The Reluctant Hero (26 page)

‘I don’t think you have much choice in the matter, Mr Jones.’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’ And with dexterity and speed that surprised him, given the pain his ribs were causing, Harry picked up the brimming slop bucket and threw the contents full over Amir Beg and his stiff white shirt. The man, and the cell floor, were covered in excrement.

Beg fled through the door, vomiting.

Harry would die, the other man was certain to insist on it. But not here.

Martha made herself comfortable in one of the alcoves, out of sight of Benazir, not wishing to aggravate her any more than was necessary. There she sat, and waited.

It wasn’t in her nature to be patient, yet she was discovering many new things about herself on this trip. The reawakening of her emotions. Her ability to improvise, and to trust her instincts; to trust Harry. Her previously unknown capacity for being brave, rather than simply bellicose, and finding the strength to swallow the fear and get on with the job. She had been afraid, terrified, still was. Not the sort of fear that comes because you hate someone, but rather the opposite – the fear that is there because you care, and are afraid of losing what it is you value and love. Harry.

Neither was she the type of woman who would normally remain silent. Every fibre in her body screamed for her to do something, to shout out her lungs and create the most spectacular fuss. The politician’s way. But that wouldn’t be Harry’s way. Sit on the bank of the river and wait for the body of your enemy to float past, he had once said to her, she couldn’t remember when. An old Chinese proverb, but it had stuck, so, not knowing what else to do, she waited.

No woman can sit still forever. She needed the toilet. And on the way she discovered a waist-high bookcase, its top covered in globules of ancient candle wax, its shelves crammed with paperbacks, mostly Russian, but to one side she discovered a copy of a novel entitled
Jamilia
, written by Chingiz Aitmatov. The back cover announced that he was a Kyrgyz and the winner of many things, including a Lenin Prize, and that the book was ‘the most beautiful love story in the world’. She
was in the mood for distraction and it would while away the time. It might even help her understand these strange impenetrable people. She returned to her alcove, the book in her hand, to discover a mug of tea and a plate of bread and jam on the table. Perhaps the other woman had begun to soften. She sat down, sipped, nibbled, and began to read.

It was Bektour, not his mother, who appeared at her side a few minutes later.

‘I didn’t think I would see you again,’ she said.

‘Me, neither.’ He tried to offer a smile, but it was a tired attempt that couldn’t stretch as far as his eyes. His long hair, usually carefully groomed, was tangled.

‘Have you heard anything?’

‘Something’s going on at the prison, something unusual. Amir Beg has arrived. That’s not usually a good sign.’

‘We have to find out about Harry,’ she said, reaching out to squeeze his hand in concern.

‘We will. We have a saying. A house with too many draughts can hold no secrets. By this evening our friends in the Castle will be able to tell us what’s happening.’ He frowned, pushed his tinted glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, as though his eyes might betray him. He was trying to be brave, for her, but his weariness made him clumsy. ‘I hope it’s not too late,’ he said.

Harry got his wish. He wasn’t going to die in that cell. Soon after the spluttering form of Amir Beg had
disappeared, three guards came in and set about kicking him again. Yet they did it quietly, with no taunts, and without undue force, beating him almost with respect. It wasn’t every day a prisoner covered Amir Beg from head to polished toe in total humiliation. This was a man they would remember.

Harry did his best to protect himself, pushing himself into a corner, going limp, trying to ride the blows, hands around his head, but another couple of ribs went and his left eye would be closed for days. While they were laying into him, the boot tips slamming home, he tried to get away from them by withdrawing into himself, focusing his mind on anything but the beating, and he found himself clutching Zac’s chess piece. The horse. He hadn’t realized he’d been carrying it all this time, even on the scaffold, clutched so tightly in his hand that it had all but sunk into the flesh. Now he understood what it had done for Zac, and what it could do for him. Harry began to ride the horse, away from the straining boots, beyond the cell, right out of this world, until his mind floated into darkness and he could no longer feel the pain.

The guards stopped as soon as he slipped into unconsciousness, and left him, lying in the shit.

It was several hours later when they came back for him. They hauled him back to his feet and dragged him out of the cell. Harry allowed himself a grim smile of satisfaction as he realized they weren’t headed for the Hanging Room but in the other direction. He was in so
much pain and confusion, and had only one eye open, that he had little idea where they were taking him, but he remembered a short flight of steps, they were dragging him upward, to another level, out of the Punishment Wing. Amir Beg had clearly had enough of the rat’s nest of cells for one day. Harry even managed to laugh a little. He might yet die in daylight. One of the guards shook his head in pity. ‘Crazy man,’ he muttered, as they dragged him on.

An electric buggy was waiting for Sid Proffit and the barely conscious Zac when they got off the plane. An immigration officer stood beside it. He demanded their passports.

‘It’s not him,’ Proffit blurted out in explanation. ‘Not Harry Jones.’

‘I know that, sir,’ the immigration officer replied as they assisted Zac into the buggy. ‘I met Mr Jones once, several years ago, when he was a minister in the Home Office. I’ve even seen you on your hind legs a couple of times, on the telly in the House of Lords.’

‘Oh, really. Was I at all interesting?’

‘No idea, to be honest. We remember faces more than facts. And yours is an easy one. Not too many who go round looking like Karl Marx nowadays.’

‘Karl Marx didn’t have his suits made in Savile Row,’ the peer huffed.

‘He lived just round the corner, sir, in Soho, while he was writing
Das Kapital
.’

‘Did he? You seem remarkably well informed.’ ‘Used to be Special Branch, in my early years.’

The buggy was approaching passport control; the immigration officer nodded to a colleague and they were waved straight through. Shortly after they drew up outside a sick bay. A doctor and nurse were waiting for Zac, who was laid on a cot while they began an immediate inspection. He barely stirred. The immigration officer took Proffit to an adjoining room where cups of tea were waiting. The peer piled in three sugars and sipped greedily; he needed the energy, he was exhausted. Yet as his strength was restored, he grew agitated. ‘You must do something about poor Harry,’ he insisted.

‘Sorry, sir. Not my part of the pitch. Someone will be along soon. But what can you tell me about Mr Kravitz?’

‘Not a lot, really. He’s simply a friend of Harry’s.’

‘Then he’s a lucky man,’ the immigration official replied, and went back to his tea.

It was some while before a police inspector arrived. She was accompanied by a sergeant, and once again Proffit began to recount his tale. There were moments when he struggled to contain his impatience, tempted to pull rank or lean on his many years and demand they take immediate action rather than sitting around in an overheated room sipping hot drinks, but events had taken their toll on his old limbs, and he had no suggestions as to what precisely they should do. What could anyone do for Harry now? So he sighed,
answered their questions, told them what he could, while the immigration officer chewed his lip, the inspector leaned forward attentively in her chair, and the sergeant scribbled notes.

‘There’s Martha, too,’ Proffit said. ‘Heaven knows what she’s up to. She stayed behind to help him, you see. Ran from the plane as the doors were closing.’

‘And Mr Jones – what happened to him?’ the police inspector asked.

‘I don’t know! All I know is that Harry went into the prison, and he never came out.’

‘A little rash of him, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I do,’ the peer protested. ‘I regard what he did as an act of singular bravery.’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

Proffit looked with beseeching eyes towards the immigration officer, but he merely shrugged. As he had said, not his part of the pitch.

‘You must help him, quickly,’ Proffit pleaded.

‘We need to know as much as possible before we can do anything. Can’t go blundering in. You understand that, don’t you, my lord?’ the police inspector said.

‘Of course. But only his American friend can tell you more.’

‘And the doc says he’ll not be fit for questioning for another twenty-four hours,’ the immigration official said.

‘Ah . . .’ The police inspector sighed in resignation, while the sergeant snapped his notebook shut.

‘You have to stir yourselves. Pull your fingers out or whatever it is you people do!’ Proffit burst out in impatience. ‘I fear something terrible is happening.’ But his protest was like the last guttering of a candle. He fell back in his seat, exhausted, his beard slumped on his chest.

‘We’ve got to wait for the American. Hang on until then,’ the police inspector replied.

‘I only pray Harry can hang on, too,’ Proffit sighed mournfully.

Martha began reading
Jamilia
, at speed, as she had become accustomed to in her job. It was a story, recounted by a young boy, of frozen hearts, indifference, and family cruelty, of people looking the other way, refusing to see the pain, of the abuse of a young woman, for the reason that she was young, and a woman. Martha’s story, too.

Suddenly her tears were blotting the pages.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Riley?’ Bektour asked as he passed.

She shook her head. ‘It’s just this stale tobacco smoke,’ she lied, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘We don’t do this in Britain. I’m not used to it.’

‘Get some fresh air,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll be here.’

‘I can’t. In case . . .’ In case Harry turned up. A ridicu lous notion, but one she had to cling to.

‘Here, take my mobile phone. I’ll text if anything happens.’ He pushed it across the table.

‘You’re very kind.’

‘And my mother’s very frightened. I hope you’ll forgive her.’

‘I’m frightened, too, Bektour,’ Martha whispered, picking up the phone and heading for the door.

The guards threw him to the floor. His hands reached out to cushion the impact of the fall on his cracked ribs; still he gasped in agony. When he looked up he found himself in a wet room, with tiles on the walls as well as the floor, which had a large drainage hole in its middle. Many of the tiles were cracked and others had been replaced in varying shades of off-white. A collection of buckets, brooms, mops and other cleaning paraphernalia stood guard in one corner. There was also a third guard. He was holding a hose.

They instructed him to take off his clothes. Even flexing his shoulder to slip off his shirt made him wince. Soon he was down to his underwear. Boxers, and still remarkably white. ‘Mr Klein sends his compliments,’ Harry muttered as he dropped them to the floor. The guard with the hose turned on a tap, and Harry braced himself for the barrage of water that was about to come.

Yet it was an anticlimax. Instead of erupting in a gushing fist of water, the hose dribbled and had difficulty in reaching across the room. The guard had to place his thumb across the end to create more pressure, like a gardener watering flowers. Harry laughed gently
at yet another absurdity in this clapped-out country. ‘Marshal Stalin’s compliments, too, I see.’ The guard with the hose, hearing the dictator’s name, got the joke and nodded ruefully. Harry stepped forward, made the job easier for him. He knew that washing all the crap off wasn’t for his benefit but somehow, even at this time, he preferred to be clean.

A little further down the corridor was another room. They escorted Harry there, still naked, dripping wet. They didn’t kick or abuse him, but instead grew quiet, as though they were the ones who should be nervous. Harry’s heart sank as he stood at the entrance. It was a room about twice as large as his cell, and although it had no windows it was brilliantly lit. At first blush it seemed like an office. There was a large desk with a plain wooden top completely bare except for a glass ashtray, and a comfortable captain’s chair positioned behind it. Standing in front of the desk was a simpler, stouter chair. There was a large cupboard against one wall with double doors, a map of Ta’argistan on the opposite wall, and even a coat stand in one corner. There was also a hand basin with a towel hanging beside it. Yet if this was a place of work, it was work of the most appalling kind, for above all the other impressions that Harry was taking on board hovered the sharp smell of antiseptic, not the carefully disguised scent you might find in a place of healing but the sweet-sour, astringent reek that came when the stuff was used in industrial quantities. He looked at the
floor. No rug, just bare concrete, painted with thick gloss grey, like a garage. And every leg of the chair in front of the desk was bolted to it.

So it would be here.

Harry was still naked and damp. The guards pushed him forward, sat him in the chair, secured him to it with thick leather straps at his wrists and ankles, and one right around his chest. He groaned as they tightened the strap, above the cracked ribs. When he opened his eyes once more, Amir Beg was there.

He perched on the desk, in front of Harry, sipping a mug of steaming tea. Different glasses, the usual pair still being cleaned of shit. He was staring at Harry’s body, his eyes wandering slowly across it, sizing the man up. There was a peculiar passion in his expression, one that made Harry feel desperately uncomfortable, want to cross his legs, hide himself, if only he could. He wondered it there were something sexual in it all. Harry knew what he had to do, try to knock the bastard off course, deflect him, distract him, because there could be no doubting that his intentions would take Harry through the most excruciating moments of his life.