Notorious (29 page)

As I turn into the brittle wind, she raises her hand with an air of finality. Then she flicks her fingers, dismissing me.

I walk down through the silent village, hearing nothing but the creak of the dead wood and the old leaves raking their fine-veined husks along the cold cobblestones. I try not to think of shadows slipping between houses, black wraiths climbing out of the silver-tipped water in the well. The hunched trees close over me all the way down the mountain.
No coward soul is mine
. I find the mosaic path and look across to the glass house turning dull silver in the late afternoon. There is nothing in the grey sky – nothing on the plain. The panel is a steady red. I put the bracelet to my ear. Nothing.

I continue downhill, slipping in the mud. Trying to see the car from where I am. The noise of my boots against the falling stones almost obscures the approaching beat. The black shape moves over me. The branches vibrate, dried mud lifts from the ground, wet stones and smaller rocks fly upwards. The earth is joining the kingdom of water in the sky. Chips of stone hit my neck. I put up my hands to block out the sound, the wild air, and it is then that I see the red light on the bracelet has gone out. I lose my balance and land on my back, sliding and sliding until I crash into a bush.

I lie on the trembling ground, looking up through the branches which whip back and forth against the flat sky as the black body swings restlessly overhead. The metal runners reach forward like grasping metal hands, glints of light slice off the dark windscreen, the wind booms between the blades.

The helicopter tilts. I see a man peer out: black shirt, black sunglasses. Not Devlin.

I crawl further under the bush and watch as the helicopter finishes its arc and beats its way up the mountain.

I count to fifty then slide, using my hands to push me faster down the muddy slope. Too slow. I force myself to my feet and run.

The branches catch my jeans, I am constantly slipping on the mud and wetted mosaics. I see shadows waiting behind the bushes and when I reach the stonier ground, see more shadows between the boulders. A rock falls somewhere, stone chipping on stone, like a drop of liquid chrome. The helicopter is a faint thudding in the distance, a speck disappearing over the summit, falling upwards into the crown of mist.

I reach flatter ground, see the car between the boulders, am running towards it when a black wraith moves at the corner of my eye. I swing around and am grabbed by both arms.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ shouts Devlin.

‘Devlin.’ I am so relieved to see him I try to lean against him. But his immediate tensing reminds me and I push myself away.

‘I wanted to see,’ I jangle the bracelet, ‘how far I could go.’

The light seems brighter here, the scars on my wrist more noticeable. A shadow passes over his face. I smell Scotch and mouthwash, more Scotch than mouthwash.

‘It’s broken anyway,’ I say. ‘It went red then it went out.’

‘I turned it off,’ says Devlin. He looks up the mountain. ‘That’s why the chopper can’t find you.’

‘Dev – ’

‘When I switch the tracker back on, they’ll think it was a malfunction. Hopefully.’

‘Dev – ’

‘You need to go now.’

I see the shadows around his mouth, the grey skin under his eyes. He is drinking himself into illness.

I say, ‘Pietr offered to help me get the bracelet off.’

‘He won’t be able to,’ says Devlin.

‘At least he offered.’

‘That’s his job.’

‘Is it?’

‘You can’t play both sides,’ says Devlin. ‘You’ll have to choose.’ After a moment, I say, ‘Pietr wouldn’t put shackles on me.’

He turns away. ‘Go home then.’

FRIDAY

I
must have caught a cold because I wake sneezing the next morning. I am still sneezing at breakfast when Rosza gives me what she says is a lemon drink but which has a sour smell of spices. A shiver of nausea runs through me with the first mouthful but after that, it seems to taste better.

‘It’s the mountain air,’ says Rosza, ‘and everything else.’ She watches me finish the drink. ‘Did you have troubles getting home?’

I shake my head.

She picks up my wrist. The panel on the bracelet glows green.

‘It came back on halfway across the plain,’ I say.

‘And the
ofanculu
helicopter?’

‘It flew over me. Maybe it was a coincidence.’

‘Maybe.’ She doesn’t sound convinced.

The clouds hold back the sky, filtering in another day of low light. I go to find Pietr. Crossing the courtyard to the guards’ quarters, there are more reflections in the slicked wet ground than profiles in the sky. The secret world above revealed only in reflections.

Pietr is standing by the workbench in the garage. A large stainless steel box is in front of him; straw packing trailing from it. I think I see the metal-grey outline of a gun beneath the straw but I am distracted by what is in his hands.

He turns when he hears me and puts down the object with just the right degree of casualness. If I hadn’t been looking I wouldn’t have seen the way his fingers linger on the gold base as though he can’t bear to let it go.

‘The days are darkening.’ He moves so he is between me and the object. But I see it reflected in the steel side of the box: a rectangular bird, about a foot high. The great image of the Arabian desert. A falcon.

‘My mother said you weren’t feeling well,’ he says.

‘She gave me a drink which tasted horrible but it did the trick.’

‘That is my mother’s way. Unpleasant action which always works.’

He turns. I look at the statuette. I had done a paper at university on the classic Sumerian falcon, from the Gilgamesh era. This object has the cracked and shabby aura of the well-travelled artefact. I tell myself it must be a copy. I try not to think of my father.

Pietr is swivelling. ‘You’re admiring my bird?’ he says, picking it up. My nails dig into my palms as I fight not to snatch it from him.

‘Tell me,’ he says, holding it out. ‘Have I been swindled?’

‘Oh, it was always more of a hobby. I scraped through my PhD. Daddy pulled strings, you know.’

I take the bird as casually as I can. It is so heavy it almost plunges through my hands. I imagine it buried in sand, carried secretly in the robes of monks and holy men, passed from father to son, for four thousand years. But even all the erosion and mishandling through the ages can’t blur the deep eye rolling back to look at me.

‘Is it Sicilian?’ I say. ‘Something local?’

‘That’s right,’ he says, watching me carefully. ‘Gold plate of course.’

I automatically heft the bird up and down, weighing it. ‘A lead shell?’

He nods. ‘To make the tourists think it is the real thing.’
Thingk
.

The bird is growing warm in my hand. It has absorbed heat from somewhere – from me – and it is burning. Fire and ice.

Pietr says, ‘They make them here in the winter months. Write stories of a magical falcon to sell on carefully faded bits of paper. You know the sort of thing: two lovers cursed by an evil magician, he turned into a wolf, she a falcon. He doomed to the icy ground, she to the desert air.’

‘Why is the woman never the wolf?’ I can’t resist running my thumb over the curved beak, the hunched shoulder, the graceful lines etched into the wings. I have an image of a grey-haired woman standing in a long hall, the shattered and empty glass cases around her. I think, This is the first time that Pietr has lied to me. That I know of.

‘Men prefer to think of women in feathers, not fur,’ says Pietr. ‘Cleaner somehow.’

‘Radiant women, on pedestals.’ The grey woman is screaming as black-masked figures run from the hall. ‘Yet we’re not like that at all.’ I see myself watching the woman on television, see myself with tears in my eyes. Maybe I am imagining the tears.

‘I never felt quite clean as a teenager,’ I say. ‘I felt messy, untucked. I wasn’t radiant.’

‘A baby wolf.’

‘Yes.’ I put my hand over the golden eyes.

He takes the bird from me. ‘It’s worse living with real wolves.’

I watch him pack it away. ‘It’s a good copy. The weight makes it real. Most souvenirs are too light.’

‘It’s not especially dignified,’ he says. ‘But I keep telling myself that it’s better than doing . . . other things.’ He fits the lid onto the box.

‘What other things?’ My hands feel cold.

His lips press tightly together, the cords in his neck are rigid.

I think of the grey-haired curator screaming at the looters running from the museum in Baghdad.

‘You told me I wasn’t responsible for what my father did,’ I say. ‘That was good advice. For everyone.’

His hands rest on the box as though he can’t bear to let it go. Outside, the sky has a purple tinge. It reminds me of the days after my brother disappeared. Days like blue cylinders.

‘I never wanted to lie to you.’ He slides the box across.

His fingers are still resting on it. I think of the images of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, two days after the American invasion of Iraq. The dark hooded figures running down the shattered hall, the anguished cries of the curator. Systematic looting, the news reports called it. Looting. Always such an ugly word. Whole cultures appropriated. Systematic looting: not random but planned and organised. The vultures already there, helped into the city by the advancing army. Old connections, old friendships. A century of deliberately orchestrated plunder, the prosecution had said at my father’s trial. Illegal smuggling, beginning in Africa one hundred and twenty years ago with the most heinous of trafficking. The connection to Poland particularly lucrative for all involved.

I touch the steel box. His grasp tightens.

‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘it is enough that you know I have it.’

I walk with him across the courtyard. The sky has an unsteady look, as though it is rising and falling in a bowl of dark ice. The trembling is reflected in the wet cobblestones and in the droplets of mist drifting through the archway. Reflections endlessly escaping into the distance. The clouds clasp and unclasp, birds fall down the mountain, the trees quiver. A whole other world on the other side of the dark bowl. The world endlessly repeated.

Stefano is bent over one of the Mercedes, polishing a side panel. He glances at us and keeps working in tight, rhythmical circles.

‘I could have left years ago,’ says Pietr, ‘but I wanted to find out what happened to my father.’

‘Stefano doesn’t know?’

‘Stefano is totally loyal to my mother. He would never do anything to hurt her.’

‘Would that be hurting her – to find out about your father?’

‘I always feel Stefano is looking for something in me,’ says Pietr, ‘that he can’t find.’

‘You’re the only blond for five hundred miles, Pietr. It’s probably follicular jealousy.’ He smiles.

I say, ‘Your father was the good man.’

‘Maybe goodness is the delusion. A man who constantly wants to save the world either has no problems or has problems he is not facing.’

I stare at Stefano. I could swear he was watching us over his shoulder as he worked. I think, He must be around the same age as Rosza.

I say idly, ‘You could look up the autopsy reports.’

Pietr frowns. ‘The originals were lost. They only had typed copies.’

‘Then the ambulance report,’ I say. ‘The driver must have had to file something. Some of the drivers might still be alive. Talk to them.’ I touch the box. ‘You could give them a souvenir.’

I tell Pietr I am going for a walk and go and stand by the lake. It is so quiet I hear a train going past, the long note of the horn barrelling into cold morning air. The lake has lost its blue purple. It is the colour of ashes reflecting the sky now. I taste frost on my tongue.

I drift towards the dark, squat outline of the hut. Nothing stirs, just the shifting trees, the splintering ice.

No sound behind me but I know before I turn that Devlin is there. He nods and awkwardly climbs down the muddy slope. He has the hip flask out before he reaches me.

‘Happy hour’s started, I see,’ I say.

‘What’s happy about it?’ he says, looking around for somewhere to sit before wedging himself against a tree. He looks greyer than yesterday.

I say, ‘We’re not scheduled to meet.’

‘I wanted to see whether you were okay after your little jaunt.’

‘No thanks to you.’

‘All thanks to me. I convinced them it was a malfunction.’ He grimaces. ‘But Mitch is coming down from Rome – to put me off the case. What a stupid expression. I’m not just put off. I’m fucking put out.’ He takes a drink. ‘Anyway, now is your chance to bargain.’

‘Will I find out what happened to my brother?’

He takes a step away from me; another towards me. I watch him. He is never this aimless. Finally, without looking at me, he says, ‘Whatever you suspect is bad enough.’

‘So you’re not with me, Dev.’

‘Stop calling me that. I know you think it’s cute. It’s not.’

I am tired suddenly. ‘No, it’s not.’

He caps the flask, puts it away and says, low, ‘I’m offering to help.’

‘You’re against me.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he shouts. ‘I’m giving you a pass out of here.’

‘Why should I trust the guy who put this – ’ I jerk the bracelet up and down my burned wrist – ‘on me?’

Under the ashen sky the marks are livid flames. Devlin reaches out and holds my wrist in both hands. I am so taken aback that he has touched me that I am still. His fingers are cold as ice. His face seems to fall in on itself. He drops my hand. The disappointment is a bitter tide dragging beneath my heart.

‘I thought if we knew where you were, we could protect you.’ He sounds uncertain.

‘You could have asked me.’

He shrugs. ‘It was above my pay grade.’

It is the casual dismissal which does it. And what I say next. Later I think, That is when it all started to go wrong. The ground began cracking under our feet, we began building to the words which would hang like black birds in grey air, never to be unsaid. I should have stopped. But of course I didn’t. It was always my fault as much as his. Maybe more.