The Reluctant Hero (3 page)

He made out a flight of stone steps at the end of the passage that led down to a wooden door built of ancient planks. The hinges swung open quietly as the door was drawn back, flooding the passage in front of him with unexpected brilliance. He blinked in the sudden rush of light; it was as though the gates of paradise were beckoning. He tried to laugh, find some comfort in the thought. Then, once again, he saw the pale features of the angel.

They both drank more than was good for them. While Jimmy Jackson served Napa chardonnay to most of the
guests, he always seemed to have a crystal glass filled with some fine single-barrel bourbon on his tray when he passed Harry, which was often. And as Bernice grew relaxed, she let her own defences down, while failing to notice his.

‘To the new year,’ she said softly, raising her glass, her other hand snaking around his waist and pulling him closer. ‘I hope it’s going to be a very special one, Harry.’

‘What way?’

‘You and me.’

The words seemed to roll into one.

‘You make it sound like . . .’ He struggled to find the right description, but she wasn’t to be denied.

‘Like Bonny and Clyde? Yes, and bubble and squeak, and—’ She was about to say love and commitment, and wasn’t it about time they got their stuff together, but something held her back. ‘That’s how I feel about us,’ she whispered. Her eyes had filled with emotion, but as she looked up into his, she realized she had made a most terrible mistake. It was as though she had taken a telescope expecting to see the stars and had discovered only the deepest, most intense black hole that sucked everything out of her night.

For a moment neither of them spoke. There was no point. She knew that words wouldn’t change a thing. And even before he could squeeze out an apology she had broken away and disappeared in the direction of the powder room. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t to
know that tomorrow would be the tenth anniversary of Julia’s death.

Then Jimmy was at his side once more, his tray bearing yet another bourbon of quite exceptional proportions and his eyes full of understanding.

‘How many tumblers of this stuff make you a social drinker, Jimmy?’

‘Two, I guess.’

‘And an alcoholic?’

‘Three. And that’s your third.’

‘In which case, I’m already there and it makes damnall difference. Geronimo, Jimmy,’ Harry muttered as he emptied the glass in one. ‘And room for another before you throw me out of here, I guess.’

It was over. Not just the evening but Bernice, their affair, another little chunk of his life. It was approaching midnight, no point in waiting, time to leave, there was nothing more for him here. And he was beginning to feel the effect of all the bourbon. He made his way to the washroom, which he was glad to see was empty. He took his time, relieved that he could be on his own at last, and was washing his hands when the door swung open. Harry didn’t look up, not wanting to engage in small talk, concentrating on scrubbing his hands.

‘Hello, Harry,’ a voice said. ‘So this is where you’re hiding. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

Harry looked up to find the pale eyes of Hervé d’Arbois staring at him. He was a man close to seventy years of age, not tall but most elegantly presented. The
hair was gently silver, the nose aquiline, the fingers long and elegant, giving the impression that they had never strayed far from a keyboard. The voice had a gentle Parisian veneer, like so much of the rest of him. The cufflinks were in the form of gold Crosses of Lorraine. Hervé d’Arbois was one of those ubiquitous Frenchmen who had been quietly running the country for the past hundred and fifty years, no matter what the colour of the government. His life represented a waltz through the corridors of privilege: the Sorbonne, two years at ENA – the École Nationale d’Administration in Strasbourg – balanced by national service in Algeria during the bitterest days of the war for independence. Later he’d served a term as a European Commissioner. D’Arbois had spent a lifetime seducing power. Harry had got to know him in Brussels where he discovered that a single phone call from d’Arbois could achieve in a matter of minutes what months of laying siege to the European Parliament could not. A most useful man, was Hervé, one to whom people listened. But not Harry, not tonight. The bourbon had kicked in, as though it had a point to prove, and his temples were throbbing. He wasn’t in much of a listening mood. Harry splashed water on his face from a running tap.

‘It’s simply that I believe you know him. At least, you
knew
him,’ d’Arbois was saying as Harry at last emerged from the waterfall.

‘Sorry, didn’t catch that. Who?’ Harry muttered as he headed in the direction of the hand-dryer. The noisy
rush of hot air forced d’Arbois to wait until he was done.

‘Zac. Zac Kravitz.’

Harry’s heart began to race in alarm. It wasn’t simply the alcohol.

‘Harry, I am all but retired, a man of leisure, but I still hear many things. Old habits, you understand. And the word is that your friend has got himself into – as you say – a spot of bother. Rather a bleak spot, too.’

‘But . . . how?
Where?
’ Harry demanded in confusion, the words echoing back accusingly from the tiled walls.

‘Ta’argistan.’

Harry, his brain cells already battered, bruised a few more trying to recall where the place was.

‘I’m not familiar with the detail,’ the Frenchman continued, ‘but it seems Mr Kravitz has been moving in the murky commercial underworld these past few years. Mercenary work, commercial intelligence, something of the kind. The sort of stuff that leaves dirt under the fingernails.’ D’Arbois sighed, producing a brilliant white handkerchief and polishing his rimless spectacles with meticulous care.

‘Zac, he . . . sort of went AWOL. Hid himself away. I lost track,’ Harry mumbled, partly in explanation but also in apology. He should have kept tabs on him, but it had all been so long ago, in another life. Even P.J. had upped and left him. ‘He always was a bit of an awkward bugger.’

‘Which is why it seems no one wants to help him.
Not his government, certainly not his business associates.’

‘But what the hell’s he done?’

‘I only pick up –’ the Frenchman waved his glasses in a vague circular motion – ‘whispers. Rumours. But he seems to have upset someone. Someone very important. His associates don’t expect to see him again. It happens, you know, in a primitive place like Ta’argistan. Get yourself in trouble with the government there and –
poof!
– you disappear. I only mention it because I seem to remember that you were a friend of his, once.’ He delayed delivering the final word, as though it made the matter of no importance.

Harry stared into the mirror. The antiseptic lighting seemed to have bleached all the colour from his face, yet at the same time highlighted the creases. How could it do both? he wondered in confusion. From beyond the door, at the outer limits of his storm-tossed senses, he could hear the crowd had grown suddenly still, and a clock was beginning to chime.

‘We should go and join them, Harry,’ d’Arbois said, and before Harry knew it he was gone. Through the part-open door there swept a tide of cheering as the clock struck midnight. He pushed a few stray strands of his hair into place and followed the Frenchman, but the other man had already disappeared, lost in the throng of celebration. As Harry scanned the room, he spotted Bernice. She was in the arms of a commercial counsellor from the Spanish Embassy. The energy of
their enthusiasms suggested something more intense than an exchange of diplomatic courtesies. So, she was a survivor, nothing wrong with that. His fault, anyway. And she wouldn’t be needing a lift home. Harry stumbled for the door.

In his mind he was walking through a meadow. He was panting, filling his chest with barrels of cool mountain air that seared his lungs; he’d been racing with his elder brother, Chingiz. He’d won, his first time. He was growing, getting quicker, had taken Chingiz by surprise, a shortcut through a thicket of lucerne. The sharp blades had cut his bare feet, which now stung furiously, but it had been worth it to beat his brother. They had run from their home to the river that was gorged with spring melt water and which thundered down the valley, dragging brilliant pebbles and even large boulders with it. A profusion of flowers clogged the banks, forming a blanket beneath the blossoming rosewillows, whose branches bent towards the cascade of tumbling water. At last, winter had surrendered.

As he turned, in the distance he saw his grandmother, bearing a pitcher of sour milk and a headscarf bulging with bread. She had been the one who raised him, while his mother spent her days in the fields. Now she was drawing closer, beckoning to him.

He held it all together, kept his thoughts and fears from running amuck, even when they bound his hands behind him and kicked him up the rough wooden steps
of the scaffold, right up to the moment they began mocking him. He heard them wagering money on whether he would be a ‘stiff-dick’ – one of those poor wretches who, at the bottom of the rope, somehow got an erection. As he heard their laughter he stumbled, fell, overwhelmed by disgust. How could they? They wouldn’t put a dog down like this!

He picked himself up and looked towards his destination at the top of the stairs. His eyes came to rest on the noose. It held him like a cobra’s eye. It seemed remarkably heavy to him. Rough twisted hemp. Almost an inch thick. With a double-tied knot.
Allah O
Akbar! God is great! May He be merciful
. . .

He began repeating the prayer as he made his way up the last few steps, trying with his words to shame the guards, and to drown out their mockery. God is great! But where was He?

They offered him a hood, but he declined, his eyes brimming with hatred. Why should he hide from them, help them sleep? And while he was shaking his head in contempt, they shackled his feet in irons, so that now he could do no more than shuffle inches at a time. Then one of the guards approached. He had the noose in his hand and was reaching out for him.

‘May God shit on your soul and on the memory of your mother!’ the prisoner spat, no longer able to contain his fear. What difference did it make if they beat him again, broke his bones? But they didn’t, not this time.

‘Yeah. You just tell him when you see him,’ the guard smirked through crooked teeth. ‘In about forty seconds,’ he added.

Was it so close?

The noose tightened around his neck, rough, scratching, its ferocious knot nestling behind his left ear. That’s where it would happen. About the second vertebra. Snap clean through his spinal cord, if they had got it right. Instant unconsciousness, he had been told. But how did anyone know? Then he would hang there, slowly strangling, even as the heart raced to respond. That’s when the priapism would happen. Unless, of course, these barbarians couldn’t even arrange an execution and his body fell too far, when the head would be wrenched completely off his body.
Allah O Akbar!
Allah O Akbar! Allah O Akbar! Be merciful
. . .

A patch of white stood out in the middle of the scaffold. The trapdoor.

He tried to imagine a field of fresh white tulips spreading in the early sun, but the illusion wouldn’t last. He couldn’t concentrate. Too many scuffed heel marks.

He could do no better than hobble now, swaying as he moved forward, inch by inch, his mind stuttering along with his feet.

Allah O Akbar! For pity’s sake
. . .

His voice rose as he prayed. He could feel his bladder screaming. And there, directly in front of him, was the angel once more, his smile like quicksand for the
soul, beckoning him forward. He couldn’t think of a single reason why he should any longer do as he was told, but he did so anyway, afraid that if he stood still his bladder would betray him, yet even as he stepped forward, the noose seemed to slip around his neck, and was tightened, savagely. He could feel the knot pressing into his neck.

He began to struggle, but only inside. It was as though a wall was closing around him, blocking his view. Stand tall. See beyond it. To the meadow once more.
God is great! Stand tall!

He stretched to the very tips of his toes, stretching to see if his beloved grandmother was still there, waiting. God rest her soul.

And there she was, so very close he felt as though he would be able to reach out and touch her, her weathered skin the colour of freshly turned earth, her smile like a new moon, wrinkling her face like a flood plain in spring. And tears in her eyes. Why tears?

He felt his footing slip, and for a moment he lost sight of her, the wall once more.
Stand tall! Stand tall!!!

And there she was again.

It took Harry three attempts to get his key in the lock. Once inside, however, he proved more adroit at filling a glass. He was already so drunk that very little was making sense, nothing lined up properly; his thoughts were half-formed, his emotions wholly exaggerated.

Today was the day Julia had died, just six months
after Zac Kravitz had dragged her from the sinking boat, Harry had led her off-piste and into the path of an avalanche. There had been no warning. One moment she was there, skiing almost within touching distance, then the mountain had moved.

Snatched away, just when they needed each other most. No, not so much needed –
wanted
. Since her escape from
Guinevere
’s clutches, life seemed to have taken on an added richness, as if every day must be lived to the full, in case it was her last. And Harry was at the centre of it all, with a look, a word, a scribbled message, a smile, and they had tumbled closer together. At least, that’s the way he remembered it. Never had they made love so generously, or so frequently, and Julia had taken the lead. It was as if she was in her own race against time.

He hadn’t realized how desperate she was to become pregnant, and hadn’t even realized she had succeeded, not until the doctors in his Swiss hospital had told him. She may not have known herself. Harry had lost not only Julia, but their child.

There had been plenty to fill his life these past ten years – enough, in truth, to fill quite a number of lives. Plenty of women, too, even another brief marriage, but no one like Julia. And in the lonely reaches of this night, it seemed to hurt as much as it had done that first day when he had returned home from the Alps, entirely alone. Now he sat in the dark, with his drink and his coruscating guilt, as streetlights pointed sharp fingers
of accusation at him through the half-drawn curtains. He began to mutter feebly, his tears washing the dribbles of whisky from around his lips, his voice like ripping sandpaper.