Shadow Play (24 page)

Yes, this must have been my primary consideration. Why otherwise have I spent so many pages these last few days fondly recalling the characters and routines of my new life, whilst I pause to debate the question of their sincerity in just a couple of
cursory paragraphs, as though I still don't wish to consider too closely other versions of those events? More than believing in them, it must be that I want them to be true. From very early on, I wanted to believe in the truth of that life and my place within it so much that I chose not to think too deeply about Sr. da Lima's reputation or his power. I preferred to ignore how I was led to a job in that restaurant, and argued instead that Auguste always seemed to believe me when every three months or so I couldn't come to work for five days (my excuse being I would be away for a quick trip to the interior, or a break by the coast).

Because these were the dates of my ‘missions', the reason I was kept in their employ. I was flown out by night – sometimes for a few hours, sometimes across oceans – landed and housed, handed a plan to memorize from which was subtracted all purpose and background. Only my role was highlighted, and I was given two days to prepare myself. The appointed place could be the toilet of a restaurant or a hotel room, a make-up studio, a bank vault, a locker-room scenario once for which I was ‘disguised' in nothing but a towel, and even the deep end of a swimming pool. Twice, we were inside rented limos: I had been made up as a chauffeur and only had to turn around, fire, then park and walk away. Most recently, I simply shot a young lady on her doorstep.

Though there was no pattern of locations, it was always arranged so that I could strike at close range, and afterwards I'd be in a private aeroplane within two hours. I have as little idea of who my victims were as I have of my employers, whether I was putting away the same man's enemies or being maintained by an entrepreneur who rented out my services to various parties. There was a phase when I was sure of being the instrument of
a government agency. After five years, I have no such certainty any more.

I wish I knew all the cities I visited, if not some of the stories. Only once, just weeks ago, I was taken back to London for the first time since my capture (for the assignment involving the lady). It was strange, the moment I understood this, and in my sudden euphoria I even considered asking to visit my old flat, if not the pub or Patty, to see what had become of my stuff, especially my studio equipment. But I stayed quiet, because it was obviously impossible. Besides, although I sometimes dipped into my London diary at bedtime with as much pleasure as before, I realized I was no longer certain that I wished to return to my earlier life.

But things have changed very suddenly, and I'm writing this in the present. I am in New York at the moment, arrived two days before a job. The target is a middle-aged man. His face appeared somewhat familiar, but as usual I refrained from asking, or pursuing the question in my own mind (it would only have complicated matters for everyone). We were to get him around ten the next day on the street outside his flat, since he usually goes out for dinner. Or at least that was the plan.

This morning, the man who called himself Fred apprised me of some unusual circumstances. Apparently, things are suddenly “hot”, and everyone is disappearing for a while. They claim they won't even be able to use the airstrip just now to fly me home. So it's been decided to suspend the mission, and release me for the present in New York. When they need me again, as always, it'll be up to them to locate me.

It is clear to me that I lost my composure in responding to this surprise, although Fred kept insisting there was no more he could say, and that he had no idea I was from Brazil, nor had he ever spoken to anyone from there, so he wouldn't know what my bosses were thinking. When I moved aside from the door, he told me I had to leave the room in three hours. He left an envelope on the table, which turned out to be full of notes. I didn't count them, all I cared about was whether they'd left me any numbers I could call. Where could I plead my case, explain why I had to be taken back? Brazil was all I had now, and hadn't I always given them my best?

Fred has vanished when I emerge from my room, and I give up and head down the street. I could return tomorrow, although such a hope is belied by whatever little I know about my employers. A voice within me wonders if I'm being put out to pasture, and this freedom is a sign of their recognition. Immediately I realize this is what I'd dreamt of for almost a year after my capture: no matter what the city, I'd have given everything to be released. But now “capture” seems an alien word: I haven't thought of it in that way for several years. All I can visualize is Saturday evening at the restaurant, and the merry drinking afterwards. Who would stand in for me? Should I accept the company's explanation at face value? Why couldn't they retire me there? Is there enough money in that envelope to buy a regular ticket?

There probably is, but I remember I have no passport, and no way of explaining at
any
Embassy how I'm here. I know I could be pleased that after five years I have earned enough trust to be allowed to wander on my own: isn't that another reason to believe their story, that they will eventually re-hire me? Then
the counter-explanation occurs – they are just confident I am aware of my lack of choices.

Anyway, it has only been a few minutes since the idea entered my head. Perhaps I'm merely light-headed, or being a fool, because I don't even have a weapon. But what better way could there be of proving that I'm an exemplary worker? I remember all the specifications precisely: 14
^th
Street, ten o' clock, his face from the photograph. What I have to decide is what crossing the line will mean. Will they be impressed and consider it initiative, or will my disobedience infuriate them – that I jeopardized the entire organization? In that event, I could be sure I would lose much more than Brazil.

I'll tell you what I have decided: I'll find a hotel and remain horizontal till the morning. Then I'll take my cue from my own impulses. I'll trust to my old habit, my greatest strength, that no one, not even myself, ever knows what I will do next, and my ability to do it without being paralysed by any regard for the implications.

 

I was heading home from supper at my usual time (Ana and I still share a place on 14
^th
Street, and I was planning to stay there till the autumn, to be near Seb when he started at Columbia after his gap-year), when I felt there was something unusual about the speed of the guy walking towards me. A moment later, I realized it was his speed as well as the line that he was following, although he was facing downwards. He didn't maintain the distance you'd expect on a broad sidewalk: instead he seemed to be making directly for me. He was still a few yards away, but based on this much evidence, I looked around quickly for anyone within dissuading distance, made up my mind, turned, and began running. As expected, no one followed me, but that didn't resolve anything. I'd sensed what I'd sensed.

There are two memories that stand out from the following week. The first is of my incessant peeping through each of the windows of our flat for any obvious signs of surveillance. Frankly – though it only transmuted my fears into something else at the time – there were none. The second is that of night, since daytime had no meaning except as emptiness I had to wade through, and all that was real happened after midnight,
as I lay not daring to switch off the light because that was when the real shakes began, accompanied by the sweating and its seepage from skin into the sheets. And then the dreams of being stranded in a sinking city, and of being chased down a wide empty street with blocks on either side as long as a thousand windows, except none of them was open and I was trying to make a getaway in a cycle-rickshaw.

I gave way to prolonged fits of weeping each day, with broken breathing and high-pitched yelps, because what was beginning to sink in along with my initial, self-centred terror and shock was grief. Another exceptional woman had been lost on my watch. How could I have not warned Sharon to be more careful and hire protection, because of how deadly her adversaries could be? How did I fail to foresee that?

As I dwelt on her memory, it grew clear at last that I hadn't accepted Sharon's offer simply out of enthusiasm for the project, essential and thrilling as it had seemed. I had loved her, instantly, and had leapt at the chance to deepen our association. Yet I was not in love with her, despite the events of our first meeting. It was something else she had restored to me, from another life, a much stranger and more unforeseen form of love. I scoured the pictures on the Internet to verify these sensations, but what I sought was more ephemeral than they could capture. She brought back my son to me, or perhaps a phantom daughter I'd never had. It was in her gestures, her pitches, her rhythms and her volatility; I'd been embracing all of those. I realized I would have collaborated with her on anything when she walked in that Saturday morning. My initial misgivings now exposed themselves in an alternate light. I didn't want her to misconstrue my warmth. I hadn't wanted us to be lovers.

On the third morning when I had actually noticed daybreak before I fell asleep, it occurred to me to pick up one of the books from the shelf behind my sofa, from the Enid Blyton Five Find-Outers series. Seb had brought them over from my mother's storehouse of my things in Calcutta when he stayed with her one summer. I went through
The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters
in an hour and a half, then a Mr Meddle book,
The Magic Faraway Tree
and
Mr Galliano's Circus
all on the same day. The evening after that I began with
Just William
, moved on quickly to
Shock for the Secret Seven
, and arrived at morning chortling my way loudly and helplessly through
William's Treasure Trove
. There were so many priceless moments in every story, such as the occasion when William replaces Robert's letter to his latest flame Diana, which he has accidentally dropped into the brook, with one akin in spirit to what Robert might have written:

Dear Dianner, I hop you are well. Thank you for asking me to cum to the sowth of france with you I will cum to the sowth of france with you. I don't think that your conseated and die your hair or that you look a site without makeup or that your harfwit and I wouldent mind being seen ded in that hat with fethers and I no weel have a jolly good time in the sowth of france. with luv, Robert Brown.

These last few tactfully phrased statements are a bunch of insults he has overheard his sister Ethel spew out about this girl, only William feels he has turned them round successfully into compliments.

I began earlier the next evening with Seb's copy of Roald Dahl's
Collected Stories
, but somehow they were too menacing
and adult for my present needs and I gave up and picked instead my old
Rubadub Mystery
starring Roger, Diana, Snubby, Loony the dog, Miranda the monkey, and Barney. That was also the first night in a week when I dared to lie in the darkness afterwards and wait to fall asleep.

It is extraordinary how I still remember those nights as an oasis of safety, a refuge so incongruously innocent I wished the whole world was peopled just like that, like Peterswood policed by ‘Clear-Orf' Goon or William's timeless village, or the Malgudi of Swami and Mani. I went through half of the thirty-odd books on that shelf like a grotesque man-child starved and crazed, afraid at the same time of what would happen once I had finished them, when I would be forced out of this enchanted zone into the fullness of real time and my present life.

When I was a child we played a game in which tiny footholds of land lay far apart within a torrential stream, and there was a ravenous, thrashing crocodile that could kill you with the faintest touch of its flailing arms. The river was narrowly bounded on all sides, there was always one less spot of land than there were desperate humans, and you had to move from one chalk-circle to another through the dangerous water every few seconds. My shelf of books was now my only island: I could think of nowhere else to leap after that, and yet inch-by-inch the land around me was unstoppably disappearing under.

And I haven't stopped running since, nor have I ceased to fall. The chapters of a novel you'll find among these papers are nothing but fiction, Ellery. But it was my obsession with the undisclosed principals of Sharon's phantom book from which
arose its peculiar vision of all-encompassing alliances and indecipherable interests, and it was that same fixation that set me running. Perhaps, in my ill-chosen mode of hothouse seclusion I completely lost the plot, yielding to the most unjustifiable hysteric paranoia, but it became increasingly clear during that period that I couldn't imagine resuming normal life until the motives behind her murder had been resolved.