Charlie Johnson in the Flames (12 page)

Charlie had worked with fixers in a lot of places, and none of them had this princely refusal to anticipate those disasters willed by his employers. It was scorn, not laziness, Charlie decided. Disasters willed by others, Buddy was prepared to fix. But if a team wanted to fuck it up, Buddy had concluded, it was not his job to stop them.

Charlie's working assumption was that this time – especially after six assignments or whatever it was together – Buddy would decide to warn him if he saw trouble coming. Though when he thought about it, he might know when trouble was coming faster than Buddy. He had not told him the whole story, and so there were bound to be some bad moments ahead, when Buddy discovered what he was in for, but on mature reflection, Charlie felt Buddy wouldn't back out. He couldn't say why exactly. It had something to do with the silence that had come over Buddy after the incident with the Tigers. Through the long miles of the night that followed, as they drew up to one checkpoint after another and Buddy sat staring straight ahead, you could feel his hatred for these people and what they had done to his country. Hatred like that was a lodestar. You could set your compass by it, or so Charlie supposed. But, as he turned out the light in the Hotel Moskva, it did strike him that one of the commoner mistakes in life was to suppose that conviction was catching, to suppose that if you felt something with cold fury, Buddy – or anyone else – would feel it too.

Charlie rarely dreamed but he dreamed of Annie that night. He had wanted to call her from the hotel room, but he hadn't, and also couldn't now, he realised. He had been thinking of her as he drifted to sleep looking at the curtains eddying in the breeze as the city slowly settled and slept. When he saw her in the dream, it was so vivid that he wanted to call out to her. They were at the island, and she was getting into the small steel-frame outboard. She was maybe four and she had her life-jacket on, and she got into the boat carefully, the way he had taught her, first one hand then the other on the thwarts and no standing, just sliding down into the seat. She was wearing jeans and that red top and the toenails on her bare feet were painted light green. When she was seated, in the back, she was looking up at him and her hair was tied in two bunches. She said something to him, maybe calling him to get into the boat, but he couldn't make out what it was. But it was morning, and he knew they were driving over to the marina for bread and fresh coffee, and they had the whole day ahead of them. When he woke the curtains by the open window were still, and the city was momentarily silent and in darkness.

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here was a war on, after all, and it wasn't smart to look like a foreign national on buses heading in the general direction of the front line. So he played Buddy's silent, possibly idiotic brother all that day, as the bus, one of those fume-spewing monsters, plied its way south, through one long village after another. There was a guy in the seat behind who had the look about him so they said nothing, not even when the bus stopped at a gas pump and everybody got off for a smoke and a leak. Even after the guy with the look stepped down at a town halfway, they didn't talk.

The windows were open, it was a bright spring day, and the curtains were flying around, and Charlie was thinking about municipal buses in Greece, half a life-time before. The Norwegian girl wore a straw hat, and he only knew her first name, and they travelled together for most of the day, conscious of the hot line of their bodies vibrating against each other. She would be fifty now, and he might not recognise her in the street. He wondered whether she remembered the old monk on the donkey they had seen at dusk riding through the lemon orchard. He wondered how she would remem ber the scene on the beach in the dark when they were naked and she had said he could, so quietly, just like that, that he didn't believe it at first. Then she added ‘‘But you have to come out before' because she didn't have any protection. So he did, and she had been a tight fit and it may have hurt her, though he didn't know and she hadn't said. She was a big-boned, wide-hipped girl with acrid white skin and freckles every where.

Afterwards they had gone to sleep in the upstairs room at the taverna on the beach. In the middle of the night, a drunk had burst through the door and fallen on his face on the bed across the room. They waited to see if he would move, and when he didn't, they decided to leave him where he was, breathing heavily, face down in his clothes. The next day when he woke up, his first words were in English: ‘Who the fuck are you?' He turned out to be a cook from Macclesfield, the taverna owner's brother, home for a holiday. He wasn't alto gether pleased that his brother had double-booked his room. His name was Spiro and he looked at the pretty blonde girl, holding the bedclothes up at her chin, as if Charlie was the luckiest man alive. Which at that moment, he was. The memory of it was so strong that Charlie began laughing, and the old lady with the kerchief in the next seat looked at him oddly, and so did the man with the busted blood vessels on his nose, who was reading the official newspaper. This was fine, of course, because Charlie was playing Buddy's idiot brother. And only idiots laugh for no good reason.

He was still in a good mood when the bus put them down at the depot in the southern town where Buddy said they were going to find the reservists. It was exactly what he had expected, though, as Charlie realised, few places surprised him any more. He had reached the age his father used to warn him about, when surprises just get fewer and fewer. It had the standard items for a town its size: old style imperial barracks, a baroque church that was shut, a yellow and white party head quarters looking out over a neglected, paper-strewn park with children's swings, a closed newspaper kiosk and the Hotel Sport's neon sign just coming on as the light drained away like dirty water in a tub. You couldn't imagine living in a town like this, but then that was your problem. The inhabitants probably thought there was no other life anywhere else, though there weren't many of them about to ask.

A dump, Buddy said as he surveyed the scene. On the other hand, it was the one place that had said no to the war. The reservists had formed up in this square, straight off the buses from the front, and they had smashed the doors of the party headquarters. This was to the credit of the town, Charlie thought, since it was the head quarters of Second Army Group, and lived off the military, especially the bars where the soldiers drank off hours, like the one in the Hotel Sport, where they now proposed to spend – as Buddy gloomily put it – ‘rest of our lives' till someone showed up. What they would do if no one did was not clear. They didn't have a Plan B. This had to be the bad guy's town, Buddy said, since the shoulder flashes on Charlie's still were from Second Army Group, Special Operations.

They drank a few beers and listened to the jukebox, though naturally there wasn't a country and western song on it to save Charlie's soul. So there was nothing to do but let the listlessness of the place seep into their bones. A few guys with short-cropped, Army-style hair came into the bar, eyed them suspiciously, drank up and left. ‘This is terrific,' Buddy said, beneath his breath.

It was now moonless and dark outside. A silver Merc, one of those big heavy diesels, dusty from the road, wheeled into the square, and paused purring in front of the bar. The driver, whoever it was behind the tinted glass, had both of them in plain sight through the bar window. The machine stood there, and then slowly, wheeled off, rubber crackling over gravel. Buddy decided it was time to take a walk. The barman nodded. There was another place, he said, five minutes away. ‘You should try there.' Buddy nodded. They hadn't asked.

The shutters were up on the long low rows of houses on both sides of the street, and thin oblongs of pale light from the televisions inside played through the shutters on to the sidewalk. It seemed that everyone in town was watching television and quite possibly watching the same thing. As they went past each house, Charlie could piece it together, glimpse by glimpse through the shutters. It was official television, lots of hearty accordion playing and big women in peasant clothing thumping around some studio. The people would have watched anything else had they been able to afford one of those foreign dishes. Whenever the editorial writers and other deep thinkers tried to portray the regime as serious Big Time Evil, Charlie always thought of the incorrigible mediocrity of its official television.

‘Charlie, level with me,' Buddy said, head down, kicking the gravel as they walked.

Charlie said nothing. The reality was he didn't know what he wanted. Just find the bastard. But then?

‘There could be problems.'

‘Which it is your business to anticipate.'

‘Your guy is Special Operations. Nobody is going to talk about Special Operations.'

‘Since when did that ever stop you?'

This was how Charlie thought he would manage it, simply by provoking Buddy into remembering that miracles were his business.

‘I know someone,' Buddy said, though why he hadn't said so earlier, Charlie didn't understand. Buddy knew someone in every one of these small towns. Someone had to mean a girl he had slept with once, or a man he done a favour for or had been in a car with on the road to the front, or had been shot up with somewhere. Their names and phone numbers were all in a scuffed cardboard-covered address book he kept in a vest pocket, ‘next to my heart', as he put it. In this case, it was a local radio reporter, who lived behind the shutters of a small house, up one of the cobbled streets off the route the bus had taken into the town. Local radio was a good bet: during the reservists' demonstration, a reporter from the local station had gone down to the crowd in front of the party headquarters and had broadcast the whole thing – which was why anybody knew about it at all. The reporter was still in jail.

She opened the door and she didn't display any of the excitement that girls sometimes showed when Buddy turned up. She stood there, hand on the door, and smiled without surprise at Buddy and then gave Charlie a once-over, lingering on his eyes. There was noise from the radio and smoke rising from a cigarette in an ashtray, yellowed lighting from an overhead bulb and brown plush furniture, an unmade bed, a plastic screen behind which you could see a bathroom, and some of her underwear on a line over the sink. Anna or some such name. Charlie wasn't paying attention. She might have been twenty-five, and her colour wasn't all that good, pale like smoke. Why did they all look like this, these girls, with neglected black hair and that smoky complexion and look of resentment, as if you, a perfect stranger, were personally to blame for how their life had turned out?

She curled her bare feet beneath her on the sofa and studied the picture he gave her for a second, biting a fingernail. She looked at Charlie but he didn't see why he should give anything away. She didn't ask where it was taken or why Charlie was interested.

It was obvious she knew him. She said something to Buddy and then she looked at Charlie again and said ‘the Colonel'. She nodded noncommittally and took a drag from her cigarette. So now they were looking for the Colonel.

She knew him, Charlie reasoned, because it was a small town, and a small unit, and at his level, he would be one of the kings.

Charlie couldn't figure out what else she might know and what she would be willing to say. There might even be something between her and the man himself. Or between her and Buddy. They were talking, not looking at him, and so anything might be happening. As she smoked and dropped the picture on the pile of newspapers in front of the sofa she might have been wondering what it would cost her to tell Charlie more. Such thoughts were passing through Charlie's mind, though he knew he couldn't really anticipate anything. Sustained attempts at anticipation turned out to be pointless or depressing or both.

He wondered how far she could be trusted. He couldn't make anything out from the way she moved the hair off her face and tucked it behind her left ear or from her thin smile as Buddy laid out his line of goods. In his business, Charlie was always trusting people. It was never exactly trust, of course, more a matter of playing the odds. She would be doing the same thing. If he was exposing her to danger so what? It wasn't his business to protect anyone. They were all adults here.

As the smoke thickened around the single light bulb above his head, and he watched Buddy talking to the girl on the sofa, Charlie had one of those moments of decompression when the point of it all – this journey, this story, whatever it was – seemed to be escaping him. What did these places mean to him now? These rooms with stained wallpaper, these local reporters and other people's wars. He was sick of it. He studied the poster of some long-haired singer in front of him and the Nike one on the other wall that said: Just do it. What he wanted to do was to go home. But there wasn't one to go to.

These senseless and abrupt drops in his internal barometric pressure came and went without warning and they made him feel that whatever he was doing was an entire waste of time. When they were happening, he felt that he had been emptied out by a life of following stories. He had done all this too many times, working a source in a dirty room in some place he didn't really care about. He felt all this but he also knew – this was the only benefit of getting older that he had ever noticed – that this moment would pass, and that he would recover momentum. Because momentum, after all, was all there was.

‘What do you want him for?' the girl asked, in good English. She looked at him, evenly, drawing in the smoke, waiting to exhale.

Buddy shrugged, as if to say, I tried explaining, but no good.

‘He killed a woman I knew. I want to talk to him about it.'

He hadn't meant to say it, or at least not yet. He had not said as much to Buddy. So it was Buddy's turn to look surprised.