Black Water (13 page)

Travelling the Atlantic Ocean alone, the label round his neck at all times as he had been instructed, even when he was washing – surely it must have made some impression on him? When he tried to remember that voyage, there was something in his head about an ice cream, an ice cream sandwich made with thick soggy slabs of some sort of cookie mixture. A sailor who played cards with him? A little girl in a pinafore? Without his mother there to make the pictures of the voyage, that Atlantic journey at the age of twelve seemed vaguer when he thought back to it than the one he had undertaken with his mother when he was three. Saying goodbye to Poppa and Nina must have been hard but, as far as he remembered, the voyage itself didn’t bother him – being in a state of transition was too familiar to his bones.

The arrival – that was different. Like all the passengers, he hung over the side, watching the coast appear. He joined the melee processing clumsily down the gangplank, bumping his case on the wooden ridges and losing control of it at one point, tripping a young woman in heels just ahead of him. She turned her head back to him, scowling over her shoulder, then stopped, blocking the way for everybody, to adjust her stockings. Then he was on the quay and trapped in a huge crowd of adults who grouped and gathered in greetings before moving off, people clinging to each other. When a clearing opened, he turned to his left and saw, first of all, a barrel-chested man in a tweed coat and black hat who was shouting, ‘
Indié verloren, rampspoed geboren!
’ with his arms wide open. His ruddy face was contorted and open-mouthed, as if he had made a tremendous joke. On her knees next to him, kneeling right there on the wooden planks of the arrivals jetty, was a woman with her hair scraped back in a ponytail that revealed harsh lines leading down from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She had tears pouring down her cheeks. She, too, had her arms open and she was crying, ‘Come here! Oh come here, baby boy!’

The power of transience: in motion, you could be whoever you wanted to be. When had he learned this? On that solo Atlantic journey, with the label round his neck? Or earlier, at the age of three, watching his mother cadge cigarettes from different passengers or sailors, varying the details of who she was according to whether she was talking to a man or a woman, a sailor or a fellow passenger? Whatever lessons were learned then, chief amongst them was this: if you don’t want people to know who you are, keep moving.

If you kept moving fast enough, you could be several selves in quick succession. If someone struck up a conversation with you on a plane, you could pretend to be from Macau and single and a brain surgeon – after you had assessed that the person you were talking to was neither from Macau nor a brain surgeon themselves, of course. In the taxi queue outside the airport, you could be a Spanish businessman, widowed with six adorable children. Later that same day, in a hotel bar perhaps, you could say you were psychic and that your mother had been mistress to a Persian king – you could claim you had a fatal disease and only months to live. The possibilities were endless.

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.

The trick to being unusual was learning how to milk it. He liked to use the geography of his birth to wrong-foot people, especially women he was trying to bed. He liked to choose exactly the right moment to reveal a little about himself – after a few drinks together, when their gazes had locked once or twice. Maybe there had been a light touch or two, a brushing of a sleeve, a hand resting briefly on a knee, although that would have been quite forward in those days. In the early sixties, as he remembered, a woman’s favourite way of inviting physical contact was to pick a bit of fluff off your suit jacket, often with a brusque, maternal swipe of the hand. After a certain amount of this, a certain amount of her batting him around like a small boy, came the point when he could start taking the initiative. These small physical gestures were only indicators, though. The real movement forward came when the talking started, when they began exchanging stories. That was when he knew he was home and dry.

One of his favourite gambits was to ask her where she was born: always so much more tactful than asking a woman how old she was. You could get tripped up that way if you weren’t careful: they had a tendency to ask you to guess, a question which was surprisingly hard to answer to your own advantage. If you stuck to where rather than when, it was a neat and simple way into intimacy. You couldn’t say to a woman, ‘Tell me your unhappiest childhood memory,’ straight off, but when they told you where they were born, the conversation automatically became more intimate. The tragic detail from her childhood would be lying in wait at the end of that simple, factual answer. Sometimes there wasn’t one, of course – sometimes the story of her birthplace was routine, told with a self-deprecating laugh in acknowledgement of its ordinariness. And then, because she was a nice woman – he only went for nice women – she would ask back.

The pause. The downward look. The soft voice that indicated this was not something that he usually confided in a person he had only just met.

‘I was born in a concentration camp.’

The best bit was the steady gaze he received, tinged with confusion, as the woman he was talking to recalibrated what little she knew of him, this tall young man with brown but not-dark skin and thick but straight black hair, who looked definitively un-Dutch but not definitively anything else.

Once, but only once, one of them said it out loud, sceptically, ‘You don’t
look
Jewish.’

Was it Alida who had said that? No, Alida came later. Alida came after ’65. Alida was the one who looked for the scars on his back: the scars that weren’t there.

Once, in a bar on Gravenstraat, a pale freckled woman with large breasts but unfortunate teeth came up to him while he was sitting on a high stool and stood next to him, waiting to be served. He wasn’t really out for the night, just having a beer after work, making the same one last until he was ready to go: Frankenmuth,
brewed for modern American tastes.
She stood a little closer than was necessary, considering the bar wasn’t all that crowded, she staggered a little – she was quite drunk, he thought – and put her hand on his thigh to steady herself, before saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and then snatching the hand away, as if his thigh was hot.

The bartender came up to them and rested his wrists on the bar, looking at them expectantly, and the woman said, ‘Oh, it’s me now, thank you darling. Can you do a Pink Squirrel? Two of them.’ She held her fingers up in a V-for-victory sign.

The bartender looked at them with such disdain that Harper wanted to say,
please, the second one isn’t for me
.

‘Oh, okay,’ she said then. ‘Two Old-fashioneds.’ She looked at Harper. ‘My friend’s in the corner there. She’s really nice.’

They made small talk while the bartender mixed the drinks. Behind the rows of bottles on the wooden shelves, there was a mirrored surface that reflected the jewelled golds and browns and oranges of the various liquors. When he moved his head, he could glimpse different shards of their reflections; her hairline, an eye or ear, his nose. She turned her back to the bar, placing both elbows on it, and surveyed the room as if they were spies, before talking from the side of her mouth.

‘I’ve never met a
neger
before,’ she said. ‘Me and my friend are going to a party later, want to come along, meet my friends? They’re really nice people, they’d be interested to meet you.’

Up until that point, he had been giving it some serious thought. ‘Thanks,’ he said, picking up the change he had left on the bar and pocketing it. ‘But I’ve already met more than enough white people.’

‘Choose an Anglo name,’ his trainer at the Institute had told him, as they sat with clipboards in the meeting room and worked their way through the details of his new identity for travel purposes. ‘Something that’s easy for anyone to understand, something nice and neutral. Not Smith, for heaven’s sake. Barnhardt actually
chose
Smith.’

Nicolaas Den Herder, born on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, to a white Dutch mother and an Indo officer in the Dutch Colonial Army, had already changed his surname to Luther, then to Aaltink, then back to Den Herder.

He thought about it.

‘Favourite film star? Childhood pet?’ the trainer said helpfully.