Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Martin,’ she said. ‘If you’re listening, forgive me.’

  He’s listening, she thought. He is listening.

  She gazed around the room as if for some small sign of him, a quiet movement perhaps, the shiver of curtains, a cloud crossing the mirror. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. She was sick, deluded by grief. But she sensed her husband anyway, his nearness, the tap of his cane, the awkward way he moved.

  ‘Forgive me for lying to Pagan,’ she said. ‘I was trying to protect you, Martin.’

  19

  LONDON

  Richard Pasco heard footsteps on the stairs. They were light and unhurried. He didn’t know how long the woman had been gone. He’d slept, wandered the house, looked inside rooms – most of which were unfurnished. At one point he’d wondered if she’d simply gone away, abandoned him. Maybe she’d come back when he was sleeping, then left again, he didn’t know. The skylight was dark. He sat on the edge of the bed. His chest ached. The ulcers in his mouth stung.

  The door opened. The woman on the threshold of the room wasn’t the one he expected. She moved toward the bed, stood looking down at him. Her hair was reddish-brown and hung to her shoulders. She was, Pasco thought, a looker, the kind who might take your breath away, the sort you’d turn your head to appreciate on the street. It was a long time since Pasco had felt anything of a sexual nature; that part of his life had been eclipsed. He looked up into her face, saw how light reflected against pink lipstick and glowed in the soft contours of her hair. It was hard to estimate her age. Middle thirties at least, possibly zoning in on forty; she carried time beautifully. Her neck was smooth, and such faint lines as she had on her face seemed to enhance her.

  He concealed his hands in his pockets. The woman smiled at him. It was a sympathetic expression, as if she understood that the disfigurement of his hands embarrassed him. She moved closer to him. He lay very still, waiting for her to speak, but she appeared perfectly content just to watch him. It was strange how comfortable he felt. Her scrutiny of him was a gentle business.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ she said.

  Pasco, who had started to rise, obeyed. He wasn’t sure why he was feeling this contented. With the other woman, he’d moaned and bitched about the urgency of his business, but with this one he felt no such inclination. She emanated a confidence of manner. She appeared to be at peace with herself. She had elegance, not the kind that overwhelmed and intimidated you, the remote kind you saw in fashion magazines, but something understated.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. She was still smiling at him. She raised a hand and pushed a lock of hair back from her face. Then she let the hand fall upon his leg and left it there and Pasco felt a flush of intimacy. He wouldn’t go so far as to pretend she might be interested in him physically, but the touch was nice.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  Pasco’s lips were dry, ‘I guess I’ve been sleeping most of the time. Where’s the other woman?’

  She placed her fingertips on his mouth for silence. ‘She’s gone. It’s my business now.’

  Pasco closed his eyes. Her touch, her proximity, he could lose himself in all this, he could forget his wasted years, he could perhaps even forget the fanatical need for retribution that had so possessed him. He’d settle for this brief illusion of belonging somewhere.

  ‘I’ll take care of it all for you,’ she said. She brought her face very close to his. Her breath was clean and warm.

  ‘I need to go away for a few days,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are certain preparations, Richard.’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ Pasco said.

  ‘I can’t take care of all your business by staying here. And I can’t take you with me this time.’

  ‘But you’ll come back.’

  ‘Of course I will. Then we’ll travel to America together. You didn’t think I’d just go away and not come back, did you? There’s plenty of food in the kitchen. I brought you some books. I also stopped at a pharmacy, got you some painkillers and cough medication.’

  Pasco shook his head. Something ghosted through his mind just then, a quiet shiver of recognition, as if somewhere he’d met this woman before, only he didn’t know where or when. A familiarity, and yet not.

  Pasco felt the woman’s mouth touch his lips lightly a moment. He shut his eyes again. Old longings burned inside him. The darkness was sweet. Her fingertips moved to his lips, parting them slightly. Then he felt her hand go to his groin and he was instantly hard, too many years had passed without love, without sex, without affection. He imagined that if she were to slip her hand inside his fly he’d explode. He was burning.

  He smelled her perfume and it reminded him of something, something in his recent experience – Yes. He had it. The scent was suggestive of crushed raspberries, the death of autumn, the tang in the air of winter. He opened his eyes in surprise.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  She knew she didn’t have much time, that she was already pushing her good fortune, and yet this knowledge charged her with excitement. The need to move, to move rapidly, to get out of this house that was no longer safe. She’d only dressed and changed her appearance for Pasco because she wanted to bring him a moment of quiet arousal, a little flash in the gloom of his life. Call it a gift. She changed her clothes and her make-up quickly, rearranged her hair, then hurried from the house and drove until she came to an all-night cafeteria on the outskirts of London.

  She went inside, bought a cup of coffee, carried it to a table. The big fluorescent room was deserted. On the wall before her was a poster with a photograph and the question Have You Seen This Woman? The photograph depicted a face too harshly lit, creating a misleading impression of gauntness.

  Her attention was distracted by two uniformed cops entering the room. They went to the counter, ordered cups of tea, carried them to a table a few yards from her. They lit cigarettes and sat hunched over their teacups like a couple of tired conspirators.

  She was conscious of one of the cops gazing at her, a beefy man with a trim black beard. She met his eyes briefly, then looked away. She was aware, on the periphery of her vision, that he was rising from his chair and moving in her direction. What was there to see? A plain woman dressed in a cheap dun-coloured lightweight coat, no stockings, a pair of flimsy sandals. Nothing special. She gazed into her coffee just as the policeman’s shadow fell across her table.

  ‘Excuse me, miss.’

  She looked up at him. She ran a hand through her hair, which was pulled back tightly. She knew she had the complexion of a pumice-stone. She adjusted her glasses, which pinched the bridge of her nose.

  ‘You don’t mind me asking if you have any form of identification on you, do you?’ He had a deep pleasant voice. He seemed slightly embarrassed by his question.

  ‘I don’t mind, Sergeant.’

  ‘Constable,’ he said. ‘Constable Graham.’

  ‘Am I suspected of some illegal deed?’ she asked.

  The cop smiled. ‘Nothing like that. We’re looking for somebody.’

  ‘Of course.’ She opened her purse. ‘The woman in the poster,’ and she gestured toward the wall. ‘I follow the news.’

  The constable reached out to take the driver’s licence she offered him. He studied it a few seconds, checking the picture against her face. She wondered if he sensed anything about her, if she emitted some kind of strange vibration – like a tuning-fork – a barely audible buzz that might alert him. But he had no affinity for hidden nuances. He intuited nothing, none of the dangerous fire inside her. He was a policeman ploughing through his daily grind, devoid of insight, and no challenge to her.

  ‘You don’t think I look like her, do you?’ she asked. ‘She’s so … I don’t know, well, glamorous.’

  ‘She’s glamorous all right, Miss Hawkins.’ He handed the licence back. ‘Sorry to have troubled you. We have to check.’

  ‘No trouble,’ she said. She put the licence back in her purse and
shut the clasp. She watched the constable go back to the table where his colleague sat. They finished their tea and went outside.

  A manhunt, she thought. Exhaustive. No stone left unturned. She finished her coffee, set the cup down, gazed through the window across the parking-lot. The police car was driving away.

  She looked round the empty room, watched the cook in his grubby white uniform wipe down a stainless steel grill. Much of her life was spent in places such as this. All-night cafeterias, airless waiting-rooms in railway stations, ferry ports. There was always a sense of time suspended in these places. Lonely travellers, salesmen, hikers with backpacks, odd types who clutched books about Etruscan ruins or bird-guides to the Algarve.

  The anonymity of transient places appealed to her. She could be anyone she liked. Withdrawn and moody, unapproachable, brooding over something too deep to explain. If the whim moved her, she could be mildly gregarious, indulging in the kind of idle gossip people in transit usually shared. Weather, timetables, this hotel or that, a restaurant recommended. It sometimes happened a man would indulge in a slight flirtation with her, and she’d despise the empty chatter and the fake smiles and the way a hand would linger a second too long on her arm. At these times she was conscious of abrupt changes inside herself; it was as if she suddenly lost altitude and something in her head popped and she wasn’t the person she’d been only minutes before. A shifting took place, and she was somebody else. Kristen Hawkins, for example. A dowdy woman in heavy-framed glasses, she projected dullness. She wasn’t the kind who’d attract strangers. The slight downturned set of her lips suggested a lifetime of emotional parsimony. Kristen Hawkins might have given her heart only once, and then to somebody who’d crudely mishandled it, and now she preferred her own company. She wore her disappointment like a brooch.

  Identity was all loose surfaces anyhow. You could slip and stumble on the uncertain shale of identity. Besides, where was it written that you had to be the same person all the time? The tedium, the predictability, the maintenance of a constant self was a chore. She was in a state of permanent flux. Nothing was real. Nothing bolted down. It wasn’t that she acted out roles: she became other people. It was a form of possession. Even her memories, those roots of self, were uncertain things, images seen through clouded glass.

  She found herself thinking for some reason of her parents: how long was it since she’d seen them? Years and years. Were they dead or alive? She didn’t know. She pictured her father, that mad blind ranting bigot; and her mother, a gauzy drunken belle whose face she couldn’t bring to mind, but she could hear the light tinkling voice going on about how things had been better in the old days when servants were never a problem and the blacks knew where their bread was buttered, and how that Luther King fellow had just about wrecked everything, and on, and on.

  She remembered the house, the creepy old mansion where they’d locked her in the basement when she’d misbehaved, and how one time they’d sent her away to some clinic where she’d stayed for three months, for your own good, sweetheart, you understand, don’t you …? The guy in the clinic, Dr Lannigan, had asked her questions, stupid questions, what do you think of your parents, do you love your mother, does your father communicate with you, dumb-ass questions. When he wasn’t asking questions Lannigan was giving her downers and she’d pretend to let him hypnotize her and he’d put his hand under her skirt and play with her clitoris, which she’d enjoyed, even though she had to pretend she wasn’t feeling anything.

  She thought of poor, sad, broken Pasco: yes, yes, she’d be his angel of vengeance, not because she felt any sense of duty or obligation to him – these were moral imperatives, ridiculous concepts – but because the presumptions of the man known as Mallory amused her. The arrogance of the CIA amused her. They thought they could use her and that when they’d done that they’d capture her – like a minor piece in a board-game? Just like that? She smiled at the notion, at the conceit of it. The idea of anyone capturing her – the FBI, Special Branch – it was inconceivable. She felt immune to the dangers around her, the pack that pursued her. She was above them. She soared in other realms. She wasn’t earthbound.

  But it was more—

  There was a delicious symmetry the past sometimes threw into the present, old accidents of fate that turned out years later to have a design that could never have been predicted at the time of their occurrence. Martin Burr and Richard Pasco. That was a perfect example of how these streams of events, simmering quietly away for years in subterranean places, surfaced and conjoined. And then there was Pagan, who wouldn’t let the killer of Martin Burr stray too far away from him. No, Pagan would hunt her, Pagan would chase her to the ends of the world, because he knew no other way. Because, like herself, he couldn’t walk away from unfinished business.

  The CIA and Frank Pagan: two birds, one slingshot.

  She shifted the angle of her face, her attention drawn to a calendar on the wall. It depicted a bright primrose. The colour induced a sudden sharp headache. She shut her eyes, tried to quieten the pain. But there was an erosion inside her, something giving way. She thought of mine shafts collapsing. The yellow of the primrose was burning into her. Even with her eyes shut she retained a vivid impression of the colour.

  She sensed slippage in herself, as if she were tumbling through cracks of identity. Kristen Hawkins. The girl Carlotta who’d been born in a decrepit old plantation house in North Carolina. Other incarnations down the years. Alyssia Baranova, Russian security agent in Venice. Caroline Starling, who’d once dynamited a train ferrying weapons to San Diego. Karen Lamb, the London underground bomber. Carmen Profumo, pastry-chef. An uneasy splintering was going on. She had the strange feeling of racing toward a void where she’d cease to exist entirely.

  The yellow – it reminded her of something unpleasant and painful. She opened her eyes, yes, she had it – the shrink they’d sent her to when she’d been incarcerated briefly in Danbury, the guy with the putty-coloured face and an air of professional sympathy, the way she’d been strapped to a table as if to be made ready for execution, the wires that ran from a box to the sides of her head, the cold feel of petroleum jelly, the plastic disc inserted between tongue and palate – and then, then the hideously stunning jolt of electricity, the rip of current through her skull, the scrambling of images and perceptions, and the pain, the God-awful yellow pain, that cutting serrated yellow pain.

  She rose and went outside. She needed the night air. She walked to her car. The headache passed, the outbreak of panic was over. She stood directly under the big sign that said OPEN 24 HOURS and she thought about Pagan and the trail she’d left for him.

  20

  LONDON

  Number 36 Brondesbury Terrace was a Victorian redbrick house in a cul-de-sac. Foxie parked the car across the street from the front door. Pagan was already climbing out and heading in the direction of the house, which was in darkness. He walked up the path and Foxworth, wondering at Pagan’s lack of stealth, the way he allowed himself to yield to urgency, followed.

  Pagan rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. The house was silent, a dead house, black windows.

  Pagan tried the door handle. Locked. He rang the bell again. Again there was no answer.

  ‘You want to do the honours?’ he asked Foxworth.

  ‘Why not,’ Foxie said. He went back to the car and returned with a tyre-lever and an old oil-stained sheet. He wrapped the tyre-lever inside the sheet and tapped the window a couple of times in a gentle manner and the glass broke. Pagan carefully picked out a few remaining slivers and climbed through the space, and Foxie clambered in behind him.

  ‘Find a light switch,’ Pagan said, stumbling into an item of furniture.

  Foxie fumbled around the room, reached a doorway, flicked a switch. ‘Lo and behold. And there was light.’

  The room they’d entered was airless, stuffy, plainly furnished. No sense of permanence. A place to stay a night or two, nothing more. A convenience. The walls were unadorned, the wallpaper fade
d. The kitchen, which they entered next, contained a few items of cheap Formica furniture, an old gas stove, an antique refrigerator. If houses could be said to reflect the souls of those who inhabited them, this one couldn’t have told you much about its tenant’s personality.

  They left the kitchen, entered what was clearly a sitting-room. Couch, a couple of shabby armchairs, a table, thin curtains hanging at the window.

  On the table lay a paintbox and a tiny sable brush. The paintbox was labelled Photo Technology. Pagan studied the brush, which had been meticulously cleaned, and imagined her sitting in this room, labouring diligently over her warped reworking of Roxanne’s portrait, stroke after fastidious stroke.

  ‘This is the place,’ he said. ‘This is Carlotta’s lair.’

  Carlotta’s lair, the centre of her web. He wondered how long she’d been in this house, how long she’d lived in this part of London – leading, at least superficially, an ordinary life, surrounded by ordinary neighbours, walking the streets, going inside stores, being to all intents and purposes normal, unremarkable – and yet knowing all the time she was running the risk of discovery. He imagined it delighted her. He thought it thrilled her, this domicile in a city where she was sought after by law officers, and her photographs appeared in newspapers. Living on an edge, and loving it.

  They explored the downstairs rooms, ransacked the drawers of a bureau and found nothing of interest. A few bills addressed to Kristen Hawkins, no personal mail. Kristen Hawkins, Pagan thought. Another new alias. Hawkins was close to hawk, but far enough removed that the name wouldn’t jump up at him out of a computer as one of her likely aliases.

  They went upstairs where there were a number of small rooms, most of them unfurnished. In what had obviously been Kristen Hawkins’s bedroom, there was a big double bed with a red velvet quilt, a wardrobe, a dressing-table with an oval mirror.

  The drawers of the dressing-table contained a large arsenal of make-up, lipsticks, powders, dozens of cylinders and small jars of cream and powders. Hairbrushes, eyebrow pencils, several pairs of glasses, bottles of hair colouring preparations, rinses. Inside a small plastic box were contact lenses of different colours: blues, greys, greens. The bottom drawer was stuffed with an assortment of wigs: short, long, black, blond, grey.