THAT is my first spy thriller based on events in Budapest and Manila. My templates are the novels of Graham Greene and John Le Carre. Here are excerpts.
* * *
He shot himself for four minutes before he shot the room.
The camera sat on a stack of auction catalogues he had never opened — Budapest, Hong Kong, the corners gone soft with humidity. He had set the timer to catch himself against the window, the skyline going blue behind his shoulder. The people who paid for these clips wanted glass and height. They filled in the rest themselves. He had learned that the filling-in did half his work.
“Nine minutes,” he told the lens, in the voice they liked — lower than his own, somewhere east of Vienna, hard to drop on a map. “You know what happens at nine.”
He did not enjoy this part. Not the lying; the lying was the easy muscle, worn smooth. It was the wanting. He could never make himself sound like a man who wanted something. He sounded like a man being paid, which was accurate, and accuracy was the one thing his face had never been built to sell.
Four minutes, and the work was: stand where the light fell, keep the chin down, drop the shoulder, say four sentences in an order that had been worked out the year before by a man in Prague, who had since gone to prison. Raise one hand to the jaw on the third sentence and let it stay there. Do not blink at the wrong moment. Do not look at the lens as though it were a lens.
He was good at it. He had been good at it for two years, and it had stopped costing him anything, and the stopping had cost him something he had not yet found a name for. At four minutes he stopped. He crossed the room and turned the camera the other way.
Now the frame held the wall.
Three paintings. The large one was near enough to a Manet that the difference belonged to other people. Beside it, smaller, a Monet the size of a paperback — water lilies under glass so clean it framed nothing. Between them a Klimt study no wider than his hand, the gold gone matte with age and cigar smoke.
He filmed each one for a slow count of 30. Then the corners. Then the backs, where the stretchers were, where the gallery labels had been steamed away and something else written in pencil — small, in a hand that was not his.
The pencil was the point. Everything else was reputation.
The flat was on the 11th floor of a building on a street with two names. From the window, you could see one tower and the air-conditioning plant of another. A wedge of the river slid brown and unhurried toward the bay.
He had lived in it for four years. It was the longest he had lived anywhere since he was 19.
The lift was the old kind, with a brass plate and a mirror. In the lobby was a man called Danilo, who sat behind a counter with a logbook and a telephone, and a small television with the sound off.
Danilo was 58 and had two sons in Dubai, and a knee that had been operated on twice. He was the most useful man in the building and the cheapest information in the city, and Hugo paid him four thousand pesos a month to be neither.
“Sir. Good evening.”
“Danilo. Anybody been?”
“There was a man last Tuesday. He asked which floor the corner units were on. I told him I don’t give out floors. He said he was from the management company. I said the management company is on the second floor, and I know the girl who works there.”
“And?”
“He went away.” Danilo looked at the television, where a game show was on with the sound off. “He came back Thursday.”
Hugo put the courier bag under his arm.
“Same man?”
“I didn’t see him Thursday,” Danilo said. “Someone else signed him in.”
“Which line?” Hugo said.
Danilo turned the book round.
The line was neat and said Cable maintenance — roof access and gave a time. Hugo photographed it. Then he asked: “Does this log go up to the office?”
“Every Friday. Photocopy.” Danilo closed the book. “I already changed Thursday. There is no line now.”
Hugo looked at him. Danilo shrugged with one shoulder, which is a thing a man does when he has been poor for a long time and has decided whose side he is on.
“Four thousand,” Hugo said.
Hugo put the money under the courier bag where the counter camera could not see it, and Danilo took it without looking.
***
Upstairs he put the courier bag on the counter and turned on the television out of habit and not out of interest. The six o’clock news was on, which in this country meant the president.
He was there in the corner of the frame, in a polo shirt, at a podium in a provincial gymnasium with a tarpaulin behind it, and the strap under him read DRUG WAR: 30,000 DEAD, and the smaller line under that in gray read figure from human rights groups; police count 6,200. The president said something about the young people of this country and their future, and the gymnasium laughed, because he had said it as a joke, and it had been one.
Hugo watched it for the length of three sentences.
He had lived in this city seven years and had never once said a political sentence, and the reason was not courage or the absence of it. A man with a document problem does not go on record about anything.
But seven years is long enough to learn the sound a city makes when it has decided not to talk about a thing. It is not silence. It is the noise of a jeepney horn and a man laughing at a joke he has heard before and a woman on the next balcony beating a mat.
Six thousand or 30 thousand — the number depended on who was counting, and everybody in the building knew that, and the lift had a new notice in it that morning about the barangay cleanup.
He changed the channel. A game show. A woman won a refrigerator and put both hands over her mouth.
The president came on next — a recorded address, in a barong, the bangs fallen across his forehead like wayward lines of rain. He said, comfortably, in the tone of a man sharing a small domestic truth, that he had used fentanyl, on a doctor’s orders, for the pain, and that anyone who said otherwise was a liar and a traitor to the country.
Hugo, who had spent four years arranging for other people’s drugs to arrive in other people’s countries and had never once been asked for a reason, thought: it must be restful, being the only man in the room who is allowed one.
E-books of the novel are available.
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