How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

irregularly, like a code tapped out against a cell wall, the blood running down to the corner of his mouth. It tells him things he didn’t know: that he is upright, that the injury is recent, that he is alive. Panic circles him. His fingers spider across the cold plastic until they reach, finally, something that yields. Rubber, a thin ridge of rubber. It comes to him that he is locked inside the fridge on the top floor of the house. At least it isn’t switched on. At least he isn’t cold. The whole thing is almost enough to make him laugh. But he doesn’t. Instead he opens his mouth and screams.

• • • •

There is no way of knowing how long he sleeps for, but it can’t be more than an hour. What wakes him is not pain but noise. A knocking, persistent and steady. It might be a loose shutter. His hands return to the rubber ridge. He has worked it loose enough that he can slide two fingers between rubber and rusted metal. A hundred tiny arrowheads flurry into the soft soil of his skin. He expects the opening he has created to let in sound, and it does – the knocking becomes more urgent – but to his surprise it also lets in light. Someone has switched on a light. He pushes his head forward as far as he can, ignoring the stabbing pains around his neck and across his back, and sees through the gap a number of surfaces that he struggles to understand: peeling wall, rotten door frame, a narrow slice of hallway. The vizier steps in and out of view. When he reappears a few minutes later the transformation is so complete that at first he thinks it must be someone else. Gone are the suit, the glasses, the neatly combed hair. He has lost ten years and acquired a dirty vest and a dressing gown. His hair sticks up in places as though he has just been asleep. August isn’t aware of making a noise but the vizier turns to look directly at the fridge. The metallic rattle suggests at least one chain and padlock. It is startling to see the vizier at such proximity. Afterwards August struggles to locate his impressions, as though they are valuables hidden inside a strange house. He turns each detail over repeatedly with trembling hands. Unblinking grey eyes, dirty teeth, a sense of profound calm. A body packed so densely with power that August wonders how he ever managed to conceal it beneath the Iranian’s grey suit. The vizier smiles, reaches out and snaps one of August’s fingers at the middle knuckle. When he opens his mouth to scream it is filled with a damp choking fist of material and he hears the shriek of tape and feels a tightness clamping around his head. It takes all his concentration to keep the gag from slipping down his throat. But the vizier doesn’t know that. And so for good measure he slams an open palm into August’s ear with such force that his head cracks the plastic casing at the back of the fridge.

• • • •

Family is sleep, he hears the vizier say. The windowpane in the room must be broken, the closed shutters a few metres above the front door. No, no, he hears.

He bites down on the gag to muffle the pain in his hand as he works open a gap.

Is this your house?

A familiar voice, one he wants to hear.

Caretaker. What you want?

I’m looking for someone. It’s very important.

No here, my friend. You go now —

Well, he told me he was here.

Lawrence sounds tired and irritated.

Here? No, no.

Yes, he definitely said he was here. And I’ve been here before, so I know this is the place he was talking about.

Family is sleep, baby is sleep. My friend, look time. Very —

Your family is inside?

Yes, my —

I thought this house was empty. I thought it was being rented out. Who did you say you were?

August thinks: what else does he remember? That the house is unfurnished and unheated, that it’s the last place anyone would bring a baby, that on the day he came here there was no sign of a caretaker? Lawrence should make his apologies and leave now. It won’t take a moment to call the local police from his car and give them the address. Better still, ask the embassy’s consular section to make the call, they’ll already have the right contacts, it’ll conceal his interest in the matter. Either way they’ll be at the door within the hour. It won’t be pretty, but he can hold on for that long.

Listen, my friend. Not here.

Wait a second, don’t shut the door. I know it’s bloody early. I’ve got money. Tell you what, take this. Let me have a quick look around to put my mind at rest and then —

A lorry on the road above the house changes gear to climb the hill. August fumbles against the tape covering his mouth but the pain in his broken finger slows him down. Instead he tries to hook an edge over the broken plastic at the back of the fridge.

— a friend of mine. Look, it’s really important. I won’t wake your children, I promise. Otherwise I’ll have to call the police and report a missing person and I’m sure nobody wants that. They’ll wake everyone up. They’ll probably have to call the owner too. Out of interest, who is the owner? Maybe I should give him a call myself.

He finds a sharp plastic edge but it slips off the tape and tears open his cheek.

This man, your friend, how he look?

He’s very tall, with dark hair. He was here a few hours ago.

Very tall, very…

What, his build? He’s pretty skinny.

Skinny?

You know, thin. Like … like this door.

He is English?

Yes.

Okay, no, no.

No one like that?

There was Turkish man here yesterday but no English man.

He tries again and the plastic hooks into the cut