‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Ross,’ the clerk said, studiously avoiding eye contact with the foreigner. ‘Sign here, please.’ Kale signed the form and the clerk copied details from the passport before handing it back with a key. ‘Room twenty-two. Fifth floor.’ Kale crossed the dark hall to the old fashioned elevator and pulled open the wrought-iron gate. The clerk watched him disappear as the cage moved slowly upwards, and he shivered. Perhaps it had been the cold air that had come in with the stranger.
Kale’s room was drab and bare and smelled stale. The short, narrow bed sagged in the middle. He dropped his bag by a cracked porcelain washbasin and lay back on the bed, lighting a cigarette.
He closed his eyes and smelled again the cordite and the dust that had stung his nostrils on that scorching African day so many years ago. The sergeant, a heavy ignorant man, was shouting above the bursting of shells — a vivid image that had recalled itself often. The soldier beside Kale was dead, a man whom he hardly knew. Soon the flies would settle on the body, feed on the wounds in the heat of the sun. Kale was sweating, pricked by fear and by heat. The whitewash walls of the village had been reduced to rubble by the shelling from the rear. And still the rebels refused to move. Dark-skinned men with Russian rifles. Kale crouched in the crater, his eyeline at ground level, trying to pick out the surviving figures in the smoke and dust that billowed out from the destruction. Five men from his unit had already moved a hundred yards out to his left and were trying to circle the north side of the target. The clipped tac, tac, tac of a machine gun came from not too far ahead and Kale saw two of the soldiers fall. This time the shots had not come from the enemy marksman who had so successfully kept them pinned down. Tor Christ’s sake give the bastards cover!’ the sergeant was bawling. Kale moved up, head and shoulders above the crater, his mouth dry. Again the machine gun sounded and this time Kale saw the rebel, moving through a gap in the wall to his right. He sighted quickly and fired. The figure dropped in the dust. The gap had been no more than three feet, maybe two hundred metres distant. Almost immediately a bullet struck the rim of the crater and threw up dust and rock splinters in his face. Kale pulled his head down sharply, blinking furiously as the dust stung his eyes. ‘Get that damned bloody sharpshooter for Christ’s sake!’ the sergeant was shouting further along the line. ‘We can’t move till we get him.’ But he was not firing himself.
Several rifles were cracking around Kale now and the soldier on his left fell suddenly across him, half of his head torn away. Kale kicked the man off him and watched the thick, sticky blood staining the khaki of his shirt. The shelling had stopped to allow the troops to move in, but no-one stirred from his cover. The five men who had moved out earlier were all dead. And now the slightest movement brought the crack of a rifle from somewhere out ahead. Almost without fail the marksman was making a hit. Kale shifted his position slightly and picked up a dead soldier’s helmet out of the dust. He threw it along at the sergeant. ‘Stick that up on your bayonet so he can see it,’ he shouted.
The sergeant glanced grimly at him and saw that there were only the two of them left alive in the crater. The others were sheltering behind a wall away to their left. ‘Who’s giving the mucking orders?’ he growled. Kale said nothing and the sergeant spat and then hooked the helmet over the top of his bayonet and pushed it above the level of the crater. Almost as soon as it appeared a bullet spun it away behind them and the sergeant heard a second shot from only a few feet away as he pulled himself tight into the rim. Kale had caught only the briefest glimpse of the marksman as the man shot at the helmet. But it had been enough. Enough for him to get in his shot and feel a tight satisfaction as the sharpshooter toppled from his cover at the end of what had once been the main street of the village. Two more figures moved in the shadows. His rifle cracked again, twice, and both figures fell. ‘That’s some bloody shooting, Private Kale!’ The Sergeant grinned momentarily and then thought better of it. ‘You can hang in here and give us cover when we move in.’
Kale had been as accurate in practice but it had meant little to him. Strangely, now there was something precious in the skill. When he saw how he could cut men down. The sergeant noticed the slight, humourless smile on Kale’s lips and frowned. What the hell was there to smile about? But in these last minutes Kale had discovered a sense of purpose. In the final event it was the only thing the army gave him. It led him to find in himself the cold, calculated ability to kill men, to hit back. An ability that transmuted all his crippled bitterness into a perfect and tangible expression. Out of all those long, hot days under the relentless African sun, the long, cramped, unsanitary nights among the cockroaches and the sweating bodies, had emerged a vocation, and with it an inner confidence that had finally enabled him to stand apart from a world he despised.
Kale stared up at a crack in the ceiling of the hotel room. He had one day left before the hit. He would use it well.
III
Bannerman looked from the window of this office on the top floor of the IPC building, down into the back courts below. Mean little yards bounded by brick walls that formed geometric patterns between the terraced rows. Beyond them, against the night sky, two cranes rose high above the houses that were being swept away in the redevelopment.
He had spent the afternoon sitting in the press lounge at the Council of Ministers, drinking coffee and watching the curious behaviour of the lobby men. These creatures of strange habit sat about in the lounge among the potted plants, drinking, talking, or working behind a smoked-glass screen where stood rows of desks and typewriters and banks of telephones. From time to time groups of reporters would launch themselves suddenly from their seats as they spotted various officials whom they would follow into little rooms off the lounge, a well-practised ritual that required no signs. In these tiny rooms impromptu press conferences were held. The press relations officials held court. Pens scribbled in sacred silence as the high priests delivered careful words to the scribes. The ceremonies were, without exception, performed in French. Questions were frowned upon, brushed aside. The sermons concluded, the journalists would then drift away, sometimes back to the lounge, sometimes to the press room, dependent upon whether ‘the words’ were relevant to a particular country or reader-ship. It was a strange performance, baffling to the outsider. Only those in the inner sanctum who could read the faces and interpret the words were privy to its secrets.
In one corner, the Italian Minister for Agriculture, making a rare personal appearance, had delivered a diatribe to a group of excitable Italian pressmen whose voices rose and fell; arms waving, frequent laughter. In another, a clutch of British reporters was gathered round a Junior Minister from the Foreign Office; notebooks in pockets, wary eyes on the earnest face of the Minister as he spoke. Bannerman had recognised him: Robert Gryffe, an Under-Secretary of State, earmarked by the Prime Minister for a senior post if the Government won the election — or so it was rumoured. Gryffe was a popular public figure. He had that quality, rare amongst post-war politicians, of charisma. He was an outspoken moderate, a ‘man of the people’. The Party had been using him frequently in recent months in their party political broadcasts. Bannerman watched him with distrust. He had grave suspicions about men of the people.