Charlie Johnson in the Flames. Michael Ignatieff
while hers had a queenly disdain which he came to admire.
He had said to her once that she should be running a small country. She laughed and then said in her dark voice, ‘No, Charlie, it is enough to run you.’ So she stayed: they all got younger, except Charlie and her. He supposed they were about the same age though with women you could never be sure. She was the subject of much speculation, most of it sexual, because of the perfume and a couple of cream outfits that made even soundmen, the most boring train spotters in their business, sit up and sniff the office air like hungry dogs. But because she was Eastern European, and ‘kept to herself’ and was older than most of the crews, nobody had tried anything, or come back to tell about it. She knew everything of course because she processed all the expense claims. What male sordidness was there in those piles of chits: trips to brothels, doctor’s bills for the clap, hard-core services of every description, which they dropped on her desk, followed by comical, bold-facing lying, about why none of it looked as bad as it seemed. Charlie had tried it on a few times himself, but she was never fooled. She listened expressionless and then tossed back two of his claims just to let him know that she was not taken in by his low-rent villainies.
They had become friends, but he couldn’t remember when. Not at first, but slowly over the years. He would sit on the edge of her desk, pass her a cup of coffee from the machine and that was when he got used to talking to her, got used to her kind of listening, which was intent and detached and seemed to know where he was going before he got there. He would tell her about the assignments, and because she’d done the flights and hotels, hired the fixer, she understood. She knew where you could get a decent camera in Peshawar or Luanda or whatever, and had once hired a plane which extricated him from Kigali when nobody was landing there. Her competence back at the fort came to be something he depended on in the field. You could tell your story quickly and she didn’t need a lot of explanation. So a certain complicity had developed. One-sided, he now realised, because he didn’t talk about home and she never ventured the slightest hint about her private life. The one time he took a step into that terrain, asking what she was doing that weekend, she replied, looking up over her glasses, ‘That is none of your business.’ And then she threw him out because she had too much paper, she said. ‘Get out, Charlie. Come back some other time. I’m busy now.’
Then there came the day he returned from the funeral in the States. She stopped him in the corridor to say that he didn’t look so good, and he walked into her office and slumped in the seat in front of her desk. He told her about his dad, a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, out of Des Moines, six foot four and a half in his stocking feet, who had liberated the camp, with Mika in it, in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1945. He had taken Mika back to Dedham, Mass., where he turned her into an American and gave her a sense that the world would always be steady under their feet, until the Sunday morning when Mika found him by the work-bench, every spanner, wrench and screwdriver still in its place on the wall, lying on the garage floor, dead of a heart attack at sixty-three. If Charlie thought about it now, Frank’s passing was the beginning of the bad period, for Mika had nestled like a bird in Frank’s arms for forty years. When he was no longer there, she soon ceased to be there either, which was why their son, Charles Johnson, who had gone to war like his father and trusted to his strength as much as she had, sat in Etta’s office and found himself swallowing his tears.
You could explain their being in the hotel together, he thought, by this history of confession, except that you wouldn’t want to exaggerate. Apart from that one time, talking about the death of both of his parents, there hadn’t been all that much confessing.
There was a lot she did not know, like, for example, why he had called her, and not his wife, when the Navy hospital had discharged him. He didn’t either. So that made two of them. They were there in the hotel, waiting until the reason became obvious to both of them, and he would either return to his life or blow it up.
‘You are in the rootcellar, Charlie,’ she said.
The squad didn’t come through the door, not then anyway. The half-track moved on slowly with its treads making a clinking sound like hot coals slipping down in a grate. Nobody moved, not in the cellar, not in the house above. It was like that for hours. They did nothing but sit there, once moving over to the pile of onions to piss, which left them stuck with the smell of their urine and the onions mixing together in the dirt.
A man could die of restlessness. If you believed you had to take charge of all the waiting – that was the way to get yourself wasted. That day he learned from Jacek how to wait: to go into a special Polish Catholic zone of attentive motionlessness, waiting for the sun to make its transit of the dirty window, watching the blades of grass flame as the sun went through them.
But the people in the house went out. From the cellar window, Charlie couldn’t see more than an old man and the woman, who must have been his daughter, working in the vegetable patch. The patrol came by twice. If the old man and the woman were hiding the presence of the strangers in their rootcellar, they were doing a terrific job. If they were about to betray them, they were also doing a terrific job. Charlie had no idea what was going to happen.
The light was fading, and the cover of a possible escape was coming up rapidly when Benny flicked on the radio and whispered his call sign. Jacek leaned his head against the cellar wall and closed his eyes. ‘Idiot,’ he whispered. Exactly. As if the patrols weren’t monitoring every band. Then there was a scratchy reply, low but distinct. So now they had to move, because the patrols would be back, zeroing in on where Benny’s signal came from.
Benny went first, beckoning them up from the cellar and giving them the run sign, and they hurtled down the short passage to the light, clearing the village track and blundering into the trees the other side. When they reached the woods, Charlie turned and looked back: there were eyes watching him from the window of the house.
‘We shouldn’t have left them.’
‘It happened too fast,’ she said.
She was not there to pronounce absolution. But then it occurred to him it wasn’t she who was interested in absolution. It was him.
Benny hadn’t been that wrong, just five hundred yards wrong, and they found the rebel command post on the first ridge among the pines, within sight of the house. Except that ‘command post’ was ridiculous for just a dug-out so well hidden that it might have been a trap for animals. There were three of them, village boys, absurdly young and not exactly inspiring confidence, but they had face camouflage which made them look like semi-serious killers and in the forest gloom Charlie could see RPGs, Zastavas and some armour-piercing shells on a clip. Jacek was happy because he could turn over and Charlie did a breathless stand-up, in the dug-out, trying to project enough sound volume to get picked up on the camera mike, but not enough to get them caught, with the red-rimmed eyes of the fighters just visible at the rear of the shot. Looks real, Jacek said, after he had checked the gate, except that Charlie knew it wasn’t especially real. The camera always had a way of flattening things out, leaching the danger out of any moment. Danger or not, it was a good career move. Charlie had a report proving that the guerrillas were still active in villages within four miles of the border. And the twenty-somethings were still dozing in the American Bar. Now all they had to do was get it up the hillside when the darkness came, reach the sat phone in the Jeep and beam it back.
‘So Shandler could pass you in the hall and give you his significant nod,’ Etta said.
‘Fuck Shandler. And his significant nod,’ Charlie said.
He slowly slipped down so that he was lying with his head in her lap. She did not play with his hair; she did not stroke his chin or rub her hand along his eyebrows. She let him use her lap: that was all. And she would stick a cigarette between his lips from time to time. His palms hurt and when he went to scratch them against each other, she stopped him. ‘You were lucky,’ the surgeon said. ‘All you needed to lose was another fraction of an inch, and you’d have been in trouble.’ A half-second more. The terrifying unworthiness of good luck.
Etta asked if he had seen Jacek’s footage, but he shook his head. There was a television in the room, but he didn’t even want to watch the competition. Santini was probably down there right now.