Charlie Johnson in the Flames (10 page)

Charlie played with the dials, back and forward, but he could never get her face to come into resolution, could never freeze it in such a way that he could print it and have something to hold on to. She slipped away into the flames, and all he could feel was the thud of her body against his and the smell of burning and the groaning from her lips near his ear.

But if you slowed down the militia unit footage, to the moment when the commander got out and came down the path to the house, you could see his face clearly in a frame or two. After she caught and began to flare like a torch, yes, you could see his face. Charlie slowed it down, froze the frame, pressed print and then waited, with a feeling of being satiated and certain of at least one thing, while the single image came off the printer.

He had it in his hand when he came into Shandler's office and he was studying it when Shandler gave him the lecture. It wasn't easy of course, because the footage had run everywhere and the network had recouped every dime. But the thing about Shandler was that he liked to make you think the money didn't matter. There was also the principle, though Charlie never could anticipate what ‘the principle' would turn out to be. Charlie got the whole pompous lecture, the one about not being professional, about not telling them, leaving crew behind, taking leave without permission, not seeking appropriate medical help, the whole boring administrative stick. Charlie even had time, so little did Shandler's words imprint themselves upon him, to observe that their whole relationship was a cliché: Johnson the field man confronts Shandler the desk man. The desk man always wins.

‘So what's it going to be?' Charlie said.

‘I had considered dismissal,' Shandler said.

‘So why don't you?'

‘The footage was too good.'

‘And it would look ridiculous to fire the man who burned his hands getting it.'

‘Something like that.'

‘So I'm grounded.'

‘Desk assignments for a while. Glad to oblige.' Shandler looked at him over the top of his rimless half-glasses.

‘Look at this.' He handed Shandler the picture: a man of about forty, dark hair, trim and tight inside his uniform, one hand outstretched, with the lighter at the end of it.

‘So?'

‘I want to find him.'

‘Not on my dime, Charlie.'

So Charlie said what he had always wanted to say, what he had often rehearsed, but this time it was for real, and he only had one take, so he had to muster years of professional experience into his voice. He gave his boss a long look and said,

‘Shandler, you are such an asshole.'

As he turned and walked out, Charlie had the distinct feeling that he had burned every bridge left.

Except one. He left the office, crossed town and made his way to what he thought was the right bus stop. He wasn't absolutely sure, not being the
perfect
father, that she used this one, but it was the one closest to school, so he waited, and sure enough, a little shoal of them in their red and white uniforms showed up, talking so intently as they came along that Annie looked shocked to see him standing there smiling.

‘What are you doing here?' she said. The other girls eddied back to give her room to deal with this peculiar creature.

‘I've come to take you home.'

‘But you never take me home.'

She didn't look like either of them, he thought. The genes had skipped, and there was a fresh-faced version of Mika looking up at him, squinting at him just the way his mother used to.

She added for good measure, ‘Mom said you're away.'

‘Your Mom's right. I was away and now I'm back for a day and I'm here to take you home.' He said all this brightly, keeping everything light. That was what being a parent was all about, keeping control of the emotional weather.

She still seemed puzzled when the bus came and she stepped on and flashed her pass, and he had to ask what the fare was. The other girls, a trio of them, sat at the back of the bus, whispering and watching them, and she sat on her own, and left a place for him, and he was touched by how hard she was trying, especially with her friends staring at her. He gave the three harpies a cheery wave as he sat down.

He asked what the lessons had been, and she gave a shudder and said music, and it made him laugh to think that the genes had played this second curious trick. Elizabeth had had to reconcile herself to the fact that her own talent wasn't going to have any succession, just as she had been reconciled to only having one, despite her oft-stated conviction that Charlie was the disaster he was because he had been an only child.

Annie pulled her exercise book out of her satchel and sat it on her knees, and he opened it and looked at the procession of her rounded, laborious letters, struggling to catch up with her thoughts. He followed her com position down one side of the page and over on to the next and the one after it. She was in a Gothic phase, and there was a lot of moonlight, and sighing trees, and a dog that howled. He approved of the dog, he said, and suggested that they needed to know what colour it was.

‘But it's pitch dark,' she said. ‘You can't tell what colour the dog would be.'

‘What about the moonlight?' he countered, and she looked at him and conceded that the dog was probably light brown.

The bus let the harpies off, and she was more at home with him then, sitting in silence and then asking where he had been. He had to hand it to Elizabeth: the protection was full time. He just said, ‘Away.'

When they got off at her stop he held out his hand and she took it, and all the way up through the park he felt the keen, new sensitivity of his raw skin against hers. ‘I'm just going to drop you off,' he said as he rang the doorbell. ‘Then I've got to get back to work.'

‘But it's almost dark,' she said, disbelievingly. He was stroking her face and giving her a soft shove in the small of her back to get her inside, as the door opened. Elizabeth registered, then concealed, her shock, and shooed Annie inside. ‘Be there in a sec, sweetheart,' she said, as Charlie caught a glimpse of Annie looking back at him as the door closed.

‘Don't you
ever
do that again,' she hissed.

‘Pick my daughter up from school?'

‘You fucking well know what I mean,' she said. ‘I am keeping up appearances. I do nothing but keep up appearances. Not for your sake. But for hers. And you
will
do what I say.'

‘Or?' He wanted to know what kind of threat he was hearing, though he had a fair idea.

‘You will never see her again.'

She tried to hit him, but he caught her hand first and held it by the wrist up in the air for a second, then let it fall. She stood back, fighting tears, getting them down so Annie wouldn't see, and then she pushed the door open with her shoulder, turned and went inside, closing it behind her.

E
IGHT

                                                                  

E
tta flew home to the small town in what Charlie called her little country, and she let herself sink back into the rhythm of her parents' lives. She took her mother shopping and her father to the doctor to have his injections. They were eighty and eighty-four, and they had lived in the same apartment since they were married. She sat with them at night, at the kitchen table, playing cards with her father, while her mother did the dishes. Nothing had changed since her childhood. The lined wallpaper was the same. The fireman's calendar by the door was the same, though a new one came every year. The rituals were the same – reading the local news paper aloud, while her father nodded and her mother stacked the plates on the draining board. She was glad to be home.

By day, she ironed for her mother and listened to the gossip, noting how the ambit of what she talked about in her small voice had shrunk from the town to the street and from the street to the stairwell of their apartment. Her father was forgetting, but it was the best kind of forgetting, the kind he didn't notice. One night, she stood in the doorway of the room where they slept on separate beds and listened to them breathing slowly through their mouths and she felt that they had become as vulnerable as children.

She paid their bills and made arrangements with their neighbours to get the firewood carried up the three flights and stacked on the balcony. She went for walks on her own, out into the bare fields on the edge of town. One evening, when they were all heading for bed, her mother stroked Etta's face, as they stood in the hallway by the kitchen and said that she looked worried. Care-worn was the actual word. Etta smiled and said she was fine. Her mother said she should go and pay a visit to Uncle Janos. His business was going well and he had moved to a big villa on the heights above town. He still lived alone. Etta kissed her mother on her forehead and told her she should get some rest.

‘Why don't you see him? He asks after you.'

‘I'm happy for him. It's late, let's go to sleep.'

Her mother went into her bedroom, but as she closed the door she gave her daughter a look, both timid and questioning.

As Etta always did when she came home, she kept away from him. It had long ceased to hurt or even matter very much. She felt nothing, in fact, but she didn't want to run into him and she didn't want to discuss it with her mother, although she wondered what she did or didn't know.

That night, when her parents were asleep, Etta phoned Meg and heard about the scene with Shandler and how it had occurred after Charlie had seen the tapes. Now he had disappeared, nobody knew where. Meg said he had been smiling when he came back down the corridor from Shandler's office and walked straight out holding nothing but a picture. Etta didn't like the sound of this, especially the smile. She'd witnessed his duels with Shandler over the years, and he often behaved stupidly afterwards. The Perrier bottle against the wall, for example. Now he was smiling. Free at last, he would be thinking. Dangerous to think you were free at last, Etta thought, especially if you were Charlie Johnson.

Meg also said that Elizabeth had rung her. She was in a bad state, Meg said, not crying but wanting to know where Charlie was. He had walked out days before, she had checked the usual places and he was nowhere to be found. Elizabeth also asked where Etta was. So Megan had told her that Etta was at her parents', Meg apologised, but Etta said she had done the right thing.

After this call, she rang Poland and Jacek came on, still wide awake, though it was now about one in the morning. She had never met Jacek face to face, but she had booked him countless times. She had heard Charlie's stories, and the gist of them was that Jacek was the more reliable of the pair. Etta certainly thought so. When she told Jacek that Charlie had gone missing, Jacek went silent and then told her what he had said to Charlie as he dropped him off at the airport. Jacek explained that he was sorry he had said it. Or not sorry, because he meant it, but sorry because of where it might lead.

Though, Etta said quickly, it was the clue they needed.

Yes, Jacek agreed. It was a clue.

She left him her number and put the phone down and sat on the end of the bed, rubbing her arms through her nightgown, feeling cold.

Kill the son of a bitch.

The words didn't have to mean exactly what they said. Charlie exaggerated. He allowed himself to be taken over by rhetoric. He liked the violence of words. He didn't have to mean them. He might just mean he wanted to confront him, yes, confront him, make him feel fear, regret, anything. Not necessarily kill him.

She got out her black book, dialled her numbers and got the information she needed so that when Jacek, who must have been thinking the same, rang and said he was going, she had flights for him too, getting there more or less the same time, or so they hoped. There were visas to be arranged, but if Charlie had got one, so could they, probably at the airport.

Then Magda came on the line and told Jacek to leave them alone. The women hadn't met either but it didn't matter. They both felt as if they had. Magda said she didn't feel easy about these plans, and Etta agreed. Magda said she felt it would be dangerous to unleash Jacek and Charlie together. The event had done Jacek damage too, and he wasn't right and he needed to stay home longer. While she couldn't stop him, there were risks if the two men went out on the road again. Charlie wasn't in any shape either. Etta said she understood. This was when Etta added that she was going too. ‘To keep an eye on them,' she said, and they both laughed, the idea being so improbable, but it was what they thought. Neither of them was in the rescue business, and they knew that these were men who couldn't be rescued in any case. But they needed watching. They couldn't be trusted. The words didn't have to mean what they said, but everything could get right out of hand.

Etta told Magda that being a unit manager was all about preparing for consequences, warning crews about them and, occasionally, getting men who didn't know what they were doing to realise that they didn't.

Magda said, ‘I want Jacek to come off the road.'

‘I don't know how,' Etta replied.

‘He needs to see what I see,' Magda said.

‘How could they?' Etta replied.

In the morning, she made the calls to Buddy, the fixer Charlie always used in Belgrade and she tipped off Meg, who said she would tell Elizabeth nothing for the moment, except that Jacek was tracking Charlie down. Etta had never met Elizabeth. What had happened was between Charlie and her, and while she had not gone just to nurse him, she had kept hope at bay throughout. When Charlie had wanted her to stick around, she tried to send him back home. So the slate was clean, as far as she was concerned, and she could look Elizabeth in the eye any time. Though she couldn't imagine it would be much fun.

After she kissed her parents goodbye and boarded the plane later that day for London, the problem on her mind was not Elizabeth, but Charlie and Jacek. Something Magda had said the night before stuck in her mind. The two men, Magda said, were in the grip of a bad spell, except that wasn't right, it was more that they were bound together by a new kind of anger she had never seen in Jacek before, and which was – and here Magda searched for the word –
corrupting
him.