I Am Pilgrim (31 page)

She smiled. ‘You’re right. Silly of me. Forget the owner – he’s an awful man, to be honest. The wife’s even worse – fancies herself as a decorator.’ Her laugh had always been brittle, like a glass breaking, and it hadn’t altered.

She took a step back and ran her eye up and down. ‘You look well, Scott – the years have been good

to you.’

‘You too,’ I said, shaking my head in fake wonder. ‘You’ve barely changed.’ I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but she nodded happily – flattery and delusion were part of the air she breathed.

We continued to look at each other for an awkward moment, neither of us quite sure what to say

next. ‘How’s Dexter?’ I asked, just to get over the hurdle.

A shadow of confusion fell across the tightly drawn skin of her face. ‘That’s strange. Grace said she wrote to you about it.’

I had no idea what she meant. ‘I didn’t have any contact with Grace for years. Wrote to me about

what?’

‘That’d be Grace,’ she said, doing her best to smile. ‘Not interested unless it was about her.

Dexter ’s dead, Scott.’

For a moment I couldn’t get the gears to mesh: he was a strong guy – always sneering at people –

but still, dead? That was a bit extreme. Because I was an outsider who never spoke to anyone and he

was loathed, the rest of the squash team always made sure we were paired together and, more than anyone, I had to endure his racquet-throwing and taunts.

His mother was watching my face, and I was thankful I didn’t have to fake it – I was genuinely shocked. She herself was fighting to blink back the tears – no easy thing given how much skin the plastic surgeons had cut away over the years.

‘I asked Grace to tell you, because I knew how tight you two were,’ she said. ‘He was always saying

how often you would go to him for advice, not just on the court either.’

Corcoran said what? I would have rather gone to Bart Simpson for advice. Jesus Christ.

‘We can be honest now, Scott – you didn’t belong, did you? Dexter said that’s why he always stepped forward to partner you – he didn’t want you to feel like you were excluded. He was always

very thoughtful like that.’

I nodded quietly. ‘That was a part of Dexter a lot of people didn’t see,’ I said. I mean, what else could I do – he was her only child, for God’s sake. ‘What happened?’

‘He drowned – he was at the beach house by himself and went for a swim one night.’

I knew the stretch of beach – it was dangerous even in daylight; nobody in their right mind would

go swimming there in the dark. Fragments of things I had heard drifted back – he had flunked out of

law school, ugly stories about hard drinking, time spent at a rehab clinic in Utah.

‘Of course there were spiteful rumours,’ his mother said. ‘You know what people are like – but the

coroner and the police both agreed it was an accident.’

I remembered his grandfather had been a prominent judge – on the Supreme Court – and I figured

somebody had put the fix in. If there was a note in the house I suppose it was handed privately to his parents and they destroyed it.

I’ve had too much experience of death for someone my age but even that couldn’t inoculate me. I

always thought it would be me, but Corcoran – the dumb sonofabitch – was the first of my class to

pass from this world, and it must have taken the colour from my face.

‘You’re pale,’ Mrs Corcoran said, touching my arm to comfort me. ‘I shouldn’t have said it so directly but, Scott, I don’t know any correct—’

She was swallowing hard and I thought she was going to cry but, thankfully, she didn’t. Instead she

forced herself to brighten. ‘And what about you – still in the art business?’

Grief hadn’t unhinged her – that was the legend I had created for friends and family when I first went into the field for The Division. Legally, nobody was allowed to know of the agency’s existence, so I had spent months crafting my cover story before the Director finally signed off on it.

Arriving at Avalon unannounced one Sunday, I told Grace and Bill over lunch that I was sick of Rand, sick of research, sick of psychology itself. I said the greatest thing the two of them had given me was an interest in art and, as a result, I was leaving Rand to start a business dealing in early twentieth-century European paintings, basing myself in Berlin.

As legends went, if I do say so myself, it was good – it allowed me to travel anywhere in Europe

for my real work and at the same time provided a reason to lose contact with my former acquaintances until I was virtually forgotten. And, obviously, it had been believable – here I was, so many years later, listening to a woman who had been a friend of Bill and Grace asking me about the

art racket.

I smiled. ‘Yes, still chasing canvases, Mrs Corcoran – still squeezing out a living.’

She looked from my cashmere sweater down to my expensive loafers, and I realized my mistake –

out of deference to Bill’s memory I had dressed up for the occasion.

‘I suspect more than squeezing,’ she said, eyes narrowing.

I didn’t want her to think my fictitious business was successful, or else people might start asking

why they had never heard of it, so I took the almost revolutionary step of telling the truth. ‘I was

lucky,’ I said. ‘Maybe you already know – Grace left me some money.’

She paused. ‘I would have bet everything I owned against that,’ she said softly.

‘Yeah, she could be pretty aloof,’ I replied, ‘but underneath I suppose she must have felt something.’

‘Obligation, if you ask me,’ she replied tartly. ‘They’re dead now, so I don’t suppose it matters –

Grace never wanted you, Scott, not even from the beginning.’

Whatever difficulties I’d had with my stepmother, I had never expected to hear it put so bluntly. I

wondered if Mrs Corcoran was exaggerating, and a look of doubt must have crossed my face.

‘Don’t stare at me. I heard her say it – about a week after you arrived from Detroit. We were having coffee out there.’ She pointed towards the lawn that overlooked the lake.

‘Bill, Grace and I were watching you – the nanny had you down at the water ’s edge, looking at the

swans, I think.’

As young as I was, I remembered that – I had never seen swans before and I thought they were the

most beautiful things in the world.

‘Bill wouldn’t take his eyes off of you,’ Mrs Corcoran continued. ‘To be honest, I’ve never seen a

man so taken with a child. Grace noticed it too. She kept looking at him and then, very quietly, she said: “I’ve changed my mind, Bill – a child doesn’t fit in with us.”

‘He turned to her. “You’re wrong,” he said. “It’s exactly what we need.
More
kids – give this place some damn life.”

‘There was a finality to it, but Grace wouldn’t let it drop, determined to have her way – apparently they only had a few days to tell the agency if they were going to keep you.’

Mrs Corcoran paused to see my reaction. What did she expect – is there anyone who doesn’t want

to think their parents loved them? ‘Yeah, Grace was an experienced shopper,’ I said. ‘She took everything on a sale-or-return basis.’

The old woman laughed. ‘That’s why I always liked you, Scott – you never let anything hurt you.’

I just nodded.

‘Anyway, the argument between them became increasingly bitter until finally Grace lost her temper.

“You know your trouble, Bill?” she said. “You’re a porter – you see anyone with baggage and you’ve

always got to help them.”

‘With that, she told him you’d be leaving in the morning, and headed for the house, claiming she

was going to check on lunch. Nobody saw her for the rest of the day. Bill sat in silence for a long time, his eyes still fixed on you, then he said, “Scott will be staying at Avalon until he goes to college, longer if he wants. He’ll stay because the porter says so – and Grace will have to accept it.”

‘I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen that steely side of him – I’m not sure anybody had. Then

he turned to me and said the strangest thing.

‘You probably know Bill wasn’t a spiritual man – I never once heard him talk about God – but he

said that every night he sat by your bed while you slept. “I think Scott was sent to us,” he told me. “I feel like I’ve been chosen to care for him. I don’t know why I think it, but I believe he’s going to do something very important one day.”’

Standing in the old house with so many years gone by, Mrs Corcoran smiled at me. ‘Did you, Scott? Was Bill right? Did you do something very important?’

I smiled back and shook my head. ‘Not unless you think finding a few lost canvases is important.

But Bill was a fine man and it was good of him to think like that.’

From out on the lawn, we heard someone calling Mrs Corcoran’s name – she probably had to give

a speech. She patted my arm, starting to go.

‘Well, who knows?’ she said. ‘You’re not old, there’s still time, isn’t there? Goodbye, Scott.’

But there wasn’t – time, I mean. I was still in my thirties, but my race was run. Only a fool would

think it could turn out otherwise. So – say hello to the fool, I have often said to myself when I think back on those days.

Chapter Twenty-nine

THE SARACEN, NEWLY arrived in Afghanistan, was travelling fast, sticking to the sparsely populated valleys for as long as he could, always heading east. It had been almost fifteen years since he had been in the country as a teenage muj, but every day he still saw evidence of the old Soviet war: abandoned gun emplacements, a rusted artillery piece, a goat-herder ’s hut bombed into oblivion.

Creeks and rivers ran along the valley floors, and they provided safety. The fertile strip on either side of the watercourses was planted with only one thing – marijuana – and the tall, moisture-heavy

plants provided good cover from US thermal-imaging equipment.

Finally, however, he had to abandon the valleys and climb into the forbidding Hindu Kush mountains. In the steep forests he followed the tracks made by timber cutters, hoping the surveillance drones would see his packhorses and dismiss him as one more illegal logger. But above the treeline,

every breath a labour because of the altitude, there was no cover and he had to quicken his pace even more.

Late one afternoon, in the distance, he thought he saw the mountain scree where he had brought down his first Hind gunship, but it was a long time ago and he couldn’t be sure. Toiling higher, he

crossed a narrow ridge and passed shell casings and rocket pods of a far more recent vintage.

In the years since he had last seen the country as a
muj
, the Afghans had known little but war: the Russians had been replaced by the warlords; Mullah Omar ’s Taliban had defeated the warlords; America, hunting Osama bin Laden, had destroyed the Taliban; the warlords had returned; and now

the US and a coalition of allies were fighting to prevent the re-emergence of the Taliban.

The used ammunition told him he must be close to Kunar Province – referred to by the Americans

as ‘enemy central’ – and, sure enough, that night he heard Apache helicopters roaring down a valley

below, followed by an AC-130 gunship which people said fired bullets as big as Coke bottles.

In the following days he was stopped numerous times – mostly by US or NATO patrols but twice

by wild men who described themselves as members of the Anti-Coalition Militia but who he knew were Taliban in a different turban. He told them all the same thing – he was a devout Lebanese doctor who had raised money from mosques and individuals in his homeland for a medical mercy mission.

His aim was to bring help to Muslims in remote areas where, because the continuous wars had destroyed the country’s infrastructure, there were no longer any clinics and the doctors had fled.

He said he had sent his supplies by boat from Beirut to Karachi, flown to join them, bought a truck, driven through Pakistan into Afghanistan and, at the Shaddle Bazaar – the world’s largest opium market – had traded the truck for the ponies. All of it was true, and he even had a cheap digital camera on which he could show photos of himself tending to the sick and inoculating kids at a dozen ruined

villages.

That – combined with the fact that every time his caravan was searched they found a wide range of

medical supplies – allayed both sides’ fears. The only items he carried that led to questions were a pane of thick, reinforced glass and several sacks of quicklime. He told anyone who asked that the glass was used as an easily sterilized platform on which to mix prescriptions. And the quicklime?

How else was he to destroy the swabs and dressings he used to treat everything from gangrene to measles?

Nobody even bothered to reach deep into the small saddlebag which held his clothes and spare sandals. At the bottom of it was a collapsible ‘helmet’ with a clear plastic face plate, a box of R-700D

disposable face masks, a black bio-hazard suit, rubber boots, Kevlar-lined gloves and rolls of special tape to seal every join from the helmet to the boots. If the equipment had been found he would have

told them that anthrax occurs naturally among hoofed animals – including goats and camels – and that he had no intention of dying for his work. As further proof, he would have shown them vials of antibiotics he was carrying, stolen from the hospital he had been working at in Lebanon, which was

the standard drug to treat the disease. But the men he ran into were soldiers – either guerillas or otherwise – and they were looking for weapons and explosives, and nobody asked.