Old Enemies (30 page)

‘You can’t!’ The words came as a wail of anguish, and her hands began flailing at his chest with such wretchedness that Harry was taken aback. Her pain seemed so much more than an act. She was sobbing profoundly, battling to take each breath, her face fallen forward and buried in his chest, the tears real and already soaking through his shirt.

‘You can’t leave Ruari,’ she whimpered.

She raised her eyes to him, the tears flickering in the firelight like a necklace of diamonds.

‘Harry, he’s your son.’

Harry had once been close, too close, to a mortar round. It was outside Baghdad, on that mission to snatch an Iraqi general shortly before that first Gulf War. He and his buddy had already been wounded, and then in the dark some outfit of the Republican Guard had started lobbing mortars, pretty lightweight stuff but they’d got lucky and one of the shells had blown Harry and his chum clean off their feet. There were plenty of fragments, too; Harry escaped serious injury but the shrapnel found his partner, and that’s what eventually killed him. Harry could never forget the sensation that immediately followed the blast. He had no idea where he was, even who he was, the disorientation was total, his thoughts scrambled, his lungs bursting, until eventually he woke up to find himself crawling through the sand. And that was precisely how he felt now.

‘It can’t be.’

Harry had to struggle to produce each word, forcing it out, yet even as he tried to deny what Terri had told him he began to doubt himself. Suddenly he realized he had no idea how old Ruari was, early teens to judge by the family photographs, but that’s all they were, photographs, already out of date even by the time they were put in their frames.

It had been seventeen years, and then a few months, since Paris. June. The sixth, to be exact. How deeply it had carved its way inside his memory.

She took a step back from him to give him room to breathe, and to think. ‘I was already seeing J.J. by then, and I’d decided I couldn’t carry on with you, even though I loved you so much, Harry. It’s true. I didn’t know I was pregnant, and by the time I did, I couldn’t even be sure whose child it was.’

Harry’s mouth had gone dry, his words seemed to stumble over each other. ‘When did you find out?’

‘Not until much later. By that time I was married to J.J., and you were back with Julia.’

‘And you never let me know.’

‘How could I? What would you have done, Harry? Torn all our worlds apart, that’s what you would have done. Neither J.J. nor Julia deserved that.’

‘How did you find out? About me and Ruari?’

‘Oh, Harry, you only have to know you both to see that. He has little features, his ears, his fingers, the shape of his head, that are pure you, but it’s inside, in his character, that you find it most. He’s wilful. Ridiculously stubborn. Totally determined. Typical Jones.’ Somehow she was smiling through her tears.

He turned away, trying to shield himself, only to be forced back. ‘And . . . J.J.? Does he know?’

‘We’ve never talked about it. Sometimes I think he’s guessed but . . . Harry, he’s been a brilliant father to Ruari. He may not be the most gifted athlete, he’s rubbish at football and far too serious for his own good, but he loves Ruari and has always done his best.’

‘I think he knows.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said sadly.

‘We’ll all have a lot of sorting out to do after this.’

‘After what?’

‘After we’ve got Ruari back.’

‘So you’ll help?’

‘You do ask the most ridiculous questions.’

And before he could say any more she was in his arms once again, and this time she didn’t run away.

Barriers had come down, past lies and all the hurts that went with them had been ripped away. From this point their worlds were never going to be the same. The longing was mutual and they said not another word until they had satisfied it. It was madness, it was escape, it was both celebration and selfish distraction, it was love, greed, desperation, lust, all those things. They spoke without words, reliving old times, trying to lose themselves, and when they had finished they lay back amongst the cushions in front of the fire, seeing their bodies as though for the first time, and remembering. It was so much like it had once been – and then it seemed too much so. Their pasts had been irreconcilable, their obligations inescapable, and reliving those long-lost moments served to remind them only that they were buried as deeply and as inextricably as ever within the troubles of the present.

‘Have we just made everything worse?’ she whispered.

Worse? How much worse could it get? Everything had changed, and not just between the two of them. The nature of the kidnap had changed, too. What had once been political had now turned to money, and a huge amount of it, while the deadline had been cut from months to days. Bodies with their throats ripped out suggested their adversaries lacked any shred of pity, and they no longer had any idea who their adversaries were, or where they and Ruari might be.

‘I’m not sure we can handle it any more, Harry,’ she said. ‘
We
’, that wonderful, exquisitely tormenting pronoun, so short and yet bursting with significance, for he knew she was back to talking about her and her husband. She sighed, rested her head on Harry’s shoulder. ‘J.J.’s in another place. I think he’s in danger of breaking, Harry. He knows that if he manages to raise the ransom money it will destroy everything he’s ever tried to create, but if we don’t get Ruari back, that will destroy him even more completely. It’s more than one life at stake here. I don’t know how much more he can take.’ She had just cheated on her husband, but there was no mistaking her care for him. Harry tried to remember whether he had felt like that with Julia.

‘Let me help pay the ransom.’

‘You?’ She ran a finger gently down his cheek until it stopped on his lips. ‘No, I can’t let you do that. J.J. has enough people trying to crucify him, and you would be the last nail. He doesn’t deserve that. He mustn’t know about you, Harry, not yet at least.’

‘I can’t let Ruari suffer simply because J.J. isn’t able to raise the money.’

She took his face in her hands, brought it close. ‘And I won’t let J.J. suffer simply because you can.’ This wasn’t just about Ruari, it was about them all, and she was taking charge, navigating through the reefs that surrounded them. ‘He’ll do his bit, whatever it takes. The Breslins are stubborn, too.’

‘Ah, I almost forgot. Sean.’

‘He’s said he’ll help, of course. With the money. And he’s booked on the morning flight to Trieste. Somewhere to start picking up the threads once more. He says it’s better than simply sitting here waiting.’

‘He’s probably right.’ No, certainly right, Harry realized. There was no substitute for having a man on the ground, behind enemy lines. That had often been his job. ‘I’ll go with him,’ he heard himself saying.

‘You? And Sean?’ She couldn’t hide her incredulity.

‘Share resources. Experiences.’

‘You and Sean?’ she repeated.

‘It’s about Ruari, not about him and me. He told me that himself.’

And he reminded Sean of those words when he phoned him a few minutes later, after he’d torn himself away from Terri and thrown on some clothes.

‘So you’ll be coming with me, will you, Mr Jones?’ the Irishman responded. ‘Covering all the bases, you say? One man at high table, the other in the gutter. So tell me, which one of us is the better equipped for the gutter?’

‘Only one way to find out, Sean.’

‘You may be right.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

Sean was about to put down the phone when he hesitated, another thought in the air. ‘Are you with my daughter-in-law by any chance?’

The old bastard knew. No point in dodging the fact. ‘I am.’

There was a silence, a short hesitation as Sean digested the news. Harry thought he was working up some form of rebuke, but even as he waited for the outburst of denunciation, the line went dead. He found the silence more damning than words.

They met the following morning at Gatwick Airport. They didn’t fly direct to Trieste with Ryanair, the Irish airline, but flew instead to Venice on a rival carrier. When Harry asked why he was told in the curtest terms that Sean had once had a falling out with what he called ‘those dozy gombeens at Ryanair’ and hadn’t flown them since.

It seemed to Harry that the Irish could never let go of a slight, even with each other. So they had flown into Italy across the dark, silted lagoons of Venice, where they hired a car and took the coastal road to Trieste, which brought them to the centre of the city by nightfall. Throughout the entire journey, although they sat together, Harry and Sean exchanged barely a word.

Trieste had once been one of the major ports of Europe, the main outlet to the sea of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lavished pomp and riches upon it in a manner they thought befitting their status as the pre-eminent power on the continent. And typical of the Habsburg mind, they ended up with a city that was solid and familiar, logical and spacious, but lacking in any great landmark or signature; it was all trombones and dumplings, with barely a Latin flourish in sight. Whatever eminence the place had came to an abrupt end with two bullets fired at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the imperial throne, and his wife, Sophie. Their coffins were brought back in sombre procession through Trieste, and some said the city had been in mourning ever since. A century later it was a small town by the sea, with a population of two hundred thousand souls and declining, its port much redundant, its mercantile princes largely fled, its old quarter that dated back to Roman times half-updated but never finished, a little bit of Austria on the Italian coast where the local
osterias
still served boiled pork in the middle-European way and many of the old barmen in this town of watering holes and coffee shops still greeted their guests with a very Germanic ‘Bitte?’. Yet as Harry and Sean made their way towards their hotel on the central piazza, they saw people promenading in the typical North Italian manner, the women walking arm in arm, wrapped in their furs against the winter breeze, the miniature dogs strutting on their short legs and leads, the menfolk following dutifully behind. Some writers complained that Trieste had no clear character, yet it was perhaps nearer the truth to suggest that it had many different characters, and the inhabitants simply hadn’t bothered to decide which they preferred. Many newcomers and transients like D’Amato made the glib mistake of identifying character with authority, but when they had passed away or simply passed on, like so many before them, the Bora would still blow, the ferry would still leave for Albania, and Trieste would remain staring out across the Adriatic, as it always had, waiting for whomever or whatever came next.

Yet if Harry was expecting mediocrity, he was pleasantly surprised. Terri, who had made their reservations, sent them to the Grand Hotel Duchi d’Aosta on the central Piazza dell’Unità. The exterior of the building suggested little more than a slice of solid Habsburgian conformity yet inside it was an eye-popper, filled with quirky North Italian delights and period pieces. ‘No hardship here, then,’ Sean muttered as he gazed around the foyer, ‘not that there’ll be any time to enjoy it.’ They had an appointment the following morning, at ten, with D’Amato.

‘Will you be eating in our restaurant tonight, sir?’ the concierge enquired. ‘We think it is the finest in the city. It’s called Harry’s Grill.’

‘Suddenly lost my appetite,’ Sean replied sullenly.

‘And I’m going for a walk,’ Harry added. ‘Get to know this place.’

So they left their suitcases and went their separate ways, Sean heading off into the night while Harry began his walk. He spent no more than two hours, but that was all it needed to familiarize himself with the heart of Trieste – the Piazza dell’Unità dressed in its Christmas fare, the quietly lit seafront, the downcast docks, the Grand Canal which was no longer so grand. Only when he was almost back in the Piazza dell’Unità did he stumble upon the narrow streets of the Old City with its two thousand years of history. They were still adding to it in their own distinctly chaotic fashion; many of the buildings on its largely pedestrianized streets were empty, in the process of refurbishment, their windows barred, their doors blocked, but much of the work had already been abandoned, with weeds encroaching on the fresh render and threatening to swamp the temporary power lines. He walked through a maze of alleys and ate pasta at a restaurant that in the summer would spill out onto one of the paved squares. While he ate he examined his fellow diners, wondering if any of them might have answers to his questions.