Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

The internal phone rang.

Inskip.

‘I’ve got something.’

Anselm went back to the blue room, to Inskip’s station. He sat on the chair next to him. Inskip pointed at his main monitor. A column of names, one highlighted.

‘Here’s a Martin Powell on a list. The date on it’s 1986.’

He scrolled down the column.

‘It’s alphabetical,’ he said.

‘I see that.’

‘Here’s the list that follows, dated a month later.’

The new column had names with figures beside them, amounts of money in rands, the South African currency. Inskip scrolled down it. R10,000 was the smallest sum. There was no Martin Powell.

‘List number two,’ said Inskip. ‘Some kind of payroll. Notice that this list is mostly alphabetical. Five names from list number one have gone and in their places are five new ones.’

‘Mostly alphabetical,’ said Anselm. It took him a second to grasp the meaning. ‘The new names are all in the alphabetical positions of the missing ones?’

‘You’re quick, Master. That’s right. My assumption is that whoever made up list number two changed names but didn’t bother to re-sort alphabetically. Just cut and pasted in the new names.’

‘Payments,’ said Anselm. ‘Could be the five used false names on list number one, assumed names, but were then paid in their real names.’

‘And Martin Powell is gone.’

Inskip selected a name. ‘And in his place is this man.’

The name was: NIEMAND, CONSTANTINE.

Anselm was staring at the screen. ‘What’s the year?’

‘1986.’

‘Go to the top and scroll.’

Anselm looked at the names. He knew what the lists meant. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. ‘These people are mercenaries,’ he said. ‘This is the gang assembled for a coup in the Seychelles.

Organised in England. The South African government backed it, then they betrayed it to the Seychelles government. Paid off the troops.’

Inskip turned his shaven head, blue in the light. He raised his eyebrows. ‘How do you know that?’

Anselm got up. ‘I know it because the world is too much with me.

As for you, this is bonus-quality work. But there isn’t a bonus.’

‘Your approval, I’m content to bask in that.’

‘While you’re warm, run the Niemand name.’

Anselm went to his office and rang the number in London.

‘Carrick.’

‘W and K.’

‘Hold on.’

Clicks.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We have something.’

Anselm told him.

‘Your operator’s very good,’ said Carrick. ‘We need that name checked. Soonest.’

Inskip, holding up a notepad. His eyes were bright.

‘Hold on a moment, please,’ said Anselm.

‘Got him,’ said Inskip softly. ‘Got Niemand.’

Anselm said to Carrick, ‘We have something on Niemand. I’m putting the operator on.’

Inskip came in, took the handset, cleared his throat. He looked at his notes. ‘A man and his wife and a security guard were murdered by black burglars in a house in Johannesburg four days ago,’ he said. ‘Another security man killed the attackers. His name is given as Con Niemand. His firm says he’s an ex-soldier.’

He listened. ‘No. This is from the Johannesburg Star. British. The name is Shawn.’

Anselm was looking at his desk, sightless. He didn’t register immediately.

‘S-H-A-W-N,’ said Inskip. ‘Brett and Elizabeth Shawn. Ages forty-seven and forty-one.’

Sitting in the Mercedes with Tilders, Kael and Serrano on the ferry, the voices from the crackly bug:

Well, that’s something. Shawn?

Shot by blacks. So it appears. The business is strange. Werner, the question is what do we do now?

…HAMBURG…

Towards home in the cold night, late, Anselm walking, the far shore’s lights lying broken in the lake.

Reading the names on Inskip’s list, he had felt a sense of recognition and it had come to him: the farcical plot to stage a coup in the Seychelles, he had found out about it in late 1986. He remembered going to London from Paris, staying at the hotel in Russell Square. He’d stayed there often, he knew it well: the cramped bedroom, the tiny floral wallpaper pattern, the corner shower that steamed up the whole room, the small dining room where only breakfast was served, always eggs, bacon and sausage, pigeon-sized eggs cooked hard, bacon that was mainly fat, a single sausage like a pygmy’s little finger.

He talked to the man in a pub, it was winter, December, near Christmas, the pub wasn’t far away from the hotel, on a corner. They sat at a table in a corner of the saloon bar. The man wanted revenge on people, his superiors, he was sixtyish, bland-faced, a thin scar beneath his right eye. An accident in childhood, perhaps. Struck by a swing.

Anselm tried to remember whether he had written a story about the Seychelles business. The clipping would be in the cartons sent from San Francisco at Lucas’s instructions. Some time in the first week, he had cut the tapes on one. Grey-blue document boxes, stacked neat as bricks. He remembered opening one and reading a clipping with his byline datelined BOGOTA, TUESDAY. It had meant nothing to him; something written by a stranger from a place he did not recall. He sat there for a long time, blinking away tears. He did not open the boxes again.

Two people were coming towards him: men, one medium, one shorter, they moved apart, he felt an alarm-they wanted him to pass between them. He moved to his right, the right-hand man shifted.

Guten Abend, and they were gone. The taller man was a tall woman. Her perfume brushed his face like a cobweb. He carried it a long way, he knew the scent, he knew it well. For a few moments, he wanted desperately to know who wore it, tried to will his mind to tell him.

The pulse in his throat quietened. He could not remember ever going to Bogota. He remembered his first trip to Beirut…since when did he remember that? Sleeping on the floor of the Dutch photographer’s small apartment in Ashrafiye near the Place Sassine. The bakery called Nazareth. Henk introduced him to the crepes, the cheesy crepes. He remembered the impossible traffic, the insane driving, cocks crowing from gutted buildings, vegetable patches in the ruins, the feeling of people pressing upon you.

He could probably always have remembered his first time in Beirut. He simply hadn’t thought about it. You didn’t know what you remembered until you thought about it.

Nonsense.

Why were so many things coming back? Was everything going to be restored? An unbroken thread? A complete chronology? Would he remember his life again as one piece? Would he be whole again, remember people now unknown to him-people he had loved, people he had slept with? Were they all going to appear without warning, rise silently through the black mud and matted weed like peatbog men?

The thought made him uneasy. Perhaps it was better to be without the memories. What did it matter? What did holes, gaps, matter? Life didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t a story, it wasn’t a journey. It was just short films by different directors. The only link was you. You were in all of them. You missed a plane and your life changed. You misheard a place name, went to the wrong bar and then you spent two years with a woman you met there. You were leaving for Europe and the agency rang and instead you went to Colombia. The difference was five minutes. Kaskis rang and then you almost drowned in the Caribbean. Kaskis rang again and if you’d been in Bogota you wouldn’t have spent a year lying in holes in Beirut and you’d have missed the experience of a red-eyed teenager recircuiting your brain with the butt of a Kalashnikov.