Chapter Twenty-One
One item that had been recovered from the dead body of Garnet G. Wendelson was a cheap, paperback copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Inside the front cover of the volume - and this despite the waterlogged state of the book, which had ballooned to double its normal size, having soaked up the water of the Taedong River like a dry sponge - it was possible to make out a short hand-written inscription, “To Garnet, with love, Marie-France.”
One item that had not been recovered from the dead body of Garnet G. Wendelson was a small bronze plaque bearing the inscription ‘In commemoration of the opening of the Wendelson Building by Garnet G. Wendelson on 1st May 2009’ or words roughly similar to these, and it was the non-discovery of this vital piece of evidence which continued to throw doubt on the validity of Martin Meek’s account of the events leading up to Garnet’s actual death. No one was more acutely aware of this fact than Martin himself. Martin reasoned that in all likelihood the plaque would never be found, and that the Pyongyang police should have no reason to suspect him on the basis of its absence, but nevertheless it was another reason for disquiet in his already troubled frame of mind. Garnet’s body had been recovered from the water of the Taedong River in an admirably short space of time after its spectacular high dive, but it had taken another three days, and a team of experienced police divers, to locate the whereabouts of his wheelchair, and it had been still several further days before the hunt for any other evidence that the alluvial depths might hold, had been called off entirely. The official verdict on Garnet’s death had eventually been pronounced ‘suicide’, but with the unusual adjunct, ‘possibly aided by person or persons as yet unidentified’. The principle players in the tragedy had all been allowed the freedom to return to their home countries; Garnet’s body had been released for cremation; and it was understood that the police investigation was closed pending further information, but even though Martin had been back in Garnet’s Park Avenue apartment for almost ten days now, the phone call he received, the day after his meeting with Leyton Drisdale and Jake Carver did not come as any real surprise to him.
“Hello”
“Mr. Meek? This is Lieutenant Kim, Pyongyang Police Department, you may remember that we spoke before.”
The combination of the crackling reception on the telephone line and Kim’s poorly accentuated English made the ensuing conversation hard for Martin to follow, but by the time he had replaced the receiver, he was under no allusion that the lid on the Wendelson case appeared as though it was about to spring wide open again, and nothing that he could say or do would prevent it. Lieutenant Kim had been understanding, apologetic even - it had not been any desire on his part to pick away at what he considered were already healed wounds - it was the media he said, they were the problem. There was an investigative TV show from South Korea interested in the story and some of their team had already started sniffing around, eager to uncover any hint of police inefficiency in the investigation or, better still, a larger conspiracy theory. Apparently some of the larger US networks were already interested in their findings: the potential syndication rights were going to be huge, and as Lieutenant Kim explained, the Pyongyang Police Department could not afford to miss out on a piece of that action.
He had finished the call by saying, “I am sorry Mr. Meek, I truly am, but I think that we will require your presence back here in Pyongyang before the end of the month. Formalities, you understand, but we have to be seen to be doing everything by the book. Consider this as purely a courtesy call, but I trust that I shall be able to reach you on this number if we need you here as a matter of urgency?”
Martin had attempted to explain that in actual fact, no, he would not be contactable at this number; that, due to the terms of Mr. Wendelson’s will, he was actually in the process of vacating his quarters in the Park Avenue apartment in order that Mr. Carver could avail himself of its lavish facilities, that, in any case, Pyongyang was the very last place on earth that he currently wished to return to, being, as it were, the last known definitive whereabouts of the mysterious assassin Medea, who, he had only lately ascertained might also have in her arsenal a bullet with his own name inscribed upon it, and, that fact aside, he had no wish to co-operate with a film crew of investigative journalists who would inevitably be looking to sensationalise what for him was still a sensitive incident, not to mention a personal loss and tragedy, but Lieutenant Kim had long since hung up, and Martin found himself giving his excuses to an empty room. His head still throbbed beneath its bandage. He really needed to lie down and think through what he should do next.
It had been a bad couple of days for Martin: he had hoped that by returning to New York the events in Pyongyang would be physically displaced from him; that he had put himself beyond the reach of recrimination or publicity. He had also hoped that, at the very least, Garnet would have made some provision for him in his will: the apartment would have been the least of his expectations, perhaps a comfortable salary for life, or a lump sum to set him up in something, would have been more realistic, but he had found that there was nothing. He was not even allowed to keep a familiar roof above his head; suddenly his standing in this foreign city seemed as perilous as when he had been sleeping rough on the boardwalks of Brighton Beach a decade before. If only Garnet had lived a little longer, he had talked of changing his will, surely then... It was not a time for ‘if onlys’ and ‘surely thens’. He needed to come up with a clear plan of action.
Martin had never been allowed to sit on the chaise longue in Garnet’s library when his employer had been alive, although he had often times transported Garnet from the confines of his wheelchair to lay on the divan’s soft fabric in the manner - so he liked to believe - of his aesthetic hero Des Esseintes, but since his solitary return to the apartment Martin had taken to stretching out, full length, on its comfortable cushions every afternoon, in part as the basis of a convalescence regime, but also partly through sheer childish perversity, now that there was no one around to tell him to do otherwise.
The library was a beautiful room: light and airy, totally unlike the stereotypical picture of fusty academia, with a view directly out onto the tops of the pollarded trees lining that stretch of Park Avenue, but sufficiently insulated against noise, to block out the sounds of the continuous traffic that passed by directly below. The walls of the room still showed the blank spaces where favourite paintings had been removed at Garnet’s request for shipment to his Pyongyang hotel suite, the slight variation in wallpaper colour the only clue to the pictures’ previous place of residence, the rectangles of colour variation looking like ghost images, or photographic negatives, of the original works. Martin remembered the library when the paintings were all still in situ, it had looked crowded and more fussy then; the pictures held no sentimental value for him, he preferred it how it was now.
The atmosphere of the room was such that it encouraged occupants to drift off into the realm of daydreams, and Martin allowed himself just such an indulgence now.
When he had been a small boy, a regular part of his life, so he remembered - possibly inaccurately - had been a frequent trip to the local crematorium to stand around the grave of a recently deceased relative, or friend, usually of his parents, followed by the solemn return to the house of the bereaved, to indulge in nostalgic small talk over a light repast of vol-au-vents, sausage rolls and dry, furled sandwiches, that appeared to be turning up their corners empathetically with the victim’s turned up toes. Decades then had seemingly passed without a single funeral to attend, until this week that was, and, reminiscent of the joke about buses, two had come along together. How different each occasion had been, Martin mused.
First, chronologically, there had been Marcel Chin’s burial. A public event, attended by anyone who was supposedly anyone in New York society. Reminiscent of Princess Diana’s funeral only in the spontaneous displays of loud public and affected grief, the final progression of Chin’s body to be received by the earth was
every bit as showy and ostentatious as had been the later years of his actual life. An antique, black carriage, pulled by four handsome, black stallions, carried the lifeless body, which lay in a sumptuously padded, open coffin, such that office workers on the elevated floors above Wall Street could look directly down upon the corpse, the face of which had been heavily made up by a team of undertakers in order to obscure the massive disfigurement caused by a bullet fired from a Tokarev SVT-40 sniper’s rifle, which had entered Chin’s head just behind his left ear socket and re-emerged neatly in the centre of the artificial dimple in his chin, that several years earlier a team of plastic surgeons had spent many hours, during the course of several operations, working upon, in order to give the appearance-obsessed architect a ‘Kirk Douglas’. The coffin-bearing carriage had been followed, at a suitably slow pace, by a long train of black stretch limousines, the windows of which were all darkened to obscure the identities of the - presumably - rich and famous guests who wished to pay their last respects. Behind the cavalcade of cars a New Orleans-style steel band followed on foot; a bevy of scantily-clad dancers - of both sexes - writhing and squirming rhythmically to the sound of the echoing metallic beat. Further back still a troupe of youthful, female cheerleaders threw their batons in the air with gleeful abandon, seemingly disconnected and oblivious to the supposedly solemn event occurring ahead of them. Lining the streets immediately before the entrance to Trinity Church a rag-tag band of onlookers had cheered nervously as the carriage reached its final destination, unsure of the etiquette required of the occasion, until, and following the example of a tall, dark-suited pallbearer who had raised his hat in an overly actorial fashion, bringing it back, by the action of a near bow, to rest in front of his chest, a respectful silence fell upon the inquisitive masses. A few paparazzi flash bulbs had gone off as the procession had passed through the cemetery gates, and there had been the occasional exclamation of excitement as an eager fan thought they had glimpsed their particular object of adoration through one of the tinted windows, but otherwise the journey to the cemetery had passed without incident.
Martin had travelled in one of the limousines, accompanied by two former colleagues of Chin from his architectural studios, who chatted all the way about a project on which they were currently jointly working to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, and a miserable, young, pale-faced, aesthetic-looking man who described himself as a ‘close friend’ of the deceased but who did not offer further elucidation. Not for the first time Martin wondered just what exactly he was doing there.
Two days later there had been Garnet’s cremation: a small affair, attended by a few close - if that is the word - acquaintances. There were no surviving Wendelson relatives, and ‘friends’ would have been too strong a word to describe the slightly disparate band of mourners who stood, shoulder to shoulder, in the Morningside Crematorium chapel of rest, listening to the resident priest describe the life and achievements of a man, of whom most, at best, could only claim to having had a passing knowledge, and that chiefly acquired from the pages of the tabloid newspapers rather than from actual firsthand experience. As for genuine mourners, Martin could count only three, and that was numbering himself in that category, alongside two elderly men he knew to be Mr. Arnold Metz and Mr. Monotone, friends from Garnet’s past. Metz was himself confined to a wheelchair now, his thin, gangly legs no longer capable of supporting his previously fluid mimic’s frame, but the tears that welled up in the corners of his eyes during the priest’s oration appeared to be genuine enough, and not as the result of a stage act imitation of emotion. Monotone - or Mr. Monotone as he now styled himself, in the belief that the appendage gave him a degree of respectability commensurate with his age - looked largely unchanged by the passing years. Big, bald, and bespectacled would have been the three most common adjectives to describe him in his youth, and the same three were equally applicable today. Leyton Drisdale was present, of course, as both the executor of Garnet’s will and representative of his estate, and Jake Carver sat at the rear of the aisles of seats, a lowering presence, like the first threatening dark cloud on the horizon on an otherwise clear, blue day. Invitations had been sent out to old neighbours during his time in Florida, to Zurich and to Kiev, but most were returned months after the event, either ‘address unknown’ or with a hastily scrawled ‘deceased’ written across the envelope: the reality was that Garnet had acquired few friendships along the course of a relatively long life, and of his past there were few survivors who were capable of verifying the gossamer threads of truth and falsehood; history and fiction. He was a private man destined to go to his grave with his memory laid open like a blank page, ready to be filled in by a media and public who would feel no qualms at misrepresenting him for the sake of a better story. Such had been Martin’s thoughts on the day he committed his former employer to the ground, but he recognised even then that he was being foolishly sentimental, that Garnet himself would not have cared a jot for public opinion, just so long as he was remembered for the building which would continue to carry his name, long after his body had turned to dust. If Garnet had ever consciously allied himself to the immortality-obsessed Gilgamesh - and there was little doubt in Martin’s mind that he did - it could be argued that Garnet had discovered the truth sooner than his hero: you are remembered for your achievements; only through these can you gain immortality.
Garnet’s reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh had resulted in an additional pilgrimage during the visit to Iraq that he had shared with Martin those many years earlier. Martin remembered the day well: it had begun like so many others on that journey - up early; bright sunshine; hot weather; greeted by their official government guide; a cup of acrid, black coffee; and a bumpy ride in the back of a French-built 4WD, along dusty, unmade roads, past a landscape of largely featureless scrub and dunes, only punctuated by the odd low, desolate dwelling and an occasional farmer tending to his herd of goats. The object of that day’s expedition had been to visit the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, one-time home to the Epic of Gilgamesh's eponymous king. In its day - although admittedly its day was several millennia back now - Uruk had stood as the world’s first city. It was the largest settlement at that time in Mesopotamia, situated on a branch of the mighty Euphrates River, with the finest buildings, and constructed by a civilisation that exhibited the earliest evidence of writing. Later clay tablets, written in Akkadian using the cuneiform script, reveal the complexity of early Uruk’s religious and scientific knowledge, and with the Epic of Gilgamesh* they also have what is widely considered the first ever work of literature, the account of Gilgamesh’s experiences having been written a full millennium earlier than such European epics as the Odyssey and the Iliad.
To stand on the site of Gilgamesh’s ancient city, had long been an ambition that Garnet had harboured; to view the walls that Gilgamesh had constructed and which, at the end of the Epic, he is to realise are destined to outlive his mortal frame, and remain as his testament to future generations.
If Garnet had been expecting to see a perfectly preserved ancient city rising up from the glistening sands he was to be disappointed. Modern day Uruk is little more than an outline of its former glory, the mud brick walls largely reduced to their component elements, the central ziggurat only discernible by its raised surroundings, the whole site more resembling the trenches of a World War One battleground than an important area of world heritage. Unlike Babylon, Uruk had not received the twenty first century makeover from its modern day ruler. As the objective of a tiring drive, and to someone as archaeologically ignorant as Martin was, Uruk had proved something of a let down; for Garnet, who had based a large part of a life philosophy on the idea of immortality achievable through building monuments, Uruk had the potential for being crushingly disappointing. There, in the desert dust of modern day Iraq, with the sand-filled wind blowing unceasingly from the west, Garnet could have seen everything that he believed in, everything that he had worked to
wards, revealed as a sham: the myth of immortality just that, a myth. Surprisingly though, Garnet had not been disheartened by the ruins he saw that day: Martin recalled the look in his eyes that same afternoon, as he was bumped and wheeled across the uneven, rocky ground, back to the waiting driver and his vehicle, running the gauntlet of the few curious Marsh Arab children who begged for pens and picture postcards. It was the look that he had seen in his own father’s eyes when he had been confronted by an insurmountable rock face in his beloved Cumbrian mountains, and in the eyes of his older brother when he had been knocked down for the third time in his school boxing tournament; it was a look of steely determination, that said more eloquently than any words, ‘must try harder’. It was almost as though Garnet had been making his own personal assessment of the Uruk model as a standard for immortality and had returned a mark of delta minus for durability. That evening, back in their hotel, overlooking the blue, Scud-inspired minarets of the Mother of All Battles Mosque*, they had been welcomed back with a traditional meal of fish caught from the waters of the Tigris. The memory reminded Martin that he was feeling hungry, and that the meal ticket that he had come to rely upon for so long had been cruelly taken away from him.
Beside the chaise longue, on top of an elegant, low, marble table a free recruitment ads newspaper lay open, its pages an invitation to be read; a relic of Garnet’s previous occupancy. It had worked for him before, could it possibly work again? Was this Fate, deciding the new direction that his life would take? Martin pulled himself up to a seated position, swinging his legs off the side of the divan, so that his feet once again rested upon the floor, and took the newspaper, holding it lightly at the top of the central fold, so that the sheets were allowed to fall open, at random, wherever they chose. A page thus selected, Martin closed his eyes and ran his finger down the rows of closely printed text, hoping that by some minute electrical impulse, some microscopic, external stimulus, there would be provided the necessary sign that he required to halt his roving digit and allow him to claim his new beginning. Ten seconds later and with no divine guidance apparent, Martin resorted to a rather more down to earth selection process, along the lines of ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo’, which had the outcome of him being instructed to ‘Earn money and learn a trade’ and told that ‘Luggage conveyancing personnel are required for immediate positions at JFK, Newark and La Guardia’: a career choice that he had decided not to pursue long before he had even finished reading to the end of the advertisement. Only the day before he had read about a baggage handler having his head blown off on the tarmac at the airport in Bogota when he inadvertently interrupted a major drugs deal: now admittedly New York was not Colombia, but the job was not without its inherent risks. He may be on his uppers, but he was not keen on the idea of being shot at for a living; he had problems enough in that direction as it was. Momentarily, he considered selecting again to see if something more palatable turned up, but even in his directionless state, he realised that this was somehow debasing the magical quality of the random process. An ornamental globe perched on the other extreme of the table, provided an alternative and more interesting opportunity for random selection. Again, in his youth, Martin recalled how he would flick through the pages of his school atlas, marvelling at the exotic-sounding destinations, wandering if one day he would visit any of them, speculating how different they would be to his Lake District home. Little could he have imagined, even when he set out on his first trip to the United States, that he would be afforded the opportunity of visiting many places that at the time were just so many words in a textbook. Travel back then had been a fantastic escape; his time with Garnet had transformed it into a tedious routine. Perhaps it was time to learn how to escape once again.
Martin spun the globe with a decisive hand, leaving one finger remaining in contact with the cool surface to trail across the continents and the oceans, the friction of touch ever slowing the orbits, Fate once again allowed to decide the direction of his passage. Across Papua New Guinea, and the Solomons, ever slowing, over Easter Island - shame, he would have quite liked to visit there - and the vast blue expanse of the South Pacific, hitting land again at Chile, but onward and beyond, still slowing, across northern Argentina, and Paraguay, across southern Brazil, and he was flung out into the wild waters of the South Atlantic Ocean, almost stopping, almost stopping, would he reach a new landfall, would the globe continue around for one last moment? Yes, just. Land ahoy, captain.
Martin removed his finger from the surface of the halted globe to read the words beneath. Swakopmund, Namibia. Martin shrugged. So be it. It was as good a place to go to ground from the joint pursuers of Medea and Media as anywhere else. And it beat airport baggage handling at any rate.