You don’t expect evil to walk in through your office door in the middle of the afternoon, but if it does, you assume you’ll recognise it for what it is.
I didn’t, though. Not until it was too late.
It was the early-evening shift at the news desk – the shift everyone tried to avoid, because it always seemed to last longer than any of the others. News desk is a bit of a misnomer, because there isn’t actually a desk in here anymore. Once there were several: smart, modern structures of steel and vinyl and wood, each one bearing those three initials that are familiar and instantly recognisable across most of the – well, I won’t say across most of the Western world; I’ll just say they’re letters that are very widely known.
By now, though, all we’ve got left are a couple of trestle tables – which collapse when you least expect it, precipitating you and whatever you happen to be working on at the time onto the floor – together with several lopsided chairs. As for modern technology, we’ve managed to hang on to the foreign editor’s laptop, which we share on a rota, although, since it was the foreign editor who drew up the rota, he gets the longest turn.
It does mean we can bash out news stories, although, as the wifi connection is wildly erratic, there’s never any guarantee when we’ll be able to send them. Sometimes by the time they reach their destination the news can be twenty-four hours old. Those nineteenth-century war reporters wouldn’t have had that problem, of course. I’m talking about those stylish gentlemen who camped elegantly on a high ridge to report on the Charge of the Light Brigade, and those earlier ones who sipped chilled wine and scoffed caviar and smoked salmon while the Duke of Wellington routed Napoleon. They wouldn’t have had to bother about wifi or failing batteries. They’d simply have scribbled their stories, added suitable flourishes about death and glory, stressed the victories, skimmed over the defeats then handed the missives to a passing aide. After that they’d have returned to their wine and to cheering on the cavalry and shouting encouraging things like, ‘Onward into the valley of death, boys’, at judicious intervals. I expect it might have been a tad dangerous for them at times, but whatever else they might have had to endure, it wouldn’t be the uneasy boredom of early evenings in a war-torn city like this one.
Sometimes during those long evenings, I even wonder if the world has dropped into a black hole without anyone noticing it. Or whether Earth’s rotation is slowing down and we haven’t managed to keep up with it. I once said that to the interpreter who is part of the news team, to which he replied that he didn’t give a tinker’s toss if the world was slowing down or going backwards or whether it was performing somersaults across the universe, because it wasn’t likely to make any difference to the people in this devastated city, or stop the relentless shelling. And since we would all probably be blown to smithereens by the next round of air strikes, how about breaking out the remaining bottle of whisky. (Alcohol’s forbidden out here, of course, but there are caches of it if you know where to look.)
I made a mild protest about it not being a good idea to drink on an empty stomach, and the interpreter said that could be damned, we were all doing everything on empty stomachs by this time, because the promise of another food consignment being on its way was starting to look as hollow as a blown egg.
We venture out when we think it’s safe, to gather news about what’s happening. We interview local people as well – that’s supposing we can find anyone who’s prepared to talk. It makes for a good human-interest story when they will, though.
When a report comes in of an actual disturbance, we grab bulletproof vests and dash off, brandishing cameras and recorders. I say ‘dash’ but it’s more a kind of half-skulking, half-prowling. You tiptoe through the rubble, constantly looking over your shoulder for snipers. There’s a line of poetry – I forget who wrote it – about a man tiptoeing down a lonesome road in fear and dread… ‘And having once turned round, walks on, and turns no more his head – because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.’ Something like that.
I quoted that once when the interpreter and I were making our cautious way through the streets. He said, somewhat caustically, that he wouldn’t know how people behaved on lonesome roads; he thought we were more like escapees from a French farce, trying not to be caught in the wrong bedroom. Of the two he would prefer the wrong bedroom, he said, because at least you’d have got your leg over. He has no romance in his soul, that interpreter. That was one of the many times when I wondered what I was doing out here, trying to report what’s happening, trying to establish who’s gaining the upper hand, trying to work out which of the spies can be trusted. All the time dodging shells and snipers. All the time eking out the food.
I was on my own at the start of one of those uneasy, unending evenings when the stranger turned up. And that was when the evil came in, although I didn’t realise it at the time. Or did I?
I’d been staring out of a window, trying to dredge up sufficient energy to go out and find one or two people to interview, wondering if the interpreter could be found and whether he was likely to be sober.
It was only when the shadow fell across the door that I looked up and saw the stranger standing there. He smiled hesitantly, as if he was unsure whether to come in. Then he said, very politely, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and stepped inside. And despite his demeanour, just for a few seconds I had the strongest feeling that a menace had come in with him. Almost as if he might be dragging it behind him like an invisible cloak, or something out of Dante or Victor Hugo – those leaden cloaks that weigh down the souls of liars after death. And then I thought: Hell’s teeth, I’m sitting here in the midst of a ravaged city and the next time I go outside I’m likely to be blown up or shot into tattered fragments, and I’m quoting Dante’s Inferno for God’s sake!
‘I think I might have something unusual to report,’ he said. He spoke English, but with an accent that I couldn’t pin down. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed and he had one of those smooth, olive complexions. He could have been anything from Arabian to Spanish. ‘And,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to see you because I think it might be interesting – something you’d want to follow up.’
When I was learning my trade in provincial newspapers we used to get people coming in all the time saying they had things that would be interesting and unusual. Nine times out of ten they weren’t interesting at all, of course. But there was always the tenth time…
So I said we were used to odd things. ‘But you should know right away that we don’t pay for stories.’
‘Of course not. I wasn’t expecting … Could I sit down? I’ve been standing out there in the square, trying to summon the courage to come in.’
I pulled out a lopsided chair, but even after he sat down he seemed not to know how to continue.
To help him along, I said, ‘How about if we start with your name and address.’
He supplied these willingly enough. I thought the address was somewhere on the edge of the city. One of the once-spacious apartments. Always supposing it was a genuine address he was supplying and a real name.
He had, it seemed, been walking home a couple of days earlier when a cripple – a youngish man – limped out of a building and into his path.
‘That wasn’t unduly alarming,’ he said. ‘All he wanted was for me to deliver a letter to an address on the other side of the city. He couldn’t walk as far as that, he said. Well, that was obvious to anyone, because he was badly lame. And since all the public transport stopped running…’
We exchanged wry looks of understanding regarding public transport.
‘So I agreed to take the letter. It seemed a harmless request, and we’re all in this appalling situation together. You’d want to help a poor crippled soul, wouldn’t you?’
‘It was only later that I realised I couldn’t keep my promise,’ he said. ‘I work at the food centre, you see. Quite long hours.’
He paused and looked at me, and I said encouragingly, ‘I know the food centre. They had soup yesterday.’ This was such a rare event it was worth a mention, although I didn’t add that most people eating the soup – in fact most people eating the majority of the centre’s meals – deemed it advisable not to enquire too closely into the precise ingredients of the dishes. If anyone ever writes the history of this particular segment of this war, they may paint dark word-pictures of men eating the rats before the rats ate them. They won’t know how close to the truth that is.
‘I was on the rota for duty all day,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like to let them down.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I gave the letter to a friend – another of the helpers at the centre. He’s very trustworthy, and he promised to deliver the letter that same afternoon.’
‘And did he?’
‘I don’t know. He set off to deliver it, but no one’s heard from him since.’
‘That’s not unusual,’ I said. ‘People are vanishing all the time. Have you been to wherever he lives?’
‘Yes, of course. No sign of him. No answer to knocking or calling through the windows.’
I made a note of the disappeared man’s name and address so we could check it for ourselves. ‘What about the destination for the actual letter? Can you remember the address?’
‘Only that it was somewhere in the Old City.’
The Old City. With the words, the images came unbidden. Bombed buildings jutting up like decaying teeth, some of them still smoking from the blast that had destroyed them, others drying and decaying where they stood. Incredibly, families still lived in those husks.
‘I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly where it was,’ said the man.
‘Fair enough. But why come to us about this?’
‘There doesn’t seem anywhere else to report things any longer. At least, nowhere you can fully trust. And I thought – well, you people are used to investigating things, to finding out the truth. That’s right, isn’t it? And a single person vanishing so quietly in the midst of all this…’
I said, thoughtfully, ‘Blowing up a hundred people and the street with them is almost routine now. But the silent disappearance of one law-abiding citizen – an aid worker – there’s something different about that.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said eagerly. ‘You don’t know what might be going on, do you?’
It sounded as if he was visualising the uncovering of a malevolent spy ring of complicated nationality and intricate loyalty – even of being hailed as the brave and conscientious citizen who led to its being cracked. Nor was it so outrageous an idea. The letter could have contained information. Or payment for information received. For a wild moment I had similar visions on my own account. Even if you work in a bombed-out shell that was once a recording studio and you only have a fifth share in a laptop, it doesn’t mean you don’t occasionally dream of journalist of the year awards. Even Pulitzers.
However, I said, temperately, ‘Can you leave it with me for a couple of days?’
‘Yes, but what will you do? Will you try to find the crippled man? I’d try to do it, only I’ve promised to be at the centre.’
Tracing the crippled man was the obvious initial course of action. ‘Whereabouts did you see him?’ I said.
He pointed out the location on the big map we had pinned to one wall – although the contours of the actual places no longer bore much resemblance to the printed streets and squares.
‘I know where that is,’ I said. ‘What time of day was it? People usually have a routine.’
‘I know,’ he said, and we shared the unspoken thought that most people’s routines were tied to when it was considered safe to scuttle along to somewhere like the food centre, or to dodge between the shadowy old buildings. It provides a semblance of security to think you’re dodging the snipers and the bombs. It’s a false security, of course, because the snipers and the bombers are playing the same game – but whatever gets you through.
‘It was just around sunset,’ he said.
Of course it would be sunset. That halfway time when the day is handing over to the night, uneasy to relinquish its spurious hold, but unable to resist the encroaching darkness.
‘I’d be really grateful if you’d try to find out a bit more,’ he said, sounding relieved. ‘You could let me know at the food centre what you find out. Would you do that? I’d like to know. There’s so much clever evil in this city, isn’t there?’ He paused, and stood for a moment, outlined in the open door, and the impression of something menacing brushed against my mind again. His voice – his whole manner – seemed subtly to change. ‘And when it’s not clever, it’s a hungry evil, isn’t it?’ he said softly, and went out.
Those last words stayed with me as I went along to the Old City an hour later.
A hungry evil sounded like the title of a slash-and-gore horror film, or a paperback with a lurid jacket and promises in the strapline of macabre cavortings.
But a clever evil … that was a term that had class. It could almost be Shakespeare. The best quotes usually were from Shakespeare, if they weren’t from the Bible. Whatever they were, those three words struck a resonance in my mind – I felt I recognised them. Probably, of course, I knew them because it was the name of a computer game or a rock group.
Sunset in this city – probably in any city in the world – is a strange time. An Irish journalist once told me that in Ireland it used to be called the purple hour. The mists steal in from the mountains, he said, like violet cobwebs. The Irish always like to spin a good story.
Here sunset is a mixture of rust and a dry-looking terracotta. If you happen to be of a fanciful turn of mind you’d say it’s as if all the blood that’s been spilled in this war has leached into the air, tainting it for ever. Actually, of course, it’s simply the dust from the old buildings, scorched and tanned by the centuries of sun. There are even traces of the really old city here and there – fragments of Greek and Byzantine influences. When you walk through certain parts you feel as if you’re glimpsing that legendary rose-red city, ‘half as old as time’.
But rose-red cities notwithstanding, on that evening I felt as if I was walking through a blood-tinged tunnel. It was quiet, but it was a listening quiet. Several times I whipped round, convinced I was being watched, and twice I looked up to the jagged tops of the buildings, thinking I had seen the glint of a rifle. Nothing moved though.
I was starting to think it had been a bad idea to come out here on my own. It was vanity, of course; if this turned out to be a wild goose chase, I didn’t want the rest of the team to know about it. I’d never have lived it down.
This was the area where the stranger had been accosted by the cripple. It might once have been quite a prosperous district – with merchants and suchlike. No one was around now though. But even as that thought formed, as if answering a cue, I heard footsteps.
At first I thought they were echoes of my own steps, but then I realised they weren’t quite matching up. They were uneven, dragging. The footsteps you’d get from someone who was trying not to be seen. Or from someone who couldn’t walk very well.
Like a crippled man.
I turned round and saw him. Thin, slightly hunched over, not a hunchback exactly, but as if there might be a deformity of the spine. And one leg – the left – dragged, giving him a lurching, lopsided gait.
He was younger than I had expected and there was a surprising look of agility – even of strength – about him. But if he made any kind of attack, surely I could overpower him. Or I could run away. This last thought was not one that did me any credit, but there are times when you have to be realistic.
I slowed my pace and allowed him to catch up with me.
He drew level and regarded me, his head on one side. Then he said, ‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have the look.’ He considered me for a moment longer, then he said, ‘And you have the look of a man good and trustworthy.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Then I shall ask a kindness.’
Here it comes, I thought. And so it did. ‘I have a letter,’ he said. ‘Very important – for a cousin living here.’ He pointed to the address on the envelope. It was written in English – I couldn’t decide if that was strange or not. ‘It’s my cousin’s house,’ he said. ‘You know the place?’
‘I think so. The general area, certainly.’ I frowned, and then, with the feeling that I might be reading from a script prepared for me by someone, I said, ‘That’s quite a long way from here.’
He pounced eagerly on the words. ‘I cannot walk so far, you see. Could you take pity on a lame man and deliver it for me? It is urgent – there are details about care for my cousin’s young children. So it should be taken to him this very evening. There will be a reward.’
‘A reward?’
‘My cousin will reward you.’ His eyes held mine.
A sensible man would have refused the request outright. A sensible and a kind man would have said something about taking the letter to the cousin later – and then returning very speedily to the newsroom to enlist back-up. Only a fool would have said, ‘All right,’ and put out his hand to take the letter.
I said, ‘All right.’ And put out my hand to take the letter.
As I walked to the address on the letter I was doing my best to think myself into the part of the intrepid lone investigator. It wasn’t because I was apprehensive – well, not really – but the donning of a mental disguise felt like the donning of armour, or at least a bullet-proof vest. I tried out a kind of Philip Marlowe character first – hard-bitten newspaperman who kept a bottle of Chivas Regal in the collar drawer. But by the time I had reached the next intersection, I had discarded Marlowe in favour of George Smiley – until I remembered that Le Carré had described Smiley as having the ‘cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’, and while satanic cunning was all very well, I wasn’t sure about the other part. So I switched from Smiley to James Bond, which meant I could pretend there would be a dry martini and a slumbrouseyed lady waiting at journey’s end.
Journey’s end.
Here it was. The place written on the envelope. It looked as if it was a warehouse, and it was surrounded by similar buildings, all of them huddled together, as if they might be propping each other up. They all looked deserted and had that eyeless appearance of most derelict buildings. But appearances can be deceptive, and for all I knew they might have housed anything from the latest consignment of Kalashnikovs to nests of agents from any one of half a dozen countries. Still, people were living in all kinds of unusual places now, and a warehouse might provide quite spacious accommodation for several innocent families, dispossessed of their homes.
Shadows were spreading thickly across the ground, which was turned to a mosaic of crimson and gold by the sinking sun, so that it was like walking across one of those Persian carpets from the old legends.
The warehouse had those massive double doors that unfold to admit large vehicles. They were closed now, though, and if there had been anything resembling a letterbox I would just have posted the letter through it and beaten it out of there like a bat escaping hell. But there was no letterbox. What there was, was a small, inset door, with a tiny grille at the top. I knocked as loudly as I could, but there was no response, so I stood on tiptoe and peered through the grille. There wasn’t anything to see – just a dark void, with anonymous shapes.
The disguise-fantasy had taken a new turn now, probably a result of walking across that Arabian Nights swathe of sunset patterns on the ground. I was no longer James Bond or a whisky-drinking investigator; I was the hero of some gothic horror fairy tale, faced with a locked chamber. Still, this was hardly the Arabian Nights’ copper castle with its forbidden and fateful golden door. It was a battered old warehouse, not the forbidding turret that the gallant and foolhardy knight must enter by hook or by crook, by picklock or jemmy … Nor was it Bluebeard’s castle with its sinister inner chamber, which turned out to contain not priceless treasure or the elixir of life, but the mutilated, clotted bodies of his brides hanging from butchers’ hooks…
With this last image, something so bizarre and so macabre stirred in the depths of my mind that I immediately pushed it away. But it stayed with me, like sun dazzle printed on the retina, so vivid that I wondered if I might even be hallucinating – from the heat, the lack of food, the interpreter’s whisky… Because it’s all very well to don a smidgeon of courage by pretending you’re James Bond, but when it comes to visualising Perrault’s murderous villain, salting away bartered brides and piling up mangled bodies in the seventh chamber…
Almost without realising it, I reached for the handle of the inset door. It would be locked, of course, and I should have to see if I could slide the letter under the door and trust to luck that it reached its recipient.
But the door was not locked. It swung inwards with a faint creak that might have been a cracked, whispering voice, saying, ‘Come inside, you are expected…’
Still, all I had to do was step inside, deposit the letter somewhere where it could not be missed, and beat it back to the newsroom.
After the sultry radiance of the setting sun, the interior of the warehouse was so dark that it was confusing, and I stood in the doorway waiting for my vision to adjust. I had the impression again of massive shapes grouped everywhere, some of them swaying slightly, as if the slight ingress of air from my entrance had disturbed them. There was something wrong about them – they were in the wrong place and I could not work out why.
But there was one thing that was not confusing and that was the smell. It came at me like something solid, and I gasped then flinched.
The darkness was not quite so thick now, and I could see that the shapes seemed wrong because they were suspended a couple of feet above the ground … They were hanging from massive iron hooks driven into the rafters overhead … Pallid shapes, but streaked with dark, livid red … mottled … Here and there globules of yellow fat clung to their surfaces…
A dreadful comprehension started to unfold and my stomach lifted with nausea.
Because if you’ve ever smelled meat that’s recently been slaughtered – if you’ve ever walked into a butcher’s shop when they’re re-stocking the freezers – if you’ve ever entered an abattoir…
Incredibly, in this bomb-torn, shelled-out city, where the inhabitants were living on scraps and charity, this warehouse was filled with the unmistakable scents of raw meat – not all of it fresh.
Behind me the door which I had left open was slammed shut, and there was the sound of a key turning. I spun round, but it was already too late. A man stood there, barring the way. He wore an overall, darkly stained, and in one hand he held a long knife. In the other was a saw.
He said, ‘You have brought me a letter, I think?’
A letter … ‘Yes.’ My voice seemed to be coming from a long way away.
‘If you read it, you will understand.’
The single sheet of paper slid from the envelope easily enough.
On it were written the words, ‘This is the only one I could send you today.’