you wanted it to.

  Come to think of it, Buddy was OK. There had been that night on the highway in ’92, during the Drina clearances in ’92, when they were stopped by the Tigers at the check point. They pulled everyone out of the Jeep and into this shit-smeared interrogation room in the station house nearby. They’d given Buddy the real treatment. ‘It is normal,’ Buddy said to Charlie under his breath when the drunk waved the gun about and said he would fucking kill everyone, fucking everyone. What Buddy meant by normal was that the swearing was a giveaway. Real shooters don’t swear. This guy, sweating, eye-rolling drunk, wasn’t dangerous, just unreliable, so Charlie kept thinking this is normal, and the drunk waved the gun about for the benefit of the boys lolling against the back wall of his office. Creeps like that always go for the local speaker, and they had gone for Buddy. This one had English. ‘They fuck your mother? That’s why you work for them?’ ‘They pay me,’ Buddy said. ‘What do they fucking pay you?’ He gave him a number.

  ‘What’s your fucking name?’

  Buddy gave him his name.

  ‘So why this shit bag calls you Buddy?’

  ‘It’s my nickname.’

  That’s when he hit him. Jacek lunged, but the guys at the back had their hands on him and sat him back down hard.

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, shit bag.’

  It took three hours for the asshole to sober up, three hours for the toxicity in the room to dissipate and for everyone to agree cheerlessly that it had been a misunderstanding. They got Buddy back into the Jeep, which had been stuck by the checkpoint, surrounded by Tigers wearing black garbage bags over their fatigues to keep off the rain. The Tigers raised the barrier and let them through and Buddy went silent as the smoking wood fire in the barrel by the checkpoint died away in their rear-view mirror. He stayed silent right through the next four checkpoints as they passed out of the active zone. He didn’t even smoke a cigarette, though Charlie had offered him one. Yeah, Buddy was OK.

  After talking with his guys, Buddy’s plan was this: go south to this particular town on the municipal bus, spend time in a bar that Buddy knew and wait till some guys from the unit showed up to drink. Then get them to talk. Why this town? Well, mostly because the special units were stationed there and maybe some of them would talk. The reason they might talk was that the only known uprising of reservists had been there too. The boys came back from the zone, on leave, and went to the local press and said they wouldn’t go back, they were sick of it. They even organised a demonstration in front of the party headquarters. So, Buddy reasoned, one of them might finger the guy Charlie wanted to talk to.

  But the plan, such as it was, was risky. The organs would pull you off a bus if they found you heading there. But then they could do the same here, if they found you talking to anyone in uniform. So Charlie would have to make himself inconspicuous and play Buddy’s idiot brother or something and say nothing for a hundred and fifty miles of two-lane blacktop. But it could be done. It was good calling it a plan, though both of them knew it didn’t deserve the name. They had to get an informant, they had to get lucky. It was obvious to them that they didn’t know what they would do if they did get lucky. ‘It is an improvisation,’ said Buddy. Charlie peeled off a roll of dollars, Buddy palmed them, and they were in business again.

  The good thing about him, Charlie realised after he’d got back to his room, was that Buddy never asked the motivation question. He did not say: Charlie, what is the story? What are you doing? This praiseworthy reticence was the result, Charlie judged, of all those years as a fixer for foreign outfits. They came in, they had stupid ideas for stories, usually stolen from a com petitor, and Buddy never asked why. He had allowed luxuriant growth in the ‘They don’t pay me to think’ side of his character. The result was mostly attractive: for example, he didn’t chatter in the crew van, didn’t volunteer dumb ideas and he didn’t smoke all that much either, just slumped staring into the distance, occasionally telling a joke about a girl he knew in the town they were passing. The jokes had a certain charm in that Buddy enjoyed presenting himself as the hapless victim of one weasel-like blonde after another, although it was doubtful there was much truth to this persona. But there were sides of him that could be irritating. Once Charlie had come to town to track down a refugee story and they wasted a week discovering that the massacred refugee children, the innocents put to the sword, were all a mirage. Instead all they’d found was a drab motel on the outskirts of town, hung with laundry in the corridors, where the massacred children had turned up, safe and sound. It was funny, at least later on, how they had stormed through the motel, with Jacek irritably slashing the laundry lines aside, furious that the kids were actually there after all, grubby, tired, bedraggled and unharmed. The look in Buddy’s eyes had said he had known it all along.

  Charlie had worked with fixers in a lot of places, and none of them had this princely refusal to anticipate those disasters willed by his employers. It was scorn, not laziness, Charlie decided. Disasters willed by others, Buddy was prepared to fix. But if a team wanted to fuck it up, Buddy had concluded, it was not his job to stop them.

  Charlie’s working assumption was that this time – especially after six assignments or whatever it was togethe
r – Buddy would decide to warn him if he saw trouble coming. Though when he thought about it, he might know when trouble was coming faster than Buddy. He had not told him the whole story, and so there were bound to be some bad moments ahead, when Buddy discovered what he was in for, but on mature reflection, Charlie felt Buddy wouldn’t back out. He couldn’t say why exactly. It had something to do with the silence that had come over Buddy after the incident with the Tigers. Through the long miles of the night that followed, as they drew up to one checkpoint after another and Buddy sat staring straight ahead, you could feel his hatred for these people and what they had done to his country. Hatred like that was a lodestar. You could set your compass by it, or so Charlie supposed. But, as he turned out the light in the Hotel Moskva, it did strike him that one of the commoner mistakes in life was to suppose that conviction was catching, to suppose that if you felt something with cold fury, Buddy – or anyone else – would feel it too.

  Charlie rarely dreamed but he dreamed of Annie that night. He had wanted to call her from the hotel room, but he hadn’t, and also couldn’t now, he realised. He had been thinking of her as he drifted to sleep looking at the curtains eddying in the breeze as the city slowly settled and slept. When he saw her in the dream, it was so vivid that he wanted to call out to her. They were at the island, and she was getting into the small steel-frame outboard. She was maybe four and she had her life-jacket on, and she got into the boat carefully, the way he had taught her, first one hand then the other on the thwarts and no standing, just sliding down into the seat. She was wearing jeans and that red top and the toenails on her bare feet were painted light green. When she was seated, in the back, she was looking up at him and her hair was tied in two bunches. She said something to him, maybe calling him to get into the boat, but he couldn’t make out what it was. But it was morning, and he knew they were driving over to the marina for bread and fresh coffee, and they had the whole day ahead of them. When he woke the curtains by the open window were still, and the city was momentarily silent and in darkness.

  TEN

  There was a war on, after all, and it wasn’t smart to look like a foreign national on buses heading in the general direction of the front line. So he played Buddy’s silent, possibly idiotic brother all that day, as the bus, one of those fume-spewing monsters, plied its way south, through one long village after another. There was a guy in the seat behind who had the look about him so they said nothing, not even when the bus stopped at a gas pump and everybody got off for a smoke and a leak. Even after the guy with the look stepped down at a town halfway, they didn’t talk.

  The windows were open, it was a bright spring day, and the curtains were flying around, and Charlie was thinking about municipal buses in Greece, half a life-time before. The Norwegian girl wore a straw hat, and he only knew her first name, and they travelled together for most of the day, conscious of the hot line of their bodies vibrating against each other. She would be fifty now, and he might not recognise her in the street. He wondered whether she remembered the old monk on the donkey they had seen at dusk riding through the lemon orchard. He wondered how she would remem ber the scene on the beach in the dark when they were naked and she had said he could, so quietly, just like that, that he didn’t believe it at first. Then she added ‘‘But you have to come out before’ because she didn’t have any protection. So he did, and she had been a tight fit and it may have hurt her, though he didn’t know and she hadn’t said. She was a big-boned, wide-hipped girl with acrid white skin and freckles every where.

  Afterwards they had gone to sleep in the upstairs room at the taverna on the beach. In the middle of the night, a drunk had burst through the door and fallen on his face on the bed across the room. They waited to see if he would move, and when he didn’t, they decided to leave him where he was, breathing heavily, face down in his clothes. The next day when he woke up, his first words were in English: ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He turned out to be a cook from Macclesfield, the taverna owner’s brother, home for a holiday. He wasn’t alto gether pleased that his brother had double-booked his room. His name was Spiro and he looked at the pretty blonde girl, holding the bedclothes up at her chin, as if Charlie was the luckiest man alive. Which at that moment, he was. The memory of it was so strong that Charlie began laughing, and the old lady with the kerchief in the next seat looked at him oddly, and so did the man with the busted blood vessels on his nose, who was reading the official newspaper. This was fine, of course, because Charlie was playing Buddy’s idiot brother. And only idiots laugh for no good reason.

  He was still in a good mood when the bus put them down at the depot in the southern town where Buddy said they were going to find the reservists. It was exactly what he had expected, though, as Charlie realised, few places surprised him any more. He had reached the age his father used to warn him about, when surprises just get fewer and fewer. It had the standard items for a town its size: old style imperial barracks, a baroque church that was shut, a yellow and white party head quarters looking out over a neglected, paper-strewn park with children’s swings, a closed newspaper kiosk and the Hotel Sport’s neon sign just coming on as the light drained away like dirty water in a tub. You couldn’t imagine living in a town like this, but then that was your problem. The inhabitants probably thought there was no other life anywhere else, though there weren’t many of them about to ask.

  A dump, Buddy said as he surveyed the scene. On the other hand, it was the one place that had said no to the war. The reservists had formed up in this square, straight off the buses from the front, and they had smashed the doors of the party headquarters. This was to the credit of the town, Charlie thought, since it was the head quarters of Second Army Group, and lived off the military, especially the bars where the soldiers drank off hours, like the one in the Hotel Sport, where they now proposed to spend – as Buddy gloomily put it – ‘rest of our lives’ till someone showed up. What they would do if no one did was not clear. They didn’t have a Plan B. This had to be the bad guy’s town, Buddy said, since the shoulder flashes on Charlie’s still were from Second Army Group, Special Operations.

  They drank a few beers and listened to the jukebox, though naturally there wasn’t a country and western song on it to save Charlie’s soul. So there was nothing to do but let the listlessness of the place seep into their bones. A few guys with short-cropped, Army-style hair came into the bar, eyed them suspiciously, drank up and left. ‘This is terrific,’ Buddy said, beneath his breath.

  It was now moonless and dark outside. A silver Merc, one of those big heavy diesels, dusty from the road, wheeled into the square, and paused purring in front of the bar. The driver, whoever it was behind the tinted glass, had both of them in plain sight through the bar window. The machine stood there, and then slowly, wheeled off, rubber crackling over gravel. Buddy decided it was time to take a walk. The barman nodded. There was another place, he said, five minutes away. ‘You should try there.’ Buddy nodded. They hadn’t asked.

  The shutters were up on the long low rows of houses on both sides of the street, and thin oblongs of pale light from the televisions inside played through the shutters on to the sidewalk. It seemed that everyone in town was watching television and quite possibly watching the same thing. As they went past each house, Charlie could piece it together, glimpse by glimpse through the shutters. It was official television, lots of hearty accordion playing and big women in peasant clothing thumping around some studio. The people would have watched anything else had they been able to afford one of those foreign dishes. Whenever the editorial writers and other deep thinkers tried to portray the regime as serious Big Time Evil, Charlie always thought of the incorrigible mediocrity of its official television.

  ‘Charlie, level with me,’ Buddy said, head down, kicking the gravel as they walked.

  Charlie said nothing. The reality was he didn’t know what he wanted. Just find the bastard. But then?

  ‘There could be problems.’

  ‘Which it is your
business to anticipate.’

  ‘Your guy is Special Operations. Nobody is going to talk about Special Operations.’

  ‘Since when did that ever stop you?’

  This was how Charlie thought he would manage it, simply by provoking Buddy into remembering that miracles were his business.

  ‘I know someone,’ Buddy said, though why he hadn’t said so earlier, Charlie didn’t understand. Buddy knew someone in every one of these small towns. Someone had to mean a girl he had slept with once, or a man he done a favour for or had been in a car with on the road to the front, or had been shot up with somewhere. Their names and phone numbers were all in a scuffed cardboard-covered address book he kept in a vest pocket, ‘next to my heart’, as he put it. In this case, it was a local radio reporter, who lived behind the shutters of a small house, up one of the cobbled streets off the route the bus had taken into the town. Local radio was a good bet: during the reservists’ demonstration, a reporter from the local station had gone down to the crowd in front of the party headquarters and had broadcast the whole thing – which was why anybody knew about it at all. The reporter was still in jail.

  She opened the door and she didn’t display any of the excitement that girls sometimes showed when Buddy turned up. She stood there, hand on the door, and smiled without surprise at Buddy and then gave Charlie a once-over, lingering on his eyes. There was noise from the radio and smoke rising from a cigarette in an ashtray, yellowed lighting from an overhead bulb and brown plush furniture, an unmade bed, a plastic screen behind which you could see a bathroom, and some of her underwear on a line over the sink. Anna or some such name. Charlie wasn’t paying attention. She might have been twenty-five, and her colour wasn’t all that good, pale like smoke. Why did they all look like this, these girls, with neglected black hair and that smoky complexion and look of resentment, as if you, a perfect stranger, were personally to blame for how their life had turned out?