Black Water Read Online Free

table in front of the man and began to wave them in the man’s face and scream. It occurred to Harper that this was a test, that Benni had invited him in here to see how he would react – Benni was, after all, under the impression that he was recruiting Harper rather than the other way around. He glanced at the other men. They were all striking various poses around the room – two of them were mimicking the man with the moustache, staring at the merchant, teeth bared, faces gleaming with sweat. Two others were leaning against the wall, arms folded, staring, trying to look as hard as possible; one of the others was turning restlessly to and fro. The last one, the driver, who was about eighteen, Harper guessed, a tall boy with sloping shoulders, stood close to Harper and Benni, motionless but with his arms raised and his fists clenched, his gaze flitting this way and that, as if he were engaged in a high-speed race on a dangerous road and needed to be hyper-alert. Some of them had been drinking but they were all, all but Benni and himself, possessed by a kind of pseudo-sexual excitement. It came off them like a scent. Harper guessed these boys didn’t get much, if any. This kind of activity had to do instead.
    The man with the moustache carried on screaming, his face contorted, his voice high-pitched, and Harper found this screaming more unbearable than anything. Just die , Harper thought, looking at the merchant, just close down, make your thoughts leave your body . He wondered if it was possible to make yourself die, in extremis , to will it to happen but of course it wasn’t. Dying was a giving up of will. You could no more will it than levitate.
    He wanted to think about something other than the bloodied man in front of him so he thought about his own end. He would like to be able to see the sky, he thought. A perfect death would come in an arbour of some sort, with trees and flowers around, with a woman beside you who loved you and laid a cooling hand on your forehead. Your last thought as you slipped into unconsciousness would be that you were loved; the air full of sunshine, a blue and infinite sky.
    Not somewhere like here, alone but for the people who wanted you dead. Not this darkened room, with dank walls and a stinking dirt floor and a little grey light scarcely strong enough to illuminate the faces of the people who were about to kill you. Not like this. Not circling in water, either, unaware – how’s that for fresh air, Bud?
    The thought that he pushed to the back of his mind, as he stood and watched a man in pain and did nothing because his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military, was that he would never know what the look on his own face was like in the minutes before he died. He would never see it mirrored in a loved one. It felt like the most profound of premonitions, that there would be no witness to his departing, or no benign witness, but it was only three decades later, sitting on a rock above a green pool on a beautiful island, with a notebook on his lap, that he remembered it.

 
    That night, he slept better than any night since his arrival on the island. The irony of this did not escape him. He rose early and greeted Kadek, told him that he would like to go into town later, pick up a couple of things. The roads to town were so potted and poor that he could have strode along the river in the same time it would take them to bounce there together on Kadek’s moped, the weight of Harper on the back flattening the tyres.
    He told Kadek to finish his duties first and then get the moped and return for him later in the morning. It didn’t look like rain that day. When he stared at a man across a desk or in a prison cell, he could assess with cold accuracy not only whether that person was lying but whether later he would give up the truth. When he looked up at the sky, he knew what it was hiding too, what it would