For politeness, he said, 'It's a fine station – and I enjoyed the music.'
'The music is not for your enjoyment,' she responded curtly.
'I don't understand. Why, then, is it played?'
'Psychologists told us to – narcotics addicts hate classical music broadcast loud. It's why they are not here. The music makes the station free of them. We have in Hamburg a big drugs problem, and you should be careful in the city, most careful where accommodation is inexpensive… We are cursed by immigrants and the crime levels they bring, most particularly the Albanians. Enjoy your visit.'
He went out into a brittle midday sunlight. The wind trapped his hair and scoured his face. Beyond the stalls, when he reached the edge of the big, wide square that burst with traffic, he paused, opened the map and took his bearings.
He had come to destroy a man, but did not know how and would have been hard put to articulate why
– except that breaking the man was the only road sign posted to him as a way back for his pride.
After he had crossed the square and had started out down a wide street, he understood why the woman in the tourist kiosk had curled her lip when he had insisted on a cheap room. So little money had been given him that he must husband it. She had sent him to where rooms were inexpensive, on the Steindamm.
He passed shops that sold sex videos and sex gear, and by cafes where Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians or Afghans lounged on plastic chairs, and by doorways where hookers – young and old, heavy-hipped and skeletal thin – waited, smoked and eyed him. He saw the sign for rooms to rent. He stopped.
A woman, African, stared at him. Her chest bulged in a halter-top and her thighs were bare below the short, tight skirt. She sucked at her cigarette, then blew the smoke at him but the wind snatched it away.
He smiled, but shook his head. The recruits in Basic Training had talked sex – talked sex, described sex, gloried in sex. Had sat around the TV while the videos played sex, had boasted sex. Malachy Kitchen's first sex had been with a girl from a farm, in a barn, on the edge of the Devon village where his parents had moved to. Second sex had been with a corporal's wife, and he'd washed for a week afterwards, had scrubbed himself and prayed there wouldn't be a rash to show for it. Third sex had been with a girl at the end of a ball at the Royal Military Academy: he hadn't known her name, had been half-cut and it had been under a tree across the grass from the Old Building. Fourth sex had been with Roz. He gestured, he hoped politely, to the prostitute from Africa that he wanted to pass by her and she moved aside with reluctance. He went inside and there was a man at the counter, small, wiry, with plastered hair, and he asked in the correct German, as taught him, for a room.
'For one hour or for two hours?'
He shook his head.
'For a half-day?'
He said he wanted a room to stay in, and sleep in – alone.
'For how many nights?'
Malachy was about to say that he did not know, but that seemed inadequate. For three nights. He was given a price. No haggling, no dispute. The key was handed to him, and then, as an afterthought, a residents' book was opened on the counter and a pen pushed forward.
He thought of giving the name Ricky Capel, and the address Bevin Close. He shook his head, heaved the black plastic sack on to his shoulder and started to climb the stairs. On the first landing, in one of the rooms that would have been hired for an hour or two he heard a bed's springs whine. On the second landing a man came by him still pulling up his zip. He was wondering how long it would be before the African girl took a client to the first or second floor. He went on up.
The room allocated to Malachy was bare but for a bed, a basin and a faded print of a mountain scene. He crossed a worn rug over linoleum and dropped his sack.
He was there because of what had been said to him, and said of him – none of it yet wiped.
14 January 2004
'Is it a crisis? That's what I'm asking.'
'Way outside my loop of experience. What I can tell you, he's not a mark on him.'
'I've got a gunshot wound, a PI category, and a road-traffic accident casualty – and a Jock with a scorpion sting.
Where in that does Kitchen figure?'
'For God's sake,'Fergal said, 'I'm the adjutant. You're the MO. You want my judgement – pretty far down, propping up the heap, I'd say
… From what they said at Bravo, maybe a bit lower than propping it up.'
The medical officer was bent over the trolley. The gunshot victim was dosed with morphine. It was an ugly wound, but a challenge for him. He had to stabilize the man before he could be shipped out by helicopter. Not much else he could do. What struck him, as he probed to get the worst of the detritus from the wound – fragments of the bullet, fragments of the camouflage trouser material – was the consummate bravery of the young guy. Not a whimper, not a scream, not a shout. Trust in his watering eyes… A damn good soldier. And alongside him, flat out on the second trolley and waiting patiently for his turn, was the casualty from the road-traffic accident. Oh, God – and there was the I Corps captain, who stood remote from them in the doorway and had not spoken since Fergal had brought him to the aid post.
'What's the latest on that bloody chopper – or are the blue jobs on a day off?'
The adjutant peered over his shoulder. 'You wouldn't think so much stuff could get in there… Extraordinary.
They had a dust storm back at Brigade, but the RAF are up now. The chopper's ETA is just down from thirty minutes.
Is that going to be time enough?'
The medical officer growled, 'Have to be, won't it? For both of them.'
As a captain, the MO had the qualifications of a general-duties doctor. He had trained at medical school in London and had then thought that any future was better than an inner-city practice so he'd joined the army and been posted to the Scottish regiment. The work gave him swagger and was not demanding. Back in the UK, at the regiment's barracks, he spent his time patching up injuries from training and sports. In Iraq, his duties varied between extremes: from gunshot wounds to the complicated childbirth problems of local women. He was accepted: his skills were admired from Sunray down to the youngest soldier, and he revelled in it.
With minute tweezers he lifted clear threads of cotton cloth matted in the blood. He stood to his full height. 'Not much more I can do.'