Silencer

Paul Alkazraji

Description

Jude and Alex Kilburn have moved from London to Albania to grow a church, in particular by publishing a keen biography of a local hard-man turned Christian. But a clandestine group has made it their mission to stop this work...The Christians sense danger, but the list of potential enemies is long: unreformed ex-paramilitaries, nationalists, mobsters. How and by whom will the cycle of violence and revenge be foiled?

Informations

• Publié par: Highland Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909690899
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
The Silencer
Albania, One Summer in the Late 2000s
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
The Characters
Glossary
The Silencer
In the Balkans, publishing can be deadly
By Paul Alkazraji
Dedication
To my Albanian friends... and the ‘Sydney Cartons’ of His service.
Albania, One Summer in the Late 2000s
Chapter 1
J ude Kilburn looked back over his shoulder. The narrow road behind was empty. He sat at the rear of a taxi van gripping the seat in front to steady himself as they bounced and climbed. A man-sized dummy like a Guy Fawkes doll flashed by hung by its neck from the roof of a half-built house. He knew it was a common practice thought to ward off evil in Albania, but it was as if on the edge of his own spirit he felt the passing of a shadow with it.
An old man with a hawkish nose and a dark blue cloth cap sat on his right with a package wrapped in newspaper on his lap. Jude nodded him an acknowledgement then unbuckled the front pocket of his bag and took out his mobile phone. It had a clip-over Union Jack cover that he’d bought on Portobello Road in London; it was kitsch but he liked it, more so for living abroad. He checked it for text messages. There was just one with a heart shape of asterisks and ‘Alexandria’ written in the centre. He ran his thumb softly over the glass. He lifted out his copy of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which he was re-reading, and then a packet of mints. He offered one to the old man.
“Where are you from?” the man said keenly.
“The North of England,” said Jude.
“ Anglia. Shumë mirë. Good,” he replied, his eyes brightening. He unfolded the newspaper and took out half a cucumber and a piece of white cheese. He then offered Jude a twig of dried meat.
“ Faleminderit. Thank you,” said Jude.
“What are you doing here?” he said leaning closer.
“Work,” replied Jude not wanting to open that discussion more, and looked again through the window. Vine groves in tidy stone-walled enclosures passed by, and a huge, rusty tank on the forecourt of a petrol station with the word ‘ Lavazh ’ sprayed roughly on it in red. Jude smiled with a touch of lament that it did not signify his favourite brand of Italian coffee but a car wash.
He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose and his mind turned briefly to work that morning in Tirana. He remembered the director of Speedy-Print, Jetmira, with her tailored Italian clothes and marble-topped desk, evading giving an exact price for printing the book he was going to publish. Later, drinking coffee with Edona, a student of Political Science with long, fragrant hair, he’d asked her how she was progressing writing the story from the tapes the subject had recorded. She seemed concerned and hesitated to say something as he’d watched her. She’d then moved the subject along.
He shuffled to the left of the seat and peered through a small, glassless window frame towards a ridge of mountains stretching back to the east of Tirana. The warm, early-August air ruffled his fringe and he pushed it back off his forehead. It was beyond that range that members of the British Special Operations Executive, Amery, Smiley and Maclean, had hidden in a forest from the Partisans sent to capture them one summer late in WWII. A smile rose in the corner of his mouth at recognising the place.
The old man slapped his hand down on Jude’s thigh and laughed. Jude turned to him and smiled fully. He looked forward to the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of a dark-coloured car way back before it passed out of sight. The van’s front window had a knot of cracks in it like a spider’s web, and more cracks striding out to the edges like the creature’s legs. A bolt was loose on the seat in front of him between a leg and the van floor. He wondered if it might shake free. Everything was rattling and creaking. Look at the state of this, he thought: the driver’s probably not had the brakes serviced since the fall of the Berlin Wall reverberated down here. He was not standing on formality either, just a white vest and a golden chain around his neck. He was in his mid-fifties and Jude could see the white stubble on his cheeks, the glistening bald patch and the greying curls hanging below it. He was singing along to the radio: a gritty smooth rock ballad by, the announcer said, the singer Aleksandër Gjoka . Next came some Euro-pop track with a heavy beat that he seemed to like more and turned the volume up. They were climbing steeply now and Jude lurched sharply as they cornered a hairpin bend. Across a ravine he watched the massive rock ledges fall away like the ends of a giant’s collapsed bookshelves.
Behind the driver a youth was jerking his mobile phone as he played with it. His legs were stretched out on the seat showing his trainers in the aisle: dirty white and split. A row back on the right a woman with strong, careworn features held her daughter as she lay sleeping on her lap. The girl had white ribbons in her hair and shiny, black sandals with buckles. She began to stir.
“ O, shoferi. Could you turn the music down a little?” Jude called to the driver.
“ Pa problem !” he said obligingly. The girl sat up.
“ Mami , I’m sick,” she said. The driver tossed back some blue plastic bags and the girl snatched one and vomited in it. She lay back down on her mother’s lap. The welcome scent of pine came in through the window from trees by the roadside that looked battered and broken. The youth’s phone suddenly exploded in a high-intensity Techno ring tone and he shouted into it: “ Po, po . I’m on the Krrabë road. Well what can I do about it? Okay. Okay.”
“ Budalla . Stupid…” the mother shouted at him. “Can’t you see my daughter is sick! Now you wake her up again?”
“Keep it down boy, will you?” shouted the driver turning around.
“Yes,” said the old man, “she needs to rest! When my niece was sick…” The ‘paaarrrp’ of an oncoming car horn jolted the driver’s head back towards the road and he swung the van to the right on a corner.
Away to the west the view opened out before him. The ridgelines of mountains, light brown and then deep brown into shadow, rose beyond each other for over fifty kilometres fading into the blue haze. The sun was falling lower over them tingeing the dust with an orange-pink. Jude leant forwards to see and felt pleasure well up. There was an eruption of birdsong from beneath the old man’s jacket. He reached inside it methodically and Jude watched half-expecting him to draw out a canary in a protective caress. He lifted a mobile phone to his ear.
“ Alo . I’m on the Krrabë road! What? Wait, I said. I’m coming!” he shouted. All eyes turned to glower at him. He sniffed and seemed oblivious to it.
Jude turned around to drink in the view through the rear window. A dark blue ‘90s Mercedes with a broken headlight was drawing up behind them. The van driver now began to accelerate as the road levelled out along the top of the ridge. He tapped out a cigarette from a pack on the dashboard and slipped it into the corner of his mouth, glanced in his side mirror, and squared himself at the wheel. The Mercedes pulled out to the left and began to draw alongside. A sign with white arrows on black indicating a sharp turn left was coming closer. An old, Chinese truck came rasping around the bend with its horn on. Jude tightened his grip a little on the seat in front. The Mercedes braked and swung back sharply in behind them. He could see a faint grin of pleasure on the van driver’s face in the rear-view mirror as he touched the lighter to his cigarette. He manoeuvred the gears upwards.
A line of pylons marched up the mountain’s flank and across the road ahead of them. In seconds, the wires flew over their heads. A white stony riverbed snaked away on the valley floor, perhaps five kilometres away, the water catching the sun and flashing its message. The driver’s mobile phone rang with the Nokia tone and with one hand on the wheel he put it to his ear.
“ E, mo! ” he shouted. ”What’s up?” As they took the bend the van tires began to sing on the road surface. He dropped the phone and the cigarette into his lap and gripped the wheel. Jude ran his hand through his hair and felt his heart beat quicken. The driver began beating the burning tobacco off his lap.
“ O, zoti Schumacher ? Take it easy there!” Jude called to him. The youth turned around and grinned. The Mercedes pulled out to the left for another attempt to pass and began to pull up level. Jude looked down at the two men sitting in the front. Both wore clean, blue shirts and sunglasses. The passenger looked up at Jude, and then seemed to nod to his driver. The road swung to the left over a narrow bridge and the Mercedes was forced back again in behind the van, beating on its horn.
Whitewashed, stone walls, holding back the mountain dirt behind them, streamed past stencilled with logos and sprayed with graffiti: ‘Albanian Exhausts’, ‘Geri’, ‘LSI’… Then came a café plastered with Nescafe posters, a man selling ice cream from a scratched refrigerator, and an old man bobbing sidesaddle on a mule laden with white sacks, flicking its rump with a stick. The old man in the cloth cap called something to the driver who didn’t respond. Jude could feel touches of cold sweat on his palms. He took his glasses off and cleaned the condensation with his T-shirt.
“Lord, keep us on the road!” he prayed under his breath. He glanced backwards. The Mercedes was right up to the van’s bumper. It swung back to the left and pulled parallel, the driver hammering his horn. Then it touched the side with a metallic grate.
“ Zot i madh! God!” shouted the driver, jerking his hea