The Perfect Soldier (22 page)

Llewelyn looked away again, over his shoulder, the way he’d done before. On a cue, McFaul pressed the Record button and Llewelyn’s head turned into camera, picking up the story. James Jordan had gone looking for a child from the town. Darkness was falling. Everyone had known there were mines but a child’s life, in the eyes of the young aid worker, was more important. James Jordan had always been a gambler. But in the hot Angolan darkness, his luck had finally run out.

Llewelyn paused. Then his voice took on a new gravity.

‘He died instantly,’ he intoned, ‘his body ripped to pieces by just half a pound of high explosive.’

There was a long silence. Then McFaul stood up behind the camera. Llewelyn was looking at him, waiting for a reaction.

‘Well?’

‘Luck didn’t come into it. The boy died because he didn’t listen.’

‘That’s what you said this afternoon. We’ve got that, lots of it. It’s important, too, all that stuff about manuals for aid workers. Makes the point.’

‘I know. So why all this shit about luck? This was an incident, not an accident. You should be talking about blame, not fate, or luck, or whatever fucking excuse you want to use.’

Llewelyn crossed the road and began to rewind the videotape, one eye to the viewfinder, ignoring McFaul’s outburst. When he got to the start of the first take, he played it back. McFaul watched the smile spread across his face.

‘Good,’ he was muttering, ‘excellent.’

One hand had come up to his face, fingering the bruise. At length he got to the end of the take, lifting his head from the viewfinder and looking for McFaul. McFaul was already
behind the wheel of the Land Rover. Llewelyn removed the camcorder and collapsed the tripod. Beside the driver’s door, he paused.

‘I was worried about the bruising,’ he said, ‘but actually it looks quite good. Even adds a little something.’

McFaul studied him a moment, then started the engine and engaged gear. Over the chatter of the diesel he leaned out of the window and jerked a thumb towards a distant curl of smoke.

‘City’s back that way,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t take you long.’

Molly spent the evening with Christianne at the MSF house. Robbie had dropped off a handful of the tins spared by the UNITA troops at the airstrip and Molly cooked a risotto of tuna, rice and a sprinkling of black olives while Christianne hunted for a spare battery for her two-way radio. The old rechargeable had run down and without a handset she was, in her own phrase, ‘stuffed’.

Molly had laughed, recognising one of James’s favourite epithets. After supper, they sat in candle-light while Christianne mused aloud about where life might have taken them both. They’d had plans to travel. They’d made a list. Berlin, for some reason, was at the top. Followed by Dublin, Bali and California. In this, as in so many other ways, they’d thought alike. Food had been the same. And music, too. And the simple, physical things. Swimming. Playing volleyball with the kids. Going for long hikes in the mountains.

‘The mountains are miles away,’ Molly pointed out, ‘and travelling’s supposed to be dangerous.’

‘Doesn’t matter. We’d have got there somehow, I know we would. You know what he used to say? If you’re hungry, you eat. If you want to do something badly enough, you’ll
do it. Anything’s possible. As long as you’re serious. Mountains?’ She looked wistful.
‘Pas de problème.’

Past ten o’clock, Christianne finally gave up on the spare rechargeable. Molly watched her circling the room, restoring things to their proper places, making ready for bed. Tomorrow, with luck, there’d be news of an evacuation flight.

Molly got up, stretching, one last question still unvoiced.

‘Did you see him at all?’ she began. ‘James? After he died?’

Christianne was chasing a mosquito with a slim paperback. She shook her head.

‘It was very dark.’

‘But afterwards. When you’d brought him back here. Did you see him then?’

‘No.’

‘At the hospital at all?’

‘No. His body was inside a sack, a bag, you know …’ Christianne had the mosquito trapped in a corner. She flattened the book against the wall and then stepped back.

‘And after that you buried him?’

‘As soon as we could, yes.’

‘And he was …’ Molly stared hard at the smudge of blood on the wall, ‘pretty much in one piece?’

‘Yes, oh yes. Excuse me.’

There was a second knock at the front door. Christianne left the room. Molly heard voices in the hall. Then a shadow appeared, someone tall, stooping into the room. Molly turned round. She’d been examining a photograph propped on the mantelpiece, James standing knee-deep in a river, grinning at the camera, kids all over him. The photograph was still in her hand.

‘This is Andy McFaul,’ Christianne was saying, ‘he knew James, too.’

Molly stared up at the face above her. The hair was greying,
cropped brutally short against the skull, and the candlelight played across the hollows of his face. The bottom half of his face was latticed with deep blue scars, giving the smile a curious deadness. McFaul, she thought. The name at the end of the report she’d read at the embassy. The man who’d wasted so few words on her dead son.

Molly glanced across at Christianne, offering her the photo of James. McFaul withdrew his hand.

‘There’s a message from Luanda.’ He nodded at Christianne’s radio, lying on the bed. ‘We’ve been trying to raise you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. The ambassador. He wants you to get in touch.’ He paused. ‘I get the impression it’s urgent.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Next morning, McFaul was still half-asleep when Bennie told him about Katilo. A message had come in via Fernando at the UN compound. The UNITA commander had scrubbed their morning meet. McFaul and Christianne were now to present themselves at a road-block on the northern edge of the city at two o’clock. Arrangements would be made to take them on to Katilo’s headquarters from there.

Now, getting dressed, McFaul was still furious. Deferring the meet by half a day meant losing precious time in the minefields. If the rumours about the evacuation were true then Muengo might yet be denied access to fresh water. The existing safe paths led straight to the most polluted stretches of the river. A couple of days’ work could transform the situation.

Outside, McFaul heard the chatter of a diesel. The engine died, a door slammed, and there were voices. One of them was Christianne’s. The other belonged to the woman he’d met last night, the dead boy’s mother, Molly Jordan. McFaul cursed, hopping across the room on his good leg and fumbling beneath a pile of dirty laundry for his last clean shirt. He was still pulling it on, snagging the stitches on his upper arm, when the door opened behind him. McFaul manoeuvred himself round. His plastic leg with its straps and its Velcro lay on the camp-bed. He felt utterly naked.

Molly Jordan was first into the room. McFaul could see
Bennie behind her, trying to explain to Christianne that the boss had been a bit late getting up. Molly was staring at McFaul’s left leg. The amputation had been an inch or two below the knee. The skin was gathered and tucked into the stump, the flesh above scarred and pitted where the surgeons had removed fragments of shrapnel.

McFaul stood on one leg, motionless. Under the circumstances there was little else he could do. Molly was already backing through the door. She was wearing a blue T-shirt with some kind of bird on the front.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying, ‘I’d no idea.’ McFaul shrugged.

‘Heavy night,’ he muttered. ‘Slept in a bit.’

‘No, I meant …’ Molly shook her head, making way for Bennie. ‘We’ll come back later.’

She turned and hurried out through the schoolroom. McFaul heard a door slamming, footsteps outside, then the growl of the diesel as the Landcruiser restarted. Too late, he remembered the change of plan.

‘Tell her Katilo’s off until this afternoon,’ he shouted to Bennie. ‘Tell her it’s back here for one-thirty.’

The two women returned an hour later. McFaul gave them the last of the instant coffee he’d been saving. They were sitting round the table in the schoolroom while Bennie and Domingos readied the piles of spare equipment for crating. Word had finally arrived from the UN in Luanda. Negotiations with UNITA’s national leadership were going well and an evacuation flight had been scheduled for three days hence. The World Food Programme people had volunteered one of their big Hercules freighters and with Katilo’s acquiescence, they’d all be out of Muengo by the weekend.

Now, McFaul emptied the coffee-pot into Christianne’s cup. Bennie had organised some biscuits from somewhere, Peek Frean dry crackers, and McFaul nudged the plate towards Molly Jordan, apologising gruffly for the absence of cheese. Last night, at the MSF house, he’d met her only briefly but a couple of minutes’ awkward conversation had been enough to sense her bewilderment and her vulnerability. Under the tight smile, this woman was plainly lost.

McFaul glanced across at Christianne. She’d already checked into the UN compound, hearing first hand from Fernando about the postponed meeting with Katilo.

‘Did Fernando let you use the HF,’ he asked, ‘to talk to the embassy people?’

Christianne looked at Molly, then shook her head.

‘We didn’t ask.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m …’ she shrugged, ‘not sure.’

There was a silence. Then the sound of hammering from the road outside. Molly couldn’t take her eyes off the stretchers. There were four of them, lightweight aluminium, neatly propped against the wall.

‘My fault,’ she said at last, colouring slightly.

McFaul reached for a biscuit, breaking it between his fingers. Food was beginning to be a problem and he hadn’t eaten properly for days.

‘You didn’t try?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s …’ Molly exchanged glances with Christianne, ‘a bit awkward. Before I came out here I met the ambassador. Nice man, extremely helpful, but …’ she looked at McFaul at last, ‘he didn’t really approve.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of me coming here. He was very fair. He didn’t stand in my way. He just made it plain that I shouldn’t be going … shouldn’t have come.’

‘He’s right.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. So you’ll understand why …’ She offered McFaul a wan smile. ‘I expect I’ll see him when I get back to Luanda. He can get it off his chest then. Whatever it is he wants to say.’

She fell silent as the hammering started again and McFaul wondered just when they’d get round to talking about James Jordan. In his own mind the boy’s death had already become a classic, the kind of textbook case history he’d quote when he next talked to incoming aid workers. The way McFaul read it, this woman’s son had taken his own life. Explaining just how wasn’t going to be easy but it had to be done.

McFaul got up and limped across to the window. Bennie was hammering as well now and the noise was getting on his nerves. McFaul pulled the window shut. The glass had long gone and the replacement plywood plunged the room into semi-darkness. The hammering abruptly stopped. McFaul glanced down at Molly.

‘That OK for you?’

‘I’d prefer it open. If you don’t mind.’

‘I just thought …’ McFaul shrugged, opening the window again then resuming his seat at the table. Looking at Molly, he’d settled on the word that best summed up what her son had really done. Suicide. The boy had committed suicide. By not listening. By thinking himself somehow invulnerable. McFaul stirred, aware of voices outside the window. The newcomer was Llewelyn. He must have walked over from his billet in the UN compound. He was talking to Bennie, running through some kind of check-list he’d evidently compiled, sequences he’d need for his precious film
before the Hercules descended and brought the shoot to an end. There was stuff he wanted to do around the schoolhouse, a classroom situation to mock up. It might feature Bennie, he said, going through the basics with the locals. Then there were the survey maps Llewelyn had already seen, close-up material, a hand adding fresh details, somebody working at the computer keyboard, inputting new data, someone else on the radio, conducting a pretend conversation, material to establish just how hi-tech the de-mining business had become. The list went on and on, punctuated by grunts from Bennie, and McFaul was on the point of going out there and telling Bennie to get on with the crating when Llewelyn mentioned Molly’s son.

‘This boy Jordan,’ Llewelyn was saying. ‘Your boss tells me you had him in the fridge for a while. At your place.’

‘Yeah. Too fucking right.’

‘Because the power was off at the hospital?’

‘Apparently.’

‘So your boss brought him here?’

‘That’s right.’

‘For how long?’

‘Dunno. Couple of days at the most. Long enough to knacker everything else in the freezer.’ McFaul was on his feet now, returning to the window. He could hear Bennie laughing but he was too late to bring the conversation to an end. ‘Gennie failed,’ Bennie was saying. ‘Ran out of fuel. You could smell him half a mile away, the state he was in. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of stiffs in my time but nothing like this. You ever watch
Alien?
That sequence when the guy’s flat on the table and this thing comes bursting out of his—’

McFaul shut the window with a bang. The room went dark again. Molly sat at the table, motionless. When Christianne
tried to comfort her, she shook her head, crossing and uncrossing her arms, taking a deep breath.

‘You should have told me,’ she said quietly. ‘However bad it was you should have told me.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘No?’

‘Non.’

Molly looked at her for a long moment, her face quite impassive.

‘So how bad was he?’ she said at last. ‘When you buried him?’

Christianne looked at McFaul, out of her depth now. McFaul sat down at the table. Molly’s hands were ice-cold to his touch.

‘He was a mess, Mrs Jordan,’ he muttered. ‘He was a mess when we found him. And a mess when we buried him. There was nothing we could do.’

‘Molly. My name’s Molly.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s OK, just tell me. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve come.’

McFaul hesitated a moment, remembering the night he’d driven out with Domingos to recover the boy’s body, the long hours they’d spent with Christianne at the roadside. By the time they’d swept a path to the site of the explosion, Jordan’s remains were black with flies. One or two had somehow survived the transfer into the body bag, the buzzing audible for days afterwards.

Molly was still watching him, still waiting for an answer.

‘What do you want to know?’ McFaul said at last.

‘Everything.’

‘There’s nothing else I can tell you. He stepped on a mine. Probably a bounding mine.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a mine that …’ McFaul shrugged, ‘jumps up.’

‘And explodes where? At what height?’

‘Metre. Metre and a half.’

Molly raised her hand, palm down. When it reached belly-height, McFaul nodded. Molly’s hand shook for a moment.

‘So who makes these mines?’

‘Everyone. The Americans. The Russians. The Italians. They’ve been around for years. Soldiers hate them. As you might imagine.’

‘And do they sell them? To these people?’ Molly gestured vaguely towards the window.

‘Yes. Or to middlemen. That’s the likeliest. That’s the way it normally works.’

‘And they … these middlemen …?’

‘Sell the mines on. To whoever wants them.’

‘Buys them?’

‘Of course.’

‘For a profit? They’re sold for a profit?’

‘Yes. First to the middlemen. And then …’ McFaul shrugged again, ‘to the customers. We call them end-users. In the business.’

‘Business?’

There was a long silence. Christianne leaned forward, her second coffee still untouched.

‘I told Molly about Maria …’ she said. ‘The little girl, you know, that night.’

McFaul nodded. Unlike James Jordan, Maria had survived the minefield, only to be killed a week or so later during the second night of shelling. Christianne knew the mother, a woman called Chipenda, and Molly had said she wanted to meet her.

McFaul nodded, glad that the conversation had changed tack.

‘You know where she is?’

‘Yes. She’s in the cinema. Camping out.’ Christianne paused. ‘I was wondering about Domingos. We need someone to translate. She only speaks Ovimbundu. I thought …’ she glanced at Molly, ‘if Domingos’s not too busy.’

McFaul was already on his feet. He limped out of the schoolroom. Llewelyn was crouched in the sunshine, the camcorder cradled in one hand, explaining a sequence to Bennie. They were pretending the equipment had just arrived. On a cue from Llewelyn, Bennie was to start unpacking it. McFaul watched for a moment, then intervened.

‘Molly Jordan’s here,’ he said to Domingos, ‘she needs a bit of help.’

At the mention of Molly’s name, Llewelyn looked up.

‘Now?’ he said. ‘She’s here now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘Having coffee,’ McFaul glanced at Bennie, ‘and listening to you, fuck-face.’

Bennie looked nonplussed for a moment, then closed his eyes and groaned.

‘Shit,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Boss.’

‘Yeah. And so you fucking should be.’

Llewelyn was on his feet now, the unpacking sequence forgotten.

‘What’s she doing next?’ he asked. ‘Why Domingos?’

‘She wants to meet a woman in the city.’

‘Who?’

‘Just someone.’

‘Yes, but who?’

McFaul took a step towards Llewelyn, tired of arguing with this clown who’d appeared with his camera and his tripod and his fantasies about James Jordan. He was about to settle the debate when Molly appeared at the schoolhouse
door. McFaul lowered his fist and turned away, taking Domingos by the arm. The Global Land Rover was parked nearby. Beside it, McFaul explained about Molly, still shaking with anger. Mrs Jordan wanted to talk to Maria’s mother. He and Domingos would go with her. Domingos would translate. Under the circumstances, it was the least they could do. Domingos nodded, watching the Englishwoman walking towards them, deep in conversation with Llewelyn. Beside the Land Rover, they stopped. Llewelyn was looking at McFaul.

‘I need to get this on tape,’ he said at once, ‘it’s important.’

‘Get what?’

‘This meeting you’ve set up. Mrs Jordan and the girl’s mother. It makes all kinds of points. In fact, it’s vital, absolutely vital.’

McFaul stared at him a moment, another surge of anger darkening his face. He should have hit him earlier, he knew it. He should have established the rules, brought this sick media game to an end. Llewelyn was already opening the passenger door of the Land Rover. McFaul looked at Molly.

‘You want him along? You want it all filmed? Taped? Whatever he does?’

Molly was watching Llewelyn as he made himself comfortable in the back of the Land Rover.

‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t.’

Molly stepped towards the Land Rover. Llewelyn moved across the bench seat, making room for her. She looked him in the eye, shaking her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t want this on camera.’

Llewelyn stared at her.

‘What?’

‘I said I don’t want you here. This is private. Myself and Domingos and Mr McFaul.’

‘Andy,’ McFaul muttered.

‘Andy.’ Molly glanced up at McFaul, correcting herself. ‘Just the three of us.’

Llewelyn shook his head, disbelieving.

‘We’re here to make a film,’ he said thickly. ‘It might help if you remembered that.’

‘You’re here to make a film. I’m here for lots of reasons. Please …’ she held the door open, gesturing with her hand, ‘if you don’t mind.’