He tried to remember how Sutler had evolved. Was he simply a way of manoeuvring about a tricky piece of policy? A shared idea developed through discussion? The truth was that Sutler was proposed by Geezler as fully realized idea. Geezler had decided everything. He’d set up the name, the contract. He’d organized the flights. All of it, right out of the blue. I have something for you, but I need an answer now, yes or no? If you say yes you have to leave immediately. This would be his one chance. There would be no other opportunity. They want to build a new city, first as a military base, then as a civilian project. We’ve bid for the contract and while the announcement isn’t official there’s little doubt it’s ours. We’ve identified four potential sites. It’s safe, he said, you’ll be in the south, nowhere near Najaf, Nasiriyah, Basrah, or any of those places. In fact, you won’t see one Iraqi. No worries about that. We’re sending you to the desert. All you have to do is make an initial assessment. We need someone there now. Two hundred and fifty thousand, in and out.
All this under one provision: You must become Sutler. We can’t give this contract to an existing provider.
* * *
Nathalie showered after him, tiptoed barefoot out of her room. Martin followed and stopped in the courtyard, a cigarette already lit, eyes squinched shut. Disturbed by the sunlight he stood and scratched his head. The food, cutlery, crockery left out with a note from Mehmet saying he would return with the hire-van by quarter to nine and that they should all be ready. Martin studied the breakfast and complained item by item. Dry bread, sweaty cheese, cold milk, no juice. What kind of torture was this?
As Nathalie came out of the shower, her hair bound in a towel, Martin poured her a coffee.
‘We’re late. It’s eight fifteen. We asked for breakfast at seven thirty.’ She added sugar to her cup and told Martin that they needed to hurry, and asked in French if Eric was awake yet. ‘Is that the last cigarette?’
Irritated, Martin pointed to their room. They had a whole pack of duty-free cigarettes, unopened, less than three metres away. He slumped back to the room to make a point. Ford offered Nathalie a cigarette.
‘Don’t tell me you speak French?’
‘No. You were looking at the packet.’
‘Am I really that obvious?’ Nathalie leaned forward for a light and held back the towel, revealing a shoulder. ‘How can you be amusing so early?’ She took a first deep draw. ‘What are you doing today?’
‘I don’t know. I might go to the hammam.’
‘No. The hammam is no good. Come with us. Martin is filming. Eric will help him. We’ve hired a car. It’s going to be boring for me and I want some company. You might even find it interesting.’ She turned her head to blow smoke past Martin who stood in front of her, a carton of cigarettes in his hands. ‘Why not? He can come? You and Eric are going to be busy. I will be bored.’
* * *
Mehmet drove with one arm out of the window, abstractly directing the traffic out of their way, while Ford, Nathalie, Martin, and Eric held tight to the seats and vinyl straps, too alarmed to complain. A necklace of fat ebony beads batted the windscreen. Ford spent the hour-long drive with one hand and shoulder keeping the sliding door shut. A sandy breeze buffeted unpleasantly against his face and he momentarily thought of himself as lost, faceless, worn down, his one goal — modest or monumental — to be in less of a fix with each passing day, to be less in flux. To his knowledge this day seemed as stable as the previous day, an improvement already with no visions in barber shops, no awkward introductions, and, so far, no surprises. Staying this comfortable, at least for a while, presented no risk, he could recoup, prepare, ready himself for the next step. The van clipped the verge. Eric tensed into the seat. He listened to headphones as he read the book he’d been reading in Kopeckale, looking up only at the most violent jolts. Newspaper cuttings slipped from the pages, so that he held the book in both hands. Preoccupied, Martin said nothing but appeared to be brewing a complaint.
When they arrived Nathalie took Ford by the arm and said that they would look at the churches. The boys could manage without them. She held her hands out flat. ‘Look. See. I’m shaking. I’ve never been so terrified.’ Was Mehmet trying to kill them or was this just something he did for the rush, because there’s nothing quite like zooming a group of tourists?
‘Zooming?’
‘Provoking. Eric’s word. Zoom-zoom. Everything becomes a verb.’ Nathalie paused to survey the rock face. As they headed to the closest bluff Martin warned them to stay out of shot, and Nathalie waved her hand over her shoulder.
‘One hour.’
‘I know.’ Nathalie pointed at the cliff pocked with holes, stabbed her finger in the air to show where they were heading, ‘I know, I know, I know.’ She talked as they walked. These churches were the reason she agreed to accompany Martin on this trip. ‘When he gets to this point I’m not so interested. I prefer all of the work beforehand — the preparation. At first it’s not so bad, but each time it becomes a little more difficult. More fuss. More trouble. I wanted to go to Malta with Eric. I wanted to leave Martin to it.’
Ford remembered the tickets folded inside Eric’s passport, a flight from Athens to Luqa. Nathalie continued to talk about the churches. Her university at Grenoble had developed a process to preserve the frescos. ‘They are layered one over another. The old painting. A new layer of plaster. A new painting. Whenever they feel like it.’ Her hands interwove, indicating layer upon layer. ‘They believed the devil would rise from here,’ she said. ‘I’m serious. They thought he would come up through the cracks in the ground, that there would be an earthquake and he would rise. Dust. Fire. The end of the world. They calculated the day and the hour and built churches to protect themselves. Of course nothing happened. But who knows,’ she laughed, ‘perhaps they were wrong?’
He liked how she spoke, how her accent re-tuned the words so that they sang a little off-scale. Not unfamiliar but refreshed.
They entered the first church through a short vertical shaft, the steps long since worn away. Nathalie crawled behind Ford and passed her camera ahead. Inside the chamber Ford found an opening and watched as Mehmet unloaded the equipment and Martin and Eric assembled the camera and tripod. The van, the three men, appeared small and inconsequential; the landscape surrounding them unearthly and barren. Ford had not paid attention on the drive and was surprised by the valley’s slow swoop and the salt-white peaks, the massive dunce caps worn out of the soft pumice, rising independent from the valley floor. From here he could see more windows and doorways puncturing the rock. Long-abandoned churches and animal pens. Nathalie idly took a photograph as he leaned into the view.
Martin and Eric worked quickly together.
‘What are they filming?’
‘A documentary. A project. The Project.’ Nathalie dusted her legs. ‘It’s a little complicated. Why, what is he doing?’