I Saw a Man Read Online Free Page B

a door, the crackle and fuzzy speech of a guard’s radio.
    For a second or two Nico breathed on the line, deliberate and slow. “Huh, well,” he’d said eventually. “ Hasta luego, bro. Take it easy, yeah?”
    The line went dead. The message light began to blink. Michael watched it pulse for a moment, then, sliding his keys off the kitchen table, left the apartment. He pushed through the lobby doors downstairs and crossed the street into the spring light of the morning and walked north towards Washington Square. The higher windows of the buildings were catching the sun, making them flash in the corner of his eye. As he crossed over Prince a cooling breeze ushered a scent of cinnamon and bagels down the street. Michael walked faster into it, as if he were trying to outpace the memory of Nico’s voice behind him, or discover some kind of a promise in the sweetness ahead.

CHAPTER THREE
    THEY MET JUST three weeks after Caroline moved to London. A mutual friend was screening a film at the Frontline in Paddington, a social club for correspondents, journalists, and filmmakers. As the documentary played in a darkened room on the top floor, the windowpanes crackling with spring rain, images of Harare, Bulawayo, and the Zimbabwean veldt appeared on the screen. The film was about Mugabe’s operation Murambatsvina, “throw out the rubbish,” a forced clearance of urban slum dwellings that had left 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless in winter. Caroline watched as a grandmother in a red bobble hat, overlooked by policemen, heaved a sledgehammer against the crumbling breezeblocks of her home.
    Something about the juxtaposition of the rain against the windows and the film on the screen made Caroline nervous. The shower against the glass, the wash of tyres in the street below, the acacia and jacaranda trees silhouetted against a southern sun. She’d lived in Nairobi and Cape Town, and had worked all over Africa. She hated what she was watching on the screen, but she knew she loved it, too. Already, just three weeks after arriving in London, she could feel the pull of those images, an umbilical desire to be a part of it. But then, in immediate response, she felt an equally strong urge to resist. To stay. Whatever had been the catalyst for what she’d felt that morning in Dubai, the residue of it was still a counterweight within her, an instinctive force she didn’t understand but to which she felt compelled to listen.

    Caroline first caught sight of Michael sitting a few rows ahead of her, his profile partly lit by the screen. As the film played she studied what she could of him. His fair hair was swept back from his forehead and the collar of his shirt was askew, the label showing. When he turned to say something to the person next to him she saw the suggestion of a break to his nose. It lent him, she thought, an interest beyond good looks. He seemed familiar but it was only later, when she saw his face in the full light of the bar, that she remembered where she’d seen him before: on the back cover of one of the books she’d packed into her hand luggage three weeks earlier.
    The only people Caroline knew at the screening had already left, so taking a last swig from her bottle of beer, she approached Michael. He was talking to an older man, a grey-haired reporter with a beaten manner who’d made his name filing stories from the front lines of Vietnam. Caroline didn’t wait for a break in their conversation.
    “ ‘All they got is the facts,’ ” she said as she squeezed between them, putting the empty bottle on the bar. She looked up at Michael. “ ‘But what about everything else?’ Good line, that,” she continued, holding his eye. “True, too.”
    Michael looked down at the woman who’d interrupted them. At first he had no idea what she was talking about. When he did, he couldn’t tell if she was serious or taking the piss. She was smiling up at him, but her face betrayed nothing.
    “Thanks,” he said. “But