His wife asked if they could take a taxi, and he said it was, on the map, only a hundred metres or so… They should have used a taxi. She leaned more heavily now on his arm and the case squealed on its wheels. There was sleet in the air and a thin film had settled on her shoulders and in her hair. They passed a bench where a bearded old man sat with an opened bottle beside him, then statues to Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. He did not know who they were or why they were commemorated. He looked again at the map and realised he had gone too far along the street and must turn to the right. She sighed heavily, blamed him.
They had to cross a major road but went with other pedestrians, and then they were in Lindenstrasse. The hotel was an old, white-painted building. He had expected something modern, glass and steel. He helped her up the steps and bounced the case after him.
They were at Reception. A girl was there, young and blonde. She wore a low-cut blouse and leaned towards him across her desk. He sensed Naghmeh’s recoil. She queried his business there and he answered that he had a reservation. She asked, of course, in what name. In what name? He turned away from her. He felt a fool. He had to reach inside his jacket pocket, produce the Czech passports, flick one open and look at the name. He should have memorised it on the first flight, the second or third, or on the train. He grinned, played the idiot, and displayed the page of the passport that carried a name and his photograph. Both were taken, photocopied, handed back. Registration forms were given to them. He said, in his difficult English, that his wife was not well. He made a meaningless scribble on his form in the signature box, and asked for the key. It was given him, with a sealed envelope.
They took the lift, went along a corridor and heard TVs. He unlocked the door. It was an ordinary room, with a double bed and a wardrobe, a small desk and a television on the wall. A door led to a bathroom with a walk-in shower.
She looked around her and sagged. In the hotel in Tehran there had been a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers because of who they were. Not here. He opened the envelope as she sat heavily on the bed. It was handwritten, not signed, on the hotel’s paper, and said at what time they would be collected. He checked his watch. They had an hour and ten minutes to pass. Was she hungry? She shook her head.
She lay down, eyes closed. Pain seemed to cramp her. He had created her exhaustion, her loss of dignity, because he could not face life without her. Her breathing was ragged.
The Engineer found a magazine and read about Lubeck, what an old Hanseatic trading city offered the visitor and where marzipan could be bought.
How long could he hold out? Two more cigarettes had been lit but he had seen at least another six in the packet. He might hold his silence for the next and perhaps the one after that. Foxy didn’t know how long his body would allow further resistance. Pain travelled from the burn points, the cuts, the bruising, the splits and the wrecked gums to his brain.
The goon, Foxy realised, was not trained. He had no experience of the dark interrogation arts. He understood only physical force and the infliction of pain. But men would come, elbow him out. They would have the same skills as the interrogators from the Joint Forward Intelligence Team in Basra, whom he had sat alongside and done ‘terp’ work for. All the basics were used by the Brit interrogators: sleep deprivation, stress postures, hours under the hood that was a thick hessian sack made for sandbags, slaps, kicks and shrieking in the ears. Big, proud men were broken by them, as he would be. Foxy would be broken, lose the resolve… so what had all the pain been for? Might he not at the start have coughed who he was, his name and mission… He had bought time.
He didn’t know how much more he could buy. The man across the room from him, exhausted, breathed heavily. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His fingers trembled and the wood shivered in his hand. Frustration, obvious, built in the goon’s head. The next spate of violence would be uncontrolled aggression and Foxy would suffer… knew it. But didn’t know how long it mattered that his silence held. When he had been the interpreter for the JFIT people in Basra, he had never seen one of them show anger, lose their cool. He knew the routine: questions, silence, beating and kicking, silence, burning – knew it and waited for it. How long did they need? More than an hour? More than one more beating and two cigarettes? Foxy couldn’t remember what the gaunt little American, with the hook for a hand, had said or what was called a ‘code of conduct’ with a prisoner.
He lay on the cell floor, trussed, roped to the wall and knew it was coming soon: a bad beating and kicking, and a burning.
A decision that only Mansoor could make: to give up on him and wait for the senior officers to come, or to try one more time.
He had been exhausted and had spent time leaning against the table – not sitting. He had been brought a glass of juice by one of the Basij peasants; the guard had had no stomach for what he had seen, the prisoner on the concrete floor, and had vomited his last meal. He had drunk the juice, which had refreshed him, given clarity to his thoughts. The two guards inside the cell, minding the door, had not spoken during the long hours. He thought they were terrified by what they had seen. He knew they looked away when he used a cigarette to burn. They did not interrupt the growing understanding he had.
When his mind cleared it was as if he had slapped his own face hard. He was, himself, exposed. He could have been naked, lain alongside the man on the floor. He could have been beaten and accused.
It was about the man he was tasked to protect – clarity came in a burst. A puzzle that had been obstinate slid into place: so simple. Some who examined his actions might find it hard to credit that mere enthusiasm, and vanity, had led him to create circumstances where the prisoner remained in his custody and not in that of officers with experience and rank. He was tasked to protect Rashid Armajan, a man of great sensitivity. He had pulled from the water an agent in a camouflage suit who offered no explanation and he imagined that the couple now travelled anonymously, without a cordon of guards. He thought he had put them at hazard – perhaps killed them. Some would say – suspicious men with the cold eyes of investigators – that the denial of information about the capture was itself an act of treason.
He could go from the cell, down the corridor and into his office, slap on the lights and telephone to the Crate Camp Garrison. He could demand to speak first with the duty officer, and then that the commanding officer, from the al-Quds Brigade, be woken and brought to the telephone. He would tell of an arrest made five and three-quarter hours earlier, a failed questioning, and no message of such an important matter passed up any chain and…
A great sigh. Almost a sob of desperation.
He dropped the cigarettes onto the table, pushed back the flap of the packet, flicked the box of matches and reached for the wood.
Mansoor believed that salvation, for him, lay with a confession from his prisoner. Then he would telephone the Crate Camp Garrison and get the connection to the duty officer. He steeled himself, took rambling steps across the cell, away from the table, and towards the man on the floor.
The scream went to the marrow of Badger’s bones. He looked again to the east, away into the blackness of the night, and did not see the dawn’s first softening. He would not go until that early light signalled the day’s start.
Until his death, he would hear Foxy’s screams, never be free of them. There would be, even in a deniable world, an inquiry – like a fucking inquest – and the questions would be asked by those who had never been in a shallow scrape, covered with scrim net and watching the movements of the guard detail around the home of a target who made the bombs that killed the guys brought back through the Wiltshire town. Likely the questions would be asked by those who had never gone without water when the thermometer hit 110 degrees plus, had never lain in a scrape and pissed into a bottle. They would not know of a meeting of a landmine clearance group with a terminally ill woman, who stood tall with courage, and did not see small kids kick footballs and ride tricycles, unaware that their mother would soon be dead but that their father would beat her to the grave. They would know nothing, but would demand answers to their questions.
Wasn’t your job, Constable, to get Sergeant Foulkes into position, then support him in every way possible and do the donkey work of extracting him?… You were aware, Constable, that Sergeant Foulkes was nearly twice your age?… How was it, Constable, that you permitted Sergeant Foulkes, an older and less fit man than yourself, to go forward to retrieve the cable and microphone?… Did you not feel retrieval was your job?… Did you, Constable, pull your weight on this mission?
The shout came from deep in his chest, rose in his throat, burst from his mouth, was silent and hurled towards the coots, the ducks, the marauding otter and the browsing pigs on the edge of the reed bed.
‘You weren’t fucking there. If you weren’t there, you don’t know.’
He would stay until dawn, but there was no light yet, no smear, to the east.
