The guard opened the gate. Niemand crossed the storeroom, walked down the aisles of packaged goods that reached to the ceiling. Substandard, damaged, dangerous, mislabelled, overcooked, undercooked, production mistakes, very old, the Chinaman’s stock came mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia.
At the doorway of the back room, Niemand pushed aside the curtain. The Chinaman’s new wife was sitting in an armchair covered in tigerskin plush velvet, one of four arranged in a row in front of the television set. She heard the sound of the curtain rings, looked over her shoulder, barked his name and went back to watching an advertisement for miracle kitchen knives. A man with a bad hair transplant was sawing slices off a broom handle. Then he went to work on a piece of cheese, processed cheese, sliced off squares of yellow rubber.
‘Try that with your favourite knife and see how far you get,’ said the salesman.
The camera showed the audience clapping. Many of the people did not look like kitchen-knife buyers. They looked like people recruited from the street to applaud men with irregular hair. The camera showed the set of knives on offer. Eight knives. One of them looked like the weapon in the hand of the man who’d dropped from the ceiling.
‘Cutting, chopping, slicing, dicing, they’ll never be the same again,’ said the salesman.
‘Jackie,’ said Niemand. ‘I’ve got a video I need to watch.’
The Chinaman had told Niemand that he imported Jackie through an agency in Macau and that his resentful son, sent to take delivery of her at the airport, was screwing his father’s new companion within days.
‘She says she was a model,’ the Chinaman had said. ‘I think she model without her clothes on, know what I mean?’
Jackie used the remote to kill the knife man, went to an empty channel, just electronic fizz. ‘Put it in,’ she said.
Niemand went to the set. There was a video in the slot, something called
Jackie got up, her nylon dressing gown slid like water, showing a length of thin thigh. She handed over the remote and went to the back door. ‘Come and have drink when you finish,’ she said, staccato.
‘No one to talk to here. Boring.’
Niemand sat on the edge of a chair and found the Play button. Static. It became an aerial view of wooded sub-tropical country, late in the day, shadows. Taken from a helicopter, Niemand thought, probably from the co- pilot’s seat, the colour the result of filming through darkened glass.
Then the photographer was descending and Niemand wasn’t sure what he was looking at, a fire, fires, an African village burning, thatched huts on fire, perhaps two or three dozen, cultivated ground around them… The camera went left and another helicopter could be seen, a Puma, no markings visible. Now they were on the ground and the filming was being done through the open door of the helicopter, a dark edge visible.
There were bodies everywhere, dozens and dozens of bodies. Black people.
The camera zoomed in on a group, at least a dozen people near what looked like a water trough made of steel drums sliced vertically and welded together. Black people, poorly dressed, most of them women and children, a baby, lying on the ground, hands held to their faces, some face down as if trying to kiss the packed dirt.
Men in uniform came into view, white men in combat gear carrying automatic weapons. Niemand recognised the firearms, American weapons. The soldiers were Americans. Niemand knew that because of their boots, American Special Forces boots, he’d once owned a pair.
The soldiers were standing around, five or six of them, they weren’t alert, weapons cradled. The camera moved, three people in coveralls, probably civilians, talking to a tall soldier, the only one without headgear. The camera zoomed in on the group, the soldier was talking to one of the civilians, a man with a moustache. The soldier took off his dark glasses, wiped his eyes with the knuckle of his index finger. The man with the moustache said something to the person next to him, a man, short hair, a mole on his cheek. He shook his head, gestured, palms inward. The group broke up, the soldier was turning towards the camera, the screen went dark.
When the picture came back, the tall soldier was standing at the bodies lying around the water trough.
He moved a man’s head with his boot.
The man was alive, he lifted his arm, his fingers moved.
The soldier shot him in the head, gestured to the other soldiers in the background.
Niemand watched the rest of the film, another two minutes, rewound it and watched it again. He retrieved the cassette and left without seeing Jackie, drove to his place and packed his one bag.
Two hours later, he was in a British Airways business class seat. Johannesburg fell away beneath him, the flat, featureless townships smoking as if bombed, smoking like the village on the film.
Could be Mozambique, he thought. Could be Angola, could be further north.
8
…HAMBURG…
Inskip loomed in Anselm’s open doorway. ‘Your friend called,’ he said. ‘The one who won’t give his name.’
David Riccardi was his name. Presumably it was the call to tell him about Alex Koenig. Many hours too late. Anselm closed his eyes at the thought of her visit.
He had known Riccardi for ten years before they were taken hostage. They’d worked together a few times, run into each other in odd places. Then they spent thirteen months together, close together. Manacled, chained to walls and beams, in the dark or half-dark, the last four months in a damp cavity beneath a cold-storage plant where they could not fully extend their legs. That was where his knee trouble had started. His knee trouble and his hip trouble.
‘When?’ said Anselm.
‘Oh, two-fifteen, two-thirty.’
The wrong side of the night. But Riccardi’s circadian rhythms were permanently disturbed, so was much else of David.
‘Why doesn’t he ring you at home?’ said Inskip, stretching, reaching up, hands embracing, his ribs showing against his T-shirt. He was about two metres tall and thin.
‘He doesn’t want to wake me.’
‘I see. So he rings you where you aren’t.’
‘Not everyone who phones you wants to talk to you.’
‘I’ll ponder that,’ said Inskip. ‘The Frogs are happy about the Indonesian, happy as Frogs can be. May I ask you a question?’
‘You may
‘What exactly
‘Debt collection.’
‘Debt collection?’
‘Say the Ukrainian government owes you five million dollars, they won’t pay, you’re desperate. You go to Bowden. They offer ten, twenty cents in the dollar for the debt, it depends. For you, that’s better than nothing, cut your losses. Now Bowden’s the creditor.’
‘That impresses the Ukrainians, does it?’
‘Bowdens wait until they find a Ukrainian government asset to target somewhere, maybe a Ukrainian Airways plane in Oslo, something like that. Something valuable. They bring up the legal artillery, get a court order impounding the asset. Now the Ukrainians have to fight a legal action in a foreign country to get their plane back. That or pay up the million. Bowden’s bet is that they’ll want to talk a settlement. Say sixty cents in the dollar. And they usually do.’
‘I see. What a sheltered life I’ve lived.’
‘All that is changing.’
Anselm went back to reviewing the logbooks. Every file had one, all checks, results, speculations, actions, all recorded in writing. As behoved parasites who lived off other people’s computer systems, professional prowlers of the cyber world, W amp;K kept no electronic records of their own, worked only through proxy computers, and
