Afterward we lay in bed, relaxed and swapping old stories that had always made us laugh. We had made it, it seemed. One journey completed and another begun. The window was thrown open to the night noises of the sea, with a full view of the stars.
“You see?” she said. “It’s not always so hard finding perfection.”
“Sure beats making it in a tent out in the middle of nowhere.”
“No more of that, I guess. God, when I think of all the strange places we’ve made love. Maybe we should make a list.”
“We could have your aunt Aleksandra put it in needlepoint. Hang it on the wall over there.”
She laughed.
“Perfect. That little hooch in Sierra Leone could go right at the top.”
“What, because of our audience?”
Several lanky young boys had walked in on us while Mila was seated atop me, breasts dripping sweat onto my chest. Fortunately they had not come to alert us to any emergency. They had simply been on a random prowl, checking out the latest arrivals from the outside world. Mila got flustered and told them she was giving me a massage for a stomachache, a story I promptly ruined by heaving with laughter and making her breasts bounce.
“You think we gave them an education?” I asked.
“I’m sure they’d seen worse. Or better. Family of ten living in the same room. Not much they hadn’t seen from Mom and Dad by then.”
We recalled other locations—a grass mat beneath the stars in Goma, a hammock slung inside a sweltering tent in Congo that collapsed on us during a cloudburst. Or that night on the edge of a mud desert when Mila got up for a drink of water and nearly stepped on a scorpion that had bedded down in her shoes.
Other places came to mind as well, but some were best not mentioned on this night or any other. Merely thinking of one of them made me want to pull the covers higher over Mila, so dark and powerful were its memories. Fortunately, her imagination must not have strayed there, because when she next spoke she sounded as cheerful as before.
“I do miss the mosquito netting. There was something very sexy about it, having it draped all around us like that.”
“The lace canopy bed of the aid worker. Maybe Stavros could lend us one of his fishing nets.”
“Stavros.” She frowned. “Next time he’s in here he better not smoke.”
Then she yawned and rolled onto her side, facing me. A lock of hair fell across her mouth, and she was too drowsy to even pull it away, so I did it for her. Within seconds she was asleep. I leaned across her to blow out the candle, then thought better of it. I was still too keyed up to sleep. Part of it was excitement over what lay ahead, but I was also still agitated by the disturbing memory that had crossed my mind moments ago.
I slid out of bed and threw on a robe and slippers. Then I took the candle, refilled my wineglass, and stepped back into the night. The breeze was picking up, and it carried the scent of the fields, a grassy blend with weedy hints of caramel and skunk. Somewhere around the house were guidebooks for the local flora and fauna. I needed to start learning which plants made what smells, and which ones might be useful. This was my universe now, a pleasing thought. In the morning there would be no crowds seeking aid and comfort. Only Stavros, uphill with his goats and his blue bee boxes, out walking terraced groves in the sun.
I searched the sky, which on clear nights here was always brilliant with a milky wash of stars. There was Orion with his belt, standing guard. Above him to the right I spotted Castor and Pollux, twin brothers to Helen of Troy. They always seemed more mysterious and timeless when viewed from the land that named them.
It was around then that the owls started up. They’d done this without fail during our earlier trips, and the sound’s familiarity was welcoming. I listened for a while as I savored the last of the wine, vainly trying to decipher their meaning, and I was about to turn in when I heard the boat.
The motor didn’t sound like a big one, and a few moments later I spotted red and green running lights passing just offshore, moving slowly north to south. By water, we were only three miles from Emborios. The journey was easy under good conditions, and the sea was still fairly calm despite the freshening breeze. But it seemed odd for such a small craft to be poking around at this hour, and in these waters. The fishermen of Karos sometimes trolled or laid traps in darkness, but that usually happened toward dawn, and I’d never heard that the pickings were particularly good along our stretch of coastline.
The boat continued south, now moving out of sight. The noise was loud enough that the owls halted in mid-sentence, as if annoyed by the interruption. Unless the boat was circling the island—which seemed unlikely—its only possible destination was the southernmost dock, at the DeKuyper villa that Stavros had told us so much about. It was uphill from us, barely visible from our place and perhaps a mile away as the crow flies. It was the only house farther out on the point than ours, except for a few abandoned stone shacks built centuries ago by hunters and herdsmen.
DeKuyper was a Dutch industrialist who had made his fortune in plastics, apparently by winning big contracts with the European Union. According to the locals, he rarely visited, and even then he almost never showed his face in the towns. Stavros had positively gushed with tales of the Italianate marble and custom ironwork that went into the construction of the villa, reputedly the largest on the island. But he always showed a grudging respect whenever he spoke of the man himself, in the way of a serf discussing the lord of the manor.
I had always wondered how much Stavros exaggerated these stories. From our vantage point the house seemed to fit snugly into the hillside. It didn’t look any flashier than about half the new places that now towered over Emborios. Perhaps DeKuyper had found one of those architects who is an expert at concealing wealth and ambition. Maybe the house, like an iceberg, kept its bulk out of sight. I walked to the southern edge of the patio and looked uphill. Total darkness. If DeKuyper was home, or receiving visitors by sea, then he hadn’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat.
It’s hard to say for sure what unsettled me most about the boat. Its apparent stealth, perhaps—the careful speed as it crept down the coastline, even though every craft I’d seen before on such a track had plowed by at breakneck pace, trailing a white rooster tail of spray. Maybe it was also the natural skittishness of anyone trying to settle into a new home, especially one as isolated as ours. In any case, when the boat did not return in the next fifteen minutes I watched the hillside in anticipation, waiting for a light to come on. When none did, I concluded that it had either scooted farther around the island or out to the open sea.
I went back inside and shut the doors against the chill. Then I felt my way down the hallway to a closet where I kept an old shotgun. Its heft and shape were familiar, although it somehow felt heavier in the dark. I smelled gun oil and the metal of the barrel as I carried it to our room, careful not to bump the walls. Then I placed it on the floor just beneath my side of the bed, where I hoped Mila wouldn’t notice it in the morning.
Old habits die hard, I suppose. Aid workers for the UN had never been allowed to keep firearms, even though we often paid, and paid dearly, for well-fortified security when we couldn’t enlist the help of our blue-helmeted protection forces. Walking around armed to the teeth would have made us look like just another combatant, or so the reasoning went. Good advice in theory but not always in practice, so I had learned to use a wide variety of weapons and, in the worst of places, had always kept one nearby, if out of sight. Mila disapproved of the practice, but even she realized that it had come in handy a few times. And she almost never had to deal directly with many of the scoundrels I had faced almost daily.
Just before sliding between the sheets I remembered that the gun was unloaded, so I went back down the hall to retrieve a box of shells. It was in its usual place, but was empty. I was almost certain that I had left a few in there after my last hunting excursion. Maybe Mila was right after all about Stavros, the old brigand. I made a note to call on him first thing.
The owls resumed their conversation just as I was climbing into bed, and their calls were as comforting as an all-clear signal. My precautions suddenly seemed foolish. Mila breathed softly at my side, her body cooling beneath the sheets. I had shut the window, but the shutters were thrown open to a starlit deep blue. It cast a pale light that made my skin look almost as young as hers. The smell of candle wax mingled with the sour aftertaste of retsina. I listened from the pillow until the owls stopped. Probably the night’s final update from the realm of the hunter and the hunted.
Soon afterward I must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing I remember was a flashlight shining brightly in my face, jarring me awake. I blinked and squinted and bolted upright, thinking for a moment that I must be in a tent on yet another scene of ruination. A hand shoved against my sternum to make sure I went no farther. Then a smooth male voice spoke from out of the glare. In English, with an American accent.
“Time to get up, Freeman Lockhart.”
Mila was already sitting, rigid beside me with the sheet pulled to her neck. She said nothing, just stared with wide eyes.
Someone flipped on the ceiling light. In addition to the man at my right, another stood by Mila, and a third was at the foot of the bed. They wore identical gray tracksuits, and smelled like cigarettes.
“You were on the ferry,” Mila said.
“Good girl, Mila!”
It was again the man to my right who spoke. He sounded genuinely pleased.
“You’re very observant. More so than Freeman, anyway. That will have to change.”
I was still too unstrung to be very observant. But it somehow made everything worse that they knew our names. Maybe that’s what made me think of the gun, just beneath me on the floor. I reached down for it and had just grasped the stock when a foot planted firmly on my hand while a fist struck sharply across the bridge of my nose. The impact was blinding. I dropped the gun and felt blood ooze up in my nostrils and then drip onto my chest. The man kicked the gun away and let go.
“That’s all right,” he said, still just as calm as you please. “Wouldn’t have done you much good without these, in any event.” He pulled a few shells from the pocket of his warm-up jacket.
“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” I tried to snarl it, but sounded more like a man with a cold.
“I’m Mr. Black. And these are my colleagues, Mr. White and Mr. Gray.”
Black, White, and Gray. Obviously their idea of a joke, although we were in no mood to laugh. But it’s odd how quickly one can grow accustomed to an intrusion like this, or at least calm enough to begin weighing your odds for survival. On the positive side, I had yet to see any gun or weapon other than my own, and in disarming me Black had used no more force than was necessary. He also had maintained his strangely placid demeanor. As he spoke I felt my pulse rate slacken. Just try to think of it as one of those times in the field when you were summoned in the middle of the night to some emergency, I told myself. This, too, shall pass.
“As for your second question, we want
you,
Freeman. For a few hours anyway. You don’t mind if we borrow him a while, do you, Mila?”
She answered by lunging for the phone on her side of the bed. The fellow named White reacted with an agility somewhere between that of a cat and an antelope, crossing six feet of space in a fraction of a second. I reached across the bed to protect her, but before I could even slip an arm around her waist White had taken Mila’s arm with one hand and the telephone with the other. She cried out in pain and shrank back, whereupon White immediately let go. He accomplished all this without even knocking over her wineglass, and then stepped away from the bed as smoothly as a waiter who had just delivered the check. Mila rubbed her wrist. The skin on her shoulder beneath my fingers was gooseflesh, and I felt her body quivering in rage or fear, perhaps both.
“Please,” Black said in mock aggrievement. “That’s been temporarily disconnected anyway.” He dropped a handkerchief in my lap. “You’d better clean up. Where we’re going it won’t be good form if you start bleeding all over the carpet.”
By then, what was disturbing me most was their skill and polish. Black’s response to me, and then White’s to Mila, plus whatever stealth they must have employed in making their entry, suggested the sort of deftness that results from years of training and days of planning. In a way it would have been less frightening to be dealing with brutal thugs and a host of heavy weaponry, a gang of robbers who would do the deed and then vanish. The professionalism now on display bespoke a higher authority, some organization with deadlines to meet, goals to achieve, and real staying power.
“Who do you work for?” I asked.
“What is it they say? ‘We’re from Washington and we’re here to help.’ We’re with a government agency near and dear to your heart. No one you’d be embarrassed to be seen with. Not even on Karos.”
“And if I’d prefer not to take you up on the invitation?”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to be a little more convincing.” His tone remained cheerful, his smile intact, but I got the message.
“So, what do you say, Freeman? Will you be coming with us?”
I looked to Mila for counsel, but her eyes offered only despair. All things considered, I decided that leaving might be the best course of action.
2
I
t was certainly a low-tech abduction. A single flashlight lit our way as we threaded uphill along a stony path, stepping past brambles and goat droppings. I had not yet explored this part of the hillside, and kept thinking we would soon reach a road where car doors would slam and other figures would emerge from the darkness, well armed and efficient, to bundle me up and drive me away. But we just kept walking, no one saying a word.
After half an hour we finally reached a gravel lane, and I looked around for a truck or van, some vehicle bristling with antennae, or lit from within by the glow of sensitive equipment. But still we walked, having covered at least a mile by now. I was beginning to regain my confidence, and with it, my eagerness to find a way out.
Black led the way. Gray was behind me. White had stayed with Mila, presumably in case she got a notion to run or tried reconnecting the phone. Although at this hour the local constabulary was probably fast asleep in a haze of ouzo. The whole island seemed hushed, the stars immovable. It was so dry up here that there wasn’t even dew on the grass, but perspiration soaked my shirt and I was breathing heavily from the climb.
I suppose it should have bothered me that my escorts hadn’t covered their faces, or blindfolded me for our journey. Wasn’t that supposed to spell doom? Would I end up in a weighted sack at the bottom of the Aegean?
It seemed unlikely, if only because I have never been a keeper of anyone’s secrets but my own. While those are dark enough, they would seem to be of little concern to any larger cause or movement. That is almost always the nature of your secrets when you’re paid to stay on the sidelines, closely observing the action but only rarely joining in.
Twice we paused while Black spoke into a handheld radio. I couldn’t make out the words, and wondered if he was talking to White, making sure everything was okay back at the house.
Under other circumstances the hike might have been enjoyable. It felt good to stretch my legs. The pain in my nose had subsided to a dull throb, and the fresh air cleared my head after our day of travel and all of the wine. A waning crescent moon was suspended above the sea. The night breeze had shifted, and even through the smell of drying blood I caught a whiff of brine.
Black and Gray still hadn’t displayed a weapon, and I mulled the possibility of making a run for it. Compared to war, famine, or even some local thug with a private army, taking on a mere pair of unarmed adversaries on a gravel lane in the dark seemed like a tolerable matchup, no matter how well they were trained. The hang-up was Mila, and what might happen to her if I simply bolted. If I could first grab the radio out of Black’s hand, then I might make a run for it with a clear conscience, dashing downhill into the brush. Newcomer or not, I knew the island’s terrain better than they did, and I could set out quickly for the nearest village, Kastro. The thought of arriving at its crumbling Hellenic watchtowers seemed like salvation itself. Bang on a doorway to awaken some townsman in his nightshirt, a medieval scene where he would hoist a lantern and sound the alarm, alerting his neighbors to the intruders in their midst.
I waited until Black halted and again pulled the radio from his jacket. Before he could make contact I made my move. But as soon as I took my first step, Gray pounced, pulling my wrist behind my back with some deft move he must have learned ages ago and tripping me with his right foot. The next thing I knew I was on my knees, gravel digging into my joints.
“You’re not going to be like this all night, are you, Freeman?”
It was Black, lowering the radio. I said nothing in reply.
“Besides, we’re almost there. Bear with us a while longer. Show’s about to start.”
The gravel lane turned out to be a driveway to the DeKuyper place, and after another few hundred yards our little party sauntered up to a huge wooden door. Black produced a jangling set of keys with the assurance of an invited guest. The house was still completely dark, and I counted at least three unlockings before the door swung free. Gray, taking care to stay behind me, didn’t switch on a light until he had shut the door.
Stavros had been right. The place was really something. High ceilings and a cavernous great room with floor-to-ceiling windows, which probably overlooked the sea, although right now the curtains were drawn.
The other rooms, what I could see of them, seemed to have been decorated in good but somewhat sterile taste. Maybe DeKuyper had paid someone. Oak floors were covered with thick rugs and colorful throws, all well coordinated even if the overall effect was a trifle lifeless. Heavy beams supported a vaulted ceiling. Shelves in every corner displayed samples of local pottery. Other artwork seemed to have been selected mostly for the colors, which blended with the rugs and curtains. A passing glance at the kitchen revealed gleaming, oversized appliances and black marble countertops.
“This way,” Black said, turning down a hallway, flipping on lights as he went.
“Friends of the owner?” I asked. “Or paying customers? Or did you get those keys some other way?”
“We’re friends with a lot of people.”
We turned down a hallway. A door at the end opened onto a long room with wall-to-wall carpet.
“In here. We’ll do our business in the boardroom.”
A boardroom was exactly what it resembled—eight sleek leather swivel chairs around a long teak table straight out of Scandinavia. There was a video screen on the far wall, and someone had set up a laptop at the end of the table. The carpet smelled new. Maybe DeKuyper had built the place as a corporate retreat, a tax write-off where he could harbor one of his yachts. I wondered if Black, White, and Gray were staying overnight. Maybe I would be, too.
“Be seated, Freeman.”
Black locked the door behind him and gestured to a chair in the middle, where I took a seat. Gray moved down to sit at the laptop and began pecking at the keyboard. The video screen lit up, displaying a field of icons across a wallpaper of fleecy clouds. It looked as if they were going to treat me to a PowerPoint presentation, as if they were selling Amway, or time-shares.
“We’re here to make a sales pitch,” Black said, as if happy to confirm my suspicions. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour, so relax. Try thinking of us as slightly unorthodox corporate headhunters and it will be much easier to take.”
I tried placing his accent. I’m usually good at that. Among fellow Americans I can pin down the lilt of Georgia, the pinched vowels of Cleveland, traces of each of the five boroughs of New York, and any hint of a past tie to Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. So far with these fellows, Gray had hardly spoken and White had yet to utter a word. That left Black, whose intonations were wiped clean of identity. He might have been raised by a family of newscasters in Indianapolis.
What else to make of the man? Urbane. An air of competence. Probably someone who found it easy to get comfortable in a tight place. I had come across men just like him out in the field, especially during a brief hitch in Afghanistan, where intelligence people were as thick on the ground as farmers, planting their own exotic seeds for harvest. As with them, I assumed that whatever poses Black showed me probably had nothing to do with the person he really was. It was part of his profession, a performance to divert your view from everything he wished to hide. So go ahead and look at his face all you wanted, he seemed to say, because he had more important things to disguise.
“There’s a job we want you to do for us,” Black said. “But before getting into specifics I thought we might introduce our package of inducements.”
Gray clicked the mouse. Onto the screen flashed a copy of my résumé, or CV, the entire career of Freeman Napier Lockhart encapsulated in forty-five lines of black type. You couldn’t have found that just anywhere, and I stirred uneasily.
“Accurate?” Black asked.
“Must be, since I wrote it. Where did you get this?”
“Let’s go back a few years. We’ll skip the stuff about law school, the public defender’s job, the first UN posting to Singapore. Helping with boat people, wasn’t it?”
“Coming from Vietnam, yes. Summer of ’81.” The smell of fish oil and the green glow of the warm Pacific. Stern Singapore policemen who loved nothing better than bashing skulls with billy clubs whenever a loaded sampan came ashore under our so-called protection. Bashed mine once, too, which won me two expense-paid weeks in a hospital along with an insincere apology from the foreign minister.
“What are we playing, ‘This Is Your Life’?”
“More like Scrooge’s visitation by the spirits, except that I’ll be doing the talking for all three spirits. Just a friendly assessment of your past, your present, and—quite possibly—your future.”
“Nice to know I have one. Not sure I like the Scrooge comparison, though.”
“Oh, it fits. You’ll see. But no need to worry. We’re here to help you set things right. Rebalance the ledger. Give us the next image, Gray. Our real starting point. Recognize this fellow?”
I did. The picture on the screen was a tanned, smiling man in his late thirties, dressed in khaki pants, a white polo, and a Day-Glo orange vest that made him look like a school crossing guard. Stones lay on the pavement all around him like spent shell casings, an appropriate image because all of them had been thrown in anger. The air was smudged by traces of oily black smoke, which I knew had come from burning tires. The man stood in front of a white Volkswagen Passat station wagon with a large blue “UN” painted on the door.
“It’s me. On the West Bank. Nablus, by the look of it. Around nineteen…”
“Eighty-eight. June, to be exact. Just as the intifada was hitting its stride. During your one-year posting, riding shotgun for a two-man observer team for UNRWA.” He correctly pronounced the acronym “OON-rah,” although with a slight note of disdain. It stood for a mouthful, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, an outfit that was still alive, if not exactly kicking. Its mission was to serve the needs of the millions of Arab refugees who had been uprooted during the procession of wars that began with the creation of Israel in 1948. The wars have continued at irregular intervals since—like a comet with an erratic orbit, capable of destroying entire worlds on every return.
“Interesting place to start,” I said.
“Why?” Black sounded genuinely curious.
“It was my first taste of war. Or what I thought was war, until I saw the real thing in Bosnia. I’d never been that close to gunfire.”
“Did it scar you for life?” Now he was playing with me.
“If anything, I enjoyed it too much. Watching all the dustups and confrontations, then trying to sort them out.”
“Boys throwing stones versus soldiers and tanks. Not exactly a great matchup from the fan’s point of view.”
“No. It never was. It’s why we felt like we had to be there.”
“Witnessing for the world.”
“Make fun of it if you want, but, yes, that’s what we were doing.”
“Funny how you fellows got out of the witnessing business once the suicide bombers found their way into the mix. Maybe all your good deeds and compassion helped give Hamas a jump start. Either way, you should have no trouble remembering this fellow.”
Gray clicked again. The shot was almost identical, except this time the character standing by the UN car was a bronzed young Arab, mid-twenties, black hair askew. The orange vest draped him like a sack, and he seemed to be suppressing a smile. Suppressing all sorts of feelings, in fact, because that had been one of the job requirements.
“Good Lord. It’s Omar.”
“Omar al-Baroody, your partner in crime. Almost cute the way they paired you up, car by car. One Palestinian for every outsider. Ten little teams patrolling at any one time. Just like Butch and Sundance. Or Starsky and Hutch. You did two hitches with Omar, correct?”
“Yes. We were partners for my second three months, and then for the last three.”
Two stints like night and day—the first tense and argumentative, the second loose and harmonious. In between we did a lot of growing up, and we parted as friends.
“Been in touch with Omar lately?”
“Only by letter. Haven’t seen him in years. He still sends New Year’s cards when he can find me. For a while I kept expecting his name to turn up on one of the parliament lists for the Palestinian Authority. Then he moved to Jordan.”
“That’s right. To Amman. He’s still there, with a new venture in the works.”
“Doing what?”
“More on that later.”
Was Omar in some sort of trouble? As far as my country’s government was concerned, it seemed a likely possibility for any Palestinian male of means and cleverness, and Omar qualified on both counts. But such worries dissolved when Gray put up the next image.
It was the hulking gray PTT Building in Sarajevo, the bunkerlike fortress of offices where Mila and I had worked for three years. Shell damage made it look like someone had dragged a giant rake across the concrete facing.
“Bosnia, ’92. Where you met your wife.”
I said nothing in reply. The mention of Mila reminded me of the stakes in play. I wondered how she was faring with White, and what would become of her if they kept me much longer.
“If there’s a point to all this, will you be making it soon?”
“Patience.”
As Black said it, he bunched and steepled the fingers of his right hand, palm up, then waggled them up and down. It was the same sign that every driver in Jerusalem and the West Bank makes when you honk your horn or yell for them to get out of the way. It, too, meant “patience,” but its subtext was “Fuck you, asshole.” Black’s little way of telling me to shut my yap, or of hinting that this whole production was leading up to something concerning the Middle East.
Gray clicked ahead to an image of lanky African boys crowded at the mouth of a dirty white tent.
“Rwanda,” he said. Then he named an outpost town where we had set up shop. “Nineteen ninety-six. Toward the end of your time there. And here’s where things get interesting. Gray?”
Gray pulled a Tyvek envelope from a briefcase and slid it across the table to Black. We were moving onto dangerous ground. Everything I had eaten at the taverna was astir, coiling in my entrails like a rattler. I took a deep breath, but this only brought on a cramp, so I exhaled loudly.