Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  He ran a fingertip round the rim of the glass. ‘The request for Pasco’s free passage came to Burr from a man whose name Marcia doesn’t know, but she believes he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. It sounds to me that what really troubled Martin was the fact he knew Pasco was a fall guy. The drugs were in Pasco’s possession without Pasco’s knowledge. But Martin – and this is totally out of character – swallowed his misgivings and kept his head down. Pasco cleared Heathrow and was pinched in Moscow and shipped off, again according to Marcia, to the icy wastes for years.’

  Foxie, hunched in an attitude of concentration, said, ‘And Martin deleted all this from the computer because it wasn’t something he wanted on his record.’

  ‘If you’re ashamed of something, your natural inclination is to expunge it,’ Pagan said. He thought of the woman: if he’d been in the habit of keeping a diary, would he have mentioned the business with her? Would he have set down on paper his complex physical responses? He seriously doubted it. The idea of some hypothetical future reader was a deterrent.

  Pagan said, ‘Marcia’s understanding is that the CIA wanted to get one of their own out of Russia.’

  ‘She was muddy on that point,’ Foxie said.

  ‘Sure, but it has the ring of truth. The CIA gives the Russians a drug smuggler, a quote unquote capitalist degenerate. In return they get back their own man. Cold War business as usual. People were for barter. Question: where does Carlotta come into this? How did she get involved with Pasco? And who the hell was Pasco anyway? If he was a regular drug smuggler, Martin wouldn’t have bothered his arse about him. He certainly wouldn’t have let the matter haunt him. And he wouldn’t have deleted the record. So was Pasco just some innocent businessman set up for the fall?’

  Foxie drew a hand across his face in a weary manner. Entanglements of the past, he was thinking. The mysteries of history. You could never reconstruct anything precisely as it had happened. ‘Let’s say Pasco wanted revenge, a justifiable desire in the circumstances. He knows how to locate Carlotta. I can’t get a grasp on the mechanics of how he knows that, but he decides to enlist her help. She discovers Burr was involved in the set-up …’ Foxie shrugged. He was circling the delicate notion that what lay between Pagan and the woman was a personal matter. He thought of the computer image, the way she sat on Frank’s bed. ‘And by killing Martin, she pulls you a little deeper into her jetstream, in a manner of speaking.’

  Jetstream, Pagan thought. Turbulence, great disturbances of air. I’ve been in her jetstream too long, Robbie.

  Foxie continued, ‘But Martin wouldn’t be the only one involved. The CIA officer who set up the exchange was another. Perhaps there are others involved in Pasco’s downfall. Are they on her hit list as well?’

  ‘If a hit list exists, they’re on it,’ Pagan said.

  ‘So … what we’re saying is that Carlotta is Pasco’s agent of vengeance.’

  Agent of vengeance. Pagan again struck a match, set fire to a strip of cellophane in the ashtray and watched it burn. Ten years ago a man passes through Heathrow on his way to Moscow unwittingly carrying a generous amount of cocaine. Ten years later, Martin Burr is murdered. All because he’d been involved in the entrapment of an innocent man; because he’d given a helping hand to some devious plan originating within the CIA.

  Ten years. Pasco harbours a grudge year after year. He plots his revenge. The weather in his heart turns ever more bitter by the day – and who could blame him for that? Yet it was revenge at one remove, carried out not by himself, but by the woman – who’d certainly leap at the opportunity to shoot somebody as close to Pagan as Martin Burr.

  Her terrorism was a complex business because it operated on different levels. At the lower end of the spectrum it was designed in a narrow way specifically to hurt him – the theft of the photograph, the intrusion into his apartment, the slaying of Burr; at the far end, her scope was broader, ranging from the bombing of the supermarket to the deaths at the hotel. And yet it wasn’t really complex, not when you analysed it, it was all personal, because the things she did, large or small, touched his life adversely – and now he was being pulled into another of her worlds, one that involved a man called Richard Pasco. Jetstream, he thought. A good choice of word. He was imprisoned by her movements, sucked inside her activities, which was exactly the way she wanted it.

  And maybe, God help him, that was the way he wanted it too.

  He clasped his hands round his drink, squeezed the glass tightly. He raised his face to look at Foxie, and he said, ‘Martin’s assistant in the Drug Squad was a man called Anthony Trotter. It’s possible he might be able to shed a little light on what happened ten years ago.’

  ‘Is he still active?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘It’s easy to check.’ Pagan released his glass and pushed it aside. He rose, stepped out of the pub and into the sunlit street. Late afternoon, and the world was all too bright. Starlings screeched over the rooftops of Soho, reflecting sunlight in black oily flashes that were suggestive of polluted water rippling.

  They went inside Pagan’s office where Pagan made a phone-call to personnel and asked about Trotter. He was informed that Trotter had retired and lived in a nursing-home in Colindale. Pagan scribbled the address and phone number down. As he slid the sheet of paper across the desk toward Foxworth, the phone rang.

  He picked up the receiver and spoke his name. He immediately flicked the switch for the loudspeaker and glanced at Foxworth; the woman’s voice came out of the small beige amplification box.

  ‘Frank,’ she said. She sounded distant. She dragged out the vowel in the middle of his name. Fraaank. Pagan placed a hand to his mouth and bit on the corner of a fingernail.

  ‘Not in a communicative mood, Frank? Don’t want to talk to me?’

  She spoke with an exaggerated Southern accent, Georgia, Alabama. Pagan still didn’t say anything. He wondered who she thought she was today, what role she was enacting, what character she’d become.

  ‘I do believe you’re playing the silence game,’ she said. ‘Are you unhappy with me, Frank? Am I making you miserable? Doncha wanna talk to lil ole me?’

  Pagan stared at the sunlit window. The call was long-distance. He was certain of that much. There was fuzz on the line; the connection had a slight echo. He wondered where she was phoning from. Stick a pin in a map of the world. She could be anywhere.

  ‘Jeez-us, it’s hot here,’ she said. ‘It’s so god-damn hot you wouldn’t believe what I had to do. I had to take off all my clothes and rub my body with ice. Everywhere. Every little corner. Breasts. Stomach. Between my legs. I’m doing it right now, Frank. Even as we speak. God, it feels good. It feels really good …’

  Pagan looked at Foxie, who was sitting with the palms of his hands pressed to the sides of his expressionless face. What was Foxie making of this? What was he thinking?

  She said, ‘It just feels so cold, slippery, wet … Can you imagine it, Frank? Can you see it? Can you feel it?’

  Yes, he thought. I can imagine it. He could see icy water sparkle on skin, rivulets running formlessly the length of her body.

  ‘You know what I wish, Frank? I wish it was you holding the ice. I wish it was your hand. Wouldn’t that be something?’

  He said nothing, wasn’t sure how to respond.

  ‘Say. Are you alone? Is somebody with you? Is that why you can’t speak? Am I embarrassing you, Frank?’ She laughed softly.

  ‘I’m not embarrassed,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a shit what you’re doing to yourself. Ice. Whipped cream. Chocolate sauce. Smear yourself with anything you like. I don’t give a damn.’

  ‘Oooh. Mister Cool. You can’t imagine what a fucking turn-on it is when you talk like that. It gets me off. You wouldn’t believe. Frank Frank Frank. I ever tell you how much I enjoy your name? I just love that name. And Pagan. There’s a name that has all kinds of dark little echoes to it. It has this wonderful rough secretive feel about it. Pay-gan. It feels good in my mouth. It feels
good just saying it.’

  ‘Great. You like my name. That’s terrific.’

  ‘Oh shit. I just dropped the god-damn ice. What the hell. I’ll get some more from the freezer. Gotta go. Gotta keep the fantasy running. Can’t lose the momentum.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  ‘Wait for what, Frank?’

  ‘Talk to me about Pasco. Talk to me about Pasco’s list.’

  ‘Pasco’s list? Very good, Frank. Very good indeed. If you were here right now, I’d give you a special bonus for all your hard investigative labours. I’d fuck your brains out for you. I’d fuck you so you’d never forget it. It wouldn’t be like anything you ever experienced before. Not with anyone. Not even with your wife.’

  He ignored the reference to Roxanne. What was the point in rising to her bait? He needed control, not the dissipation of his energies into anger. ‘There’s just one small problem regarding your generous offer,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I know. A long-distance phone-fuck’s not exactly the real thing, is it?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So if you want to claim your bonus, you’ll just have to find me, won’t you?’

  ‘Right. And since you’re not about to give me your address, why don’t we pass a little time by discussing Pasco’s list?’

  There was a long silence. Pagan thought she’d severed the connection, but he hadn’t heard the click of the receiver going down. The palms of his hands were damp.

  ‘You still there?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure I am.’

  ‘Do we talk or what?’

  ‘Talking’s a bore. I prefer action every time. Don’t you, Frank?’

  ‘Pasco,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we—’

  She interrupted him. ‘This ice is just running all over me, Frank. Running down my tits. Making my nipples hard. Running over my stomach. Down and down – oh, yes – into my cunt. I’d like you to be here, I’d like you to lick me dry. You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? Your head between my legs. Your lips. Your tongue. I can imagine it. I can just imagine you down there. And I’d take your cock in my mouth the way I’m doing with this ice right now. I’d suck your brains out of your head. You have no idea what I’m capable of. This is turning you on, Frank. This is really making you sweat. Don’t deny it.’

  An indeterminate longing rushed to his head and he thought: a phone-job, electronic foreplay, masturbation with a satin glove on. It was tawdry and cheap, and there were numbers you could call twenty-four hours a day right here in London and get the same kind of service, and it would never have crossed his mind in a hundred years to dial any one of them – so why was he getting a buzz out of this? Because it was Carlotta and not an anonymous stranger, because she knew which buttons to push, because she was right when she’d said she could read him like a book. Because she had a way of imbuing her sleaze-speak with a certain authenticity, even a strange erotic elegance. Because he had this bloody disease, this fever, this wretched fault line in his character. I’d fuck you so you’d never forget it. Because because because.

  ‘Pasco,’ he said again.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Pasco,’ she said.

  ‘Listen—’

  ‘You ever visit Washington, Frank?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a very nice hotel I’d recommend. The Madison. You heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Twenty-four-hour room service. I like room service.’

  ‘Is The Madison where you’re calling from?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you? I’m hanging up now, Frank.’

  ‘No, wait, just wait—’

  ‘The ice is melting, Frank.’

  He sat forward in his chair. ‘Let’s talk about Pasco,’ he said again.

  Again she was silent for a long time. There were background noises he couldn’t identify. A door opening, a hinge creaking, he wasn’t certain. ‘Carlotta,’ he said. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘There’s no Carlotta here,’ she answered. And now her accent had completely changed; it was crisp, perfect Home Counties English, almost officious, as if she were a receptionist determined to let nobody pass her desk. She’d slipped from one persona to another seamlessly in that disconcerting way she had; an exchange of souls. ‘You’re speaking to Kristen Hawkins, and Kristen Hawkins isn’t the kind of person who talks to strangers on phones. Kristen Hawkins is a very private individual. A very private individual altogether.’

  The line was dead. Pagan hung on a few more seconds before he replaced the receiver. He swung round in his chair and looked at Foxworth. He wondered what Foxie saw in his expression, if there were any detectable signs of agitation on his face, any indication, however small, that the woman’s words had had an effect on him. Suddenly angry with himself, with the fact that he’d participated for a fraction of time in the fantasy Carlotta had created, he got up and walked to the window and laid his forehead upon the glass and was struck by the urge to break the pane with a quick gesture of his skull, as if this might allow fresh cleansing air to circulate around and through him.

  Foxie said quietly, ‘It’s none of my business.’

  Pagan didn’t turn round. ‘You’re right. It’s none of your business.’

  Pagan watched the sunbathers in the square, patches of reddish human flesh exposed to the sky. He said, ‘I just don’t want you to get the wrong impression, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know what impression you think I have, Frank.’

  ‘It must have sounded to you … I don’t know … as if there was something between her and me. It’s not like that. We’ve never …’

  ‘She was the one doing all the talking,’ Foxie said.

  ‘And I was doing all the listening.’

  ‘Did you have a choice?’

  Pagan wondered about choice, the sloping alleys of motivation and need, those inclines that led you down into darkness and the recognition of a dreadful appetite inside yourself. He turned to look at Foxie, and said, ‘You’re too sympathetic, you know. I ought to be more thankful.’

  Foxie shrugged. He gazed at the blank walls where only lately Carlotta’s photographs had hung. What the hell did it matter to him if Pagan had a weird thing for this woman? Chemistry happened. Contrary feelings rose like sap. It wasn’t something you went looking for. So Pagan had a hard-on for the woman. This wasn’t exactly a revelation. The way he’d studied her photographs, the manic determination of his search for her, his recurring bouts of crankiness and frustration – you didn’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to catch on. But the whole thing was worrying Pagan, it was something he was carrying around inside himself, and he couldn’t shake it free. Foxie wondered: Did he want to? Or was he getting a charge out of it?

  ‘I wish I could explain …’ Pagan said. ‘But I don’t think I’d know where to begin.’

  Foxie shook his head. ‘There’s really no need. Basic biology, Frank.’

  Basic biology, Pagan thought. Foxie had a way with charitable expressions.

  Pagan said, ‘She’s a monster. She kills the way other people blink. I know all that …’ He looked remote all at once. ‘What do you suggest? Therapy? Exile on Elba?’

  Foxie understood that in all the years of their relationship this was probably the closest he’d ever come to Pagan. He’d been ushered into Pagan’s private world and introduced to his devils, and he didn’t know how to behave. ‘Frank. So far as I can see, there’s only one cure. We find her and we lock her away.’

  Pagan thought: lock her away for the rest of her sorry life in black solitary confinement. Deprive her of all human contact. But would that liberate him? He placed a hand on Foxie’s shoulder in a friendly manner.

  ‘Do one small thing for me,’ he said. ‘Get somebody to run a check on the airlines. I don’t know where the hell she was calling from, but it sounded a long way off.’

  ‘Consider it done,’ Foxie said, and he left the room slowly, as if he were reluc
tant to leave Pagan alone with his demons. But you could do nothing about another person’s private demonology; you couldn’t free other people from their own hells.

  Pagan sat motionless at his desk, thinking of the woman’s voice. I’d fuck you so you’d never forget it. Sergeant Whittingham appeared in the doorway, coughed politely to catch Pagan’s attention.

  ‘Don’t mean to disturb, Mr Pagan,’ he said. ‘But this just came for you.’ He was carrying a cardboard box, which he held tentatively. ‘Messenger service.’

  He approached the desk with the box. Pagan saw the label: Alpha Express Delivery.

  ‘You think we should open it or send for the bomb experts?’ the Sergeant asked.

  Pagan said, ‘We’ll open it.’

  ‘Is that wise, Mr Pagan?’

  ‘Wisdom’s overrated,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Just the same—’

  ‘Give me the box, Sergeant.’

  Whittingham did so. Pagan unravelled the tape and stripped off the brown wrapping paper, then looked at the sergeant. ‘If this worries you, Whittingham, you don’t have to stay.’

  ‘No, I’ll stay, Mr Pagan,’ Whittingham said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Whittingham nodded, although he was frowning, a man on the edge of a flinch. Under the wrapping paper was a shoebox. Pagan slowly raised the lid and saw his gun wrapped in pods of plastic packing-material. There was a small handwritten card: You might need this. Happy hunting.

  ‘You see, Sergeant. Nothing to worry about after all.’

  Whittingham said, ‘Will there be anything else, Mr Pagan?’

  ‘No, that’s all.’

  Whittingham stepped out of the office and Pagan looked at the pistol. This was the gun that had killed Martin Burr. He was plummeted back into the hallway of the apartment, hearing again the sound of the gun exploding. Seeing Martin die. He drew the pistol out from the mounds of packing-material and was holding it just as Foxworth came back inside the office.