The Widow's Son

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

The Fourth Day of December 2002

Henry Mayler’s Opening Story

        “Let’s get one thing out the way before I go any further, Mr Elijah man.” Henry took a sip of whisky from the glass on the table in front of him and the service stenographer noted the pause in Mayler’s account by adding a single blank space as he stopped speaking. Her normal way of dealing with such things was a single blank for brief, with a double-blank meaning a pause of some length. Before she could contemplate the occasions she had used a triple blank space, Henry Mayler had continued.

          “It was me who was effing shot at Al Hasakeh on your behalf. I’m here as the injured victim of an operation that went wrong. Anyway, now that’s said I’ll get back to the story. After what happened in the bazaar I was acutely aware of the danger I had put myself in, but if there was to be any reaction I was expecting it inside the market, not outside. In my haste to get away I tripped over something just before getting to the car. My knee hurt badly and the fall shook me up but I managed to stand quickly and open the car door. That was when the glass in the door shattered. I had no idea what had caused it as I had heard no sound. For a split second all I could do was stare at what was once a normal car door, thinking it was something I’d done that broke it. Other than the normal loud noises of a packed Arab market I’d heard nothing that would indicate someone would be after us so soon. When I eventually got my head into gear the first reaction was to partially turn my head towards the back of the car, that’s when it hit me. The only way I can describe it is that it was like having a cricket ball bowled very hard into my upper thigh. It hurt like hell. A similar thing happened to me when I’d played in a varsity cricket game in the Parks one year against a really quick bowler. I know this will sound stupid and melodramatic, but time seemed to stand still for me. Everything was moving in slow motion to the point of stopping.

“The bazaar went silent to my ears. I have no idea why I looked to the rear of the Mercedes and not the front, but that’s where I looked. I was lucky in some ways as the bullet had hit hard muscles and was imbedded in them. I was thankful to have done lots of walking and standing in my job as a photographer. There was very little blood coming from the wound and just a small hole in my shorts and my upper leg. It was as I was looking at my wound that he pushed me into the car. I was completely dazed and out of it all. He was the opposite. He just stood there in the open, firing off round after noisy round in the direction from where the bullet in my leg must have come. He was shouting, but I haven’t a clue what he said. All I could see was his mouth opening and closing very quickly. My ears were hurting from his gunshots as much as my leg from the bullet. The firing stopped and I had a peep through the back window. I saw one of them. He was black, but not an Arabian black. Perhaps a European black going by his modern, stylish clothes. He was on the ground and not moving, but there was another man running away in a zig-zag fashion.

“That man was tall, thin and had blonde hair. Hadad, that was my driver, was also on the ground by the rear door of the car. He was lucky, having taken only a grazing shot to the shoulder, and was meekly seeking cover. I helped him to stand and opened the door for him to get in. He lay across the backseat holding his shoulder. Then the Russian drove the car as though possessed with its tyres screaming under clouds of dust.

“It was I who noticed the car that was chasing us. Razin, the Russian, had his eyes notched up five times their normal size and fixed like glue on the road ahead, for that I was thankful; the car was travelling as if there was a rocket under the bonnet. I told him we were being followed and he pulled a gun from under the thawb that he wore. There was another gun, I presumed that to be the one he’d used outside the bazaar, tucked under his left leg as he drove. I remember thinking that I hoped the safety was on. Very calmly he told me that as soon as he had a chance he would pull our car off the road and ambush the one behind. That wasn’t the exact language he used, but that’s what it amounted to. He spoke in Russian but I can understand the language. He gave me the gun from under his leg and a new clip from the trousers he wore under the robe. He asked if I’d fired a weapon; I lied and said I had.

“We rounded a sharp bend, passed some low, sandy hills and then the road turned abruptly right in the opposite direction we wanted to go. Razin slung the car behind one of those sandy hills off the road and shouted at me to get out. Clutching his gun to my chest I did. He ran across the dusty road and hid. From across there he had the clearer shot than me and hit the driver before the car had fully rounded the bend. It veered violently towards me before it overturned once, then righted itself and came to a halt. I shot the passenger from where I’d been hiding, but Razin got to the car before I had and I saw him take something from the driver. I have given thought since then about what it could have been, but honestly I have no idea what it was other than it was small and flat like a phone. But I can’t swear it was a phone. It could equally have been a letter. In fact, I think it was a letter. After he put two more bullets in them both he set the car on fire and we drove off, not speaking again until we reached Aleppo. I had the shell in my leg removed when I was taken to the British Embassy in Damascus. The stitches are due out tomorrow and my limp isn’t so noticeable anymore. Is that enough for you?”

          “Right, yes, thank you, Henry. We were both enthralled,” Elijah announced as he left the room holding the door ajar for the stenographer who followed, leaving Henry Mayler alone with his thoughts and his whisky.

* * *

If one leaves a single word on a blank sheet of paper seldom will it convey much in the way of meaning. This was how the in-house service stenographer had begun the typed recording of Mayler’s story. One word at a time, until they started to make sense. The meaning they conveyed became a sentence that could stand on its own much the same way as a writer of fiction would construct a sentence.

Gradually the sentences she typed became paragraphs resembling the opening chapter of a work of prose. The collection of words that made those paragraphs were never enough to form a cluster of chapters, nevertheless, in more ways than one, the fantasy had begun and the writer of fiction had a story to tell.

This book is simply a collection of single words that left alone would have survived without a meaning. 

Daniel Kemp     

Friday, Six Days Later

          Have you ever noticed that no matter how much the sea changes from mountainous stormy waves to the friendly calmness that could bore a conch shell into silence, it always returns to that monotonous hollowing sound of a wind through a tunnel. However, on some occasions that hollowing sound seems to represent the chanting of an echoing death that’s waiting for me below. That’s how it is in my way of life. Up and down and down and up without any indication of how it will all end.

I was at home, on the sofa, watching recorded rugby games when the telephone rang. The career I had chased after like a demented dog had descended from four years of stormy hell, where bells were ringing both inside and outside of my head every day, to almost six solid months of solidified boredom in my apartment doing nothing and hating every moment of nothing. But I didn’t want the change he offered over that telephone line. I was in what was politely called the latter stages of convalescence, due to a bomb going off in a pub in Ireland I’d had the misfortune to be sitting in. The prospect of going back on the front line, so to speak, was what I was waiting for, not what Geoffrey Harwood held aloft as his incentive. The repeating referee’s whistle on the television was hammering my brain to death as I tuned in to Harwood’s idea of normality.

          “Ezra, how goes it, old man? Fit, well and healthy I hope?” Without waiting for the answer he already knew, Harwood ploughed on.

          “Ready to dirty your hands again, are you? Good.” Again, I had no chance to reply, not even to comment on the dawn-shattering timing of his call. After the friendship I and a man named Job had shared, I wondered if all ex-military men were cursed with an inbuilt early morning alarm clock. 

          “I’ve been holding your medical report back for about a month now, Ezra. It says you are fitter than an average Tour de France cyclist, but I thought you deserved a bit of extra leave, dear boy. Your stint as commanding officer in Northern Ireland has not gone unnoticed. You ran things extremely efficiently over there. How do you feel about taking control at Group, old chap? Big enough job to suit those talents of yours, do you think? There’s bags of prestige to be had being in charge of one of the top four intelligence agencies, enough even for your inflated ego. A much more favourable stipend than you are receiving now and far better stability than at field control in a hotspot like Northern Ireland, albeit that it has quietened down a lot over there. At Group there’s the worldwide intrigues to keep you interested. And then there’s the Home Office parties to mingle amongst if you’re unlucky to be invited. No, dear boy, I jest. I’ve had some wonderful evenings at those parties.”

          “I can’t think of anything I’d rather not do, Geoffrey. Right at this moment I’m watching a tedious game of rugby, but even that’s better than what you propose. I told them at the debrief I would not welcome a sedentary job. That was in the report they produced. I saw it. You must have read it. So what are not saying and what do you really want me for?”

          “Ah, you can speak. Thought you’d died of shock. Right, got you, old man. First I want you to drive to a public phone box and call Adam. How’s that for a daily bout of exercise? Adam will direct you elsewhere for you and me to meet. Please make sure nobody is following you to the place Adam points. Of course, I shouldn’t have to tell you that, but you have been lazing around for some time and may have forgotten what you are supposed to do in circumstances such as these. We are off somewhere far from grand, dear boy, so wear something more suitable than a dinner jacket. I don’t want you attracting unnecessary attention.”

Despite the usual ludicrous pomp and ceremony that Mr Geoffrey Harwood employed as the present head of Group, I did not accept the reason he gave for such a needless warning. 

          “Jack Price once told me, Geoffrey, that if the person doing the following was any good at their job then they’d be practically impossible to spot. In the last six months the only trips I’ve made have been back and forth to a posh clinic that’s looking after my medical welfare, and to the local pub that looks after my mental side. I doubt very much that I rate a ‘very good’ or clumsy idiot come to that, to shadow me. But what is bothering me is why the need for so much secrecy? This line has been cleared as secure. The engineers were here two days ago, on Wednesday, working their little machines over the whole place finding nothing. I’m a recovering invalid, nobody is interested in me. Can’t you stop being so long-winded and tell me what you want, old chap?” I threw in the ‘old chap’ bit as my way of being sarcastic. It worked!

          “No, I can’t. Why can you not do as I’ve ask without comment, Ezra? You are so predictable.” He stopped and I could sense his eyes staring at me through the phone for daring to use his snobbish means of address. “Your intransigence can be so dull after a while. I know how much you have missed us, and I also know how much you needed that break, but I’m serious about you taking on the responsibility of Group. Your performance over in Ireland was spoken of in high places and in my opinion your retirement was pencilled in far too soon, old chap. I’d positively hate to wave you goodbye. I think we can squeeze a good few more years out of you in a home based office not risking your nuts being shot away out on the street. We can leave that sort of thing to the young at our stage of life, I think you’d agree. It’s your experience they need, Ezra, no good seeing it wasted and you ending up watching the piss-up at your own wake. I’m pleased you mentioned dear old Jack Price. We’re in desperate need of his sort, but as he’s dead, we’ll have to put up with you as second choice.” I thought I heard a faint snigger of a laugh, but never having heard him laugh I thought he must have brushed his stubble against the handset.

          “You’re all heart, Geoffrey, and so eloquent and persuasive.”

          “Good, that’s that then! Go find a phone box, Ezra, and call Adam, dear boy.”

          “I’ll go and wind the crankshaft of the old jalopy in a jiffy, just got to find my goggles and scarf. Both she, the car that is, and I hate the cold weather,” I replied caustically.

          “Phone box, dear chap. Take some coinage with you and leave the sarcasm in your flat,” and with that the line went dead. 

* * *  

A few months on from my birth I was christened Patrick West by my parents, but over the thirty plus years I have been engaged in covert operations for Her Majesty’s intelligence service I have used a few other names: Shaun Redden, Paddy O’Donnell, Frank Douglas and Terry Jeffries or, on the one that finished six months and a few days ago; Jack Webb. On that last tour in Ireland I was in charge of all operations against the Irish Republican Army and its spin-offs; by now, however, I’m a self-taught expert on daytime television. My operational name has been changed so many times by the hierarchy in charge of Group that it was becoming more and more difficult to remember the script and the role I was meant to be playing, whilst dodging the enemies’ radar for the benefit of Kipling’s Great Game for our great nation. During this last period of enforced leave I’ve been on the sick list but it’s called a different name in the corridors of power that the likes of Geoffrey walk up and down. It’s known as the surgeon’s list. This is the second time in my career that my name has graced that assembly. Not bad I suppose, but nobody counts the negatives and gives away gold stars for not being sick, that’s taken for granted.

In my case the surgeon has never been a surgeon, but he at first, and then she for the second time, had no need to explain the lack of scalpels. They tried coaxing the screaming voices from my head by sweet talking me, not cutting me open. They called it cognitive therapy. I called it meddling in memories that were never mine to give. On my last visits to the clinic the cognitive therapy was supposed to quieten the repetitive yelling that belonged to the girl of seventeen who had her eyes gouged out for the simple reason of dating a British soldier serving with the catering corps in Derry. A month after that attack I attended her funeral. Her constant screams of pain were permanently terminated by the serenity found in the blister strips of painkillers she was prescribed, only she emptied the whole packet of fifty pills in one go washed down by a cheap bottle of gin. For me, however, her screams will never die. 

After a few days of sitting beside that girl, questioning her whilst she fiercely battled against the acceptance of her blindness, I went to see a man who told me of the whereabouts of an IRA bomber of a Belfast pub. That bomb killed three and maimed five fellow Irishmen and two women in the name of freedom from Protestant choice. By the time I got to him he had entertained some members of the Ulster Volunteer Force who had nailed his feet to the floor and his hands to a wooden beam above his head then set about removing his reproduction organs by savagely hacking them from his body and as that was not enough for their shared pleasure, they slowly peeled away his facial skin. I wonder how murder and mutilation can be justified in using such terms as freedom for the oppressed while suppressing those who disagree with the philosophy of force. I would have gladly asked the hierarchy of the IRA, if I had been given permission to go and find them. But I’m a man after all and none of what I’ve told you should have affected me, should it? That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? Be the hero that Geoffrey Harwood reveres. Bite the bullet and sing ‘God Save the Queen’. After all people like me should be the first through the doors to count the bits of bodies hanging from the ceilings so that the reports in the daily newspapers get the sums right. That’s what we’re paid for, right? But there were times during that last tour that left me thinking I was getting slower through the door and laying the blame for that on having only half of one foot. The other half had been shot away, but I do try to keep swinging on door handles, after all, who would appreciating reading there were fifty-one dead when someone had missed a body or two?

The foot thing was one of the reasons for my first visit to the surgeon’s rooms in the clinic in Harley Street. I lost three toes to a bullet when on the very first mission I undertook on behalf of the SIS, Secret Intelligence Service. It was meant for my head but in the wrestle for his gun the shot took my toes off. It was when I was recruited for that mission I met Jack Price and the ex-soldier I’ve mentioned by the given Biblical name of Job for the first time. That adventure, and all subsequent ones were of my choosing, losing toes was not. Another reason for my first visit to the clinic was because I killed the man who had shot my fictional twin; the girl who had become very dear to me. I watched her die from a bullet that took most of her head with it when she was sitting in the passenger seat of the car I was driving in New York. When all that happened I was a baby of twenty-three years of age. Time moved on and others died for other causes, three more at my hand, but any feelings I had for the death of others were depleted from any remorseful side I may have been born with. I watched death and destruction from the distance I constructed to keep myself safe, unconnected to anyone.

But not this last time. Not on the Green for my fourth tour— No one does four tours in that shit hole of Ireland, Webby. So nobody will be looking for you.

Over the Irish Sea I went, not looking for anyone except the bastards who bomb the innocent for their version of freedom. But Ireland being Ireland, something beautiful will always emerge. Kerry found my weakness after I’d been there for less than a month. Hers were the latest and hopefully last screams the surgeon wanted to pull from my head. I played the man of courage, saying there were none, tucking them away in a place to find sleep, but everywhere was overcrowded. I awake to pictures of Kerry with her agony of both knees and hands shattered by hammers before being raped and the word TART slashed across her breasts. So what’s a little drive to a phone box compared to running from IRA cell to English cell, ducking the inquisitions at both ends by the grace of my two-toed right foot? Metaphorically speaking of course, because I never ran. All I was supposed to do was gather the intelligence, collate and make sense of it then decide what others could do in response. Nothing safer, eh! How about lying on the floor of a pub amongst the carnage of desolation after the detonation of a nail bomb that kills the man I was speaking to only four foot away and leaves me with one kidney less to siphon the evil whisky through?

During that six months’ idleness of mine I had managed to keep physically fit and in shape using the apparatus Job and I had added to a room in my apartment when he’d stayed for a few days. It had become part of my daily routine, but it wasn’t my physical side that bothered me as I grabbed a hat and coat and waited for the lift from my top-floor apartment. It was that mental fight against the crashing waves of memories that flooded my head at times with no escape other than forming their own scream. But men aren’t supposed to find bitterness in heartache, are they? I did though. When the lift door opened I shut the screams away and went in search of a new life-conquering telephone box.  

* * *

The brief conversation I held with the normally gregarious and chummy Adam, who I hadn’t spoken to since returning from Ireland, was concise and cold. The opposite to what I’d expected—“67 Lavington Street, Ezra. I know you know where that is. Jacob said to be as quick as you can,” and then silence apart from the sound of a replaced receiver. He could have just been having a bad hair day, he was that way inclined, although I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in his voice as though he resented my call for some reason.

Adam was the connection operatives such as I used for the verification of orders plus those things beyond the reach of ordinary soldiers. Ezra was my assigned Biblical label, while Jacob was the soubriquet of whoever sat in the chair overseeing Group. I never had enough of an interest to enquire into the motives or calculations for everyone who worked directly inside that secret organisation to have a biblical name. The ‘point’ of any decision is for others to justify and find a cause. It was not mine. There were a host of similarly constructed names; Job being one. Jack Price worked outside of Group for a separate party who held the shared interests of putting the British Isles above all else. I could, as a man on the spy as it was known, appreciated the need for covert arrangements, but asking me to visit an established, well-known company location would put a face to a name and was tantamount to declaring my decision to leave the service. Had I refused Geoffrey’s ‘invitation’ my dissent would have brought about the same end result; resignation. Whereas by going to the appointment, I turned the word resignation into the phrase of retirement from street work, with one hand holding on just in case it hadn’t completely disappeared as the yearly manure added to St Stephen’s Green, in Dublin, Ireland no doubt had.