The Fighting Man (1993) (4 page)

The landlord would have said, if he had been asked, that he had come to respect the quiet Englishman. Typical of him, what he had done in the bar. Thrown up, not the first and he wouldn’t be the last, in the bar – but the first and last to go out into the kitchen and get a mop and a bucket and a bottle of disinfectant and sluice away the mess. He had never had trouble with the Englishman and he had noted the strength last night when Gord Brown had told big Rocky that the fun time was over, and big Rocky was capable of putting men into hospital and had gone like a lamb, and Gord’s voice never raised. Gord had reached the mobile home. In the vision of the binoculars the little guys hung back. The landlord focused again on Gord Brown. The contours of his body were shown under the wet clinging trousers and shirt, no spare weight. An easy roll on the balls of his feet as if work and the absence of sleep were something he could cope with. The landlord wouldn’t have known what was a good-looking man, but his wife had told him that there had to be a good and concrete reason for a man with those features to be without a woman. Dark hair was flattened back on his scalp. The eyes were clear, the ears were neat. There was a weather tan to his cheeks. Good teeth that were looked after. He could see the stubble, through the magnification, on a jaw that was powerful . . . Gord went into the mobile home.

The landlord would have admitted it, wasn’t ashamed of it, that he would have given a week’s takings to have known what proposition had stirred Gord Brown to miss his bed when he needed it. He considered how, some time and some day, he might find out. He would speak to the post. The post was sister-in-law to the driver who delivered orders from the store in the village. The driver went rough shooting with the policeman. If the policeman got to hear then it would come back to him along the chain of the driver and the post. But the post wouldn’t be with him that morning for more than an hour.

Gord came out of the mobile home . . . He carried a black and bulging bin liner bag. The landlord saw Gord drop the caravan’s keys into the message box beside the road. The rims of the binoculars were pressed hard against the landlord’s eyes. Gord opened the passenger door of the Nissan pick-up and the smallest of the little beggars climbed up and inside. Gord picked up one of the others, the only one who carried a bag, and lifted him easily into the open back of the pick-up, and the landlord fancied that he heard, carried on the wind, shrill laughter, and then the last one went the same way, and Gord threw the bin liner bag in after the two of them. The landlord watched Gord drive the red and mud-spattered Nissan down the road past the hotel and round the corner, gone from sight. Gone without fanfare. As far as the landlord remembered from fifteen months back, he had arrived without fuss.

He went away down the corridor to the guest rooms, to the room where the door had been left open. Last night, late, he had spent more than twenty minutes getting out two collapsible beds and bringing sheets and pillowcases from the airing cupboard. He’d insisted on it, two collapsible beds and the double bed, for the three of them. Little beggars, dirty little beggars, because only the double bed had been slept in.

There had to have been a past. If there hadn’t been a past then Gord Brown would never have driven away with them.

‘. . . Fight fire with fire . . .’

The fast train hammered south.

He understood fighting fire with fire because it had been talked of by the embarrassed young officer, searching for neutral ground, safe talk, who had been charged with minding him when he was confined to quarters in the base camp at Dhahran before the flight back to England. They had spared him close confinement, but he was never to be out of the sight of the minder when he was eating, lounging, sleeping, crapping. The minder, an infantry officer who had come out to Saudi too late to join his unit for the big push into the Iraqi desert, had rabbited one evening about the shortage of flame throwers experienced by his battalion when they had hit the concrete defensive positions of the Republican Guards. The infantryman had said that what he had been told by those who had been in close-quarters combat was that flame throwers would have been the answer to the defensive machine-gun positions, that they’d been held up while waiting for an armoured squadron to give them the punch needed to silence the machine guns. It was more than three years back and Gord could still remember the chatter of the infantry officer, and the nervous young man’s pleasure at finding acceptable conversation.

He had driven the Nissan to the centre of Glasgow, left it parked on a double yellow line underneath a sign that threatened clamping and towing. The carriage clattered at speed through a station, blurring the faces of those on the platform who waited to take the slow stopping train behind.

He was far back in his seat. The flame throwers that Gord had been told about were all old Soviet stock. He had good retentive memory, had been blessed with it since a child. The sort of soldiering he’d done, before the Gulf and ignominy, had been an endless series of courses, the stacking of knowledge as a way of keeping men from boredom. The word turned in his mind, ignominy, and it hurt deep. It was the word that had been used by the Discipline Board, unofficial . . . All the flame throwers that he knew of were Soviet made. The principals, the most recently manufactured, were the LPO-50 and the TPO-50. He could recall the instructor’s session, tipping rain outside, a blackboard hung with photographs and plans of the working parts, in a camp lecture room. The LPO-50 was worn on the back supported with a shoulder harness, good for street fighting, range of fifty metres with something to spare. There was the heavier cousin, the TPO-50, that was mounted on a two-wheeled cart, a big bad beast that threw thickened fuel close to 200 metres. Good dirty weapons . . .

A slow streak of advancing fire. Gord dozed. His eyes blinked. There was a flame flash in front of him. The smallest lit a cigarette. The fire was moved into the face of the one with the attaché case, and then was passed across the central table to the oldest who sat beside Gord. The triple cloud of smoke wafted towards him. They seemed to think it funny, and each of them was grinning and there was their reed chuckle. The cigarettes were bloody hideous and it was foul smoke. He laughed himself. They grinned wider and chuckled louder and spurted the smoke over him again. He was laughing because he had bought his rail ticket, standard class and single, on his plastic, and in four or five weeks the bill from the plastic company would be pitched by the post into the box in front of his caravan home, and it would rot there because sure as hell Rocky wouldn’t be picking up his debts. There was his note in the box to Rocky, along with the caravan’s keys and the Nissan’s spare keys, and his instructions that Rocky should sell the pick-up and dispose of what he had left behind in the mobile home, everything that wasn’t in the black plastic bag on the rack above him, get what he could for them and binge the lot in the hotel bar. Rocky wouldn’t get much for the Nissan, not after he’d paid off the clamping or the towing fee, not with the bodywork rust, but there would be enough for him to drink himself stupid.

His commitment was made. Gord Brown did not expect to be coming back to the sea loch and the failing fish farm. He had turned his back on the eagle nest on Sidhean Mor . . .

If he wasn’t coming back then Christ alone knew where he was going.

He drifted close to sleep. The flame was in his mind, careering forward towards the slits of a machine-gun nest. There were no doubts to confuse him. The hesitation had been settled in the dark hours on the beach. Too long since any bastard had come for him in respect. They were the best he had, three little devils with suits that didn’t fit them and hats that were down across bright eyes, but they had come to him from necessity. It was good to Gord Brown to feel wanted. Their smoke was across his face, inside his mouth, up his nose, seeping into his closed eyes. He had yearned to be wanted.

The train jerked to a stop. The crowds on the platform and then the concourse swam around him. He thought that anyone there, if he had told them the business he was at, would have told him he was lunatic, just as big Rocky and the landlord would have told him, if they’d been offered the chance.

Wrong, the whole damn lot of them.

Their names were gibberish to him. He gave them the names of the three best men he had known. Francis and Vernon and Zachary. They had been with him in the Land Rover, too bloody long ago,
Eff
and
Vee
and
Zed
.

Gord stopped on the concourse and set the black bag down. He kicked aside a discarded fast food pack and opened the top of the bag and lifted out his scarred boots and rummaged until he found what he searched for. The passport was given to Vee. All of them looked at the photograph, tight-faced and glowering and blinking at the flash, and there was the shout of their laughter. He told Eff where he would see them the next day, and he slapped Vee on the back and felt the strength, and he tweaked the cheek of Zed and saw the friendship light in the man’s eyes.

It was because they had come for him, and wanted him.

2

The clerk was busy that evening, as he was every day and every evening of his working week, in the private world that was his filing system. His territory was a small annexe area by the entrance to the long rectangle basement room that housed the Record Section. The clerk was the master of this basement territory, and watched over it with all the keen spite of the wild cat jaguar in the magazine photograph that was stuck with adhesive tape to the plaster wall above his personal desk in the annexe. Every officer who came to the Record Section, no matter how senior, even the colonels and the brigadiers and the general himself, was required by the clerk to wait at the iron barred door for admittance to this part of the basement and to show his personal identity document, and to sign himself in, and later to sign himself out. No matter how senior the officer, he was obliged to leave his attaché case on the floor beside the wastepaper bin and the legs of the table that held the shredder machine. It was the empire of the clerk. The Israeli advisers had put in the IBM computer system, but the clerk dictated how much information was fed onto the disks, and the great majority of his material was still stored, as it had been for the last decade, in the cardboard box files on the racks that divided the basement room into narrow and high-sided corridors. The power had come in gradual degrees to the clerk, and now he revelled in the knowledge that he was indispensable to the smooth running of the G-2 section of military intelligence. He arrived at his desk a little before seven each morning and he never looked up and switched off the lights before eleven each evening, and if there was a crisis and access was required in the black small hours of the night then the clerk would have come in response to the call within five minutes. Only five minutes for him to throw on his fatigues and ride the empty streets on his motorcyclette from the room that he rented behind the McDonald’s on 1 Calle and 4a Avenida. It was accepted by those who used the files in the G-2 section tucked away without prominence behind the Palacio Nacional.

The clerk knew the smooth-faced lieutenant by the name of Benedicto.

The attaché case of the lieutenant was set on the floor beside the wastepaper bin and the legs of the table that carried the shredder.

The clerk assumed that the name of Benedicto was a cover. The lieutenant only came to the basement area late in the evenings, never wore uniform.

Behind the clerk was the scraping sound of the vacuum flask being opened, and the scent of ground coffee. He turned away from the photographs that covered his desk. He had them in two piles. One for the faces that he could identify, and one for those he could not. It would take back-checking, research, for him to be able to put names to all the faces of the men featured in the photographs. He glanced at the hunched, concentrating features of the lieutenant.

Sometimes the clerk shaved before he came to the basement, sometimes he was not troubled. It was his mark of independence, as a humble clerk who earned less than five hundred quetzals a month, that he could appear in the Record Section unshaven and have power over the manicured officers with their smells of lotion and talc.

The clerk thought it would have taken the lieutenant at least twenty minutes each morning to shave around that thinnest of moustaches on his upper lip.

The clerk saw, and there was little that slipped his attention, the clear lines of the scratch marks on the right forearm of the lieutenant. Not for him to pass comment . . . but he noted them, the scratching of the nails of a man, woman, driven beyond despair by pain.

It irritated the clerk that he could not identify three of the faces of the mourners. Twice he went to the corridors between the file racks, and manipulated the stair steps into position and climbed, awkwardly because of the old injury, to gather back-files from upper shelves. He would brush the cobweb skein from the files, shake clear the small spiders and stamp on them, and take the files to his desk. The files that harboured the small green spiders contained a dossier bank on the population of Guatemala, and of those in exile, of far greater quality than the disks of the IBM computer installed by the Israeli advisers. As long as he ruled the basement, the clerk would maintain that balance.

Another file was laid quietly on his desk.

He looked up and into the calm of the lieutenant’s eyes. He had never been told but it was obvious to him. The lieutenant was an interrogator. It was late in the evening. The Cherokee Chief station wagons would be out and tasked and cruising for the lift. A suspect would be brought to a safe house. Of course it was necessary for the interrogator to prepare himself for his work.