He was speaking of Boathwaite. Even now his body was tanning in the sunshine out in the yard. I wondered what they considered to be his crime. He must have run the base as they asked him: turning the raw prisoners into farmhands and sending gangs of them out to the Zone to scavenge from Polyn. Maybe he’d been a little softer in command than they wanted? Had he failed to bring enough back from the Zone? Or was his fate down to some lingering politics that I had no sight of, like what had seen me imprisoned by Boathwaite’s brother?
I guessed that whatever happened here was a sideshow to the world Eben had flown out of. Maybe his standing there hinged on his adventures here in the north. I knew now that on the other side of the straits something limped on. It hadn’t abandoned us — in fact, it seemed to look to us for its salvation.
My mind was snapped back to the room by his mentioning the Zone.
His white, sightless eyes had fixed on me at the end of the table. ‘The last trip to the Zone threw up some promising things. We’re looking forward to learning more before we leave.’
He proposed a toast and put his glass to his lips. The level in it barely altered, while all around the table the guards emptied theirs. Purefoy proposed a toast in return. People began eating, the drinking became general and loosened the mood in the room.
The guard next to me served me with roasted meat from a tray. I remembered him as a bully. Flushed with drink, he boasted of his young wife and whispered indiscreetly about what I’d missed.
‘They gave him a last chance one year ago. That’s when they sent the Jap out from Alaska.’ He nodded his head at Apofagato, who sat up at the far end of the table.
He’d been to the Zone himself, he said. Trouble was, Boathwaite was too damn soft. A dozen or so prisoners a year would never make a dent in that place. They needed to turn the whole base out, march them into the Zone en masse.
When he said ‘soft,’ I thought of the pile of ies in the snow-melt on the bridge.
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said.
*
The afternoon dragged on. The bottles kept coming. I didn’t drink and nor did Eben Callard. By mid-afternoon, the noise in the room was a roar. Men took turns making outlandish toasts. The guards’ wives were flushed and giggly.
Suddenly Eben Callard’s voice cut through the buzz of drunken laughter. ‘We haven’t heard from Makepeace,’ he said.
I said I didn’t mean to give offence, but I’d drunk as much as I wanted.
The room quietened. He said he hadn’t had a toast in mind. He’d wanted to hear me speak about the Zone and what we’d found there.
So I told them what I’d seen, more or less, leaving out my own visit to the city. I told them about the Tungus boy, and the poison, and how we shot the prisoners on the bridge.
That phrase too soft that the man next to me had used kept coming into my head. I told them about Zulfugar and the soft-nosed bullet that had cored him like an apple.
I wanted them all to know, the women too, since it was done in their name. And I told them that we had come back empty-handed.
They heard me out politely and without interest, as if these were things that we didn’t speak of, but were plain to all of us.
When I was done speaking, Eben Callard thanked me for my account of the trip. ‘Sure you’ve been straight with us?’ he said.
I told him I had.
‘Because some of my men followed your trail into the bush and went digging.’
He signalled and someone brought a sack into the room. I knew what was in it. I’d buried it near the ashes of the fire the night before.
Eben Callard reached in and pulled out the mason jar with its waves of light. He held it up with both hands, as though he was going to bless it. The room went quiet enough that you could hear the faint hum of all that light moving.
‘I wish I had eyes to see it,’ he said, ‘because I hear it’s a pretty thing.’
6
WHY EBEN CALLARD needed to make theatre out of proving me a liar, I don’t know, but after he had, he had his men take me down to a room in the courtyard where they left me for a while, bound fast, before they hauled me out to question me.
They took to me another room with shades over the windows, where, in spite of the heat of the day, they had a stove lit which they’d rake from time to time with pokers, with the plain intention of letting me think they were going to burn me. They said they wanted to know why I’d liand where the thing had come from and why I had hid it, but the truth was, I think they were just itching to knock me around the place.
One of them stepped forward with a roll of papers which he spread out in front of me.
‘I want you to look carefully at these drawings and tell me if any of the things the prisoners found are shown on it.’
There were six sheets of thin waxy paper with drawings on them in a kind of faint blue ink. The pictures were drawn with a very exact hand and measurements and figures were inked in alongside them. There was writing in Russian, too, but I couldn’t read it. Some of the images I could recognize — there were suits and masks like the guards had been wearing, something that resembled a rifle — but others were simply too strange for me to make head or tail of.
I shook my head in a weary way and told them that all we’d found was the flask, and they had that.
*
They let me alone to sleep, and around noon the next day there was a knock on the door and someone slid in a plate of food. It was sausage, stale bread, and beetroot soup. I recognized the sausage as leftovers from our feast. It had grown more leathery and little drops of oil had gathered on its cut ends.
As I was eating, the door opened again and two guards showed Eben Callard to the spare seat in the room.
‘Make sure her hands are tied,’ he said.
The guards roped my arms to the chair and yanked the cord tight. They left the room at a signal. The shut of the door seemed loud over the silence that followed.
Being alone with him after all that time wasn’t as strange as you’d think.
‘How do you look, Makepeace? They tell me you’re marked.’
‘I look about the same,’ I said. ‘What happened to your eyes?’
‘You want the long answer or the short one?’
I told him I didn’t mind either.
He passed his hand over the table top in a steady, thorough way until it lighted on the handle of the spoon. With his other, he found the soup bowl, then he stirred it up, until the broth went cloudy like his sightless eyes.
‘Before Evangeline, you know, we had a big property outside of Esso. That was the place we left America for. It was really something. The earth’s volcanic and rich and there are hot springs right under the city. You just sink a pipe and you’ve got hot water. We had heated greenhouses, tomatoes all year. We were on the side of a mountain you could ski down and only a couple of hundred miles from Peterpaul.’ He sighed with the recollection of it. ‘And I bet you thought life was good in Evangeline.
‘Then all the changes came. We got overrun. There were Russians and Evenki and some Koreans who had been there from the beginning. They formed a militia and kicked everyone else out. They didn’t care if we had a title to the land. For the next five years it was Snakes and Ladders with no ladders. First run out of Esso. Then run out of Evangeline by James Hatfield’s people.
‘You know that we lit out of there with nothing? A bunch of men came to our house with torches. They said someone had raped James Hatfield’s girl and I was supposed to have done it.