Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘The call came.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘OK, everything is OK.’

  ‘I have your word on that?’

  ‘Sure, you have my word.’

  ‘No suspicion?’

  ‘Caution, of course. Not suspicion.’

  ‘You’re sure, absolutely sure?’

  ‘Nothing is ever absolute, my friend. But, yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘I want certainty.’

  ‘I think you worry too much.’

  ‘And I think you worry too little.’

  ‘Life’s short.’

  ‘It’s long enough,’ Mallory said.

  ‘My money …’

  ‘It’s been wired.’

  ‘Try to relax, Mallory. If you remember how. But some men cannot change their nature. They can only camouflage it for a short time.’

  ‘Sometimes you speak the most incredible bullshit, Galkin,’ Mallory said. ‘I think all that wine you guzzle has softened your brain. Go lie on the beach, or whatever it is you do.’

  ‘I have every intention.’

  James Mallory hung up. He rubbed the gold eagle on his black pinky-ring in the fashion of someone trying to summon a helpful genie.

  9

  LONDON

  Pagan and Foxworth drove to Kilburn, a few miles north of Oxford Street. Kilburn High Road was busy, pedestrians strolling in the extraordinary September sun, the plate-glass windows of shops flashing reflected sunlight. It was a mixed neighbourhood. It had attracted enough Irish immigrants to earn the nickname County Kilburn, but immigration had also brought West Indians; for every Irish face you saw, you encountered an equal number from Jamaica or Trinidad. In more recent years, young professionals had bought and upgraded houses in the district, because they were relatively inexpensive and close to the West End. It was, Pagan thought, one of London’s more atmospheric districts, and he might have enjoyed it in a better frame of mind.

  The public phone from which the woman had called was located a hundred yards from the tube station. Foxie found a parking-spot and walked with Pagan to the call-box, a glass rectangle whose panes had been cracked and broken. Graffiti was spray-painted in every available place. Cheaply printed leaflets had been stuck to the glass. Cryptic messages, initials, call Josie at 756-4753 for a gum-job, John Major’s a wanker, Free Ulster from the Brit fascist army pigs.

  Across the street was a small supermarket packed with shoppers, windows plastered with announcements of bargains – bananas, half-price loaves, cheap liver. This was the view she would have had when she was phoning him. He imagined her looking at the supermarket, watching people come and go, shopping-trolleys, babies in pushchairs, the restless surge of humanity.

  Pagan entered the call-box. The floor was littered with scraps of paper, pages ripped from directories, a few torn betting-slips. She said she’d left something here for him – but where? There were very few places inside a call-box where anything could be concealed.

  He looked around. He sensed her presence inside the booth; he thought of her lips close to the receiver. A woman’s touch, soft, caressing, arousing. There was a kind of clammy intimacy about standing where she’d stood not thirty minutes before. Why this call-box? he wondered. Why Kilburn High Road?

  ‘See anything?’ Foxie asked. He was holding the door open.

  ‘Litter,’ Pagan said. He scanned the floor, moved papers around with his foot.

  Foxie squeezed inside, ran his fingers around the edge of the coin-box. He encountered something stuffed in the narrow space between box and wall, and he said, ‘Ah,’ and tugged out a thin brown envelope on which was written PAGAN in bold block capitals. The envelope measured roughly six inches by four. Foxie gave it to Pagan, who didn’t open it at once.

  Instead, he stepped out of the stuffy call-box, examined the envelope, held it up to the light, wondered if it contained perhaps a strip of explosive material that would detonate as soon as you tore the flap open. This was how she made you behave – as if everything commonplace concealed a hidden danger. But if she wanted to kill him, this wouldn’t be the way she’d choose. He had the feeling she’d want to look him straight in the eyes at the moment of his death; she’d want that final intimacy, a last encounter. She wouldn’t go for anything so ordinary and impersonal and easy as a letter-bomb. Where would she find any pleasure in that?

  He thought, I know what’s in this envelope, what she left for me, I know.

  He ripped the flap, looked inside, slid out the photograph. It was, as he’d suspected, Roxanne’s.

  And yet it wasn’t.

  He stared at it, then turned his face away and tried to maintain control of himself. Foxie, who’d also glimpsed the picture, said nothing. Pagan slipped the photo back inside the envelope where he wouldn’t have to look at it. His heartbeat felt wrong. The rhythm of his pulse was different, his mouth dry. He tapped the envelope against the back of his hand. Some things were pointless in their cruelty. He felt the sun on his face and smelled diesel fumes on the air and saw a double-decker bus reverberate past him – everything observed through a glaze.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Foxie asked.

  Pagan said, ‘I’m not at my best, no.’

  ‘I just don’t see …’ Foxie left his sentence unfinished.

  ‘What don’t you see, Foxie?’ Pagan asked, a sharp little note in his voice. ‘The extent of her cruelty? How vicious she is? She leaves fifty-something people dead in a hotel dining-room, she kills more than a hundred in one mad moment in an underground carriage – what is it you don’t understand, Foxie? Dear Christ, if she’s capable of killing all these people without blinking her eyes, why shouldn’t she be capable of something small and insignificant like this?’ And he waved the envelope under Foxie’s face. ‘This is nothing, Foxie. This is chickenshit. This is only a fucking photograph of a dead woman. So what the hell is it you don’t see?’

  Foxie was unprepared for Pagan’s tone of voice. He stepped back, as if the older man’s rage were a virus you could catch from breathing the same air. ‘It’s what she’s done to the photograph—’

  ‘Oh, that really strikes horror into your heart, does it? Grow the fuck up. After mass murder, you should be astounded by what she can do with a few brushstrokes and some paint?’ Pagan flapped the envelope against his thigh. ‘What does it amount to anyway? A little desecration, eh? I mean, I can live with that, don’t you think? I should be able to cope with that, shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t buckle under some minor act of vandalism, should I?’

  Pagan’s anger was a mixture of colours inside his head, a palette spilled. He was aware of the reductions in his life, things taken away from him, stolen. His dead wife, well, that was the big one, the major diminishment. That had changed the music of his world to a melancholic, minor key. But Roxanne lived for him still, even if it were only in little flutters of memory, or a collection of yellowed paperback books, or in the never-changing world of a simple photograph that sat on his bedside table.

  But even the photograph had been taken away from him. And now, in a different form, a hideously unacceptable form, it had been returned. He felt the curious clarity that sometimes accompanies an extreme emotion. Everything around him was suddenly sharp, well defined, bright, too bright.

  He stared across the street at the supermarket. Bread half-price. Calf liver reduced. Rice Krispies going for a song. The world was ordinary, if you made it so. It consisted of banalities, if you could numb the emotions in yourself. He continued to rattle the envelope against his thigh. It was only brown paper in which a photograph was enclosed, that was all. That’s how you had to think of it. You couldn’t let it unglue you. You couldn’t come unravelled. She wanted to rattle him, and he’d allowed it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He didn’t look at Foxie. He’d revealed his rage and now he felt the need to withdraw to a quiet corner of himself where he might assess his wounds in private. He stuck the envelope in the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘You have nothing to be sor
ry about, Frank.’

  ‘Stop being so bloody forgiving,’ Pagan said. ‘You keep turning that other bloody cheek, don’t you? I rant, I rave, I dump crap all over you – what are you made of, Robbie? Reinforced concrete? Or some saintly substance? How can you stand me?’

  ‘Because I care, I suppose,’ Foxie said.

  ‘God,’ Pagan said. ‘You’re too good for this world, Foxie. That’s your problem. The world doesn’t deserve you.’

  ‘Why? Because I happen to have patience and a small amount of sympathy?’

  Pagan watched the people come and go in the supermarket. ‘If everybody was like you—’

  He didn’t have time to complete his sentence.

  The blast was sudden, unexpected. The window of the supermarket disintegrated abruptly, the air was filled with glass shards that seemed to have been sucked rather than blown out of the window-frame. An empty baby carriage outside the store was thrown over and over, the red plastic globes of a child’s toy jangled along the pavement, a shopping-trolley was turned upside-down, broken boxes of cereals and bags of sugar were dispersed by the force of the explosion, tomatoes and fruits turned in mid-air to pulp, and the shards of glass changed to hard, dangerous rain.

  Pagan raised a hand defensively to his face, and for an instant following the violent crack of the blast there was profound silence, which he recognized as the lull before the outrage. And then it began – women screaming, rummaging with panicked cries among fallen shelves and ruined display cases for their lost children, men shouting, people struck by debris that had come down from the ceiling, chunks of cement, tangled wires, sparks that flickered from exposed connections. Black smoke was rising in thin palls from the back of the supermarket.

  ‘Call emergency services, Foxie. Ambulances. Fire brigades. The local cops. Now.’

  Foxie didn’t hesitate. He went inside the call-box, and Pagan hurried to the other side of the street. I was meant to see this, he thought. This was intended to happen in front of my eyes. This was designed. He pushed his way inside the supermarket, shoving aside trolleys, cardboard boxes, broken shelving. Where to begin? The heat inside the market had the force of a blowtorch.

  He smelled the scent of foodstuffs beginning to char. He saw shop assistants in bloodstained clothing try to free a woman stuck beneath an overturned refrigerated display case, he stumbled into a man whose face was covered in scores of tiny cuts from sharp flakes of broken glass, he moved over a floor littered with hundreds of battered oranges, he helped an elderly woman to her feet and tried to console her with a few quick whispered words, but she was shaken, brutalized, her expression one of shock. He moved on, drawn to the black smoke at the rear of the market, pausing here to free a tiny child from a soft-drink machine that had tilted and jammed the kid against the wall, stopping there to drag a man from under a concrete slab. The screaming was constant – and now there was not only panic in the sound, but disbelief: this kind of thing didn’t happen here, this was what happened elsewhere, this was stuff you read about in newspapers.

  He felt the smoke swirl about his face, clog his nostrils, darken his skin. He drew a small boy away from the area where electric cables released sparks and flickers of flame, and reunited the kid with his anxious mother who was wandering blindly a few yards away, and told them both to get the hell out of the store.

  The smoke continued to thicken, and the flames, increasing in intensity, were made to change shape and leap dangerously forward by air forced through a ventilation system that was somehow still functioning. He wondered how long before the whole store blew, before naked flame reached the place where bottles of white spirit had been broken, and firelighters had been stored. Every now and then something popped like a gunshot – pressurized spray-containers of furniture polish, cylinders of shaving lotion, bottles of cooking-oil. When the flames made contact with volatile substances—

  He coughed, smoke choked him, fire reared around him. The only course of action was to make sure the store was emptied before it finally exploded, but first he had to be certain nobody was injured and immobilized behind the smoke. He searched the area in a frantic way. His eyes smarted, and there was pain in his lungs. He found a half-conscious young woman and helped her to her feet and escorted her toward the door, and then he turned and went back again to the rear of the store, stopping every so often to shout commands that could barely be heard above the screams and cries – Get out, everybody who can move, just get out into the fucking street and as far away from here as you can. He plunged back into the fumes, but visibility had become a serious problem. He couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of himself, and he was suffocating, coughing fiercely, and the flames were shimmying close to his body. The heat was insufferable, a thousand desert suns. He imagined his skin peeling away from bone. He clamped a hand across his mouth and moved through the blackness, as if he were pushing his way inside the airless territory of a bad dream. He saw, through a space in the smoke, a man in a white blood-soaked jacket, and he grabbed his shoulders and dragged him back in the direction of the front door, hauling him crudely across broken glass and smouldering rolls of toilet paper and the imploded relics of fruits, crushed plums, strawberries turned to purée. That was it, he couldn’t go back, he didn’t have the energy, the lung-power. If there was anyone else trapped at the back of the store, there was nothing more he could do. He found some last little reservoir of resolve and dashed around, herding people out toward the street, trying to impose his will on those too shocked to move, too traumatized to realize they were in danger. They passed through the door and into the street, not with the panic he might have expected, but in a zoned way, like people drugged. Shock was a narcotic. Fear paralysed. The survival instinct was numbed. He had to shout more, push harder, get them to move, get them all out of this place as quickly as he could – so he shoved, and bullied, and berated the stragglers, and cursed them for their slowness. And suddenly Foxworth materialized, helping, cajoling, his manner like that of a captain of a sinking ship steering people to the safety of lifeboats.

  The sound of a fire-engine was audible, then the whine of ambulances. He helped Foxie bundle the people – fifty or sixty of them – down the pavement about thirty yards, where they came to a stop and gathered like mourners. The fire-engine appeared, bright red and comforting, and hoses were rolled out, hatchets unsheathed, sun burned on metal helmets. Pagan slumped against a wall, fighting for breath. Foxie looked at him with concern.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘I wasn’t … dressed for this kind of occasion,’ Pagan said, and his voice was hoarse. His linen suit was scorched, his face blackened.

  ‘Apart from the wardrobe, are you OK?’

  Pagan nodded. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Perhaps you need treatment,’ Foxworth suggested. ‘You must have inhaled a lot of smoke.’

  ‘All I need is a drink,’ he said.

  ‘Alcoholic or otherwise?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘There’s an off-licence down the street.’

  ‘A cold beer, if possible.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a flash.’

  Pagan rubbed his eyes. He looked at the faces around him of those who’d emerged from the ruined supermarket. They were stunned. They observed the firemen, but not with eager attention. They might have been watching a scene flashed by satellite from another continent. He wondered about the number of serious casualties, the possibility of fatalities. He listened to the forceful blast of water from hoses, the sound of more glass breaking. One of the firemen was making an announcement through a loudspeaker. ‘Clear this area, please. Please get as far away as you can until the danger has passed. Please co-operate to the full extent.’

  Foxie came back with two bottles of chilled Heineken. Pagan gulped half of one immediately. It cooled his throat, created a pleasing icy sensation in his chest. A salve. He was quiet for a time, then he said, ‘She puts on quite a display.’

  ‘Ye
s, she does,’ and Foxie’s voice was low.

  Pagan finished the bottle, reached for the second one. He sipped, coughed, his lungs hurt. ‘I get the uncomfortable feeling this is just a side-show, Foxie. Something she wanted us to see because she knew we’d be in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘For our benefit,’ Foxie said.

  Pagan clutched the beer bottle and turned his face back in the direction of the fire-engine. Our benefit, he thought. Or maybe just mine.

  An elderly man, who stood a few feet away, his forehead covered in small cuts, said to nobody in particular, ‘It’s that bloody woman, I bet. The one in all the papers. I bet she’s behind this …’

  An overweight girl in blue jeans and sleeveless black top said, ‘Yeah. Does what she bloody well likes, don’t she? And nobody does a fucking thing about her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have happened in my day, tell you,’ the old man said. ‘All this mindless violence. Not in my day.’

  Pagan looked at the tattoo on the girl’s arm. It was a pink heart pierced by an arrow. It was more suggestive of penetration and pain than it was of love.

  10

  LONDON

  Pasco woke in the middle of the afternoon to find the woman standing over him. She handed him a cup of coffee. He sat upright, unsure of his surroundings. The woman was her usual unsmiling self – and yet there was something different about her now, a slight touch of colour in her face, a hint of lipstick. He sipped the coffee. She sat on the bed and looked at his scarred hands.

  Pasco stared at her over the rim of his cup. His hands embarrassed him. Scar tissue that hadn’t healed, creased pinkish areas that resembled skin-grafts badly done. He’d lost several fingernails that had never grown back.

  ‘You had a rough time,’ she said.

  ‘Rough’s one way of saying it.’

  ‘You and Galkin,’ she said. ‘Both of you had it rough.’

  ‘Galkin, yeah,’ he said. He wondered if there were going to be more questions about this Galkin, and he dreaded the idea. What if she raised something James hadn’t covered? Something out of the blue? What would he do then? You couldn’t wing it when it came to this woman. He understood that. You couldn’t spout half-truths and hope for the best. She was all concentration and attention.