The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (112 page)

‘He had to escape. He fled and came to Cyprus. This is where he died.’

‘We bring him here.’

Udo indulges Henning’s idea, although it’s clear that he doesn’t agree. ‘Why?’

‘Because he’s in our care. Because we can keep him safe.’

Udo straightens his suit jacket. He hates stories, he says, especially stories like this.

‘We bring him here,’ Henning turns to Udo, ‘to Cyprus, and we see who comes after him.’

‘This isn’t thought through. It’s undigested. It looks like a solution, but it isn’t.’

‘We bring him here.’

‘We do no such thing.’ This is Udo’s final word.

On their way home, Henning stops to show Rike the view. Behind him a single peak rises from a flat plain. On top of this peak sits a monastery. She’s seen the image in postcards, the blocked walls bridging boulders and outcrops. Without a bare blue summer sky it isn’t as impressive as expected. Henning sucks on an ice-pop. One hand on his hip again, but this time he isn’t annoyed. He asks Rike not to tell her sister about the man on the train. Not one word. Isa doesn’t need to know, and she isn’t to mention it. OK? Agreed? He tucks his tie into his pocket and leans forward so the lolly won’t drip onto his shirt. His lips are stained red and he laughs. He stands in front of a sign that says
no photographs – military installation
and asks Rike to take a photo. ‘Send it to Isa,’ he says, ‘tell her we’ll be back in an hour.’ They will stop by work first.

Rike holds the phone to Henning’s ear as he drives because his fingers are sticky, and the headset hasn’t worked since he dropped it. Udo is stuck in the departure lounge and there’s a rumour that this will be the last civilian flight into Damascus. He’s thinking they should go back to their original plan. He wants Henning to join him, not immediately, but in a couple of days. There will be military flights from the British base at Akrotiri.

Henning disagrees with almost everything he’s hearing. He shakes his head.

‘How? Why? It makes no sense. Train doors do not open. They just don’t. Not while it’s moving. Even in Italy.’ Pause. ‘No. Why would he?’ Pause. ‘I don’t know. I don’t see how that’s possible.’ Henning will soon become a father. His imminent fatherhood has made him particular, exact. He’s a little insufferable.

He begins to drive faster, indicates that Rike needs to keep the phone to his ear. ‘These aren’t the questions I’d be asking. I’d question how he got from inside a sealed train to outside.’ Then, finally, more emphatically. ‘It isn’t Sutler. It can’t be. It has to be someone else. Sutler doesn’t exist . . . And Grenoble,’ he asks, ‘before you go. What’s the news from Grenoble?’ Henning listens then agrees to make the call himself.

The problem, he explains to Rike, is that we have three Sutlers and a level of unimaginable incompetence, in Iraq, in Turkey, in Malta, in Italy. At every turn. The first, in Rome, was caught between two trains and ripped to pieces. This Sutler, to demonstrate the confusion, doesn’t match any earlier description of Sutler. The second was a man sighted in Grenoble who has since disappeared. The third is a man found wandering in the Syrian desert, currently in hospital in Damascus.

‘The thing is,’ he says. ‘We have three Sutlers, when we shouldn’t have one.’ Sutler, he is convinced,
does not exist
.

‘I’ll have to go to Damascus,’ he says. ‘I can see this happening. It could be for a while.’

Henning seldom talks about his work, and today, while speaking with Udo about Sutler, she sensed something she couldn’t place. Regret?

‘Make sure Isa doesn’t get into trouble. Keep an eye on her? Make sure she doesn’t do too much. Make sure she keeps her appointments. Keep her out of trouble, and above all, keep her calm. If I go,’ he says. ‘If. I’ll be back before the birth.’

This, Rike guesses, was the point of today’s trip. Not to deliver his superior to the airport, not to help choose a gift, but to gain an assurance. Isa needs to take things easy.

1.2

The first report – that Stephen Sutler has been killed in Italy, struck by a train – sounds implausible. Gibson struggles to confirm the information. He calls Parson but gets no reply. He calls two journalists at the IP, then a friend at the Home Office. Finally he calls Paul Geezler, former Advisor to a Division Chief at HOSCO, now Director of CONPORT, thinking this is good news, which makes discussing what he needs to discuss a little easier.

‘This is what we know,’ he says. ‘It isn’t much. I suppose there’s some way to identify him, otherwise, why would this be announced?’

While it’s frustrating not to have Parson’s word on this, Gibson feels some vindication. Parson wasn’t wrong: Sutler is in southern Italy, and has been, more than likely, for all this time.

Geezler isn’t so sure. Why is this man believed to be Sutler? It seems a spurious attribution? What are the facts?

Gibson repeats what he’s heard. Nothing is confirmed. It’s still a rumour. As soon as he has details, he’ll let him know. He looks at the river as he speaks, at the long span of Blackfriars Bridge. He asks about the reconstruction, the dissolution of HOSCO and its re-emergence as CONPORT. He asks if Geezler has seen the
Financial Times
. ‘There’s nothing but admiration,’ he says, ‘everyone is sounding confident.’

Geezler confides that he would like the whole thing over. He’s taken a company which is now the byword for corruption, divided its business into separate zones, and parsed out the responsibilities. He isn’t saying there shouldn’t be some accounting, someone held responsible, especially the authors of this disaster, Sutler, Howell, the men at Camp Liberty, but it needs to end. As soon as the hearing is done, they can all move on.

‘Look, Paul . . .’ Gibson is grateful that Geezler has introduced the subject. On the river a barge works against the current. ‘They’ve called me in. They want me at the hearing.’ Gibson shifts his weight and balance to keep the barge in the centre of vision. ‘I’ve already spoken with them. I’m guessing they want me to repeat everything at the actual hearing. I have nothing new.’ Gibson refers to his notes laid across his desk. ‘April. Twentieth. I don’t quite know what they’re after.’

Geezler says this is anyone’s guess. He wonders why Gibson has been asked to appear in person, when others have submitted testimonies and are not being called, and others will appear in prepared video statements. He sounds impatient. ‘HOSCO is over. It’s history. What’s left of the military contracts are now handled by CONPORT. They should be happy that this, at least, has been salvaged. Everybody is tired of all the bad news. We need to be moving forward,’ he says. ‘I have to be honest. If the man in Rome turns out to be Sutler, it won’t be a bad thing.’

Gibson agrees.

The windows are dusty. He shuts his right eye and the barge loses distinction. He wonders if this is new or something he hasn’t noticed before. His left eye has always been weaker. At some point the body offers only disappointment.

1.3

Rike finds the cat flopped over the kerb, impossibly soft with a long black tail tracing the edge of the paving. A hard sun cooks a vegetable stink off the road. The cat has been shot and much of its head is lost to the dust, the blood can’t be distinguished at a distance from the fur (an oily black) so the animal’s shape shifts from something familiar and toy-like – tail, legs, a handsome skinny body, a luxuriant pelt – to something approximate, a spill or a smattering. The cat, in contradiction to its pose and silky fur, isn’t soft at all but stiff, and this is what makes her feel sorry – how she knows something is wrong, because even from a distance the head doesn’t make sense.

Rike can’t remember the name her sister gave it, but is certain that this is the one Isa singled out because of his skinny grace and how he seemed simultaneously wild but familiar enough with people. These cats are distinctive: thin and long and built for speed and stealth with small and narrow heads.

She crouches beside the animal, doesn’t want to touch it but finds it hard not to reach out, at least to run a finger over its paw. The previous night she’d felt the same urge, as the cat, startlingly black, materialized from the night and crept toward the food. People round here, would they kill a domestic animal for sport? Superstition? Fun? Henning talks about rivalries and vendettas between the families who fled the north and were assigned houses, decades ago, in town or in the villages, and the families who still live in the small row-on-row blockhouses of what was once a simple refugee camp but is now referred to as a
settlement
, a
township
. Even now, the people in the settlement don’t properly belong in town or out of town, and there are second, third, and fourth generations who have no direct memory of their exodus, who insist that Famagusta, Kyrenia, North Nicosia are home when those houses have accepted new owners, long-since established. Killing a cat would be a way to keep trouble bubbling, to remind someone that this is not their home.

Rike also feels displaced, albeit in a lesser, trivial, way. They were supposed to be in Damascus (
they
being Rike, her sister, her sister’s husband, and soon-to-arrive baby). Her sister’s child was to be born in Syria, they dearly wanted this, but no, the majority of the German consulate and their families have been evacuated. Most have been sent home, some to Turkey: a few, who need to monitor the remaining interests of German nationals in Syria, have been relocated to Cyprus. While Henning works in Nicosia, Isa has chosen accommodation in Limassol, a good forty-five minutes away and closer to a hospital. So the child’s birthplace will be Cyprus, and Cyprus feels like nowhere. A holiday island, a place to play – and Rike pines for the break she isn’t going to have, the one the two sisters planned,
their time
, before everything changes with the baby.

Rike speaks with Henning about the cat when he calls in the morning. She makes sure she’s the first to answer, because it’s possible he’s arranged to have the cats removed as he doesn’t like his wife’s habit of feeding the strays and can’t understand her sentimentality.

‘I’m pretty sure it’s one of her favourites. Black. A little wild. She’s given them names.’ Arabic names, names of districts, streets, and markets.

Between them they agree not to tell Isa. The move, their own exodus, has been disruptive enough.

Too lazy to pick up, Isa takes her calls on speakerphone. Rike shouts,
It’s Henning
, and leaves for her room because she doesn’t like to hear their arguments, every detail cutting through the apartment, which is much too large, hollow and temporary. Today Henning holds his ground.

‘You’re not doing them any favours. You’re prolonging the inevitable.’ Henning makes no secret of the fact that he doesn’t want Isa feeding these creatures. ‘You shouldn’t be near them. They have scabies, this is why they are bald, fleas, and ticks, and god-knows-what. You should think about what you’re doing.’ He hopes to be home soon. Udo is coming round to his idea.

Rike can hear Henning’s exasperation. Doubt roils in his classic pauses (Henning is known for his pauses). He can make you feel stupid, he can posit doubt – all with the briefest pause. When Isa hangs up she ambles back to Rike’s room, hand on her belly, a slow wading walk. ‘They give them training: How to Manipulate People.’ She makes bunny-ear quotations with her fingers, then, walking away, casually drops the complaint. ‘You know where he’s staying? He’s staying in the Hyatt. Where we were engaged. The Hyatt.
Some covert operation
.’ While Henning is not a spy, there is, nevertheless, some truth to the fact that the intelligence community prefer the Hyatt, Henning would confirm this. The Hyatt, it’s a standing joke among the staffers, is always the last refuge in a coup.

Rike has to agree about the cats. It might not sound rational, but who knows if there’s rabies on the island, or if a cat scratch could open some improbable complication in the last trimester. She knows you can get lockjaw, or that allergy where you grow hard buboes in your neck or armpits. Jesus. Cats aren’t as friendly as they appear: fur, teeth, instinct, selfishness and cunning. Essentially they’re just big rats. Unlike Henning, Rike can’t speak about her fears without sounding ridiculous. Henning is always certain. Not one gram of doubt or self-consciousness. Everything about the man announces confidence, the silences and withdrawals, his assured authority. And he is back in Syria, secretly, to help identify a man found in the desert. A man in a coma. A man hooked to drips and machines. A man they are pumping back to life so they can transport him to Cyprus. A man everyone has been looking for:
Stephen Lawrence Sutler
. Sutler Number Three.

Rike follows the news about Rome on the internet. The man who died was seen running along the tracks before he was hit. There are rumours, and rumours about rumours. There are photographs of men standing on railway sidings, an aqueduct beside them, captions explaining that the evidence was spread over two hundred metres. The men are wearing sunglasses and they look down, about, concentrated on their task.

Isa spoons cat food into one of five bowls, her face set in a grimace. The sisters play a game: how did the man get to the desert? Sutler Number Three.

‘Dumped.’

‘Bad business . . .’

‘Drugs.’

‘. . . ran out of fuel. Walked in the wrong direction.’

‘Asked a Russian for directions.’

‘Punishment. A quarrel. Bad love.’

‘Stag night.’

‘Outcast. Because people hate him.’

Three books sit in a line across the counter, Isa is undecided on which thriller she wants to read. She tells Rike that she can’t work out her mood this morning, and Rike knows well enough not to pester her. It’s important to match the right book to the right mood. Isa is wearing one of her brother’s T-shirts: ‘Show Me Your Junk’, which she claims not to understand. Her favourite reads ‘It Isn’t Going to Suck Itself’. Henning dislikes the T-shirt almost as much as he despises her brother. ‘It’s a point of fact,’ Isa likes to say, which only makes him shake his head. She’s not to be seen within a hundred kilometres of anyone from the embassy wearing those T-shirts. ‘I’ll take it off,’ she agrees, ‘before I answer the door.’ Isa studied psychology before switching to the diplomatic service (two reasons why she will always finish an argument). She reminds Henning that there are more present worries, for example: the apartment is owned by a Russian company.
Russian
. She found this out today. Karnezis Property is owned by Palakov International. Andrei Palakov is a self-styled community investor and
biznizman
. What percentage of their rent, she wonders, is going to fund the trouble they’ve so recently fled?