“So what the hell is this?” demanded Flynn, not quietly. “Open season on me?”
“There has to be some mistake,” said Todd. A stationary van lurched into the path of his car. “I can imagine all sorts of people wanting to take pot-shots at you, Mickey, but two different ones in the same day? I don’t think even you’re that unpopular. Your friend Laura: could she have made a mistake?”
Flynn thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t see how. She didn’t pick him out of a line-up, she put together one of those PhotoFit composites. I recognised it as Fahad.”
“Then could you have been mistaken?”
“No way. It was him. I couldn’t have made a better picture of him myself.”
Todd frowned. For once he avoided looking at Flynn as he spoke. “Mickey, you had a pretty rough time at his hands. It’s bound to have left—scars, and probably more in your subconscious than in ways you’re aware of. It’s possible that you’re always going to see him in the shadows. Anyone threatening you may always tend to look like Fahad.”
“Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” They traded a grin, almost like old times. Already the spectre was hanging a little less heavy. Serious again, Flynn went on: “Gil, it was him. It was like he was there in the room with us. Laura had never even heard his name, only saw him the once, but she put together a picture as good as a photograph. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“I told you, all I saw were flames. And Laura shut up in the kitchen, too scared to make a run for it, waiting to burn. And Derek.”
“Derek?”
“Derek the senior wino.”
Even senior winos tend not to hang about the same place for three years. Todd had never met him. “Did Derek see them?”
Flynn rolled impatient eyes. “Who knows what Derek saw? Including Derek. He sees things that aren’t there. He thinks there’s an anaconda living under the floor.”
“Did anyone ask him?” Todd knew the problems of getting a cogent story out of a career alcoholic. They were the same as, though greater than, the problems of getting a cogent story out of any eye-witness. He knew from long experience that if he were to ask six good men and true to describe the same incident he would get six detailed, authoritative and wildly divergent accounts. Between noticing different aspects and remembering them imperfectly, their testimony would be chaotically contradictory. Thus their honest descriptions of the same robbery could range from a West Indian armed with a shotgun knocking down a shop-keeper and rifling his till to a white man with a solarium tan armed with a replica handgun waving his fist under the assistant’s nose and making his get-away empty-handed after failing to open the till.
Eye-witness testimony, which laymen think incontrovertible, is in fact so seriously unreliable that courts must look for supporting evidence to corroborate even the most honourable of witnesses. But still sometimes it is all there is, and seekers after truth must do what they can with it, understanding its weaknesses and interpreting as best they may where necessary.
All that goes for eye-witness testimony goes ten-fold for wino-witness testimony. But still it may be all there is, and must then be explored for all it is worth. If Derek had seen something, Todd would find out—even if it proved harder to work out exactly what it was he had seen.
Derek had seen nothing. He had not even seen the snake that morning. He had seen Flynn racing up through the building—Flynn had shouted at him, he could not remember why—then a lot of men in yellow trousers arrived and it started raining. All his bedding was wet that night. It was enough to drive a man to sobriety.
They left him pondering the unfairness of life and went to inspect the wreckage of Flynn’s apartment. (Even Todd, who was a fundamentalist as regards the English language, accepted that the word “flat” was an inadequate substitute.) It was comprehensive. They stood at the livingroom window, or at least the aperture it left, looking over the river.
Todd cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you need me to tell you no life insurance company would look at you twice.”
Flynn gave a little snort that could have been mirth. “Insurance be damned. There’s a bookie up the Tottenham Court Road who gives odds on things like the Second Coming and the next pope being a woman, but you try laying money that I’ll still be alive by weekend.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
Flynn did not comment on it, but he had noticed and appreciated that plural pronoun. He shrugged. It looked like a heron shrugging. “What can I do? I tried ignoring it and damn near got Laura killed. I tried running, and got two hundred and twenty people I didn’t know from Adam killed. What’s left—fight back? I’d even try that, if I could get near the bastards.”
Todd was looking pensive. “We don’t have to fight them, at least not yet. All we have to do is talk to them—find out what’s going on.”
“I know what’s going on. They’re trying to kill me.”
“Both of them—Fahad and Obregon? In concert? By turns? I don’t believe it, Mickey. Look, the only thing in the world those two men have in common is their dislike of you. A South American drug baron and a Palestinian guerrilla?—they wouldn’t be able to find one another even if it occurred to them they might want to. No, this is either one of them or the other. Or—”
“Or what?”
Todd shrugged, broad shoulders rising bear-like up his thick neck. “Or it’s someone else again, laying a smoke-screen.”
“Oh come on,” growled Flynn, “how the hell many people do you think there are with reasons to want me dead?”
“There were four on the list you put together after this.” His gaze travelled the gutted room. “Perhaps we should get in touch with all of them, see what they have to say. The one responsible might consider himself safe enough to boast about it. At least then you’d know where you stand.”
Steps on the stone stairs surprised both of them. As Todd turned to look he saw Flynn’s long body seem to shrink against the smoke-blackened wall and his eyes flared darkly. He thought, He’s afraid—he’s really scared. Then he thought, Of course he’s afraid, somebody’s trying to kill him—he might act as if being young and feckless and earning big money makes you immortal, but actually he’s no more immune to pain and death than I am. In his shoes I’d be scared shitless.
But it was nothing to be scared of, only Derek panting bronchitically up the last of the ten flights. He had remembered something. “A man. Came looking for you. Yesterday, after everybody had gone.” The sentences had to fit in with his breathing. “Said if you came back—to give you this.”
It was a business card. Still puffing, Derek held it out in his big grimy hand. Somehow it had stayed pristine in his custody, as if all his efforts and whatever sense of responsibility remained to him had been channelled into keeping it safe. Flynn took it, glanced at it once and put it in his pocket. He thanked Derek solemnly and Derek beamed and stumped away.
Todd said, “Who was it?”
Flynn sighed. “Byron Spalding, Deering Pharmaceuticals. He’s been the bane of my life since I photographed their god-damned chemist. OK, it’s nice to win prizes, but it’s month-old news now and they’re still looking for copies of the pic—for trade magazines and house magazines and one for the foyer and one for Auntie Home’s album for all I know. They wanted to buy the negative, were quite pissed off when I told them I don’t sell negatives. Almost wish I had now. It was on the plane, I don’t think I’ll get much more mileage out of it now.”
Todd had thought of writing to the four men who might have grown tired of waiting for Flynn’s funeral. But of course he would think that: all his life except for the first seventeen years he had defined his place in the world by what he wrote. He had influenced public opinion and private values. He had campaigned, and challenged the campaigns of others. He had taken on the establishment and the sanctity of received wisdom, and if he had not won every battle he knew he had left his mark on his adversaries. In the course of nearly forty years as a journalist Todd had seen much that he had written given short shrift, only to turn up later in the guise of new government thinking or a courageous opposition stance. He had infinite faith in the potency of the written word.
Flynn belonged to a different generation and a different trade. He grew up on instant food and throw-away ideologies. His idea of an old song was one which had been in the charts for four weeks running; his idea of a classic book was one which was not a TV show first. The Chinese saying “The oxen are slow but the earth is patient” had no appeal for him: the most patience he ever displayed was to wait in a traffic jam without thumping his horn.
Photography too is the ascendency of immediacy over the considered, of appearance over meaning, full of impact and undemanding of intellect. It disdains to explain itself. The photographer, like the Hollywood starlet, is almost entirely concerned with filling the eye. Deeper issues have to be plumbed by some other medium.
So perhaps it was inevitable, a reflection of their different roles in and attitudes to life, that whereas Todd thought of writing to the four men, Flynn proposed going and knocking on their doors.
Todd was aghast. “Well, it’ll tell us what we want to know. The one who’s trying to kill you is the one who answers the door with a loaded 12-bore.”
Flynn was aware of the risk. But doing nothing was also dangerous. Whoever wanted his life enough to destroy a plane full of people would try again and probably soon. If he played it by the book he would end up having it read over him. His best chance of walking away from this was doing something unexpected.
The former MP was a separate case, but the other three were by definition men beyond the reach of law. Each would have been behind bars had it been otherwise. The police could neither touch them nor guarantee to keep them at bay. If the man who tried to kill Laura found her again he would finish the job. Then he would move on: to Todd for sure, and after him to anyone and anything that mattered to Flynn until he was content with the pain inflicted and decided to take his life too.
“There’s nothing else I can do, Gil,” he said. He was over the horror but despair remained as a thin burr behind his voice. “They’ve left me nothing else, not even the time to think much about it. I know where to find Obregon and I’m going to see him. If I can I’ll build in some edge so he doesn’t drop me on the spot; but if I can’t, what the hell, I’m only speeding the inevitable and maybe saving us all a lot of trouble. At least this way I’m not going to be responsible for anyone else’s death.”
“Mickey, you’re not responsible for anyone’s death. None of this is your fault.”
“I don’t know. Maybe if I’d been a bit more ready to back off, a bit less keen on going boldly where no photographer had gone before?” He ran his fingers through his hair distractedly. “If Obregon killed two hundred and twenty people because I pushed him over the edge of reason—”
Todd was steadfast, partly because he believed he was right but beyond that because Flynn needed him to be. “If Obregon destroyed that plane, it wasn’t because of anything you did to him eighteen months ago but because he is and always was evil, which is why you took him on in the first place. If we’re playing the numbers game, set a figure on the lives you saved by moving him along. Add up the misery you prevented.
“Anyway, I don’t know. Obregon? I’m not convinced. After these many months why would he suddenly be so angry with you again that nailing you would be worth killing not only two hundred and twenty uninvolved people but also one of his own couriers? Marine Faber must be worth her weight in gold to him, but he’d have lost her if she hadn’t panicked when the police came aboard. Why was it suddenly so urgent?”
“I’ll ask him.”
“You think he’ll give you the chance?”
“Hellfire, Gil, I don’t know. Maybe it is crazy.” Now Flynn’s fingers were shredding the business card Derek had kept so carefully for him. “But I’ve got to do something, and I can’t think what else. He killed two hundred and twenty people—for me—and I have to do something about that.”
“All you’ll do is die.”
Flynn shrugged. “I sure as hell can’t live with it.”
Todd had said everything he could think of to dissuade him. He thought Flynn was probably throwing his life away for no good purpose, but he had no power to stop him. Once he would have tried, but they were both a little older now. “Colombia, is it? Will you fly?”
“I’ll get onto a military flight somehow. I’m not boarding another airliner, or going any place with a lot of people, until this is settled one way or the other.”