Most probably, he thinks. He says, “I couldn’t live with that. But then we mustn’t overdramatize. This isn’t television—”
“Yes, it is.”
It must be the lunchtime wine that traps him, makes him drift beyond himself, because when she says, “We’re sort of comrades now,” reclaiming that sweet, outdated term, Leonard feels it could be true. He has to swallow a half sob, he is so gratified and touched. Caught out, as well. It’s a winning remark, naive and generous and undeserved. She thinks he’s better than he is. He’s Comrade Leonard now. For the moment, more than anything he does not want to let her down, not while she’s here. “Okay, then, you’re the chief. Let’s hear your genius idea.”
“I can trust you, can’t I?”
“All the way.”
“You’re on my side?”
“I’m listening,” he says, a little guardedly. “Go on.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t. You first. You talk.”
“Just talk?”
“I want to know the story. I don’t get anything about you lot, my mum, my father, Mr. Lemon and his gun. You firebrand sofa-hating activists.”
Leonard laughs out loud at this. If only it were true. “No pasarán,” he says, raising his right fist, enchanted by any description that includes him among the activists.
“What’s that?”
“No pasarán? You know the Spanish Civil War?”
She shakes her head. “Were you in that?”
Leonard throws his head back again, not laughing at Lucy’s innocence but delighted by it. Why should a girl of seventeen know about the Spanish Civil War or, come to that, the compulsive part it has played for so many years in his imaginative life? “No, that was way before any of us were born. More’s the pity, possibly. I might have gone and done my bit.” And he embarks on telling her—his captive audience, who at least is pretending not to find him tedious—about his political epiphany. “Let’s see, I was twelve years old, so 1987.” He was, he explains, “a fervent and precocious little boy, a bit too earnest for my age perhaps,” and one that was as keen to take part in politics as others at the time were to play in football games or form a gang. “It was all Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out! Out! Out! in those days. Thrilling times.” Lucy nods as if she knows who Maggie Thatcher was, from her mother, possibly. “I remember …”
Leonard stops to check her expression. Celandine always grimaced or held her hands up in mock horror whenever her stepfather said I remember. “Try to remember wordlessly, Unk,” she once suggested, spitefully. But Lucy has tilted her face in interest. Her shoulders are still rubbing his.
“… there was this older man, one of the organizers. Mr. Perkiss,” Leonard continues, failing to recall the Christian name and then fleetingly recognizing that he is now the older man and one who also hopes to be inspiring. “He had only one hand, the left. The right was missing from the elbow. He always had the empty sleeve of his jacket turned up and safety-pinned to his shoulder. Walked a bit crablike. He must have been getting on for seventy. But he was still the fastest leafleteer among us. He’d been a milkman.” Leonard smiles to himself; he’s never forgotten Mr. Perkiss’s oddly sideways bearing, nor his unhesitant agility—even though he was not a southpaw by birth—at gates where others fumbled, and his confidence with growling dogs and hostile residents. This, to a lad of only twelve, looked like political heroism. Leonard wanted nothing more than to earn this man’s approval.
“Did you find out about his arm?” prompts Lucy, as dutifully as a TV host, rescuing Leonard from his short silence.
“I didn’t like to ask at first. It was a bit too personal, I thought. But I did ask him, finally. I said, ‘What happened to the other one?’ Not exactly subtle. I can still remember Mr. Perkiss lowering his voice, as if he thought it all too small a matter to discuss, and telling me, ‘I left my arm in Catalonia.’”
“Hey, that would make a mighty lyric for a song.”
“He’d been a volunteer, you see? In 1937. The Spanish Civil War. That’s why I mentioned it before. No pasarán. ‘They shall not pass.’ He was a member of the International Brigade, when he could hardly have been out of his teens. Maybe just a year or two older than you are now, Lucy.”
“Boys are not like that these days. Not at my college. They go to Spain to get a tan. And to get wrecked.”
“My Mr. Perkiss, he got wrecked—in the old sense.” Leonard begins to tell her about the battle of the Ebro, in which Perkiss was a stretcher-bearer. “Nineteen of his troop were killed that day. Can you imagine it? Frenchmen, Russians, Americans, Italians. The International Brigade. Good mates of his, Lucy. He’s doing what he can to save some lives and then this Fascist soldier lobs a grenade at him. He takes full blast.” Leonard slaps and detonates his chest, a brass player’s concert trick. “He takes full blast of it. Got shrapnel in his face and legs and chest. They had to pick the pieces out with kitchen tongs!”
“Did my father know this man?”
“Of course not, no.” Her question puzzles him. But then he understands why she was so thoroughly attentive at first but is now fidgeting. Maxie is the one she wants to hear about. That is what she thought all this was leading to. Leonard would rather tell her about the pivotal and inspiring day that Mr. Perkiss let him see and touch his “war damage,” the shiny scar, six centimeters long, below his knee, the other scar along his underjaw and down to his Adam’s apple, a hairless and pitted length of tight and damaged skin. He could never grow a beard, thanks to General Franco. “The worst luck was that the detonator hit Mr. Perkiss just below the elbow,” Leonard continues, speaking more quickly. “Can you imagine, Lucy, what a chunk of steel the size of a pigeon’s egg can do if it hits flesh at speeds like that?” Lucy starts to roll a cigarette. “It punched a hole in his arm. It sliced the artery and then passed through and only missed the comrade behind him by a whisker. Half a centimeter closer and that man would’ve lost his face. Mr. Perkiss’s arm was hanging from a thread. Snip, snip, and that was it. Neat job. They left it where it fell. In Catalonia. Didn’t even save his watch. Didn’t stop him doing this, though. One arm’s enough.” Leonard raises his clenched fist, feeling foolish, finally. “The Socialist salute. That’s who I got it from.”
By now it’s obvious Lucy is not truly interested in Leonard’s hero of the left or the fact that Leonard himself, when he was Lucy’s age, still dreamed of emulating this man and hoped, when he was older, in his gap year possibly, to make a sacrifice, though not of a limb, for something he believed in.
“I’m only telling you all this,” he says, hoping to regain lost ground, “because the one other man I’ve met who’s come close to Mr. Perkiss is your father. You know, prepared to lay down his life for a cause. He was always lost in one cause or another.” He doesn’t add out loud what he is thinking: that unlike Mr. Perkiss, Maxie Lermon could be brutal and stone-hearted, that his high-sounding principles were only a smokescreen for his transgressions, that her father was fanatical, preoccupied with action, careless of effect.
“That’s why we have to stop him, isn’t it?” she says. “Because he’s not the sort to stop himself.”
What she proposes is a mirror kidnapping. “You kidnap me, or seem to anyway,” she says, too sweetly passionate to warrant opposition. “You threaten tit for tat. It’s quite a neat idea. It’s biblical. It’s eyes and teeth. No one’s going to guess what’s really going on.”
“So what is really going on?” Leonard hasn’t understood. The drink has made him sluggish.
“Not a lot, in fact. And that’s the joy of it. I only disappear into your spare room for however long it takes. A week at most … Come on!” She slaps his hand. “I bet three days. I just hang out, read books and stuff. I’ll be your cook! And you send ransom notes and make phone calls. You say, ‘We’ve got the headbanger’s darling girl here. She won’t get free until the hostages get free. And if he hurts the hostages, then she’s hurt too. If they go hungry, she goes hungry. Shout at t
hem, and she gets shouted at. Simplissimo as that. But when you free them, the family, we free her, the long-lost daughter. It’s your call, Mr. Lemon.’ No, this is really genius.” And it does seem genius. It seems the sort of intervention that is both honorable and risk-free and, with red wine on its side, might even be mistaken for daring.
“What do you reckon?” Lucy asks. Her hand is on his arm again.
“I reckon, let’s have another drink and talk it through,” Leonard says, managing to sound both hesitant and roguish. “See if it’s okay.”
“What’s not okay?”
“‘See if,’ I said.”
“It’s so okay that Dad”—her first use of the word—“is going to be totally disarmed. You know, disarmed, like doesn’t have a choice. Not unless he is a complete monster.” Lucy is becoming more excited with everything she says.
“Well, that’s a possibility.”
“It’s not. It’s truly not.”
“Maxie’s not predictable. Maxie can be”—Leonard has to say it carefully—“too passionate.” He means unhinged. Thuggish and unhinged.
“I think he is predictable. I’ve met him for myself. We’ve talked—”
“For twenty minutes at the most. Three birthday cards and a photograph, you said.”
“No, more than that. Not only on the doorstep when he came in August, just suddenly. But since.” She lowers her voice and leans in toward Leonard, as if to trust him with an intimate disclosure. “He’s phoned. We’ve met. We’ve been on walks. We’ve been in pubs. Don’t say. My mum’d have a stroke if she found out.”
“Well, mum’s the word. Trust me.” Her eyes are wet, he sees.
“But it’s for me, not Mum. I had to talk with him. Why wouldn’t I? Aren’t I entitled to? And now I know he sort of loves me. In a way. I asked him and he said he did. Or would. Give him the chance, at least.” She sits up suddenly, a fresh bright girl engaging with the world, a practiced catchphrase from FBH, the television show, on her lips: “It’s Flesh and Blood and History … and common sense. They’re on our side.”
“That’s quite a lineup, Lucy.”
“Yes, it is. It means he’ll never let me come to any harm. Admit it now, this is how it works.” In her scenario, her father dares not tie his victims up for fear of ropes around his own girl’s wrists. He dares not use his fists or fire his gun at anyone, the family or a policeman, anyone, or let his comrades do it either, for if he does, then Lucy will be beaten up or shot as well. A wound to match a wound. A death to match a death. A love to be rewarded with a love.
“Equivalence,” says Leonard.
“And if he wants a ransom,” Lucy adds, “or makes demands, you know, a helicopter or a wad of notes, all you do is ask the same for me. It’s only words. And if he tries to kill himself, he can do it knowing you’ll kill me as well. Don’t laugh. I see you couldn’t hurt a fly. But only we know that. How sweet is my idea? He’ll have no choice. He’ll have to … what’s the word? Resign?”
“Surrender, do you mean? Admit defeat? Capitulate?” Leonard smiles; the thought is satisfying. “You know what, then? Just think it through. If he backs down, if he caves in”—sweet phrase—“is that the end of it?” He shakes his head. She does the same and waits, biting her lower lip. “No? Exactly. Your newfound father will be dragged away in front of all the cameras and then locked up for one very long time. Don’t kid yourself. How will you live with that?”
“I’ll visit him in prison every week. I’m doing him a favor. There’s no defeat. I’m saving him.” This is where her argument is won.
She loves her father, Leonard thinks. Or at least she loves the idea of her father. Well, no surprise. Unquestionably, Maxie is a man who’s easy to be beguiled and inveigled by, on first encounters. Lucy will not have had the chance to feel his rage or spot the thug in him, as Leonard has. She will have found him handsome, charismatic, and mythically romantic. Overpowering, in fact. Of course she doesn’t want to lose a man like that for seventeen more years—forever, probably. She needs to know exactly where he is, even if that is in a cell. She wants him within reach. And more than that, she’s offering him the chance, his first and only chance, to prove he loves her. Yes, that’s her genius. What she proposes is a test of love. Leonard lifts his chin and offers Lucy Emmerson a loving smile of his own. She’s overpowering as well. He is the one who has capitulated. He has become Lucy Emmerson’s slavish comrade. Her only help. There’s no one else. He daren’t say no. At least, he daren’t say no to her face.
Lucy, like an excitable adolescent, wants to baptize the plot and their confederacy by pricking their fingertips with a brooch and shaking bloody hands, but Leonard will not stab himself. He says he is too old for punctures and perforations. But he agrees “in principle” to her grand plan. Overnight, he’ll square the idea with his wife (“No problem there,” he boasts) while Lucy collects her few “unsuspicious” things from home. “Nothing that looks too planned,” she promises. “I mean, I’ll leave my toothbrush in its usual place, and my BaxPax, stuff like that. It has to seem like I’ve just been grabbed. Right off the street. Like a genuine kidnapping. No witnesses.” She kisses Leonard’s cheek. “You’re really nice,” she says, delighted with the caper she has planned and now can share. Rather than return her kiss, as she seems to expect, Leonard raises his good hand for her, the painless one, and clenches it again.
“No pastarán,” she says. “We’re going to get on fine. I’m going to be the perfect guest. Three days maximum. Radiant! Tomorrow, then. High noon.” They arrange to rendezvous in the car park of the Zone superstores near the airport’s Charles III terminus. “Just sit and wait. I’ll find you,” she says. “There’s no mistaking that creepy van of yours.” Now she tilts her face again and smiles. “Let’s see that Texas photograph.” She leans across, her hair in his face. His hand is on her arm. Good mates, no more than that. They talk and smoke until the lights come on, this naught percenter and this child that might have been his own. They seem unlikely comrades, sitting damply with their drinks, more drinks than he can manage, their two hats on their laps providing the beer yard with its only vividness: red beret, yellow cap.
4
LEONARD IS NOT SORRY to get back to the van and be himself again. Those hours spent behind the Woodsman, so thrilling and so promising at first, have left him cornered rather than resolved. He is relieved, though, to find that his van has been neither clamped nor towed. Throughout his meeting with Lucy Emmerson he has never quite forgotten the single yellow restricted parking line running under its nearside tires and has worried what ingenious excuses he might have to offer Francine to explain why he is so unexpectedly late home. He cannot tell her he has ended up, expensively, at a City Highways car pound after an afternoon of drinking and smoking with a pretty teenage girl. A more likely delay, given his white lies of that morning, would be having the vehicle locked in by careless rangers at some unattended forest clearing. But, thankfully, the van is untouched. He can save his inventions for some other occasion. For a moment only, his spirits lift. This trip has not proved to be an entire disaster. Not yet, at least. Not if he can go back on his promise. He knows he will, he knows he must. Leonard flushes hot and cold at the prospect. What folly has he promised Lucy Emmerson? Pressed up close together on that wooden bench, conspirators, he has abandoned his good sense. On the journey back, he can concoct the most convincing reasons for his change of heart, something that will satisfy both the girl and himself, though nothing he does now—including speeding or taking risks, as he has just done, pulling out too carelessly into lively traffic—will get him home before his wife as he has promised.
Leonard knows the law. He should not be driving at all: 25 centiliters of wine is the limit and he has drunk three times that volume. And on an empty stomach. He’s risking a suspension. But it is only early evening, not quite dark yet. Random checks are not usually deployed until much later. He will avoid the motorways, however, where there are robot eyes to monitor t
he vehicles, and return the way he came, on rural routes. First, though, he turns the van round, drives back toward the hostage house, and parks again on the fringes of the mobile village with its circle of incident and rescue vehicles. Something pulls him there, something that he hopes is more than prurience. He is only idling, in both senses. He does not even turn the engine off or get out of the van. Instead, he reaches for his thermos under the passenger seat, where it has rolled and been forgotten during the jazz-fueled journey down. The lime-and-honey-flavored green tea is tepid and cloudy. It is reviving, though, and, he imagines, sobering. If he is stopped and questioned by the police (or Francine, come to that) because his driving or behavior is erratic, his grape-and-tobacco breath will have been partly cleansed and sweetened and might not betray him. Everything he does from now on until the lights go out tonight must help erase the day.
The parking ground is no less busy than it was this morning. Groups of officers come back off shifts, expressionless. Young men and women in uniform swipe their ID fobs at the catering van for their free drinks and sandwiches. Techies in hi-viz jackets fuss and tinker with their aerials and armories, issuing and taking back the beam guns or laser tasers that frontline officers from the National Security Forces are authorized to carry and far too ready to use. The army and police forces do not mix with the rescue services, Leonard notices. Taking lives and saving lives are worlds apart. And they all despise the television crews. They are like playground gangs, keeping to their own kind and unhurriedly sharing their boredom with familiars. So the siege continues. Nothing new has happened this afternoon, he thinks, and is disappointed. Now Leonard understands what has pulled him back onto this open ground, something worse than prurience: it is the hope that the hostage-taking has been ended quickly while he’s been in the pub, not only for the victims’ sake, and not at all for Maxie Lermon’s sake, but for his own well-being.