Excellent.
I adjusted the position of my chair and closed my eyes for a while, letting the sun get in amongst the crow’s feet. ‘Master,’ said a voice, ‘a rare and special pleasure.’
I looked round and saw a figure in a brown raincoat squinting down at me.
‘This seat taken?’ said Solomon. He sat in it without waiting for an answer.
I stared at him.
‘Hello, David,’ I said eventually.
I knocked a cigarette out of its packet while he signalled a waiter. I glanced over at the two Sunglasses, but they were looking as far away from me as possible every time I turned.
‘Kava, prosim,’ said Solomon, in what seemed like a pretty handy accent. He turned to me. ‘Good coffee, terrible food.
That’s what I’ve been putting on my postcards.’
‘It’s not you,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it? Who is it then?’
I kept on staring. It was all most unexpected. ‘Let me put it this way,’ I said. ‘Is it you?’
‘Do you mean is it me sitting here, or is it me you’re supposed to be meeting?’
‘David.’
‘It’s both, sir.’ Solomon leaned back to let the waiter unload the coffee. He took a sip and smacked his lips with approval. ‘I have the honour to be acting as trainer for the duration of your stay in this territory. I trust you will find the relationship a profitable one.’
I nodded my head in the direction of the Sunglasses. ‘They with you?’
‘That’s the idea, master. Not one that they like very much, but that’s all right.’
‘American?’ He nodded.
‘As apple pie. This operation is very, very joint. Much jointer than we’ve had it for a long time, as a matter of fact. A good thing, all in all.’
I thought for a while.
‘But why didn’t they tell me?’ I said. ‘I mean, they knew I knew you, so why didn’t they tell me?’
He shrugged.
‘Are we not but teeth on the cogs of a gigantic machine, sir?’
Well, quite.
Of course, I wanted to ask Solomon everything.
I wanted to take him right back to the beginning - to reconstruct all that we knew about Barnes, and O’Neal, and Murdah, and Dead Wood and Graduate Studies - so that between us we’d be able to triangulate some kind of position in this mess, and perhaps even plot a course out of it.
But there were reasons why I couldn’t. Big, strapping reasons that stuck their hands up at the back of the class and wriggled about in their seats, forcing me to listen to them. If I told him what I thought I knew, Solomon would either do the right thing or the wrong thing. The right thing would, very possibly, get Sarah and me killed, and, very certainly, wouldn’t stop what was coming. It might postpone it, get it replayed on another pitch at another time, but it wouldn’t stop it. The wrong thing didn’t bear thinking about. Because the wrong thing would mean that Solomon was on the other team, and when you come right down to it, nobody knows anybody.
So, for the time being, I shut up and listened while Solomon ran over the fine print on how I was expected to pass the next forty-eight hours. He spoke fast but calmly, and we covered a lot of ground in ninety minutes, thanks to him not having to say ‘this is real important’ every other sentence, as the Americans had done.
The Sunglasses drank Coke.
I had the afternoon to myself, and as it looked like being the last one I’d get for a while, I wasted it extravagantly. I drank wine, read old newspapers, listened to an open-air performance of some Mahler, and generally sported myself as a gentleman of leisure.
I met a French woman in a bar who said she worked for a computer software company, and I asked her if she’d have sex with me. She just shrugged, Frenchly, which I took to mean no.
Eight o’clockwas the appointed hour, so I dawdled in a cafe until ten past, pushing another helping of boiled pork and dumplings around the plate and smoking immoderately. I paid the bill and walked out into the cool evening, at last feeling my pulse shake itself up at the prospect of action.
I knew I had no reason to feel good. I knew that the job was almost impossible, that the road ahead was long, rocky, and had very few petrol stations, and that my chances of makingthree score years and ten had dropped through the floor.
But, for whatever reason, good is what I felt.
Solomon was waiting for me at the rendezvous with one of the Sunglasses. One of the pairs of sunglasses, I mean. Although of course he wasn’t wearing sunglasses now, it being dark, so I quickly had to concoct a new name for him. After a few moments thought, I came up with No Sunglasses. I think there may be a touch of Cree Indian in me.
I apologised for being late, and Solomon smiled and said I wasn’t, which was irritating, and then all three of us climbed into a dirty, grey diesel Mercedes, with No Sunglasses at the wheel, and set off on the main road out of the east of the city.
After half-an-hour we’d cleared the outskirts ofPrague, and the road had narrowed to two fastish lanes, which we took at an easy pace. Just about the worst way to fuck up a covert operation on foreign soil is to get a speeding ticket, and No Sunglasses seemed to have learnt this lesson well enough. Solomon and I passed the occasional remark about the countryside, how green it was, how parts of it looked a bit likeWales - although I’m not sure if either of us had ever been there - but otherwise we didn’t talk much. Instead, we drew pictures on the steamed-up rear windows whileEurope unfolded outside, Solomon doing flowers and me doing happy faces.
After an hour the signs started showing forBrno, which never looks right written down, and never sounds right said, either, but I knew we weren’t going that far. We turned north towards Kostelec, and then almost immediately east again, on an even narrower road, with no signs at all. Which just about summed things up.
We wound through a few miles of black pine forest, and then No Sunglasses went on to side-lights, which cut our speed down. After a few miles of that, he doused the lights altogether, and told me to put out my cigarette because it was ‘fucking with his night vision’.
And then, all of a sudden, we were there.
They’d been keeping him in the basement of a farm house. For how long, I couldn’t tell - I only knew that it wasn’t going to be for much longer. He was about my age, about my height, probably had been about my weight before they’d stopped feeding him. They said his name was Ricky, and that he came fromMinnesota. They didn’t say that he was scared out of his wits and wanted to go back toMinnesota as soon as he could, because they didn’t have to. It was in his eyes, as clearly as anything has ever been in anyone’s eyes.
Ricky had dropped out at the age of seventeen. Dropped out of school, dropped out of his family, dropped out of just about everything that a young man can drop out of - but then, pretty soon, he’d dropped into some other things, alternative things, and they’d made him feel better about himself. For a while, anyway.
Ricky felt a lot worse about himself at this moment; most probably because he’d managed to get himself into one of those situations where you’re naked in the cellar of a strange building, in a strange country, with strangers staring at you, some of whom have obviously been hurting you for a while, and others of whom are just waiting to take their turn. Flickering across the back of Ricky’s mind, I knew, were images from a thousand films, in which the hero, trussed-up in the same predicament, throws back his head with an insolent sneer and tells his tormentors to go screw themselves. And Ricky had sat in the dark, along with millions of other teenage boys, and duly absorbed the lesson that this is how men are supposed to behave in adversity. They endure, first of all; then they avenge.