Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

She was waiting at her car, grey tracksuit on, yellow glasses off, breathing normally.

‘I found a reserve of energy,’ she said.

‘I noticed.’

They didn’t speak until she stopped outside the office gates. She didn’t look at him.

‘Perhaps that is not a thing we should do together,’ she said. ‘It might not bring out our best natures.’

Anselm took his bag from the back seat. ‘I don’t have a best nature,’ he said. ‘Least worst, that’s my best.’

…LONDON…

The request from Lafarge to find a motorcycle was on his desk. He was tired, not just his knees hurt now, his left hip sent splinters of pain up and down. He summoned Inskip and explained.

‘It’s Mission Hopeless,’ he said, ‘but they’re paying. Carry on, Number Two. Or is that Number One? No, I would be Number One, surely?’

‘Number two,’ said Inskip, ‘is a crap in toddler talk.’

Anselm nodded. ‘I shouldn’t distrust my instinct for the language. Carry on, Number Two.’

In mid-morning, Inskip stood in the door, his egg head to one side. Anselm thought he saw a faint flush of blood in the pale skin. Also, Inskip was wearing a red T-shirt. He hadn’t noticed that earlier. Had fashion changed? Was red in the ascendant?

Inskip said, ‘Would you like to listen to something, Number One? Number One being a piss.’

Anselm nodded, rose and went to Inskip’s workstation, sat beside him.

‘I’ve found this person,’ said Inskip. ‘In a company that’s doing closed-circuit TV trials in London. Roads, stations, shopping malls. The football. A minion of the coming total surveillance state. I haven’t been entirely straightforward with him. Forgivable, is that?’

Anselm looked into the black eyes, looked away.

Inskip touched the key.

Asked and we could’ve fucking looked, couldn’t we?

They didn’t know . Inskip’s voice.

Asking’s how you find out what you don’t fucking know.

They didn’t know to ask.

What? Is this fucking philosophy? This what I fucking missed by not going to fucking Oxford?

George, what could you have told them?

What? Every fucking pushbike and Porsche and cunt on a skateboard that went through the check, that’s what.

Can we get that now? It’s a small window, five, ten minutes.

I’m waiting. We serve you lot, don’t we. Only to ask. Say again?

Four-fifty on. The passenger might be leaning on the rider. He might have a bag, a sports bag, that would probably be on his lap, hard to see. No helmet, the passenger… No helmet. That’s where you start, sunshine. Hang on.

I’ve got an offender here, five-three, that’s a nice bike, he looks like he’s gone to sleep, the bumboy, not at all alert, no helmet, shocking disregard for the law.

Plate? Can you run that?

Running, my lord…Yes, this is your person…I can give you an address, see how fucking easy it is when you simply ask?

Point taken. A salutary lesson, George. Name and address?

‘He thinks you are?’ said Anselm.

Inskip put a hand to his naked scalp, lay fingers on it. ‘MI6,’ he said.

‘You may go far in this line of work.’

‘And owe it all to my teachers.’

‘Give it to Lafarge.’

…LONDON…

She found a person to start with, at the London School of Economics, in the School of Oriental and African Studies.

They sat in a small study that smelled of cigarette smoke. He was an overweight man in his fifties, head shaven, black polo-necked shirt. He looked like a Buddhist monk gone bad, in thrall to things of the flesh, the ascetic life a memory. His eyes were red, he smoked Camels in a hand that trembled a little, and he jiggled his right foot without cease.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Americans are not strangers to the region.’

‘But massacres?’

‘Massacres? A difficult term. Massacre. Imprecise. Like genocide. Used very loosely.’

‘Killing civilians. Lots of them.’

He started to laugh, coughed, kept at it for a while, produced an unclean red handkerchief, crumpled like a tissue, tore it open and covered his mouth.

She looked away. He recovered.

‘Sorry. Terrible tickle in the throat. Dust. Place never gets cleaned. So, yes. Killing of civilians? Common practice in the region. For about three hundred years.’

‘But not by Americans.’

‘Depends. Depends on what you think is the causal chain, I suppose. In Angola, for example.’

‘For example?’

‘You’re not connected with television, are you?’

‘No.’

‘I do quite a lot of television. You may have seen me?’

‘I thought your face was familiar.’

‘Really?’ He ran a hand over his scalp, a pass, quick. ‘Yes. Well, I’ve been too busy recently, books and whatnot, can’t drop everything because some television producer calls. They expect that, you know, incredible arrogance.’

‘About Angola, you said…’

‘Lots of atrocity rumours about Angola in the eighties. One a month. What you’d expect from a superpower war-by-proxy, I suppose.’

He studied her, scratching an eyebrow. ‘Wishart. Are you the person who wrote that Brechan story?’

He had assumed a prim expression. He looked like a Pope now, some Renaissance Pope whose portrait she’d seen somewhere.

‘Not the headline,’ she said. ‘That was in poor taste.’

‘Thoughts of Wilde crossed the mind. None so hypocritical about buggery as the unexposed buggers.’

‘Yes. To get back to Angola…’ She had to wait while he lit another cigarette. He had a big lower lip, red, and when he blew out smoke, it turned down and he showed paler flesh inside, the colour of tinned tuna.

‘Angola,’ he said. ‘A resource war, one of the late-century resource wars. Many more to come. I’m considering a book on the subject… working on it, actually. I’ve done a lot of work on it. I’m well beyond considering it.’

‘Atrocities…’

‘Well, there’s always talk. I remember a story about a village disappearing off the face of the map, in some American rag.’

‘Would you know which one?’

‘This is so long ago.’

‘This is very important,’ Caroline said. ‘When you say American rag…?

He seemed to be galvanised, sat back in his chair, ready to speak to camera, chins up.

‘Well, American rags. There’ve been a few. America’s got this tiny left fringe. The right’s a huge great heaving pit of snakes-but energetic. The left’s always been quite pathetic, sad. No life and no theory at all. Well, a little, just the simpler bits they can half understand. Gramsci, they half understand bits of Gramsci. The hegemony stuff. But deep down the right loonies and the left share the same conspiracy mania, it’s rooted in a small-town America paranoia. There’s a plot out there to take things away from them, democracy, freedom of speech, a man’s guns, a man’s right to fuck his pig, there is no, I mean absolute zero, understanding of structural…’ He tailed off, seemed to have lost course, blinked at her with stubby eyelashes.

She said, ‘A village in Angola disappeared off the map?’

He focused. ‘Of course, you have to be on the map to disappear off it, don’t you? The logical precondition. God knows how they could tell it had vanished.’

‘And you say there were others? Atrocity stories?’

‘Many. Both sides. Raped nuns are always good value. The atrocity story is a staple of modern conflict. It illustrates what utter monsters the other lot are. As in the ex-Yugoslavia. Take for example…’ ‘So they said this Angolan village had been destroyed?’