The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 23

Many years later, I walked up to the customs post at Sharm el-Sheikh airport, stood in a queue of nine people, counted my steps, concentrated on my toes until I could feel each individual end, could define the shape of every part of my feet. They didn’t pat me down as I went through security, and they didn’t bother to check my luggage. In duty-free territory, I bought bad international coffee and a bad international magazine, and waited for my gate to be called.

Colourful pictures, words on a page.

I flicked through without paying much attention, eyes still circling the hall.

I stop. Flick back a few pages. Look more closely.

A series of pictures: beautiful people in beautiful clothes. Not a gram of fat between them, no grey hair, no wrinkles, only perfect, cosmetic smiles. Champagne from glasses with twisting spines; gold at the women’s necks, gold in the cufflinks of the tuxedos.

A bewildering tapestry of names and faces. She used to be a PA, but now she’s head of her own media firm. He used to work in the invoicing department of a stationery shop, but now he’s a management consultant, and fabulous. He used to weigh twenty-two stone and was scared of meeting new people, but having earned 1×106 points through Perfection his life has been transformed and he’s just got engaged to the runner-up of Miss Colombia 2009.

She loves her yacht.

He loves his house.

He met his wife through Perfection, the perfect woman, he hadn’t known what perfect meant until he saw her.

I lay the magazine down as my flight is called, walk to the gate, diamonds temporarily forgotten, the worst of the job done. From here, things should be easy.

A premium-class seat near the door; not quite first, not quite economy. Padding and iced water in a plastic cup. The air stewardess who directs me to my chair wears stunningly red lipstick.

Standard uniform requirements for female cabin crew:

The seat next to mine is empty. I pull on my seatbelt, tugging it a little too tight around my middle, lean back in my chair.

The door closes, a clunk as we’re sealed from the outside world.

I half close my eyes.

A man sits next to me.

He wears a linen suit, a white cotton shirt, glasses balanced on the top of his head. His watch has a thick leather strap, but the face is constructed so you can see the gears turning beneath, a skeleton watch, £450 at a pinch, more indulgent than his shoes (£60) or his haircut (£15) — a thing that perhaps carries meaning for him. I wonder if I should steal it, but decide the strap is too wide, it won’t fit, and besides I’m not in the mood.

I glance up at his face, and he is known to me, and he is mugurski71, pulling the flight magazine from the chair back in front of him, flicking through, eyebrows drawn, face crinkled, considering Black Sea holidays and resorts on the Aegean.

I look away.

Can he remember my face?

Impossible: we haven’t met, he has no picture in his hand to compare against my features.

Yet equally impossible: coincidence. _why and mugurski71 do not meet by chance, not like this.

The plane begins to taxi to the runway. The cabin crew perform safety checks, seatbelts, lockers. With perfect painted smiles they indicate the emergency exit here, there, air masks, lifejackets, stay calm, save yourself, then the kids.

I pretend to read my magazine, he pretends to read his.

How has he found me?

“The money.”

He spoke so calmly, eyes turned still to the pages in his lap — Detox to perfection with our 5* holistic getaway — that I wasn’t entirely sure he’d spoken at all.

Then he spoke again.

“I followed the money. Once we concluded you had stowed away on the cruise ship, I sent people ahead to watch the ports, see who disembarked, who checked into what. The day the ship arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, an Australian passport cleared customs, which wasn’t on the ship’s manifest. We found you as you checked out, but you used the same account for both the hotel and the flight to Istanbul. I had to run to make this flight, which is undignified. My name is Gauguin.”

He held out one hand, club-fingered and pale, his eyes still not rising from the magazine. I declined to shake it.

“You’re talking to me?” I asked.

“Yes. I am.”

“I don’t know you.”

“I work for Prometheus.”

“I’m afraid that means nothing to me.”

“The flight to Istanbul is approximately an hour and forty minutes. The magazines run dry after barely ten minutes of entertainment.”

Silence.

I gave up pretending to read, sat back in my chair.

Counted backwards from ten.

“Gauguin, right?”

“That’s right.”

“French post-impressionist artist, died 1903, days before he was due to start serving a prison sentence for libelling the governor of the Marquesas Islands. Have you seen Tahitian Women on a Beach? There are two women by the sea, a pattern in the sand, as if they’ve been doodling, a pipe, some tobacco, not used. They have flowers in their hair.”

“You know more about it than I do.”

“Then why call yourself Gauguin?”

He shrugged. “It’s a name. I can use something else, if you want.”

“Gauguin is fine.”

“And you are…?”

“You can call me Why.”

A push, a rise of engine, the wheels come up, heads go back; I glance out of the window to watch the dust outside give way to the sea, and there’s the town, barely bigger than the airport that serves it, five streets of luxury, a nowhere place in the desert. He waited until the sound of the engine had slowed, the flight levelled off, before folding his magazine perfectly, precisely, into the pouch in front of him.

“There are some questions we’ll need to ask,” he said.

“What questions?”

“About the robbery. How you accessed the 106 Club in Dubai; how you got into the party. How you escaped. Why you targeted Prometheus.”

“I targeted diamonds.”

He smiled at nothing much and said, “My employers don’t see it that way. Only a fool steals from a party, in the manner in which you did. Anyone reasonable would have targeted the safe, or while the jewels were in transit.”

“I’m a better thief than I am a safe-cracker,” I answered, honestly enough.

A stewardess leant down, interrupting before Gauguin could open his mouth to reply, took our cups, promised a trolley service with light refreshments still to come. Gauguin thanked her courteously; I didn’t have the heart.

When she turned away, I said, “If you knew I was on this flight, why not simply wait until I reached Istanbul?”

“Pressures of time.”

“You’re playing catch-up.”

A shrug: he’s here, isn’t he?

“You brought guns to our meeting in Muscat.”

“You sent a prostitute.”

“Guns,” I repeated. “Sometimes it’s not paranoia.”

He shrugged, a busy man in a busy world.

“You want diamonds, right? I heard you made a deal — your guys help get the diamonds back, the UAE invests in your company?”

A flicker across his face, the tiniest twitch to his smile, and I’ve made a mistake, a right balls-up, and I will have to walk away soon and let him forget. But he’s between me and the aisle, so I added, “I don’t have the diamonds with me now. You want them, we’re going to have to negotiate.”

He smiled at nothing much, turned away, examined the buttons in the plastic ceiling above our heads, the fans blowing in cold air, the illuminated seatbelt light. “No,” he murmured. “No, I think not.”

Silence.

I waited, he waited, and the realisation began to dawn that this man could out-wait the ice age. A childish desire in me; I counted to one hundred, then counted back. Still he waited. I leaned my head back in my chair, ran my mind over my body, feeling each little ache and pain, readjusting my posture so my back was straight, feet on the ground, knees together, shoulders relaxed. Still he waited.

I permitted myself to play out a few scenarios in my mind, and they all ended badly.

I focused until my mind ached on the faint grey pattern woven into the fabric that covered the seat in front of me, and heard myself say without quite knowing from where the words came, “Perfection killed a woman I knew.”

Does he react?

No audible gasp, no nod, no frown. What does he do?

He stares at nothing much, and adjusts his cuffs. I watch him do this, and wonder if he’s even conscious of the act. With the index finger of his right hand he explores the inside edge of his sleeve, feeling the stiff fabric, probing for irregularities. This done, he tugs, once, twice, on the cuff, bringing it into alignment with the bone down the inside of his arm.

Radius, ulna, humerus, scapula, clavicle. Hip bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the knee bone, now hear the word of the Lord…

“Was that why you stole the Chrysalis?”

“No. But it made it more satisfying when I did.”

He nodded, said nothing. Is he also reciting all the bones in the body to himself, is that his mechanism? Femur, patella, tibia, fibula, tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges, how does he not move, how does he not blink?

I can learn a lot from Gauguin, but now isn’t the time.

Then he said: “Tell me about your relationship with Byron14.”

I was less surprised than I thought I’d be. The question had been one of many that circled around my possible list of scenarios, a hovering curiosity on the edge of my mind. “Who’s Byron14?” I replied.

“Byron14 is the individual who you have been in communication with for the last few days via Tor,” he murmured, staring at nothing much, cufflinks rolling between his fingers. “Byron14 is a killer and a terrorist. What have you been discussing?”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“Are you sure you can’t hold it?” Like a schoolteacher at an exam.

“Yeah — no.”

As I tried to stand, he grabbed my wrist, face turned upwards, eyes fixed on mine. I felt something brush against my leg, thought it was my seatbelt falling away, but the pressure remained. His eyes flicked down; mine followed.

The knife was ceramic, of course, and only four or five inches long, with a blue plastic handle. Four inches are three more than enough. The angle of his arm, where he held it against my femoral artery, obscured it from all but my inspection, the curve of his fingers along the back of the blade making it look like, perhaps, at worst, he was touching the side of my leg. I sat back down slowly, and the knife followed my journey, before returning back inside Gauguin’s jacket.

My heart, my breath.

I closed my eyes.

“You wouldn’t risk it,” I said at last. “Not on a public flight.”

“I have a very slim chance of being arrested,” he replied. “You’d die for sure.”

“Can’t help you dead.”

“You aren’t helping now.”

“Can’t do anything at thirty-five thousand feet.”

“That’s fine; we’ll land before you know it.”

My heart, too fast, breath too quick. I tried to count and the numbers were tangled, come on, come on!

I found I was trying to remember Parker, forcing myself to picture his face as I had seen it on the photograph. I could see the photograph in my mind’s eye, but his features were flat, unreal, and I bit my lip until I tasted blood. A list of characteristics — mousy hair, pale grey eyes, a mole on the right side of his chin, large ears, small nose — these are just words, they are nothing that has meaning.

“Just relax, Why,” said Gauguin, leaning back in his chair, eyes half closed like a man about to sleep. “Just stay calm. Stay calm.”

My mum, walking barefoot across the desert.

I close my eyes, and feel the sand beneath my feet.

“I’m calm,” I say, and it is true. “There’s really nothing to worry about.”

We fly north-east, towards Istanbul.