In the Evil Day (26 page)
He hit the concrete hard, legs not ready for it, knees not bent, sat on his backside, jarred the bones. He got up, ran around the right side of the car, looked.
Keys in it.
Bag off, into the car, reach to close passenger door, a manual thank Christ, turned the key.
A tortured sound. The motor was already on, running, they’d left it running, so quiet he hadn’t heard it.
Reverse where it should be?
Shit no, forward. He hit the brakes, tried again.
Backwards down the lane, twenty metres, engine screaming. Into the street. Braked, looked, nothing coming, a tight left turn.
First gear. Missed it, got into second, pushed the pedal flat, it didn’t bother the engine, the motor could handle second-gear take-offs. An old man in a raincoat looking at him. Down the rainslicked street, right at the first corner. Going anywhere, going away.
Slow down, chicken brain, said the inner voice. Take your time. Being picked up by the cops now would be silly. Stolen car.
Alive.
Jesus, alive.
Third-time lucky.
You didn’t get more than three.
THE FAX was there when she got back: three stories. Two were short, just a few paragraphs. The third spread over three pages. It was called:
‘And Unquiet Lie the Civil Dead’.
The date was February 1993. The byline was Richard Monk.
She read quickly and she drew a line beside a section:
As for Namibia, the white South African regime regarded it as a fief. Soldiers killed
with impunity. It was sport. One regiment was on horseback. They rode down
running humans, teenagers many of them, just ill-nourished boys. The soldiers
galloped alongside them and they shot them between the shoulderblades with
automatic shotguns. And the riders laughed at what they saw. There were no consequences.
Later, Mozambique was the same, a place to corral starving two-legged
animals: blow them up with grenades, sizzle them with flame-throwers. But this
had limited training value; it was too easy.
And then came Angola, sad, ravaged Angola, cursed with oil. At least 300,000
people—many of them civilians—have died in the civil war since Holden Roberto
of the FNLA first took the CIA’s coin in 1962. Together, Holden and the agency
held a small war and the whole world came: the US, South Africa, China, the
Soviet Union, Cuba. South Africa was invited in by the US and it came with
alacrity. In August 1981, given the nod by a Reagan Administration foaming at
the mouth over the Cuban presence in the country, it invaded southern Angola. The
South African force of 11,000 men, supported by tanks and aircraft, laid waste to
Cunene province. Some 80,000 Angolans fled their homes. How many died is
unknown. The South African army settled down for a long and murderous stay.
From 1981, the US used both military power—South African troops (and
their proxies) and Savimbi’s UNITA forces—and economic pressure as it set out to
destabilise countries in the region. As a result, some estimates put deaths by starvation
at more than 100,000 in 1983 alone. Along the bloody way, there have been
many chances to end the Angolan conflict. But, until last month, the US turned its
face against any settlement that did not fully replace Soviet with American influence.
The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency will miss Angola and the nearby
countries. They like the region a lot. It has been good to them, a wonderful place to
train staff, hundreds of them (even black officers, although the South Africans didn’t
approve). It has also been a chance to provide extravagantly paid work for the
agencies’ loyal friends—the little ‘civilian’ airlines and the freelance specialists of
all deadly and corrupt kinds.
As for the warm and loving community who live by selling arms, the misery of
Angola has been a bonanza. Millions of dollars of US weapons have gone to the
South Africans and their ally, Savimbi’s UNITA.
And hasn’t Angola been fun for America’s so-called mercenaries, the live-action
fringe of the gun-crazies. Almost every bar they infest has some thickneck who can
tell you stories about high old times killing black people in Angola (with the odd
rape thrown in). In Tucson recently, a man called Red showed me his photographs.
In one, he was squatting, M16 in hand, butt on the ground.
Behind him was an obscene pile of black bodies, one headless.
‘Soldiers?’ I asked.
‘Niggers,’ he said. ‘Commie niggers.’
Some of these men even claim to have fought Cubans, but that is highly unlikely.
In Angola, the Cubans fired back.
Sick American porn-killers are bad enough but there is the possibility of much
worse.
In early 1988, CIA and DIA propagandists began feeding the media stories
about Cuban troops using nerve gas in Angola. (Angola was always ‘Marxist
Angola’, the Cubans were always ‘Soviet-sponsored’, and Savimbi was always ‘the
US-backed freedom fighter’.) Highly dubious ‘experts’ were always cited. Of
course, their South African and other connections were never mentioned.
Fragments of evidence now suggest that this campaign was in response to
rumours in South Africa of a village in northern Angola being wiped out.
Wiped out by which side? How? We don’t know. But should the rumours have
spread outside South Africa and been investigated and confirmed, the CIA-DIA
misinformation artists had done the groundwork for blaming the Cubans.
Richard Monk. Who was Richard Monk?
Caroline found the contents page. The Notes on Contributors said: ‘Richard Monk is a freelance journalist who is no stranger to the world’s trouble spots.’ That wasn’t going to help. She typed
richard
monk
into the search engine.
An hour later she had nothing.
She circled the editor’s name: Robert Blumenthal. Where would he be decades later?
Another search. Hundreds of Robert Blumenthal references came up. She went back and added
editor behind enemy lines.
Half a dozen. The first one said:
…veteran radical editor Robert Blumenthal, 69, collapsed and died Saturday
while giving the William J. Cummings Memorial Lecture at the University of
Montana’s School of Journalism…Behind Enemy Lines…
She went to the source,
The Missoulian
, daily paper of Missoula, Montana. Robert Blumenthal was long gone. The Saturday he died at the podium was a Saturday in 1996. The story mentioned
Behind Enemy Lines
among seven or eight publications Blumenthal had edited. They had names like
The Social Fabric, To Bear Witness,
Records of Capitalism
. It said he had lived in Missoula for ten years with his partner of twenty-two years, the photographer Paul Salinas.
Go home, lie in a bath with a big whisky, eat scrambled eggs for supper. Watch television.
Colley. The bastard. He’d treated her with contempt, casually used her. She didn’t know why or how. But he had betrayed Mackie to someone who wanted to kill him, tried to kill him.
Mackie might be dead.
She might have killed him by going to Colley instead of going to Halligan.
Get on with it.
It took another hour to find a phone number for the right Paul Salinas. When she had the number, it rang but no one answered, No machine.
She waited. Tried again. Again. The fifth or sixth time, she was going to go home, it was after 8 p.m., the receiver was picked up.
‘Salinas.’
‘Mr Salinas, my name is Carol Short. I’m ringing from Sydney, Australia. I’m a publisher’s permissions person and I’m hoping you can help me.’
She carried on lying, told him a story about wanting to publish Richard Monk’s piece in an anthology of political writing.
‘Publisher? Sorry, did you say that?’
He was wobbly, she could tell. He might have been asleep, the phone ringing unheard.
‘Yes. It’s called The Conviction Press. It’s new, no money, no track record. We’re not acceptable politically.’
‘Australia?’
‘Yes. Sydney. I don’t suppose you know, but there are radicals in Australia.’
Salinas laughed and she could hear that it took a lot out of him.
‘We were in Australia in ’75, late ’75,’ he said. ‘Met a lot of people. Amazing people. Byron Bay, we went up there. That was really good stuff they were smoking. Big year for you Aussies, wasn’t it, ’75?’
She had no idea what he was talking about.
‘People seem to have thought so at the time.’
Would that response pass?
Salinas laughed and he sounded stronger.
‘That’s what Bob loved about Australians. Give nothing away.
Not
bad
. See something, read something, it’s excellent, you love it. What do you say?
Not bad.
Bob adored that. He adopted that. It was our joke. Shakespeare?
Not bad.
Picasso?
Not bad.
You like this food, exotic ingredients, three hours in the making?
Not bad.
He had a time, any shit descended, he’d say, Paul, let’s go live in Australia.’
Salinas had a deep voice. Each word had its space. She saw a big man with a beard, black hairs on the backs of his hands.
‘We need to get Richard Monk’s permission to publish,’ she said. ‘But I can’t find a writer or journalist by that name on any database.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ said Salinas.
Silence.
‘
Behind Enemy Lines
was Bob’s last fling. Not that he knew it.’
‘It doesn’t surprise you that I can’t trace Richard Monk?’
‘Hell, no. Write for anything Bob published, brace yourself for wiretaps, mail intercepts, the short-haired men in the brown suits having a quiet word with your neighbours.’
‘You’re saying that wouldn’t be the writer’s real name?’
‘Not if you can’t find him.’
‘Well, they say it’s such an interesting piece. We’d be sad not to republish it. But if we can’t, we can’t. If I can’t ask him, that’s that.’
‘Yeah, pretty much.’
Caroline sensed something. ‘I feel like a failure,’ she said. ‘I am a failure. Can I ask you for advice?’
‘Sure.’
‘If you were some dumb publishing assistant and you wanted to find out who Richard Monk was so that you could ask him, what would you do?’
There was a moment of nothing, just a hollow sound on the line.
‘I’d ask the person I was talking to.’
‘Who is Richard Monk, Mr Salinas?’
‘Hold on, I’ll get Bob’s secret ledgers.’
She held. The lonesome sound. This would all be worthless.
Nothing would come of this. He came back inside two minutes.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t retain your name?’
‘Carol Short. The Conviction Press. Sydney. The number is 61 2 7741 5601.’
Please God, don’t let him say, I’ll ring you back.
‘Doesn’t seem to be here. I’ll have to ring you back.’
Gone.
‘At any time,’ she said.
McClatchie wouldn’t have fucked this up.
‘Let me ring you back,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for you to pay for the call.’
‘No, wait. Here it is, this is it…the last issue…
And Unquiet Lie
…here we are. Money order, address in San Francisco. Not much. Still, he would’ve been doing it for the cause.’
‘There’s a name?’
‘John Anselm.’
WOULD THEY report the stolen car to the police? They’d tried to kill him three times. Tonight was just a delayed execution. They were not ordinary citizens who reported things to the police.
Three times in this huge city they’d found him. How had they done that? Once by the mobile, perhaps, he had worked that out, there was no other way.
But after that?
He had hurt three of them. Possibly badly. Possibly kissed them off.
Air. He needed air. He found the button, his window descended.
Cold London winter air. Exhaust fumes. A wet smell, like the smell in a cupboard where damp clothes had been hung.
Go where?
