Connery (Part 16)

A Speculative Novel

Sometimes when I dream, I have this almost absurdly literal dream. I told my psychiatrist about it. Dr. Volpe had recommended Dr. Habbermas when I had settled in the Bronx. She had a maisonette office, though her title on the brass plaque outside the street door – listed between an accountant and a physiotherapist – read ‘Pain Consultant’, which struck me as a much neater definition. This is when I was living in New York in the mid noughts.

‘All people really need,’ she told me on our first meeting. ‘is someone to listen to them. That’s all it is. Really.’

Her prices were high, but I allowed myself this luxury. I had decided to seek professional help for my mental health not out of any real concern for my own well-being nor out of any hope that I could be cured, whatever that actually means, but because of Sasha’s assessment of me as a psycho at the team building exercise in Wales. Of course, there was personal animosity to take into account, hell hath no fury stuff, but it worried me that I was so transparently readable to others. My disguise, such as it was, was slipping and I needed to reassert it. Fix it with some cognitive behavioural glue. I had to see the signs and the symptoms that others could see and adjust them so they wouldn’t be seen anymore, or others would see them as something else, something perfectly acceptable. I’d been to a finishing school set up by the HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim in a small town about forty minutes north of Tel Aviv. I can’t give you much more because I was driven there blindfolded and back again. Arrow sent me there to complete my training. I came away with a tan and a refined methodology at my fingertips, not to mention a whole bunch of new toys. Their lessons on poisons and explosives had been great. I loved the stuff they showed me in terms of anatomy and the unarmed killing classes were particularly instructive. But the psychological stuff had meant wondering about my own weaknesses. It is a commonly held misconception that those of us who are suffering from or at least living with a psychiatric disorder are somehow not aware of it. Schizophrenics know full well that the voices are in their heads, even as they hear them outside of their heads. Hallucinations are frequently unconvincing in reality. In movies and books, it’s different of course. You get to the end and then you realize the unreliable narrator was crazy all along, an associate character who seemed like flesh and blood is actually an imaginary friend and they disappear in a series of flashbacks. I won’t name the films, because I don’t want to spoil them for you if you haven’t already seen them, but their ability to depict the lived subjective reality of mental illness is dubious if not downright mendacious. Dr. Habbermas has diagnosed me as a highly functional sociopath. She avoids the term psychopath because of the negative connotations but I think she probably has scribbled it in her notes somewhere. She has noted my complete lack of empathy for fellow human beings and likewise for animals. She noted my sense of superiority to others and certain ideas I have about how people see me. I lack self-awareness to get an accurate picture of how I come across in social interactions. Which is the nub of the matter. There is no cure for this. There’s no way I can change how I feel or more accurately don’t feel. But there are certain behaviours I can avoid and there are certain ways of thinking that help me to align myself more obviously with normal people. With the rest of humanity. I take my own mental notes.

I sit in a comfortable chair and lean back. There’s a footrest. It isn’t really a couch or anything like that. Habbermas’ room is always dimly lit. There’s the lamp on her desk where she sits with her fingers gripping a sharp pencil and there’s a wall mounted lamp aimed at the ceiling; the daylight comes through blinds and the triple-glazing muffles the noise of the city to barely audible series of desperate screams.

‘Dream?’ she said. A slight suspicion. She warned me before about making things up. She noted that I lie.

‘I’m in a house and every room in the house is in a different country. The hall is in Cumbria; the living room is in Potomac; the kitchen is in Paris; the bathroom is in Venice.’

‘And the bedroom?’

‘I was coming to that,’ I tried not to sound annoyed.

Dr Habbermas shouldn’t have interrupted as much as she did. It was one of the things I liked the least about her. But she was shrewd, and she got to the point.

‘The stairs I climbed were back in my flat in the Bronx. I mean they were the building where I live now. The bedroom was in tatters. I don’t recognise it. But I mean nuclear bomb tatters. Arson tatters. Utterly destroyed, paper peeling from the walls, plasterboard visible. Something out of a movie. Yellow. Colour of nicotine fingers. That disgusting yellow.’

Although she never smoked in my presence, I’d have bet a million dollars Dr. Habbermas was a smoker.

‘Disgusting?’ she said, quietly.

‘But on the wall, there was writing. Lots of writing and I knew it said something pertinent.’

‘Pertinent?’

‘Yes. Pertinent, relevant, important. Apropos.’

‘But to what?’

‘This is the point. If you just let me…’

‘Sorry, go on.’

Even apologizing for an interruption is at times an interruption.

‘If I could get close enough to read the writing, I would be able to work out what it was relevant to,’ I said. ‘I had the knowledge that this was really important, but I didn’t know how. I desperately needed to read it. But as I was going forward it was like in a comedy when someone has their braces caught on something.’

‘Their braces? Like in their teeth?’

‘No, the things to keep your trousers up.’

‘Ah! We call them suspenders.’

‘Well, those. Like a bungee cord wrapped around my waist and it was letting me get close. Close enough to see that it was definitely writing, but then – p’tang – I would be snapped back.’

‘P’tang,’ she said as the pencil scratched.

‘You see how boring it is? How literal? I have to literally read the writing on the wall.’

‘So, the writing on the wall is some obvious sign telling you something what you essentially already know. An obvious and clear message there for all to see, but for you, this is rendered mysterious. Frustrating.’

‘That’s it exactly.’

‘It’s not uncommon at this stage of therapy that our behaviour and ways of thinking adapt to the expectations of therapy. Dreams suddenly become more vivid and adopt a more obviously articulate symbolism and the patient remembers them more clearly. In this case your dream is clearly telling you something in a way we hope to uncover straightforward messages from the unconscious. Some deeper more authentic truth.’

‘What is it though?’

‘That’s it, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to say for sure, but at a guess…’

‘Come on. Don’t be coy, doctor.’

‘I would say that your subconscious is telling you that you don’t have a deeper more authentic level of being. The most mysterious part of you is the most obvious and vice versa.’

‘Right. Well… okay. That’s hurtful.’

That hadn’t been my dream. I made up that dream on the subway on the way to my appointment. The literal dream I had was even duller. I was buying a pair of shoes and trying on different types and I was always undecided between a size 9 and a size 10. 9 was too tight and 10 was too roomy and then a shop assistant gave me a size 9 and ½ and they fitted perfectly. Then, I left the shop and then I woke up. I should have told Dr. Habbermas that dream and seen her turn it into another insight into my pathology. I liked Dr. Habbermas and I really enjoyed talking about myself. She was an intelligent and empathetic person and she tried hard to understand and treat me. I sometimes detected a hint of fear and these moments were interesting because they indicated that I had revealed too much. It became a discipline to make a mental note of these moments to try and eliminate them.

On the whole, I was proud of what I had achieved and how far I had come. I thought of Feather Lane and my mum and dad, Mary and Larry, frequently. I thought about how strange and isolated the place was and how small my ambitions had been then. I would look across the estuary to Millom and think it was London because the church spire made me think of Big Ben. But from there I had got myself to university – okay Manchester, not Oxford or Cambridge but still – and then joined the army and been accepted in one of the most elite units in the British army – can you say ‘most elite’? – the Paratroopers, working my way up once more from private to officer and as an officer I had been recruited into the Secret Service. Now my time in the Secret Service had come to an end. Mr. Arrow – through Ollie – advised me to take a generous redundancy package when it was offered in the next round of restructuring that was bound to take place. The Mossad holiday came next and then I was freed up to freelance much more than I had been doing. There were two parts to the freelance work. The first was the stateside job that saw me living in New York for two years. Here I was a consultant for the CIA on the recommendation of Alan Parlon and with references from my former Washington chief. This meant a lot of work in Langley as well as trips to Guantanamo and Baghdad, eventually. My facility with languages meant that my Arabic was now as good as my German and better than my Italian. My French was fluent, which helped me in some parts of mainly Northern Africa. I was also becoming more and more involved in electronic surveillance techniques, the internet, the dark web and opening up sources of information hitherto untouchable. This was interesting and I found I was able to sit endlessly and study the materials. It was a rabbit hole I could easily get lost down for hours at a time. I enjoyed the enhanced interrogation techniques and stuff like that, but that stuff was dangerous for me. A bit too much fun. The electronic material kept me at arm’s length from actual people. I was also sought for perspective on the bigger issues. My reputation was built almost entirely on that one report but writing a convincing report was an art in itself. You had to aim for what they wanted to hear, but not too on the nose as to fall into the truism trench. It was a balancing act. This job gave me enough money to pay for a not bad apartment in the Bronx, plenty of opportunity to travel, a very decent quality of life and an immigration status that soon resulted in the successful application for a Green Card.

My other work was for Mr. Arrow and his cabal. These assignments were communicated to me via a messenger service. I would be handed a white envelope and inside would be the name and location of an individual on a green slip of paper. No sums of money were ever mentioned but money would appear in my Swiss bank account once the situation had been taken care of, generous enough to avoid any arguments or need for negotiation. I had total freedom in terms of method and timing. It was preferred that the deaths resemble accidents or suicides, but random murders were also seen as good enough when there was no alternative. This took some pressure off. After all, it is difficult to make a murder look like an accident. The police have developed methods to look for tell-tale signs. For instance, you can’t just hit someone on the head and throw them off a building. An unconscious body hits the ground differently compared to a conscious one. Did you know that? Well, I do now. Someone who is strangled breaks a bone under their tongue. An accidental drowning and a forced one are also discernible by where the water is found in the body. Poisons are detectable, and modern motorcars are extremely difficult to tamper with, without leaving evidence of tampering. In many cases, a random murder was less suspicious than a staged accident that was discovered to be staged.

The worst thing is that the world is a busier place than anyone knows, and overpopulated. You watch movies and you think there are parking spaces everywhere and a maximum of five or six people walking down a street at any one time. Museums and shopping malls, public transport and hotels are virtually deserted. People go places and are on their own all the time. But in reality, it is so difficult to get someone alone in a situation where their death could credibly take place without interferences or someone seeing. Witnesses are all over the place and now with CCTV cameras and traffic cameras, the undetected murder is going to quickly become a dying artform.

My original method when I had been operating on the level of the enthusiastic amateur had been to pick someone at random, or by opportunity and then kill them and escape as quickly as possible and as far away as possible. My safety very much depended on the fact that I didn’t know the person and there was nothing to connect me to the crime. Even if I left some physical evidence, I wasn’t in a DNA database and I’d never been arrested. I was nevertheless always careful to not leave such evidence. Now however my preparation would become more methodical. Using my new knowledge of the internet, I was frequently able to find out a lot about my assignment before I ever needed to physically approach them. If I could afford it, I would try to have a three-day window in which I could follow the target, learn their routines all the better and if possible, devise a way of killing them and then getting out. The assignments fortunately came on a rough average of once every six months or so and were geographically widespread. I had the added advantage that if I was committing the murder in the UK or in an allied territory, then I knew that Mr. Arrow or his associates would, if at all possible, deflect any investigation as much as they could away from me. Also, there was an effort made to choose assignments which would align with my own work schedule. If I had to be in Hong Kong, then the journalist would also be on a layover there for 24 hours. If I was in London, then the government scientist who was due to testify to the House of Commons committee would be a quick train ride away. I would pick up assignments in the US but these I didn’t like. I still had a queasiness about committing crimes in places where I would be sticking around. I was like a child who had done something wrong. My first instinct was to run as fast as I could in the other direction. I had a naïve hope in putting as much distance between myself and whatever I had done.

But I would learn many things working for Mr. Arrow. I would learn that running away actually made you look suspicious. Doubling back and walking towards the crime would make you look innocent. Surely the criminal would be scramming. I also had to learn as many techniques as I could so that I wouldn’t leave an identifiable pattern, a behavioural fingerprint if you will, that would allow law enforcement to begin linking these crimes together, concluding there was one murderer. So, I did become expert in garottes, poisons, radiation, vehicular sabotage and manslaughter, nerve points, throats, centres of gravity, arteries, common household accidents, common workplace accidents, electrocutions, guns and knives, hammers and clubs, things you find around the house. I knew about planting evidence to make it look like a robbery gone wrong, a crime of passion. I wanted detectives to look at a crime scene and say something like ‘It’s obvious that the victim knew the killer’ because the one thing that was true in all these cases, or almost all, was that I didn’t know the victim and the victim had never laid eyes on me until the day they died. Sometimes if I was lucky the victim might turn out to be horse rider, or a skier, in which case it was easier to confect a neck-breaking accident.

In none of this was there a clear political motivation on my part. I was simply following orders. Sometimes I could guess from the news reports and the obituaries, or even before that from my reading of the news and the information I gathered prior to the job, what the motivation Mr. Arrow and his colleagues might have for wanting that person to no longer exist. But it wasn’t straightforward, and you could never really be clear. Did that journalist uncover something too sensitive in Italy or did Mr. Arrow really feel so offended by the colour of his trousers? Was that ex-member of MI6 really going to tell all in the autobiography she was planning on writing, or did she somehow offend the wrong person at a dinner party? On at least one occasion, I was sure that a spouse was being offed so that someone could finally get together with the widow. And there was always the possibility that money as inheritance was frequently in play or the controlling interest of a large corporation. These last were the most difficult as they had the best security. Journalists were the easiest. It was easier to kill a journalist than not kill a journalist in some cases. This was recognised by the money that appeared in my account after certain jobs. A CEO could net me a million plus fee, a minor civil servant would be substantially less. A journalist hardly covered airfare.

Throughout all this time I would see Jennifer intermittently. It was not particularly regular. She was in her own way also a paratrooper. She wanted to land in my life for a whole week at times, making all sorts of demands, with very little consideration of the amount of disruption she was causing. Obviously, she loved to cause the most disruption so if you complained it only made her gleefully happy – ‘goody!’ – and more likely to do it again or extend her stay even further. And then all of a sudden, she would be gone and the flat would be very empty and I would feel drained and miserable. She didn’t like the flat. She didn’t like the Bronx. She wondered why I hadn’t bought a place in Manhattan.

‘It’s not like you can’t afford it,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

But what she said was true. Still, I wasn’t going to show off my wealth. And the Bronx suited me. It was becoming gentrified and this was a good thing. Get rid of all the poor people and all that depressing, sad, sad, sad stuff, and open coffee bars, antique shops and bookstores. Win win. When she came, I became a passenger to her life as she forced me out to eat and to go to the movies, or shows, or attend some upper-class party she had been invited to and then we would go back to her hotel room or my apartment and I would do what she told me to do. Her flirtatious way of talking was hemmed with danger and under everything there was the sense that she knew much more than she was letting on and she was just crazy enough to say something regardless of the consequences. There were times when I would be with her and she would create a scene expressly designed to get me into a fight. Usually, I managed to defuse the situations before they escalated but once I saw that wasn’t going to be possible and I let the guy beat me up. This shocked her. I knew then she had been assuming that I would kill the guy over her. She thought that was a power she was going to be able to wield and once she’d done it once, it would become a feature of our relationship. That was why I decided it could never happen. So, this twenty-five-year-old yuppie who had no doubt played some football at college got himself the opportunity to knock me around for five minutes. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed. After the first two or three punches, I saw that he was tired, his hands hurt, the alcohol was wearing off and he was unsure of where this was all going to lead. The adrenalin drained out of him and he had pictures of a police cell and maybe him accidentally murdering me. ‘A promising career in finance ended in tragedy today…’ the news reporter in his head would intone, obviously zooming in on the tragedy of the puncher rather than the punched. I didn’t feel any anger at him. Or any sense of revenge. I knew what I could do. The power lay in no one else knowing. Or the absolute minimum. And it was worth it. Jennifer had to sit in the ER holding an ice pack to my face while a doctor sewed up my eyebrow. She called me ‘Mahatma Coleridge’ until repetition made it punitive, but she stopped trying to get me into fights. It was no fun once it was clear I wasn’t going to kill anyone for her entertainment. And it shook some of her own ideas about me. Maybe I really was this submissive weed who just went to the gym too much because he was lonely. Like everyone, Jennifer didn’t live properly with other people, they lived with romantic notions of what that other person was that they had built up over time. She knew nothing about me. The person she liked wasn’t me at all but in the end, she decided she liked the physical look of me enough for that not to matter. She liked my body, that is to say. For the first time in my life, I started to take notice of it. I remember mum getting passingly interested in cars just because dad spent so much of his time and enthusiasm on them. It would definitely pass, but mum was curious for a week or so either side of buying a new car for instance. I felt the same way about my body. It suddenly occurred to me that there must be something about it if someone as intelligent and discerning as Jennifer seemed so fascinated by it. In her hotel room or in my flat, in the lavatories of restaurants or the Museum of Modern Art. If I did what she wanted, I knew she would keep coming back and I wanted to see her. Then she would be gone.

She married Hector, the thatch-haired fiancé and I was invited to the wedding which was held on Lake Como. Mr. Arrow was there, but we only had the briefest most desultory conversation.

‘All well, Samuel?’ he said.

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said.

‘Good, good,’ he said. Then a sad smile. ‘Good.’

Ollie was there too, and I spent much of the wedding talking to him, especially once he had become good and drunk. He wasn’t wearing alcohol as carelessly as he once had. His face had that permanent blush and his speech slurred in a way that it never had before. If anything in the past alcohol had for the most part sharpened him up, until of course he was far too drunk. But from the aperitif on he was talking as if he had half a bunch of grapes in his mouth. We were under an awning on the lawn of the Hotel Mira, inside a gazebo most of the guests were dancing enthusiastically to a school disco mishmash of musical styles and decades: one minute doing the time warp the next minute raving.

‘I always thought Jen would go for someone with a bit more spark,’ Ollie said. ‘Rather got the impression she had her eye on you for a while. But I guess you’re the last option in the marriage, eff or kill game.’   

I was drinking orange juice to replenish and refresh, having been ambushed an hour earlier and led to a room that Jennifer had quite obviously prepared. It wasn’t out of the question that she was getting marriage just for the frisson it added to adultery. Hector was a lummox, but I imagined he wasn’t the sort to take kindly to being cuckolded.

‘Where are you at anyway now?’

‘New York.’

‘That’s where you live, but where are you at? What are you doing?’

‘Consultancy work. Mainly. CIA, FBI, NSA.’

‘Acronyms. If the bullets don’t get you, you’ll drown in the alphabet soup.’

It was odd. Ollie was on track to take on a leadership position in MI6. I was fairly certain that he was being groomed for the top job, but hearing the bitterness in his voice, I wondered if maybe I had missed some chapter of his life where something had broken. A step had been missed. A fall discretely hushed up. If I’d still been part of the circus, I would have known. The walking dead. The shadow had fallen. That sort of thing. And before you know it someone leans around the office partition and says, ‘We’re having a whip round for poor old Ollie. You know he’s going at the end of the month.’

‘The yanks are running us around now. Airstrip One, that’s all we are now. Orwell had it all down I black and white and what do we do? Turn most of the horrors into light entertainment. You got out while the going was good. Your mercenary instincts were perfectly attuned. You’ve always been good at that Sammy.’

‘Don’t be dull, Ollie,’ I said.

‘Sorry. Point taken,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is. Weddings, I suppose. There just like funerals but far more depressing. Makes you think.’

‘Perspective.’

‘That’s it exactly. Big questions,’ he clapped as loud as a gunshot. ‘What am I doing with my life?’

His daughter came up to him and grabbed his hand. She was about four years old. Though I’m terrible at guessing ages so she could really have been anything from 3 to 13.

‘Come and dance with me daddy,’ she said.

‘Eff off Petulia,’ he said, shaking her hand off. She stomped off to her mother and siblings.

‘You don’t seem to be doing too badly for yourself.’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a beautiful family. Career is going well.’

‘But what is that?’ Ollie said. ‘You had nothing, and you moved up. I had everything and I moved on a horizontal line to still having everything. I suppose I enjoy the variety of incident, as the chap said about Hamlet, but there’s not much else going on. Sometimes, I’d just like to shake everything up. You know how a jigsaw almost completed is literally begging to be thrown up in the air.’

I knew what he meant.

‘Well, throw some jigsaws up in the air, then. If you feel, you really must.’

Later that night, I got out of the hotel and crunched across the gravel, walking on the grass when I could, and then over the lawn and down an old lane I had found on the maps. The lane led down some moss-covered steps to the lake shore and I followed it around as headlights swept over the lake from a car passing on the road on the other side. Lights twinkled and it was as hot as it had been during the day. I had showered and felt clean, but I began to sweat also immediately.

I came to a jetty and then followed a road that led up away from the lake and hotwired an old purple FIAT parked in the square of the small village nearby. I drove to the outskirts of Milan where I found another small village, though here one village tends to sprawl into another and a town and then the city with the countryside rarely breaking through. I broke into a large apartment on the second floor of a condominium in Via Scarruti. The locks were old fashioned, clunky and easy. I sprayed them with liquid nitrogen and then broke them with a tap of a hammer. There were no alarms. Signora Gardini was sleeping deeply. She made a throaty rattle which was unnervingly loud. She had a cat which watched me from its basket. I checked the whole apartment but there was no one else there. Orange streetlighting spilled across the room in rectangles. Once I was accustomed to the darkness, I padded across the bedroom and sprayed an aerosol in her face. She rattled again and coughed slightly, and I drew back with my face covered. Her eyes opened into slits, little gleams in the night. It was difficult to tell if she could see me or not. She breathed and then her whole body went rigid. It jolted a few times and then she collapsed. I looked at the aerosol. I couldn’t read the Cyrillic writing because it was too small, but it had worked well, and it would lead to Moscow and away from me if the investigation ever went that far. I put it back in my pocket and turned on a light in the kitchen where the blinds were down. I was going to drive back but I was now feeling the fatigue of the day and the day before that travelling hadn’t been particularly restful. I made myself a coffee so that the journey back wouldn’t have me nodding off or making any stupid mistakes. Feeling this tired felt a little like being drunk. One was liable to make stupid mistakes. I blew on the coffee once it was ready and sipped it, careful not to burn my mouth. The cat wound around my legs expecting food and hoping that I would facilitate a feed. Now the lady was dead there was no rush. It was four o’clock in the morning and the sun would be coming up. I imagined most people would be sleeping in as it was a Sunday. My plan was to replace the car and then spend the rest of the morning in bed. I had a late afternoon flight back to the States. I finished my coffee, cleaned the cup, put it back where I had found it, rinsed the mocha, put it back where I had found it and wiped down all the surfaces. I had a quick check and then turned the light out. I went back to the bedroom and checked that the lady was indeed dead. It would appear to be a heart failure. At least, that’s what they had told me in the CIA where I had managed to get the aerosol. In the living room, I noticed there was a jigsaw on the coffee table. I saw from the box it was supposed to be view of Venice painted by Canaletto. It was nowhere near finished. Nor would it ever be now.