There were no answers that way. The film, she’d seen the film, the whole thing was about the film. People would kill to get the film.
A village in Angola. Americans. That was still the way to go.
Anselm said Kaskis intended to interview Joseph Diab, an ex-soldier, Lebanese-American, in Beirut. In the Lebanon anyway, which was mostly Beirut as she understood it.
Did the paper have a correspondent in Beirut? She never read the foreign news pages.
It took five minutes to find out. They had a stringer called Tony Kourie who worked for a Beirut paper, a moonlighter. He answered the phone. A faint East End accent.
He said he knew her name, he’d seen the Brechan story. They compared weathers. Then she asked him and he whistled.
‘No shortage of Joe Diabs here. Had a go from the American end, have you? US Army?’
‘No. I will if I have to.’
‘I’ll have a try. Anything else might help?’
It came to her from nowhere.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Get back to you.’
The phone. Halligan.
‘Caroline, we’re at the end of the road here, darling.’
‘I need a little more time,’ she said, confidence gone.
‘Full account. Pronto. Today. In writing, in detail.’
‘I think I’ve shown…’ ‘Shown? You won’t mind me saying turning up Brechan’s bumboy, that’s now looking less spectacular. A lot less clever of you. In the light of information received.’
The skin of her face felt tight. Information received?
‘I’ll get back to you,’ she said.
‘You will. Soonest. And the contract, well, study the fine print.’
Minutes passed. She realised she was rubbing her hands together. The phone again.
‘Caroline, Tony Kourie. Listen, I’ve got a likely Joe Diab. Joseph Elias Diab, age thirty-six, born Los Angeles, parents both born in Beirut. Former US Army senior sergeant.’
‘Yes?’
‘And dead. Outside the house of his cousin, six shots to the body.’
‘When?’
‘Night of 5 October, 1993.’
‘Thanks, Tony. Really, thanks. Repay you if I can.’
‘Tell the bastards to run some more of my stuff.’
‘I will.’
Caroline looked at the printouts, but she didn’t pick them up for a while. She knew. Anselm, Kaskis and Riccardi had been kidnapped on the night of 5 October, 1993.
57
…HAMBURG…
She would be full of regret.
Then again, she might not be.
He was going through the day before’s logbooks, rendering them billable, thinking about Alex, thinking about what happened next.
The phone whispered. Beate.
‘Herr Anselm, a Caroline Wishart. Yes?’
He thought to say no, he wanted to say no, but he had given her the number. She would try again.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Beate said, ‘Mr Anselm will take your call.’
They said hello.
She said, ‘Mr Anselm, I’m really sorry to bother you again.’
He waited, he didn’t mind being rude to her, he didn’t want to talk to her, let her feel that in his silence.
‘It’s about Paul Kaskis.’
He didn’t want to talk about Kaskis or about Beirut, to this woman, to anyone.
‘Ms Wishart, I don’t know what you’re working on, I know nothing about you except that you caught a politician with his pants down. And life and death is just a phrase. So, with regret, no.’
A pause.
‘Mr Anselm, please, please just listen to me,’ she said, rushing. ‘It’s not just a phrase. A man showed me a film of people being murdered. In Africa. By American soldiers. He wanted to sell the film. Then I saw someone try to kill him. I also want to ask you whether you know that Joseph Diab, the man Paul Kaskis was in Beirut to see…’ She ran out of air. ‘Joseph Elias Diab was murdered the same night you were kidnapped. He was executed.’
A film.
Anselm barely heard the rest.
A man called Shawn murdered in Johannesburg. And Lafarge in London looking for a man named Martin Powell, now thought to be Constantine Niemand, who was there when Shawn died and who killed Shawn’s killers.
Kael had talked about a film.
‘What’s the man’s name?’ he said. ‘The man with the film?’
‘Mackie. He called himself Mackie. Bob Mackie.’
Not Powell or Niemand.
‘I’ll call you back in a few minutes, said Anselm. ‘Give me your number again.’
He went through to the workroom. Inskip wasn’t at his station. The man next door, Jarl, the Scandinavian and Baltic specialist, pointed to the passage door and drew on an imaginary cigarette. A longing imitation.
Anselm followed Jarl’s finger, braved Beate’s eyes, and then it took muscle to open the glass door against the wind, then to prevent it slamming. Cold. It would be cold even with a coat. The north wind was running a rabble of clouds across a pale-blue sky. Across the road, the trees were stripped for winter now, shivering.
Inskip had his back to the view, to the lake, to the wind, lighting up. He handed over the cigarette and lit another. They hunched against the wind ‘A holiday,’ said Inskip. ‘I’m thinking, let’s fly away to ten days of sun. Sun and naked skin.’
‘Why waste money,’ said Anselm. ‘You can get the exposure here over two or three years. For naked skin, we have St Pauli.’
Inskip didn’t look at him. He drew on the cigarette held high in his fingers, near the tips.
‘My, you’ve thrown my thoughts into disarray,’ he said. ‘I had in mind a concentrated experience, two or three years of sun in ten days. And I was thinking of my own skin. My own etiolated skin.’
Anselm blew smoke. The wind’s grab reminded him of a holiday in the Hamptons in winter when he was a teenager, smoking in the dunes, the wind-whipped grass, the stinging sand, grit on teeth.
‘Those South African lists?’ he said. ‘Remember your piece of detection?’
‘Indeed. The aborted coup gang.’
‘Write them down?’
‘In the file.’
‘Of course.’
They smoked. Below them, on Schone Aussicht, two police motorcyclists appeared, riding abreast. A police car followed, then three dark-grey Mercedes Benz saloons. A second police car and two more motorcycles completed the convoy.
‘Who’s this?’ said Inskip.
