Secrets (10 page)

‘Proof? Of what?'

Joseph closed his eyes, his strength seeming to ebb. He coughed, then gasped for breath, the effort shaking his fragile body. Adam wondered if he should call for the nurse.

‘The drawer,' Joseph managed finally, between painful gasps. ‘Red folder, in the drawer.'

Puzzled, Adam reached into the bedside drawer and withdrew a fat, red file wrapped about with a half dozen elastic bands.

‘Take it and go,' Joseph told him. ‘I don't have the strength to talk any more, but I'm glad you came.'

‘What is this?' Adam demanded. As always in his dealings with Joseph he had the feeling he was being set up for something; he suffered from the annoyance that he came back for more every bloody time.

Joseph Bern smiled, it lit his face and danced in his eyes and, in that moment, Adam remembered just why he kept coming back.

‘Bosnia,' Joseph managed. ‘Other things too, but mostly Bosnia and Congo. Read it, I prepared it for you. You could say that it is my legacy.'

He closed his eyes then and Adam watched as his old friend and sometimes enemy fall into sleep. He wondered if he'd wake again.

He paused at the desk to speak to the nurse, telling her that Joseph seemed to be having trouble breathing and to make sure the hospice had his contact details for when the inevitable happened.

‘He's had very few visitors,' she said. ‘He has no family?'

‘No. There's no one left now. You'll let me know if any arrangements have to be made.'

She smiled. ‘It's all been taken care of,' the nurse told him. Joe has organized it all. ‘Some people feel the need, you know. It makes them feel happier if they've put everything in order.'

Adam nodded, thinking wryly that logistics had always been Joseph's forte. Then thinking it odd that the young woman should refer to him as Joe. No one, in Adam's experience, ever had.

He drove home, the red folder lying on the passenger seat. Adam eyed it suspiciously from time to time, wondering what it contained, wondering if he'd be better off not knowing. If he should just keep it until the funeral and then bury it, unopened, with the man who had compiled it. He no longer wanted any part in such matters as their mutual past had brought.

Joseph stirred, the pain in his lungs interrupting his desire for sleep. He too remembered that first day, but his thoughts strayed to the hours before he had met Adam Carmodie that first time.

He recalled the grit beneath his nails. The ground hard under his back and pinprick rough against the line of bare skin where his shirt had been pulled free.

Insistent voices, too far off to make out the words or even the language. Like voices off stage. Out of the action.

And then, there were hands. Hands pulling him upright. Steadying him when he thought he was about to fall. Arms, thrust beneath his own, keeping him on his feet.

Joseph could not move. Joseph was certain that he could not move, but they dragged him forward.

His head dropped towards his chest and the sun-baked ground scraped against his feet as they manhandled him, pulling him towards the half open tent flap.

They must have taken his boots.

Grit beneath his nails. Sandy, fragmented earth rasping against his skin.

He tried to move his feet, place them flat on the ground but Joseph found that he couldn't quite remember how.

His legs buckled but they dragged him on. Pain in his right side as one of his captors pushed close, recalling the sharp memory of someone kicking him there. Throwing him to the floor, kicking at his side with hard-toed boots.

The pain grew worse as they forced him to bend beneath the tent flap. Then the brightness as they turned his face towards the sun.

Joseph could feel his skin begin to tighten under the sudden heat and he could smell the sweat on his own body, pungent and musky, mixed with the scent of sun-dried earth and summer dust. The smell of sunlight, hot and harsh, breathed into pain-scorched lungs.

He could smell them too. The one's that held him. Sweat long dried on unwashed bodies. A smell that matched his own, strong and sour, and filled with too much heat.

Joseph felt what little strength was left in his legs diminish. Pouring out through his feet and into the dust. And then the other one was there.

Joseph fought hard to put a name to the scent. Put a face to the man who came now, to stand, almost companionably at Joseph Bern's left shoulder; to speak so softly in his ear. This one's scent, clean and newly washed, redolent with soap and fresh drawn water, laced with just the merest tang of woodsmoke.

‘I'm letting you live, Joseph. Letting you go. We will agree to differ on this matter and you will agree to leave.'

Joseph could see the other's face, now, in his mind's eye, as clearly as if he stood before him, blocking out the blinding brilliance of the sun. The sweet half smile, the pale blue eyes, soft with regret as though he had no wish for any of this unpleasantness.

And that was all.

They dragged him forward once again, feet scraping the ground as they moved him far too fast for his feet to gain a purchase.

Then lifted by the arms, thrown face down on to the wooden flat of an open truck.

Pain cut into him, lancing into his belly and drilling into the ribs on his right side. Vibrations of pain as the truck engine started. Rattling and shaking through his frame, a network of pain, resonating with an almost musical cruelty orchestrated by the engine noise, the shifting gears, the bumps and ruts of the mean excuse for a track that they were travelling along.

Joseph moaned, tried to shift his weight a little to ease the pain on his right side.

Joseph could feel the wood, rough and splintered, beneath his outstretched hand and beneath his cheek. Sun-warmed. Trapped heat. Trapped scents of wood and oil and dirt.

He tasted blood in his mouth.

And there was grit beneath his fingernails …

‘Mr Bern.' A soft hand touched his face and then came to rest, gently, on his shoulder.

Joseph opened his eyes.

For a moment, he was back in Africa, back in that filthy flatbed truck with the pain vibrating though his body, lancing, knife-like, as he woke and moved.

But it was a woman's face he saw when he opened his eyes, and a woman's voice he heard and the pain was now, not the pain of more than fifty years ago.

And there was no sun, here. Only a patch of grey cloud, seen dimly through a blinded window and the lash of late September rain against the glass.

And the ironic thing, Joseph thought, was that back then he had not been the one to have taken the moral high ground. That time, it had been Clay.

‘Do you want some water?'

‘I'd rather have a whisky.'

She smiled. ‘In a little while, Joe. I'll bring it before I go off duty. You've already had too much today.'

‘Won't kill me,' he said and laughed harshly.

She lifted him and put the glass to his lips. It was getting harder to swallow. They'd offered him more pain relief. A morphine pump that he could control himself, but he'd resisted, knowing that really would signal the end and he wasn't quite ready yet.

She laid him down and Joseph turned his face towards the window, so he could watch the rain.

He'd arrived in the Congo before the rest of them, getting there just before the elections in May of 1960, paid by one of the big mining corporations to look at the logistics involved in shipping out the copper they planned to mine. The infrastructure wasn't as badly neglected as some places Joseph had known. Katanga, the state that produced almost two thirds of the Congo's mineral exports, had been shipping copper for fifty years. So, there were roads. More or less.

Joseph had surveyed for the company by day and watched as the political situation unfolded, going into Elizabethville most nights. There'd been something like eighty different political parties, Joseph remembered. But only two men stood out from the herd; Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu.

Joseph heard the nurse coming back into his room.

‘I thought you were going back to sleep,' she said.

‘Too much on my mind.'

‘You want to tell me? I like your stories.'

Stories, Joseph thought. That's all they were to her, this young woman, probably not even into her thirties.

Probably no older than he'd been back then.

‘Sit, then,' he said. ‘I'll talk for a little bit.'

He waited until she sat next to him, leaning her arms on the bed and putting her head close, so he didn't have to raise his voice.

‘The Americans were scared,' he said. ‘Lumumba had the backing of the Belgian Communists and the AAR and he'd persuaded some of the Belgian businesses to stay.' Joseph managed a harsh laugh. ‘Not that he wanted them. Wanted the white colonists out, just like that Nkrumah, in Ghana. Said they should drive all the white colonists out of Africa.' He smiled. ‘You know how many attempts there were to kill him? Man was like Castro, seemed to have a charmed life. CIA even sent him poisoned toothpaste.'

‘I heard they sent Castro an exploding cigar.'

Joseph choked out a laugh, but his eyes were closing. He felt her move, then tuck his hand beneath the sheet before leaving softly.

He recalled how he had continued with his survey and he and that geologist … Joseph could not recall the man's name. They had discovered what looked like new reserves. The only fly in the ointment was that they were on
Baluba
land. Not, Joseph thought, that anyone actually cared what the
Baluba
thought. A favourite sport of the mercenaries that Joseph remembered from Elizabethville, was to go out hunting the
Baluba
.

The
Baluba
didn't seem to have any part in this new and promised world of independence and profitability.

Joseph shifted awkwardly on to his side. It was all in the file he had given Adam, all of Joseph's guilt, all of his mistakes. But more important than that, there was Clay, running through every page; guilt, written in blood. Joseph knew, had he been less of a moral coward, he might have revealed all this years before. But he was implicated; as guilty, as bloody as any other, and to betray Clay would have been to betray himself.

The pain had receded just a little and finally allowing his eyes to close, he drifted into sleep.

I
f asked for a description, the one thing people always said about Clay was how pale his eyes were. There had always been light, but looking in the mirror – which he bothered to do only when shaving – he had to admit that the passing years had leached even more of the colour from them.

The second thing people said was that his eyes changed with his mood. That often that strange shift from blue to almost steely grey was the only clue to what he really thought about anything. The only clue they had that life was about to get that much harder. At rest, when he felt happy, when he woke from sleep the pale blue was almost the colour of washed-out forget-me-nots and, since retirement, or what passed for it in his world, the man had actually been happy more of the time than he'd been enraged or frustrated or simply irritated, which was good news for those who happened to cross his path.

Right at this present moment, though, he was anything but and the young man with him was both conscious of the potential threat and, oddly, amused by it.

‘Secrets,' Nathan said.

‘Not the ones we are looking for.'

‘Were they ever?' Nathan allowed himself a smile. Clay did not intimidate him; he'd known the man too long, grown up in his shadow. Seen the moods and tides too often to be afraid. Besides, Nathan wasn't sure he knew how to be afraid.

‘Maybe Annie was right,' he said. ‘Maybe there is nothing left for anyone to know. Maybe no one ever knew as much as you thought they did.'

One of Clay's dogs wandered over to where he sat and lay a muzzle on the arm of his chair. Nathan stoked it absently. Clay had two of these great big hounds, Hugin and Munin he called them. Thought and Memory, like Odin's ravens. Nathan liked them both; big and impressive looking, but gentle as lambs, they seemed at odds with everything else Clay embraced.

Clay frowned; that in itself was a rare expression of emotion and Nathan logged it thoughtfully. In his opinion and in Annie's, Clay was obsessed about something that no longer concerned anyone. The fears and anxieties of his youth had come back to haunt him and neither Annie nor Nathan could quite put their finger on why. Had something actually happened that had raised Clay's concerns? Or was it, as Annie had suggested in a seemingly outrageous moment, the onset of senility?

Nathan had known she had a point, but they'd both just looked at one another for a moment and then Nathan had shaken his head. ‘No, not Clay.' And Annie had pretended to agree. Neither of them had mentioned it again until the day that Clay had finally consented to see the doctor and the doctor had referred him for a brain scan and the results of that had been … .

‘You should have sent someone to just talk to Molly Chambers,' Nathan said.

He'd said it before, Clay had disagreed then and he did now.

‘Molly wouldn't talk, not to anyone. Any more than Edward would, we none of us
talked.'

Nathan shrugged. True, he thought. The old guard and their code of silence. Or was it just the old guard? Annie was probably the only one alive who knew Nathan's secrets and, for that matter, Nathan was probably the only one who knew hers. As far as Clay was concerned, that would mean that they'd both confided in one person too many.

Clay assumed he knew everything, Nathan supposed. It was what Clay did; it was unlikely he would have even conceived of a situation in which secrets could be kept from him. That, in Nathan's view, was perhaps his one weakness.

‘Sometimes you could just ask, you know. Once people are dead, they're a little on the silent side. Shooting them before they can tell is not always the best option.'