The Abrupt Physics of Dying (41 page)

Angels and Men

30th June, Geneva, Switzerland

Clay flung open the double doors and stood looking out over Lake Geneva from his room at the Hotel Métropole. The sky was clear, the air crisp. Ice-capped mountains burned like white phosphorous in the distance. A ferry slid across the glassy early-morning surface of the lake.

He’d left the hospital through the gardens after climbing from the balcony, the would-be assassin unconscious on the floor. He’d hailed a taxi in the street and arrived at the airport just in time to make the Air France flight. By the time he arrived in Paris, half-smashed on airline booze, he’d almost convinced himself that Rania was still alive. We find her soon, the assassin had said. Who else could he have meant? It had to be her.

He’d gone straight from arrivals to the ticket desk, bought an ongoing ticket to Geneva, arriving late the same evening. At immigration, a lone bearded Aussie had attracted no attention, just another tourist in the queue, passport stamped and on his way.

But now Clay sat on the bed, looked out over the lake, and tried to think clearly. Sober, hungover, he put his head in his hand and crushed the weak part of himself that had dared to hope. He knew the damage had been too extensive. He’d seen it too many times. The medic had said that the brachial artery had been hit. He’d tried to clamp it, he’d said, frowning, unsure. With a wound like that, she would have had little chance, despite the evac, despite the
medical attention she would have received on the plane. And, yet, she’d seemed almost stable when he’d last seen her in the Mukhalla airport, the world tearing itself apart all around them. Had the news reports of her death been a ruse designed to protect her? Koevoet had told him stories of South African DCC agents whose covers had been blown and had been provided with similar stories, new lives.

Find me, she’d said.

He’d been here for more than two weeks now, trying to do just that. He’d tried every possible combination of telephone numbers from the note on Rania’s cigarette package, transposing fours and nines, ones and sevens, zeros and nines, everything that could remotely be misconstrued as something else. He’d made hundreds of telephone calls. And with every perplexed, muttered negative, in French, in German, in Italian, he’d felt her slipping away. And with every day that went by, more lethal radiation was pumped into the groundwater in the Masila. More dead kids. More miscarriages. Lives ruined. Fortunes made.

He’d tried to decode Rania’s words, spent days in Geneva’s solemn public library researching the history of Aden, scouring maps of Geneva, lists of street names, reading Rimbaud.
Anges et hommes
. Angels and men. The pure and the totally fucked-up. He’d finally found the words in a poem, written not by the eighteen-year-old genius, but by a love-struck absinthe-soaked Verlaine in 1884:

We have all suffered too much, angels and men, of this conflict between the worst and the best. What the hell that was supposed to mean, he had no idea.

Clay stood staring out of the window, poured himself a tumbler of vodka and downed it in one go. He was about to leave the room when the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Monsieur Greene?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Your friend from Muscat.’ The Consul from the French embassy. He had DWG’s details, passport number. With his diplomatic access it wouldn’t have been difficult to track Clay down.

Clay shuddered, let the line hang, heard every mile there in the silence.

‘Someone has tried to contact you, or rather who you were, through the Embassy, Monsieur Greene. I thought you would want to know. They said it was important.’

‘Go on.’

The Consul coughed, shuffled some papers. ‘The man said to tell you to contact the Canadian company, that someone there has information for you. About RM, if that means anything. He didn’t leave a name, or a number.’

‘That was it?’

‘I wrote it down word for word.’

Clay pulled in air, filled his lungs, held it awhile. Jesus Christ. So much for disappearing. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him that Claymore Straker was dead.’

‘Thanks. For everything.’

‘Goodbye, Monsieur Greene. Be careful.’

The Gare Cornavin was the busiest place in the city. Crowds streamed by, train times and destinations clicked over machine-gun quick on the big overhead boards, people stood on platforms with newspapers and steaming cups of coffee. Clay found a big bank of public phones and picked the stall at the far end. He checked his watch, wedged the receiver between his shoulder and jaw, pushed in the pay-card. The Canadian company. It would be late in Calgary, but you never knew. People like Raymond Perry gave their lives to work, night and day, chasing God only knew what, wealth, status, position, power, recognition, all the shit he had once vaguely believed in. He dialled the number. Everything was getting a bit easier now, the everyday tasks that had, at first, frustrated and infuriated him, relearning the most trivial of lifetime habits.

Clay looked around the station, the thousands of anonymous faces hurrying past. The phone rang, twice, three times. Clay let it go on ringing, imagining the thing calling out into a dark empty space, computer screen-saver light weeping over plush office furniture.

‘Hello?’

‘Mister Perry?’

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘It’s Clay Straker.’

‘Just a moment.’ The line went quiet. And then: ‘Give me your number. I’ll call you back.’

A few minutes later the payphone rang. Clay picked it up.

‘You’re supposed to be dead.’

‘I am dead.’

‘Indeed.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I give you my word that I had no idea what was going on out there.’

Clay said nothing, doubted it.

‘You did me a big favour, son. Now I’m going to do one for you.’

Clay held the receiver to his ear, tried to slow his breathing.

‘It wasn’t Parnell who gave the orders for Champard’s murder. Or any of the other killings.’

Clay swallowed. ‘How do you know?’

Perry chuckled. ‘Since your call I have made it my mission to know. Listen, son. Champard never gave that letter to Parnell. He sent it straight to Medved. He must have thought it would have more impact, going straight to the top.’

It made sense. Champard would have known what Parnell’s reaction would be. Medved’s carefully crafted image of the caring CEO, champion of social justice, his well-publicised philanthropy, would have made him a more likely choice.

‘Medved brought in a contractor to solve the problem, a Bulgarian mercenary.’

Clay took a breath. Jesus Christ. ‘Zdravko Todorov.’

‘That’s right, son. Parnell is an unprincipled crook, but he’s not a murderer.’

‘Who can you trust these days, eh, Mister Perry?’

The line was quiet for a moment. ‘Look, son. You were right. Medved was screwing us, selling us all the big lie about Petro-Tex. He was pulling millions out of the operation, funnelling it to his own accounts. Nobody fucks with me, son. So listen. In three weeks, Medved will try to launch a substantial private offering in London. He needs money, and lots of it, to develop those new fields. I have documents in my hands right now that prove everything I’ve just told you. More. If you’re interested, I’ll be in London on the 7th of July. You can reach me through my office.’

Clay walked back to the hotel in a daze, an oblique drizzle falling now, wet green leaves swirling in the streets. It always went to the top. Saleh, Medved, Perry – these were the people who ran the world. Was it a surprise? It shouldn’t have been. These were the ‘
they
’, the people who held the controls to the whole machine, yanked the levers and flipped the switches that sent the soldiers into the helicopters, got all those people at the train station scurrying in their thousands of directions, to their millions of tasks.

It all made sense. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope the Consul had given him in Oman, slid out the larger of the folded newspaper clippings, reread it for the sixth time. Rex Medved in the news again, hailed by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs as a heroic example of the West’s steadfast commitment to moderate secular governments in the Middle East. Despite personal threats, despite having members of his staff murdered in Yemen (Thierry Champard was mentioned by name), despite a war raging, his company continued to operate, continued to generate wealth for the people of Yemen. The story hinted of deep links between Medved and the Minister, shared business interests, campaign contributions. There was a photo of Medved shaking the Minister’s hand in front of the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris.

If it ever got out that Medved was responsible for Champard’s death, his own employee, a French citizen, his credibility and influence inside the French government would be destroyed. The Minister himself might be implicated, their cosy relationship exposed. Once the news of Claymore Straker’s appearance in Muscat had filtered back through official channels to the Minister, he must have informed Medved and then used his influence to secure the documents from the Consul’s office. And it was Medved’s man who’d come to the hospital that night. They were tying up loose ends, ensuring that Champard’s death and everything else that had happened in Yemen remained firmly tied to the so-called terrorists. And if Rania was still alive, if that was possible, they’d want her silenced, too.

Clay ran all the way back to the hotel through the darkening streets, along the lakeside, past couples walking hand-in-hand, the city lights shining white and red on the wet pavement, the cars hissing past, the summer rain in his eyes, his heart pounding.

He was sliding the key into the lock of his hotel room door when he heard the phone ringing inside. He closed the door behind him, ran to the desk, picked up the receiver.

‘Yes?’

‘
Bonsoir, monsieur
.’ A woman’s voice, soft, broken with age.

‘
Oui, madame?
’ he said in halting French.

The line was quiet a moment. He could hear the woman breathing on the other end. ‘
Rimbaud
,’ she said.

Clay stood, pushed the receiver to his ear, heart palpitating. ‘
Anges et hommes
,’ he said.

The line went quiet. He heard shuffling in the background, a scraping sound.

‘Meet me at the Café Grand Quai, Rue Général Guissant, the day after tomorrow at five o’clock in the evening,’ she said in English. ‘Sit at the third table from the entrance, next to the window.’

‘Wait,’ said Clay. ‘How will I …’

The line went dead.

The Conflict Within

Clay checked out of the Métropole that same night, slipped out the back way into the night. He knew that his continued, relative anonymity depended entirely on the French Consul’s nerve, his goodwill. He needed to keep moving.

A few streets away he hailed a taxi, and asked the driver to take him to a local pension, somewhere quiet. He found a small, family-run guesthouse on the outskirts of the city and signed in under an assumed name, paying cash up-front. That night, unable to sleep, he sat at the little desk under the eaves and started to rebuild his field notebook from memory, one page at a time. Each measurement, each set of numbers he’d recorded, the location of the sampling points, concentrations, units. Each came to him as a picture, a photograph almost, the numbers stamped in his memory so that he could see the corner of the page where they had originally been recorded, the red glow of the digits in the instrument’s window, explanatory sketches there as clearly in his mind as if he were looking at them now on the page. By morning he had reconstructed half of his Masila work, all of the Al Urush field measurements, the conceptual models, the preliminary groundwater flow calculations. Finally, at about ten, he managed to sleep for a couple of fitful hours.

By 16:30 the next afternoon, Clay arrived at the Café Grand Quai. The café hummed, sparkled in the low-angle light. Cups and saucers clinked, waiters moved with steaming trays among the well-dressed patrons. The windows were open, the lake calm beyond the car-filled
street. The third table along the window was empty. Clay sat, looked around the café. He ordered a beer, waited.

Five o’clock came and went. Clay scanned the café, the crowd growing now, groups of suited businessmen standing at the bar with after-work beers, couples holding hands across tables, laughing, leaning in to kiss. A group of women in summer dresses and heels floated past him, and sat in the corner window booth, three tables along from Clay. Perfume drifted in their wake, the mingled scents of expensive brands, heady, overpowering. By a quarter to six, the place was packed out, loud. Clay ordered another beer, looked out over the lake. The women in the corner booth had ordered champagne, and sat sipping from tall elegant flutes. The pretty blonde at the end of the table glanced at him, held his gaze a moment, smiled. She had big eyes, slender, pale forearms. Clay nodded and looked away.

Clay finished his beer, glanced at his watch. Gone six. He took out a twenty-franc note, put it on the table, stood to leave.

A woman in a black head scarf stood before him. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘sit.’ She sat, pulled back her scarf to reveal grey hair gathered back into a neat bun. She was diminutive, frail almost. He guessed mid-sixties, clear grey eyes; soft, powdered skin.

‘Will you take tea?’ she asked.

Clay waved a waiter over. The woman ordered tea. Clay pointed at his empty beer glass.

The woman waited until the waiter was out of earshot. ‘
Ce
roc affreux
,’ she said. That terrible rock.

‘Aden,’ he replied, the last word of Rania’s note.

She smiled, reached across the table, put her hand on his arm for a moment as if she knew him, had been expecting him. Her tea came, his beer.

‘Thank you for coming, Monsieur Straker.’

Clay swallowed. ‘How did you find me?’

‘You found me,’ she said. ‘We spoke last week on the telephone.’

One of the calls he’d made. ‘Rania?’

She nodded, frowned into her tea. ‘I was with her in the hospital in Marseilles when she …’ the woman choked back a gasp, reached for a handkerchief, and covered her eyes. ‘When she passed away.’

Clay’s heart lurched, stumbled. Nausea overcame him. He felt himself sinking away, darkness encroaching. It was why he’d come. Despite everything, he had wanted to believe. He had been stupid.

He fought his way back. After a while he said: ‘I am sorry for what happened.’

‘Yes. It is very sad.’

‘You knew her well?’

‘Yes.’

Clay looked at her.

The woman sipped her tea. ‘She looked so much like her mother, but she always reminded me of Yves, her father. He, too, was very idealistic, naïve almost.’

‘She told me her father died when she was young.’ He was back on the hotel balcony in Sana’a now, so close to her, the aurora of a million night fires flickering beneath them.

The woman looked into his eyes a long time. ‘She was always a very serious girl, like her father. They were very close. After Yves was killed, she and her mother left Algeria and moved to France. She was twelve, I think, at the time. A very impressionable age for a young girl.’ The woman sipped her tea, dabbed her soft unweathered lips with a cloth napkin. ‘Twelve, yes. I remember, because I spent the summer with them in Algiers that year. It was the last time I saw them all together.’

Clay watched her disappear into the dark jaws of the Hercules again, her hair blowing in the engines’ wash, her arm raised, replayed that very moment when he lost sight of her for the last time, the brutality of that instant, then the ramp closing, the turbines powering up. He swallowed. ‘How was her father killed?’

The woman put her hands together as if in prayer and raised them to her mouth. After a while she looked up at him. ‘Yves was a very principled man. Though he did not support the Marxist government
of the time, he was very vocal in his support for a secular Algeria. He was assassinated by the Algerian Islamic Movement. Not long after, of course, the whole country descended into civil war.’

He could see Rania now, sitting in the car beside him in the darkness, the lights of the hotel glowing beyond the palms, the veil drawn up over her eyes, everything about her hidden away.

The woman was peering at him intently. ‘Rania was raised as a Muslim – her mother was very pious.’

Was
. They had shared something else, too.

The woman continued: ‘I never approved; of course, it wasn’t my place to comment. But you could see the conflict within her. From her father, she got that hunger for change and all things modern, from her mother, a bedrock of tradition ingrained since childhood. The poor girl was caught between two cultures, one side of herself always battling with the other.’

Clay looked out across the lake to the mountains. All of these souls, these individuals, each with fires inside, loves, fears, hopes and conflicts unknowable, all of them gone now, and him still here somehow, able to consider what had been lost. And all of it as unknowable as the universe, the birth of stars.

‘Maybe that was why she wrote so well,’ he said, choking on it.

The woman looked into his eyes. ‘I can see why she was so attracted to you, Monsieur Claymore. I am pleased that you came.’

‘What did she tell you?’ It hurt thinking of it.

‘From Yemen, just before the …’ She stopped, looked down, took a sip of tea. ‘Before the accident. She said she was going to finish something important and come home, that she had had enough.’ The woman looked off over the lake. ‘In the hospital, she seemed a different person, as if she had finally found some peace. She had never spoken to me of a man before.’ The woman pulled a handkerchief from the end of her sleeve, crumpled it to her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. You must excuse me. She loved you.’

Clay looked out across the lake to the mountains, scribed the silhouette, each crag and valley.

The woman reached into her handbag and withdrew an envelope, handed it to Clay. ‘In the hospital, just before …’ she stumbled, recovered. ‘She told me you would come, that I was to give you this. She said you would understand.’

Clay opened the envelope. Inside were three battered, handwritten pages. It was Rania’s story, the one she had given him that night in Al Shams’ village.

Clay reached across the table, took the woman’s hand, held it for a long time.

After a time the woman said: ‘If you want to know the truth about what happened in Yemen …’ She paused, scribbled something on a small notepad. She handed him the paper, looked him in the eyes.

Clay glanced at the paper, looked up.

‘It’s not far from here. Two hours by train.’ Then she put a
fifty-franc
note on the table, stood, rearranged her scarf about her face, and was gone.