For who would ever have supposed, at first glance, with so much else to think of, that a Marshall was a girl? And not only a girl, but a Jemima alias Jed alias Jeds, calling from the Roper's Nassau residence?
Fourteen times.
Between midnight and four a. m.
Ten to eighteen minutes between each call.
The first thirteen times politely asking the hotel switchboard for Mr. Thomas, please, and being told, after due attempts to connect her, that Mr. Thomas was not answering his telephone.
But on the fourteenth shot, her industry is rewarded. At three minutes to four in the morning, to be precise, Marshall in Nassau is connected with Thomas in Curaçao. For twenty-seven minutes of Roper telephone time. Jonathan at first furious. Rightly. But then less furious. And finally, if Burr read the music right, not furious at all. So that by the end of their twenty-seven minutes, it's nothing but Jonathan... Jonathan... Jonathan... and a lot of huffing and puffing while they get off listening to each other's breathing.
Twenty-seven minutes of lovers' bloody vacuum. Between Roper's woman, Jed, and Jonathan, my joe.
TWENTY-FOUR
"Faberge," Roper said, when Jonathan asked him where they were going.
"Faberge," Langbourne replied out of the corner of his mouth.
"Faberge, Thomas," Frisky said, with not a very nice smile, as they buckled themselves into their seats. "You've heard of Faberge the famous jeweller, haven't you? Weil, then, that's where we're going, isn't it, for a nice bit of R and R."
So Jonathan had retreated into his own thoughts. He had long been aware that he was one of those people who are condemned to think concurrently rather than consecutively. For instance, he was comparing the greens of the jungle with the greens of Ireland and reckoning that the jungle beat Ireland into a cocked hat. He was remembering how in army helicopters the ethic had been to sit on your steel helmet in case the bad guys on the ground decided they would shoot your balls off. And how this time he had no helmet ― just jeans and sneakers and very unprotected balls. And how as soon as he had entered a helicopter in those days, he had felt the prickle of combat start to work in him as he sent a last goodbye to Isabelle and hugged his rifle to his cheek. And how helicopters, because they scared him, had always been places of philosophical reflection of the corniest kind for him, such as: I am on my life's journey, I am in the womb but heading for the grave.
Such as: God, if you get me out of this alive, I'm yours for ― well, life. Such as: Peace is bondage, war is freedom, which was a notion that shamed him every time it took him over, and had him casting round for somebody to punish ― such as Dicky Roper, his tempter. And he was thinking that whatever he had come for, he was now approaching it, and Jed would not be earned, or worth earning, and Sophie would not be appeased, till he had found it, because his search was for-and-on-behalf-of both of them.
He stole a look at Roper, sitting across the aisle with his head back and his sleep mask on, and it occurred to him that until recently their relationship had been of a rather formal kind ― health, passports, company structures, menus, Dan and so on ― and that if they had been German they would still be calling one another Sie. But that now, with action in the air and the same women in common. Jed and Sophie, a bond of mutual dependence was forming between them. And that Roper was aware of this also ― even if he didn't know the full reason ― hence the little extra confidences, glances and asides.
And that he had never seen anybody riding into a battle zone in a sleep mask.
He stole a look at Langbourne, seated behind Roper reading his way through a lengthy contract, and he was impressed, as he had been in Curaçao. by the way Langbourne sprang to life as soon as he caught the whiff of cordite. He would not say he liked Langbourne the better for it, but he was gratified to discover that there was something on earth apart from women that was capable of rousing him from his supine state ― even if it was only the advanced techniques of human butchery.
"Now, Thomas, don't you let Mr. Roper fall into any bad company," Meg had warned from the steps of her plane as the men humped their luggage to the waiting helicopter. "You know what they say about Panama: it's Casablanca without the heroes, isn't that so, Mr. Roper? So don't you-all go being heroes, now. Nobody appreciates it. Enjoy your day, Lord Langbourne. Thomas, it's been a pleasure having you aboard. Mr. Roper, that was not a seemly embrace."
They were climbing. As they climbed, the sierra climbed with them until they entered bumpy cloud. The helicopter didn't like cloud, and it didn't like the altitude, and its engine was wheezing and braying like a bad-tempered old horse. Jonathan put on his plastic earmuffs and was rewarded with the howl of a dentist's drill instead. The air in the cabin turned from ice-cold to intolerable. They lurched over a coxcomb of snowcaps and flipped downward like a sycamore seed until they were flying over a pattern of small islands, each with its half-dozen shanties and red tracks. Then sea again. Then another island, coming at them so fast and low that Jonathan was convinced that the clustered masts of the fishing boats were about to smash the helicopter to pieces or send it cartwheeling down the beach on its rotaries.
Now they are splitting the earth in two, sea one side, jungle the other. Above the jungle, the blue hills. Above the hills, white puffs of gun smoke. And underneath them roll the ordered ranks of slow white waves between tongues of dazzling green land. The helicopter banks tightly as if dodging unfriendly fire. Square banana groves like paddy fields merge with the sodden moorland of Armagh. The pilot is following a sanded yellow road leading to the broken-down farmhouse where the close observer blew two men's faces off and made himself the toast of his regiment. They enter a jungle valley; green walls envelop them as Jonathan is overcome by a dreadful need of sleep. They are climbing up the hillside, shelf by shelf, over farms, horses, villages, living people. Turn back; this is high enough. But they don't. They continue until zero is upon them and life below untraceable. To crash here, even in a big plane, is to have the jungle close over you before you hit the ground.
"They seem to prefer the Pacific side," Rooke had explained in Curaçao, eight hours and a lifetime ago, speaking over the house telephone from room 22. "Caribbean side's too easy for the radar boys to track. But once you're in the jungle it makes no difference anyway, because you won't exist. The head trainer calls himself Emmanuel."
"It isn't even a letter on the map," Rooke had said. "The place is called Cerro Fabrega, but Roper prefers to call it Faberge."
Roper had taken off his sleep mask and was looking at his watch as if checking the airline's punctuality. They were in free-fall over zero. The red-and-white posts of a helicopter pad were sucking them downward into the well of a dark forest. Armed men in battle gear were staring up at them.
If they take you with them it will be because they daren't trust you out of their sight, Rooke had said prophetically.
And so indeed had Roper explained before going aboard the Lombardy. He won't trust me in an empty henhouse until my signing hand has signed me off.
The pilot cut his engines. A squat Hispanic man in jungle uniform trotted forward to receive them. Beyond him, Jonathan saw six well-camouflaged bunkers, guarded by men in pairs who must have had orders not to leave the shadow of the trees.