Nom de Guerre Read online

  The black man watched a pick-up truck highball across the bridge, then slam gears before taking the hill at another run. After that there was silence and he climbed down from the cab, lit a cigarette and looked at the woman. She was walking towards him now and he ambled down the slope to her car. He did not know her name, he did not want to know her name. She did not know his. She did not speak, but lifted the tailgate on the Toyota and dragged aside the carpet covering the spare tyre. The black man looked on as she pulled out the neoprene tool bag and slipped the elastic over the top. A Sig-Sauer pistol slid out as she upended it, together with a length of thick electrical cable. The woman gestured with one hand and he nodded. She put the gun and cable back in the tool kit and refixed the housing. The black man looked beyond her once more to the stillness of the water and the twin sections of iron framework bridge, that was all that remained of the original. ‘Three days,’ he said, and walked back to his Chevy.

  He came into Royston from the east, truck burbling and belching oiled smoke every time he put his foot on the gas, and bumped over the railway lines. Immediately on his right were autoshops, motorcycles standing outside one of them, and a little further on—King’s Auto Line. Duncan Tires faced him as he chugged up the hill on 29 and came to the lights. On red, he put on the brakes and knocked the gearshift into neutral, watching the handful of white faces on the street. They stared at him briefly, a couple of them looking at the truck, and then the lights changed and he crossed Church Street. Glancing to his left, he saw the pharmacy and a sign saying ‘Tri-County Industrial and Hardware’. The road bottomed out down a small hill and he passed the Pruitt funeral home and a red brick church with white-silled arches for windows. He drove slowly past the Tri-County Medical Center and glanced at the set of self-storage units on the other side of the road. Ty Cobb, the old baseball player’s name was everywhere. Beyond the sprawling Chevy and Oldsmobile dealer’s on the left-hand side, was city hall and then the Royston motel on the right. The black man pulled off the road and parked the truck.

  An elderly white woman greeted him in reception, vertical creases of age above and below her lips pinching her mouth into a mean grin. She looked at him out of cat’s-eye glasses pushed high on her nose.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I think I’m gonna need a room, mam. My truck’s about to bite it.’ He rubbed his arm and the black skin of his hand.

  ‘How many nights?’

  ‘A couple, I guess. Depends if I can get my truck fixed.’

  ‘I’ll need picture ID.’

  He showed her his fake driver’s licence. ‘Where can I get my truck fixed?’ he said, leaning dirty elbows on the reception desk and looking right up in her eyes. She stepped back.

  ‘Well, there’s lotsa places, I guess. Y’all head on back thataway to the railroad tracks and you’ll see King’s Auto Line.’

  ‘Thank you, mam.’ He stood up, wiped grimy palms on dirty jeans and took the room key from her.

  The room was neat and functional. He looked in the toilet and in the shower, making sure there was paper and soap, then he went back to his truck. He saw a couple of black faces, but not many. The western end of town was richer, nice white men’s houses, with porches and verandahs and steps leading down to the yard. It had clearly been built long after the far end by the railroad tracks. He had a look, making sure he knew the route out towards 85, and then swung the truck round and headed back to the autoshops. His truck kicked smoke and fumes as he killed the engine in front of King’s. A mechanic in worn overalls looked up from under the hood of a Chrysler, as the black man jumped down from the cab. He looked again at the engine he was working on, then at the Alabama plates on the tow truck.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’ the black man said. The mechanic did not answer at once, but picked up a rag and wiped the grease from his hands. The black man glanced to his right as a police department Ford bumped across the railroad tracks and headed out of town.

  ‘You got yourself a problem there, buddy?’ The mechanic spoke slowly, a pinch of snuff lumpy under his bottom lip.

  ‘All but broke up, my man. I’m pissing oil ever’ which way. Got to get back to Birmingham, and I ain’t gonna make it like this.’ The black man took a cigarette from the crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes in the top pocket of his jacket and popped a match on his thumbnail.

  The mechanic looked behind him, sighed and walked outside. He glanced underneath and then straightened. ‘Look, buddy. I can’t look at her now. Leave her where she’s at and I’ll see what I can do in a while.’

  ‘Whatever you say, bro. I ain’t going no place.’

  The black man left him then and wandered across the railroad tracks to the benches set in the shade of two oak trees, and flipped away the butt of his cigarette. The mechanic would look and tell him he was burning oil not losing it, and the head was letting a little water into the oil. More than that, right now he had a problem with the exhaust system which was adding to the loss of power. He would be able to fix it up, but it would take a couple of days, as they were busy with work from the Chevy dealer up the road. The black man knew. He had checked long before he arrived.

  The sun came out as he walked up Highway 29 to the intersection with Church Street running off to his left. He turned up his collar against the nip of the wind and wandered along Church Street. Two middle-aged women watched him suspiciously from the doorway of the pharmacy and he smiled at them and touched his fingers to his temple. They looked away hurriedly. Across the road was a Western store and half a block down on this side, the place he was looking for. He felt a quickening of his pulse as he saw the sign sticking out at right angles to the window: ‘Casey’s, dealers in fine jewelry’. He looked out of the side of his eye as he passed; the woman was there, bending over the half-empty display cases in the window. She was slim, maybe fifty, maybe more. She wouldn’t weigh very much. Directly adjacent to the store was a gap, like a grass-floored alley running fifty yards back between the jeweller’s and the fashion store, with the parking lot out front. Beyond the alley, the undergrowth got tangled and a water tower dominated the skyline.

  The black man kept walking, a bank on his right, and in the distance, the spire of a church clipped at the sky in grey tiles over white. He paused for a moment as a lot opened on his left, two blocks down from the jeweller’s store, and he saw an aging policeman leaning against his Ford, talking to a young buck deputy with a cocktail stick in his teeth. He hid his smile and thought of similar events in the past, and the need to smoke tickled the back of his throat.

  He lay in his motel room and watched Fox news disinterestedly, waiting for the call from the autoshop. As he wandered back past the medical center and city hall, he had noticed a sign declaring a city residents’ meeting for the night after this one. Nobody spoke to him. He saw few black faces; the black/white thing here was not as bad as Louisiana or Mississippi, but it was bad enough. He tried to imagine being black and growing up here, with Confederate flags still flying from some of the houses.

  The call from Donny, the mechanic at King’s, came just after lunch. ‘Gonna take at least a couple of days, but I’ll get to it. Y’all can take it like it is, if you wanna, but you won’t make Alabama.’

  That evening, he looked for a bar but could not find one, in the end having to settle for beer from the Winn-Dixie and drinking in his motel room. He bought food to go, watched television and slept. The following morning he walked back up the street, through rain that slanted in grey stripes at an angle of thirty degrees, spraying his jacket and soaking the front of his jeans. He wondered how his hair would look in the wet. Again, only the woman was in the jeweller’s. He opened the door and a little bell tinkled. She looked up with a smile on her thin, white face, and then the smile faltered, then faded to nothing.

  ‘How y’all doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Just fine, mam.’ He smiled at her, showing his teeth.

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  ‘Necklace. I’m stuck
here for a couple of days. My truck’s broke.’ He pointed in the direction of the railroad tracks. ‘I wanna get something for my girl, ’cause she’s pissed at me for not getting home.’

  She looked at him with an expression on her face that said she had an idea of just what kind of girlfriend he would have, and then looked at the glass display cabinets before her.

  ‘Gold or silver.’

  ‘Gold.’ He was enjoying himself now. ‘Thick gold chain is good. Yeah, thick gold chain.’

  She showed him an assortment and he ummed and ahhed for a while, telling her he wasn’t sure and he would probably have to think about it for a while. The telephone rang from behind her and she excused herself and opened the door at the back of the store to answer it. He moved away from the counter, watched the street for a moment, counting cars going by. Then he looked back again. She was leaning against the doorjamb with one hand hooked in the crook of the other arm, as she talked. He smiled at her and glanced briefly beyond. He could see a small sort of sitting room, probably where she took her lunch, and beyond it a back door which must open on to the little strip of land that separated her from the building behind, bordering the grassed alley. He motioned to her that he was going to think about the chain for a while and stepped back on to the street. The aging chief of police was watching him from the lot two blocks down. He was seated in his cruiser, waiting to pull on to Church Street. The black man gave him a brief glance, then crossed the road to the Western store, which seemed to be permanently closed. He could feel the cop’s eyes on his back as the Ford gunned its way to the lights.

  The mechanic called him the following afternoon, his third day in town, and told him he could collect the truck. The black man checked out of the motel and shouldered his overnight bag, before walking one final time along the main street. A couple of rednecks were stowing fence-post wire and a shovel in the back of their Dodge as he crossed Church Street, and gave him the eye. He ignored them, waited for the lights to change and wandered down across the railroad tracks to the autoshop, where his red tow truck awaited him. He paid for the work with a credit card and tossed his gear into the back.

  ‘Should get y’all home,’ the mechanic told him, ‘but you wanna get that head sorted out real quick.’

  ‘Appreciate it, bro.’ The black man shook hands with him and climbed up into the cab. He fired up the truck and ground into first, the rumble from the muffler stiller than before. Hauling the wheel round, he drove back out of town the way he had come and swung a path through the gentle hills, with their grey-green grass and scattering of naked trees.

  The woman was waiting in the blue Toyota, just off the highway by the old bridge. The black man drove down the hill, checking his rearview mirror and the road ahead. The highway was deserted. As he got close, the woman waved her arm and he rolled the truck off the road and down the slope to the old bridge. He did not cut or slow the engine, just kept her going, steering with one hand and opening the door with the other. At the last minute he jumped, and the truck rolled into the river with a hiss from the hot metal. He stood a moment, watching it lurch and boil, the black water cuffed into slapping, white-lipped surf, as the river took hold and dragged the Chevy down. It was gone in twenty seconds.

  Still no cars passed on the highway. The woman with the blue-black hair and cold eyes slid into the back of the Toyota. The black man jumped into the warmth of the driver’s seat and glanced once behind, as she fed herself beyond the back seat and into the trunk. The roll top was across and she couldn’t be seen from outside. On the floor by the passenger seat doorwell was a set of New Jersey licence plates.

  The black man drove back towards Royston, the clock on the dash reading nearly ten after five. She closed the store at exactly five-thirty, before driving to the far side of town where she lived. Her husband worked at the Chevy and Oldsmobile dealer’s, selling used cars. He had watched her stop by as she drove home from work the previous evening. He could not help but think that this was a strange place to end up, given everything she had been through. He parked the Toyota on Church Street, a block up from the jeweller’s. Traffic moved across the 29 intersection, but there was no sign of the police chief. He did not lock the driver’s door, but walked quickly up to the jewellery store and stepped inside. He could feel the length of electrical cord against his breast. The Sig was stuck in the waistband of his jeans, a switchblade in his back pocket.

  ‘Y’all come back for that chain?’ she greeted him. ‘Somebody else looked it over just this afternoon.’

  He did not answer her, but reached behind him and turned the key in the lock. He could see the pocket of air convulse in her thin throat, and a strip of unease light up in her eyes.

  ‘Matter of fact, I’m about to close up now,’ she stuttered.

  From his pocket he took a pre-rolled joint, sniffed the glued-down paper and put it in his mouth. He popped a match on the glass top of the counter and lifted the gun from his belt.

  ‘You’re already closed,’ he said.

  Vaczka placed the advert in the personal section of Back Street Heroes, and bought the issue, when it came out, from the newsagent’s on King Street. There were various lonely hearts in there. One made him smile: ‘Long-haired male with 650 Bonny Chop, 30, fat, dirty, bad teeth, and a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, seeks slim willowy blonde, 18-25, for visits to the opera, French cinema and escorting to cocktail parties.’ He read on, scanning the page till he saw it. ‘Looking for heroes to wave the flag. Get in touch boys. It’s been too long.’ He had given Stahl’s cloned mobile number.

  Back in the flat, he found Amaya hovering in the hallway and regretted giving her a key.

  ‘I thought you had college today,’ he said, jaw set in a line.

  ‘I have. I’m going now.’

  ‘What’re you hanging around here for?’

  ‘I’m not hanging around. I was waiting to ask you something.’

  ‘So ask.’

  She came into the living room and dropped her bag on the floor. ‘What’s the matter with you, Jorge? You’ve been really on edge these last few days.’

  ‘Business,’ he said. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

  She touched his face, cupping a cheek with long fingers. ‘You can talk to me, you know. We’re a partnership after all.’ She paused then. ‘Although sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.’

  Again he fought the desire to put his hands round her throat, and he bit his lip. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, turning away. ‘Things on my mind, that’s all.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ He felt her hand move on the knots of his spine. He tensed, then relaxed, mind working.

  ‘Just things, bits of business here and there.’

  ‘Business with Stahl?’

  He turned to her now. ‘Yeah, stuff with Stahl. We’re trying to set up a couple of deals.’

  She nodded, suddenly not looking him in the eye. ‘Anything I can help with?’

  ‘No. I may have to go up north, though. But I don’t know when.’

  ‘What sort of business?’

  ‘Oh, nothing important.’ He took her by both shoulders and squeezed. ‘Just things I do over and above teaching you lot. What I get down there hardly pays the phone bill.’

  She went to college and he watched her walk the length of the street until she disappeared round the corner, the beginnings of an idea in his head.

  Fifty Triumph motorcycles rode two abreast across the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle. They had gathered from all corners of England in the early hours of the previous morning, the hardcore from Hounslow in West London. They were following the hearse that carried the remains of their ‘brother’ to his final resting place. He had been killed in an accident with a lorry in South Shields. They rode with no helmets, their mark of respect, and a police car followed the last of the bikes in escort. High on the old bridge, a video team from the BBC took close-up shots of their faces. Below them, leaning against the ironwork next to his unmarked police car, John Newham
smoked an Embassy Regal.

  David ‘Dog Soldier’ Collier rode his Thunderbird at the head of the twin lines, his feet resting on the customized forward footpegs, the wind ruffling his short-cropped hair. They all wore colours—a rarity—the death’s head between two crossed M16 rifles; and leather chaps over jeans. People stared from their cars as they passed on the other side of the road. North of the city, they stopped at the little church on the council estate close to the A1, where their brother’s family had worshipped for years. Gringo guarded the bikes while the rest trooped into the church.

  Back at the old bridge, Newham stood with his hands in his pockets, collar turned up against the wind, and waited for the camera crew to come down. He shook hands with the cameraman. ‘I’ll get it copied and let you have it, John. Soon as I can, mate. All right?’

  ‘Sound,’ Newham said. NCIS had contacted his Special Branch office yesterday morning, telling him that intelligence sources had informed them about the funeral ride. No helmets, a new biker gang, and a chance to get their faces on video. Ten minutes later, Newham had set it up.

  After the service was over, Collier shook hands with the brother’s parents and they all headed to the bridge over the A1, where they stood as one and looked out at the four lanes of motorway. A full two minutes of silence and then Collier raised a fist to the road, before turning back to his bike. The key was in the ignition, and he was about to turn it over when a soldier from the Manchester platoon came alongside him and unrolled a copy of the latest issue of Back Street Heroes. ‘Somebody wants to talk,’ he said.