A Dying Breed, page 17
‘Look at this. These fuckers are never gonna be able to run a country, they can’t even run a roadblock.’
Trout turned to Patrick. ‘That’s off the record, by the way.’ He grinned.
Two of the Afghan officers strolled towards the Chevy, both smiling and holding up their hands as if to acknowledge the lunacy of being made to stop a US Army vehicle. Patrick felt Karim shuffle in his seat. The Afghan soldiers were almost at the Chevy and now Patrick too felt nervous and suddenly nauseous, a cold sweat on the back of his neck.
‘What’s happening?’ he whispered to Karim. The fixer looked directly ahead, his reply no louder than a whisper.
‘I’m not sure, maybe nothing. But if something bad happens, stay close with me.’
The Afghan officers came alongside the Chevy, Monneghan punched stop on the CD player and Trout wound the automatic windows down.
‘Good morning friends,’ said the man at Monneghan’s door. ‘Accept our apologies. We were told to stop everyone, even our good allies. Can I ask where you are driving to?’
‘Where the hell do you think we’re driving to? I’m on the airport road, aren’t I? I’m driving to fucking Bagram. I’m taking these VIPs up there, and thanks to you, I’m late …’
But the Afghan wasn’t listening. He was looking past the American soldier into the back of the SUV, staring hard at Karim. Patrick saw him nod in the direction of his colleague, who was standing at Trout’s window, and on this signal both men calmly lifted handguns from their sides and in almost the same moment pushed the barrels of their revolvers downwards into the necks of the two Americans and fired. Inside the closed car, the shots were close to deafening. Patrick pitched forwards and grabbed Karim’s leg with one hand. He was aware of liquid on his face and in his panicked state assumed he’d been shot. He instinctively put his other hand to the wound, but found himself intact. His palm came away coated in the blood and flesh of one of the American soldiers. Then he heard screaming; an animal sound more terrifying than the gunshot. One of the Americans was still alive.
The Afghan gunmen wrenched open the SUV’s front doors and without attempting to conceal their crime from the growing line of traffic, pulled Monneghan’s body and the still-screaming Sergeant Trout out on to the road. A third shot made Patrick jump again and the screaming stop. The gunmen jumped into the front of the vehicle. Patrick instinctively started to feel around for the door handle, but there was no time. The two Afghans who’d previously remained at the roadblock had now lifted it and were running towards the Chevy. The smaller of the two pulled open Patrick’s door and punched him in the side of the face, sending him sprawling into Karim’s lap. He leapt in just as the fourth man got in next to Karim, sandwiching the two together and shouting loudly in a language that Patrick couldn’t understand. He saw Karim nodding vigorously, trying to keep eye contact. Then he felt Karim’s hand on the side of his head, pushing him gently down into the footwell.
Karim got on to the floor alongside Patrick and whispered in his ear: ‘Keep down, don’t talk, or they say they will kill us.’
The new driver started the car and pulled hard left on the wheel. The Chevy lurched forwards and Patrick felt vomit rise in his throat as the SUV’s rear wheels bounced over the body of one of the dead Americans. As they accelerated down the wrong side of the Bagram Road there were several more sharp turns and Patrick bounced left and right. His body knocked against the leg of the soldier sitting above him, prompting a half-hearted kick in the ribs.
16 Vaffanculo!
DATELINE: Deppington, Oxfordshire, England, July 4th
Mariscal lay low in the bath listening to his heart, its dull beat moving the water above his chest. He watched the tiny ripples and counted the seconds between one plodding thud and the next. An unlit cigarette was stuck to his lower lip. He sighed deeply and heard his heartbeat slow. This was the closest he had come to a feeling of contentment for several days. He closed his eyes, then opened them again as the impatient chatter of his mobile phone sounded from the bedroom next door. He called out to his wife. ‘Lucy? Lucia, are you in there?’
There was no response. Rob hauled himself from the bath and stepped gingerly on to the white bathmat. The only towel left on the towel rail was too small to make it all the way round his midriff and so he held it in place with one hand while using the other to help him on his way across the wet floor from en suite to bedroom. Lucia was standing with her back to him, straightening the counterpane on the bed and ignoring the angry ring of her husband’s telephone. Rob muttered an oath and tiptoed round his wife, catching the phone just before it vibrated itself off the bedside table and on to the floor. He glanced at the screen: unknown number. Normally he’d let a call like that go straight to voicemail, but these weren’t normal times. He swept his finger across the screen.
‘Yeah?’
‘Mr Mariscal?’
‘Yeah.’
The voice at the other end of the phone was clipped and official; a woman’s voice. ‘I have the Foreign Secretary for you, Mr Mariscal.’
‘You do? Fantastic.’
‘Can you take the call?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. Yes, I can take the call.’
‘Hold the line please.’
There was a series of clicking sounds as the line bounced around Whitehall and then the familiar northern growl of the serving Foreign Secretary. These calls were not unusual; quite a few senior politicians liked to speak to Rob before agreeing to do an interview the following morning.
‘Rob. All right? How are you?’
‘Not too bad, thank you, Foreign Secretary. You?’
‘Good, good. Busy. Too busy. But we do our best. Listen, your lot have been talking to my lot about an interview tomorrow, but you know how I like to ’ave a word with the organ-grinder and not just leave it to the monkeys. You got a minute?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. So, brass tacks. What kind of elephant traps have you got in store for me tomorrow morning?’
Most of Rob’s available attention had been elsewhere for much of the day, but he had a kept enough of an eye on the news to know what kind of direction a lead interview on Afghanistan would have to head in. ‘Well, we’ll have to talk casualties – ours, theirs. Then equipment, what our boys need, and what they haven’t got.’
The Foreign Secretary snorted. ‘They’ve got plenty of everything, Rob, but it’s never enough. Chuffing generals always want a bigger and better train-set to play with, don’t they? Sometimes mum and dad have to say “no” and put up with the tantrum.’
Rob smiled. ‘Well, if you’d like to say that tomorrow, Foreign Secretary, please go ahead.’
A basso chuckle rolled down the line. ‘You’ll be lucky. “We’re doing absolutely everything we can for our brave boys.” That’s what you’ll get and you bloody well know it.’
‘Fair enough. Then we’ll have to ask about exit strategy and dates, I guess.’
‘If you ask me when the Army’s coming out, I’ll just dead bat it.’
‘I know you will, but you know we have to ask it anyway.’
‘Yes, yes. What else?’ The Foreign Secretary liked to negotiate to the last full stop and he didn’t mind how long that took.
Usually Rob was happy to oblige – he enjoyed the cut and thrust of these conversations – but his heart wasn’t in it tonight. ‘Maybe a bit of Israel or the wider Middle East, if there’s anything going on, but that’s about it, I think. I’m happy to throw you an open-ended one, if you’ve got something you want to put out there?’
The Foreign Secretary laughed again. ‘Really? What is this, my bloody birthday? Or are you going soft in your old age? No, I don’t need any open questions, thank you very much. I know you, Rob. There’s always a catch. I’m sure you’ve got something up your sleeve. But don’t you worry, old son, I’ll be ready for you. See you in the morning.’
The line went dead. Rob removed the towel from his waist and dabbed the phone dry before gazing at the blank blue screen. The Foreign Secretary was wrong; he had nothing up his sleeve. He walked back to the bathroom. The water in the tub had cooled but the bath was still more inviting than anywhere else he could think of, so he put the phone on the side and climbed back in. In his haste to take the call, he’d dropped his cigarette into the water and flecks of brown tobacco now floated among the bubbles. He swished them away, unfolded his pale frame, and stretched out. Using his big toe, he turned the hot tap back on, whipping his foot away just in time to avoid scalding it.
The rush of water was louder than Lucia’s footfall and when his wife appeared at his shoulder, he jumped. She spent some minutes tidying up around the sink, putting toothbrushes, toothpaste and a cake of soap back in the correct place, before turning to face her husband. Mariscal moved his arms from his sides and cupped his hands self-consciously around his genitalia. He tried to make it look a relaxed and natural position, but the apprehension on his face, and the positioning of his hands, made him look like a naked footballer about to defend a free kick. In another time, at an earlier point in their relationship, the sight of Rob like this – vulnerable and absurd – would have reduced Lucia to fits of easy laughter. But the smiling and laughing stage of their marriage seemed to be behind them. He observed his wife; her long white linen trousers and red heels, her loose denim shirt, untucked. Dark hair tied up. No jewellery. Rob had always been impressed by how good she could look with so little effort. He knew that part of the trick was that his wife looked different. His original and originally affectionate nickname for Lucia had been the Camel, and it was obvious why: the high step, huge eyes and exaggerated grace, together with the ability to look exotic and out of place no matter where she happened to be; and especially here, Rob thought, especially in this picture-postcard English village.
Before she was Mrs Mariscal, she was Lucia Vivendi and there was even more life in the woman than the name. Roman by birth and in temperament, she had been working as the London stringer for an Italian news agency when Mariscal met her, in the Today programme green room early one May morning. He fell for her heavily and immediately, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Rob had never wanted anything as much as he’d wanted Lucia. Nor had he ever had to work as hard at anything as he had at courting her.
‘What did the Foreign Secretary want to talk about?’ Although she’d lived in England for nearly two decades, Lucia’s Roman accent was strong and she pronounced every word in every sentence with great care. Rob used to think this sounded sexy. Now it made her sound stern.
‘Oh, you know, the usual. He’s on tomorrow. Wanted to know what we’d ask him ’bout Afghanistan, Israel, Middle East, that kind of thing.’
‘And you told him?’
‘I gave him a few clues, yes.’
Lucia nodded. The smile was not a warm one. ‘Maybe the children and I should try and talk to you about those places? Israel, Afghanistan?’
Rob knew exactly what was coming but found himself unable or unwilling to do anything other than assume his usual position, on one side of an old argument. ‘I’d love to talk to you about Afghanistan, Lucy, what would you like to know?’ It was well-trodden ground but that didn’t stop them returning to it again and again. The argument revolved around what Lucia referred to as Rob’s ‘perverse pattern of attention’.
‘What I’d like to know, Rob, is how you manage to be so interested in these things that are happening thousands of miles away? But at the same time, you are totally disinterested in what’s happening here, right in front of your face? How do you manage that?’ The question was rhetorical. Rob wasn’t expected to say anything and he knew he shouldn’t.
But tonight, he couldn’t help himself. ‘It’s “uninterested”.’
‘What?’
‘It’s “uninterested” not “disinterested”. Disinterested means impartial, like—’
‘Vaffanculo!’
Rob heard the angry ricochet of high heels on the hard floor as she stormed from the bathroom. ‘I wish you would fuck me, Lucy. Maybe that’d help. Maybe that’s what we need …’ he shouted after her.
Lucia either didn’t hear or chose to ignore him. Rob heard her shout down the stairs to their two daughters. When she was angry her Italian accent grew more pronounced and both girls answered quickly.
Rob felt strangely elated by the row. He was glad that Lucia had picked a fight and glad to feel the heat of an argument. Back in the old days, they argued all the time. It was a game or, at the very least, a shared hobby. They fought long and loud and bitterly, but they always made up and it was the making up that Rob most looked forward to. These days they rarely fought and they never made up. Rob placed another unlit cigarette between his lips. Yes, he’d take the heat of an argument, however short-lived, over whatever it was they had at the moment. Polite small talk, cold silences; the marital equivalent of a never-ending nuclear winter.
He and his wife had made two mistakes. One mistake each, at least, that was how Rob saw it. The marriage wasn’t a mistake. They were both happier married than they had ever been before. The first mistake was having children, and having children had been Lucia’s idea. The change came two years into married life with the arrival of a daughter, and then, just over a year later, another. From Mariscal’s point of view, the time, attention and affection Lucia then had available for him was halved and halved again. He knew this wasn’t how a father was meant to react to the arrival of his first- and second-born, but he couldn’t help it, it was how he felt; short-changed and cheated.
So the children were Lucia’s mistake. Leaving London was his. Moving to the country had been all Rob’s idea and it had taken him a long time to talk his wife round. She’d been born in a great city and had lived happily in several others. She had nothing against the English countryside but no particular affection for it either. Mariscal started with all the usual arguments: better schools, fresh air, more room for the kids to grow and play, less dog shit. When these arguments made no impression, Rob ordered an unnecessary office subscription to Country Life and started bringing the magazine home each week, leaving it lying around where Lucia was bound to find it. At first she recycled the magazine as soon as she saw it, but slowly the rich, rolling lawns, loggias and turquoise swimming pools drew her in. She began to browse, then graze and before long she was scouring the magazine’s colourful pages looking for the Mariscal family idyll hidden somewhere inside.
The cracks started to show almost as soon as they had unpacked and redecorated. The village was pretty – and the house was perfect – but the people were a problem. Through his regular visits to the village pub, Rob realised long before Lucia that their new neighbours were a collection of the humdrum, the worn out and the undeserving rich. ‘There are none so mean as those who are given money without grafting for it.’ He remembered his dead father’s words but he remembered them too late; he wondered how long it would take Lucia to reach the same inevitable conclusion.
After she’d finished fixing up the house and had settled the children at the local school, Lucia started to devote more time to exploring the village. One of her earliest and most enjoyable discoveries was the local charity shop. She recovered and recycled bagfuls of designer clothes donated to the shop by local ladies bountiful and began to wear these clothes in public. Twice in Rob’s presence she had worn a hand-me-down dress to a local dinner party. Each time she drew admiring comments from the outfit’s original owner and her husband. When she refused these compliments and pointed out that you could wear just about anything with her frame, Rob knew that as far as Lucia was concerned, she was just stating a fact. He also knew that that wasn’t what most of the women heard. Weeks later, when Lucia wondered out loud why there were so few new donations hanging on the charity shop rails, Rob feigned ignorance. He knew that his wife’s new friends would rather burn a thousand pounds worth of designer gear in a brazier in their back garden than see it worn by someone else to greater effect. And this was the sort of place he had brought his new family to. When he allowed himself to think about it, he felt profoundly guilty. So he didn’t think about it. Instead, he spent more time at work and therefore more time in London, eventually arguing that it made more sense for him to stay in town during the week and just return for weekends.
All these things had happened, like most things happen, incrementally, and it was nearly three years into their new life in the country when Lucia woke one Wednesday morning and realised she was effectively marooned. If she had wanted, she could have ordered and organised a return; her father was wealthy and would have happily put his hand in his pocket and paid for the family to return to London. He had been against her relationship with Rob from the outset, against the marriage, and most vehemently against the move to ‘nowhere’. But asking for his help meant admitting a mistake, and also the children were in school now – they had good friends, even if she didn’t. She would make this work and if she couldn’t do that, she would settle for making everyone else believe that she had made it work.
They were better in company and so weekend guests, friends and family were encouraged, almost bullied into visiting. From their arrival on Friday evening to their departure on Sunday afternoon, Lucia put on a bravura display. Fuelled by red wine and the occasional gift of a gram of cocaine, she was the happy hostess, the dutiful wife. She cooked and served and laughed and played after-dinner games. She got her old record player out, piled a dozen Italian and English forty-fives on top of the machine’s mechanical arm and danced alone until others joined in. As the late nights turned to early mornings, she might go so far as to run a hand through Rob’s ragged hair, even sit on his lap, her arm flung casually around her husband’s neck. Sometimes these performances were so convincing that even Rob himself believed something might have changed, only to find his Paisley pyjamas back outside the spare room come Sunday night. So he would catch the first train back to London on Monday morning and stay there till Thursday or sometimes Friday. He told himself and others that this was the perfect arrangement. But without Lucia’s day-to-day influence, the loose threads of his life had started to fray. His personal life became messy, and his financial situation fraught.
