Heavy, p.49
Heavy, page 49
Good question, Ernie thought, stung. He resented the words in Jack’s mouth. Bird shit rained down from above and he dodged out of the way.
“Your loyalties,” said Ernie, as calmly as he could, “are making less and less sense. Surely it would be better if you just upped and trotted off out of here before Dick Foley gets us all shot?”
Or shoots us, Ernie thought, watching Jack’s ruined face for some sign of understanding.
“He’s not going to do that,” said Jack, frowning at nothing. “He needs us.”
“Not for much longer,” said Ernie, as Jack hunched up like a church gargoyle, his scars forming a furrow of discomfited concentration. Hard to imagine this distorted face had grown from the old, deceptively angelic one on Surt. “You’ve seen what happens when someone is unnecessary or in the way by now—”
“I saw you let your spiv die—”
Ernie let the jibe wash over him like so much foul water. He reminded himself, with a small flutter of fear in his chest, that he was trying to win over someone who’d possibly done his first murder when he wasn’t even in his teens. It was a damn dangerous game.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, trying to shake the image of Jack, his able hands caked in gore, bending his neck until it cracked, that sharp, swift twist he’d given the track workers, “is why you’re still defending him when even his biggest fan out there—”
“Shut up.”
“—doesn’t want to follow him any more.”
“I don’t have any other choices.”
“Jack, just leave.”
Jack, animated in his distress, threw his arms wide and grumbled, “And go where?” in the bass gurgle of despair that came out warped by his face. Ernie admitted, internally, that he had a point. There was nowhere for someone like Jack to go, especially not here, that wouldn’t sooner or later result in an abrupt bullet in the back of the head at dawn.
He was just not suited to a long life.
Ernie opened his mouth to try another argument, and closed it again as dark blood began to trickle sluggishly down from the tender landscape of Jack’s nose, over his lips, into his mouth.
* * *
Irene crouched in the snow behind a parked car and felt the thick cold wet carpet of muddied white behind her touch her backside. Ahead of her, Ridell had pressed himself against the side wall of a mission building, moving with a purposeful, direct grace that startled her. He had come into life as Captain Foley said: We need to get there without being seen.
She recalled with a small start that he had been promoted in his military service precisely because he was good at things like this. Even if it seemed preposterous that a man of his size could go unnoticed, he melted into the landscape, flowed between the obstacles like smoke, and now he beckoned them from the corner with his head up and his jaw tight.
She followed Captain Foley through the snow, imitating his zig-zag, running when he ran, walking when he walked.
There was a sign on the door which Mr. Shoe murmured was about repairs.
Above it she recognised the characters Church of God. They had packaged up so many translations of the pamphlets for so many different languages; these had stuck, because they had discussed in the Church, if it was worth spending their meagre funds trying to send the Word to China.
The conclusion had been: They are the ones who need it most. Russian-language and Chinese-language pamphlets, in boxes marked ‘CLEARED BY THE HOME OFFICE’ and ‘CLEARED BY THE FOREIGN OFFICE’ and ‘CLEARED BY BRITISH AUXILLARY INTELLIGENCE’ with huge stamps. Everything was proper and above-aboard.
They broke into the Church of God building complex.
Nothing lay inside but dust, and cold, and feathers glued to the floor by the leavings of birds.
Irene lifted her head to the rafters. Birds shuffled in the dark.
God is with us, she thought, trying to ignore the dereliction of the building. God is always with us.
Captain Foley beckoned her away from Ridell, whose animal grace had faded the moment they stepped over the threshold, and from Mr. Shoe, who appeared to be sulking. Again she felt it, the pinprick awareness that she was alone among men: the size of them, the size of her, and the stink of all their unwashed bodies like the palpable rendering of a threat.
Irene left her bag with the soldier and the spy and went to see what her Captain wanted from her.
“Just across the street,” said Captain Foley, in a low whisper. He pushed her gently to look around the corner of an open door: there, through the intact windows and their divided layers of glass, she could see a building opposite, no different to their own but that it was flanked with newer ones and crowned with a mast.
It didn’t look much like a police station or a prison, Irene thought, uneasily. She wondered what they were holding Maureen in that place for. It looked more like a signalling outpost, or a kind of child’s imitation of Broadcasting House. A provincial echo of civilised society.
“The question is,” Captain Foley murmured, “whether we can trust Ernie to translate accurately and not muddy the waters.”
“Sir?” Irene whispered, struck by the thought that, beyond the walls of the building opposite, unsuspecting Communists were going about their work. They would do, she supposed, the same things as her: file reports, annotate surveillance photographs, monitor communications. The only difference would be their round sandwiches to her triangular ones, their grey flannel to her grey boiled wool; the only difference that she was right, and they were wrong…
“My hope,” said Captain Foley, frankly, shocking her, “is that we’re not going to need him for this. But it pays to be careful, Irene, and between you and me—“ he lowered his voice even further, “I would not be surprised if he tried to defect.”
Irene turned back from the window to look at his face.
“They go native if you leave them there too long,” he said, baldly, with an expression of rueful regret. “I tried to tell Braithwaite. One can’t be complacent. It’s what happened with the other Shoe, you know. Just tried to settle down and fade into the background. Couldn’t allow it.”
“But we need him,” Irene whispered. She glanced back into the room where Ridell had slumped to the ground among the bird doings and appeared to be daydreaming, and Mr. Shoe – Ernie – was gazing at the rafters. Was he scheming? Did he have some plan in mind? Could he really abandon them?
“We may not,” said Captain Foley. “But I can’t be sure yet how good her English is. Report suggests passable, if not fluent, but who knows which way she is playing up or down her abilities.”
Irene blinked once or twice. The sentence came from nowhere. It had no bearing on anything. It didn’t mean anything. It was a phrase dropped from another world. She felt she had missed an entire briefing.
“Who, sir?”
“Lian Lin,” said Captain Foley, a little impatiently, as if she were being disappointingly stupid.
“Is she going to help us, sir?” Irene asked, clinging to it. This must be some contact the Captain had made, someone who would know how they could extract Maureen from captivity, from torture. She was a double agent, perhaps, a sleeper. Someone whose location in this city was a fortunate coincidence. Perhaps one of the Captain’s previous excursions had been to contact Witham and find the names of nearby agents—
“I should bloody well hope so,” said the Captain, adding, “Whoops, language. I didn’t come all this way for her to be difficult.”
A cold screw worked its way slowly through Irene’s heart, puncturing her desperate rationalisations.
“… What about Maureen, Sir?” she said, feeling ice water flood her breast.
He shrugged.
No, Irene thought. Don’t shrug. You don’t shrug when someone says that. You leap into action. You’ve been working out how to free her. No one gets left behind. You don’t believe in unnecessary violence or abandoning agents. That’s not who you are.
She felt a tremor begin in her chest.
It spread like ink on wet paper, filling her up with something that blotted out all of the well-conceived arguments, all of the neat little categories within her. Like red ink, correcting these errors.
“All we have to do now, I suspect, is wait in a state of readi—” he began
“GET HER BACK,” Irene shouted. It came out of her like vomit, and with less warning. “YOU CAN’T LEAVE HER THERE WITH THEM.”
He gave her a quizzical, mocking look, as if she were a child throwing a tantrum that was not even worth the trouble of a telling-off. She recalled the expression. She knew it of old; the girl is ridiculous. The girl is talking out of turn. The mixer thinks we want her opinion. Ignore it. That thing.
Then he was on the floor, and her hands hurt, and her arms hurt, and her throat hurt, and she was shouting, still. Shouting about Maureen, shouting about nothing. Shouting because her voice came out of her throat and rang through the building and stirred up the birds. And beating him, she was beating him, beating him with her fists, beating him with her feet, beating him with the savagery of disappointment; beating him because, because when you are a disappointment, Irene, sooner or later a beating was necessary.
It was justified. It was what you did.
And then she wasn’t beating him any more. Her hands and feet touched the air, her heels struck something solid.
There was a rope around her waist. An arm. A person.
She smelled the pungent smell of Ridell and his vegetable sweat and the undertones of singed clothing and the dirt in his hair.
“Let me go,” she muttered, and barely heard it herself.
He did not let her go.
She began to feel colder in the pit of her stomach. Her hands shook, and hurt, and shook.
Captain Foley got to his feet and pushed blood from his eyes and wiped blood from the tumble-down hank of his hair. He raised his eyebrows at her, and sighed.
“Irene.”
Her body weighed more than its own effigy in lead. The Devil was in her, she thought, the Devil was in her and she was weak, like they’d always said. Weak and bad, like her blood.
“Irene,” Captain Foley repeated in a softer voice, as if she were weeping. Irene touched her face, but her cheeks were dry. “I think we’ve misunderstood each other.”
The cold crawled up her spine.
“You can let her down,” said Captain Foley to Ridell. “Irene, I feel terrible that we’ve come to this. Please, let me explain.”
The cold worked its way into her hands and dropped them by her sides.
“Alone,” he added, nodding to Ridell, to some distant shadow in the background who must have been Mr. Shoe. “Come with me, Irene, we’ll talk about it.”
He led her into a side room. It had pipes attached to the walls, where water must once have come, and the remains of a sink bracket, and the smashed fragments of an uncountable quantity of off-white plates, with one tin disc sitting unbroken in the midst of the destruction. As if someone had murdered a kitchen.
“This is very hard on you, I think,” said Captain Foley, after a long pause. He stood with his back to the doorway; Irene found herself in the middle of the room. “I understand, Irene. You are an administrator, not a field agent. You have risen to the challenges of this mission admirably so far – it would be asking too much to expect professionalism at every step.”
Irene felt the words administrator and professionalism like wet, stinging slaps to the face. He looked disappointed. Not betrayed, not angry. Disappointed and pitying. You are a disappointment, Irene.
“And I am to blame,” he went on, his hands behind his back like a preacher, his head dipped. “I can see that, it is very clear to me – I’m afraid the prospect of getting to the end of the mission and being able to go home and see Mrs. Foley and the girls again has got the better of my thoughts, and I’m as guilty as you are of being unprofessional. Braithwaite will be highly disappointed in me – obviously. More so, really, because it is after all my responsibility to make sure no one is pushed beyond their bounds and abilities, it is rather what Braithwaite has appointed me to do—”
Irene drew a breath.
“I have overworked you, Irene,” he said. “This is unforgiveable – I can’t ask you to think kindly of me for it – and while I do expect better from you, I suspect one must relax one’s expectations under extraordinary circumstances – you can hardly be asked to match up to the level of experienced men, on a mission you were not fully-briefed to undertake—” Captain Foley leaned on the door frame as if exhausted.
“I’m sorry, Sir.”
“It really is my own fault,” Captain Foley sighed, looking to the ceiling. “I sought to incorporate too many volatile elements – subversive ones, too – and keep a smooth operation. It’s hubris, I suppose. Braithwaite won’t be impressed with me at all.”
Irene twisted her fingers around each other. When she shifted her weight, the whole cloud of detritus beneath her shifted too, a loud shower of cascading fragments of crockery. The sound was, in this moment, painfully familiar: Clumsy. We couldn’t expect any better from you, of course.
Captain Foley rubbed his own face. Irene knew it must hurt, by now. Her hands ached: she put them behind her back, horrified by their presence, their attachment to her.
“It was remiss of me to leave you with so many bad influences around to pervert your thinking,” he said, bringing his hands together in front of his lips, a thoughtful prayer to no one, “I am to blame for your weakening of heart and purpose. This will not do.”
“Sir,” Irene said, “I must bear some of the responsibility—”
“No, no, Irene,” said Captain Foley firmly. “This was my own mistake. These people I have brought you into contact with are dangerous, seditious influences and you were not prepared, and that is my own cross to bear.”
“You can’t think of everything, Sir,” Irene said, tilting her head back. “Colonel Braithwaite says you don’t delegate enough—”
“True,” Captain Foley said. “I forgot I’d told you about that. Hoist by my own petard again, mm?”
He stepped into the room, and patted her on the arm. Irene flinched at the touch. She couldn’t have said why: guilt, perhaps, at the flakes of blood still clinging to his hair.
“Just keep it together a little longer, Irene,” he said, with a flash of a brief smile. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Heavy: Twenty-Six
“I don’t understand,” Ernie repeated, as Pig wiped the blood from his lip with the crook of his hand. “All of us are better off out of it but you just won’t see it.”
Pig showed the blood to Ernie. “Something has to keep me from doing anything worse,” he said.
Ernie put his ravaged hands – one gloved, one naked – onto his broken hips, and tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. He said, like a man waking from a dream. “You know. I’m starting to wonder. Just a little. But I am starting to: just what exactly, how much you did do, Jack.”
“You saw me kill four men,” said Pig. The tally rested on his hands, but the words themselves came out as easily as if he were counting rabbits. Their necks had broken the same way.
“He told you to do that and you know perfectly well what I mean,” Ernie said, folding his arms. The breaks, twists, and distortions of his body made the gesture from something natural into an ugly torment of limbs.
“Yes,” said Pig.
We’ll make it quick. If you really think he’s not going to survive.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, he told me to do it,” Pig said, listening to the sound of Swineheart’s neck breaking, feeling the warmth of his anguished body under his hands. The waves hissed up the black sand beach. Swineheart twitched and kicked feebly. Dick Foley held his legs. His fractured body weighed down by two boys.
Pig curled his hands around each other, blood on them both. The weight of the memory hung about his neck and ankles, threatening to drown him. He struck out for land, for the sky, and for something else that would drag him away from the final, absolute click of Swineheart’s neck.
“We’ve come for someone,” Pig said, cutting off the past with the concerns of the present. “Maybe it is your poet.”
Ernie only continued to stare at him. His pupils moved across the ruts of Pig’s face, searching for something he didn’t find; he shook his head as if knocking away a fly, and said, impatiently, “Xiao Huli is dead, Jack. She’s dead.”
“Are you su—”
“Yes, I’m bloody well sure. They threw her in a fucking pit like they throw everyone they’re finished with. Shut up.” In his stare there was nothing but the faltering, weak heartbeat of Swineheart, Pig’s face reflected in his eyes, and the clumsy, endless cold butchery. Penknives and flesh, congealing blood still warm. The uncontrollable heaves as he hacked off two small hands and threw them into the sea for the gulls: five-digit fish sinking through the furious surf, bleeding into the freezing Atlantic Ocean.
“Simon, then,” Pig said, desperately striking for land and sky. For some sense. Something had to save him. Someone had to be coming.
Fires lit behind Ernie’s gaze and he pulled his coat tight around him. “No, Jack – God damn you – he – HE CAN’T BRING PEOPLE BACK FROM THE DEAD, HE’S NOT FUCKING JESUS—”
Pig heard himself, distant as the echoes of a church bell whispering deo, deo, on a sticky summer night a thousand lifetimes away, saying, “But you only have his word for it that he’s dead.”
The words brought Ernie to a halt. He dropped his arms by his sides, and for a moment there was only silence deeper and more profound than the absence of words. Ernie grimaced, an old wound re-opened by the struggle, a fresh wound opened by an old agony, and half-lifted his hands only to let them drop. He seemed incalculably ancient, impossibly tired; the look he gave Pig was poisoned with sympathies Pig couldn’t stand to claim.
“No,” said Ernie. “I know Simon is dead.”
* * *
Irene remained gone. Ernie felt moth wings beat at the inside of his breast, wondering what, exactly, Dick was telling her. In a sudden, guilty memory, he saw Jack stumbling back from a polite conversation on Kovavaara West Station, ‘drunk’ and disoriented, reeking. The persistent coughing had begun the next morning. The red eyes, the sudden clumsiness. A palpable and obvious drop in his understanding.
