Axel had said, 'You don't only have rights in this world as some gift of God. If you are given rights, you have to take the downside on board. You have to acknowledge obligation and duty. If the citizen has rights, then the citizen also has obligation and duty. You are the citizen, Charley. Bad luck. You cannot always hand over your obligations and duties to other people. Cannot walk away, cannot cross over the road. I don't have to give you syrup thanks for what you're doing, I don't tell you that we're all grateful to you. I'm not thanking you when all that's asked of you is to perform your duties and obligations as a citizen. I hope you didn't want a pretty speech.'
They had sat in his hire-car up the lane from the lights of the community, and Danny Bent had come by and stopped to peer in through the misted window and had spat onto the ground when he had turned away. Too right, she had wanted a pretty speech. She had wanted to feel proud, flushed and pleasured, and his quiet and cold voice gave her nothing. She had sent the fax. Three days later, the last evening when she had returned from a day at school, the envelope from the travel agent in London had been on the table in the hallway of Gull View Cottage, beside the telephone, under her photograph, and enclosed had been the ticket to Palermo, via Rome. He had said, cool and devoid of emotion, what she should write in a fax to be sent in the morning, why she was stopping two days in Rome, when she would reach Palermo. He had told her, brusque, where accommodation would be reserved for her in Rome, at what time he would meet her.
When she had pushed herself out of the hire-car and kick-started the scooter, Fanny Carthew had been watching her. When she had reached home, pushed the scooter up the drive, Zack Jones had spied on her with his binocular lenses. She was turning her back on them, and she knew so little of the man for whom she danced.
Where the sea crashed upon the rocks at the base of the cliffs, a shag bird strutted and held out its wings, drying them in the formation of a blackened cross. It was her place.
Her father had said, 'When that Italian telephoned, maybe I should have been a bit firmer with him. Perhaps I should have told him direct, 'She's not coming, there's no question of her travelling to Palermo.' Those sort of people, because they've money, they believe they can buy anything. There's a job down the drain, God knows where you're going to find another one. And what are we supposed to think, your mother and I? But I don't suppose we matter to you. You are treating us like filth, and after all the love we've given you. What are your mother and I supposed to think? You let that American into our house, you skulk out in the garden. You come back from drinking with him, but, of course, your mother and I are not told, and you stink of alcohol. Mr Bent and Miss Carthew, they both saw you last night, with that American, but we're not told. All we're told is that 'if we talk about it we might be responsible for hurting people'. What sort of an answer is that to two loving, caring parents?'
She had felt then a depth of sadness, and the mood must have been mirrored on her face, because her father had broken his whining attack and her mother had come from the kitchen and put her arm around her daughter. It had been the only time since the American had first come that she could have wept, cried out her heart. Charley had said, head against her mother's chest, looking into the bewilderment of her father's eyes, that she was sorry. She had said that she was sorry, but that she could not tell them more.
She had gone away to her room to lay out on her bed the clothes she would pack to take to Palermo. She had not told them that the hostility of the common room had given her raw satisfaction, nor had she told them of the sparse moments of delight when she gained the fast, cracked smile from Axel Moen, nor had she told them of the brutal excitement she felt at the chance to walk away from a life that was trapped on tracks of certainty. She had not told them, 'I want out, I want to bloody live.' She had gone into her room and laid out on the bed, beside the sausage-bag, her best jeans, two denim skirts, her favourite T-shirts, her underwear from Marks and Spencer's, two pairs of trainers and her best evening shoes and a pair of sandals, the severe cotton nightdress that she had been given the last Christmas by her mother, her make-up bag and her washing-bag, two dresses for the evenings, her bear that had been in her bed for twenty years and which still carried the yellow ribbon for the safe return of the Beirut hostages, and the leather-framed photograph of her mother and father from their twenty-fifth anniversary, and the airline ticket. She had checked what she had laid out. She had packed the bag.
When she could no longer see the peregrine on its perch, and no longer see the shag on the rock washed with the sea, when the darkness had closed over her place, she rode home and back to her small room and her packed bag, and the bungalow was like a place for the dead.
It was raining. The wind drove the rain to run in rivers on the windows. Charley settled in her seat. She didn't screw her face against the glass, she didn't look back, she didn't try to see whether her mother and her father still stood on the Totnes platform and waved. Maybe she was a proper little bitch, and maybe that was why Axel Moen thought he could work with her. A mile out of Totnes station, as the big train gathered speed, the world she had known, and felt she was condemned to, was slipping, blurred, away. Behind her was the suffocation of home, the smallness of her place on the cliff, the drear routine of the school. She had thought she lived. The train powered towards Reading. She felt the adrenalin thrill. At Reading she would take the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport. She believed, at last, that she was challenged.
From where he sat at his desk, Dwight Smythe could see the man through the glass of the partition wall and through the open door. Axel Moen was clearing the desk that had been given him since he had come to London. He could see him take each sheet of paper from the drawers, fast-read it, then take the sheet to the office shredder and mince it. Each last sheet, read and shredded, so that when he boarded the plane he would carry nothing. There were handwritten sheets and typed sheets and note jottings, and each one was destroyed. Dwight's telephone rang. Ray wanting him. Ray had finally got round, taken him four days, to going through the budget figures.
He walked out of his office and across the open area. Axel Moen was sat on his desk and turning a file's pages and seemed not to notice him and he had to manoeuvre round him, awkward, and Axel Moen never shifted to make his way easier. There was a small bag on the floor beside the desk, and there was an Alitalia airline ticket laid down beside the file that Axel Moen was reading, hard concentration.
Ray hated figures. He was like a bad housewife when it came to accounting. He went through the budget figures as if they might bite him, and scrawled signatures on each sheet, and didn't seem to know what he was signing. Ray pushed the budget sheets back.
'That's a good job, thanks. Thanks for taking the weight. Is he about cleared up?'
'Given him his ticket, given him petty cash.'
'What time they going?'
Dwight Smythe peered out of the Country Chief's office and across the open area towards Axel Moen, still bent over the last file.
'Oh, they don't travel together, hell, no. He doesn't hold the hand of that poor kid. She goes British Airways, I was instructed to book him with Alitalia. She doesn't get any comfort treatment. You'd have thought…'
'You hooked into his file?'
'I did what I was told.'
'There was an area blocked off to you.'
A bitter, droll response. 'There was an area of the file to which I was not admitted. Not suitable for an administrative jerk.'
'I hooked in, but my key code doesn't get blocked.'
'That is privilege to aim at, that gives my life a goal.'
'You have, Dwight, don't mind me saying it, a rare ability to get stuck in my throat so's I want to spit. He was in La Paz, Bolivia.'
'I got that far – have you anything else for me, Ray?'
The Country Chief's finger, a moment, jabbed at Dwight Smythe's chest. A lowered voice. 'He was in La Paz, Bolivia, that was '89 to '92. Only the best get to go down to Colombia and Peru and Bolivia. Three-year postings for wild guys.'
The lip curled. 'You talking about cowboys?'
'Don't push. They move into coca-leaf-production country, where the campesinos grow the goddam stuff. There's remote estancias up there, with the small airstrips that the cartels use to ship the coca out for refinement in Cali or Medellxn. Back in La Paz life is behind razor wire and walls and with a handgun beside the pillow and checking under the car each morning. Up-country it's serious shit. Our people have CIs out there, our people try to hit the airstrips when the CIs report there's going to be a shipment. We have to fly with the Bolivian military. A Bolivian helicopter pilot might get to earn $800 a month, he's wide open to corruption, but you have to tell him where you're flying, you have to trust him. You can't reckon to fly with your own people every day.
You have to trust. You wouldn't know about that, Dwight, living that sort of stress, waiting for betrayal, and pray to God you never learn. They were up near the Brazil border, hot news from a Confidential Informant, two
