When another commentator on Morning Ireland refers to Conway as an unfortunate ‘casualty’ and traces everything back to ‘the fuse lit by the fall of Lehman Brothers’, Jimmy’s impulse is to scream. What he does instead is turn the radio off and go over to his desk. He starts making notes, which is something he should have done hours ago – but it’s all still fresh in his memory. On the back of what feels like a second wind he sketches out an alternative, more complex narrative than the one taking hold over the airwaves and online.
But when he’s finished and he re-reads it… it doesn’t seem that complex after all.
So before he loses this sense of there being a bigger picture, a comprehensible one, and before his energy levels dip again, he decides to call Maria.
He checks the time and picks up the phone.
As it’s ringing, he tries to imagine what he might say to her if she answers.
He can’t.
‘Jimmy.’
‘Maria…’ He hesitates, his mind blank for a second. Then he rallies. ‘Look, I’m sorry I hung up on you last night, but I had no choice, I was in the middle of something really intense, and not… not unconnected to…’ He sighs. ‘I think I’ve discovered what happened.’
He didn’t mean to say that quite so directly – or at all, in fact.
Not without a bit of preparation, a bit of lead time.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I think I’ve discovered what happened to Susie, to all of them.’
‘Jimmy, please.’
‘No, listen. I’m not insane. Everything is connected… me stopping the book, taking on the Bolger thing, it’s the same people… I was put under a lot of pressure, and… even that guy last night, who jumped off the building, Dave Conway, have you heard about that? He was there, at Drumcoolie Castle, he -’
‘Jesus, Jimmy, stop.’
He does.
But not for long. ‘Maria, please, let’s meet. Believe me, you’re going to want to hear what I have to say.’
There is a long silence. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy, but you sound deranged.’
‘Maybe I do. I’ve been up all night. But listen to me.’ He starts whispering. ‘The helicopter was sabotaged. The target was the Italian guy, Gianni Bonacci. He worked for the UN. The others were collateral damage.’ He pauses. ‘It’s very complicated, Maria’ – he hadn’t been going to say this either, not yet – ‘but you have to understand, it wasn’t Susie’s fault.’
Unpaid leave.
Effective immediately.
If that isn’t code for fuck you, you crazy motherfucker, hit the road and don’t come back, then Tom Szymanski doesn’t know what is. That’s the downside of working for a PMC, no job security, no guaranteed deployment – and no back-up services either, no Walter Reed.
No tea, no fucking sympathy.
Just a one-way ticket to JFK and make your own way home after that, thank you very much.
Fuck you very much.
He rolls over on the bed and faces the wall.
But come on, six months of having the inside of your head pounded in the Congolese jungle and you’re supposed to just ease back into civilian life and switch it off?
Szymanski himself, though, never actually had it switched on – not over there, that was his thing, his chilled exterior, the quality he was most proud of, like guys who professed to have big dicks or still had hair. But then this bastard Lutz thought he detected… what? Early signs of stress, a disproportionate reaction to what had happened? Didn’t want his unit contaminated with any hint of darkness? With feelings of remorse or grief or guilt? Didn’t want anyone having nightmares?
Good luck with that.
Asshole.
The irony, however, is that in the week he’s been back all Szymanski has had has been fucking nightmares.
With the neat accompanying trick of never actually seeming to fall asleep.
Chilled exterior, I don’t fucking think so, not anymore.
He hasn’t told anyone he’s back yet, and isn’t going to either, not for the moment. Instead of taking a connecting flight on to Cleveland he got the AirTrain and then a subway into Manhattan and has been holed up in a hotel here ever since, two hundred bucks a night, and all the junk food, tequila and hookers midtown can throw at him.
He doesn’t want to go home. That’s why he signed up with Gideon Global in the first place, after his three tours in Iraq – anything to avoid his folks, his ex-wife, his two kids, the ghost of his former life as a solid citizen of C-town.
So maybe he did react, so what? Watching that poor sap get shot in the head at point blank range was pretty fucking intense.
Ashes.
Ray Kroner.
And then those women and kids he’d just smoked.
Fuck me.
What is it, you see hundreds of incidents, roadside bombings, IEDs going off, firestorms, shootings, all sorts of trauma and injuries – plus some of that other stuff in Congo, holy shit – and you ride it out, you even laugh some of it off, as a survival mechanism. But then one thing comes along, a particular incident, and it may not even be such a big deal, if you’re looking at it as a scale of one-to-ten sort of thing – intensity-wise, body count-wise – but it sticks.
In your brain.
And that’s it, you’ve got it for the rest of your life, like a fucking tattoo, this single image that keeps coming back at you – when you close your eyes, when your mind drifts, when the booze wears off, when your cock goes limp again. It’s like what some couples have – our song, listen honey, they’re playing our song – well this is your song, motherfucker, all yours, and don’t you forget it.
In Szymanski’s case – with due respect to those two women and the three little kids – it’s Ray Kroner’s twisted face lying in the mud, twisted because of how the bullet stretched the top of his head off to one side.
He’s never going to get that image out of his mind. He didn’t know Kroner that well, and didn’t even like him, but now he’s stuck with him.
And you know who he blames?
Szymanski rolls over, gets off the bed and goes to the window. Some view. The back of another hotel, a much taller one, stacked rows of windows and AC units as far up as he can see. Down to the left there’s an alley-way with a thin shard of early morning street action just visible at the end of it – cars passing, MTA buses, yellow cabs, regular New York shit.
He saw him on TV a few days after he got back, on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, Meet the Press or Face the Nation or Suck my Dick, one of those, he doesn’t remember, he was flicking around, hungover as shit, waiting for room service, and up he pops on the screen, with a brace on his hand, and they spin this… this fucking fairy tale about an early morning accident on the streets of Paris. But he doesn’t want to talk about it, no, of course not, he wants to talk about the issues.
That’s who he blames.
The guy on TV.
The guy they were protecting and who Ray Kroner should have blown away when he had the fucking chance.
That’s who.
Senator John fucking Rundle.
Maria Monaghan can’t meet Jimmy until lunchtime.
Which means he has a few hours. He looks at his watch. Three hours, give or take.
So maybe he should…
Have some breakfast. Establish a little structure.