Shake Off (19 page)

O
n the final day of Helen’s home-concocted codeine withdrawal plan we sat outside a place advertised as a café by day and a bistro by night. Tonight we were to have no codeine, and we’d just been shopping for food and treats to take home. I drank a bitter lemon, Helen drank wine, making the one glass last. We were in the small village nearest the house, a ten-minute drive. We watched holidaymakers straggle back from the beach in a long weary line that ended in the town’s only hotel. The sun hung low and the damned midges gathered, looking for exposed flesh. Two women in bikinis came towards us, and clearly they were mother and teenage daughter. They had sarongs wrapped around their waists to cover their thighs. The daughter glanced at us as she approached, still at an age where she was self-conscious about her developing womanhood. The mother too looked at us, or rather at me, protective of her daughter, assessing my threat as a sexual predator. I looked away, embarrassed. Helen nudged me and moved her head closer to mine.

“Does Michel wish Helen had tits like that?” she asked. She was serious.

I laughed and shook my head, unsure whether she was referring to mother or daughter. “I think Michel has his hands full with Helen as she is,” I said. “Any more and he wouldn’t be able to handle her.”

Helen stuck her lower lip out as the women passed. “Still, Helen sometimes wishes that she was endowed with more.”

Last night I’d had a blow-by-blow account of her encounter with the man on the beach. Helen described him as being in his forties, fit and good-looking “in a swarthy kind of way,” although I wasn’t sure if that was just to rile me. She had recounted their conversation, adding needless and stupid descriptions in an attempt to ridicule the exercise and make me jealous.

According to her, he had a slight accent, “More than you do,” she’d said. “And no, he didn’t look Jewish.” I’d said nothing because I hadn’t asked; I knew she was trying to get a rise out of me. Anyway, I knew from experience that it was stupid to rely on looks to make such a judgment. And besides, his being Jewish or not told me nothing. I was left with an uneasy feeling about the encounter though, and
Helen
had agreed to let me know if anyone else approached her or if she saw him again.

To my relief we left the café and walked back to the car; I hated sitting out with people about, I was reminded of how much observing and memorizing of faces I usually had to do, something I’d had a break from at the house, apart from the obsessive beach-watching. Helen had something planned for when we got home, some more burning of incense, some ceremonial destruction of the remaining tablets. It was just symbolic, I told her, but she said that was precisely what I needed.

“People have had rituals since they started sitting around fires, Michel, with good reason. Trust me, I’m doing a PhD in rituals.”

So I trusted her. We went back to the house before it got dark—to comb the beach for rubbish left by the day-
​trippers
. I kept to the tide mark, picking up the things washed in by the sea: a long bleached bone, a bottle with no message in it, several bits of frayed blue nylon rope that would take a thousand years to degrade, an old flip-flop worn thin by the sun and sea.

In the house I lit a fire and Helen went into the kitchen, returning with a tray on which sat a plate holding the remaining pills. Next to it was a mortar and pestle, similar to one used by Mama to grind garlic with salt. I laughed at Helen, but she just smiled and handed me the pestle. I put three of the tablets in the wooden bowl, like tiny, perfectly formed cloves of garlic, and tapped them lightly with the pestle. They split into fragments.

“We need them turned into powder, Michel, not smaller pills.” I ground them down, adding three more. I hoped she would leave the room so I could pocket some of the tablets for emergencies, but she stood opposite me throughout, until every last tablet was pulverized.

Then we went to the fire, and I wanted to sniff or lick some of the powder before the inevitable, but it was a fleeting, if strong, desire.

“Say goodbye to the pills,
ma belle
.”

I poured the powder onto the fire and it burned with a bright orange flame, sending white smoke up the chimney. The mortar felt like I’d emptied it of lead, not powder. I also felt a lightness in my chest, a clearing in my head. “There’s more to burn,” I said.

Helen looked surprised. “You have more pills?”

“No, not pills.” I ran upstairs to the bedroom and pulled a chair to the middle of the room. In the ceiling was the hatch into the roof and I pushed it open and felt about for my Harrods bag, which wasn’t where I thought I’d left it. But then I found it and pulled it down. Inside were the passports and papers and money and newspaper cuttings and reports, and I took it all, leaving the money, which I put back, and went downstairs. I checked for the envelope, which I had carried on my person at all times since leaving Tufnell Park.

As Helen watched, I put everything, apart from the Lebanese passport, in one pile. I picked up the Swiss passport and put it on top of the Lebanese passport—might I still need it? The truth was I just felt vulnerable without it, and besides, since Berlin it was no longer usable. If I was going to do this then I would do it properly. I put it on the fire. Helen squeezed my hand as we watched it burn. It curled and crackled in the flame. I put the Greek passport on next; it burned with a blue flame. They, and other documents, all burned in different colors that we were convinced reflected their respective national flags but in reality were all the same blues and oranges and greens.

When some false company notepaper and business cards and fake utility bills had gone, we were left with just my macabre mementoes of the massacre. The cuttings and copies of reports: a European Union report, the official PLO account, the Israeli Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the events at the refugee camps in Beirut—the so-called “Kahan” Report, a UN effort running to 300 pages. Everyone had investigated, questioned, taken evidence, examined the photos, watched the TV footage and written a report to tell everyone else how terrible it was. No one, not one cocaine-addled whisky-soaked Maronite Phalangist, not one obese cynical Zionist general, not one conniving pseudo-
​fascist
puppet warlord had been brought to justice. Who would bring them to justice? Who would do it? The PLO? According to Abu Leila, they were more interested in making deals in Norway with the people who had let it happen. The Arab nations? A craven, rhetoric-filled group that were either beholden to the West, to whom they sold oil, or too busy suppressing their own people. The Lebanese government? There’s a funny thing—the very people who had carried out the massacre were now ministers in the government. Their leader, the man who stood on the Israeli command center roof overlooking the flare-lit camp, was minister for tourism, according to the clipping I’d found in
Le Monde
. And the West? The West wrung its liberal hands, but to them it was a small thing in a big picture, something that did not concern them directly, something that Third World people did to each other.

Helen put her hand on my arm.

“You’re shaking,” she said. I gathered the newspaper cuttings and the reports and placed them in her hands.

“This is when my parents were murdered,” I said. “This is when all of my family were murdered.”

Then I went outside.

T
he darkness enveloped me like a cold blanket. I walked on the sand, listening to the water reach up the beach then drain away. It washed at my thoughts and sucked the bad ones out. Washed and sucked, washed and sucked. Helen was reading the cuttings in the house. She had been for a while. I could see the light coming through the windows in the distance. Soon she would know everything, almost everything, the context of that day at least. She’d caught me off guard, asking about the name Roberto. I would have to explain all that to her, although I didn’t understand it myself. I walked up to the dunes through the soft sand and sat down in the long grass facing the sea. It was as if I could hear voices in the surf, whispering and talking. Then the voices seemed to get stronger.

They weren’t imagined at all, they were real.

I lay down in the grass; no one should be here at this time of night. I crawled in the direction of the voices, the noise I made covered by the surf. The voices grew distinct but I couldn’t make out the words. I crawled a bit closer, breathing in sand. I could hear Hebrew. I froze, sharp grass stabbing my face. Another voice answered and I cursed Abu Leila’s memory for not allowing me to learn the language. Without lifting my head I could make out three shadows in the dark, crouched down in a circle. They were looking at something on the ground between them, a sheet of paper or a map illuminated by a small torch. I couldn’t deal with three of them on my own, and no doubt at least one other was waiting in a car somewhere. I crawled slowly backwards through the grass until they were out of sight, then, hunched down, ran along the line where the beach met the dunes until I came to the house.

I looked through the French windows and saw Helen blowing her nose. I went inside and closed all the curtains.

“We have to go,” I said. She started to say something, but a length of snot came out of her nose. She laughed at this and I smiled, giving her my handkerchief. I threw the cuttings on the dwindling fire, giving it a final surge of flame that reached up the chimney. You could still see the pictures though; even the text was still readable on the burnt newspaper. The words existed in a delicate state of clarity that was only destroyed when I poked at the grey fragments and they disintegrated. “We have to leave, they’re here, they’ve found us.”

“What do we do?” she said, calm as anything.

We went upstairs. I told Helen to leave the lights off. We packed our things, taking our time because, as I reassured Helen, they would do nothing until they thought we were asleep, because they just wanted the envelope, although I had no reason to believe that. I was frightened because we were in the middle of nowhere and they could do anything. Why couldn’t I have just left Zorba alone?

I asked Helen how she felt about driving us out.

“What other way is there?” she asked.

Then I realized what I was asking. “You don’t have to come,” I said. “They’re not here for you.”

“If you think I’m staying here on my own you’re fucking mad. Besides, have you learned to drive overnight?”

I carried the bags down to the car. I opened the car door, quickly disabling the courtesy light, and put the bags on the back seat, then went back into the house. Helen was in the front room, peering at the books on the shelves.

“You can’t appeal to their good nature by reciting poetry,” I said. “I doubt they’re the kind of men who read it. We must go.”

“But you are, Michel. You’re the kind of man who reads poetry.” She pulled a thin book from the shelf and put it in her handbag, looking around the room for any forgotten items.

“Wait in the car and I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. “Don’t put the car lights on or start the engine or close the car door.” I went upstairs and took the holdall with the money from the attic hatch. I got down the stairs in three steps.

Helen was in the driver’s seat, her door ajar. I got into the passenger seat, leaving the door open.

“OK. Start the engine.” She turned the key but nothing happened, not even a starter motor. She tried again three times—it was dead.

“It won’t start,” she said. Of course it wouldn’t start, these people were professionals and had been at the house already. Helen looked panicked, so I kept my voice level, although my stomach was churning. They had probably been inside as well, looking for the envelope. I could feel it next to my chest like a slab of iron, sitting there since Berlin. They would have disabled the car after we’d come back from town, probably when we were on the beach picking up rubbish. I was panicking now. Think like Vasily, I told myself. You can’t have a crisis if you have a plan.

“Where do they park, the day-trippers that come down to the beach?” I asked.

“About a mile and a half up the road; we pass it when we come to the house.” I remembered a wide bit of the road where I had seen several cars parked on the verge. That’s where the path started down to the beach, about twenty minutes’ walk. I retrieved the bags from the back seat and got out of the car. I spoke quietly, as I wasn’t sure how far away they were.

“Is there another way up there, apart from the road and beach path?”

“You would have to go through the wood, but there’s no path and in the dark…”

“Through here?” I pointed to the trees by the drive. She nodded. We pushed through the brambles, glad of our jeans. Something hooted in the trees. I picked up a stick to push back the brambles, holding them aside to let Helen pass. After ten minutes we stopped to get our bearings and breath, down on our haunches.

“Michel?” she whispered.

“What is it?”

“This is real, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t get more real,” I said. I listened to the unfamiliar noises of the wood, trying to discern anything manmade.

“Michel?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever it was that happened to your family, did you see it?”

I couldn’t see her face in the dark, which meant she couldn’t see mine. “Yes,” I said.

She put her hand to my face and held it there for a few seconds. I kissed her palm. “We’d better keep moving.”

A few minutes later we came onto the beach path some fifty meters from the road. The path rose up from the beach, now in the far distance, not visible from where we were. I told Helen to wait in the wood, told her that I would be back soon enough.

“Where are you going?” she whispered.

“To get a car.”

You couldn’t see the road from the path. I walked in the shadow of the trees until it was visible, then stepped into the wood. The Renault 4 was there, facing away from the house, but no other car. This didn’t mean that the Golf wasn’t nearby. My Russian with the toy cars would tell me that it would be somewhere down the road beyond the house, facing the other way. They would have radios, communicating by clicks if nothing else. I moved closer through the trees. My heart jumped. In the driver’s seat I could see my slopey-shouldered friend who I had first spotted in the canteen at UCH. I needed to get him out of the car without him alerting his colleagues. On the other hand I didn’t have much time, they may well have visited the house and already be on their way back up the path. But no, they would have called the car back to the house. We might have enough of a headstart to get clear, provided Helen’s driving didn’t suffer under the pressure she must be under. She’d been remarkably calm so far, considering what I’d thrown at her. I worried that she was still in shock and that she would imminently crack in some way.

I wasn’t sure whether I should kill the agent or just incapacitate him. If it took the former to do the latter then that is what I’d have to do. Method became my concern; he was possibly armed. He wouldn’t be expecting me, so I had surprise on my side. Of course all this thinking was just a way of putting off the inevitable. I was at a point on the path where I had to step onto it and commit myself. I found a heavy stick that fitted my palm nicely and was about to move when the car door opened and he got out. I stepped back and froze behind a tree. He came around the back of the car and approached me, undoing his fly. He stood against a tall pine two trees away and the night air was filled with the sound of his urine splashing against dry leaves. I could smell it. I stepped out. He turned towards me, but was more concerned with doing up his fly than defending himself. I hit him square across the temple before he even managed to get his hands up.