The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [87]
It is our impression that Qasim’s proposals to the Amir were in the nature of a spur-of-the-moment attempt to salvage his operation to destroy the ALF and to rescue his own credit with the Amir. This turn of events could not have been anticipated except through advance briefing of Qasim on Firecracker’s role and identity. This would have constituted a breach of security that at the time was considered unacceptable.
78. FROM MIERNIK’S DIARY.
By last night I had regained control of myself. The killing unnerved me. As my own psychiatrist I know why only too well; the machine gun will never be my weapon. I see Mother’s face in every muzzle flash. How could I know those men would choose to attack us? Once they had done so, instinct took command. Some mystical force, occupying a place on the spectrum of emotion somewhere between rage and ecstasy, flooded into the cavity of my body. It is the primitive brain, not the mind, that controls men in all important matters. I did not consciously think of protecting Zofia, much less Ilona and the other males. One does not operate rationally at such moments. I ran into the darkness, meaning to kill, knowing that only murder would release me from the force that seized me. I had no thought for the lives of those men, no thought for the future, no thought for anything except the Sten gun that was dearer than any part of my own body.
I do not dramatize; if anything, I fail to find language gorgeous enough to describe what I felt and what I did. The death-giver is beyond language, beyond thought, he enters another region of experience. No wonder the Society of Assassins, the SS, the Cheka took on the character of religious brotherhoods. They knew secrets other men dared not seize. It was only afterward, looking at those ragged blood-stained bodies, that I realized what I had done, and what my act meant in terms of the future. The dead men, in themselves, still had no reality for me. Only the act of killing had meaning. I realized that I had loved killing them. The after-emotion was similar, I think, to that which must be felt by a man who acts out an obsessive sexual fantasy. He dreams for years, lurks about schoolyards, reads in the newspaper of more courageous maniacs. At last he rapes a child. Joy is what he feels in fact; horror and remorse is what he knows he must feel in theory. He instructs his mind to repel the memory of ecstasy. The mind obeys, but the primitive brain lies down for a little happy sleep: he knows it will awake again, overpower the mind, and insist on a repetition of the crime. He watches over its cot with tenderness.
Of course I knew who the victims were. Pathetic dolls manipulated by men like me. We plant the germ of an idea in them and send them out to die of their infection. Perhaps they were as happy when the bullets ripped into them as their ancestors would have been to receive the spear-blade that sent them to Allah. As they died in the moonlight did visions of Marx pass before them? Did an incantation by V. I. Lenin echo in their ears? The wretched will always find something they do not understand to die for. Death itself is their reward: Christ, Mohammed, and Beria must all have expired with a final little shiver of spiritual avarice, knowing that they had been the brokers of so much joy.
Tonight—life! Or Kalash’s vision of it. He has himself been rather glum, but for different reasons from mine. To be the object of murder is not, for Kalash, a religious mystery but an insult to his position at the apex of the human species. Apparently he and his father have worked out some suitable revenge, for today he was cheerful again. Late in the afternoon he had Paul and Nigel and me summoned to one of the gardens inside the walls of this astonishing palace. We found him sitting under a baobab tree whose branches provide a canopy above the little courtyard. A lion slept under a stone table a few feet away. (These beasts are household pets of the Khatar; slaves are specially