‘Positive. And I can’t do anything unless I’m there.’
Geezler said that he’d be in touch. ‘We can’t have him stamping up dust. You understand? No complications.’
‘You want him found?’
Once again Geezler paused.
‘Is this question serious?’
‘Completely.’
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘If he shows up now then everything is in question again. The damage is done. It might be better that he remains undiscovered.’
‘Send me and we will discover who he is, and if necessary, he will remain unknown.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I can clean up whatever noise, whatever mess, he makes.’
* * *
The call from Gibson came almost immediately. In a crisp voice he changed his instruction.
‘I’ve heard from Paul Geezler, he wants you to go to Malta. Go there directly. HOSCO are prepared to set more money aside for you to find Sutler, a fund to ensure that he stays out of the picture. Don’t allow him to cause further embarrassment. If you find him you will need to negotiate with him, find out what he is doing and what his intentions are.’
* * *
Parson returned to his hotel and booked his flight online and a hotel in Valletta, then for good measure he booked a room for Sutler at Le Meridien, Balluta Bay, under the name Paul Geezler. He sang Geezler’s name as he typed.
VALLETTA
5.1
Anne walked through the three rooms that made up the apartment, dissatisfied with the arrangement. This was not the villa she had imagined, and definitely not what was promised — a separate, remote, and spacious palazzo. Instead she had a shared house on the edge of the village, with nine small apartments each rented out and an empty pool. Eric’s bed, a folding cot shunted under the windows, didn’t appear solid enough and looked like an animal trap, with springs and wires ready to snap shut. He wouldn’t complain even if it gave him backache, not immediately. She would hear about it in years to come at some holiday meal. That room in Malta, he’d say. That awful bed. Can you remember? And then some story. She couldn’t remember if he still smoked, another one of his deceptions. If he did he could stand on the balcony and smoke and she wouldn’t need to know. The balcony gave him privacy. He’d like the room, but hate the bed. She had to remind herself of his age, that there were boundaries not to cross, information she did not want to know. She thought of him as someone who switched on and off, a boy who logged into accounts and identities, someone who could choose when to be her son: as if this were an account into which he could or could not log into. Weren’t there boundaries also for her, didn’t he need to know this also? It occurred to her with sudden dread that he might — as he had at home — seek out men.
Shabby, unkempt, and cramped, wasn’t this his assessment of the hotels and casas particulares Eric had stayed at in Cuba with her husband? Anne wondered why she had thought that this arrangement would work, of how much easier it would be if she simply hadn’t arranged the holiday. She looked at the cot and couldn’t see her son, an adult, sleeping in it, but the cot came standard in these kinds of apartments, which was better suited anyway for a couple, rather than a mother and her adult son.
The prospect wasn’t quite desperate. Its best feature, a view over Marsaskala, the village, and the bay, would please him. For the last three mornings she’d sat out and watched the view change, watched how the light reverberated through the room carrying colour so that the room and the view seemed continuous. Even in autumn the sun came through with a clear brightness and the water remained an intense blue, almost unreal, and she could feel the colour as she looked at it, the fulsome blue of a deep sea, nocturnal and without limit. Anne regretted not renting an apartment with an extra room for him, knowing that Eric would prefer privacy over a nice view, if he still smoked he would resent having to sneak out for a cigarette. The shutters which could halve the room weren’t substantial enough for him, for her. She’d lie in bed fretting over the cot, knowing that what troubled her was not the bed, not his discomfort, not the issue about him smoking.
Catching her reflection she pressed out a smile and closed her hand about the keys. She should not over-plan. If he wanted to do nothing, he could do nothing, but if he wanted, if he was in the mood, she would show him around Valletta and around some of the island. It would take a little time, she told herself, to learn how to be about him, to regain that ease. On the weekend they could take a boat and stay on Gozo. Despite the promise of a few trips the notion they would spend time together no longer seemed as ideal as it had on previous visits.
It was strange not to have heard from him. No text messages, no calls, and no email. Strange as it was it fitted with this new understanding. The new Eric, post-computer. Ready to leave, she called her husband and checked herself more carefully as she spoke. Her eyes were a little red from reading, from squinting at the manuscripts in the archives, considering for too many hours an evasive, slanted script. Her hair was also beginning to frizz, however short she had it cut the heat and the rain made it too active.
‘You’ll talk to Eric?’
‘He hasn’t called. He doesn’t call me, he emails. You know this. If I hear from him I’ll pass the message along.’
‘But when you speak with him you’ll not forget to ask about the flight?’
‘If he calls I’ll make sure I ask.’
‘You’ll forget.’
‘I won’t forget. I’m writing it down. If he calls I’ll tell him his mother is worried about the flight.’
‘I’m not worried about the flight. I’m worried that he’ll miss the flight. I’m worried that he has made other plans. It’s a different thing.’
There were ways in which her husband irritated her: how he talked without paying proper attention; his assumption that he understood her better than she understood herself; how he appeared never to doubt himself.
Leaning into the mirror she ran a finger over her lips and again looked into her eyes, the same weary blue as the evening light on the walls, a bruise, blue leaning toward violet.
5.2
Ford sat in the bar nursing a sweet local brandy. He watched three men labour up the street arm in arm, shirts undone, drunk and roaring at the rain. When they passed by the window they raised their fists and cheered in companionship for no reason he could see. British or German, he couldn’t be sure. Ford checked his watch, leafed through a two-day-old Herald Tribune, and felt another grain of aggravation. An irritation had plagued him recently, a sense of many things shimmering, sliding along the periphery. It was the city, he supposed, the drama of tight hills, steep streets, the hint of some satisfaction waiting at the peak, just out of view, when what he needed — an idea, a solution, a single sensible reason not to go to the airport — remained far from his grasp.
Nothing in the paper interested him. The war figured in its pages without mention of HOSCO, Geezler, Howell, or the Massive, and no Kiprowski. Never news about Kiprowski. Space given instead to roadside bombs, Shia and Sunni assassinations, multiple attacks at police stations and oil refineries, a suicide bombing at an employment office. He read about the UN stalled in making any practical decision on the occupied oil-fields. The trials of former heads of state. As reassuring as this should have been, the absence of any reference to fifty-three million missing dollars increased his anxiety — the absence of news about HOSCO he regarded as suspicious. Ford folded the paper and drank up. He checked Eric’s agenda, the flight would land in two hours and he needed to find a taxi.