Louise Doughty - Black Water

He was recruited by the Institute straight out of his military service and for the first couple of years, after his basic training was done, was sent on jobs that involved a lot of transience. It was mostly delivering packages to embassies or organisations, although he was too junior to know the contents. New recruits often spent a year as delivery boys before they returned to be based behind a desk in Amsterdam and learn more about the Institute’s work — they weren’t going to trust you immediately, after all. This suited him fine: he was in no hurry to get his feet beneath a desk.

Travel of any sort was terrific training. Officials, for instance: there was a certain look that got you past those people — immigration or customs officers, ticket collectors; the people who wore uniforms that denoted status without any real power. This look could best be described as politeness tinged with boredom — a look that implied there was absolutely nothing at stake. That was the mistake that illegal immigrants or drug traffickers always made; either their rank fear showed or they were excessively friendly. The answer lay somewhere between the two: but a hint of boredom, that was essential. The person behind the desk in front of you was almost certainly bored as well, after all. You were in it together.

Once he was settled in a seat in a departure lounge or railway station waiting room, he liked to do his homework. How readily people gave themselves up to his gaze. The families were straightforward, the women and men clutching children, exhausted by the endlessness of it all but mostly by their offspring’s obliviousness to their sacrifice. The businessmen always liked to sit a little apart, to indicate that they were only there because they were being paid to be there. Then there were the young couples, usually having stupid arguments, because all arguments were stupid between a couple at that age, everything freighted by the lifetime of disappointment that lay ahead. ‘So much for Things go better with Coke ,’ he once saw a beautiful young woman wail at her unfortunate beau, who had trailed halfway round San Diego airport in search of a vending machine and then brought the bottle back without opening it. She meant, are you the one? Am I having children with you? Is this it? What she meant was, when you’re having trouble at work at the age of forty-five, will you be the kind of guy who lets his boss walk all over him and doesn’t get his bonus and can’t look after me and the kids? Because if you don’t have the initiative to open a bottle of Coke on the opener attached to the vending machine before you bring it back to me then how do I know you have the initiative to hold a good job down and to anticipate what I need when I need it? She didn’t know it, the beautiful young woman, but that was what she was asking. And the young man’s soft sigh — he didn’t snap back, just accepted the admonition — said, yeah, well, all that’s probably true but I’m easy-going at least and maybe that’s more important than you think and this is the guy I am so take it or leave it, hon. The helplessness of other men never ceased to amaze him.

These were the times when he gave a shudder of gratitude at his observer status. Who would want to be part of that? The truth was, even though he was the same age as the young couple, his courier work made him feel a world apart from them, mature and powerful.

When did he ever see anyone in any of these transitory places that he would have liked to trade lives with? Rarely, although it wasn’t unusual for large groups of people in motion to include one or two oddities like him. At an airport in Ceylon, on his way back from delivering a report for a British firm, he had seen one, another oddity, sitting amongst the people waiting to board one of the newly established flights. The airport had been an RAF station during the war and was only just being developed for commercial purposes. The cost of flights was prohibitive for anyone but government officials or the wealthiest of local families so the people waiting were all well dressed, many of them Indians returning home. Amongst them, clearly happy to stand out, was a white man, small, ginger-haired, tough as a little terrier, Harper guessed — he could always spot them. Ordinary people thought that the men to be afraid of were the obvious ones, the big men who shouted aggressively, the ones with uniforms and guns. Harper knew better by then. This man sat quietly in the departure lounge like him, dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt, his frame coiled and dense, his eyes watchful. He was playing the game too. CIA, Harper guessed — definitely American, in any case, on his way back from something, technically off duty but unable to relax. He must have been doing something in conjunction with the British as well, the Americans didn’t have that many interests in Ceylon. He was scanning each passenger in turn, just as Harper had. When his gaze reached him, Harper looked back, keeping his expression a professional blank as he and the other man took in everything about each other and moved on. Anyone watching them would assume they hadn’t noticed each other at all, whereas he knew this man had surmised in a second that he was a fellow professional, albeit not exactly his sort.

In the far corner was an Indian couple in late middle age, sitting next to each other but staring straight ahead. The woman was wearing a knitted brown cardigan over her sari. Her husband had his hands resting on the top of his walking cane, which was upright in front of him. His mouth was slightly open. Harper knew that this couple, each in their own way, would do almost anything rather than spend another minute together. Two British girls sat opposite the middle-aged couple, embassy secretaries perhaps, fanning themselves against the exhausting humidity with magazines, prim in their chairs, legs tucked underneath and crossed at the ankles, exchanging glances from time to time. He guessed they had been sharing an apartment for a while. They were returning home with heads full of secrets about each other. One had flat, chunky-heeled lace-up shoes and the other, the one with money in the family somewhere, was in delicate blue pumps. Even though they hadn’t known each other before they came out here and had little in common, they were bound together now. Nearly everyone waiting for the plane was fed up or impatient. The travelling world was full of people who wanted to arrive so badly that that imperative stopped them observing their journey. If you didn’t want that, you were at a distinct advantage.

If a flight was delayed long enough, then by the end of the wait, he felt he could write the biography of almost everyone on the aeroplane.

As the group rose to board, the American in the open-necked shirt walked past where he was sitting. Their glances met again but they did not exchange a word, or even a nod. In that instant, Harper, new to his line of work, felt that although he was a man excluded from civilian life, with no real nationality or home, he was part of something else: a kind of brotherhood, an understanding that would only be acknowledged in the briefest of looks. There was a community of shadow men out there, around the world, in airports and railway stations — on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind, all ghosts, all invisible, all playing the same game. He had been inducted.

Lots of training, lots of games, lots of sex: that was how he remembered those years in Amsterdam leading up to ’65. He was a young man in his twenties and apart from a multiply-divorced mother who drank so much she didn’t know who he was sometimes, he had no ties, no obligations. He didn’t look like the people around him but he didn’t look definitively like anyone else either. Part-something.