Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

Anselm sat for a while, smoked a cigarette. The room had warmed. He sipped the whisky, finished it, went to the kitchen and poured another one. People interested in his past, things he knew. Alex, this woman. Sniffing around him. He was a source. A repository of something. They thought he had something they could use.

But why did that make him uneasy? He knew about cultivating people, getting people to trust him, to tell him things.

Forget Caroline Wishart. She wanted something and there was no knowing what it was. It was unlikely to be what she said it was.

The life of question and answer. How had he fallen into it?

You’re got an inquiring mind. Not many people have. Consider yourself blessed. His mother had said that to him. He couldn’t recall anything else his mother said. So, from all the years together, all the nurturing, he came away with three sentences.

No.

He remembered something else. Her telling him, in this house, that she was leaving his father. He was seventeen. On the terrace of this house, sitting in the wicker chairs, losing their paint even then and never painted again.

The chairs were still on the terrace, the exposed surfaces bare of paint. His father had remembered them from before the war, before he was sent to America.

The last Anselm to sit in the chairs, look at the garden, at the canal. He would be that one.

The day she told him, it was autumn. He remembered the big drifts of leaves lying in the garden, in hollows, at trees. Leaves liked to cluster.

He had trouble recalling his mother’s face. In Beirut, in the coffin for two, her smell had come to him in dreams, lingered in his nostrils when he woke as if it were actually in the air. Not a perfume exactly, cologne and something else, a talcum powder perhaps. The smell had filled him with a sadness and a longing so unbearable that he would gladly have died to extinguish it.

That day on the terrace, she said, she had a matter-of-fact way, she said: Darling, your father and I are getting on each other’s nerves. We’re going to take a little break from each other. A sort of holiday, really. It’ll be good for both of us. Don’t look at me like that. It won’t change anything. And you’re both grown-up now.

She joined Medecins Sans Frontieres. He went to college and she died in the Congo. His father said on the telephone that it was quick and painless, a fever, she lost consciousness. Some exotic viral infection, he couldn’t remember what it was called.

What did people mean when they said grown up ?

Anselm rubbed his eyes, finished the whisky. He went to the big stone-flagged room off the laundry, the boxroom, floor-to-ceiling shelves. In the corner, stairs went down to the cellar. Frau Einspenner had taken him down those steep stairs, a little of the exquisite apprehension came back to him.

The cartons from San Francisco stood on the floor, only one opened.

His life before Beirut lay in the boxes. He felt no attachment to that life, no curiosity about the missing pieces of it. He should leave the material remains alone.

He began with the open carton.

…LONDON…

‘His name is Constantine Niemand. South African, an ex-soldier, a mercenary, worked as a security guard in Johannesburg. Two days before he arrived here, he was on the scene of an affair in Johannesburg, a burglary gone wrong, five people killed, three blacks, one a security guard, the other two…’ ‘Losin me, boy.’

‘A white couple were killed. Brett and Elizabeth Shawn, British passports.’

‘Your Krauts running that name?’

‘Yes.’

‘The woman, what’d you do there?’

‘There’s a watch on the place. She hasn’t shown.’

‘And the old address?’

‘The old address?’

‘Your reliable pricks heard the phone ring. Then he wasn’t there. Who the living fuck do you think called him? And how the fuck did she know to call him? Hasn’t crossed your brain has it? And don’t say in essence to me again, I’ll strangle you with my own hands.’

‘With respect, Mr Price, I’m not prepared…’ ‘Sonny, deal with me or deal with the devil. There’s much worse coming up behind me. I’m the good cop. You want to walk from this fucken Waco you created, get the fuck out. And wherever you go, get on your knees every morning noon and fucken night and pray the Lord to take away the mark on your fucken forehead.’

‘We’ll cover this stuff, Charlie.’

‘I truly hope so, Martie. I truly do. Or we’re talking missing in action.’

…HAMBURG…

It was in the second carton. In the top box.

A flimsy magazine with a sombre cover of light grey type on a black background.

Behind Enemy Lines. A Journal of Argument.

February 1993.

Four articles were promoted on the cover. The top one was: ‘And Unquiet Lie the Civil Dead’.

Anselm took the magazine to the study and sat behind the desk to read it.

From the first words, he knew that he had not written it. No matter how battered the brain, there was something in it that knew what it had created, and he had not created this. It was vaguely familiar but it wasn’t his.

He found what the woman was talking about, the village in Angola.

Fragments of evidence now suggest that this campaign was in response to rumours in South Africa of a village in northern Angola being wiped out.

Wiped out by which side? How? We don’t know. But just in case the rumours spread outside South Africa and were investigated and confirmed, the CIA-DIA misinformation artists had done the groundwork for blaming the Cubans.

Nothing. It meant nothing. Why had someone told Caroline Wishart that he had been paid for writing the article? And given her his San Francisco address as the place the cheque was sent to?

He paged through the rest of the magazine. On the last page was an offer for back issues of the magazines and three others:

The Social Fabric

Records of Capitalism

To Bear Witness

To Bear Witness

That was it, he knew the name, that was how he knew Bob Blumenthal. He pictured his face again. A cafe in San Francisco. In the afternoon. Long ago.

Anselm was looking for a cigarette when it came to him: he had written a piece for Blumenthal on the CIA and European intelligence services. That was what they talked about that day. In 1990. Blumenthal had rung him. Kaskis and Blumenthal went back a long way, Blumenthal had taught Kaskis at college after Kaskis left the army. Kaskis had written stuff for him.

Anselm thought about living in San Francisco, in Kaskis’ tiny apartment on the hill. Kaskis knew the people who owned the building, Latvians, friends of his family. Kaskis never spent more than a few days at a time in San Francisco. Anselm remembered him staying for a week once, that was the longest. They went out at night, went to bars where journalists hung out, drank a lot. Kaskis always had somewhere to go later. Someone he had to see before the night was over.

Anselm remembered the piece. It was published in To Bear Witness and it was called ‘American Spider: Global and Deadly’. It would be in the document boxes.

Why should he help this woman, this muckraker? Because he’d heard something in her voice. Perhaps it was a matter of someone’s life and death. He rang Inskip again, got connected to the London number. She was close to the phone. Was it a work number?

‘John Anselm,’ he said. ‘I found the article. A man called Paul Kaskis wrote it. He had the magazine pay me. He owed me money.’

A long sigh. ‘Paul Kaskis, do you…’