In the Evil Day

41

…LONDON…

She found a person to start with, at the London School of Economics, in the School of Oriental and African Studies.

They sat in a small study that smelled of cigarette smoke. He was an overweight man in his fifties, head shaven, black polo-necked shirt. He looked like a Buddhist monk gone bad, in thrall to things of the flesh, the ascetic life a memory. His eyes were red, he smoked Camels in a hand that trembled a little, and he jiggled his right foot without cease.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Americans are not strangers to the region.’

‘But massacres?’

‘Massacres? A difficult term. Massacre. Imprecise. Like genocide. Used very loosely.’

‘Killing civilians. Lots of them.’

He started to laugh, coughed, kept at it for a while, produced an unclean red handkerchief, crumpled like a tissue, tore it open and covered his mouth.

She looked away. He recovered.

‘Sorry. Terrible tickle in the throat. Dust. Place never gets cleaned. So, yes. Killing of civilians? Common practice in the region. For about three hundred years.’

‘But not by Americans.’

‘Depends. Depends on what you think is the causal chain, I suppose. In Angola, for example.’

‘For example?’

‘You’re not connected with television, are you?’

‘No.’

‘I do quite a lot of television. You may have seen me?’

‘I thought your face was familiar.’

‘Really?’ He ran a hand over his scalp, a pass, quick. ‘Yes. Well, I’ve been too busy recently, books and whatnot, can’t drop everything because some television producer calls. They expect that, you know, incredible arrogance.’

‘About Angola, you said…’

‘Lots of atrocity rumours about Angola in the eighties. One a month. What you’d expect from a superpower war-by-proxy, I suppose.’

He studied her, scratching an eyebrow. ‘Wishart. Are you the person who wrote that Brechan story?’

He had assumed a prim expression. He looked like a Pope now, some Renaissance Pope whose portrait she’d seen somewhere.

‘Not the headline,’ she said. ‘That was in poor taste.’

‘Thoughts of Wilde crossed the mind. None so hypocritical about buggery as the unexposed buggers.’

‘Yes. To get back to Angola…’ She had to wait while he lit another cigarette. He had a big lower lip, red, and when he blew out smoke, it turned down and he showed paler flesh inside, the colour of tinned tuna.

‘Angola,’ he said. ‘A resource war, one of the late-century resource wars. Many more to come. I’m considering a book on the subject… working on it, actually. I’ve done a lot of work on it. I’m well beyond considering it.’

‘Atrocities…’

‘Well, there’s always talk. I remember a story about a village disappearing off the face of the map, in some American rag.’

‘Would you know which one?’

‘This is so long ago.’

‘This is very important,’ Caroline said. ‘When you say American rag…?

He seemed to be galvanised, sat back in his chair, ready to speak to camera, chins up.

‘Well, American rags. There’ve been a few. America’s got this tiny left fringe. The right’s a huge great heaving pit of snakes-but energetic. The left’s always been quite pathetic, sad. No life and no theory at all. Well, a little, just the simpler bits they can half understand. Gramsci, they half understand bits of Gramsci. The hegemony stuff. But deep down the right loonies and the left share the same conspiracy mania, it’s rooted in a small-town America paranoia. There’s a plot out there to take things away from them, democracy, freedom of speech, a man’s guns, a man’s right to fuck his pig, there is no, I mean absolute zero, understanding of structural…’ He tailed off, seemed to have lost course, blinked at her with stubby eyelashes.

She said, ‘A village in Angola disappeared off the map?’

He focused. ‘Of course, you have to be on the map to disappear off it, don’t you? The logical precondition. God knows how they could tell it had vanished.’

‘And you say there were others? Atrocity stories?’

‘Many. Both sides. Raped nuns are always good value. The atrocity story is a staple of modern conflict. It illustrates what utter monsters the other lot are. As in the ex-Yugoslavia. Take for example…’ ‘So they said this Angolan village had been destroyed?’

‘Something like that. Dimly recall, mark you. Dimly. It was a longish piece. Quite well done.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Got it. Behind Enemy Lines.’

‘Yes?’

‘California, I think. Published in some little place in California. Behind Enemy Lines. I liked the name.’

‘No chance of you having the clipping?’

He shook his head. ‘My dear, long gone, I’ve moved on. The thing didn’t live beyond four or five issues, they never did. I subscribed to everything in those days. Remotely promising, I sent off my money. They probably owe me twenty quid. Do you get a penny back when these rags collapse with ten issues owing on your subscription? My arse. Try the library here. Hopeless though it is.’

The library had never held Behind Enemy Lines. But a librarian clicked keys at speed, interested frown. He found the complete Behind Enemy Lines for sale, a rarity, seven issues, good condition, twenty pounds, from an address in Portsmouth. Southpaw Books. Email, telephone, fax.

She went outside and rang. A man with a bad cold answered. She said fifty pounds if he would go through Behind Enemy Lines and fax all items involving American involvement in Africa.

‘Go through them?’ he said. ‘Darling, basically, we sell the stuff. That’s the business.’

‘Sixty quid,’ she said. ‘How’s that? And you keep the magazines. Inside an hour.’

‘Time’s money,’ he said. ‘I’m a slow reader.’

‘A hundred. The contents pages too. I’m stopping there.’

‘Credit card transaction, is this?

‘What else?’

‘What’s your fax number?’

42

…HAMBURG…

O’Malley rang.

‘I’m sitting here just down your very pleasant little road. Where the boats are. A word, perhaps?’

Anselm went out, didn’t bother with a coat. It was much colder than when he had come to work. The sky was an army blanket, dirty grey, a shade lighter than O’Malley’s BMW, which, in turn, was a lighter grey than O’Malley’s suit.