Warlight(56)

“This is not safe for you here, Rose.”

“None of you are safe. That’s the point. They have your names, they know where you’re headed. They’ve got Connolly and Jacobs. They also claim to know who Viola is.” She referred to herself in the third person, as if someone might be listening.

“We’ll stay the night,” he said.

“Why? Because you have a girl here?”

He laughed. “No. Because we also just arrived.”

—

They ate close to the fire. The talk among them was careful, each uncertain how much the others knew. Each of them had always created a border between themselves and others so that a destination or purpose would not be exposed if any one of them was caught. No one else here knew she was Viola. Or that the man she was travelling with was her bodyguard. Her soldier was shy, as she’d discovered in her attempts at conversation on their sudden two-day journey, even when she asked him where he had grown up. He had no idea what her mission was. Just that she was a woman he had to safeguard.

When she and Felon stepped outside again to talk after the meal, the soldier came too and she asked him to move away so she and Felon could speak privately. He walked off and lit a cigarette in the distance, and she watched the faint pulse of it over Felon’s shoulder whenever he inhaled. They could hear the others laughing inside.

“Why?” Felon said it with a tired sigh of judgement. It was almost not a question. “It didn’t have to be you.”

“You would not have listened to anyone else. And you know too much—everyone’s at risk if you’re caught. We’re without rules of war now. You’d be interrogated as a spy, then you’d disappear. We’re not much better than terrorists these days.” She said it bitterly.

Felon said nothing, trying to find a weapon, some utensil, to get back into the argument. She reached out and put her hand on him and they stood very still in the dark. A faint light from the fire inside the hut flickered on his shoulders. Everything seemed peaceful, still, as when, during a long-ago evening in Suffolk, a barn owl, white, with a huge head, had floated silently to the earth near them, picked up a small animal—a rodent? or a shrew?—as if a piece of litter on the lawn, and glided up into a dark tree without breaking the arc of movement. “If you come upon their nests,” he’d told her then, “you’ll find they eat everything. The head of a rabbit, the remnants of a bat, a meadowlark. They’re powerful. Their wingspan—you just saw it—what is it—almost four feet? Yet if you ever get to hold one…there is no weight at all behind the strength.”

“How did you get to hold one?”

“One of my brothers found a barn owl, it had been electrocuted. He passed it over to me. It was large with its beautiful range of feathers, as if scalloped. Yet it weighed nothing at all. When he put it in my hands, my hands lifted, because there wasn’t the resistance I was expecting….Are you warm enough, Rose? Shall we go in?” When he spoke to her now suddenly in the present, she had to remember where she was, outside a hut, somewhere near Naples.

Inside, the fire was nearly out. She rolled herself into a blanket and lay there. She could hear the others adapting themselves to comfortable positions. She had mentioned to Felon that she was confused about the location, and he’d quickly sketched a map on a loose sheet of paper to clarify where they were. So her mind was racing over the drawn landscape stretching away from this hut till it reached their two possible escape routes, one of them a harbour where she had to contact a person named Carmen if things went wrong. She could smell the steam from their wet clothes by the fire, and Felon’s jacket was rough against her body. There was whispering. The previous year, working with him, she suspected he was involved with Hardwick, the other woman in the hut. Now she could make out muffled talk and movement in the corner of the room where he had bedded down. She forced her mind back to the landscape and imagined the journey ahead with her bodyguard. When she woke it was first light.

Rising early was another remnant of her education with Felon, from the times they used to go wildfowling, or hiking along a river to fish. She sat up and looked towards the darker end of the hut and saw Felon watching her, his companion asleep next to him. She rolled out of the blanket, gathered her dry clothes, and went outside to dress in private. A minute later the bodyguard discreetly followed her.

Felon was up and the rest were awake when she came back in. She went over and gave him back his jacket. She had felt the heaviness of it against her all night. During their quick breakfast he was courteous with her, as if she, not he, were the authority in the group. It had begun earlier, when his eyes watched her from across the hut, while she imagined him in the shadow of his involvement with the other woman.

It would be a few days later that Felon was captured and interrogated, just as she had warned him.



“You are a married man, are you not?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“I think you’re good with women. Was she your lover?”

“Met her just once.”

“Was she married? Children?”

“I really don’t know.”

“What was it made her attractive? Her youth?”

“I wouldn’t know.” He shrugs. “Perhaps her gait?”

“What is ‘gait’?”

“A way of walking, the way one walks. You know people by their gait.”