Charlie Johnson in the Flames (15 page)

She walked the steep hill down to the headquarters, past the Defence Ministry, past the sentries, feeling the police cars slowing down to observe her. She had a map in her pocket, so she knew where she was going, and she put her faith in her basic meticulousness, which included having studied the streets of a city she had never been to, on the flight from London, so that she could find Charlie if she had to. Of course she was frightened. Why not? she said to herself. What else should she be? That was how she dealt with fear. It was a matter of saying, ‘Why be surprised? Why not admit it fully?' Then you wouldn't think it was weak or ignoble. You would just think, this is how it is.

The right thing to do here, she reasoned, was to make a lot of noise, make it costly to deport a foreign journalist. The more noise, the better. Like the Plaza de Mayo women banging their trash can lids with spoons in front of the President's palace in Buenos Aires. She'd seen them on TV and she'd always admired those women, who campaigned to find out where their sons and daughters, husbands and lovers had been taken, how they had made noise, day and night for years, enough to reach through prison walls, enough to make the world notice. She wanted to believe in the power of noise and she began humming to herself, ‘A People United Will Never Be Defeated', something she chanted in a demonstration once, until it seemed ridiculous and died in her throat. As she came to that cheerless granite pile squatting on the height looking down on the highway to the airport, she told herself that she and Jacek were not playthings here. They had options, cards, chances. She told herself that it was a third-rate dictatorship, brutal but not classy, and that she didn't need to be afraid of these guards in the sentry boxes. But she was also a child of socialism – a Young Pioneer herself – and she had memories of the times when these places had real menace. She couldn't quite overcome those feelings that came from a Communist childhood of being intimidated into silence by the brutality of buildings like this one.

They weren't going to let her in and the stiff in the guard-post was pretending he didn't even see her media pass till Jacek, who had got through, came down the steps. They made a fuss, they held her back, but Jacek just took charge, and there was something implacable about him that made the guard think it would be easier to let them deal with this lunatic inside.

Inside the state security office Etta and Jacek sat together, side by side, on a bench against a wall, beneath a fly-spotted bulb, and looked at the dreary paraphernalia: posters with official regulations, tacked to the wall oppo site, the corners torn and curling; the dirty linoleum floor; a series of unmarked doors, and a high counter behind which sat a sergeant in uniform who surveyed them without interest. It was cold and she shivered and pulled her coat around her.

Jacek went up to the counter and tried it a number of ways. Etta could see that he had been trying for some time. His language was passable and so he said ‘Are you deaf?' then ‘Are you stupid?' ‘We know he's here, so let us see him', all of which were met with the same reply. The sergeant was neither deaf nor stupid, but intelligent enough to see that a game was being played and that he had a part too – which was to insist that a journalist, named Charles Johnson, from London was not in their custody.

Etta watched Jacek with fearful admiration, wishing that she could be left to persuade the sergeant in a softer, yet more effective way. But she deferred to Jacek's scornful fearlessness, and the way in which he managed to turn something risky into a game, which allowed both the sergeant and him to keep it all from getting out of hand.

Eventually, Jacek came back and sat down beside her and they waited.

‘We wait,' Jacek said to the sergeant.

‘So I see,' the sergeant replied and went back to his paperwork, with a small smile.

Stand-off. If they stayed there, it might be difficult for them to move Charlie. If they stayed there, the embassy might show up.

They didn't speak, and they didn't have to, even though today was the first time that Etta had ever seen Jacek face to face. It had always been on the phone before – the booking, contracts, equipment rental, flights – and occasionally Jacek would pass her on to Magda, because Jacek could be vague on details and Magda never was.

He looked older than his years, and the lines on his face and the tiredness that came over him in repose tightened her heart, because it made her think of Charlie too, how they were old men, getting older, in a young man's game, and how they knew this but kept trying to exploit the diminishing advantages of experience, knowing all the while that those were diminishing, and that one day, they would be old and sidelined, full of experience that no one would want.

She could see what Charlie liked about Jacek: no wasted words, no unnecessary forms of politeness, self-containment and quiet when at rest, fierce econo mical action when in motion, and all the while this wolf-like gaze, taking in the seedy desolation of the room as if he was framing it up in his viewfinder.

He might be thinking: What exactly is she doing here? but she didn't care, or didn't care to explain. What she was to Charlie was her business alone, and she was part of the story now.

The embassy showed up about forty-five minutes later in the form of a small, dishevelled woman in her early thirties with round glasses, who came in with a file under her arm, and one card outstretched for the sergeant and another one for the two of them. It said that she was a third secretary, political. Etta was glad about that. Political had more muscle than consular.

It was rather impressive, Etta thought, how this small woman managed to embody a government and to initiate a formal demand for access to a detainee, according to such-and-such a convention guaranteeing consular access to all detainees in a signatory's power. She cracked the words out in the sergeant's language, but with an official cadence that, even if it was the mumbo-jumbo of sovereignty, carried a certain auth ority. They could make out that she was telling the sergeant the government was unhappy, the ambassador was unhappy, the country would be unhappy, the whole world would soon be unhappy. It was a good show, all round, especially coming from a tired, anxious woman impersonating the authority of Charlie's home and native land. Even Jacek seemed to enjoy the way this flow of words caused the sergeant to rise from his seat and disappear through a door into a back office, carrying the third secretary's card.

‘That was good,' Jacek ventured.

She did not reply, just sat down beside them and they waited in silence. Her distaste for journalists, for the mess they got into, the mess they left behind, the mess she had to clean up, was so palpable that neither Etta nor Jacek bothered to say another word. Etta listened to the sounds of the building, the surge and rattle of the water in the pipes, the clank of doors somewhere, a garbled voice behind a door, then long silence when she could only hear the blood in her ears. He would be down below them, and she tried to imagine the cell, but only the usual images came to mind, a spy hole, whitewashed walls, a single chair, all under fierce light, and none of it, she knew,
his
cell, the particular place they were keeping him.

It was a lesson she had learned somewhere in her life, to fight free of any images she had of a thing – in this case a jail cell – because it would make it impossible for her to know the thing itself. She wanted to listen to the way Charlie would tell it – and he would tell it, she fiercely believed, he would tell it, and she didn't want anything to get in the way of his telling, and her listening.

When she looked up, a compact athletic man in a suit was standing in the far doorway behind the counter, looking at her with watery grey eyes. He had been there for some time. Etta felt herself being inspected and she did her best, with the return of her gaze, to deny him any satisfaction. His gaze moved from her to Jacek and then to the woman from the embassy.

‘In here, please,' he said, gesturing to the third secretary.

When the door opened again, forty minutes later, she was in the lead, with Charlie just behind her, carrying his bag. When he saw Etta rising from her seat, pulling her coat around her, with her mouth opening into a smile, and Jacek breaking into a grin beside her, he shook his head in disbelief.

‘I'm getting too lucky,' Charlie said, and he meant it, as he kissed Etta and smelt the fragrance of her skin and hugged Jacek. He was too lucky. It couldn't go on like this. He ought to be in the cells or on the plane out of here, and he wasn't, because they were there, because they had raised the alarm. It just couldn't go on like this. And Watery Eyes had made another mistake, which was releasing him at all.

When the third secretary had them out in the street, she said, curtly, ‘See you at the airport tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock.' And she took his passport out of the file. ‘I will hold on to this until then, if you don't mind.' Charlie nodded and with that she got into the embassy car and drove off.

‘We've got plenty of time,' Charlie said.

Etta said, ‘It's over, Charlie. You must be on the flight.'

‘Sure,' Charlie said. ‘I need a drink.'

They were back at the Moskva just in time, for the first chair was going up on the tables, but Jacek managed to persuade the flame-haired waitress that they wouldn't be long, only one drink. Charlie didn't want to talk about what had happened, not there, and all he said was that they hadn't laid a finger on him. But it wasn't strictly true, Etta could see. Something had happened down there. You could feel it in the way Charlie drank and the way he looked at her, with a kind of empty desperation and even shame, and then looked away. He said that Watery Eyes kept asking him what he was doing down south and Charlie had said that since they knew what he was doing it didn't make any sense to keep asking him.

When he said this, he smiled, but when Jacek asked him what he wanted to do now, Charlie said, looking at Etta, softly with the sound dropping down to nothing, ‘Kill that son of a bitch.' As he said this, he had the look of a man who first wanted to take her upstairs.

Etta saw that he was slipping away into that hard, exalted place where he did harm to himself. She could see it in his eyes, in his brittle amiability and his reluctance to keep still. She could see it in his longing for her too, since it was wild and had more to do with fury than with desire.

Charlie was just enjoying the last burn of the alcohol down his throat when Buddy walked in. Charlie assessed him, the short beard with the strands of grey, the old leather bomber jacket, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the neat flannel trousers which didn't go with anything, and he thought it wasn't possible, no it wasn't possible that Buddy would be working for Watery Eyes. In fact, he concluded that Buddy hated Watery Eyes just about as much, if not more, than he did and that Buddy was looking for the same shot as him.

He got up and took Buddy outside. ‘I've got six hours.'

‘It is enough. Address is not far,' Buddy said and pointed to a small black car parked across the street. Charlie had just got in, when Etta ran out after him. She had thought Buddy would stop this, and for some reason Buddy wasn't stopping anything.

‘Charlie, for Christ's sake.' She reached through the window and grabbed his hand. Jacek was behind her and Charlie knew he thought the same thing as Etta.

‘I just want to talk to him,' Charlie said and he covered Etta's hand with his own.

‘Charlie, don't be ridiculous. There will be police there.'

‘We'll find a way.'

‘It is not good to be arguing like this,' Buddy said evenly from the driver's seat, looking about to see who might be watching them.

Charlie looked at Etta, at her face in the car window frame, and he said, ‘Etta, I'm tired of being fucked around. Do you understand?'

He could tell she did understand. He could also tell that it didn't change her mind. He pulled his hand free, and the car drove off.

T
WELVE

                                                                  

T
he address that Buddy had was on the other side of the river in one of those apartment towers built when there was a country and it had a future. Buddy was driving towards it with intensity, both hands on the wheel, the smoke from his cigarette blowing into his face. Charlie sat hunched up in the front seat and took the cigarette out of Buddy's mouth, ashed it in the buttfilled tray and then stuck it back between his lips. The car was Buddy's mobile office, as he called it, with back issues of some review he had edited in the old days when there was a culture and he was an intellectual and everyone was young and had books all over their back seats. The car was a pretty good image of where they stood with the competition. Watery Eyes had his BMW, and all they bloody had was a Lada, short one windshield wiper.

Watery Eyes would do his job, Charlie was sure. So the Colonel would be waiting for them. Fuck it, Charlie thought. After those hours in the basement interrogation room, he was glad to be in the car, in the dark, with Buddy at his side. There hadn't been any rough stuff, just the same old questions, for which they already had answers, and the unspoken inference that in this fluorescent basement, with a water bucket, a tap, a drain in the centre of the floor and two figures in the back ground whose faces never came into the light, anything could happen.

Except that it hadn't. Watery Eyes hadn't reckoned on Jacek, on Etta, on Buddy and on the third secretary from the embassy. Thanks to them, Charlie had a few hours of grace. What he understood about grace was that you never deserved it. It wasn't a reward for his lunatic obstinacy. It came upon you unbidden, like the light of the moon. So here he was on a clear, still night in a sleeping city, having been mysteriously granted enough grace to reach the end of the road. For that was what it would be. The hunger would be sated and he would never pursue anything again with the same all-sacrificing intensity. For the first time in his life, Charlie found himself reconciled to the future and to the path his life had taken. He sat hunched up in Buddy's Lada, feeling something between elation and contentment. He had gone the limit. ‘
Que sera sera
,' he said. In his mind's eye, he could even see Doris Day herself, in the grainy black and white television of his childhood, singing the song with her witless and touching good cheer. It was laughable, and Charlie did actually laugh, softly to himself, a low chuckle that made Buddy look over at him and shake his head in disbelief.