Absolute Friends (43 page)

The charter flight leaves two days from now at crack of dawn. Arriving at Munich's main station Mundy seeks out a luggage shop and buys a new suitcase--green, Zara's favourite color--and, from a department store close by, a long gray dress and matching headscarf that according to her cousin Dina, mother to Kamal, she has long coveted. Since living with Mundy, Zara has taken to locking herself up from head to toe as a sign that she has returned to her tradition; but also she is demonstrating her pride that Mundy alone has the key to her. For Mustafa, also on Dina's advice, he buys a flash blue jacket and white trousers like Kamal's: the boys are the same size. Dina, he has established, will also take charge of the dog Mo for the duration.

He next calls on Zara's kebab café. At eleven in the morning business is quiet. The manager, a tubby man in a skullcap, is at first disconcerted by the sight of Mundy bearing down on him with a green suitcase. Has Zara some complaint about her treatment? he inquires anxiously, from behind the safety of the counter. No, Mundy says, she has none. Now that you've learned to keep your hands off her, she's happy in her work, he might have added, but he doesn't. The manager insists Mundy accept a coffee on the house, and how about a slice of chocolate cake? Mundy accepts the coffee, declines the cake and proposes a deal: a month's unpaid leave for Zara with immediate effect, and Mundy will subsidize a temporary replacement to the tune of five hundred euros. They settle for seven hundred.

From a public phone box he calls Zara's Turkish doctor. I'm a bit worried about Mustafa, he says. Adolescence seems to be weighing him down. He's doing all right in class, no truancy, but he's gone solitary, he's sleeping ten hours a day and looking very gray. "It is the dusk of puberty," says the doctor knowingly. So what Mundy is wondering, doctor, is this. If I can rustle up the money to send Mustafa and his mother back to Turkey for a big family beanfeast, could you see your way to providing a medical certificate that will satisfy the school authorities?

The good doctor believes he can reconcile this with his conscience.

Mundy calls the Linderhof and makes yet another excuse for not coming in, but it is not well received. He feels badly, but knows no remedy. Returning home, he lets Zara sleep until Mustafa comes back from school, then leads her by the hand to the tiny living room, where he has set the stage. The softness of her palms always amazes him. He has placed her youngest sister's photograph prominently on the sideboard, and the green suitcase on the floor below it with the new dress and scarf draped over one corner. Mustafa wears his new blue jacket. Zara's front teeth are repaired but in her apprehension she runs her tongue across them to make sure they are there.

He has laid the tickets side by side on the table together with the written release in Turkish from the manager of the café. She sits down straight as a schoolgirl on the center chair, arms to her sides. She stares at the tickets, then at Mundy. She reads the letter from her Turkish employer, and without expression replaces it on the table. She takes up the nearer ticket, her own. She studies it with severity and only brightens when she discovers that she may return in three weeks. She seizes Mundy roughly by the waist and presses her forehead against his hip.

Mundy has one more card to play. It's the air ticket for himself. It takes him to Turkey for the last week of their trip, and brings him back with them on the same plane. Zara's happiness is complete. The same afternoon, they make ecstatic love and Zara weeps with shame that she ever doubted him. Mundy's shame is of a different order, but eased by the knowledge that she and Mustafa will soon be out of harm's way.

Driving Zara and Mustafa to Munich airport in the wee hours, he at first fears ground fog but by the time they arrive it's lifting and there are few delays. Shuffling down the check-in line, Zara keeps her eyes down and clings so hard to Mundy that he imagines she is his daughter and he is sending her off to boarding school against her will. Mustafa holds her other arm and makes jokes to keep her spirits up.

At the counter there is business about the trolley-load of gifts that Zara has bought for her sisters, brothers and cousins out of her savings. A container is found. Some of the parcels must be repacked. The distraction is helpful. In his last sight of her, Zara is standing at the passenger departure doors as they close on her. She is bent double like Rani at the roadside, choking over her folded arms, and Mustafa is trying to console her.

Alone with his thoughts on the autobahn, heading north and isolated by a deluge of heavy rain, Mundy is brought back to time present by the trilling of his cellphone. That bloody man Rourke, he thinks, as he shoves it to his ear, and he is preparing to be short with him when to his astonishment he hears Amory, en clair, on an open line, chatting to him as if neither of them had a care in the universe.

"Edward, dear boy. Have I woken you from your slumbers?"

But he knows he hasn't.

"Received your message, and of course I'd love to," he is saying breezily, in the manner of an old friend passing through town. "How would today suit?"

Mundy considers asking Amory where he's speaking from but sees no point since Amory wouldn't tell him.

"Sounds great," he says instead. "What sort of time d'you have in mind?"

"How about one-ish?"

"Fine. Where?"

"How about your place?"

"In Heidelberg?"

"The school. Why not?"

Because it's bugged from ear to ear is why not. Because it's been surveyed for a whole day by polite young men and women. Because Rourke believes it's being prepared as a terrorist nest for Euro-anarchists who would like to split Germany from America.

"Our chum's in Hamburg, isn't he?" Amory continues, when Mundy still doesn't answer.

"Yes. He is." If he's still our chum, thinks Mundy.

"Until late tonight, right?"

"So he says."

"And today's Saturday, right?"

"So I'm told."

"So there are no workmen tearing the place apart."

"No." Or putting it back together.

"So what's wrong with meeting at the school?"

"Nothing."

"Family get off all right?"

"Like a breeze."

"See you around lunchtime then. Can't wait. Masses to talk about. _Tschüss.__"

A salvo of torrential rain sets his car shuddering. Long bursts of summer lightning fill the sky. The Beetle needs time out, and so does Mundy. Crouched head in hand at a roadside restaurant, he picks the hidden signals out of Amory's message or--as Dimitri would have it--the flyshit out of the pepper. In his laborious dialogue with Amory's electronic lady Mundy had suggested they meet at a remote service station ten miles out of Heidelberg. Instead they are to stage a jolly reunion at the scene of the crime, with Rourke listening to their every word.

So what has Amory told me so far--Amory who never says anything without a purpose?

That he is speaking for the record, over an open line, with nothing up his sleeve. But whose record is he speaking for?

That he is being kept informed of my movements, and Sasha's, and my family's. But who by?

That he has masses to report to me, but only within the hearing of the people he got it from. Amory like Dimitri is an artist of the unobserved life. But this time he's telling me that he's observed.

Mundy returns his thoughts to where they were before Amory interrupted them. Where is she now? Overflying Romania, headed for the Black Sea. Thank heaven for Mustafa. He longs for Jake but can't reach him. He never could.

Mundy is back at his place in the bay window on the first floor of the schoolhouse, staring down the brick path the way he stared down it when he was keeping an eye out for Sasha and his consignment of core library books. He has parked his Beetle outside the front gates, the time is twelve-thirty of the same Saturday and, yes, Sasha is in Hamburg: amazingly for him, he has actually called Mundy to inquire whether he is still of stout heart, or would he after all prefer Sasha to find a replacement for him, because "Look here, Teddy, we are both completely adult, I would say." And Mundy for his part has assured Sasha that he is one hundred percent committed to the great project, he believes in it. And perhaps in a way he does, since he has no option. To walk out on Sasha is to leave him to Dimitri and Rourke, whatever that means.

While he is waiting, Mundy has also done the stupid, anxious things that joes do when they're waiting for their case officers to show up: shaved and showered and pushed his dirty clothes behind a curtain, and prepared a sitting area in one of the classrooms, and put a hand towel and a cake of new soap beside the handbasin, and made a thermos flask of coffee in case Amory no longer drinks Scotch the way he used to. He had actually to stop himself from going into the garden and picking wild flowers to put in a jam jar.

And he is still going through these ridiculous acts of overpreparation in his mind, while at the same time picturing the arrival of Zara and Mustafa at Ankara airport and the vast reception committee of her ecstatic relations, when he realizes that a tan-colored BMW with a Frankfurt registration has parked itself behind the Beetle, and that Nick Amory, younger by far than the years between that should have aged him, is emerging from the driver's side, locking the car, opening the gate and setting course for the front door.

Mundy gets only one quick look at him before bounding down the stairs, but it's enough to tell him that Nick's nearly sixty years sit well on him, that the old shagginess has acquired an unmistakable air of authority, and that the habitual smile, if that's what it ever was--though magically resurfacing the moment Mundy opens the door to him--was not on parade when he started up the path.

The other thing Mundy has noticed, and continues to notice as they square up to greet each other, is Amory's cap, which is a flat cap, green tweed, sporting, and certainly of a better cut than the cap favored by the Major when he was roaring at Mundy from the touchline, or Des when he was carving the beef for Sunday lunch, or Sasha when he was wearing his _Tarnkappe.__

But a cap for all that.

And since Mundy has never seen Amory wear a cap or any other sort of headgear, let alone one that smacks so offensively of the rural English classes who are his professed aversion--largely, Mundy suspects, because they are where he springs from--it can't fail to excite his attention, even if he's too polite or too Edinburgh-trained to remark on it.

Stranger still, to anybody familiar with English manners, he doesn't take it off when he steps inside the house. He pats Mundy's shoulder. He does a cheerful "How are you, cobber?" Australian-style, and confirms in a quick question that nobody else is in the house or expected--"And if we're disturbed, I'm your first pupil for September," he adds, for cover. And then, like Sasha, he sweeps past Mundy and takes up a command position directly beneath the art nouveau skylight, a yard away from the island of packing cases and dust-sheets that, like a statue waiting to be unveiled, dominates the main hall.

But the cap stays put, even while Mundy gives Amory his desired tour of the property. And that's not because Amory has forgotten he's wearing it. To the contrary, he gives it a tweak now and then to make sure it's still there, in much the way Sasha used to tweak his beret; or a shove from behind as if he hasn't got the angle quite right; then a tug at the peak to keep the sun out of his eyes, except that there isn't any: the rain may have stopped, but the sky is black as soot.

Their tour of the property is perfunctory. Perhaps Amory feels as uneasy about his presence here as Mundy does. And as always with Amory, though you forget it betweentimes, he says nothing without purpose.

"Has our chum still not given you any clear picture of what he got up to in the Middle East?" he demands, as he peers down at the pile of soft goods that was Sasha's temporary bed.

"Not really. Traveling lecturer. The odd short-term contract where they needed a spare professor. Whatever came along, as far as I can see."

"Not what we'd call a full life then, was it?"

"Plus a bit of aid work. Aid work was hard to come by because of his legs. Basically he was--well, just some kind of wandering academic bum, from the little he's told me."

"A wandering _radical__ academic bum," Amory corrects him. "With _radical__ and not so academic chums, perhaps."

And Mundy, instead of attempting to moderate this, says he supposes so, because by now it's becoming clear to him that Amory, for whatever reasons, is playing to the gallery, and that Mundy's job is to support him and not try to take over the scene. It's the same role he used to play for Sasha when they were performing for the dread Lothar or the Professor, he thinks. Not every line has to be a masterpiece, he used to tell himself: just play it straight and the audience will come to you. He's telling it to himself now.

"And this will be the library," Amory comments, examining the long room with its builders' ladders and buckets.

"It will."

"The shrine to objective truth."

"Yes."

"Do you seriously believe that crap?"

Mundy has asked himself the same question a few hundred times by now, and is no nearer to a satisfactory answer.

"When I listened to Dimitri, I believed it. When I got out of the room, it began to blur," he replies.

"And when you listen to Sasha?"

"I try."

"And when you listen to yourself?"

"It's a problem."

"It is for all of us."

They are back in the hall, contemplating the veiled statue of library books.

"Looked inside any of this stuff?" Amory asks, giving his cap another shove.

"I've read a couple of the inventories."

"Got one handy?"

Mundy pulls back the dust-sheet, picks a plastic envelope from the lid of a packing case and hands it to him.

"Standard stuff then," Amory remarks, when he has run his eye down the list. "Available in any lefty library."

"The strength of the library will be in its concentrated message," Mundy says, quoting Sasha and sounding hollow to himself. He is preparing to trot out more of the same when Amory thrusts the inventory back at him to say he's seen enough.