Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

Where was Badger, and where was the fucking cavalry?

Two more shots fired. Could have been from a rifle or carbine, but not a pistol. The light lit him well. The bullets were aimed close enough to him for a spatter of the lagoon water to come up and into his face. The engine had power and the light surged closer. He heard the shouting more clearly.

He should keep still. The voice was shrill and he sensed that adrenalin surged. It would be the goon, the fucking officer, who sat in the chair and watched the birds. Wrong: watched one bird. He took a deep breath and flopped down into the water. It came over his stomach, then his shoulders. His head went under and the foul stuff was in his nose, mouth and ears. He tried to push himself away and the light was over him.

Foxy used his hands on the mud and pushed the cable aside. He felt the air forcing itself free of his chest. It was lodged in his throat and he knew he couldn’t hold it longer – and didn’t have to.

A hand clenched hard into the gillie suit. It had been pathetic: he would have been, when he reckoned he had dived, no more than a foot below the water’s surface, moving at the pace of a bloody great slug and kicking off a trail of mud. The hands had him, heaved him up, and his head was clear of the water. He heard laughter – not of humour but of contempt – and the breath spurted from his mouth. Then he cried out because he couldn’t replace it fast enough and panted.

The light blinded him. He couldn’t see who held him, who laughed at him. The laughter was killed, and the shout was of real anger – as if he had inflicted pain – the reprisal a blow to the side of his head. He didn’t know what had aroused the anger and stifled the laughter.

A rope was looped under his arms and across his chest, then drawn tight, with a jerk that squeezed more breath from his lungs. The pain pinched, and another hand had caught at the neck of the suit. The engine pitch rose and the boat gathered speed. He was dragged through the water. If his head had not been held up by the fist he would have been swamped and gone under.

He wondered where Badger was, what he had seen.

The engine noise softened. He felt his feet, one in the boot and one in the sock, scrape over the mud. The engine was cut and the big light went out but a torch was in his face and he squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t know how much time was needed, but thought it would be many hours.

The rope was used to pull Foxy over the quayside and onto the ground. He was on his stomach, but a boot went into his ribcage and pushed him over. He rolled on his side and came to rest on his back, like a fish hauled by anglers into a boat, then left to gasp on the deck. There was a jabber of voices around him and rifle barrels close to his face.

Many hours were needed, and Foxy didn’t know if he could give them, in Lubeck, enough time.

He sat in his office.

To those around him, who worked late in the treatment rooms at the university’s medical school, he was Steffen Weber. To himself he was Soheil, in Farsi, the ‘star’.

He did not need to ask. He had seen three patients that day and conducted lengthy examinations of their conditions. One he could help, with surgery, but two had conditions beyond his skill. He would deliver verdicts, positive and negative, the next afternoon. He had seen the patients, been in and out of the office and had gone past the desk his secretary used. She had left no note on his own desk to tell him: Your wife rang and requested you call her. She will be at home.

He had not telephoned her.

He could have; she could have; neither had.

What should he do? He did nothing. He did not call his home and tell her he was sorry for their argument, that he loved her, and their daughter, that nothing should be allowed to come between them. He did not ask her if she had had a good day, did not apologise for being late that evening. The consultant, a man revered in his circles, did not lift the telephone on his desk. She could have rung, spoken of her love for him and her gratitude for him working his fingers to the bone to buy their home, that kitchen, that life for her, and she might have said she accepted his judgement on what he could do and what he could not avoid. She, too, had done nothing.

Around him he felt a growing tension among his assistants, as if they believed him responsible for a situation in which an unidentified patient had obtained an appointment without the prior submission of X-rays and scans. It insulted them.

He could not respond.

As the hours of the day had gone by, his temper had shortened. The last of his patients – the forty-nine-year-old senior officer from the fire station in one of the Baltic coast towns north of the city – had been clearly beyond help, but the visit to the consultant, with his wife, would have marked a closure point from which the patient could prepare for death. The man should have been treated with courtesy, sympathy and understanding. The examination had been short, almost brusque, and the patient had been told that the consultant could offer a final verdict the next day but he should not hold his breath. He had noted that a nurse had stared into his face as the couple had left, showing rank hostility. The distrust proved widespread among his staff. The next target for a vicious response was a mild-mannered clerk from the fees office. There was a hesitant rap on his door. He waved the man in. ‘Yes?’

‘You have a patient visiting you tonight, Doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Facilities were originally booked for next Monday morning, but have now changed?’

‘How does this concern your office?’

‘The patient as yet has no name, address or-’

‘Correct.’

‘We have no record, Doctor, of how the account will be settled. We have no debit-card number, no banker’s order.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Doctor, how will the account be settled?’

‘I have no idea. We will wait and see. Now, fuck off out of my room.’

The clerk did so.

He saw Foxy on the quay and the guns pointing down at him. There were torches and a flashlight on Foxy, and the picture in the view-finder of the image-intensifier was pale green, washed out at the fringes and burned through on the focus point. Badger watched.

What could he have done? Could he have intervened? Might he have saved Foxy? He slapped it from his mind. Badger thought it indulgence to consider what he might, could, should have done. He had done nothing. It would have been dishonest to claim he’d liked Foxy, been fond of him, even that he’d acquired a degree of respect for him. He was not dishonest, never had been. To a fault, Badger spoke it like it was. He couldn’t have said it was anything other than gut-wrenching to see, through the lens’s soft focus, the man he’d shared the hide with – had slept alongside, had eaten, defecated and urinated next to, and from whom he’d been given the big confession of life with a woman who shagged around.

On the quay they were searching Foxy, had the suit pulled up, his legs, arms and chest exposed. Then hands seemed to go down into Foxy’s underpants and scrabble there for anything hidden. The boots came at him to pitch him over, and they did his backside, searched in there. He couldn’t have done anything because he had seen little of Foxy being taken – he’d been on the far edge of the clear ground, away from the hide, and had the bergens beside the small craft, with the air cylinder used to inflate it. He’d reckoned that he’d pull and Foxy would ride. He hadn’t seen the light come on, and had become aware of the crisis only after the shots were fired. Then he had scrambled, leopard crawl, and seen the scale of it. There had been a light on the boat and more lights along the raised bund line out to the right. They would have had automatic weapons, assault rifles, with an accurate killing range of four hundred yards, and he’d had a Glock with an effective hit chance of thirty yards. He had seen, with the image-intensifier, Foxy ditch the microphone and the cable.