The Untouchable (64 page)

'Why do they call me Nasir?'

'Only one side of him was a hero. The other side of him was . . . a good man and a bad killer. It's the sort of confusion this place breeds, and you've got it bad.

So, I'm telling you now, I want no part of it, nor Maggie, nor them . . . Do I leave you food? We want no part of what you're doing.'

'He's not eating, so I'm not eating.' Now he turned.

Frank saw the boyish sincerity wreath his face, and the smile. ' I'm going to win, you know. He's the loser, I'm the winner.'

'At what cost?' Frank asked sourly. 'At what bloody cost?'

The smile slipped, the frown was above the big spectacles. 'I've only one favour I need from you.

Please, request of them that the dog stays with me. I'll bring him back to Sarajevo, safe and sound, a promise, but I'd appreciate it if I could keep him. The food and the water'll do for the dog, if there's nothing better.'

It was only a dog. Frank put the request. Only another dog. Frank left with the Sreb Four. Before he went into the depth of the trees, he stopped and looked. Joey fed bread to the dog, then poured water into its mouth. He started to walk, hurrying to catch the men ahead of him, and the sun fell in shards between the trees.

It was a soft call. 'Thank Maggie for what she's done for me - give her my love.'

He was weaker.

The sun was on Mister's back. It was off his face and that brought slight relief. He stood and did not move. He gabbled numbers but they had no sequence, no rhythm, and he had no target number. The numbers were random, the decision was put off. He did not know the time, but the sun's force had come off his face and away from the top of his head and was now on his back.

He was sinking.

The numbers, in hundreds, tens and thousands, cluttered his mind. When he lost them, they slipped away from him. Then he thought of Cann. Between the scrabble of numbers was the sight of Cann's face.

Big spectacles, a wide forehead, curly hair without a comb, a small mouth - the clerk, the paper-pusher of Sierra Quebec Golf. At that age he would be little more than a probationer. The kid stuck leech like to him. Why? Mister could buy policemen and judges and bankers and the civil service and . . . What was Cann's price? Small change, ten thousand, pocket money, fifteen thousand, enough for a down-paymert on a flat. The Eagle had said: You know what I worry about?

I mean it, lose sleep about? One day you overreach - know what I mean - take a step too far. I worry . . . Poor old Eagle, good old boy, and right again, always. He could no longer see the trees at the river because the sun bounced on them and his eyes were too tired to focus on them. There was no respect in Cann's voice when he shouted . . . He did not know how much longer he could stand and not move. If he were to be beaten, and to beg, it would be soon.

He was slipping.

He played a game with a man's mind, and with a man's life.

Joey was alone with the dog. He had fed it the bread and cheese, and the apple for pulp crunching, and all of the water that they'd left. He'd heard the murmur of the van's engine as it had driven away from the track, and the pick-ups. Sometimes there were the voices, carried on the wind, of the de-miners working from the track by the river but they were little more than whispers and he could not see them.

He said to the dog, who was named after a hero and a killer, 'Doesn't worry me, Nasir, if I'm going down in the filth with him, and get to fight dirtier than he knows how. He loses, I win. What I want is to have him in my hand and to crush him. He's always won, I've always lost, but not here. You can understand that, Nasir?'

His head shook, the hunger and thirst were worse, and he could not cough up saliva to run over his tongue.

In front of him, out in the sunlight, Mister fell.

Joey croaked his shout, 'Don't cheat me, you bastard. Don't beg, don't cry. Stand up . . . '

'Stand up, you cheating bastard. I want you running, running among the mines, and I want you screaming.

Get up.'

The sound on the speakers faded and was lost against the traffic on Lower Thames Street; the picture was dying. SQCH said it was the battery going down on the mobile, or the power pack on the camera was exhausted. She remarked that she was surprised the camera and the mobile, abandoned on the vantage-point by Miss Bolton when she had pulled out, as ordered, had lasted so long. All of them in the room stared, without forgiveness, at Dougie Gough.

'Don't say it, you don't have to tell me. I take responsibility. I think they are about to go into what is euphemistically called close-quarters combat. It'll be in the gutter, Gorbals street-fighting. I ask myself, down there, can Cann win - and then, does it matter, other than to Cann, who wins and who loses? God watch for him.'

The last image on the screen, before the snowstorm, was of the fox careering away with the bone, and of the fallen man trying to push himself up.

Chapter Twenty

The skies were clear and the wind had whisked away the few clouds over the hills in the east. There would be another frost over the valley that night, the same light hoar frost.

But in the last hour of the day, as the sun balanced on the crest of the hill, it still carried strength and threw down a final limited warmth. It hit the back of a young man who sat with the clay mud on his trainer shoes, the dirt on his jeans and the filth stains on his anorak, and it bounced from the inside of his spectacles' lenses onto his grimy, unshaven face. It made fierce colours on the coat of a dog who played at gnawing his fist. It danced on the shoulders of an older man in the field, who tried to push himself up, and failed, and tried again, and made shadows from his crippled efforts. It simpered over a fallen body but still had the power to cook its flesh and to make the stench rise from it.

The sun was on the weed-strewn fields that had once been ploughed, and tickled the weeds' dried-out seed sacs and nurtured the flower-pods not yet ready to bloom, and it rested in the day's death on the grazing fields and on the carcass bones of the heifers and the bullock who had browsed there, and it filtered onto the posts and wires, and the rotted roots of a vineyard, and it splayed out over a patch of ground that might, one day, be an orchard of apple trees. The sun sank, the red replacing the gold, the shadows lengthening, and caressed the rusted frame of an abandoned tractor. It sparkled on a swollen river and caught each wave over the hidden stones of a ford, and it laid down the trellised reflections of bared tree branches onto the dark deep pools where the trout and the pike hunted. It dazzled the eyes of a retired police sergeant and a tired, life-wearied farmer, the one on a chair in his porch with his bottle in front of him and the other on the log in front of his house with the crude rolled cigarette hanging from his upper lip.

It flashed on the windscreens of the pick-ups that carried men up the hill with their armoured waistcoats, helmets with visors, their overboots and their sharp steel prods. As the sun dropped, so the valley quietened, and the men who used hammers and power drills to repair their homes came down off their ladders, and the women who had gossiped and laughed and yelled abuse at their kids while the heat bronzed their arms to walnut now scurried to drag their washing from the lines, make a last broom sweep on their doorsteps, close their doors and stoke their fires.

It would be a cold night, because the skies were clear over the valley, the sun had lost its gold and was an angry red.

The crest of the hill to the west cut the first small bite from the sun.

The ghosts came, spectral groups at first, little shadows. The axle pins of their wheelbarrow, squealed for lack of oil and they cursed at the weight of the hessian sacks they carried, with the spades and pickaxes on their shoulders. The faces of the ghosts were young and they wore field fatigues of green-blue or of combat camouflage. They went to their appointed places. The quiet around them was broken by the ring of the spades striking buried stones and the thud of earth clods thrown aside. The ghosts were the poisoners. On their hands and knees they put the plastic, the chemicals and the metal working parts into the holes they had dug and loosened the screws that made the poison live, and laid earth and small stones around the poison and filled the holes, smoothed the earth. And the ghosts measured out lengths of wire and used the flat shapes of their spades to knock in peg posts to which the wire would be tautened and tied. Later, the rain would come and drench the ghosts, and silt streams would carry the poison from the wood paths and from in front of the bunkers, from gateways and tracks, and the streams would take the poison and scatter it at random, without shape, in the fields - and the ghosts would be gone.

The drop of the sun, chewed at by the crest of the hill, made the valley tranquil. It was too low, now, to find a strand of wire over which the grass grew protectively.

The gold had gone.

He knew it would be the last time that he would try.

Mister put his weight on his hands. They crushed the grass. He pushed himself over onto his knees and then he gasped a big breath, pushed again, his knees creaked in protest, and he stood. In getting himself up, onto his feet, he had swivelled his body. He swayed.

He had weakened and had told himself it was the final effort. He stood and rocked, and his feet were numb. More than half of the sun had disappeared beneath the horizon; what was left was low in his eyes and it was hard for him to see into the trees, but he thought he saw the wide spectacles and the pallor of Cann's forehead. It was his last try: he had rallied what strength was left to him. Five times he had tried to push himself up and five times he had subsided on to his haunches. He flexed his toe muscles. The circulation had staunched and the muscles were locked tight, but his balance held and confidence trickled back.

'Well done, Mister, a good effort... Now, make my Christmas and run. Don't quit on me now, Mister.'

It was an hour since the voice had last shouted at him, a whole hour since it had goaded him. For an hour he had sat, between his attempts to push himself up, and the valley had gone quiet around him. He had thought of the past and the present, of the Eagle, and the mines, of the Cruncher, and the mines, of the Princess, and the mines, of the Mixer, the Cards, the Eels and the mines, of the spieler cafes on Green Lanes, the lorries coming through Felixstowe docks and Dover harbour, and of the power, and the mines

. . . It was the pungent smell of the Eagle, like he was rotting already, that kept the mines in his mind.

But he was standing . . . fuck the past and the present. He would not run, he would walk towards the future. His mind was a shambling mess: that was the sun and the hunger. Mister craved the future . . .

Lie low, go quiet. Young Sol in the place of the Cruncher, maybe Davey Henderson's boy in the place of the Eagle. The Princess back with him - of course she would be. A new Cruncher, a new Eagle, and the same Princess - and the word would goround the pubs, bars, clubs that Mister had walked on through a minefield, had had the balls to put his fee down, stamp them on ground that was stacked full of landmines. No fear. No bloody fear . . . He was Mistet no bastard took liberties with him.

The shadows of the trees on the hill groped toward; him.

He turned his body but kept his feet on the crushed grass. The wind came in a little surge, riffled the grass and brought him the smell of the Eagle. It seemed to cling to him. He could beat the mines, he was the Untouchable. There was a sliver of movement ahead of him. The head of his shadow wavered, far in front of him on a patch of ground that was bare or sparsely grassed. Mister saw the snake slide away from his head's shadow. Its skin was rich brown cocoa in colour, but spread on it were paler blotches, like water pools on an oil sea. It must have been sleeping on the sun-warmed earth in the last of the day's heat, but then he had stood, finally, and the shadow had cooled the place where it rested. The snake's place was on the direct line he would have taken, the shortest route he would have walked, to the riverbank. He had no fear of snakes, insects, spiders. He watched the snake meander across the patch. He saw its head, its needle eye and its jabbing tongue. He was about to take the first step, not running and not blind with closed eyes, walking, so that he held his self-respect. The snake went into the thicker grass that ringed the patch of crusted earth. He looked a last time for it. He readied his leg for the first stride. He breathed hard, sucked the air into his throat, his lungs. He had no fear. It was as if a crisis had gone. His shadow was further on than where the snake had slept. He would follow his shadow to the river and leave the kid, Cann, bawling and yelling behind him. He touched the pistol butt above his belt. As he tried to follow the last wriggle of the snake's tail, Mister saw the wire.

If it had not been for the snake he would not have seen the wire.

The wire did not have the lustred sheen of the snake's skin. It was coated in dirt. He followed the line it took. In places grass sprouted over it, and then it would reappear, then it was hidden again. He should not have looked for the end of the wire that ran at a height just above a man's shoelace knot. He knew he should have squinted his eyes shut, denied himself the sight of it, and stepped forward. The wire's line took him away to the left, past an old tree branch in which it was snagged, and then it was angled higher.

He could see the stake that held it up and its green painted body with the faded stencil markings that had a squat cluster of antennae points just below the height of a man's knee, with a ring above them to which the wire was fastened. The breath wheezed from his body . . . his knees went, and with them his bladder.

The urine steamed on Mister's leg as he went down. When he was on his hands and knees in the grass, he could not see it.

The last of the sun was above the hill's crest and the higher trees were webbed with it. The sky spread blood-reddened light on the valley, washed off it the brightness of the day.

He was broken. His head was on his knees and his fingers were over his eyes, but the tears came, and the urine flowed on his leg. Joey's voice sang out.