The Reluctant Hero (37 page)

‘So what the hell happened to justice?’

The superintendent stared, warning him. He fought back.

‘I won’t let it rest, Ron. This isn’t just some parking ticket I can write off and forget!’

‘That’s what I thought. And that’s why I’m here, man to man. To make sure you don’t raise your expectations of what we can do. And to advise you not to get your-self in too deep, not to take things into your own hands. It can only cause you trouble.’ He stood up and finished off his drink. ‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded as if he meant it. The policeman placed the empty glass down on the desk and walked from the room without another word. Harry was left, staring at a closed door. He picked up the phone and furiously began punching buttons, thinking of calling a couple of editors, but the time wasn’t right for the whimsies of the press and probably never would be. He jammed the phone into its cradle, then picked up the entire piece of equipment and hurled it into the wall. It ended on the floor, imitating a disemboweled octopus.

Everywhere Harry looked, it was the same. It was more than indifference, it was as though he had become
an embarrassment. No one wanted to know, they preferred to pass by on the other side, to look away, waiting for the grass to grow and cover everything up.

Even Zac didn’t help. He couldn’t be found. Harry found a message from him on his answering machine, but it was vague, saying he would call back, but he hadn’t. Seemed to have disappeared yet again. Then, late one night, while Harry was at home, very much on his own, the phone rang.

‘Harry?’

‘Zac!’

‘Harry, you marvellous goddamned idiot. They let you out.’

‘You know my persuasive talents.’

‘How . . . the hell are you?’ The voice was breathless and the words came a little slurred, but Harry sensed it wasn’t the drink.

‘I’m in great shape, for one of Amir Beg’s guests. And you?’

‘Oh, some medical stuff they’re seeing to. That’s where I am now, surrounded by some good-looking nurses. They’re pouring all sorts of shit into me, just to keep themselves out of harm’s way.’

So that’s why he was having trouble talking. Harry didn’t much care for what it implied. Zac’s treatment in Ashkek must have been even worse than he’d thought.

‘Harry?’

‘Yes, Zac.’

‘I don’t really know what happened . . .’

‘I’ll fill you in one day.’

‘I want to come and see you. Soon as I can.’

‘You up to the travelling?’

‘They’re letting me out of here on parole in a couple of days. Then a plane to London. So we can talk. If you’ve got time.’

Harry assumed Zac wanted to offer his thanks. ‘There’s no need for that, Zac.’

Yet there was more in the matter than Harry had realized. There was an edge to Zac’s voice that was insistent and even suggested desperation. ‘Sure there is. There’s nothing but broken bits in my mind, Harry, and I’ve got to know. I need your help putting all them screwy little pieces back together again.’

‘Trouble is, Zac, whenever you and I get together, some bastard out there always seems to want to kill us.’

‘I’ll see you. Couple of days tops, Harry, I swear. Even if it does kill me.’

He was as good as his word. Two days later Harry got a message; Zac was in town. They arranged to meet that evening at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, tucked away in a backstreet behind Harrods. It was in a discreet Edwardian red-brick terrace, no nameplate outside its modest black door, its membership traditionally reserved for those who had served in intelligence and special operations communities. It was a place of secrets, whose walls were lined with memorabilia of those who had gone before, some of whom were house
hold names, others whose real names had never been known, somewhere for Harry and Zac to talk without fear of eavesdroppers, and particularly reporters.

Yet although the club might ban journalists, that didn’t stop their newspapers. It was while Harry was waiting for Zac in the bar that he picked up a copy of the
Evening Standard
, its late edition. Buried some way inside he found a small item, that Mrs Martha Riley, the MP, was believed to have disappeared walking in the mountains while on a recent visit to Ta’argistan. It was thought she might have had an accident, presumably a fatal one. A Ta’argi consular spokesman was reported as saying that it would inevitably be many weeks before any attempt could be made to locate the body. ‘Spring comes very slowly in Ta’argistan,’ he was quoted as saying. The
Standard
concluded that a confirmed death would involve a by-election, but that given the economic circumstances and the govern-ment’s crumbling popularity, no one was in any hurry. In the meantime, until the situation became clearer, matters in Martha’s Midlands constituency would be taken care of by a neighbouring MP.

Harry crushed the paper into a small ball and threw it in a bin. The Establishment had spoken, or rather whispered. He ordered a drink, a stiff one, not bothering to wait for Zac.

He was standing at the front door of the club, wait-ing, when Zac’s taxi arrived, but it took Harry some time before he realized that it was his friend. The man
who prised himself out of the back seat was not the man Harry had known; he looked little better than the tattered figure who had been hauled from the cell. Zac’s once broad, straight back was bent, and he held on to the taxi door for support, then the railings as he hauled himself up the club steps.

‘I know, I know, I look like shit,’ he said as Harry took his hand. He stared at Harry’s ear. ‘Don’t look too good yourself.’

‘Just come from the consultant, as it happens. They’re going to grow me a new one.’

‘Give me his name. I could use him.’

Harry looked into Zac’s face. It had a tautness that spoke of intense strain, a sheet of chalk where there should have been a tan, and eyes that were distant, halfway to another world.

‘Fuck,’ Harry breathed.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘What did that bastard do to you?’

‘We talk. Over a drink.’

‘You allowed to drink?’

‘Harry, those dumb-shit doctors tell me not to drink, not to fly, not to look at nurses’ butts. What’s the point in stopping me? Ain’t gonna make no friggin’ difference.’ He was still holding Harry’s hand; there was a faint trembling, more butterfly wings. ‘Those quacks tell me that I might have a few more months if I behave myself, but I don’t know how, Harry, and I guess I’m too old to learn.’

Harry stood on the doorstep of the club, his eyes brimming with sorrow. Zac braced his shoulders and threw him a look of scorn. ‘I think this is the point where you’re supposed to ask me what my goddamned poison is. It’s a vodka martini.’ He handed Harry his coat as though he was a cloakroom attendant and walked stiffly to the bar.

Soon they were seated in a quiet wood-panelled corner, beneath a portrait of a long-tressed French girl who had been a wartime resistance fighter, deceased, Dachau. Two vodka martinis stood in front of them, mixed to Zac’s meticulous instruction.

‘To the enemy. Up its arse,’ Zac suggested in toast, raising his glass with great care.

‘Which particular enemy?’

‘Big C. Eating me away, Harry.’

‘And I don’t suppose your stay at the Ashkek Hilton helped you any.’

‘That’s partly why I’m here. I don’t remember much, but it seems like you pulled me out of one hell of a hole. I need to say thank you.’

‘My pleasure. I was doing no more than returning the favour.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Makes no difference.’

‘So can we stop saving each other and just sit down and drink, like two regular bastards?’

‘Well, I guess we can always try.’

They drank, and ordered more.

‘One thing you can tell me, you all-American hero,’
Harry said as the second martini began to take hold, ‘how the hell did you end up in bed with the President’s wife? I know you’ve always displayed a remarkable lack of judgement when it comes to women, but even by your standards that was awesome.’

‘That’s the bitch of it all, Harry, I never did. I was set up.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, I met her, sure I did, at some business reception. Cute. With a track record, apparently. And I flirted with her, of course I did, but no more. I’m not a complete dickhead. You go screwing with a President’s wife in a place like Ashkek and you ain’t gonna come out with any balls. Then a week or so later Papa Karabayev was off on some foreign trip, I was out on the town, pretty loaded, and I get a message that she wants to see me, and a car’s waiting. So I get in and I’m taken to the Presidential Palace outside of town. A back entrance. Taken up some stairs, into a room, hang around admiring the wallpaper, then I get a message that she’s changed her plans, is sick, that’s what I was told. Never saw her. But others saw me, of course. Next day I’m playing a poor game of chess in the park and suddenly I’ve got the muzzles of half the palace guard sticking in places I really don’t want them. By lunchtime I’m making buddies with Amir Beg, and he’s showing me photographs of the presidential missus getting a real going over from some guy who Beg claims is me.’

‘But? There has to be something.’

‘No, Harry, not guilty. I never had the pleasure, but I sure as hell paid the price.’ He was breathing heavily with the effort of talking, and the memory. ‘I was framed.’

‘Why?’

‘You know, old Amir never got round to telling me. Too busy beating the crap out of me.’

‘Could it have been to do with your work?’

Zac shook his head. ‘Can’t think so. I was clean, truly. Oh, there was some funny shit going down at the uranium mines, all sorts of strange whispers, but I never went near any of that. It was like I was picked out in a lottery. They needed a fall guy, and I won first prize.’

‘Why you, I wonder.’

‘I was available. And American. I got the impression they don’t like Americans.’

‘Or Brits.’

‘Yeah.’

‘There was another American, too, Zac, although she’d lived here a long time, long enough to become an MP. Friend of mine. Name of Martha.’

‘Do I remember her? I seem to think there was a woman, a cute redhead . . .’

‘She didn’t make it, Zac.’

‘Jesus.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I feel terrible about that.’ He gazed into his drink, shaking his head mourn-fully. ‘What a senseless waste. As you can see, I really wasn’t worth it.’

‘She didn’t do it for you, Zac, what she did she did for me. And for herself.’

‘Can tell she meant a lot to you.’

‘You’d have liked her, too, although whether she’d have taken to you is another matter.’

They exchanged forlorn smiles, built on an old friendship where insults were used as endearments.

‘She said something, it still bugs me – in fact she said a lot of things that bugged me,’ Harry said, trying to make light of it. ‘Right at the end, she told me not to let the weeds grow on her grave. She made a point of it, but I’m damned if I know what she meant.’

‘I can’t claim to be much of an authority on what women mean.’

‘It was important to her.’

‘Which makes it important to you. So to me, too. Harry, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to raise my glass. To Martha. And to you. To you both.’

‘Yeah. That would have been good,’ Harry said softly. ‘Perhaps even great.’

They sat, and they talked, and they drank, until they got too drunk. It was when they started singing, Harry’s maudlin song about the barman, and all those good resolutions they drank to forget, that the doorman called them a taxi.

‘Where are you staying?’ Harry enquired as he helped his friend into the back of a black cab. Zac seemed to be having trouble lifting his left leg high enough to get it into the cab, and ended up stamping at it like a horse.

‘At the 41, next to the Royal Mews,’ he said, when at
last he was done. He slumped rather than settled into his seat, his energies almost consumed. ‘It has eleven different types of pillow and a rather fine bust of Napoleon. And did I mention the exceptionally pretty Polish maids?’

‘Not much point in suggesting that you start acting your age.’

‘And if you keep the window open, I’m told you can also hear the bands at Buck House. It’s what I most admire about the British army. Your bands.’

‘You keep your windows open in January?’

‘Had them open all the time in the Ashkek Hilton.’

‘I remember.’

‘Although they never left any chocolates on my pillow.’

‘Maybe I’ll point that out to Amir Beg, next time I’m through.’

Mention of the name seemed to knock the last of the strength from Zac. He let forth a sigh of deep inner weariness; the time for banter was done. ‘Harry, if you don’t mind, let’s go by the river. I do so love it at night.’

‘Me, too,’ Harry agreed, even though it would mean a wild detour. He gave instructions to the cabbie. ‘So how long are you staying, Zac? When do you plan to go home?’

‘Home?’ The word was uttered with an unmistakable degree of confusion, as if he were reading the instructions for assembling a new toy. ‘I’m not sure, Harry, been away so damned long. Anyway, I’ve got a bit of thinking to do. Don’t want distractions. So I guess I’ll be staying a few days, until I’ve sorted things through.’

‘Things?’

‘You know. Dying things.’

His face looked ashen in the street lights. They didn’t talk any more until they were on the Embankment and approaching the Albert Bridge. It stood out brilliantly against the night sky, lit with thousands of bulbs. ‘Slow down, will you,’ Zac instructed the cabbie, ‘there’s no hurry.’ He turned to Harry. ‘You know, someone once told me they named this bridge after Queen Victoria’s husband. Beautiful, isn’t it? Doubt P.J.’s likely to name anything after me, except maybe the trash can. I’ve made a mess of things. Too many loose ends.’

‘Haven’t we all? But your life has been pretty exceptional, if you ask me.’

‘It’s had its moments, but it’s what comes next that I’m thinking about right now. You know, Harry, this cancer, it’s not a great thing to be with. I don’t want to spend enough time with it for us to become friends or anything. Know what I mean?’

‘I think so. I’m sorry.’