"Mr. Quayle. Do you hear me?"
The same voice but now in English. Justin didn't answer. But this was not a lack of civility, it was because he had managed to spew out his cloth gag at last and was vomiting again and the vomit was creeping round his neck inside the hood. The sound of the television set faded.
"That's enough, Mr. Quayle. You stop now, OK? Or you get what your wife got. You hear me? You want some more punishment, Mr. Quayle?"
With the second "Quayle" came another horrendous kick in the groin.
"Maybe you gone deaf a bit. We leave you a little note, OK? On your bed. When you wake up, you read this little note and you remember. Then you go back to England, hear me? You don't ask no more bad questions. You go home, you be a good boy. Next time we kill you like Bluhm. That's a very long process. You hear me?"
Another kick to the groin rammed the lesson home. He heard the door close.
* * *
He lay alone, in his own darkness and his own vomit, on his left side with his knees drawn to his chin and his hands tied back to back behind him and the inside of his skull on fire from the electric pains that were tearing through his body. He lay in a black agony taking a roll call of his shattered troops — feet, shins, knees, groin, belly, heart, hands — and confirmed that they were all present, if not correct. He stirred in his bonds and had a sensation of rolling into burning charcoal. He lay still again and a terrible pleasure began to wake in him, spreading in a victorious glow of self-knowledge. They did this to me but I have remained who I am. I am tempered. I am able. Inside myself there's an untouched man. If they came back now, and did everything to me again, they would never reach the untouched man. I've passed the exam I've been shirking all my life. I'm a graduate of pain.
Then either the pain eased or nature came to his aid, because he dozed, keeping his mouth tight shut and breathing with his nose through the stinking, sodden black night of his hood. The television set was still on, he could hear it. And if his sense of orientation hadn't gone astray he was looking at it. But the hood must be double-lined because he couldn't see so much as a flicker of it, and when, at huge cost to his hands, he rolled onto his back, he saw no hint of ceiling lights above him, although they had been lit as he wandered into the room, and he had no memory of hearing them switched off as his torturers departed. He rolled onto his side and panicked for a while, waiting for the strong part of himself to fight its way back to the top again. Work it out, man. Use your stupid head, it's the only thing they left intact. Why did they leave it intact? Because they wanted no scandal. Which is to say, whoever sent them wanted no scandal. "Next time we kill you like Bluhm" — but not this time, however much they might have wished it. So I scream. Is that what I do? I roll around on the floor, kick furniture about, kick the party walls, kick the television set and generally go on behaving like a maniac until somebody decides that we are not two passionate lovers lost in the outer reaches of sado-masochism, but one bound and beaten Englishman with his head in a bag?
The trained diplomat painstakingly sketched out the consequences of such a discovery. The hotel calls the police. The police take a statement from me and call the local British Consulate, in this case Hanover, if we still have one there. Enter the Duty Consul, furious to be called away from his dinner to inspect yet another bloody Distressed British Subject, and his knee-jerk response is to check my passport — which passport scarcely matters. If it's Atkinson's, we have a problem because it's forged. One phone call to London establishes. If it's Quayle's, we have a different problem, but the likely upshot will be much the same: the first plane back to London without the option, an unwholesome Welcome Home Committee waiting to receive me at the airport.
His legs were not bound. Until now he had been reluctant to separate them. He did so, and his groin and belly caught fire and his thighs and shins followed quickly afterward. But he could definitely separate his legs, and he could tap his feet together again and hear his heels click. Emboldened by this discovery, he took the extreme step, rolled onto his stomach and let out an involuntary scream. Then he bit his lips together so that he didn't scream again.
But he stayed doggedly face down. Patiently, careful not to disturb his neighbors in the bedrooms either side, he began working on his bonds.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The plane was an elderly twin-engined Beechcraft on U.N. charter with a rawhide fifty-year-old captain from Johannesburg and a burly African copilot with side whiskers, and one white cardboard lunch box on each of its nine torn seats. The airport was Wilson, next to Tessa's grave, and as the plane sweated and waited on the runway Ghita strained to catch sight of her burial mound through the window and wondered how much longer she would have to wait for her headstone. But all she saw was silverbacked grass and a red-robed tribesman with a staff standing on one leg over his goats, and a herd of gazelles twitching and grazing under blueblack cloud stacks. She had wedged her travel bag under her seat but the bag was too big and she had to splay her churchy shoes to make space for it. It was terribly hot in the plane and the captain had already warned the passengers that there could be no air-conditioning until the plane took off. In the zip compartment she had stowed her briefing notes and her credentials as the British High Commission's delegate from EADEC. In the main compartment, her pajamas and a change of clothes. I'm doing this for Justin. I'm following in Tessa's footsteps. I have no need to feel ashamed of my inexperience or duplicity.
The back of the fuselage was stuffed with sacks of precious miraa, a permitted, mildly narcotic plant adored by northern tribesmen. Its woody scent was gradually filling the plane. In front of her sat four casehardened aid workers, two men, two women. Maybe the miraa was theirs. She envied their gritty, carefree air, their threadbare clothes and unwashed dedication. And realized with a pinch of self-reproach that they were her age. She wished she could break the habits of learned humility, of drawing her heels together whenever she shook hands with her betters, a practice instilled in her by nuns. She peeked inside her box and identified two plantain sandwiches, an apple, a bar of chocolate and a box of passionfruit juice. She had barely slept and she was famished, but her sense of decorum forbade her to eat a sandwich before takeoff. Last night her phone had rung nonstop from the moment she returned to her flat as her friends one by one vented their outrage and disbelief at the news that Arnold was a wanted man. Her position in the High Commission required her to play the elder stateswoman to them all. At midnight, though she was dead tired, she attempted to take a step from which she could not retreat; one that, if it had succeeded, would have rescued her from the noman's-land where she had been hiding like a recluse for the last three weeks. She had delved in the old brass pot where she kept odds and ends and extracted from it a slip of paper she had secreted there. This is where you ring us, Ghita, if you decide you want to talk to us again. If we're not there, leave a message and one of us will always get back to you within the hour, I promise. An aggressive male African voice answered her and she hoped she had the wrong number.