The repurposed spy, p.23
The Repurposed Spy, page 23
I remember the sun streaming in through my bedroom window in Rio on the fateful day of that meeting, fourteen months ago now by my calculation. I remember that because, just after the ‘off the record’ chat I was telling you about yesterday, I needed to draw the curtains. The sunlight was making it almost impossible to see the screen. The curtains were stuck. I pulled them hard. Obviously rather too hard, as instead of closing, they came down on my head, complete with the track and part of the ceiling. I’m not sure what was worse; the coughing fit I got from the plaster dust or Latviana rushing in and remonstrating with me. She must have been hovering outside the door.
“You are destroying the room! Why?” she shouted.
“I needed to close the curtains.”
“You have to pull the cords at the side, not the curtains. Why do you not know these things?”
It was true that I had seen curtains drawn with cords, but only once, where the Mayor had opened curtains to reveal a plaque commemorating the opening of the new science wing at the school. It hadn’t occurred to me that hotel bedroom curtains might be controlled by cords too. Mine at home weren’t. Really, not my fault. No point in hoping for sympathy from Latviana, though.
“Why did you want to close them, anyway?”
“So I can see the screen properly. Without the reflected glare.”
“You stupid man. You simply pull it forward – so! - and move it like this – so!”
Hmmm. Again, how was I supposed to know that the screen was moveable? Well, now I could see what was going on, anyway, and it showed people filing into the room, so the meeting was obviously about to start. I was going to have to get to work and do my best. I used a length of curtain to dust off the keyboard. Thank goodness Latviana had left the room. I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate her staying.
Now all the delegates were seated. Helpfully, they went round the table introducing themselves; I’d seen them all before in the first meeting, of course, but couldn’t remember most of their faces. It was reassuring to know that the only one I had got wrong was mistaking the Colombian for a Honduran. Rather than just state their name and country, every minister felt the urge to make a self-important little speech. The minister nearest to the front of the screen had his back to the camera, and I had a clear view of his doodling geometric symbols on the pad in front of him. None of the others appeared to be paying the slightest attention either, at least until their turn came. What they said gave me the impression that some of them didn’t even know what the meeting was intended to be about. All were, however, united in the understanding that they were looking for ways of justifying spending some other country or organisation’s money. And raking a healthy skim off it off for themselves.
It took the best part of an hour for every minister to make his introductory speech and get to the nub of the meeting. The Colombian, who had assumed the chair, reminded everyone that the meeting had been convened to decide the next steps for the project to build a road link between Panama and Colombia, that would in turn link all the countries in Central and South America. He told them that the initial discussions that he had held in Cartagena, and that his counterpart had convened in Panama City, were all positive, though there were disagreements on how the road should be built, and serious security issues that needed to be researched and settled as well. He therefore proposed that there should be a new feasibility study and security project to assess all these points in detail, to be funded by the World Bank, and that it should be put out to competitive tender. Despite him being a very busy man, or so he claimed, he volunteered to manage the complete process himself. The minister from Panama enthusiastically seconded the motion. Since none of the ministers from the other countries had seen any of the initial reports (not that they seemed to care), and once it had been established that none of them were expected to fund anything, there was unanimous agreement. Anything, it seemed, to kick the can down the road, finish the meeting, and have lunch. From my electronic vantage point, I watched a trolley laden with bottles being wheeled into the conference room, the ministers rising from their chairs and descending on it as bees to a honeypot, each snatching up a preprandial caiprinha or G&T. More staff wheeled in more trolleys and then set the table for lunch. By this point in the proceedings, all I could hear was much clinking of glasses and simultaneous chattering. Trivial gossip. I had no hope of hearing anything further that might be useful.
To sit comfortably at the desk to write my report, I had to clear some of the debris from my earlier accident that was obstructing the floor. I kicked the curtains and track to one side so I could get the chair into a better position for typing. Once I’d finished sneezing from the dust I’d disturbed, I settled down to write my report for the Smiths. It didn’t take long, since all I could say was that those attending the meeting had decided to commission another analysis. Five minutes? No sooner finished, and as if she had been watching me (which she probably had), Latviana breezed back in, dressed up in her maid outfit, pushing a trolley covered with a white cloth. Lunch? Sadly not. She pulled away the cloth like a magician performing an illusion, revealing a small pile of clothes and a selection of bottles, surgical instruments and trays. A medical kit? Or a torturer’s toolkit? In the process, she stirred up yet more plaster dust, and another sneezing fit ensued. Latviana was unamused. “You are so stupid. Such a stupid man!” now established as her refrain every time she saw me. “Look at you! How can you stay covered with dust like that?”
“I’ve been busy. I haven’t had time to think about my clothes,” I replied.
“Go and shower now! Put these on after you have finished,” she added, handing me the clothes from the trolley.
When I emerged, I found that she’d taken away the laptop, laid the cloth over the table and arranged her jars and instruments around it. “Sit!” she ordered.
As she set about peeling off the latex mask, I thought at first that my ordeal was over. I was wrong. Badly wrong. Her purpose was merely to remove the mask, anoint me with more white cream, and then refit it. I tried to protest. Resist her by moving my head from side to side, but she proved remarkably powerful, and had her way. I might have minded less had she had been gentle and, if not polite, then silent. While pulling my head back, and stretching the mask to force it back on, she spat out a stream of invective, insults and swearing, saying how stupid/dirty/etcetera that I was, and what she would choose to do to me if she were allowed to. Having finished refitting the mask, she started to screw the lids back on her jars of creams, so I assumed she had done with me and made to stand up. She promptly pushed me back into my seat. “We aren’t finished.” Another jar, another chemical concoction, and a small paint brush. “Glue!” she announced, gleefully.
“Glue?” I was now alarmed at what might come next. What was she going to do with glue? She started brushing it onto my bald head. It didn’t feel like glue. It felt like acid, burning my scalp.
“Now you will have hair again, ha-ha-ha!. Paruka!” Saying this, she reached to the lower part of the trolley and came up brandishing a toupée, which she waved up close in front of my face, grinning with a torturer’s delight.
“Paruka?”
“I do not know the English. In Latvian, paruka. Instant hair!”
“That is a wig,” I told her. “Not a very good one, and I won’t wear it. I refuse to have it on my head. And the glue burns. Get it off me!”
“You need paruka for disguise, old man,” she told me. “Will make you look better. Maybe sexy man.”
This was the moment. Everything was now too much. Something in me tripped. “No!” I shouted at her, right up against her face. “I refuse to wear a wig, or do anything else you people want me to do.” I pushed her back and away from me forcefully into the table behind her. Maybe I pushed a little too hard, but I’d really had enough of it all, being bullied, being insulted, being humiliated. So had she, it seemed. Her reaction was to scream “Ajuda! Ajuda!” Within seconds, the door was broken open by a security guard, a big, brutal-looking, dark-skinned and bald man, brandishing a pistol. The splintering of wood added to the general chaos in the room.
Latviana didn’t stop screaming. “Help! He wants to rape me!”
My shouting “rubbish” and “I certainly do not!” (or something along those lines) wasn’t enough to stop the guard tackling me to the ground and cuffing my hands behind my back. When he pulled me to my feet, the mirror revealed that I lost my mask, was now covered with plaster dust, and had a shred of curtain glued to my head. The wig lay apologetically by my shoes, like a small dead animal.
The commotion had attracted a chattering posse of uniformed men, security guards and hotel staff, who were now joined by two armed policemen, who pushed their way to the front of the crowd and who took hold of me, one at each arm.
“Documentos!” shouted one. I told him my passport was in my jacket. Said jacket was hanging in the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room, past the bed. Reaching it, removing it from whatever pocket it was in, and checking it over, required him to push past us, manoeuvre around the desk, and clamber over the pile of curtains and plaster debris. Meanwhile, Latviana was telling the other policeman that she didn’t have her documents with her. The penalty for that omission proved to be instant detention. At that point, the hotel staff, who had joined the melée in the room as observers, made a noticeably quick exit. Likely, many amongst them would have no ID either.
Forgive me, I have to stop writing as my dinner has arrived, and I want to eat it immediately. Swordfish with hasselback potatoes. The latter is elaborate and definitely needs consuming hot to be at its best. My story will continue. Tomorrow. If I’m still here. I think I will be.
Day 400
A round number like 400 should probably be auspicious. But, being imprisoned, even in this spacious and relatively luxurious apartment with good catering, I’m not optimistic that anything good will happen. I think I stopped hoping for anything good happening on Day 200. I was already resigned to the ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’ philosophy by Day 300. And breakfast and lunch have already come and gone, so I fear Day 400 will not prove to be any better, no more worthy of a celebration than any other day here.
Still, I have to look on the bright side. I’m certainly lucky to be in Nirvana rather than in a Brazilian jail, and I can attest to that from first-hand experience. Because that’s where the police took me after the scene in the Rio hotel room. They took Latviana away too, but to where, I don’t know, as I didn’t get to ask when I saw her again, weeks later.
Remonstrating with the police officers proved pointless. In fact, I only succeeded in making the situation worse for myself by talking to them in Portuguese. Unfortunately, that made them think I was a Brazilian using a fake British passport. Not unusual in Rio, I concluded from what they said. Something else to charge me with. The disguise didn’t help my protestations either, nor did all the pots of cream and glue and stuff arrayed on the desk. I tried telling them they had been brought in by Latviana, but they wouldn’t listen; they preferred to suspect that they contained drugs or something else chemically illegal, and instructed the first security guard to stay watching over them, not touching a thing, until a police forensic team arrived.
It was bad enough being handcuffed and marched out between two heavily armed police officers, but my situation was destined to get worse. The hotel lobby, when we reached it, was packed with people waiting to watch the spectacle. And standing there, right at the front of the crowd, was the minister from Chile.
“That man! He’s a spy!” he exclaimed. “We arrested him in Santiago, and he escaped from custody!”
Proof, you might say, of the value of that disguise, had I been wearing it. My mask had slipped, ha ha! Or rather, the security guard had pulled it off. I supposed it was still lying on the floor of the bedroom. I may never had cared about my appearance, but I must have been a sight, with my artificial tan, but white face, and clothes covered with plaster dust. Oh, and a bit of curtain still stuck to my head by the glue. A scarecrow. Yet the minister still recognised me on sight.
His exclamations further animated the crowd in the lobby, and then into the chaos stepped at least four military police. (This is where I discovered that Brazil has several kinds of police force; I think the ones that arrested me to begin with were local traffic police.) There ensued a heated discussion between them as to which force took precedence in this developing scenario, but the chants that started up of “he’s a spy” tipped the balance in favour of the military. I was pushed down onto the floor again, face down, with a knee on my back; from what I could gather, this was to exchange handcuffs, since one of the traffic policemen seemed to be protesting that the military might be taking cuffs that belonged to him.
That issue resolved, I was dragged out and thrown into a cage in the back of a van. Previous occupants had obviously used it as a toilet, as the stink of urine and faeces was overwhelming. There was nowhere to sit except the floor, and as the van was driven at speed, I was jolted from side to side and back to front, thereby covering myself in human excrement. I was so consumed with the anxiety to get out, and so concentrated on trying to prevent myself sliding into the piles of shit in the corners, that I momentarily forgot my predicament.
I remembered it pretty quickly once we arrived at the police station, though. If that’s what it was, that is; from the little I saw of it, my impression was that it was probably a military barracks turned into a prison. The guards unlocked the cage in the van for me to get out.
“You stink!”
I’m sure I did, but if they’d had to travel in that cage, they’d have smelt much the same. I was aware enough to know there was no point in replying, without I wanted to make things worse for myself.
Frogmarched across a courtyard, kicked down a stone staircase, and finally locked into a narrow, tiny cell. It looked worse than the ones I had seen pictures of before, but at least it didn’t smell too bad, probably because it had a ‘window’, a small barred opening high up close to the ceiling. A concrete plinth to lie on, but no bedding. A metal pan toilet in a corner. A single light bulb above my head. Floor to ceiling bars made up one wall, out to a dimly lit narrow corridor. I remember those bars being rectangular; I’d always thought of prison bars as round. But I digress, again.
I sank down onto the stone bunk. And listened in the dark. There were a lot of sounds, most of them distant and indistinct. But coming from nearby, I could hear snoring. Loud snoring. So, someone was in another cell close to mine. Or was it a guard who had nodded off?
Behind my back, and to my left and right, three grey concrete walls, covered with graffiti, little of it artistic. Many others had been here before me and made their marks. Lots of marks. I felt my pockets and realised I had no pen or pencil, so I couldn’t add my name to the gallery, even had I wanted to. Cartoon doodles, names of lovers, vulgar jokes and expletives. I got to think of the gallery I had visited in São Paulo all those days ago. The place where I had run into Chameleon for the first time, not knowing then who she would become to me. There, her interruption meant I hadn’t stayed to look at leisure. Here, I had all the time I didn’t want. I am sure those abstract artworks composed of meaningless splashes of colour displayed in the gallery are more professional and inspiring than those on the walls of my mini-gallery there in the cell.
What caught my attention most was not on the walls at all, but low on the side of the plinth-bunk. Some predecessor had chosen this space to make a series of marks, classic old-fashioned counting, four vertical lines with a slash across them, then another group of five, and so on. Counting the days. One hundred and seventy-three. Nearly six months in this pit. A long time. This is where I got the inspiration for my counting of days here in Nirvana. Though when I started, I never imagined I would end up spending more than double that old occupant’s days in that cell. Four hundred so far.
As things turned out, however, I wasn’t destined to spend even one night in that cell. Indeed, I’d probably only been there for an hour or two when guards arrived to fetch me. This time without cuffs; they’d decided there was no risk of my escaping now. First to a room where I had to undress and put on a pale blue tracksuit made of some sort of paper material. They took my fingerprints and photographs – front and side. They swabbed my cheeks to collect my saliva and DNA. All professional and civilised. Then to what turned out to be the interrogation room. Another cell, drab and dingy. Enough space for a desk and a filing cabinet. A chair for the interrogator, none for me. A pukka fan on the ceiling, rotating slowly, screeching quietly on every turn, and doing nothing to cool the room but excelling at distributing cigarette smoke and ash from the overflowing ashtray to every corner.
I’d expected to be confronted with a fierce-looking officer in a military uniform. Not by this young man with black spiky hair wearing a tee shirt with ‘Deep Purpel’ emblazoned across the front. I’d seen so many misspelt tee-shirt logos on my travels in South America that it took a few moments to register, but it has stayed with me in pin-sharp detail. Isn’t it strange how the mind catalogues things? Mother often said that to me. Notice the things that aren’t noticeable.
I wondered whether my eyes were deceiving me or the colour had changed in the wash. The shirt looked black to me. The youth finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the desk top, and looked up.
“What’s wrong with your face? Vitiligo?” I may be a linguist, but I hadn’t heard that word before. I must have looked blank, as he continued. “Your skin. Your colour? You have something wrong with you?” I realised he was talking about the fake tan that I’d been given, his assumption being that my arms and the sides of my head were the natural skin tone colouring, while my face, which had been omitted from the ‘treatment’, was displaying the genetic absence of pigmentation and melanin.
