Death and Other Lovers Read online

  Fahad was not a thug, though he had done thuggish things in the pursuit of his cause. Though he had effected and inspired much violence, he was not by nature a violent man. He was a professional soldier, though his services were not for hire as Michael Wylie’s were. His career as an officer in the Palestinian Army had been barely hindered by the absence of a Palestinian state. The world was only now recognising the intifada, but Fahad had been fighting it for more than twenty years, since the Six Day War pushed Israel’s borders up to the Jordan and hijacked a province of Arabs who, if they had felt like second-class citizens of Jordan, relished still less a future as a religious and ethnic minority in a Jewish state.

  In the course of those twenty-odd years he had done things world opinion had not approved of. He had done things he had not much liked himself but which he accepted had been necessary to his cause. Killing Mickey Flynn would have been one such act if the Israel Defence Forces had not broken his operation up at the critical moment three years before. But he had never sought to further that cause by beating up old men and he objected to Flynn’s suggestion that he had.

  It was a measure of how strongly he felt that this professional soldier, whose calm mind and pragmatic manner allowed him to move freely in a country where his picture hung in police stations and across international borders where the same portrait was available for constant reference, now shifted his gun into his left hand in order to stab the air in Flynn’s direction with his right fore-finger.

  “Now you know that I do not go round beating anybody up for the pleasure of it. I do what I have to do; and last time our paths crossed that old man succeeded in wrecking my operation, closing my camp and putting my team behind bars or in the ground. I am not going to under-estimate him again.”

  Todd was still bleeding. Flynn looked up from his work only briefly. “Any beef you have is with me. Gil did only what he had to to haul me out of the pit you dug and I walked into.”

  Fahad’s voice was quieter. “I know that. What I don’t understand is why.”

  Flynn did not follow. “What do you mean?”

  Fahad’s gaze was like a slap in the face. “People stick their necks out for you, Mr. Flynn. Good people, people like him, risk their freedom, their jobs, their health, their lives for you. And I look at you and I don’t understand why.”

  Flynn flushed and made no reply. Made as it was with no venom, only a quiet contempt, the attack cut at the roots of his being. He did not know either why he inspired the kind of friendship that made people crawl out on limbs for him. He thought he did nothing to deserve it, felt ashamed as if Fahad had caught him out in something underhand.

  Had Todd been awake he could have explained to both of them that Flynn earned friends like that by being one himself, that the people who at one time or another had stood up to be counted for Mickey Flynn all knew that, as and when needed, Flynn would be up being counted for them.

  And so he would. But there was a naive streak in Flynn that failed to recognise that simple truth. He behaved towards people as the fancy took him, unaware that the kinder side of his nature tended to dominate the more cynical one on which his self-image was founded. He thought that the kindness he received in return came out of nowhere and left him in debt. He could not defend himself against an attack he believed was justified, and Todd who would have defended him was still lying deeply unconscious across his knees, bleeding into his T-shirt.

  Finally he looked up at Fahad, a flayed look in his eyes. His voice was low. “He needs a doctor. He’s losing too much blood. Let me call him a doctor. Then I’ll come with you.”

  “Are you mad?” Fahad raised his head in a scornful gesture inherited from his desert ancestors. He had equipped himself with a beard some time in the last three years, on the Arafat rather than the Khomeini model. “Where should I take you—back to Palestine? I came to talk to you, not to elope with you. For talking, here will do just fine.”

  “Fahad, please.” There was nothing left of the anger, in his face or in his voice. It was a luxury he could no longer afford. “He needs a doctor. He’s bleeding, he’s unconscious, I think maybe his skull’s fractured. I’ll do anything you want. But please, let me call him a doctor.”

  “Begging, Mr. Flynn? I don’t remember you begging for your own life.”

  “Jesus, Fahad!” It came out as a soft explosion of despair. “If you’ve come here to kill me, do it. But don’t just keep talking about it while he’s dying. You want my blood?—take it. Something you want to know first?—ask. I’ll tell you anything. But for God’s sake, make it quick. And get a doctor up here before you leave.”

  Then Fahad understood how it was Flynn made people care about him. Knelt barefoot on the carpet, the injured man held protectively in his lap, clearly believing that Fahad had sought him out to take a delayed revenge for the Bab el Jihad disaster, Flynn could still spare enough concern to worry about how Todd would get help after he was dead.

  Fahad sighed. He was not a vicious man, had no wish to prolong this for the distress it was causing. He had not blamed Flynn for the loss of his camp, any more than he would have blamed a tank or an RPG the Israelis had used against him. He really had come to talk to Flynn, or rather to listen. He said, “I want to know why you’re telling people I was responsible for bombing a trans-Atlantic airliner.”

  Flynn stared at him, literally open-mouthed. “Christ Almighty,” he managed, “you’re worried about your reputation?”

  “I am indeed,” Fahad said briskly, ignoring the irony Flynn had failed to keep out of his voice. “Also my credibility, and quite possibly my life. That bombing was the act of a maniac. If there’s one thing a cause struggling towards international recognition can do without, it’s being associated with madmen.

  “It has taken us years to reach the point where Western opinion accepts that there is a Palestinian problem, not just a law-and-order problem within Israel; that a solution must recognise the legitimate fears and aspirations of the Palestinian people; and that it must come from the parties involved, the government of Israel and the leaders of the Palestinian resistance.

  “The Jews refuse to talk to us on the grounds that we’re terrorists. Beyond pointing out that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, I won’t deny the evidence of history. But things are changing: we have them at a disadvantage and we must keep it that way. So direct action is no longer the flavour of the month. It’s not easy to constrain people who want to fight for their homes, but we’ve managed to keep the lid on what you call terrorism and the pressure on the Jews.

  “Now this happens. An American plane out of London is bombed and the finger is pointed at us. Specifically, at me. I helped draw up the new strategy, agreed to hold back while the politicians had their chance. Your accusations make a liar of me. I don’t like that, Mr. Flynn. I don’t like people thinking I can’t be trusted. I particularly don’t like my General Command thinking that. The policy is working: they’ll do what they have to to keep the confidence of our supporters. If I can’t prove that I wasn’t responsible for bombing Flight 98, they’ll get rid of me, and sooner rather than later. I can’t even blame them.

  “But I don’t have to take it lying down. Why did you tell the police it was my doing? Did you really believe that?”

  “I didn’t— Well, yes.” Flynn took a breath and began again. “I didn’t say it was your doing but yes, I thought you were involved. We had a positive ID from someone who saw you. OK, so it turns out the woman who ID’d you was lying, because it was her who planted the bomb. Or rather, it was me.”

  “You?” Fahad’s voice ran up, disbelieving and amused.

  “Damn you, Fahad,” snarled Flynn, and his voice cracked, “don’t you dare smirk at me! Two hundred and twenty people are dead, and if it wasn’t exactly my fault it was at least because of me; and I have to tell you, the least of my worries is any stain inadvertently splashed on the character of an Arab terrorist.”

  Fahad regarded him with al
most no expression. But what he was thinking was that Flynn was no easier to dislike now than three years ago. He said, quite patiently, “Tell me what happened.” He could just about envisage circumstances in which he too might be prepared to step out of line for the American.

  Aware that while time might be on his side it was probably not on Todd’s, Flynn recounted the briefest version of events that still contained all the relevant facts.

  When he had finished Fahad said, “This woman—Laura Wade—she was living with you?”

  “For a few days. Just long enough to do her job.”

  “Destroy these photographs of yours.”

  “We think so.”

  Fahad shook his head and again found it hard to contain his mirth. “What an example you sophisticated Westerners set the rest of the world! So she was prepared to share a stranger’s bed for the money she could get for destroying your negatives. What was your excuse?”

  Flynn flinched from the good-natured scorn in his voice, let his head bow over Todd’s, unconscious in his lap. Not much more than a whisper of a reply escaped him. “I loved her.”

  Fahad smiled. “Doesn’t falling in love with a contract killer come under the category of unsafe sex?”

  The Arab was getting ready to leave. First he was looking for something, opening Todd’s cupboards and glancing inside while his gun and most of his attention remained on Flynn. He need not have worried: while Todd needed his care and there was no immediate threat to either of them, Flynn was going nowhere.

  While he was searching, Fahad was talking. “I could kill you now,” he said conversationally. “But that wouldn’t do much to impress on my colleagues the virtues of restraint, tolerance, responsibility and humanitarianism which make this allegation against me so manifestly unjust. For now you are worth more to me alive and testifying to the fact that this woman lied about my involvement in order to cover up her own. So it would please me very much to read in a newspaper in the not too distant future that enquiries into the loss of Flight 98 have discounted the possibility of a Palestinian connection.”

  “Sooner or later the police will charge somebody with something. I guess the reasons will come out then.”

  “Given the speed at which police investigations proceed,” said Fahad, “I could be an unmarked hump in the desert sand by then. I had something swifter in mind. Newspapers are your province: arrange it.” Flynn said nothing. His face was stubborn. “You have three days. After that I shall come back, but I shalln’t be looking for you.” He jerked the gun at Todd. “I’ll be looking for him.”

  Then he found what he was looking for. He lifted from the bottom of the dresser a bottle of whisky, half full, and a glass, and put them on the rug beside Flynn. “Put him down.”

  Watching him, Flynn said, “You don’t give spirits to an unconscious man.”

  “It’s not for him. Put him down.”

  Carefully Flynn eased him onto his side on the carpet and reached for a cushion to support his head. He risked a peep under the T-shirt. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Flynn did not understand about the whisky. “Then—?”

  “When I leave here,” said Fahad, “I want to get further than half a block before converging police cars bottle me up. So I want to keep you away from a phone. I could tie you up but you’re a strong, determined and resourceful young man—you’d find some way of drawing attention to your plight. I could hit you with the gun butt, but as you see it’s an imprecise weapon used that way: if you woke too soon I could get caught, and if you never woke at all I could be that hump in the sand by weekend. This is the safest way for all concerned. The whisky isn’t for him, Mr. Flynn. It’s for you.”

  “No!” Flynn’s face jerked up at him, and if it was not the first time Fahad had seen fear there it was perhaps the first time he had seen panic.

  He looked at the label with interest. “I don’t know much about it, but I would have thought Mr. Todd a fair judge of a good whisky.”

  Flynn watched the bottle like a man watching a snake. And indeed, regardless of its merits as whisky, it might as well have been poison. It had all but killed him once before. Todd had hauled him back from the abyss, kicking and screaming, and he had not tasted alcohol from that day to this. Not because he had not wanted it—sometimes, early on, he had wanted it so much that the sweat broke on his brow—but because in the first weeks Todd had watched him like a hawk, and after that he would not risk being put through the same purgatory again.

  After seven years he did not know how vulnerable he still was to the lethal seduction of alcohol. He knew that he could not afford to start drinking again. He did not know if what Fahad proposed would tip him over the edge or not. He would have given almost anything to avoid finding out.

  His mouth had gone dry. He whispered, “I can’t. I’m an alcoholic.”

  Fahad chuckled softly in his face. “Poor Mickey Flynn. You do make a habit of loving not wisely but too well.” Still carefully, because if Flynn was going to do something silly this was probably the time, he leaned forward and poured pale liquid into the tumbler, filling it to the rim. “Drink that, then the same again. Then we’ll see.”

  Flynn’s legs had gone to sleep. He had been kneeling on the floor for perhaps twenty minutes, and for most of that time he had had some of Todd’s considerable weight on them. If he could have trusted them to work he might have made a lunge for the gun now. He did not think Fahad meant to kill him, and he would as soon risk a bullet as a return to the nightmare waiting in that half bottle of whisky. The cramp robbed him of that chance. It would take him seconds to get to his feet. An old lady with an umbrella could have got the better of him. So he just shook his head. “No.”

  Fahad frowned, breathing heavily. “You know I can make you, don’t you?”

  Flynn was scared enough to stick to his guns. His voice came fast and thin. “If you kill me, nobody’ll ever believe you didn’t bomb Flight 98.”

  Fahad had already thought of that. The angle of the gun swung smoothly through thirty degrees. “I don’t have to kill you. I don’t have to touch you. Rather than let me hurt him, you’ll do as you’re told.”

  And finally, if it came to that, if there was nowhere else to go, he was right. Flynn was not in the classical sense a brave man. He took endless risks in the course not only of doing his job but also of enjoying his life, but mostly these fell into two categories. Either he was quite sure he was smart enough to get away with something, or he had done it before he had quantified the degree of risk involved. Bravery was the thing that made you do something you did not want to do, that you doubted if you could get away with, when you were fully aware of what the likely consequences would be.

  But if he was not a brave man, he was not a coward. He did not let his friends pay his debts. If there was nowhere else to go, he would become a drinker again, with all that followed from that, rather than see Fahad lay another hand on Todd.

  But Flynn had not quite reached the point of believing there was nowhere else to go. He let his shoulders slump. “OK.” He picked up the tumbler.

  Before the pale stream was in mid-air, gleaming in the light of Todd’s slightly pretentious chandelier, Fahad knew what he intended. He stepped out of the line of fire, at the same time ranging the gun back on Flynn’s chest. Flynn, who had meant to follow the whisky with the heavy glass, now let his fingers part and the tumbler bounced dully on the carpet.

  Fahad said nothing. His face was unreadable. Unhurriedly he moved towards Flynn again, stepping over Todd’s body still senseless on the floor. Flynn wanted to get up but dared not: he had made his play and failed, he could not find the nerve to try again and anyway there was no more time. Fahad stood over him with the gun. Flynn straightened as best he could. His lungs sucked in a deep breath that made his chest swell to meet the muzzle, its small steel mouth rounded in perpetual surprise.

  “Oh Mr. Flynn,” sighed Fahad. Then his hand jerked.

  There was no sound, at least not of gunfire, so
Fahad had not shot the weapon. He had palmed it and swung it in his hand like a pendulum, clapping its length along Flynn’s jaw as he flinched away from the sudden movement.

  Pain exploded in his face like fireworks. He did not go out, not quite, but he certainly went down, toppling sideways off his cramped knees, too disorientated to save himself with his hands so that first his shoulder crashed with a thud on the carpet and then his head did. His eyes rolled; nausea boiled in his belly. All the nerves on the left side of his face shrieked as if cut; the nerves in his teeth raged. Flashes of light stabbed in his eyes. He could hear nothing over the pounding of his blood. Still he did not quite lose consciousness.

  Fahad did not intend that he should. His purpose was not to injure Flynn, or even to punish him, only to knock the fight out of him. He needed both hands for the next bit, which meant putting the gun away. Unlike Flynn, Fahad always thought first and never took chances.

  There was enough whisky left in the bottle. Fahad picked it up as he passed. The couch was handy: he sat on its edge and propped Flynn’s back against his legs. Flynn’s head rolled. Fahad steadied it with one hand, the slightly long brown hair washing over his knuckles, and with the other held the bottle to his lips. “Just the thing for toothache, Mr. Flynn,” he murmured gently.

  Flynn retained wit enough to know what was happening but not the strength to resist it. Fahad was a much more powerful man than his compact stature suggested, and had no difficulty controlling the random flailing of Flynn’s good hand with his left knee, clamping the arm to Flynn’s side.

  So one hand held Flynn’s head and the other fed him the whisky. He choked and some of it ran out of the corner of his mouth, but most of it went down his throat. Fahad stuck to the job patiently, like a farmer’s wife feeding an orphan lamb, until the bottle was empty.