The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (12 page)

‘Tom.’ Eric searched under his cot for his shoes. ‘You should come with us. She likes you.’

Ford held up the book and decided there was nothing wrong with ending the day. He wanted the boy out of his room. ‘I have homework. And I don’t have any lire.’

‘What do you have?’

‘Dollars.’

‘I can change some.’ Eric took his mobile phone and a roll of Turkish banknotes from his pocket.

‘I think I’ll stay.’

‘I’ll see you later, then,’ Eric straightened up and paused deliberately, ‘
Tom
.’ A slight pronouncement that Ford felt as sure as a pinch.
Tom
. The boy paused at the door then took out his phone and money again and tossed them onto the bed.

‘You’ll be here, right?’

‘I’ll be here.’

‘If I drink too much I’ll only lose them.’

For some reason Eric appeared unwilling to leave. Ford focused on Nathalie’s book.

It was not the kind of book he would choose. Chapter after chapter catalogued a government’s abuse of its people, photographs detailed a military raid. The army descending on a village with people cowering behind mud walls. Squat shanty-like huts disintegrating in the down-draught of helicopters. Graphs detailed statistics of displaced people and empty villages. Ford browsed, then closed the book. Enough. None of this involved him.

He returned the book to Nathalie and Martin’s room. Martin sat at the end of the bed – two cots pulled together – polishing a camera. The lens, detached, lay on a cloth by his thigh. Eric’s silver case lay open at his feet, the negative forms for a camera cut into the foam. Martin cleaned the interior of the camera with a can of compressed air. Once he noticed Ford at the door, he waved him into the room.

‘You might remember these?’ Martin pushed his glasses up to his forehead. ‘Sixteen-millimetre. Bolex. Simple. It’s more than twenty-two years old. A workhorse. Is that the right word?’

Ford placed the book on the bed, on Nathalie’s side. Yes, workhorse was the right word. ‘Isn’t everything digital these days?’

Martin stopped cleaning. ‘It is, but the quality of this is . . . richer.’ He smiled and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘We have three cameras. I don’t use this so much now. It’s from another time.’

Beside the bed, along with papers and notebooks were other books, titles in French and German, photographs on their covers of men in uniform, of rocky terrain, of mountain villages.

Back in his room, Ford lay under the covers fully dressed, because it was cold but also because his forearms were smarting from the sun. Too awake to sleep, he counted out his remaining money. One hundred and twelve dollars in cash. Enough for the room, but little else. He took off the dog tags and read the numbers. He didn’t feel confident about going online here. Hadn’t he already almost locked the account? And what was the likelihood of surveillance? Would there be some kind of monitoring right now of online activity on HOSCO’s website? He told himself not to hurry, to wait until he was in Istanbul. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that no one else could touch. He ran his fingers over the raised numbers. The only figure he could recognize was the junk account, the only number preceded by HOS/JA. The figure brought a tweak of guilt. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t stealing exactly, hadn’t Geezler promised him as much?
Take the money from the junk account
. Geezler’s own words. Help yourself. It’s yours. So much for his guaranteed future with HOSCO. So much for being the instrument of change.

He couldn’t imagine what was happening at Camp Liberty or Southern-CIPA, and understood when he thought about these places he saw them as they had been, as if they were immune to change.

Eric’s book lay on the bed with the phone and Turkish lire. He’d folded newspaper cuttings and a small black notebook into the pages. Ford reached over and picked out the notebook. If the boy kept a diary he wanted to see what he was writing.

He couldn’t read the entries, and had to stare at them a while before realizing that the writing was a numeric code. 34425 42 16982 1786 126 74025. Page after page. A simple substitution, numbers and symbols for letters, which he couldn’t crack. He read on trying to identify the common numbers, but couldn’t decide. These would be the vowels, unless Eric rotated the numbers, changed the key from time to time.

Now curious about him, Ford slipped out of bed. He began to search through Eric’s backpack, and found clothes, climbing gear, laundry. The T-shirt with the red star. He checked the side pockets but discovered little of interest: a US passport, tickets, and then traveller’s cheques tucked in a plastic wallet. The passport said only that he was twenty-two years old and born in Berkeley, California. The cheques were in dollar amounts, twenties and fifties. Ford counted to one thousand dollars and stopped, guessing he had the same number of cheques uncounted in his hands. He tried unlocking the phone but could not guess the code. Done, he returned everything to the backpack then slipped back into bed.

Eric returned late and drunk and stopped with Nathalie immediately outside the door to talk, hushed and secretive. When he came into the room he whispered to see if Ford was awake.

‘Hey,’ he whispered. ‘Mike. You awake?’

Disturbed to hear the boy use this name, Ford kept himself still, his breathing even and regular.

Eric rolled back on the bed and tugged off his shorts. Stretched out he started laughing. A patch of moonlight lay square across his hips.

‘I like you,’ he said. ‘Mike. You’re OK.’

Eric: Cuba

thekills.co.uk/eric

3.4

As Anne came into the hallway her dog ran the length of the apartment to greet her. She set down her bags containing her laptop, papers, and newspaper, and three separate packages of biscotti (a gift for the office, a pack she would keep for the house, and maybe, why not, one as an occasional treat for the dog). She shucked off her shoes and checked the corridor for signs of her husband (the television flicker on the parquet, the faint pepper-sweet whiff of whisky), fretting over her son with increasing unease.

Unable to settle her doubt she stopped at the kitchen counter and called to her husband: was there news about Turkey? Anything recent? No? Had he heard anything more about what was going on? It wasn’t only Marian but everyone at the museum from the director down to the preparators: everyone else had a better idea about what was happening in the Middle East. ‘Marian knew,’ she said, even though she’d waited almost a week to say something. So why didn’t they know? Why hadn’t they heard? She held up her copy of the
Times
.

Still in the kitchen she asked why they’d let him go. What were they thinking? Seriously? Everyone else was spending the summer in mainland Europe. When he first suggested the idea eight or nine weeks ago there were no reasons against the trip, no doubt, except perhaps money – seven thousand dollars to see him through the summer. Justifying the expense she’d told herself that this would be
good
, this kind of opportunity was
exactly why we sent him to Europe
. Now she couldn’t imagine entertaining the idea. In five weeks they had watched a kind of madness spark across the Middle East, self-immolation on a scale which didn’t make sense.

Shoes in one hand, glass of wine in the other, Anne approached her husband’s study. The dog scampered ahead. I’m serious, she said, what kind of parents are we? The routing of the American Embassy in Libya, protests in Gaza, a riot in Jerusalem, an attack on demonstrators in Tehran, the shootings at Cairo University, acquired a terrible logic.
It all creeps up on you.
Outrages in Israel, the West Bank, and the inevitable reprisals, referenced a common instability and impending collapse. All of this paled against the sudden fire of conflict in the cities of northern Iraq, the destabilizing borders between Syria, Iran, and Turkey. And now this business of unregulated contractors, along with the call for a Senate enquiry. American businesses were being stoned, vandalized, singled out; no one yet hurt, but seriously, wasn’t it only a matter of time? She thought of fires, of sparks in strong winds, of cause and reaction, not as someone prone to worry, but as someone who could assay, assess, project; as someone who could understand the wayward world.

‘Mark, I’m concerned.’ She spoke to the back of her husband’s chair, confident that he was listening despite the television: his head cocked slightly, fingers curled round the glass but not gripping.

He turned to speak. ‘Today?’ he said. ‘Nothing new. I came back and watched the news. I looked online.’

‘But there have been attacks, a bombing. It’s on CNN. The refugees.’ Anne stepped into the room, took a smooth sip from her glass.

‘An oil refinery near the border. He’s no reason to be anywhere near a refinery. It’s nothing to worry about. The trouble spots are in the south and the south-east, close to the border. It’s all localized. There’s nothing happening in Istanbul or in the centre. No one is targeting tourists.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t like him being there.’

‘I looked.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s your son.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means you
know
him. He’s sensible. Call him.’

‘I tried.’

‘Call him again.’

‘I’ll try.’ Anne said goodnight and headed to the bedroom. On rare occasions she was reminded that Mark was not Eric’s father, and that, in fact, before this marriage came a whole other life. On these occasions she asked herself if his calm came from this simple fact – she wouldn’t outright call it detachment.

Tired now, she wanted time to herself. She undressed facing her books, a wall lined with monographs and thick-spined catalogues. She preferred her books close, in the bedroom. When she could not sleep she would select one and take it to the lounge and look carefully through the images and choose one painting to examine until she forgot her sleeplessness.

She would write on the flight, because she never slept on an airplane however long the journey, and set on top of her luggage two books that she might need. It was possible that she would not refer to them, but their presence would encourage her to study. It would be better to take them and not use them, rather than leave them and need them. Rome, she told herself. Stop fussing. Think only about Rome.

While the technician worked on her computer Anne waited, first at the door to her study, then in the kitchen, anxious not to appear anxious or too obviously pressured for time.

Tomorrow afternoon she would fly to Rome. She would arrive in the early morning and would need her computer for work. She couldn’t remember the technician’s name and couldn’t find her diary with his card.

When she returned to her study she found him returning discs to their cases. On the screen a counter logged almost full. He was done, he said, as good as. Someone had deleted temporary files containing internet content and had managed to remove an essential operation file. It was easy to do. The man hesitated.

‘You said your son used the computer?’

Anne nodded. She used it for work now, but earlier in the summer she had loaned it to Eric and since then it hadn’t worked so well.

The man became pensive. He had managed to recover the file and restore the function, but there were pieces of other files recovered also, and they were now stored in a folder on her desktop. He could wipe them if she wanted, but she might want to look. If she needed he could leave the utility disc; a better way to determine which files could be deleted to make more room. From what he could see the hard drive was almost full.

After paying the technician, Anne saw him to the door then quickly returned to her office to check the folder, forgetting her coffee.

The files were numbered and dated. When opened, the screen filled with symbols and rows of zeros, crude decoding of the content. Dates and times repeated themselves, the names of places, cities, along with unintelligible words which she recognized through repetition:
4hotfun, a$$lovr, lucioboner, latino_hole, hotnsingle45, fukU2, 4U69, rut_rod
. Anne scrolled through the document and found pockets of information, half sentences repeated.
Athletic, masculine. Love bigger guys. Can host. Couple interested in third. Short stay, hotel.
Then:
Do u cum whn u r fukd?

Anne recoiled. Shut the computer. Pushed back the chair. Left the room. Walked busily away.

She sat in the kitchen, set the coffee cup in the sink. She opened the window and let in the noise from Lexington, the cabs and cars, then sat with her back to her office for a whole hour, ignored the telephone, the dog, the work she had to complete, and cast out thoughts as they occurred.

When she roused herself, she washed her face in an attempt to suppress what she now knew – that her son had sought strangers, men, in different cities. He cruised the internet
on her computer
for sex. She avoided her reflection as she stepped back to dry her face, dropped the towel before threading it over the rail, and found herself angry because she didn’t want to be the kind of person who would hide in a bathroom and cry into a towel, although she was neither hiding nor crying. She checked her face, almost automatic, but would not look herself in the eye, and was surprised by how red her cheeks were, just the cheeks: a thing that used to happen at school, or at her parents’ a long time ago when she was not a mother but a child herself, anger focused on her face in perfect slap-red circles.

U fuck raw?

This discovery could not be undone.

Halfway to her bedroom she decided this could not be ignored – and returned to the computer to check the dates of the files. The information quickly confused her. A number of the meetings were scheduled in New York for the week after his vacation, at a time when she knew that Eric was in France. In the crude half-messages it appeared that contacts were made but the appointments were not kept – a relief to discover. From what she could tell the appointments were with older men, and he was looking for sex, not company. The questions in the messages sparked a warning: did he know how to protect himself, not only from disease, but from people who would use him?