Louise Doughty - Black Water

Despite what was going on in Saigon, Harper’s department, the Asia Department, wasn’t really where it was at in 1964 — President Johnson wasn’t listening to de Gaulle, so what was new there? No, the best people were all in the Soviet Section, a whole separate unit staffed by people who had Russian or Eastern Bloc language skills: bunch of comedians they became round the office, once the guy with the eyebrows took over in Moscow, those Groucho jokes wore thin pretty fast. Other than that, there were certain countries that were hot for a while for one reason or another; the small South American desk got very excited about the coup in Brazil. There was Panama, Zanzibar, Cuba of course. The focus tended to change emphasis according to the State Department’s priorities. Even though the Institute was independent and nominally Dutch, the Americans were their most important clients — nearly three quarters of the contracts were coming from them. Company offices were going to open up in Los Angeles and New York as a result and they were already in partnership with a West Coast firm like theirs — later, there would be a merger. Harper was one of the operatives who applied for transfer there but the jobs all went to people with experience in the Soviet Section.

Everybody wanted to be in America if they could, not Europe with its old, cold, bombed-out cities, their cheap concrete buildings flung up like dentures in a ruined mouth. There was going to be this big new skyscraper in New York, the world’s tallest building it would be. They’d been arguing about it over there for years but now it was going to be designed by some Japanese guy — how ironic was that. Harper had a debate about it with Joosten who said that the guy wasn’t a Jap, he was just an American with a Jap name, and Harper said he didn’t care, he thought maybe the guys who gave him the job had memories that were pretty short, like, er, Pearl Harbor, a load of aeroplanes came out of the sky one sunny day without warning, remember? He didn’t really mean it and Joosten knew he didn’t, being anti-Japanese was something he made a show of to remind his colleagues that not all brown guys were the same. It was just something to say while they sat in a bar after work. A moment later they were arguing about whether the A-11 would burn to a crisp at seventy thousand feet.

One day, Harper’s boss Gregor came to the door of his office and leaned casually against the doorpost, arms folded. Harper had his head bent over his desk but the moment he became aware of a figure blocking the light, he knew who it was. Gregor never announced himself with a ‘good morning’ or a ‘hi’. He announced himself with silence.

Harper’s head was down over a list of figures. He was muttering the figures out loud and twirling ticks and crosses on the list with a pencil, so he had a small but satisfying excuse to take a moment or two before he looked up. While he took advantage of that moment, Gregor waited. Gregor continued to wait when Harper lifted his head. Gregor met Harper’s gaze and waited long enough for their mutual stare to become odd, expectant.

Gregor dropped his gaze, lifted it again, pushed his glasses further up his nose and sniffed — only then did he say to Harper, ‘Got a minute?’

Harper sat back in his chair to indicate that he had. He did not put the pencil down.

Gregor used his weight to lever himself upright from the doorframe, looked behind him at the open-plan office, quiet but for the discordant clacking of several typewriters at different distances from where he stood, and only at that point did he uncross his arms, take a step into Harper’s office and close the door behind him.

‘It’s raining,’ Gregor said, lifting an arm to indicate the view from Harper’s office window, which included the brown water of the canal and the blank brick wall of a warehouse building that dropped straight into the water. Harper liked the fact that there were no other windows looking into his office. The rain was invisible against the brick but when he looked at the brown canal he saw tiny pits on its surface, disappearing and reappearing in a pattern.

‘So, our Asia Department.’ It was a statement rather than a question so Harper remained silent.

‘Well,’ said Gregor with a sigh, as if Harper was being particularly truculent that afternoon. ‘We need someone on the ground. Jakarta, land of your birth, it was Jakarta, wasn’t it? Six months, a year maybe, maybe longer.’

‘Long time.’

‘He speaks! The enigmatic one speaks!’

Harper did not return Gregor’s smile. ‘Have they asked for me?’

‘I’m asking for you.’

He frowned, leaned forward, dropped his pencil on his desk. ‘Why me?’

Gregor actually shrugged. ‘Look, it’s up to you. I know it’s a big deal, it would be your first big job and you’ll need Stage Three clearance, and some physicals. To be honest, seeing how new you are I’m not sure but you know the region.’ He sniffed and rubbed at the side of his nose with one extended finger. ‘It’s your background rather than experience.’

‘Joosten knows the region better than me. He’s been.’

‘This one isn’t for Joosten. This one needs the time to develop contacts on the ground and we need to send someone as soon as possible, now the guy in the black hat has pulled them out of the UN. You’ll be taking a crate on delivery so instead of an aeroplane through Karachi, you get to go on a cruise, pretty good I would think, lots of deckchair time to do your homework. . and,’ this next point a concession to the obvious, ‘Joosten can’t pass for a local if he has to. Things are getting a little hot for us palefaces out there.’

‘Why not use the local operatives?’

‘Client doesn’t trust them, wants someone we’re sure of here, who we can move swiftly to another island as soon as job done, but it also has to be someone who can do the local thing, which, my friend, narrows it down to you. Pronto.’

Gregor watches too many movies, Harper thought. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘I can’t tell you until you’ve said yes.’

He’d been waiting for an overseas assignment ever since he joined the Institute. He had always been curious to visit the country where he spent his first three years, even though, especially though, he had no memory of those years and only his mother’s dubious stories to go on. True, it was something of a backwater, but that would give him more autonomy too.

Gregor was waiting. His patience irritated Harper so much that he was on the verge of saying he wasn’t sure he was ready and didn’t want to be told any more details, just to be difficult, but then Gregor lifted both hands, splaying his fingers in an okay, hands up motion, as if Harper had opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a pistol. ‘Look, there will be bonuses involved. Quite a few of them, in fact. And an opportunity to move sideways, which is presumably what you’ve been waiting for. It’s what all you new young guys want, isn’t it?’

‘Sideways in which direction?’

‘You don’t look all that happy behind a desk.’

Did anyone look happy behind a desk?

The following week, Gregor summoned him to his office and introduced him to a middle-aged American who called himself Johnson. Johnson had dull, pitted skin on his cheeks, the remnant of some childhood disease, and a very bald, very shiny head — it was adulthood that had done that bit. He kept running a hand over his shiny head while he spoke, as if he liked to keep it polished that way.

After things were agreed, Harper shook hands with both men and Johnson said, ‘Gregor here speaks very highly of you. I must admit I was a little concerned you were inexperienced, on paper, I mean, but now I’ve met you I can see why he does.’