The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (27 page)

An idea came to him with absolute clarity, born from a moment of spite. ‘He’s using your name.’

Geezler’s hesitation suggested new possibilities. ‘I don’t understand. You know his name or you don’t know his name?’

‘His name is Paul Geezler. This is the name he’s using?’

Again Geezler hesitated. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. How is he using my name?’

‘I’m sorry, this line is really bad. I can’t hear you. You keep dropping out.’

Parson cancelled the call, placed the phone on the bar, and then settled his head against the counter. What game was he playing?

His phone immediately began to ring. He watched it vibrate across the counter. The barman, wiping glasses, approached him and he signalled for another beer.

Parson answered the call when the phone began to ring a second time. He wiped his hand across his forehead. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t find a signal.’

He heard Geezler draw a long breath. ‘Tell me what you know.’

‘I know that Sutler has used your name for his hotel and travel bookings. Some of his reservations are booked under your name. Why would he do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Geezler answered. ‘I have no idea.’

‘He’s also starting to spend money. He booked a room in your name in Istanbul. There is a room booked in Valletta in the same hotel chain, in the same name. Why would he use your name?’ Parson looked about the bar for details, for any information which would help. ‘It looks deliberate. It’s not a common name. There are other interests searching for him now. American and British. Sutler has to know this is happening, and he’s deliberately using your name. He’s spending money. He’s making a point. I don’t think he’s running any more.’

‘And this changes what?’

Parson played a hunch. ‘If you knew him it would change a great deal.’ He waited, but Geezler didn’t reply. ‘If he ever worked for you?’ He waited again, still no answer. ‘Paul, consider. How many men have you worked with in your years at HOSCO? It could be someone you worked with a long time ago. Someone who is trying to confuse the picture by drawing your name in? How troublesome would it be if this turns out to be someone you have worked with, someone you know? I want to go to Malta.’

Geezler answered immediately. ‘You’re certain he’s in Malta?’

‘Positive. And I can’t do anything unless I’m there.’

Geezler said that he’d be in touch. ‘We can’t have him stamping up dust. You understand? No complications.’

‘You want him found?’

Once again Geezler paused.

‘Is this question serious?’

‘Completely.’

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘If he shows up now then everything is in question again. The damage is done. It might be better that he remains undiscovered.’

‘Send me and we will discover who he is, and if necessary, he will remain unknown.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying I can clean up whatever noise, whatever mess, he makes.’

The call from Gibson came almost immediately. In a crisp voice he changed his instruction.

‘I’ve heard from Paul Geezler, he wants you to go to Malta. Go there directly. HOSCO are prepared to set more money aside for you to find Sutler, a fund to ensure that he stays out of the picture. Don’t allow him to cause further embarrassment. If you find him you will need to negotiate with him, find out what he is doing and what his intentions are.’

Parson returned to his hotel and booked his flight online and a hotel in Valletta, then for good measure he booked a room for Sutler at Le Meridien, Balluta Bay, under the name Paul Geezler. He sang Geezler’s name as he typed.

Anne walked through the three rooms that made up the apartment, dissatisfied with the arrangement. This was not the villa she had imagined, and definitely not what was promised – a separate, remote, and spacious palazzo. Instead she had a shared house on the edge of the village, with nine small apartments each rented out and an empty pool. Eric’s bed, a folding cot shunted under the windows, didn’t appear solid enough and looked like an animal trap, with springs and wires ready to snap shut. He wouldn’t complain even if it gave him backache, not immediately. She would hear about it in years to come at some holiday meal.
That room in Malta
, he’d say.
That awful bed. Can you remember?
And then some story. She couldn’t remember if he still smoked, another one of his deceptions. If he did he could stand on the balcony and smoke and she wouldn’t need to know. The balcony gave him privacy. He’d like the room, but hate the bed. She had to remind herself of his age, that there were boundaries not to cross, information she did not want to know. She thought of him as someone who switched on and off, a boy who logged into accounts and identities, someone who could choose when to be her son: as if this were an account into which he could or could not log into. Weren’t there boundaries also for her, didn’t he need to know this also? It occurred to her with sudden dread that he might – as he had at home – seek out men.

Shabby, unkempt, and cramped, wasn’t this his assessment of the hotels and
casas particulares
Eric had stayed at in Cuba with her husband? Anne wondered why she had thought that this arrangement would work, of how much easier it would be if she simply hadn’t arranged the holiday. She looked at the cot and couldn’t see her son, an adult, sleeping in it, but the cot came standard in these kinds of apartments, which was better suited anyway for a couple, rather than a mother and her adult son.

The prospect wasn’t quite desperate. Its best feature, a view over Marsaskala, the village, and the bay, would please him. For the last three mornings she’d sat out and watched the view change, watched how the light reverberated through the room carrying colour so that the room and the view seemed continuous. Even in autumn the sun came through with a clear brightness and the water remained an intense blue, almost unreal, and she could feel the colour as she looked at it, the fulsome blue of a deep sea, nocturnal and without limit. Anne regretted not renting an apartment with an extra room for him, knowing that Eric would prefer privacy over a nice view, if he still smoked he would resent having to sneak out for a cigarette. The shutters which could halve the room weren’t substantial enough for him, for her. She’d lie in bed fretting over the cot, knowing that what troubled her was not the bed, not his discomfort, not the issue about him smoking.

Catching her reflection she pressed out a smile and closed her hand about the keys. She should not over-plan. If he wanted to do nothing, he could do nothing, but if he wanted, if he was in the mood, she would show him around Valletta and around some of the island. It would take a little time, she told herself, to learn how to
be
about him, to regain that ease. On the weekend they could take a boat and stay on Gozo. Despite the promise of a few trips the notion they would spend time together no longer seemed as ideal as it had on previous visits.

It was strange not to have heard from him. No text messages, no calls, and no email. Strange as it was it fitted with this new understanding. The new Eric, post-computer. Ready to leave, she called her husband and checked herself more carefully as she spoke. Her eyes were a little red from reading, from squinting at the manuscripts in the archives, considering for too many hours an evasive, slanted script. Her hair was also beginning to frizz, however short she had it cut the heat and the rain made it too active.

‘You’ll talk to Eric?’

‘He hasn’t called. He doesn’t call me, he emails. You know this. If I hear from him I’ll pass the message along.’

‘But when you speak with him you’ll not forget to ask about the flight?’

‘If he calls I’ll make sure I ask.’

‘You’ll forget.’

‘I won’t forget. I’m writing it down. If he calls I’ll tell him his mother is worried about the flight.’

‘I’m not worried about the flight. I’m worried that he’ll miss the flight. I’m worried that he has made other plans. It’s a different thing.’

There were ways in which her husband irritated her: how he talked without paying proper attention; his assumption that he understood her better than she understood herself; how he appeared never to doubt himself.

Leaning into the mirror she ran a finger over her lips and again looked into her eyes, the same weary blue as the evening light on the walls, a bruise, blue leaning toward violet.

5.2

Ford sat in the bar nursing a sweet local brandy. He watched three men labour up the street arm in arm, shirts undone, drunk and roaring at the rain. When they passed by the window they raised their fists and cheered in companionship for no reason he could see. British or German, he couldn’t be sure. Ford checked his watch, leafed through a two-day-old
Herald Tribune
, and felt another grain of aggravation. An irritation had plagued him recently, a sense of many things shimmering, sliding along the periphery. It was the city, he supposed, the drama of tight hills, steep streets, the hint of some satisfaction waiting at the peak, just out of view, when what he needed – an idea, a solution, a single sensible reason not to go to the airport – remained far from his grasp.

Nothing in the paper interested him. The war figured in its pages without mention of HOSCO, Geezler, Howell, or the Massive, and no Kiprowski. Never news about Kiprowski. Space given instead to roadside bombs, Shia and Sunni assassinations, multiple attacks at police stations and oil refineries, a suicide bombing at an employment office. He read about the UN stalled in making any practical decision on the occupied oil-fields. The trials of former heads of state. As reassuring as this should have been, the absence of any reference to fifty-three million missing dollars increased his anxiety – the absence of news about HOSCO he regarded as suspicious. Ford folded the paper and drank up. He checked Eric’s agenda, the flight would land in two hours and he needed to find a taxi.

Among the options lay the possibility that Eric had already arrived. He played this through but couldn’t escape the image of a bright airport lounge, of glass doors, of an emerging group, then Eric, backpack on shoulder, lagging behind. The boy would be there, he was absolutely certain. His mother also. Ford needed to pick her out first, whatever else he intended to do. His choices were limited: confront the boy and risk exposure, or hold back and follow them to their villa and risk losing them, risk causing alarm. Other possibilities suggested themselves. Eric could arrive with the police, or the police might already be waiting and it would all be over. The notebook could be lost or stolen, the page torn out, scrawled over, the number erased. He couldn’t quite picture what would happen once the boy came into the arrivals area, but he trusted that an explanation forced by the situation would flow from him. Would he be able to approach the boy, walk right up before the mother had a chance? Nothing he imagined would work.

Rain broke hard upon the street, overflowing the gutters and blacking the road with a smooth lacquer. Over the past four days he’d spent the morning searching for Eric’s mother, calling accommodation brokers and agents in Valletta, Floriana, and Sliema and asking about villas. The afternoons he spent at the cafés and pavilions the beaches on the west and north sides of the island, sheltering from the weather and watching tourists, not enjoying the humidity. The only Powells on the island were British, a family from Wolverhampton booked into the Hotel Intercontinental in St Paul’s Bay. A chubby family of five in matching white shorts and caps. The father bullied his family with his moods, he swapped plates with the youngest son when he refused to eat and finished his food with mixed elements of spite and silence. The daughter chewed with her mouth open, and he thought them crass until he realized that the girl had some kind of disability and needed to be told, prompted, and reminded. The realization stung – how could he not have noticed? Ford regretted not taking the exact address of the villa or the village. Such were the consequences of not planning ahead.

He didn’t spend his whole day fretting. There were moments of distraction. Valletta surprised him with its café-life, old cars, walls and doorways pasted with election posters. A quieter city than Istanbul, of handsome honey-coloured stone, buildings with long ornate windows, small enclosed balconies, wood shutters, gloss-painted doors. All a little secretive.

The brandy furred his teeth, clung to his breath. Couples dressed for the opera sheltered in doorways, hailing and hurrying to taxis.

The idea came to him fully formed. He would pay the taxi driver to come into the terminal, he would identify the boy to the taxi driver, and the man would hand Eric a note saying something simple, a number to call. I’m going, he told himself as he finished his drink. Going. I’m ready. I’m going. Going.

The plan faltered as soon as Ford sat in the cab. The driver, thickset and doughty, couldn’t understand a word he said. When he gestured
airport, airplane, aircraft
, his hand rising, fingers spread, he noticed the hearing aid in the man’s right ear.
Lu-qa
. Ford sat in silence as the cab drew around a fountain against the flow of buses. It wouldn’t work, even if he could explain what he wanted, because this broody man would draw attention to himself. No, he decided instead to call the airport courtesy phone, leave a message for Eric to contact him. He wouldn’t need to give details. Just some message. If he could think of one.

Once at the airport it occurred to him to stay in the cab and return to the city. An understanding coming to him of how strange this was, of how, on some slender possibility he’d crossed the Mediterranean, point to point, when he really should have returned to Narapi, sought out Eric’s notebook for himself. But fear of HOSCO, fear of the police, and a desire to push on had sent him island to island, to a bright strip of road alongside an arrival hall.

Stumped by indecision, he paid the driver and waited for the change. Rain drummed hard on the cab. The man half-turned in his seat and took a good long look.