“Quel étage?” he asked me. He smelled of cigar tobacco and faded lavender cologne.
“Deuxième.”
We both got out at the second floor. He went straight across the corridor and opened up the door to Apartment 7. I gave him a jerky little wave goodnight, and then I walked further along to Apartment 5. I was only halfway there when the timing-switch clicked and I was plunged into darkness. There was a window at the end of the corridor but it was covered by heavy velvet drapes. Fortunately, there was a thin chink of light shining under the door of Number 5, so I was able to grope the rest of the way.
I stood outside, holding my breath. I could hear the television news in English and the sound of water-pipes rattling. Maybe Maria was taking a shower. Always a fatal thing to do when a murderer’s after you, I thought wryly. Look at Psycho, and dozens of other stabbings-in-the-shower. I waited until I heard the chimes ring out eleven thirty. Then I thought: I’ve come so far, I might as well make myself known to her, even if my reason for being here is totally crazy.
I had my fist poised to knock when I heard the elevator whining. I stepped back, concealing myself behind the thick velvet drapes. They were choking, and they smelled of decades of dust, but I managed to hold my breath.
The corridor light clicked on and I saw a tall man step out of the elevator and walk immediately toward me. He was wearing a black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that concealed his face in shadow. He approached me with complete determination, almost as if he already knew that I was here. I slid my razor out of my copy of Time and opened the blade. If he tried to attack me, then he was going to be marked for the rest of his life.
He had almost reached the drapes when he stopped at the door of Number 5 and knocked. He waited for a while with his head bowed, and then he knocked again. After a moment the door was opened on a security chain, and I heard a woman’s voice say, “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
Without hesitation the man took hold of the door frame and kicked the door as hard as he could. The security chain was torn away and the door juddered wide open. I heard the woman gasp and then I heard a table toppled over and the sound of a lamp smashing.
I dragged myself out of the drapes and rushed into the apartment. The man had pushed the girl back on to a gold-upholstered sofa and he was trying to wrench away the bath towel around her waist. She wasn’t screaming, but wrestling with him and letting out a concentrated whimper, as if she were mortally afraid of what he was going to do to her.
“Hoete!” I shouted at him, and slashed at his sleeve with my razor. But he twisted himself around and gripped my wrist so tightly that I couldn’t break free, and then he pulled me sideways and got an armlock around my neck. I never knew a man so strong, and I used to be high-school boxing champion. He had me totally paralyzed, half-throttling me with his left arm and gripping my right hand so hard that I couldn’t even drop the razor.
He shoved me forward, toward the sofa, and forced my right hand from side to side in wide sweeping motions, so that Maria couldn’t get up without being slashed.
“Hoete!” I choked. “Hoete, let go of me!”
But Hoete said nothing. He made me lunge my hand forward so that the razor drew a thin line of blood down Maria’s left cheek. Then he cut her again, right across the bridge of the nose, so that her bone was laid bare. She moaned and tried to lift her arms in self-defense, but Hoete pulled my hand from side to side, slicing her forearms, slicing her fingers, cutting her shoulders through to the fat. The razor blade quilted the flesh on her face. It turned her lips into bloody ribbons and split open one eye.
I struggled widly, but Hoete had me in his grip like a marionette. He made me slice her breasts and cut into her stomach. He scored her thighs like joints of white pork. There was blood spraying everywhere, a maelstrom of blood, and it was dripping from both of our faces, as if we were out in the rain somewhere, dancing some intimate and terrible waltz.
Hoete suddenly stopped. It was obvious that Maria wasn’t dead, but it was equally obvious that she would be facing years and years of surgery, and that she would never be the same striking woman that Jan had showed me in the photograph.
Hoete released his hold on me and I dropped the razor on to the carpet. I was surprised to find that the television was still on, its screen spattered with drops of brownish blood. The news anchorman was talking quite normally, as if he didn’t know what had happened. I can’t understand why Jan should say that he never talked to me about anybody called Martin Hoete. If you ask me, he’s just trying to cover up for him. Well, yes, I know that Hoete was imaginary. That makes Jan’s explanation even more insane, doesn’t it? I mean you’ve considered the possibility that Jan and Hoete were one and the same person? That it was Jan who attacked Maria that night?
Did you talk to the maitre-d’ at ’t Spreeuwke? He remembers us together, yes? And he remembers that Jan ordered three beers and three starters and three entrées? He said that I wanted them? Why should I have wanted them? Jan ordered them for Hoete.
I can tell you something categorically. I have never been married and I certainly don’t know where you found these divorce papers. Anybody can forge anything on computers these days. I came to Antwerp on my own and if a woman called Maria Scott happened to be sitting on the same plane, what does that prove? Scott isn’t exactly an unusual name, after all.
It was Hoete who was married to Maria and I can understand why he was so angry with her. He turns his back for five minutes and she’s off with some smooth character with a Mercedes and an apartment right in the center of town. And then she squeezed him for money. The sheer naked greed of it. If you ask me she deserved what she got. If you ask me she can count herself lucky that she wasn’t killed.
My advice to you is, look for Martin Hoete. H-O-E-T-E, pronounced “Hurt Her”. So he’s imaginary, that didn’t stop him cutting her up, did it? Nobody is often the most dangerous person there is, that’s what Jan said, and he should know.
So, can I go now?
Heroine
He propped his bicycle up against the side of The Dog & Duck and went inside. The old oak-beamed pub was hot and noisy, and much more crowded than usual. Bombing operations had been stopped for two weeks to allow the aircrews to rest and the riggers to repair all of the damaged aircraft. Through the haze of cigarette-smoke, he could see McClung, his ball-turret gunner, and Marinetti, his navigator, playing darts on the other side of the bar, and one of his waist gunners getting intense with a ruddy-faced girl from Bassingbourn village.
He elbowed his way to the bar. As he did so, he jogged the arm of a girl in a rusty-colored tweed suit, and spilled her cider.
“Hey, watch it!” she said, turning around.
He held up both hands in surrender. “I’m sorry, that was clumsy of me. Let me buy you another.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said, in her clipped BBC accent, brushing down her lapels with her handkerchief. “It wasn’t much.”
“Well, let me buy you another one anyhow. Just for the sake of the special relationship.”
“I can’t do that,” she teased him. “We haven’t been introduced.”
He beckoned to Tom, the landlord, a podgy man with a ponderous way of talking who always reminded him of Oliver Hardy. “Tom, do you know this young lady?”
“This young lady here? Course I do. Anne Browne. Major Browne’s youngest.”
He took her hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Browne. My name’s Clifford Eager II, but you can call me Cliff.”
“I think Eager would be more appropriate, don’t you?” she smiled.
Cliff ordered a pint of Flowers and another half of cider for Anne. He offered her a Lucky and lit it for her. “Major Browne’s youngest, huh?” he asked her. “How many others are there?”
“Four, all told.”
“All girls? And all as pretty as you?”
“Now then, Eager.”
But the fact was, she was not only pretty, she was very pretty, she was showg
irl pretty, and she obviously knew it, too. She had a pale, heart-shaped face, with wide gray-blue eyes the colour of sky when you see it reflected in a puddle. She had a short, pert nose. Her lips were full and painted glossy red, and they had a permanent seductive pout. Her hair was chestnut-brown, shiny and curly, and fastened with two barrettes. She was quite petite, no more than five feet four inches tall. Underneath her severe utility suit she wore a soft white sweater which couldn’t conceal a bosom that was more than a little too large for a girl so slim.
“You want to sit down?” he asked her. They pushed their way through the jostling, laughing throng of customers until they found a small table in the corner, underneath a hunting print of the View Hulloa! In the public bar, a rowdy group of American pilots were singing “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching” with increasingly ribald words.
“What’s a respectable girl like you doing in a den of iniquity like this?” Cliff asked her.
“I’m meeting a friend. I’m going away tomorrow and she was going to lend me one of her dresses.”
“You’re going away? Anywhere interesting?”
“Torquay, that’s all. I’ve got a job there, in an old people’s home.”
“I shall miss you.”
“Good gracious, you don’t even know me.”
“That’s why I’m going to miss you. I meet the best-looking girl in the whole of East Anglia and what happens? She leaves me and goes off to Torquay.”
“Well, I expect you’ll be busy again soon.”
Cliff put his finger to his lips. “Ssh, mustn’t talk about it. But, sure. They’re giving us a break after Blitz Week. Then it’s going to be back to the old routine. Get up, fly to Germany, drop bombs, come back again, wash your teeth, go to bed.”
She drew sharply at her cigarette, her eyes watching him through the smoke. He was handsome in a big, undisciplined way. He had a broad face and strong cheekbones, and deepset, slightly hooded eyes. He was wearing a leather flying-jacket with a lambswool collar. She couldn’t imagine him in a suit.
“Where do you come from?” she asked him. “Is it the South? You have a very drawly kind of accent.”
“I come from Memphis. Well, close to Memphis. A little place called Ellendale. It has a store and a church and a movie-theater and that’s just about the sum total.”
“I’ll bet you can’t wait to get back there.”
“Soon as we’ve done what we came here to do.”
She paused. Then, unexpectedly, she took hold of his hand. “Are you afraid of dying?” she asked him. “I think I am.”
He grinned at her. “Hey, you don’t have to be afraid of dying. You’re going to be okay, down there looking after those old folks.”
“Well, of course. I just wondered, that’s all.” But still she didn’t take her hand away.
Cliff waited for a moment, and then he said, “Listen – I’m always afraid of dying, if you must know. I can never sleep, the night before we fly, and I spend the whole time saying my prayers. When you’re up there, you don’t have too much time to worry about it. You’re too busy getting yourself there and getting yourself back again, and trying not to bump into the other airplanes all around you. But there was one time when we were hit by flak over Emden, and we lost the whole of our nose section. How we managed to fly that baby back to Bassingbourn I shall never know. See this gray hair, right on the side here? I looked in the mirror after that mission and there it was.”
Anne crushed out her cigarette in the big Guinness ashtray. “If I ask you something,” she said, “will you answer yes or no, nothing else; and if the answer’s no, will you say no more about it, and pretend that I didn’t say a word?”
Cliff started to smile, but then he realized that whatever she was going to say, she was utterly serious about it. “All right,” he agreed. “I think I can manage that.”
“Tonight, will you sleep with me?”
He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He looked around to see if anybody else had heard her, but they obviously hadn’t. They were singing “Run, Rabbit, Run” and stamping their feet. He looked back at Anne and she still had the same intense expression on her face, and she was grasping his hand so tightly that her nails were digging into his skin.
“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend or anything? What’s he going to say?”
“Nothing. We’re only chums.”
“Well, I don’t know, Anne, you’re a beautiful girl, but—”
“You’re too religious, is that it? You’re a Southern Baptist or something?”
“Anne, I don’t know what to say.”
“All you have to say is yes or no. Is that too difficult?”
Cliff took a deep breath. Then he said, “OK, then. Yes. I may be stupid but I’m not that stupid.”
Tom had three rooms upstairs at the Dog & Duck. Two of them were occupied: one by a man who was traveling in laxatives and the other by a wiry, elderly couple on a hiking holiday. Cliff had seen them in the saloon bar, poring over pre-war Ordnance Survey maps and arguing with each other in tense, sibilant hisses. “No, we can’t go through Little Eversden, it’ll take us miles out of our way.”
The third room was the smallest, overlooking the pub’s back yard, where all the barrels were stacked, and the dog was kenneled. It was wallpapered with faded brown flowers, and furnished with a cheap varnished chest-of-drawers and a single bed that was covered with a pink, exhausted quilt, with a tea-stain on it in the shape of Ireland. On the wall above the bed hung a print of a First World War soldier saying goodbye to his wounded horse – “Goodbye, Old Pal.”
“Cheerful,” said Cliff, nodding toward the picture.
Anne gave a nervous little laugh. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded and looked up at him with an expression that he couldn’t read at all. It wasn’t demure, but on the other hand it wasn’t the expression he would have expected to see on the face of a girl who had just invited a total stranger to bed.
“I hope you don’t think that I’ve ever done this before,” she said. Her hair shone in the light from the bedside lamp. It had a pretense parchment shade, scorched on one side, with a picture of a galleon on it.
“I don’t know what I think,” said Cliff. “All I know is that you’re a very pretty girl and I’m a very lucky guy.”
He took off his steel-bracelet wristwatch and laid it on top of the nightstand.
“It’s funny that, isn’t it?” said Anne. “The first thing that people do before they make love is take their watches off … as if time doesn’t matter any more.”
Cliff took off his flying-jacket and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. “Do you want to switch the light off?” he asked her.
“No,” she mouthed.
He sat down on the bed next to her. “I feel kind of strange,” he admitted. “We haven’t even kissed yet.”
“Well, then, let’s kiss.”
He put his arm around her and drew her closer. He looked directly into her eyes, as if it would help him to understand her, but all he could see was the blue-gray rainwater color of her irises, and his own reflection. He kissed her very softly on the lips, scarcely brushed her, but that was enough. They kissed again, much more urgently this time, and her tongue found its way into his mouth and licked at his palate and his tongue. He kissed her cheeks and her nose and her eyes and her neck, and he felt his penis begin to rise inside his shorts.
He took hold of her fluffy white sweater and lifted it over her head. For a moment, with her arms raised and her eyes covered, she looked as if she were in a position of bondage. But then she emerged, her face flushed and smiling. “Here … stand up,” he said, and lifted her on to her feet. Without her high heels, she came up no further than his second shirt button.
He unbuttoned her red tweed skirt and tugged down the zipper. Then he slid the thin straps of her satin slip off her sh
oulders, so that it slithered to the floor. She held him around the neck and kissed him again, dressed in nothing but her brassiere, her satin step-ins, her garter-belt and her sheer tan nylons. Her brassiere was slightly too small for her, so that her breasts bulged out on either side. In her deep, soft cleavage nestled a silver medal on a fine silver chain.
Cliff’s hands were broad and big-fingered, and he had difficulty unfastening her brassiere, especially since it was too tight. “Shoot – this is worse than trying to unwrap chewing-gum with your flying gloves on.” Anne laughed, and kissed him on the nose, and reached behind with both hands and unfastened it for him. Her bare breasts came out of the cups like two warm white milk puddings, with wide areolas of the palest pink. He cupped one breast with his hand and gently circled the ball of his thumb around her nipple, so that it stiffened and knurled.
He trailed the fingers of his other hand all the way down the curve of her back, and around the cheeks of her bottom. She shivered, and came in closer. When his fingers stroked her between the thighs, he found that her step-ins were already slippery and wet. He took hold of the thin elastic and drew them down her thighs. Then he picked her up in his arms and laid her down on the quilt. Her breasts spread sideways, and he took them in his hands and kissed them, sucking her nipples and flicking them with the tip of his tongue. While he did so, she reached down and started to unbutton his shirt.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, in the same way that he had said it to her.
He stripped off his shirt, dragged off his socks and unbuckled his belt. In a few seconds he was completely naked, kneeling between her glossy nylon-sheathed knees. His body was white-skinned but very muscular, with a crucifix of dark hair between his nipples. There was a white scar on his left shoulder where he had been hit by shrapnel over Emden. His stomach was so flat that it made his stiffened penis look even bigger than it was, with its purple helmet and its thick, veined shaft.
Feelings of Fear Page 6
