Deep Black Page 4

  I got a smile out of him again, but I hated it when he did that: he looked as if he could see right through me. ‘Nick, what you’ve really got to remember is that by doing your bit to help end that war, you probably did save a whole lot of lives.’

  I lifted my hands. ‘So what? The war was bollocks. People got killed for nothing, kids got killed for nothing. Anyway, whatever. Over and done with.’

  His eyes flicked towards the clock on the wall behind me. ‘I see we’ve run over our time again.’

  That was always my cue to get up and take my leave. Most times I’d have liked to wrench the door open and make a break for it. But I knew that would only mean the next fifty-minute session would be spent talking about why I’d done a runner, so, as always, I got up and put on my leather bomber slowly. I’d learned that I needed to take it off when I arrived, because if I didn’t we’d end up talking about the reasons why I’d kept it on. Did it mean I didn’t want to be here, and was hoping for a fast getaway?

  He stood up with me and came to the door. ‘I’m glad you finally went to Bang Bang, Nick. The psyche, you see – you can never rush it, it takes its time to work things through, to help you take the right decisions.

  ‘I think Bosnia affected you more than you think. I think there’s a connection between losing Kelly and the death of Zina. We’ll get there eventually, when the psyche is ready to beam us in.

  ‘But that can only happen if you feel comfortable with our therapeutic relationship. I’m not here to hurt you, I’m here to help you. All your life you’ve had to hold things inside and not show your feelings, so I appreciate it was never going to be easy to let all this emotion out. As long as you realize it’s going to take some time . . .

  ‘And, Nick, even if you were lied to, it sounds like you really did make a difference during that time.’

  I stood on the threshold. ‘Just like old Beardilocks, yeah? At least he had the bollocks to let a few die in order to save the rest.’

  12

  Friday, 3 October

  My neck was stiff and my face was stuck to the leatherette. The sofa wasn’t the most comfortable place to sleep, but that was what I always seemed to end up doing these days.

  Forcing my eyes open, I checked Baby-G. It was a pink one – Kelly’s fifteenth and last birthday present from me. There was still time, so I pulled the blanket over my head to block out the glare of the TV and the dull grey light just seeping through the blinds.

  I pressed one of Baby-G’s side buttons and watched the face glow a purple colour and the stick man do a break-dance. She’d thought it was a bit silly, but I liked it. Fucking hell, I missed her. I rubbed my hair and smelt the grease on my hand as I closed my eyes.

  She lay so perfectly still, as I’d seen her lie so many times when she was asleep – stretched out on her back, arms and legs out like a starfish. Except that this time there’d been no sucking of her bottom lip, no flickering of her eyes under their lids as she dreamed. Kelly’s head was twisted to the right, at far too unnatural an angle.

  Why the fuck hadn’t I got there quicker? I could have stopped the fucking nightmare . . .

  As I’d leaned over her, my tears had fallen on to her hair-covered face. I checked for a pulse, even though I knew it was futile.

  I’d dragged her to the edge of the bed and gathered her in my arms, trying to hold her as best I could as I stumbled back towards the doorway.

  They would be coming up the stairs soon, respirators on, weapons up.

  I’d lain down next to her, gathering her head in my arms and pulling it on to my chest.

  And buried my face in her hair.

  Avoice from the TV told me tonight’s hot ticket was going to be Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. The TV had kept waking me during the night, but I couldn’t be arsed to scrabble around for the remote to switch it off. In fact, last night I hadn’t even been arsed to get undressed before channel-hopping for hours and eventually falling asleep. On an MTV night I could learn quite a lot about the latest bands out there. Kelly would have been proud of me.

  It was no use. I was awake now. I felt about on the floor, knocking over a couple of empty mugs then running my hand over the remains of a toasted cheese sandwich. I finally got hold of the remote and flicked through the morning soaps and re-runs of Jerry Springer until I hit a news channel. Another two US soldiers had been killed in Iraq.

  I planned my day, which didn’t take long. It was going to be exactly the same as most of the other days I didn’t spend sitting in front of Ezra. Or maybe not. I remembered promising myself I was going to open the windows today. It was getting so rank in here that even I could smell it. And, of course, there was another meeting with George.

  I rolled off the sofa and threw the blankets back on top. The kitchen was a disaster zone. The stainless steel and glass had been clean and shiny when I took up the tenancy, but these days I seemed to be sharing the place with a gorilla. He came in every night while I was asleep and messed up all the cleaning I’d done. He dirtied all the plates, filled the bin to overflowing, then spilled coffee and tea on the work surfaces. To top it all, he chucked bits of stale bread and empty spaghetti-hoops cans about the place, and after trashing the kitchen he fucked up the rest of the flat. The last thing he always did before leaving, as far as I could tell, was shit in my mouth. It certainly tasted like it, this time of the morning.

  I shoved the last couple of slices into the toaster and peeled the plastic from some processed cheese. A constant stream of aircraft headed into Ronald Reagan, and the TV next door blasted out that Channel Nine was going live to an armed siege in Maryland.

  I fired up the kettle and wandered back in to watch, munching on the cheese. I never knew why I bothered taking the wrappers off: it all tasted the same.

  I found myself watching a young black guy coming out of his front door in just a pair of jeans. His hands were in the air, but there was a pistol in one. The place was surrounded by police, one barking at him through a megaphone to put down the gun. It was hard to tell from his body language: was this guy drugged up or just pissed off?

  I tried to unstick the cheese from my teeth and the roof of my mouth. The black guy shouted for them to shoot him, pounding on his chest with his free hand. The megaphone screamed at him to put down the weapon, and for a split second it looked like that was what he was going to do. He started to lower the weapon, but instead of laying it on the ground he turned the muzzle towards the group of police hunched down behind their cruiser, and that was the last thing he did. Six or seven rounds hit him at once and he dropped like liquid. The screen went black, then we were back in the studio, the anchors changing swiftly to traffic conditions on the Beltway. Another suicide-by-cop for us to watch live over our corn flakes.

  The toast popped up. I went and shoved a fresh batch of cheese squares between the unbuttered slices and scraped the last bit of Branston from the jar with a dirty teaspoon. I’d been getting through three or four jars of the stuff a week. Ezra would have had a field day if I’d told him: I clearly had an unfulfilled yearning for the old country. Sliced white bread, cheese slices and Branston pickle – often three times a day, and lying on the sofa watching Oprah. No wonder my jeans were getting difficult to put on.

  I turned towards the window, looking through the gloom in the direction of his office to have my daily mimic. ‘Do you have any idea what that might mean, Nick?’

  Chewing on the sandwich, I shoved what was left in the air at him. ‘Shove it up your arse.’

  ‘That’s ass, Nick – you’re an American now.’

  I rooted round in the empty boxes on the worktop but with no luck. I was out of teabags but not out of pills. I had nine big bottles of the stuff Ezra prescribed me. I told him I was taking them but, fuck it, I didn’t want that shit inside me. I had enough problems with the Branston.

  I was going to have to haul my fat arse out of the flat and down to the Brit shop in Georgetown that all the embassy boys went to. All Brits hate the fancy teabags
on a string they try to fob you off with in the States. They taste terrible and there’s hardly anything in them anyway. What I wanted was monkey tea, the sort you can stand your teaspoon up in, the sort that comes out of a plumber’s Thermos looking like hot chocolate. But, then, could I really be bothered? Probably not. Depending on what George had to say, I could be leaving today. Where would I plug in my kettle then?

  I thought about taking a shower, but fuck it. I just ran the kitchen tap and threw some water on my hair to tame the Johnny Rotten look, and pulled my trainers on.

  On the way to the Metro I grabbed a Danish and got it down me before I reached Crystal City station. Eating, drinking, smoking – you name it, you can’t do it on the Washington Metro.

  A few minutes later, as the pristine aluminium train rumbled under the capital, I found myself thinking about the guy on the news. Whatever problem he’d had, it was over now. He’d got it sorted.

  I didn’t care what happened to me, but Ezra was right: if I really thought that way, I’d have already done it. I would never take that route. I could still remember the feeling I got when other ex-Regiment guys killed themselves, and it wasn’t envy, pity or anything else. It was just anger, big-time, for leaving someone else to pick up the pieces. Sometimes I’d had to sort out their kit before it went back to the next of kin. It was important there weren’t any letters from girlfriends or anything else from their secret lives to embarrass the family. I remembered burning letters to one particular guy, thinking they were from a girlfriend. When I took the rest of his kit round to his wife she burst into tears. How could Al not have kept any of the love letters she signed off as Fizz, his pet name for her?

  Then I thought about all the insurance policies that were invalid because some selfish fucker had taken an overdose. If you’ve decided to do it, and you’re sane enough to stockpile painkillers or whatever, why not go out and do a couple of freefalls and just forget to dump the canopy on the third jump?

  Worst of all was the effect on the kids they left behind. How could anyone be so selfish that they ignored the price their families had to pay? The guy on the TV, I wondered – had he got a wife, kids, parents, brothers, sisters? What if, like me, they’d watched the whole thing on TV?

  If I took the easy way out, at least it’d make fuck-all difference to anyone else’s life.

  But I wasn’t going to. I had other plans.

  13

  The sun was out at last, but I could still see my breath as I walked along Beach Street. It was ten to eleven and I was a couple of blocks south of the Library of Congress. That meant I’d have to slow down if I was going to be late. It was important for George to see everything was normal.

  The other foot traffic eyed me as if I was driving at five miles an hour on the freeway. They rushed along in trainers with their office shoes in their bags, heads down and cellphones stuck to their ears so the world knew they were doing really important stuff. Everyone, men and women, seemed to be dressed in the same make of dark grey raincoat.

  I sipped at the hole in the Starbucks lid. I didn’t want to drink it all before I got to Hot Black Inc. because that, too, wouldn’t be normal.

  I reached the brick building in the centre of DC a couple of minutes before eleven. Dwarfed by modern, nondescript concrete blocks on either side of it, the Victorian original had been converted into office space long ago. Six or seven worn stone steps took me up to a pair of large glass doors and into the lobby. Calvin was waiting behind the desk. A huge black guy in a freshly laundered white shirt and immaculately pressed blue uniform, he’d either come with the building or was part of the Hot Black alias business cover, I never knew which. I went through the palaver of signing in, not having to show ID any more because me and Calvin had a sort of relationship going. I’d been in for quite a few meetings with George lately. But he still looked me up and down as usual, taking in my jeans, trainers and leather bomber jacket. ‘Dress-down Wednesday, is it, Mr Stone?’

  ‘Correct as ever, Calvin. The day after dress-down Tuesday, the day before dress-down Thursday.’

  He laughed politely, as he had all the other times.

  I rode the dark wood-panelled lift to the first floor, George’s part of the US intelligence jungle. I had no idea who really called the shots here: all I knew was that since I’d been working for George the apartment was taken care of, and I picked up eighty-two thousand dollars a year. As an employee of Hot Black Inc., advertising tractors or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing, I also received a social-security number and even filed tax returns. I was a real citizen, in theory as American as George. After so many years of being treated like shit by the Firm, it had felt good. I was still treated like shit, of course, but at least it was done with a great big American smile and a lot more money.

  I checked Baby-G. Not late enough yet, so when the lift pinged open I waited a bit longer in the corridor, like one of the white alabaster statues set in little alcoves along the shiny black marble walls. The cleaners had been busy: the air was heavy with that morning office smell of spray polish and air-freshener.

  At exactly five past I entered the smoked-glass doors into the empty reception area. Nothing had been touched since I’d first come here over a year ago: the large antique table that doubled as the front desk was still unmanned, the telephone still unconnected; the two long, red-velvet sofas still faced each other across a low glass coffee-table devoid of magazines and papers.

  The main office doors were tall, black, shiny and very solid. I was still a couple of paces away when they were pulled open.

  George stood on the threshold, looking me up and down. ‘You’re late. Haven’t you any other clothes? You’re supposed to be an executive.’

  Before I could answer, he turned back into his oak-panelled office. I closed the door behind me and followed him. He hadn’t even taken his raincoat off. It wasn’t going to be a long comfy chat, then.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. It’s harder getting round the city, these days, with all the security.’

  ‘Leave earlier.’ He knew it was a lie. He sat down behind his desk and I took one of the two wooden chairs facing him. The fluorescent lights had at last been fitted with dimmers. George no longer had to worry that they were going to give him cancer.

  As ever, he was dressed under his raincoat in a button-down shirt and corduroy jacket. Today he even had a pin through his chunky cotton tie. I wondered if he was Donald Rumsfeld’s secret twin brother. All he lacked was the rimless glasses.

  He nodded at the Starbucks in my hand. ‘You still drinking that crap?’

  It almost felt reassuring. ‘Yep, two dollars seventy-eight.’

  He watched with disgust as I knocked back the dregs. They were cold, but I’d wanted to save some just to annoy him.

  He wasn’t in the mood for beating about the bush. He never was.

  I cleared my throat. ‘George, I’ve thought about what you’ve been saying this last week or so. But I don’t care about the war any more. I don’t care what you think you’ve done for me – I earned it. I’m not coming back to work.’

  He sat back in his chair, elbows resting on the arms and his fingers steepled in front of his mouth. Whatever he was thinking about, his face didn’t give it away. The right index finger jumped away from the rest and pointed at me. ‘You think you’re ready for that world out there, son?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I also think that the therapy is bullshit. All of this is bullshit. I’ve had enough.’

  The finger rejoined the others. ‘You’re the one with all the bright ideas.’

  I shrugged. ‘I was wrong: I’m ready. I’ve got over it. I’m going to buy a bike that works for once, and maybe get to see some of my new country.’

  He pursed his lips behind the fingertips. ‘You were hurting after Kelly was killed, son, and quite understandably so. A loss like that – a child. Must be a lonely time for you right now. It’s going to be a while before you’re back on your feet.’

  ‘George, you heari
ng me? I’ve been telling you for fucking weeks now but it doesn’t seem to register. That’s it. No more. I’m finished.’

  He leaned forward, fingers still together, elbows on the desk. ‘No need for profanity, son. What if I said you can’t leave? You know too much. That makes you a liability. What would you expect me to do about that? Motorcycles can be dangerous things, Nick.’

  I stood up, leaving the cup on the carpet. ‘You can’t threaten me any more. What have I got to lose? Kelly’s dead, remember? My whole world fits in two carry-ons. What you going to do? Rip up my favourite sweatshirt?’

  ‘How about you coming back to work? I think you’re ready, don’t you?’

  I turned to leave. ‘I’ll get out the apartment today, if you want. It’s in shit state, anyway.’

  ‘Keep the apartment. Use it to do some thinking in.’ George was as calm as ever. ‘This isn’t how the story ends, son, believe me. You’re just lonely right now. You’ll get over it.’

  14

  I sat staring vacantly at the Metro map above the head of the woman opposite, who was doing the same at the map above me. There was the smell of old margarine which had nothing to do with the train. I looked around, and suddenly realized it must be coming from me.

  George was right. I was a liability now, and he would never make an idle threat. Fuck it, so what? If he wanted me dead it would happen, I had no control over that. All I could do was get on with what I wanted to do – and that was to get as far away as possible from being treated like a lump of shit. As bad as it was only having Kelly in my head now, it had sort of set me free. They couldn’t use her to threaten me any more. It was going to be a different sort of life now. I’d watched the re-runs of Easy Rider.

  Dupont Circle was a few stops further on. Did Ezra know I hadn’t told him the truth about going to Bang Bang Bosnia? There were a whole load of things I’d either told various levels of lies about or withheld from him completely. Like my decision to bin the job, or that today’s session had been the last I was ever going to attend.