‘I haven’t heard a thing. But I really don’t think one ought to be going around handing out keys willy-nilly. How do you imagine I would react were I to encounter a total stranger in the hallway, Mr Pagan? Or if I saw somebody I didn’t know letting himself into the house?’
Pagan agreed it was thoughtless of him to give spare keys to other people without first informing her. He said good night to her in a reassuring way, then moved toward the stairs. He climbed slowly, reached the door of his flat, unlocked it. He stepped inside, groping for the lightswitch in the living-room. He flicked it: the overhead light came on. He moved to the centre of the room.
He heard the click of a safety-catch being slipped and the gun was pressed hard against his neck and he couldn’t turn his face to look at the intruder. But he didn’t have to. He knew.
12
LONDON
‘Don’t turn. Don’t move,’ she said.
‘Believe me, I’m not about to,’ he said.
He felt the barrel of the gun thrust against his neck muscle. He sought to give the impression of outward calm, as if having a gun held to his flesh were an everyday event.
‘Your lock’s not worth a shit,’ she said. ‘You ought to have it changed.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ he said, and tried to twist his face round to look at her, but she thrust the gun harder into his skin, pushing at the soft flesh beneath his jaw. He flashed on the idea of raising his arm, swinging it swiftly round at her, or bringing up his elbow and digging it into her flesh, but the prospect of catching her off guard was thin. She’d simply pull the trigger. The End. Roll the credits. He smelled her perfume, an aroma softly suggestive of raspberries.
‘And your friend sitting down there in the parked car – was he intended to be some kind of deterrent? You underestimate me, Frank.’
He wondered briefly how she’d managed to avoid Banforth’s observation, but she had a mystifying way of gliding around obstacles. Her antenna was always active. Maybe Banforth had lost his concentration a moment. Maybe he’d been diverted by the dopers loitering at the edge of the park. Whatever. She’d gone past him unnoticed. He realized too late he should have posted more observers in the neighbourhood, but he hadn’t wanted police presence to be obvious.
‘Now you’re here, what do you intend to steal this time?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I have any more photographs of my late wife for you to deface.’
‘Gee, Frank. Did I make you angry?’
‘What did you expect? Mirth and merriment?’
‘I left a replacement,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t happy with that either. Trespass and theft have a bad effect on me. And your kind of graffiti makes me sick.’
‘Sometimes I don’t like your voice,’ she said. ‘It grates on me. It’s the self-righteous whine that bugs me.’ She pushed the barrel harder into his flesh and he could feel steel bore into him and he thought of the fragility created by an undone safety-catch. A fraction of an inch: eternity.
‘You need a shower and a change of clothes,’ she said. ‘You smell like burnt wood.’
‘I have you to thank for my general appearance,’ he remarked. ‘Nice little number you did on the supermarket. What I don’t understand is why you did it.’
‘Because it was there. Because you’d see it.’
‘One of your smaller spectaculars,’ he said.
‘A little light show, that’s all.’
‘And you arranged it just for me,’ he said. ‘What do you expect? Gratitude?’
‘I enjoy a little appreciation at times.’
‘The only thing I appreciate is that by some freaky miracle nobody was killed.’
‘I wasn’t trying too hard, Frank.’
He was silent, struggling with complex urges, most of which came down in the end to the same problem: how to disarm her. But he didn’t have a chance unless he was in the mood for dying, and he wasn’t. He listened to the hush of the woman’s breath, smelling her scent, feeling the gun bore into him.
He stood motionless, suddenly aware of a ludicrous intimacy, as if somehow the gun created a bizarre link between the woman and himself, a deadly little bridge of steel. And then he was conscious of the movement of her left hand, the free hand, moving against the small of his back even as she still held the gun under his jaw. Her touch startled him.
‘You’re lonely, Frank,’ she said. ‘I think of you and I think of a lonely man.’
‘Don’t let it get you down,’ he remarked.
‘Maybe you’re still in love with your dead wife. Which would be pretty god-damn sick after all this time.’
He said nothing.
‘And you’re uptight. You’re tense.’
She ran her hand under his shirt and laid her palm upon the base of his spine. He closed his eyes and tried to distance himself from this occurrence, tried to concentrate only on the weapon.
‘You’re tense,’ she said. ‘Stress kills. Don’t you know that? When did you last get laid?’
Her fingertips were warm. She moved her hand around to the angle of his hip. ‘When did you last fuck somebody?’
Pagan didn’t answer.
‘Been a while, right?’ she asked. She was rubbing the base of his spine. ‘What do you feel right now?’
‘Revulsion,’ he said.
‘You’re lying. I don’t believe you feel revulsion. The opposite. Definitely the opposite.’
Her warm fingers caressed his skin. He remembered: those long fingers, how they’d impressed him when he’d first met her, how she gestured with them, the expressive way she used them. He had a sense of being stranded in a disturbing place, trapped between potential violence and this forced intimacy.
He had the shifting off-centre sensation of having stepped inside an erotic dream where his will-power was threatened and he could do nothing to prevent the erosion of himself. The impossible angles of a dream, the negation of geometry, the way desires blew up like unexpected storms out of landscapes you would never encounter in a waking state.
‘We had an opportunity once,’ she said. ‘Long time ago.’
‘I was younger then,’ he said. ‘I had less sense.’
‘And less control? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That’s bullshit, Pagan. You know what you want to do to me, don’t you? You want to slip your cock inside me, don’t you? You want me to spread my legs for you, don’t you, babe? You want inside me, you want to know what I’m like, what it would feel like. I’ll tell you this, it would be the most impressive experience of your whole fucking lifetime—’
He opened his eyes and tried to concentrate on anything other than her touch. Impressions of the room – his record collection, a couple of old rock concert posters. But even as he felt humiliated by her touch, by the weapon held to his jaw and his own powerlessness, he realized his body was responding to her. An undeniable warmth spread through him. He forced himself to remember the devastation she’d caused on the underground train. He brought to mind the scene in the hotel dining-room. The hand that touched him was the same one that had placed poison in the food, the same that only this afternoon had concealed an explosive device in a crowded supermarket. Don’t forget those things, keep remembering them. The same hand. The same fingers. You feel nothing. Nothing. Any other response is impossible. Sick.
‘You’re firm, Pagan. You’re in good shape,’ she said. ‘Well-preserved. I’m impressed. You want me to go on, don’t you? You don’t want me to stop. You want me to go further.’
He shook his head. ‘Frankly, I’d prefer it if you pulled the fucking trigger.’
‘I wonder why I don’t believe that.’
She took her hand away from him suddenly. She stepped back. He turned and looked at her. She was smiling at him, but it wasn’t the kind of smile you could easily read – coy, self-assured, triumphant: all these qualities. And loveliness. He could never quite get his head around that fact. She was blackness and light simultaneously, an angel fallen.
; ‘I see through you,’ she said. ‘You’re a window, Pagan. An open book. You’re so easy to read it’s laughable.’
He stared at the gun, her black cotton shirt, the way her hair had been combed back severely from her face and held tight by a clasp, the slight parting of lips. She wore a black beret, black jeans. She was dressed for darkness. He wondered about the nature of desire, the mechanics of arousal, the jarring distinction between the resolve of mind and the impulses of body.
‘One day,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll just close the pages.’
‘What’s stopping you?’ he asked. He was breathless. He considered a lunge, a flying tackle; lethal thoughts.
‘Because we’re bonded, Pagan. Whether you like it or not, there’s this weird link between us.’
‘You’re dreaming,’ he said.
‘I don’t think so. Call it the magnetism of opposites. Everything you stand for, I couldn’t give a shit about. Everything I do, you despise. You imagine law and order. I see chaos. You believe in the sanctity of human life, which I happen to think is pious crap. Reverse images, Pagan. But drawn to each other. Very much so. There’s a deep attraction. Think about it.’
‘I don’t need to think about it.’ He made a dismissive gesture.
‘Of course you don’t. It might upset the balance of your fragile little world. You like to believe things are either black or white, nothing between. You’ve got a job to do, and that defines your life for you. Nimmo tells you to drop everything, concentrate on catching me, nothing else is important. You had a better life when Martin Burr was running the show, didn’t you? Times were good then. Burr gave you scope and freedom. Now you’ve got this idiot little bureaucrat in charge, and he’s not your kind of man at all, is he? He doesn’t trust you, Frank. Doesn’t have faith in you. Doesn’t believe in the old flash of insight, does he? He’s a fucking pencil-pusher.’
He detected in her look a touch of malice: and why not? Her whole presence here was a form of incitement. If you can’t find me, I’ll come to you.
‘When did Burr retire?’ she asked.
‘What difference does that make?’
‘I’m curious.’
‘Two years ago.’
‘What’s he doing with himself now?’
‘Writing his memoirs.’
‘Why not? He had an interesting career. He’s got stories to tell. I hope I get a mention in these memoirs.’
‘Count on it,’ he said.
‘I’d feel slighted if I didn’t.’
Burr, he wondered. Why was she interested in old Martin? He said, ‘You’re running too many risks. You can’t go on for ever. You’ll slip somewhere along the way. You’re bound to.’
‘I can’t imagine a life without risks,’ she replied.
‘You can’t keep riding your luck,’ he said.
‘Is that what you call it? Luck? Luck doesn’t enter into anything I do, babe.’
She raised the gun and pointed it directly at him. ‘I don’t expect you to come chasing downstairs after me.’
‘You’re armed. I’m not.’
‘Smart thinking. I’ll be around. I have this rule. I never quit while I’m having fun.’
‘And this is fun,’ he said.
‘People’s weaknesses are always fun. Especially yours.’
Weaknesses, he thought. That was a mild word. Drawn to each other. This deep attraction. He experienced a chill around his heart. Drawn, attracted. No.
‘Don’t forget. Change your lock.’
He watched her step from the living-room, saw her back to the door, then heard her footsteps on the stairs. He moved quickly to the bedroom, where in a shoebox located under the bed he kept his gun, a Bernardelli.
The box was empty. She’d found the gun and taken it.
He ran toward the stairs, hearing the slam of the street door. He hurried down, stepped outside. There was no sign of her. He walked toward Banforth’s car and opened the door. Banforth was smoking a cigarette and staring at the street with the frozen look of concentration suggestive of a man baffled by a crossword clue.
‘Did you see her?’ Pagan asked.
Banforth shook his head. ‘See her? When?’
‘A minute ago.’
‘Where?’
‘Coming out of my front door, Benny. My front door. About twenty-five yards from here.’
Banforth looked surprised. ‘No bloody way,’ he said. ‘I haven’t taken my eyes off your house.’
‘Nice work,’ he said. ‘She came and she went and you didn’t see a fucking thing.’
Banforth said, ‘If she’d come out your front door, I’d have seen her, Frank.’
Pagan shook his head. ‘So she just vanished into the ether, is that what you’re telling me, Benny?’
‘All I’m saying—’
Pagan went back inside the house and paused in the hallway. He thought: I heard the front door slam when she left and I assumed … He walked past the foot of the stairs to the back door which opened out onto a small patio that was the property of Miss Gabler. But the door was bolted from inside. Therefore she couldn’t have left by the rear exit unless she was bloody Houdini. The question crossed his mind: was she still inside the house? He strolled quietly back down the hall and paused outside Miss Gabler’s door. He knocked gently and Miss Gabler appeared in the slit of the doorway.
‘Are you checking on me again, Mr Pagan?’ she asked.
He said, ‘I thought I heard the front door slam and I wondered …’ He couldn’t think of an explanation for having interrupted the old woman.
Miss Gabler shook her head. ‘I was watching TV in my bedroom at the back. A very interesting documentary on lemmings, actually, and why they commit mass suicide. I heard nothing.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Mr Pagan, is something troubling you?’
He shook his head, mumbled something about duty and vigilance, then climbed the stairs to his flat. She comes, she goes, she defies physics. She appears, she dematerializes. He poured himself an Auchentoshan and felt as fragmented as a man who has stepped, not for the first time, on a buried claymore mine.
13
WASHINGTON
The Eastern Seaboard of the United States, like the rest of the country during the long dry summer, was suffering from a drought of biblical proportions. The view from the plane was dismal. Fields usually lush and green were brown and parched. Rivers had dwindled to streams, and streams had evaporated. Water sprinklers that otherwise would have been spraying crops were silent and motionless. Max Skidelsky, face pressed to the window of the aircraft, thought the condition of the landscape symbolic of the nation in general. Everything withered: grapes puckered on vines, turning prematurely to raisins, apples shrivelled and rotted, decaying from within.
He fastened his seat-belt in preparation for landing. He liked the tension of descent, the spooky moment when wheels touched tarmac, the great thrust of engines thrown into reverse. He was first off the plane, first inside the terminal, because he moved a step more briskly than anyone else. He always had. He crossed the arrivals lounge, then he went outside into the furnace of high noon.
The car was waiting for him. He didn’t speak to the driver. He never spoke to drivers. They were of no significance to him, and their conversations invariably concerned basketball, which didn’t interest him.
The car headed toward the city, over which a haze of heat and smog lay. He stepped from the black Cadillac outside a restaurant, hurried under the shade of a green canopy, ignored the doorman and went inside. He turned left, climbed a flight of stairs, entered a private dining-room with smoked-glass windows and maroon linen tablecloths and a basket of breadsticks. Bread was verboten; Skidelsky watched his diet like a man with an implanted calorie-counter.
The man who was already seated at the table acknowledged Skidelsky with a slight motion of his head. He was old and had undergone cosmetic surgery in recent years, but the result was farcical. When he spoke he could barely mo
ve his lips. The corners of his eyes were unnaturally smooth and the flesh across his cheeks had been stretched as tight as a drumskin. He reminded Skidelsky less of a human being and more of an artefact, an electronic creature – like the robotic Abe Lincoln displayed at Disneyland.
‘Sit, Max,’ the old man said.
Skidelsky smiled, sat down.
‘How are you?’ The question was uttered through almost motionless lips. Skidelsky was curious about the effects of cosmetic surgery, the pain of vanity.
‘In good form.’
The old man patted Skidelsky’s wrist. ‘We’ll have a wine, shall we? They have a pleasant Bordeaux here, a Lagrange. Are you familiar with it?’
‘Whatever you prefer,’ Skidelsky said. He knew the wine, but wouldn’t presume to suggest an alternative. The old man liked to think he ran the show. And, for now, he did.
‘I suggest the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, if you have a taste for English cuisine.’
‘Roast beef is fine.’ He’d skip the Yorkshire pudding. Too heavy.
‘Perhaps some green beans?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Asparagus for starters?’
‘Why not,’ Skidelsky said.
A waiter appeared, took the orders, retreated. The old man snapped a breadstick in two and placed one half in his mouth, and sipped from a glass of mineral water. He chewed for a time. He wore a navy and red striped tie and a crisp white shirt.
The waiter brought the asparagus and poured a thimbleful of wine for the old man’s approval, which was duly given. Skidelsky looked down at the asparagus which lay in a puddle of a yellow substance. He forked one of the spears and raised it to his mouth. He choked it down with an air of determination.
‘Mmmm,’ said the old man. ‘Exquisite.’
Skidelsky, already impatient with his lunch companion, finished his appetizer, laid down his fork and glanced round the room. Gloomy and clubby – a place where old geezers came to dine.
The old man edged his plate aside and drank a little wine. Then, somewhat stiffly, he turned his face to Skidelsky and said, ‘The woman is active again, I see.’
Skidelsky had been waiting for this opening. He pounced at once. He was a leopard when it came to the prey of opportunity. ‘What surprises me is that she hasn’t been caught before now.’
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