Brahma
03-31-2011, 05:27 AM
THAT WINTER IN MANOURIA
i
I WOKE, trembling and damp with perspiration, from one nightmare and stepped into another. Instinctively I reached out for Madeleine, but found only empty space beside me.
“Yes?” I said brusquely into the cell phone whose jangling had awakened me. “What is it?”
“Martin?” said Senior Interrogator Kaminski.
“Kaminski,” I said. “ Yes, Martin Berriman.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and peered at my alarm clock. “What can I do for you?
What, indeed, could an Interrogator Second Class possibly do for the Senior Interrogator at 4 o'clock on a mid-February morning?
April may be the cruellest month, but in Manouria, February is the coldest. I hoisted the duvet up around my shoulders as freezing air from the half-open bedroom window threatened to turn my perspiration to ice.
“The Chief Prosecutor wants to see you, Martin.” Kaminski sounded apprehensive.
“What … now? I said.
“Immediately,” Kaminski said. “At police headquarters. And you’re to bring with you everything you have on the Pilgrim Society.”
“I’ve only got the one slim file,” I said.
“Bring it. And Martin … he’s in a testy mood. I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”
The cell phone clicked twice, probably from a monitoring device, and he was gone. I replaced the phone on the bedside table and started to dress.
I put on jeans and desert boots; an undershirt and the sweater that Madeleine had bought me a week before her disappearance; a shoulder holster with Glock pistol encased; and a leather jacket. A full judiciary department uniform hung in my closet, but I had never worn it since the final tailor’s fitting. I wondered briefly if the Chief Prosecutor would comment.
Finally I took out the Pilgrim Society file from my home safe. Such a slim folder: a few sketchy ‘facts’, rather more speculation, and a brief summary. No-one seemed to know the origin or significance of the name; but the horror of the atrocities attributed to its members, and the terror the name itself generated, now permeated Manourian society. What a world!
I took the stairs to the underground car park.
The air in the stairwell was breath-catchingly cold, the stairs so iced and dangerous that I was forced to use the handrail for support. Perhaps I should have accepted Madeleine’s additional offer of gloves.
Please, Madeleine, I thought at that moment, get in touch. Let me know where you are.
An underground car park at 4.30 on a winter’s morning in Manouria is a desolate, forbidding place, but this one at least was clean and well-lit, and the judiciary department Volkswagen started without hesitation.
I eased it out onto the street, set the red police flasher in motion, and drove at speed toward police headquarters.
ii
I hadn’t yet met Chief Prosecutor Jamieson in person, but like the Pilgrim Society, his presence permeated Manourian society.
His portrait, or some variety of reference to him, seemed to be everywhere. Video recordings of his interviews and discussions, his taped lectures, his written legal commentaries, were mandatory installations in every police station and courtroom in the country.
A middle-aged expatriate Scot, austere and athletic in appearance, his ‘international’ accent still bearing traces of his native dialect, he had graduated summa cum laude in law from Edinburgh, thereafter earning a Masters from Cambridge and a PhD from Yale.
He’d been there from the beginning, having personally, it was said, overseen the protracted gestation and tumultuous emergence, phoenix-like, of this newest European nation from the ruins of the Balkan Peninsular. There had once been talk of formally proclaiming him Father of the Nation, which had never eventuated.
But he was, in many respects, already a legend; and like all legends, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction.
They said his understanding of jurisprudence verged on genius; that he’d single-handedly drafted the constitution and the laws. Later, he had apparently proclaimed that there was in Manouria no place for so-called natural or moral laws; there was only the law of Manouria: the Acts, the Statutes, the sections and sub-sections.
Later still, at his direct instigation it was said, had been built the prisons and camps to hold those who transgressed against those laws.
Now everyone, it seemed, was either afraid of or in thrall to him. Certainly, everyone of importance in the criminal justice system: the senior public servants, the police minister, the police commissioner, the judges and magistrates, seemed to be indebted to him for their appointment.
So, some whispered, was the President himself.
The Chief Prosecutor was not, it was murmured ironically in some quarters, either irreligious or anti-social. He just couldn’t abide Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, cultists and trade unionists. He was unmarried, and a rider to the murmuring suggested that he didn’t like women either.
But all of these opinions were simply murmurings, never voiced aloud, and never committed to writing. For the Chief Prosecutor had his informants and enforcers everywhere, and friendship, however long-standing, did not guarantee immunity from betrayal.
Manouria, which had started life in an exultant outpouring of fellowship and goodwill, was now rife with dissent and, internally at least, in a state bordering on siege.
iii
Manouria has five major cities, of which Chburesta, with its presidential palace, supreme court, and international airport, is the capital. Rampiria Ufamati is the Adriatic port, and there follow in diminishing importance Dagabab Altuce, Avamsemur, and Demigdia.
Police headquarters in Chburesta is housed in a mediaeval, single-storied, quadrilateral building with columned ‘monk’s walk’, enclosing a central courtyard. You enter through an arched gateway complete with original portcullis, which has been electrified and is silently efficient in operation.
I showed my pass to the sentry, his young face pinched and raw from the freezing night air. He shifted his sub-machine gun to a more comfortable position while his eyes moved back and forth between my face and my photograph. We both knew the penalty for allowing unauthorised entry to such a location.
Finally, reluctantly, he motioned me through.
I parked the Volkswagen, slithered on ice as I skirted the courtyard, and then stamped my way along the columned walkway, beating my hands together as I went. Once inside the building, an armed guard whom I knew by sight subjected me to a further comparison with my photograph.
“You armed?” he asked.
I unzipped the leather jacket, and he reached across and extracted the Glock.
“Get it back when you leave,” he said. He returned my pass.
“He’s waiting for you … room eleven,” the guard said, pointing across the reception area. “He’s not happy,” he murmured.
I crossed the reception area to room eleven, tapped lightly, paused, gripped the Pilgrim file more firmly, and went in. The Chief Prosecutor was perched on the edge of a desk, reading from a file and swinging one elegantly trousered leg.
The room was embracingly warm, the heat source a large four-bar electric heater at the far side of the room.
“Berriman. Come in,” the Chief Prosecutor said affably. You look cold.”
Then, to my shocked surprise, he started to sing in an off-key falsetto voice, “Winter … in … Manouria … is … cold …”, mimicking an old Doug Ashdown song.
He stopped singing abruptly.
“Close the door,” he said, and extended a hand. “That the Pilgrim file?”
I handed him the file, then pushed the door to, behind me.
“Sit down, Berriman. Over there, behind the desk.”
He watched me move across the room, swivelling his body to do so. He stood up, then, and faced me across the desk. Not as tall as I had imagined him. Gaunter of features. Somehow an anachronism in his elegant clothes.
“I’ve been reading about you,” he said, waving the file he’d been studying when I came in. “You come well recommended from Scotland Yard, but you’re not what I asked for.”
“I’m a police officer,” I said, “and … “
The Chief Prosecutor cut me off.
“You’re an interrogator,” he said. “You were supposed to have come from Intelligence.
“I go where I’m sent,” I said.
“You didn’t request the secondment?”
“I didn’t refuse it.”
“So as to be with your lady friend?”
“Sir … ?”
He leafed through the file.
“Madeleine … Lassoeur. Where did you meet her, Berriman?”
“I was on protective duty at the G20 summit in Rome,” I said. “She was with the French delegation. We were introduced.”
He looked up at me.
“How’re you two getting on?”
It was a casual enough question, a basic expedient of the interrogator’s craft.
“I … haven’t seen her for the past ten days or so.”
“Oh? Had a quarrel, did you? A lover’s spat?”
“No … I just haven’t seen her.”
“Pretty girl,” the Chief Prosecutor said. “Still with the French delegation, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She’s an interpreter, Sir.”
“Ah, yes. An interpreter.”
He looked back at the file, flicked a page.
“Military Service … four years … Royal Corps of Signals.” He looked up at me. “Lineman? Radio operator?”
“Information systems,” I said.
“Ah.”
He went across to a filing cabinet, extracted a file and dropped it on the desk in front of me. He chuckled.
“Tell me what you think of these information systems,” he said.
I opened the file and scanned the first page. Then the second, and more briefly, the third. I looked up.
“But these are … methods of torture,” I said.
“Methods of persuasion,” the Chief Prosecutor said. “From China, with love.” He chuckled again.
“I don’t like torture, Sir,” I said quickly. “It’s messy, it’s crude, and it’s mostly unreliable.”
“Really,” he said. “And where did you plagiarise that little speech from, Berriman?”
“It’s my own opinion, Sir.”
“Is it, indeed.” He leaned across the desk, and I felt his breath on my face. “You’re not squeamish, are you, Berriman?”
He grabbed the file and replaced it in the filing cabinet. Then he returned to face me across the desk.
“Are you a Jew, Berriman?”
“No, Sir,” I said, with what calmness I could muster. “We’re Anglo-Saxon peasantry, at least from 1570.”
“Really. 1570.” The Chief Prosecutor’s voice was bright with suspicion.
“My brother’s a genealogist,” I said. “He did the research.”
“A genealogist. Well, well. What a clever family.”
Then, with a suddenness akin to his earlier musical outburst, the Chief Prosecutor underwent a kind of metamorphosis. His features assumed a lupine angularity, his formerly athletic stance the un-tensioned slump of a predator whose prey had escaped. He turned away from me, and leaned back against the desk.
“Get out of here, Berriman,” he said abruptly. “Go to Administration and read their Pilgrim file. Then get out to The Meadow in a hurry. They’ve a couple of packages for you. I want a written report. Twenty-four hours.”
“Sir,” I said, and left the room.
I collected my Glock from the guard in the reception area, and went from there to Administration. A middle-aged, sleep-eyed clerk was in attendance.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’ve come for the Pilgrim file.”
“No,” the clerk said, “you haven’t. It’s restricted.”
I felt a rising anger.
“Give me the damned file, “ I said, “or ring the Chief Prosecutor. He’s in room eleven right now.”
The clerk frowned, hesitated indecisively. Then he disappeared behind a cabinet of shelves, emerging a moment later with a file somewhat bulkier than the one I had returned to the Chief Prosecutor.
“Sign here.”
I signed a register, and turned to leave.
“The only one in existence,” the clerk said. “Get it back here today.” He sniffed. “Worth your life if you lose it.”
I went back through the reception area. The guard regarded me quizzically, but I simply nodded and went out into the now welcoming chill and the lightening sky of dawn.
iv
I was born and bred in a city, and have so far spent my life in one or another metropolitan environment. For me ‘the countryside’, like the past, has always been a foreign country.
Meadows conjure images of alpine grassland replete with cows with feminine faces, perhaps a fjord as backdrop, and cottonwool clouds adrift in an azure sky.
The Meadow was nothing of the sort. Located five kilometres beyond Chburesta and its environs, and a further two hundred metres from the road down a dirt track, it was a concrete block of a building set in a half-acre gravelled compound surrounded by a razor-wire-topped fence. Watch towers at hundred-metre intervals dotted the perimeter.
I stopped the Volkswagen at the main gate as a black Mercedes was pulling out. I extended my pass, and was directed by the guard to a parking area outside the compound. On returning to the gate, I was subjected once again to the now familiar lengthy comparison with my photograph.
The guard returned my pass. I hesitated, remembering the Pilgrim file I had collected from Administration, which I still had not read, and which was now lying on the front passenger seat of the Volkswagen. I decided to read it later.
“Kaminski’s waiting for you,” the guard said.
Waiting nervously, with a worried expression on his aristocratic features.
Kaminski, too, was on secondment. At home he was a major in the SKW division of Polish Military Information Services. We had formed a tentative friendship during the judiciary department familiarisation process.
“We’re in trouble,” Kaminski said, without a prior word of greeting. “One package, male, defunct. The other, female, unravelling fast.” This in the jargon with which I was still coming to terms.
He went ahead of me, through swing doors, along a short passage, and then hesitated before a door in which was set an observation panel.
“Those DSS bastards …” he said, his voice reflecting a helplessness in the face of circumstances over which he had no control.
I pushed past him into the room beyond.
A room empty save for the solitary figure of a woman seated on a chair to which she was secured by ropes around her shoulders and waist. Her head was slumped forward onto her chest, her blonde hair matted and bloody. Her feet were bare, her pale blue dress dirt- and bloodstained. A small, colourless pool of something that might have been vomit had formed at her feet.
I crossed the room and stood squarely in front of her. I placed my right hand firmly but gently under her chin and lifted her head so that our eyes should have met. But her eyes were closed and swollen, her face a bloody, distorted morass of contusions from the beatings they had administered.
An interval of perhaps a millisecond. And then the stunning shock of recognition.
“Oh, Christ … ! I blurted out. “Oh, Jesus!”
I dropped to my knees and reached out to take her face in my hands. I felt Kaminski’s urgent presence beside me.
“It’s no use, you can’t question her,” he said, misinterpreting my concern.
“Get a doctor in here!” I shouted.
“The doctor’s just been and gone,” Kaminski said. “We’re not to move her. Not to touch her . She’s dying. Be dead within the hour, the doctor said.”
“Who did this to her?”
Kaminski got an arm on either side of me and hefted me to my feet.
“Listen to me, Martin,” he said urgently. “She was stopped at the airport about ten days ago … “
“She’s with the French delegation,” I interrupted. “An interpreter.”
“Well … airport security handed her over to the police,” Kaminski said, “and then DSS claimed her.”
“But she’s with the French delegation,” I repeated. “Didn’t someone contact them?”
“Haven’t you read her file?” Kaminski asked. “She’s a Pilgrim.”
“Bull****!” I snapped at him. “She’s an interpreter.”
“She’s a Pilgrim,” Kaminski insisted. “Read the file.”
“No … she can’t be,” I said, as helpless suddenly as Kaminski. “I know her.”
“You know her?” Kaminski pulled me around to face him.
“We were … living together,” I said. “She disappeared … ten days ago.”
“God almighty!” Kaminski shouted. “ Haven’t you heard? There’s a net out for her contacts. They’re arresting anyone who so much as spoke to her.”
I turned away from him.
“We can’t just leave her there,” I said. “Not like that. Not like an animal.”
“We’re not to touch her,” Kaminski said. “That’s an order. She’s state property, now.”
He must have thought I was about to disregard him, for he grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me round to face him.
“Listen to me, Martin,” he said. “You’d better get out of here. I could have you arrested.”
Then, urging me toward the door, he said, “Get out of here. Get in touch with London. And for God’s sake read the Pilgrim file.”
He shepherded me from the room, and continued with me to the gate. The guard eyed us curiously.
“Read the file, Martin,” Kaminski said in parting.
He and the guard watched as I walked to the Volkswagen. Kaminski was still watching from behind the closed gate as I drove away.
v
I had intended to go to my apartment, collect a few essentials, and then get in touch with the British embassy. But instead, with a prescience I had not suspected in myself, I went straight to the embassy and requested their protection.
The following morning, Manouria was in upheaval. Chief Prosecutor Jamieson had been assassinated the previous evening – shot, it was said, by a maidservant while sleeping. An oddly appropriate death, I thought, for someone who didn’t like women. The Pilgrim Society was the official suspect.
I was flown by military helicopter, along with several strangers, from Chburesta to an airfield in Turkey, and from there by unmarked jet to an RAF base in England. Then I was whisked away to a nondescript house in a nondescript suburb of London, and de-briefed over several weeks by officials of the police and intelligence services.
Now, eighteen months later, I am no longer a police officer. I have a job in the quality control department of a manufacturing company. There’s a blonde girl here who seems to have taken a fancy to me, but she reminds me too painfully of someone I once knew for a brief period, and I am reluctant to further the relationship.
I never did read the Pilgrim file. Nor did I reveal its existence to officialdom. That document lies buried in waste ground on the outskirts of Chburesta.
It is just possible, I sometimes tell myself reluctantly when in an objectively reflective mood, that the file contained substantive proof of its subject’s participation in, or even responsibility for, some of the terrible events that blighted Manourian society. If that is so, I am confronted yet again with the dilemma of torture: whether it is ever justifiable, even in the so-called ‘ticking bomb’ scenario.
But I do not harbour such thoughts for long.
I prefer to remember Madeleine as I knew her: a gentle, affectionate soul, with a talent for languages, an interest in European mediaeval history, and a curiously perverse and obstinate belief in the essential goodness of humanity.
What was it Shakespeare said about conscience and cowardice … ?
* * *
i
I WOKE, trembling and damp with perspiration, from one nightmare and stepped into another. Instinctively I reached out for Madeleine, but found only empty space beside me.
“Yes?” I said brusquely into the cell phone whose jangling had awakened me. “What is it?”
“Martin?” said Senior Interrogator Kaminski.
“Kaminski,” I said. “ Yes, Martin Berriman.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and peered at my alarm clock. “What can I do for you?
What, indeed, could an Interrogator Second Class possibly do for the Senior Interrogator at 4 o'clock on a mid-February morning?
April may be the cruellest month, but in Manouria, February is the coldest. I hoisted the duvet up around my shoulders as freezing air from the half-open bedroom window threatened to turn my perspiration to ice.
“The Chief Prosecutor wants to see you, Martin.” Kaminski sounded apprehensive.
“What … now? I said.
“Immediately,” Kaminski said. “At police headquarters. And you’re to bring with you everything you have on the Pilgrim Society.”
“I’ve only got the one slim file,” I said.
“Bring it. And Martin … he’s in a testy mood. I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”
The cell phone clicked twice, probably from a monitoring device, and he was gone. I replaced the phone on the bedside table and started to dress.
I put on jeans and desert boots; an undershirt and the sweater that Madeleine had bought me a week before her disappearance; a shoulder holster with Glock pistol encased; and a leather jacket. A full judiciary department uniform hung in my closet, but I had never worn it since the final tailor’s fitting. I wondered briefly if the Chief Prosecutor would comment.
Finally I took out the Pilgrim Society file from my home safe. Such a slim folder: a few sketchy ‘facts’, rather more speculation, and a brief summary. No-one seemed to know the origin or significance of the name; but the horror of the atrocities attributed to its members, and the terror the name itself generated, now permeated Manourian society. What a world!
I took the stairs to the underground car park.
The air in the stairwell was breath-catchingly cold, the stairs so iced and dangerous that I was forced to use the handrail for support. Perhaps I should have accepted Madeleine’s additional offer of gloves.
Please, Madeleine, I thought at that moment, get in touch. Let me know where you are.
An underground car park at 4.30 on a winter’s morning in Manouria is a desolate, forbidding place, but this one at least was clean and well-lit, and the judiciary department Volkswagen started without hesitation.
I eased it out onto the street, set the red police flasher in motion, and drove at speed toward police headquarters.
ii
I hadn’t yet met Chief Prosecutor Jamieson in person, but like the Pilgrim Society, his presence permeated Manourian society.
His portrait, or some variety of reference to him, seemed to be everywhere. Video recordings of his interviews and discussions, his taped lectures, his written legal commentaries, were mandatory installations in every police station and courtroom in the country.
A middle-aged expatriate Scot, austere and athletic in appearance, his ‘international’ accent still bearing traces of his native dialect, he had graduated summa cum laude in law from Edinburgh, thereafter earning a Masters from Cambridge and a PhD from Yale.
He’d been there from the beginning, having personally, it was said, overseen the protracted gestation and tumultuous emergence, phoenix-like, of this newest European nation from the ruins of the Balkan Peninsular. There had once been talk of formally proclaiming him Father of the Nation, which had never eventuated.
But he was, in many respects, already a legend; and like all legends, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction.
They said his understanding of jurisprudence verged on genius; that he’d single-handedly drafted the constitution and the laws. Later, he had apparently proclaimed that there was in Manouria no place for so-called natural or moral laws; there was only the law of Manouria: the Acts, the Statutes, the sections and sub-sections.
Later still, at his direct instigation it was said, had been built the prisons and camps to hold those who transgressed against those laws.
Now everyone, it seemed, was either afraid of or in thrall to him. Certainly, everyone of importance in the criminal justice system: the senior public servants, the police minister, the police commissioner, the judges and magistrates, seemed to be indebted to him for their appointment.
So, some whispered, was the President himself.
The Chief Prosecutor was not, it was murmured ironically in some quarters, either irreligious or anti-social. He just couldn’t abide Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, cultists and trade unionists. He was unmarried, and a rider to the murmuring suggested that he didn’t like women either.
But all of these opinions were simply murmurings, never voiced aloud, and never committed to writing. For the Chief Prosecutor had his informants and enforcers everywhere, and friendship, however long-standing, did not guarantee immunity from betrayal.
Manouria, which had started life in an exultant outpouring of fellowship and goodwill, was now rife with dissent and, internally at least, in a state bordering on siege.
iii
Manouria has five major cities, of which Chburesta, with its presidential palace, supreme court, and international airport, is the capital. Rampiria Ufamati is the Adriatic port, and there follow in diminishing importance Dagabab Altuce, Avamsemur, and Demigdia.
Police headquarters in Chburesta is housed in a mediaeval, single-storied, quadrilateral building with columned ‘monk’s walk’, enclosing a central courtyard. You enter through an arched gateway complete with original portcullis, which has been electrified and is silently efficient in operation.
I showed my pass to the sentry, his young face pinched and raw from the freezing night air. He shifted his sub-machine gun to a more comfortable position while his eyes moved back and forth between my face and my photograph. We both knew the penalty for allowing unauthorised entry to such a location.
Finally, reluctantly, he motioned me through.
I parked the Volkswagen, slithered on ice as I skirted the courtyard, and then stamped my way along the columned walkway, beating my hands together as I went. Once inside the building, an armed guard whom I knew by sight subjected me to a further comparison with my photograph.
“You armed?” he asked.
I unzipped the leather jacket, and he reached across and extracted the Glock.
“Get it back when you leave,” he said. He returned my pass.
“He’s waiting for you … room eleven,” the guard said, pointing across the reception area. “He’s not happy,” he murmured.
I crossed the reception area to room eleven, tapped lightly, paused, gripped the Pilgrim file more firmly, and went in. The Chief Prosecutor was perched on the edge of a desk, reading from a file and swinging one elegantly trousered leg.
The room was embracingly warm, the heat source a large four-bar electric heater at the far side of the room.
“Berriman. Come in,” the Chief Prosecutor said affably. You look cold.”
Then, to my shocked surprise, he started to sing in an off-key falsetto voice, “Winter … in … Manouria … is … cold …”, mimicking an old Doug Ashdown song.
He stopped singing abruptly.
“Close the door,” he said, and extended a hand. “That the Pilgrim file?”
I handed him the file, then pushed the door to, behind me.
“Sit down, Berriman. Over there, behind the desk.”
He watched me move across the room, swivelling his body to do so. He stood up, then, and faced me across the desk. Not as tall as I had imagined him. Gaunter of features. Somehow an anachronism in his elegant clothes.
“I’ve been reading about you,” he said, waving the file he’d been studying when I came in. “You come well recommended from Scotland Yard, but you’re not what I asked for.”
“I’m a police officer,” I said, “and … “
The Chief Prosecutor cut me off.
“You’re an interrogator,” he said. “You were supposed to have come from Intelligence.
“I go where I’m sent,” I said.
“You didn’t request the secondment?”
“I didn’t refuse it.”
“So as to be with your lady friend?”
“Sir … ?”
He leafed through the file.
“Madeleine … Lassoeur. Where did you meet her, Berriman?”
“I was on protective duty at the G20 summit in Rome,” I said. “She was with the French delegation. We were introduced.”
He looked up at me.
“How’re you two getting on?”
It was a casual enough question, a basic expedient of the interrogator’s craft.
“I … haven’t seen her for the past ten days or so.”
“Oh? Had a quarrel, did you? A lover’s spat?”
“No … I just haven’t seen her.”
“Pretty girl,” the Chief Prosecutor said. “Still with the French delegation, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She’s an interpreter, Sir.”
“Ah, yes. An interpreter.”
He looked back at the file, flicked a page.
“Military Service … four years … Royal Corps of Signals.” He looked up at me. “Lineman? Radio operator?”
“Information systems,” I said.
“Ah.”
He went across to a filing cabinet, extracted a file and dropped it on the desk in front of me. He chuckled.
“Tell me what you think of these information systems,” he said.
I opened the file and scanned the first page. Then the second, and more briefly, the third. I looked up.
“But these are … methods of torture,” I said.
“Methods of persuasion,” the Chief Prosecutor said. “From China, with love.” He chuckled again.
“I don’t like torture, Sir,” I said quickly. “It’s messy, it’s crude, and it’s mostly unreliable.”
“Really,” he said. “And where did you plagiarise that little speech from, Berriman?”
“It’s my own opinion, Sir.”
“Is it, indeed.” He leaned across the desk, and I felt his breath on my face. “You’re not squeamish, are you, Berriman?”
He grabbed the file and replaced it in the filing cabinet. Then he returned to face me across the desk.
“Are you a Jew, Berriman?”
“No, Sir,” I said, with what calmness I could muster. “We’re Anglo-Saxon peasantry, at least from 1570.”
“Really. 1570.” The Chief Prosecutor’s voice was bright with suspicion.
“My brother’s a genealogist,” I said. “He did the research.”
“A genealogist. Well, well. What a clever family.”
Then, with a suddenness akin to his earlier musical outburst, the Chief Prosecutor underwent a kind of metamorphosis. His features assumed a lupine angularity, his formerly athletic stance the un-tensioned slump of a predator whose prey had escaped. He turned away from me, and leaned back against the desk.
“Get out of here, Berriman,” he said abruptly. “Go to Administration and read their Pilgrim file. Then get out to The Meadow in a hurry. They’ve a couple of packages for you. I want a written report. Twenty-four hours.”
“Sir,” I said, and left the room.
I collected my Glock from the guard in the reception area, and went from there to Administration. A middle-aged, sleep-eyed clerk was in attendance.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’ve come for the Pilgrim file.”
“No,” the clerk said, “you haven’t. It’s restricted.”
I felt a rising anger.
“Give me the damned file, “ I said, “or ring the Chief Prosecutor. He’s in room eleven right now.”
The clerk frowned, hesitated indecisively. Then he disappeared behind a cabinet of shelves, emerging a moment later with a file somewhat bulkier than the one I had returned to the Chief Prosecutor.
“Sign here.”
I signed a register, and turned to leave.
“The only one in existence,” the clerk said. “Get it back here today.” He sniffed. “Worth your life if you lose it.”
I went back through the reception area. The guard regarded me quizzically, but I simply nodded and went out into the now welcoming chill and the lightening sky of dawn.
iv
I was born and bred in a city, and have so far spent my life in one or another metropolitan environment. For me ‘the countryside’, like the past, has always been a foreign country.
Meadows conjure images of alpine grassland replete with cows with feminine faces, perhaps a fjord as backdrop, and cottonwool clouds adrift in an azure sky.
The Meadow was nothing of the sort. Located five kilometres beyond Chburesta and its environs, and a further two hundred metres from the road down a dirt track, it was a concrete block of a building set in a half-acre gravelled compound surrounded by a razor-wire-topped fence. Watch towers at hundred-metre intervals dotted the perimeter.
I stopped the Volkswagen at the main gate as a black Mercedes was pulling out. I extended my pass, and was directed by the guard to a parking area outside the compound. On returning to the gate, I was subjected once again to the now familiar lengthy comparison with my photograph.
The guard returned my pass. I hesitated, remembering the Pilgrim file I had collected from Administration, which I still had not read, and which was now lying on the front passenger seat of the Volkswagen. I decided to read it later.
“Kaminski’s waiting for you,” the guard said.
Waiting nervously, with a worried expression on his aristocratic features.
Kaminski, too, was on secondment. At home he was a major in the SKW division of Polish Military Information Services. We had formed a tentative friendship during the judiciary department familiarisation process.
“We’re in trouble,” Kaminski said, without a prior word of greeting. “One package, male, defunct. The other, female, unravelling fast.” This in the jargon with which I was still coming to terms.
He went ahead of me, through swing doors, along a short passage, and then hesitated before a door in which was set an observation panel.
“Those DSS bastards …” he said, his voice reflecting a helplessness in the face of circumstances over which he had no control.
I pushed past him into the room beyond.
A room empty save for the solitary figure of a woman seated on a chair to which she was secured by ropes around her shoulders and waist. Her head was slumped forward onto her chest, her blonde hair matted and bloody. Her feet were bare, her pale blue dress dirt- and bloodstained. A small, colourless pool of something that might have been vomit had formed at her feet.
I crossed the room and stood squarely in front of her. I placed my right hand firmly but gently under her chin and lifted her head so that our eyes should have met. But her eyes were closed and swollen, her face a bloody, distorted morass of contusions from the beatings they had administered.
An interval of perhaps a millisecond. And then the stunning shock of recognition.
“Oh, Christ … ! I blurted out. “Oh, Jesus!”
I dropped to my knees and reached out to take her face in my hands. I felt Kaminski’s urgent presence beside me.
“It’s no use, you can’t question her,” he said, misinterpreting my concern.
“Get a doctor in here!” I shouted.
“The doctor’s just been and gone,” Kaminski said. “We’re not to move her. Not to touch her . She’s dying. Be dead within the hour, the doctor said.”
“Who did this to her?”
Kaminski got an arm on either side of me and hefted me to my feet.
“Listen to me, Martin,” he said urgently. “She was stopped at the airport about ten days ago … “
“She’s with the French delegation,” I interrupted. “An interpreter.”
“Well … airport security handed her over to the police,” Kaminski said, “and then DSS claimed her.”
“But she’s with the French delegation,” I repeated. “Didn’t someone contact them?”
“Haven’t you read her file?” Kaminski asked. “She’s a Pilgrim.”
“Bull****!” I snapped at him. “She’s an interpreter.”
“She’s a Pilgrim,” Kaminski insisted. “Read the file.”
“No … she can’t be,” I said, as helpless suddenly as Kaminski. “I know her.”
“You know her?” Kaminski pulled me around to face him.
“We were … living together,” I said. “She disappeared … ten days ago.”
“God almighty!” Kaminski shouted. “ Haven’t you heard? There’s a net out for her contacts. They’re arresting anyone who so much as spoke to her.”
I turned away from him.
“We can’t just leave her there,” I said. “Not like that. Not like an animal.”
“We’re not to touch her,” Kaminski said. “That’s an order. She’s state property, now.”
He must have thought I was about to disregard him, for he grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me round to face him.
“Listen to me, Martin,” he said. “You’d better get out of here. I could have you arrested.”
Then, urging me toward the door, he said, “Get out of here. Get in touch with London. And for God’s sake read the Pilgrim file.”
He shepherded me from the room, and continued with me to the gate. The guard eyed us curiously.
“Read the file, Martin,” Kaminski said in parting.
He and the guard watched as I walked to the Volkswagen. Kaminski was still watching from behind the closed gate as I drove away.
v
I had intended to go to my apartment, collect a few essentials, and then get in touch with the British embassy. But instead, with a prescience I had not suspected in myself, I went straight to the embassy and requested their protection.
The following morning, Manouria was in upheaval. Chief Prosecutor Jamieson had been assassinated the previous evening – shot, it was said, by a maidservant while sleeping. An oddly appropriate death, I thought, for someone who didn’t like women. The Pilgrim Society was the official suspect.
I was flown by military helicopter, along with several strangers, from Chburesta to an airfield in Turkey, and from there by unmarked jet to an RAF base in England. Then I was whisked away to a nondescript house in a nondescript suburb of London, and de-briefed over several weeks by officials of the police and intelligence services.
Now, eighteen months later, I am no longer a police officer. I have a job in the quality control department of a manufacturing company. There’s a blonde girl here who seems to have taken a fancy to me, but she reminds me too painfully of someone I once knew for a brief period, and I am reluctant to further the relationship.
I never did read the Pilgrim file. Nor did I reveal its existence to officialdom. That document lies buried in waste ground on the outskirts of Chburesta.
It is just possible, I sometimes tell myself reluctantly when in an objectively reflective mood, that the file contained substantive proof of its subject’s participation in, or even responsibility for, some of the terrible events that blighted Manourian society. If that is so, I am confronted yet again with the dilemma of torture: whether it is ever justifiable, even in the so-called ‘ticking bomb’ scenario.
But I do not harbour such thoughts for long.
I prefer to remember Madeleine as I knew her: a gentle, affectionate soul, with a talent for languages, an interest in European mediaeval history, and a curiously perverse and obstinate belief in the essential goodness of humanity.
What was it Shakespeare said about conscience and cowardice … ?
* * *