The man, Amnon Katz, gave him his hand. For encouragement? Gabbi ignored it.
He closed the door quietly behind him and went to the back of the van. He took out a road-cleaning brush and a couple of bin liners, and smiled ruefully. He would be fucked if there were no leaves to collect and no rubbish to sweep up. He had a shovel and thick, industrial gloves.
He did not look behind him but walked towards the parked car and the steps. The wind blew harshly down the road in the centre of the teaching-hospital complex and buffeted his face. His baseball cap was well down over his eyes and a scarf closely wrapped at his mouth. The cameras would be rewarded with little. And the van? He heard its engine start. It reversed, and would be driven away. Somewhere behind him, watching him, was the stubbily built man with the old face, the bright eyes of youth and the coldness at the mouth who had met him off the ferry. Gabbi trusted that man, and regarded him as a friend. He was the one who would take him away when it was done.
He began to sweep the gutter – slush from the salt put down, a few leaves, some soil washed off the frozen shrub beds. He went slowly, had no wish to be close to the saloon car in front of him. He had seen his target go inside, with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, but the target’s back had been to him and he had seen little of the face. The condition of the wife, and the verdict she would be given, did not concern him. Each time Gabbi pushed the broom, he could feel, against his belly, the stock of the pistol – and now his mind was closed.
They sat very still, and close. The Engineer did not speak and neither did his wife, Naghmeh.
They were in the waiting room. The door to the office was shut but they heard his voice and thought he made telephone calls. Men in loose-fitting, unbuttoned white coats crossed the waiting room, knocked and went inside, then nurses in starched white trousers and figure-hugging white jackets. There was a woman at a desk close to the door, a gatekeeper. She did not make eye contact with either of them but kept her face bent over her screen. Soft music played from high speakers. There were magazines but they did not read them. They had nothing to talk about. His wife would not have wished to hear about the progress he was making in extending the range of electronics that could transmit the signal to the receiver fitted in the device, and do it from further outside the bubble that protected the enemy’s convoys from remote detonations. He had no interest now in which block of land beside which length of raised road leading to which village would be granted the necessary funding for a mine-clearance team to begin work.
Their lives were on hold and they barely dared to breathe. Neither could read the faces of those who went into the consultant’s room or left it. He could not be pessimistic or optimistic, and she could do no more than hold his hand.
It was sudden.
The door opened. He was shirt-sleeved, but with a tie in his collar, well shaven and looked to have slept. His face gave no clue. The Engineer had heard it said that an accused could always tell, from the moment he was brought back into the courtroom and confronted the judge, whether he would hang or take the bus home to rejoin his family. He felt his wife’s hand stiffen in his. She clung to him and their fingers locked.
There were X-rays in a pouch in the consultant’s hand and he spoke quietly to the gatekeeper, who nodded. Neither gave evidence of what was said, and he waved for them to follow him inside.
They crossed the waiting room shakily, did not know what awaited them.
Presence and courage radiated from her, as they had on the previous evening. In his experience, talking to patients was more difficult than performing complicated surgery on them, and he had been told that his manner was not always satisfactory: he should curb brusqueness when the news was bad and elation when it was good. He was tired and had slept poorly. Lili would have fled to her mother, taken their daughter with her, would have poured into her parent’s ear a litany of his craven acceptance of a call to old loyalties. She might come back to him, might see that his affluence would not easily be replaced on a divorcee’s circuit, if he made a call and grovelled – he accepted that their lives were altered, that a crack had appeared that would not easily be repaired. She might not come back.
They intruded into his life.
If they had not come to Lubeck, he would have slept well and been against the warmth of his wife’s body. He would have been woken by his daughter climbing across him… but he had woken cold. She looked into his face. He indicated the chairs, but they stood in front of him, silently demanding his answer.
He said, ‘There is much to talk of and I ask you not to interrupt me but to listen carefully to what I say. I have identified a glioblastoma, grade two, which is confirmation of what you have already been told by your consultants at home. The tumour is close to what we call an “eloquent” area…’
Having intruded into his life they had derailed it. He held up the scan images. ‘I want to show you what we have learned.’
‘Time to go. Hit the road, guys.’
She thought she sounded authoritative and that her voice had a crisp bite. The light was up. Dawn slipped into day. Abigail Jones’s last birthday had been her thirty-third, which should have marked her out as being at the peak of her powers. She did not believe the crap about veterans’ experience outweighing youth’s innovations. All she had worked at now hung precariously on that day’s events. She couldn’t escape it. The sun was low, bright on her face. It threw grotesque shadows.
Those shadows were edging nearer to her. She couldn’t say how fast they advanced with each minute, but at first light they had started to form, nudging through the broken gate to the compound. They were now well up the track towards her, and if she didn’t take control, get the show on the road, they would be tripping against her feet. Hard for her to see the men because the sun was behind them, but there would be a hundred, perhaps more. Nor could she see what weapons they carried. Some of the money she had paid out to the old bastard, the sheikh, would have been distributed but more would have gone into his own biscuit tin, and a suggestion would have been made that there’d be more where it had come from. She heard the sound of the big engines behind her. It would be about bluff, always was. Either the sea would part or it would not. If it did they would be fine, dandy, and on their way. If it did not, they’d be swamped and drowned. The Boys would have sorted it out for themselves: Corky in the first Pajero with Harding riding shotgun, and she would be with Hamfist, close behind – like up against the fender. Shagger would be alongside Hamfist, and they’d try to do it with gas, and if not, it would have to be live rounds – and if it was live rounds, her career was mired and she would be gone.
She’d had no communication with Badger, had tried enough times for a link. He was not switched on, maybe had not the time, or inclination, to talk. Maybe he’d been taken… and was dead. Her obligation was to be at the extraction location. If she held her hand above her eyes, down almost to the bridge of her nose – where her freckles were thickest – and squinted hard, she could see a wall of men, not soldiers or police but marsh men, the madan, from the cradle of civilisation. Ninety years before – she had read it in the digests preparing her for service in Iraq – they had been described by the British military as ‘treacherous and deceitful’. They lived in the shelter of the marshes from which they ‘looted and murdered indiscriminately’, and the last invader to have taught them a degree of discipline had been Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, eight centuries back. They would be formidable but bluff. An appearance of unshakeable will and unstoppable force might win through. She did no more pep talks. If they went into the crowd and broke legs, tossed bodies, crushed teenagers, and fired gas, but did not break through, they would be torn limb from limb, like the security people trapped by a mob in Fallujah. They were all good at the wheel, her Boys, but she was happy, in difficult times, to have Hamfist driving. The first Pajero was level with her.