Thunder in the Blood (21 page)

McGrath didn’t answer. He was looking at the files now. I’d picked them up off the bed, trying to find the first one.
‘Show him,’
Wesley had told me,
‘tell him you’re here to listen. Tell him it’s his to call. Show him everything.’
I slipped Wallace’s carefully typed chronology out of the August 1990 file and rested it on the overhead lectern. McGrath was already reading it, his eyes scanning quickly down the page. By the time I’d sat down again, he wanted a new sheet. I obliged, pausing at the bedside, looking down at him.

‘You know Grant Wallace?’

‘By reputation.’

‘And?’

‘He’s a gimp. Like me. Different reason. Different history. But still a gimp.’

‘Meaning?’

The eyes left the lectern a moment. ‘Brilliant designer. No question about it. Light-years ahead of the field. But the rest…’ He shook his head. ‘Ask Wesley. He pretty much summed it up.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Thinks the guy should be in nappies. And he’s right. The man’s helpless. Arrested development. You ever read Spock?’

I smiled, not answering, trying to mask my shock. I’d seen Wesley with Grant Wallace. I’d seen the fuss he made of him, the arm around the shoulders, the public shows of affection. Was all that make-believe? A tease? A hook to extract as much information as he could? Was Wallace just another source?
Everyone’s
fall guy?

McGrath had finished with August. I reached for the file marked ‘September’.

‘What’s your judgement,’ I said, ‘so far?’

McGrath said nothing, that same quiet smile. Then there was a knock at the door and I glanced around, expecting Nghien, finding a woman in her early twenties. Seeing me by the bed, she apologized at once in a southern accent, warm, informal, friendly.

‘Hey, guys,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

McGrath looked up. ‘Cathy,’ he nodded at me, ‘Sarah Moreton. A friend.’

‘… of a friend,’ I said, getting up.

McGrath scowled. I’d never seen him scowl before. It altered his whole face, a cloud that masked the sunshine.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘A friend.’

I nodded, not arguing, glad to accept my new status. Cathy was looking meaningfully at her watch. ‘You want me to come back later?’ she was saying to McGrath.

‘No.’ McGrath looked at me. ‘You mind if I get dressed?’

‘Not at all.’

Cathy hesitated a moment, then shrugged, hanging her shoulder bag on the back of the door. McGrath waved away the September file and told me to start reading through October. He’d listen, while Cathy dressed him. Cathy was already bent over the trolley under the window. She obviously knew the routines backwards, quick, deft, practised movements. I picked up the file and began to read, half wondering whether this was simply a clever ploy to keep my eyes away from the bed. McGrath would know all this by heart, must do.

‘First of October,’ I began, ‘the Iraqis make contact with the French Government in Paris. They’re desperate for friends amongst the Allies. The French have done well out of the Iraqis. Only a year earlier, they’ve begun negotiations to sell Saddam an entire aerospace industry on a keyturn basis. They called it the Fao Project. It went through de l’Estoile, at Dassault. They were near closing the deal at the Mirage 2.000 chalet in Vaucresson. The French stood in at six and a half billion dollars. Chevènement, the French Defence Minister, was especially keen—’

McGrath interrupted me: ‘Very pro-Iraqi, Chevènement.’

I looked up. McGrath was lying naked on the bed. A tube ran from a condom in his groin to a bag taped to the frame of the bed. Cathy was bent over him, examining every part of his body, checking it quickly, eyes and fingertips, and I remembered Wesley’s line about being on patrol, day and night, trying to judge which bit of you might give out next. I’d read a little about paralysis, about the dangers of bedsores turning into gangrenous ulcers. This woman, Cathy, was McGrath’s defence. She was the
one on patrol. It was her job to keep him in one piece.

‘He founded the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Society,’ McGrath was saying. ‘You listening?’

‘Oh, yes.’ I reddened. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You want more on that?’

I shook my head, still scarlet, returning to the text. Cathy was back across the room now, selecting clothes from the closet, holding them up, one by one, while McGrath chose what to wear. A loose pair of cord trousers got a firm yes. There was a wheelchair beside the trolley. The trousers went on to the wheelchair.

‘October the fourth,’ I read, ‘French President, François Mitterrand, puts a peace plan of his own to King Fahd in Saudi Arabia. Fahd likes it…’

I looked up. Cathy had disconnected the tube from the urine bag and begun to work the trousers up McGrath’s legs. His legs were thin and hairless, the muscles wasted, the flesh pale. I bent to the notes again, more about the French, and I was still in mid-October when Cathy started to wind a thick corset around McGrath’s stomach. A strip of Velcro bound it tight. McGrath glanced across at me.

‘You wanna watch this?’ he said. ‘Only Cathy’s world class.’

I stopped reading, putting the file down while Cathy drew the wheelchair towards the bed, readying it for McGrath’s body. Then she turned back towards him, working her hands inside the corset, pulling McGrath gently upright until his body was perfectly balanced. She hesitated a moment, taking the shallowest of breaths, then she lifted him off the bed, a single easy movement, transferring him on to the wheelchair. I got up, pure instinct, thinking she needed help, but she shook her head, aware of me by the bed, McGrath’s body sagging over hers, thin, pale, floppy, doll-like, only the eyes moving, ever-watchful.

In the chair, she folded his hands in his lap and arranged his feet on the metal foot supports. Then she opened his trousers and re-connected the tube to the condom, and as she did so I had a sudden vision of the way it would probably be with Wesley, once the virus got past the last of his defences, leaving him helpless, a list of jobs that someone else would have to do while he waited to die. I looked away a moment, knowing with absolute certainty that it would be me in Cathy’s place, me with the comb, me with
the mirror, me with the bright smile and the tuneless whistle. Wesley, back in the Guildford flat the first time we’d met, had been spot on. None of the rest of it mattered. Not, at least, compared to this.

I shook my head, trying to concentrate again. McGrath was looking at the files in my lap. He sounded thoughtful.

‘Wallace has a point about the French,’ he said slowly. ‘That had occurred to me, too.’

Later, Cathy gone, I wheeled McGrath down the ramp beside the front door and along the concrete path that skirted the side of the house. At the back of the house there was half an acre or so of cultivated garden. The ground was carefully turned, neat rows of zucchini and maize, a stand of runner beans, a fenced-off chicken run. In the far corner, nicely sheltered, was a magnificent cannabis plant. I brought the wheelchair to a halt beside the latter. We’d been talking about Wallace again. I reached for one of the cannabis leaves, and broke it off, rubbing it between my fingers, then holding them beneath McGrath’s nose. He said he smoked regularly. He said it often helped.

‘Wallace …’ I said. ‘Did you know about his little project? The stuff he’s doing about Beckermann?’

McGrath nodded. ‘Wesley told me. And one or two other guys. Beckermann humours him. He does it to keep him on the team. Guy’s far too valuable to lose.’

‘But they’ve just sacked him. Wesley tell you that, too?’

‘What?’ McGrath’s head jerked up. I’d seen the reaction once or twice before, back in the bedroom. It meant that something was bothering him.

‘Sacked him,’ I said again. ‘Wallace got fired. A few days ago.’

‘Who by?’

‘Beckermann.’ I frowned. ‘I think.’

‘Why? He tell you that?’

‘No. He said it had to do with the business. Routine thing. The work ran out. He was very philosophical about it. A real stoic.’

‘That’s nonsense. There’s work there for as long as he wants it.
Scarab
’s going longer-range. There’s an enhancement programme. They’ll need him for that.’

‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

I pushed the wheelchair on. We stopped by the chicken run.
McGrath asked me to toss in some handfuls of feed from a hopper by the water butt. I threw in the grain. The chickens bustled around, a blur of pecking heads.

‘Do you know Beckermann at all?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Seen him on TV?’

‘Of course.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘Think?’ He looked up at me. Beyond a certain angle, his head wouldn’t go up any more. I circled the wheelchair, giving him a better view.

‘Well?’ I said.

There was a long silence. I could hear Nghien in the kitchen. He was singing.

‘Wesley volunteer me for this?’ McGrath said at last.

I smiled, trying to soften the question. ‘He said you might help,’ I murmured, ‘that’s all.’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why does he think that?’

‘I don’t know.’ I paused. ‘Except that he admires you a great deal.’ I smiled again. ‘He thinks you’re straight. He thinks you care.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘To Wesley, it probably is.’

‘Yeah.’ McGrath nodded, grim-faced. ‘You’re right. That’s his problem. Doesn’t know the difference between morality and good sense. Blacks are blacks, the way Wesley sees it. Whites are whites. Very neat. Very straightforward.’ He looked up at me again, squinting in the low sunlight. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard the theory. I know what he thinks. I know what he’s after, from me. But some things just ain’t that simple…’ he paused, ‘and one of them’s Beckermann.’

I nodded. ‘Wesley says he’s highly placed.’

‘Wesley’s right.’ He fell quiet for a while, a long, brooding silence, his body held upright in the wheelchair by a thick retaining strap around his chest. At length, the head jolted up again. ‘Everywhere there’s a middle to it all,’ he muttered, ‘an inner circle. My country. Your country. Everywhere. It’s not something you can see. Or photograph. Or hold to account. Or even vote for. But it exists, believe me. Here, the last ten years, it’s been
pretty much the same people. Oil people. West Coast people. Newish money, looking for a home.’

‘And Beckermann?’

McGrath fell silent again. ‘Beckermann’s part of it, sure,’ he said at last.

I waited, wanting him to elaborate, but nothing happened. I was still thinking about Wallace, the files in his office, the precise point when his crush on Beckermann took him into dangerous territory. What had he asked the man? Where was he headed?

McGrath was looking at the chickens again. When he spoke, his voice was low. ‘Wesley gets some funny ideas,’ he said.

‘You don’t think it’s true?’

‘I don’t mean that. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about me. All this …’ He paused, his chin on his chest. ‘I guess he thinks I’m braver than I really am. You know what I’m trying to say?’

‘Not really.’

There was another long silence. Then Nghien appeared in the garden, a phrase or two of Vietnamese. McGrath blinked, answering him at once in his own language. He’d acquired Nghien through one of the Veterans Hospitals. Nghien had been a marine in the South Vietnamese Army. He’d been injured in the fall of Saigon and helicoptered out. McGrath said the two of them were very close. Now, McGrath had evidently said something funny. Nghien ran back into the kitchen, cackling with laughter. McGrath fell silent again.

At length, he sighed. ‘Wesley thinks I’ve nothing to lose,’ he said, ‘that’s what he really thinks. He thinks I’m so far down the road, nothing else is gonna make much difference.’ He paused. ‘He’s wrong. If you end up with nothing but your head, you get pretty damn careful about keeping it in one piece. Years ago—’ he broke off.

I bent towards him. ‘Yes?’

‘Years ago,’ he began again, ‘at the start of all this, I made a decision. I decided to end it. I’d nothing left. Nothing. No wife. No body. No prospects. Nothing. So … endgame … zappo.’ He smiled, rueful. ‘Problem was, how to do it?’ He looked up. ‘You with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, OK, I had a wheelchair, an electric wheelchair. The front door of the place I lived in, they kept it locked. One day, I found it open. I took the chair out on to the porch. There were steps from that porch down to the sidewalk. I’d counted them. There were seventeen. Seventeen steps. That was enough to kill me. No question. I’d just hit the toggle with my chin and zap. Finito.’ He shook his head, the faintest whistle of breath leaving his thin body. ‘And you know what stopped me?’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

‘The thought that I might screw up. That I might only half do it. That I might end up even worse than now. My head… the inside of my head. Can you imagine that? Being brain-damaged? Not being able to speak or hear? But having just enough cells left to realize how
lucky
I’d been? The way I am now?’ He smiled again. ‘Interesting thought, eh? Me? Now?
Lucky?
’

I looked down at him, following the logic, wiser now about how cautious he’d become.

‘You think Beckermann might…?’

The head jerked up. ‘He’s a powerful man. He has a lot to lose. So do others, including me. There’s not much left to damage. But it’s all I’ve got.’

‘And Wesley?’

‘Wesley’s a goner. Wesley’s past tense, and he knows it. That’s what makes him so dangerous.’

‘But do you think he’s right? About the war?’

McGrath looked up at me again. There was a bleakness in his eyes, and I knew that was the closest I’d get to an answer. I hesitated a moment. There was a clatter of plates from the kitchen. The conversation was nearly at an end.

‘There’s an Englishman I met at Beckermann’s place,’ I said quickly. ‘He’s about thirty. Drives a Jaguar. We were never introduced. I think he must be a friend.’ I paused. ‘Know who I mean?’

McGrath frowned for a moment. ‘Beckermann’s line of business? Arms sales?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Blond? Six one? Six two?’

‘Yes.’

‘And English, you say?’

‘Yes.’

I knelt beside him, scooping another handful of corn from the hopper, waiting for a name. The chickens had nearly finished by the time it came.