The Guard (14 page)

Harry and I can fulfil our duties alone, we don't need anyone's help, that's what we need to show the guard. He knows exactly what's going on outside, what we're up against and the dangers we can expect. Harry says he's deliberately keeping us in the dark so that the lack of information and resulting tension will test our mental resilience to the limit. But we're not soft. We won't weep and beg and bombard him with questions. It doesn't bother us, it just hones our concentration. Like always, we work independently. We're attuned to each other and don't need anyone else. Harry is right. We stay calm and just do our job. That's all we need to do, he says. As soon as we start to act strangely, the guard will know we've unmasked him and our evaluation will be compromised. We have to make sure we don't give ourselves away. That's why I'm being wary. I play along blithely, but keep a certain distance. From this point, Harry says, we've as good as made it. The darkness when he arrived must have made quite an impression on
the guard. He's seen the primitive conditions we've survived; now he's experiencing them first hand. As long as the situation with the resident doesn't get out of hand, we've got it all wrapped up. In no time Harry and I will be out in the fresh air in the uniform of the elite.

101

The guard runs his gaze over the well-ordered shelves. It's the first time I've taken him into the storeroom with me. I detect a measure of surprise in the dark gleam of his eyes, bordering on childish joy at the precision with which the boxes are arranged. Are other guards less meticulous? Or is it recognition of a case of best practice?

“Don't touch!”

Startled, he pulls his hand back as if he's burned his fingertips on a red-hot box.

“I mean the cardboard's got fairly soft. They could rip.”

“Rip?” His voice is flat.

“Yes, rip. I carry out an inspection every day, so I know how to pick them up. Someone who's not used to it would tear one of those boxes right away.”

I realize that I've used the word “inspection.”

The guard moves closer to the shelves and stares at the Winchester cowboy, before reading the details on the label out loud. It's as if he's making another of his mental notes despite having exactly the same cartridges in the pistol on his hip.

“Shall I show you?”

He nods vaguely, but looks at the top row with interest. I slide out a box, demonstrating how I squeeze the cartridges together at the bottom, between thumb and index finger, so that the cardboard
doesn't have to carry any of the weight. The pressure has to be just right. A touch too little and the cartridges could suddenly fall through the bottom, a touch too much and there's a chance of them pushing past each other, hopelessly breaking out of their rectangle and irreparably crumpling the weakened box.

The guard understands and immediately masters the technique. He is elated by his success. “Now we can both do it,” he says.

He lays a hand on my shoulder, a bear's paw, briefly tightening around the top of my arm.

I feel a strange smile on my face.

“But, of course, you'd rather I left them alone,” the guard says, carefully sliding the box back into the row. “I understand. You being used to it.”

I can't come up with anything better than a slight shrug; a mild protest seems the least risky at this stage. I reach up past his face to get the first box down from the top shelf, open it and count the cartridges.

102

Harry says he heard us. He heard me and the guard talking to each other. It sounds like a casual remark that requires neither confirmation nor explanation, but several minutes later, far from the bunkroom door, he adds that he slept terribly. I ask him if those two things are related, which is something I can hardly imagine: the guard and I were always careful to keep our voices down near the room. Harry must have been wide awake to even tell our voices apart from so far into the basement. He doesn't answer. He asks what the guard said. I need to think about it for a couple of steps; the five endless hours have blurred together. I can't remember very much, an exchange of generalities about
the profession. Harry wants to know if he made any more confessions. Nothing about porcelain figurines or suchlike? he asks contemptuously. He turns his head and gives me a meaningful look. No, I say, nothing like that. After a few minutes' silence, Harry says again that he clearly heard us talking. I don't understand what he's getting at. It's as if I've claimed the contrary. I tell him I'm sorry if our voices kept him awake, but would nonetheless be surprised if they had. He takes a while to react and that makes his reaction, if possible, even more astonishing. He asks if the guard is funny. Funny? Yes, funny. He heard me laughing. Maybe, Harry says, the guard has a side he only shows me. A funny side, because he clearly heard me laughing. The words rasp out of his throat, bitter on his tongue, as if we have shamelessly kept him awake. No, I say. If I laughed, it wasn't because of any jokes. The guard is no humorist.

103

Harry is sitting on the chair, left of the bunkroom door. The guard is on the stool to the right. I stand behind him and slowly tip his head back until his skull is resting against my stomach or, more accurately, my chest; he's a good bit bigger than Harry. The paring knife is blunt. There are notches on the blade that tug painfully on the hairs. But the stiff knobs on his cheek have short, compact stems that are much easier to cut than our separate beard hairs. I only need to move the blade slightly to feel numerous hairs in the bundle give way. The hair is also coarser than ours so that the knife seems to grip better.

It still takes me a good hour to pick the harvest on the guard's face. All that time Harry stares sternly into the middle of the basement. Now and then a sigh escapes his distended nostrils. The
frizzy hair on the guard's head is too intimidating. It's like there's a cap over the top of it holding it together. I wouldn't know where to start.

The guard goes into the bunkroom to wash his face and—after giving himself an extended appraisal in the mirror—returns with a beaming smile. He pulls his tie tighter, rubs his cheeks and thanks me. He says I've done a good job. He's as happy as if he's received an unexpected, beautiful gift. He says he looks good. And a lot younger too, I add. Harry jumps up, the legs of the chair scraping back over the floor. He hesitates for a moment, as if surprised by his own action, then resolutely reaches for his Flock. In no time the guard and I are pointing our cocked pistols at the entrance too. The guard stays at his post; Harry and I creep closer along opposite sides of the open space, meter by meter. Nothing unusual at the gate. We keep watch without speaking or moving. Outside it's deathly silent. The building could be on the moon. After half an hour Harry shakes his head. We look at each other in the darkness, still listening. Then Harry shakes his head again and holsters his pistol. False alarm.

104

Harry pulls me into the bunkroom by the arm, whispering that I have to come have a look, quick. The guard has just got up. He has dressed and withdrawn to the toilet and that can take quite a while. The narrow sleeping area is saturated with his smell and warmer than the rest of the basement. At the washbasin Harry steps to one side so I can come up next to him. Shoulder to shoulder we stand before the mirror, but Harry directs his gaze lower. He tells me to have a good look. Hanging over the edge of the gray washbasin are two identical flannels and a piece of pillowcase.
Harry asks if I'm blind or what. I look closely. My flannel on the left, Harry's flannel on the right, the guard's washrag in the middle. Harry claims it's not the first time. I stare and wrack my brains until suddenly Harry grabs my hand, pushes it down on his flannel for a couple of seconds and then on the guard's washrag. One is cold and wet, the other dry. He says, somewhat superfluously, that he washed himself five hours ago and always wrings out the flannel. The guard just washed and his rag is as dry as a bone. Still holding my hand, Harry asks if he needs to draw me a picture. We look at each other in the mirror. His eyes are sunken but wide open. He asks if I understand what's going on here.

105

It's not the first time. I have to realize that. Maybe it's the kind of thing I would never have expected from the guard, Harry says with a touch of triumph in his voice. Him trying to stir things up like this. And isn't it peculiar, to say the least, that the guard doesn't ever speak to Harry? He wants me to explain that to him. When he's the one who donated his pillowcase to him. What, do I think, is the significance of that? For his part, Harry wouldn't be surprised if the guard, with this kind of baiting on the one hand and blatantly sucking up to me on the other, wasn't trying to drive a wedge between us. It's probably to his advantage. Yes, it may sound strange to me. The question is, can we exclude it? Can we safely exclude it? No, says Harry, absolutely not. He might be a special agent, but maybe he has his own agenda too. Who's to say? Harry says we have to keep our eyes peeled. We have to evaluate the situation daily or, better still, hourly! It's of the utmost importance. Wouldn't it be terrible after all this time in the basement to let ourselves be outsmarted? By a newcomer? Harry and me? Us?

106

The guard might not be withholding information simply because it's to his own advantage. Who's to say he's not doing it to see how well we hold up under pressure? Because, Harry whispers in the darkness near the crushers, let's not beat about the bush, whether he's a special agent or not, the organization must have briefed him, no two ways about it. And not just regarding the situation outside. That's why he doesn't ask about the last resident or the residents who have disappeared and it's why he doesn't bat an eyelid about not seeing a single motor vehicle in a basement car park. Harry repeats that, in the same situation, he would find that last bit very weird and I would too, of course, for Christ's sake. But not the guard. He's not bothered because he knows a lot more about what's going on here than we do. I can take that as read, Harry says. And his sucking up to me might not be blatant, no, maybe it's not blatant, it's more cunning than that. I should just think about those porcelain figurines of his if I don't believe him. What a trick! It's clear that the guard is trying to win my confidence. And according to Harry that's not just to set us against each other. At the same time the guard wants to wheedle as much out of us as he can, anything that might be useful, anything that increases his head start. Because that's how I should see it. That's how Harry sees it. With the hair of his mustache brushing the top of my ear, he asks if I'm aware of just how scarce positions in the elite are? We mustn't lose sight of that. Do I hear him?

107

It all comes down to one thing, Harry says: us not knowing who this bloke really is. We haven't got a clue. And the guard might
have convinced me that he's the second-to-last in a family of seven boys and that his father worked in the mines for forty years, but so what? What's that tell us about him? That he's learned to take a back seat? To be obedient? A hard worker? Is that what we're supposed to deduce from his words? No fucking idea. We don't even know if he's speaking the truth. We don't know him. We only know one thing: he's not stupid. He's not stupid and he's a competitor. Let's not forget that, for crying out loud. He's a guard, he'll back us up if necessary. Harry doesn't doubt that, he credits him with that much of a sense of honor. But he's also a competitor trying to coax as much out of us as he can, anything that can improve his already advantageous position and bring him closer to his goal. He'll shrink at nothing. And I might be cautious, of course I'm cautious, that goes without saying, but no matter how cautious I am, it's difficult to prevent him from picking up little titbits of information the moment I relax. The guard doesn't try it on with Harry. And with good fucking reason. He knows he won't get anywhere. Harry's not giving anything away, do I understand that? And do I also understand that the guard wouldn't mind a position in the elite either? He might be a special agent, who's to say, but he still has to feed his face out of the same tins as Harry and me. And like the two of us, Harry says, he's still locked up the whole God-awful day in this godforsaken hole. Don't I think that, just like us, the guard wants something else? Fresh air? Some greenery? Do I think he'd turn his nose up at a chance to guard Mr. Van der Burg-Zethoven's white villa? Do I think he'd look the other way if Mr. Van der Burg-Zethoven's fiancée was stretched out on a white sofa in front of the window stroking her hairless pussy? Harry's just giving an example. And can we blame the guard? He'd be an idiot if it was any other way. No, we understand completely. But not at our expense. Not Harry's and mine. No way. The guard will have to get up earlier in the morning if he thinks he can steal all the credit by playing us off one against each other while he acts the innocent. The credit we, Harry and I and no one else, have earned twice over, more. Because that's what it comes down to. That's
what we have to keep in the forefront of our mind every second of every day, says Harry. The positions are limited, don't forget. The competition is murderous.

108

Do I know what suddenly occurred to him today? Do I know what's been on his mind all afternoon? The resident. The man on 29, the last resident. It's like this. We, Harry and me, don't need the guard's help: for us that's as clear as crystal and maybe the organization will see it that way soon too. We function just fine shut off from the world and whether they're big or little, fat or thin, we don't need any blacks down here helping us. But there's also a flipside to this miserable affair. A side that far surpasses the guard's underhand interests . . .

I hear Harry pacing to and fro in the pitch darkness, a meter or two in front of my feet, short lengths; the grit under his shoes crunches as he turns. I wonder how he manages to keep his orientation, if he'll soon bump into the crusher or, worse, my forehead or knees.