Bite (35 page)

I have chosen. It is evening, in a day I don't know in a month I don't know. Dakka has just brought me a pineapple, hacked roughly into pieces. A last meal. I devoured it like an animal, sucking the juice off my filthy fingers. Dakka, the apprentice rapist and war criminal, looks at me with amazement and even respect. He smiled and nodded at me, then flicked his eyes towards the torture cell. ‘Tomorrow, you?'

I nodded. Tomorrow, me. Not Jarman, but me.

(Erica's Diary 1992)

The car bumped up a ramp out of the police station and onto the street. Max, under a blanket on the back seat, saw street lights flash yellow through the fabric.

‘You can come out now,' Alex said. ‘We're in the clear.'

Max sat upright and saw Alex for the first time. He was short and dark, with receding hair, not at all as Max had imagined.

‘How did you do it?' Max asked.

‘I called in some big favours. Officially, I'm taking you for an interrogation. Voos and Stokenbrand were going to come with me but I guess I must have forgotten to wait for them. I reckon it gives us around a couple of hours.'

‘Where are we going?'

‘A little place not far from Rotterdam, on a quiet canal. D'Anville's barge is moored there. Are you ready for this?'

Max nodded and rubbed his face. The car clock read just after midnight, but it felt like four in the morning. ‘I'm running on adrenaline, but I got a few hours left in me.'

‘I want to hear the story of Grzalawicz's last hour, Max. You are the only one who can tell me.'

‘Sure, but later. When this is all over I'll tell you everything I know. But I can't tell you much about the others.'

‘Kuijper was electrocuted, just like Miller and Stevens. Someone, I guess d'Anville, had ripped the bottom five feet of lightning conductor off the side of the church, and used the power cables from the generator to earth it via the scaffolding where Kuijper was. Of course d'Anville couldn't have known that he was going to get Miller and Stevens too. That was a bonus for him.'

‘What about Mary-Anne?'

‘Dead too. Single powerful stab wound from under the left ribcage, commando style. Went straight into the heart.'

They spent two hours on the motorway, then turned off down a narrow straight road bordered by a narrow canal and quaint steep-roofed houses. They passed through a medieval town, its street cafés still busy, and then down a long flat road cutting through treeless pastures towards a distant line of giant modern windmills, their massive metal propellers turning lazily in the moonlight.

‘Look,' Alex said. They were converging with a thirty foot embankment that marched across the countryside like a wall. Above it Max could see the superstructure of a cargo ship, lit up like a Christmas tree, making stately progress towards them. Alex took the car up a sliproad onto a narrow road on the embankment, and killed the engine. Beyond was the silvery water of a huge canal, a hundred yards wide and straight as a ruler.

‘Crazy country where the water is higher than the land, right?' Alex said. ‘I'm told this goes all the way via the Rhine, right up into Switzerland eventually.'

‘Where's d'Anville's barge?' Max asked.

Alex consulted a map. ‘Just here.' He looked up and pointed out a low, dark shape moored two hundred yards away. ‘I think this is it. It's called the Roode Koninkje.'

They left the car and walked up the towpath. The evening was warm and breezy. Alex slapped a hand against his neck, and then examined it. ‘Plenty of mosquitoes around here.'

When they were fifty yards away Alex turned and pressed cold metal into Max's hand. ‘I guess I should be reluctant to do this, but all bets are off now. Call it gratitude.'

Max thanked him and pocketed the gun. It was a Heckler and Koch, like the one Miller had carried.

The barge was sixty yards long, with low living quarters towards the stern, a rusting yellow derrick, and an aged Ford Fiesta on the flat foredeck. There was light from only one window, the irregular intensity indicating a television was on.

‘You sure this is the right place?' Max whispered.

‘Name matches, place matches. But let's not go crazy, okay? Just in case,' Alex responded, tapping Max's gun.

Max reached across the three-foot gap to the barge, grabbed the rail and stepped across. Alex followed. They drew their guns and edged along the walkway until they were close to the lit window. Max took a deep breath and slid across until he could see inside.

It is a dawn after a sleepless night. I hear the generator starting up. It is wheezing away, and my pee is squirting out of me and running under my feet. I am more scared that I ever have been in all my life. I have never really felt pain. Not unbearable pain, not the pain that makes you beg for death. But I am about to.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

Hallowed be thy Name

Thy Kingdom Come

Thy Will be Done

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Give us this day our Daily Bread

And Forgive us Our Trespasses…

They are at the door. My door. I hear the key.

Forgive me and be merciful.

(Erica's Diary 1992)

Through the barge window Max saw a slim man in T-shirt and jeans, maybe fifty years old, with thinning, wispy hair and heavy stubble. He was slouched at a table with his back to the window. Max felt there was something vaguely familiar about him. He tried to think where he'd seen him before. One look at the face should do it, but he couldn't see his face.

The man was reading a magazine while the TV was on quietly in the background. Max's gaze was drawn to the news bulletin on the screen. A drenched reporter was pointing behind him to a circle of police cars and crouching cops. Beyond, Max recognised the Oude Kerk. Then Max's own mugshot came on the screen.

The man jumped up in alarm, pressing the remote control to raise the TV volume. He had recognised Max's mugshot. That put him a step ahead until Max knew who he was. Max leaned back against the barge rail, bracing himself to kick out the glass. The man turned first, saw Max looming through the window and recoiled in terror.

Recognition was instant. Max had sat next to him on the jumbo jet all those weeks ago. The nervous, fidgety guy with the fear of flying and the orange tablets. The ordinary guy described by the waitress as sitting with Erica. Old friends not lovers, she had said. Erica's kidnapper.

Max could have shot him then and there, but he was sick of death and instead he kicked the window in. By the time Max yelled ‘don't move', the guy had ducked out of sight of the window. A door banged. Max kicked out the rest of the glass and slid carefully through the window. Footsteps pounded away in the corridor outside, then the clatter of stairs. Too fast to be up, must be down.

Once Alex was inside, Max led off into the corridor. The man must have gone left, towards the centre of the barge because the corridor the other way was too short for the number of footsteps he heard. To the left the narrow pipe-fringed passage led ten yards to a wooden door in a bulkhead. A few feet before narrow staircases led up and down. Max chose down.

A door clanged shut some way ahead. Max and Alex emerged into a grey metal corridor lit by fluorescent tubes. Ahead was a hefty bulkhead, its metal door circled with rivets the size of boiled eggs. Max leaned his head against the cold metal. He could hear nothing, so he pressed the stiff brass handle and pushed. The door opened slowly, restrained by something. Max pushed harder and heard a ripping noise. Now the door opened fully, taking the torn remains of a big net curtain with it. A huge, dimly-lit chamber fifteen feet high stretched away forty or fifty yards. This was the hold, converted into a huge gymnasium. It was lined with Nautilus weightlifting machines. At the far end was what looked like a small swimming pool.

Behind Max, Alex was waving his arms around. ‘This place is chock full of bugs.'

‘Yeah. Mosquitoes.' Max could hear whining by his ear. ‘No prizes for guessing what they are carrying.'

Alex found a switch on the wall and strip lights flickered on down both sides of the gym. Only then did they see how dense the clouds of insects were. Already their clothes were peppered with thirsty insects, and there were thousands more swirling above them and speckling the white ceiling. Alex ripped off a couple of strips of the netting and wrapped one around his head. The other he offered to Max who ignored it.

‘Jesus!' Alex swatted at his bare arms. ‘Let's make it quick, okay?'

‘It takes as long as it takes,' Max muttered, making his way forward towards the pool. He looked in it. The water was shallow and dirty. Dead insects littered the surface. ‘At least we know we got the right place.'

From the deck above them they heard the creak of footsteps. ‘I'll go up and get him,' Alex volunteered. ‘You okay to search this level?'

‘Sure.'

Max crept forward towards a bulkhead at the far end of the gym. He could hear tapping on the metal. He listened, then responded with a few knocks of his own. ‘Erica? Is that you?'

The tapping became louder and frantic.

‘I'm coming for you. Just as soon as I find a goddamn door.' He looked around, then noticed a metal ladder going up to the top of the bulkhead. He climbed right to the ceiling, where a sliding hatch door was set in the top of the bulkhead. It was held shut with a padlock and short chain. Max tapped on the door, and got a frantic volley of hammering back. He slipped the pistol through the chain and began to turn it around and around until the chain tightened into a knot. One final heave cracked a link, and Max slid the door open.

The first things Max saw were the tears of joy on Erica's face. She was bound and gagged, crammed into a shallow bunk space, but she was alive. Max leaned into the space and gently untied the gag.

‘Oh Max! Thank God.' Erica breathed his name again and again, her words finally dissolving into sobs.

‘It is so good to see you. So good.' Max squeezed into the tiny, stale locker and squeezed her tight in his arms, letting her tremble and shudder against him while he untied her. ‘I'm never letting you out of my sight again, never.'

Outside, there was a noise and Max heard Alex call his name.

‘I've found her, Alex. She's up here.' Max stuck his head out of the bunk space. Alex had the kidnapper up against the wall of the gym at gunpoint, hands tied behind his back.

‘What's his name?' Max yelled.

‘He won't say,' Alex replied.

Max turned to Erica. ‘Are you going to introduce me to your old friend?'

She forced a thin smile. ‘Max, meet Dr Jarman Herrera.'

The beach stretches away endlessly to the horizon at either side, and there is not a single cloud above the ocean to soften the equatorial light which dazzles and cleanses and bleaches all things. Everything is bright: My swimsuit, a soft towel, a table with a long drink. And in that drink, ice.

As I swill my drink, the cage comes seeping back, despite all my efforts to keep that corner of my mind forever dark. In that last day, when the generator began its fearful coughing I was taken to the room which stank of vomit and fear and excrement. They stripped me, and chained me on a greasy metal table. Crocodile came to me and asked me again, as the copper clips were attached to my tongue, my breasts and my clitoris, would I take the punishment to save Jarman?

‘Is this electricity for you or for him?'

I thought long and hard and whispered my answer.

Afterwards, Crocodile took me to his room. This time I drank the gin and tonic, with plenty of freshly made ice from his new refrigerator, and showered and put on the new dress, and I even tried to smile when he asked me.

For the next few hours Crocodile used my flesh for his own ends, forcing from me not just acquiescence but the mimicry of love and desire. Everything I did then, I did to punish myself, to burn away my guilt. Afterwards, when Crocodile wept for himself and his crimes, I found my arms around his body. Curiously, I could not cry at all.

I was released that night, driven by Gaptooth along the rutted spine of a nightmare forest, and dizzy with hunger, dumped outside a government-controlled town. That was seven weeks ago. Physically, I'm healed, but my mind is numb. I know that the Erica who emerged from the cage is not the Erica Stroud-Jones who went into it. I know things about myself that no-one should ever know. Those secrets I can trust to paper, but to no person.

Yesterday, I heard on the radio that that the KPLA has gained its place at national reconciliation talks and the last western hostage, Dr Jarman Herrera had been released. I could not bear to see him again, could not bear to ask for his forgiveness. In my mind his face will live always. In the end I am only flesh and blood and some burdens cannot be borne. Now I will bear always the expression I saw on Jarman's face as we passed each other in the corridor of our gaol. Me, leaving the torture cell unscathed. Him arriving to suffer what I had not, at the uttermost end, the courage to face.

The question always returns: ‘Is this electricity for you or for him?'

I had replied just one word:

‘Him.'

And the clever, evil Brigadier had smiled, knowing we were equal at last.

(Erica's Diary, Kinshasa 1992)