Читать книгу Sandstealers - Ben Brown - Страница 8

Jamail, the avuncular hotel manager, had assigned them the ‘Presidential Suite’. He said he’d persuaded the owner they could have it for nothing, though it was usually empty in any case. The suite, rather like the country itself, had seen far better days and no self-respecting president would go near it. It sat atop the taller of the Hamra Hotel’s two towers with a sweeping view of the city, but the threadbare carpet was blighted by wine and coffee stains, and there were cigarette burns on both the sofas. Rachel and Becky sat on one of them, staring at a dreary painting on the wall—a waterfall surrounded by forest on some other continent. At first they had cried till their throats ached, but now they simply sat in shock. A pair of mosquitoes strafed their ears, taunting them in their grief.

Edwin and Kaps busied themselves at the kitchen table, studying a map of Fallujah, trying to pinpoint where it was that Danny had been ambushed. Edwin, tank commander turned war reporter, was in his element, applying with military precision the various coordinates the US Army had given them. He smoked a Marlboro right down to its butt as fingers, rulers and pencils roamed purposefully around the American map he’d stolen from the Green Zone.

‘Look, it must have been here, around this bridge.’ Edwin lit another cigarette from the old one, doing it without even looking.

‘But why would he have been there?’ argued Kaps. ‘Where would that road go that would interest anyone, let alone Danny?’

‘Oh, stop it!’ Rachel shouted. ‘What does it matter where the fuck it happened? It’s not going to bring him back, is it? He’s dead, isn’t he? Even if they’ve kidnapped him, they’ll put him in an orange jumpsuit, stick him in a cage and…’

The others knew she was right. Thoughts of death were consuming all of them; not just Danny’s but potentially their own. It could so easily have been one of them and so there was a guilty, furtive exhilaration. They were still alive.

Becky had been first to hear the news. She’d just finished lunch when ‘Dancing Queen’ had rung out on her mobile. It was Adi, the diplomat. Ever since she’d met him at a drinks party in the embassy, he’d pestered her with calls in an effort to ‘like…maybe get to know you better’. She remembered with mild disgust how the folds of fat rolled off him and fumes of halitosis wafted from his mouth. The ring on his chubby finger told her there was a loyal wife—poor, deluded dear—waiting for him back home in the Washington suburbs. However desperate Becky might become, however much she yearned for warm flesh to wake up with, she made herself promise she would never, ever sleep with him. Why couldn’t one of his colleagues have propositioned her instead? One of those clean-cut diplomats with perfect partings and bright white teeth, the Paul Bremer clones who looked like the stars of commercials for hair restorer or denture cleanser.

‘Hey, Becky—Adi here.’ The sound of his voice made her heart sink. She began assembling implausible reasons why she would be busy every night for the next three weeks of her tour of duty.

‘Oh, I…Adi, I was just…’

‘Listen to me carefully. There’s been a bad shooting on some road south of Baghdad. Near Iskandariya. I’ll get straight to the point: it’s Daniel Lowenstein. He’s a friend of yours, I believe?’

‘Yeah, course he is. Oh my God.’

‘Look, I’m really sorry, but his car was ambushed a few hours ago. Shot up pretty bad according to our units up there. His driver’s dead and Lowenstein’s missing. No sign of his body yet, but it doesn’t look good.’

Despite the humidity, Becky began to shiver. The flashback came to her as it always did, unexpectedly, like a mugging in a darkened alleyway: before her yet again, he was dying while she prevaricated. All these years later, she could still hear his pleas for help as the blood emptied out of him and soaked the snow, his ever-weaker voice calling out her name—calling, calling, calling—and her legs running to him, going nowhere. Now, as then, there was only one logical conclusion: that she had killed him.

It took another four or five minutes until she calmed herself enough to ring the others, but her finger still trembled as she dialled their numbers: Rachel first, then Kaps, then Edwin.

Soon they were huddled in the Presidential Suite, its two landlines and their assorted mobiles in frantic, perpetual use till nightfall.

They talked to the New York Times. Even though Danny had gone freelance, the assistant managing editor said he would be on the next flight, bringing with him an ‘investigator’—a former Special Forces guy. He would work out of the bureau. Danny’s older sister was on her way in from Dubai, where she was a big shot at some investment bank. The company was pulling out all the stops to get her to Kuwait and from there she’d pick up a US Air Force C-130.

They talked to Danny’s elderly parents in Pittsburgh. Lukas and Eliza Lowenstein were originally from Germany, and the hint of an accent was still there as Eliza repeated, over and over, ‘My baby boy.’ They realised she would never remember him as they did, but as the infant she’d cradled in her arms.

They talked to Sabeen, Mohammed’s widow. What would become of the children, she demanded of Becky in English every bit as fluent as her late husband’s; how would she support them? Becky would have liked to assure her, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be well looked after, you’ll want for nothing,’ but since Danny no longer worked for any organisation, she could make no promises.

They talked to the Iraqi police, the US military, diplomats and politicians, and—a novel experience for all of them—they talked to the press. The embassy Hostage Crisis Group had recommended a media blackout, so now it was down to the Junkies to persuade their colleagues to hide from the world the news that a fellow journalist had disappeared.

Much of the press corps was staying in the Hamra too; it had become famous for its raucous poolside parties, where reporters, aid workers and diplomats would talk and dance the night away while Danny held court. These gatherings ceased as a mark of respect for him, their missing warrior; the Baghdad party was on hold. No one used the pool at all now. It was as if it had suddenly become contaminated.

The journalists agreed to the blackout—after all, what if it were one of them? Still, they wanted answers for when they finally ran the story. What had he been doing down there? Why hadn’t he told anyone he was going? Did his friends think he was dead or kidnapped? And if the latter, how did they rate his chances? For once the Junkies knew what it was to try and fend off these ravenous birds of prey.

‘We really can’t say much at the moment,’ Edwin and Kaps kept repeating. They had decided a party line and were determined to stick to it. ‘The embassy and the military have told us it’s best not to get into any speculation.’ They were stonewalling, and the Danny they knew would have railed against it.

The sun he had cursed that morning was slowly dying, slipping away unmourned behind Baghdad’s higher buildings. Shadows of those still on the streets fell long and curfew beckoned. In the morning it would be one day exactly since he had disappeared. His friends wondered if, after that, it would be one week, one month, one year, until all the anniversaries began to flow into an ocean of time where Danny Lowenstein would exist only as a fading memory.

The moment Camille Lowenstein stepped nervously off the Hercules from Kuwait, a phalanx of embassy security guards swarmed around her, weighed down with M16s and 9mm Beretta pistols strapped to their thighs. They wore wraparound sunglasses and tight T-shirts showing off muscles that bulged and tattoos that boasted of lost loves or units. She had never been in the presence of so many big men and big guns. This was her brother’s world, she realised, where violence and fear were the norm, peace and tranquillity banished to a distant universe.

She was flanked by Tommy Harper, the lanky executive despatched by the New York Times, even though—strictly speaking—Danny was no longer on their payroll. Harper wore little round spectacles and clutched a briefcase. Camille’s first impression was that, if she was out of her depth here, so was he. Alongside Harper was Munro, a small, muscular Scot hired by the paper to find out more about what had happened to their distinguished former correspondent. Harper had told her, in reverential tones, that Munro was ex-SAS: ‘You know, Brit Special Forces.’ So what’s he going to do, Camille felt like asking, bring my brother back to life if he’s been shot, or rescue him single-handed if he’s been kidnapped?

Something about Munro made her feel uncomfortable. His body language implied he didn’t see what she could achieve. She didn’t even know herself. Baghdad, she supposed, was a dangerous city for those who weren’t sure what they were doing; it was a place for certainty, not for doubt.

It was the tremor in her mother’s voice that had convinced her to come. ‘Please, honey; we need you there for us, for the family,’ Eliza Lowenstein had begged. ‘He’s your brother, after all. Who knows, maybe you can help him.’ Help him like you didn’t do before, in other words—or was that just how Camille had chosen to interpret it, through the prism of her broken conscience? Besides, there was no excuse. Camille was in Dubai which—if you were looking at a map in Pittsburgh—seemed pretty much next door to Iraq.

Camille had been called out of a meeting to be told the news. She had stood there in the glass palace where she worked, staring out at its panoramic views of nothing. She had supposed she ought to cry, but no tears would flow. Perhaps it was the shock, she thought; perhaps they’d come later. She’d gone home, tossed some clothes into a suitcase and made sure her secretary cancelled everything in her diary, except the dinner date with the man she’d met two weeks earlier: Camille wanted to make that call herself. He hadn’t sounded particularly sympathetic nor very bothered that she wouldn’t be around. At 52, she couldn’t help thinking she was too old for dates anyway. As the bank’s limousine eased her past Dubai’s lavish skyscrapers, she wondered whether her brother would be dead or alive when she saw him again. Either way, she resolved she wouldn’t come back until she knew for sure. That much at least she owed him. She plugged in her iPod headphones and put on some Janis Joplin. It always reminded her of Danny. But she asked herself another question: was it bad taste to listen to music when the corpse of your only sibling could be lying in a ditch somewhere?

At Baghdad International Airport, a lone immigration officer in a slightly tatty uniform waved her through without even opening her passport. He gave her a look that said: Trust me, if you’re crazy enough to come to my country, I really have no plans to stop you. Then, as Harper and Munro shepherded her to the waiting motorcade, a plump diplomat in a white shirt and tie stepped forward to greet them.

‘Hi, I’m Adi—Adi Duval.’ Camille noticed with mild revulsion two dark ovals of sweat around his armpits. ‘You need to know we’re doing everything, and I mean everything, to find your brother.’ Adi assured her that army intelligence was on the case, with spy satellites and unmanned reconnaissance planes searching 24/7. They hadn’t yet established which group was responsible, but they had a list of suspects. CIA analysts had made it their top priority, and they’d crack it soon, he was sure they would. Danny was a ‘distinguished American citizen’ who deserved ‘our best and fullest resources’, he went on, his tone implying that the country’s less impressive passport holders might receive a slightly inferior level of service from their government.

He handed her a flak jacket and helmet.

‘You’ll need to wear these, Miss Lowenstein—just for the ride into town.’

Camille, Harper and Munro were driven at unfeasible speed to the Hamra Hotel, the gleaming white GMC Suburban—bulletproof, of course—swerving and screeching its way through the fiendish chicanes designed to slow traffic. At intermittent checkpoints ordinary mortals were having their papers checked and car boots searched, while Camille’s convoy sailed through as though she were the First Lady herself. If only her brother had enjoyed such protection.

An image returned to her—for no reason she could fathom—of Danny aged eight, playing hide-and-seek in the garden of their home in East Allegheny, Pittsburgh—‘Deutschtown’ as it was known. Camille, who was three years older, had kept on searching even when she’d seen his foot poking from behind the garden shed. He was enjoying the game so much, she didn’t want to spoil it. When she finally pounced and Danny screamed, she thought it was his silly mock surprise at being found at last, but then she saw it, curled up in the grass only a few feet from him: a Copperhead snake, watching him with sullen disapproval. All along, while she’d dragged out her search, poor Danny had been petrified. Head pounding, she’d grabbed a stick and flicked the snake away. As it scuttled off into the trees, Danny had looked at her in admiration, a look that came back to her now. She was his sister, bigger than him and so much braver. He’d been absolutely certain she would never let him down.

So why was it that she had? Not just once, but again and again.

Black curtains across the side windows hid away Baghdad, but the occasional glimpses were enough to make her swallow: so here it was, the place she had watched on countless television bulletins; where Saddam had strutted his stuff; where shock and awe had lit up the sky; where the liberating troops had marched in to such short-lived acclaim. She could never have imagined she would see it for herself.

‘At some stage we should be able to get you down to the spot where Danny disappeared.’ Adi sat beside her, the smell of his stale sweat wafting into her nostrils. ‘First Cavalry are still securing the area, but when they’re done, we could have an armed escort take you there. Only if you want to, of course.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Camille.

‘We appreciate what you and your family are going through and we understand you’re going to need some closure here.’ He chose the word carefully, to imply—very gently, but from the start—that they might well be looking for a body.

‘Thank you. I don’t intend to leave this country until I have my brother, whether he’s dead or alive.’

‘He’s really an extraordinary journalist. You must be so proud of him.’

‘Thank you, I am.’

‘I know a few of his friends; they’re over at the Hamra, too. Maybe you’d like to meet with them?’

Later, when it was all over, she would think about how different things would have been for her if she’d just said: ‘No thanks, Mr Duval.’

‘Yes please, that’d be good.’

Soft morning light fell upon the carnage of the night before: a fresh batch of mutilated corpses, dumped around Baghdad like garbage put out for collection. Some lay down alleyways, some amid the bulrushes in the Tigris. Danny’s friends knew they would be out there and couldn’t help thinking he might be among them.

The Junkies were prone to insomnia at the best of times and now sleep seemed a physical impossibility. Their wakefulness meant there was an eternity of time to fill but work was unthinkable: why head out to cover some new Iraqi tragedy when they had their very own?

‘Fried eggs and tomatoes, anyone?’ Edwin was buzzing around the suite’s kitchenette, pouring olive oil into a scratched old frying pan. ‘I’m making breakfast.’

‘You’re always doing something,’ said Becky.

He looked confused, so she let it pass.

‘Oh, all right then, why not. Two, please, sunny side up.’ She had no appetite, and neither had the others, but they would eat because it kept Edwin happy. He had loved to cook for them on the road—the more challenging the circumstances, the better: Bosnia, Africa, Chechnya, it didn’t matter where. It was one of the therapies that worked for him.

When the unnecessary business of breakfast was complete, the long silence began. Everyone slipped into memories of Danny until a knock at the door reverberated around the room and jolted them from their reveries. Becky jumped, as if it was a gunshot.

Adi stood there with three people they’d never seen.

‘Guys, I’d like you all to meet Tommy Harper from the Times, Jim Munro, who’s here as a security adviser, and this is Camille Lowenstein, Danny’s sister.’

She was the only one they looked at. She was just like Danny; a little taller and older, but with his presence. For a moment it felt as though he were with them again, back from the dead. The same persuasive eyes peered out at them through Dolce & Gabbana glasses, black and oblong, giving her the stern, studious look of the tutor you admired at university and wouldn’t want to cross.

Rachel leapt up from the sofa and hugged her, while the others were more circumspect, shaking her hand one by one and introducing themselves.

‘You got here pretty fast,’ said Rachel.

‘My bank has been fabulous but I’m kind of dazed; one minute sitting in Dubai, the next here in Baghdad—which isn’t exactly the sort of place you expect to find yourself at a moment’s notice.’

Her educated East Coast cadences rolled easily over them in much the same way Danny’s always had.

Kaps led her to the shabby armchair he’d just been sitting in and fixed her a coffee while she took in the faces around her, especially Rachel’s and Becky’s, with their puffed-up, reddened eyes.

‘So how was the flight in?’ Rachel, like an uneasy cocktail-party guest, was determined to clutch at small talk. Becky, slumped beside her, said nothing at all.

For half an hour, between more tears and drifting silences, the Junkies told them what they knew of the area where Danny had disappeared, the various insurgent groups who operated there and the extent to which the Americans were or were not in control. At the end of it, Harper and Munro thanked them and said they needed to make some calls.

‘I should be going too,’ said Camille.

Why, said the look on Rachel’s face. What the hell else is there to do?

‘Stay if you like. It’s nice to talk about Danny.’

When Turner and Munro had gone, Camille asked them again if they knew what he’d been doing in al-Talha.

‘That’s the beauty of being freelance, and the curse,’ said Kaps. ‘You don’t have to tell anyone your plans, but when it all goes wrong, no one knows what you’ve been up to. He could be pretty secretive.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s the reason he left the Times in the first place—to be a free spirit. Said the bureau had become a fortress, with all the security consultants and armed guards you had to have there. Soldier boys like your friend Munro.’

‘He took a lot of risks?’

Kaps chuckled.

‘We all take risks. You’re taking a risk just by being in this city, in this country. But Danny? Yeah, he took more than most.’

He handed Camille the coffee he’d just made. She grabbed it in the palms of both hands, defying its heat. You’re a tough cookie, Kaps thought, and something told him to be a little wary about what he said.

‘And what d’you think are his chances?’ Camille asked. ‘You guys know Iraq so well and I really don’t have a clue.’

‘Okay then, no bullshit,’ said Kaps. ‘If this had been down south with the Shia, I’d say good. But we could be talking about al-Qaeda—al-Zarqawi in particular. Not exactly renowned for the quality of his mercy.’

Camille nodded slowly. She was scared they’d think he was Jewish: people often assumed they were because of the family name, when in fact Lowenstein was the town in Germany her parents had originally come from.

‘So are you and Danny close?’ asked Kaps. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Danny talk about his sister.

‘Not especially, I’m afraid. Different worlds; me in Dubai, him in all these war zones.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘This is going to sound crazy, but I guess it would have been a few years ago.’

She was too embarrassed to admit it was actually twelve: she didn’t want to have to answer all the questions it would provoke. As it was, she could sense a frisson of surprise ripple around the room.

It had been 22nd June 1992, to be precise, and she remembered not only the date but his last words before he put the phone down on her: ‘I just don’t think we have a thing to say to each other any more. I know I’m supposed to love you, but the truth is I don’t even like you very much. Maybe it’d be best if you didn’t call again.’

For the rest of that week, Camille was busy at the embassy. Adi reported that First Cavalry had pulled in a bunch of local hoods around al-Talha and army intelligence was grilling them, so far without result. The news blackout had been lifted and he wanted her to record an appeal they could put on al-Arabiya television, but no one could agree on what she should say: was she asking for the return of a hostage or a body? And how should she sound? On a conference call with Washington, the FBI advised her to be tough, while the man from the State Department urged a more emollient approach. ‘Remember, you may just have his life in your hands,’ said the disembodied DC voice.

After the embassy meetings, Harper would go back to the bureau of the New York Times, where he was staying, while Munro was happy to hang out with old SAS chums now employed in Baghdad’s burgeoning security industry. Camille would have dinner at the Hamra and spend time with Danny’s friends. Getting to know them was as good a way as any of getting to know him. She found them fascinating, like rare species in a zoo, so unlike all the expats in her world who had done nothing and seen nothing. These people—she could tell it from their eyes—had seen so much. Too much perhaps.

‘He’s been in good hands since…well, whenever it was you last met with him,’ Rachel told her one evening. ‘He was…I mean he is… such a good friend to us.’

No one else said anything. Camille was becoming used to these gaping holes in the conversation.

‘I do read his stuff from time to time,’ she said after a minute or so. ‘I mean, I can see what a good writer he is.’

‘Unique,’ said Rachel. ‘And driven like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘I think I would. Driven is a Lowenstein family trait, and not always an entirely healthy one. But please, go on. It’s good to be with the people who were closest to him. What was it that brought you guys together?’

‘We were thrown together, I suppose,’ said Rachel sadly, but smiling too. ‘And I guess we shared a feeling, a spirit.’

‘A “spirit”?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you how Danny once put it. I remember it so well, we were lying on a rooftop in Mogadishu. The al-Sahafi Hotel, starlit and tracer-lit as usual. He said, “We live more in a year than most people live in a lifetime.” There was a kind of arrogance about that which I loved, like we were better than mere mortals.’

For a while the only sounds in the Presidential Suite were coughs and sniffles, and the distant din of the Baghdad traffic trying to seep in through the windows.

‘And when Danny said that, it made me think about when I was about ten, on holiday with my parents on the west coast of Ireland. We were on a beach, by a loch. Local builders would come along with a big tractor and trailer, and dig up the sand. They wanted it for making concrete and didn’t see why they shouldn’t just help themselves. I remember going up to them and saying, “But you can’t just steal the beach; you can’t steal the sand.” And they laughed their heads off at this silly girl from America then turned their backs on me. Well, I used to tell Danny we were no better than those guys; we were sandstealers too. I had this vision of an hourglass—you know, where you pour sand from one bit to another to measure time. The way I saw it, we were stealing sand and stealing time, because every day of our lives was so damned rich, and every year seemed to last so long. Danny loved that, absolutely adored it. From that day on he was always calling us the sandstealers.’

‘So when was it you first met up?’

Rachel’s eyes twinkled and the tears in them seemed to dry as she was carried back to the day that everything began.

‘It was 1994—in my case, anyway. Another century, another millennium. The truth is, your brother inspired me. I’m really not sure I’d have ever become a journalist without him. I think I was only about 16 when I started reading his stuff. There was nothing on earth I wanted more than to do what he was doing and see what he was seeing, so I went to where I knew he was, simple as that. I just got up one day and went to Bosnia.’

Her friends shifted uncomfortably, wondering if they should stop her reminiscing, but it was too late already.