Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Pagan said, ‘It’s not a suicide attempt, Foxie. Don’t look so damnably worried.’

  ‘Did I look worried?’ Foxie asked. ‘You’re too interested in survival to think about suicide. You’re much too self-centred, Frank, to think of eliminating yourself.’

  ‘We’ll postpone the character analysis for another time, Foxie. What have you got for me?’

  ‘Stroke of luck, actually. The first airline we checked – she popped right out at us. Kristen Hawkins flew from Heathrow to Washington on American Airlines last night. At roughly the same time we discovered the body of Richard Pasco.’

  ‘Timing,’ Pagan said and weighed the gun in his hand. Washington from Heathrow. A quick hop.

  ‘We only just missed her,’ Foxie said.

  Pagan smiled in an off-centre way. He had in his eye a deliberate light, one Foxworth had seen many times before, a grey determination, an inward focus, as if – having weighed the future – he’d come to the only possible conclusion.

  25

  CAPSICUM, NORTH CAROLINA

  In a Chrysler rented under a false name, Ralph Donovan drove through the town of Capsicum at five o’clock in the afternoon. It wasn’t much of a place. The fastest moving thing in the small town was the lengthening of shadow as the sun descended. Main Street was moribund, a dead-dog thoroughfare where a few stores were open for business, and the others had been vacated and boarded-up.

  A diner called Molly’s, a general store, a barber’s, a filling-station – everything else had gone, although you could still read the signs. Jenn’s Bridal Wear. Frank Saxx, Men’s Clothing. Cutesy’s, Everything Your Pet Could Want. Donovan wondered what kind of lives people led in these doomed places.

  He switched off his air-conditioning, because he worried about the engine overheating – which would mean getting stuck in this butthole burg for hours – and he rolled down his window, allowing his arm to hang outside. The heat was palpable, the air dry as kindling. It was the kind of heat that constituted a personal assault, an insult to your body. People who lived here would surely shrivel. Eyes would dry in sockets, skin peel from bone.

  Donovan left Capsicum and drove three miles on a narrow blacktop whose surface had begun to melt. It was a straight road and it shimmered in front of him, and the sun, glinting with outright malevolence, blinded him. He slipped on his dark glasses.

  When the house came in view he turned into the long driveway. The house, surrounded by thick willows, was an old plantation number that had been allowed to run into a state of fatal disrepair. The stone steps crumbled, the columns were larded with birdshit and smothered in deep red ivy, and a couple of upstairs windows were broken. Not at all a cheerful place. He caught a glimpse of dilapidated shacks out back, old slave quarters surrounded by a forest of weeds. He parked his car at the foot of the steps and got out.

  He wiped sweat from his eyes as he reached the columns. He’d hoped the shadow beyond the columns would provide some respite, but they didn’t. If anything, it was hotter in shade than in direct sun. Maybe heat just got trapped here in the unstirred, heavyweight air. He rang a doorbell and waited.

  Skidelsky had said that only two people lived in the joint – an elderly man in a wheelchair, and his mildly deranged wife. As he waited, Donovan had the feeling he’d stumbled inside the attic of America, the place where everything useless was stored – houses like this, slave shacks, faded newspapers, sepia photographs, maybe even broken-necked banjos. Hey-ho, he thought. The business wasn’t going to take long, provided somebody came to answer the god-damn door. He rang the bell again. Nobody came.

  He decided he’d step inside anyway. Maybe they had ceiling fans, cool air. He found himself in a big gloomy entranceway with open doors on either side. A great staircase swept in a curve to the upper part of the house. He shouted for attention, but still nobody came. He hadn’t expected the place to be empty – it would be a drag to have to come back again.

  ‘Yo-ho,’ he called out. He walked to the foot of the stairs, called again, heard nothing. He moved back across the foyer. The air smelled dusty and clammy. ‘Yo-ho! Anybody home?’

  Finally something could be heard, an odd squeaking sound coming from the depths of a room. Donovan took off his dark glasses, stuck them in the breast-pocket of his shirt. The squeaking came closer. Out of the gloom a shape emerged, an old guy in a hand-propelled wheelchair, fluff of white hair uncombed, strange pink eyes, head tilted stiffly to one side. Skidelsky had said the old guy was blind – or half-blind anyway. But where was the wife? Donovan wondered. He wanted them both in the same room, because it was more convenient that way.

  The wheelchair rattled and came to a stop a few feet in front of Donovan.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ Donovan said. ‘I rang the bell, nobody answered.’

  Saliva dribbled from the old guy’s mouth. The head remained at the same bizarre angle. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know me, I’m just passing,’ Donovan said. ‘Tell you the truth, I got lost. I need directions.’

  ‘Yeah, we all need directions, sonny. Whole god-damn country’s lost.’ The old man’s voice was decidedly strange, a muted sort of trumpeting, sometimes close to a honk. ‘If it ain’t politicians, it’s priests. You a Papist, boy?’

  ‘No, sir. Methodist.’

  ‘Methodist, huh? Can’t say much about the Methodists, except they ain’t Papists. Counts for something, I guess. Where you headed anyway?’

  ‘Raleigh,’ Donovan said. He was surprised by the spleen in the old guy’s tone.

  ‘They got priests in Raleigh, boy. They got RC churches there. Place is damned. This is supposed to be America, right? So what the fuck is Rome doing interfering with us?’

  ‘Rome?’ Donovan asked.

  ‘Papal bull comes from Rome,’ the old guy said. ‘Papal bullshit, you ask me. Hell, priests are everywhere. Black suits, collars, god-damn crucifixes, fucking saints and stigmata. What the hell they doing in America, boy?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Converting us. Or trying to. Catholic creed equals Catholic breed. No condoms. Oh, no, no condoms. Keep your peckers bare and breed like horse-flies. Ask yourself this. You think the Pope don’t jerk off into a lace hankie?’

  ‘Maybe he does,’ Donovan said. Where was the wife, for Christ’s sake? The air in this place stifled him, and there was a faint whiff of urine rising from the old guy’s grey flannel pants.

  ‘Sure he does, jerks off, gets one of his fucking bishops to dispose of the evidence. Don’t tell me otherwise, boy. I got evidence.’ The old guy tapped the side of his nose, a gesture of secrecy. ‘Man can’t get along without a little ejaculation now and then.’

  A woman appeared out of the dimness of things. She was tall and skinny, emaciated even, and she wore a 1940ish satin dress, the kind you saw singers wear in nightclubs in old movies. Her gloves reached her elbows.

  ‘A visitor?’ she asked, and glided toward Donovan.

  ‘I was just asking directions, ma’am.’

  She tipped her face to one side, the gesture of a ruined coquette. ‘And Harry has been ranting at you, has he?’

  ‘Ranting, bullshit,’ said the old guy.

  ‘He was expressing his opinions,’ Donovan said. He wanted to get this over with and be on his way back to Capsicum.

  ‘That’s all he ever does,’ the woman said. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful at one time, Donovan thought. The bone structure of her face was amazing still; but her skin was raddled, stricken and dried by too many Southern summers.

  ‘Boy’s a Methodist,’ said the old guy.

  ‘Well, isn’t that a nice thing to be,’ the woman said.

  ‘Beats the holy shit out of Rome.’

  Donovan smiled, shuffled his feet. The woman had a hand on his arm. ‘It’s so hot, so terribly hot. Can I get you a glass of lemonade? Orange juice? Perhaps something stronger?’

  ‘I’m fine, ma’am, I just want directions to Raleigh,’
Donovan said.

  ‘But you’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘I’m pressed for time,’ Donovan said.

  ‘Rush rush rush,’ said the old guy. ‘The whole goddam world’s heading for cardiac arrest.’

  ‘Which will keep the priests busy administering last rites, I daresay,’ the woman remarked.

  ‘Talk to me about fucking priests!’ the old man said.

  ‘Priests,’ the woman hissed.

  ‘I warn you.’ The old guy turned from his wife and peered unseeingly in Donovan’s direction. ‘My wife has Roman blood in her, boy.’

  ‘I do not,’ she said.

  ‘Your goddam father gave a mountainload of money to that fucking bishop in Raleigh.’

  ‘So what if he did?’

  ‘Treacherous Papist bastard, he was.’

  Donovan had an insight into what it was that bound this weird couple together. It was mutual contempt and madness, assisted by lavish amounts of goading. She goaded him, he goaded her, and they’d goaded each other over the brink of sanity. It was one way of keeping a relationship going, he guessed. He stepped back, shrugged aside the woman’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to be on my way.’

  ‘Oh, dear, do you really?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again. He heard a trickling sound and realized the old guy was pissing himself. He reached down and took from the inside of his right boot an Accu-Tek 9mm pistol. He fired it directly into the old guy’s heart and then turned the weapon on the woman – who’d taken an involuntary step back – and he shot her in the chest. Accuracy was everything. He surveyed the old guy slumped in the wheelchair, looked at the woman where she’d fallen – knees upraised, old-fashioned suspender-belt visible – and then he left the house and walked down the steps to his car.

  He drove back into Capsicum. He parked outside the filling-station and took a small brown-paper bag from the glove-compartment. A kid in dungarees came out of a boxlike wooden structure. He had big hands slick with oil.

  ‘Twenty bucks unleaded,’ Donovan said.

  ‘Passing through?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Sure am.’

  ‘Can’t say as I blame you. Capsicum ain’t much.’ The kid shrugged. You might read a lifetime of nothing in that simple gesture, Donovan thought.

  ‘Where’s the john?’ Donovan asked.

  ‘Out back behind the building. You gotta jiggle the handle a bit, you want it to flush.’

  ‘I’ll jiggle,’ said Donovan. He made his way to the back of the wooden shed and found the washroom – thick with flies, thousands of them. They beat against his face and neck. He flapped them aside as best he could, then he took the lid from the cistern and placed the paper bag just above the waterline, taping it securely against porcelain. He flushed the toilet, watched the cistern fill. The water didn’t come within two inches of the paper bag. Satisfied, Donovan replaced the cistern lid, then walked back out to his car.

  ‘Awright?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Yeah, I jiggled it.’

  ‘Keep saying I’ll get it fixed one of these days,’ said the kid, and took the twenty-dollar bill from Donovan’s hand.

  Donovan got inside the car. He had exactly ten minutes to clear Capsicum. Time enough.

  ‘Go careful,’ said the kid, and smiled.

  ‘You bet.’

  Donovan was beyond the Capsicum town limits within thirty seconds. Ten minutes later he was eight miles away, but he could hear the blast even from that distance.

  26

  LONDON

  It was early evening when Foxworth arrived at the hospice in Colindale on the edge of London. It was a pleasant building, ivy and gentle sandstone – if any kind of place where the terminally ill came to die could be called pleasant. He parked beneath a laurel tree and entered the building, where he was met by a nurse.

  ‘We’d appreciate it if you restricted your visit to fifteen minutes,’ the nurse said. Her complexion was wondrously unblemished, and Foxie – given to romantic rushes – was immediately attracted to her. Her name was Sally, according to her badge. ‘Mr Trotter’s on very strong medication, you understand.’

  ‘I won’t take up too much of his time. I promise.’

  ‘Good. If you’ll follow me …’

  Anywhere, he thought. Just name it. Admiring Sally’s legs, he trailed after her along a corridor. He thought about Pagan, and wondered why Frank hadn’t come with him to this place. He suspected he knew the answer. He’d suspected it from the moment Pagan had ordered him to visit Anthony Trotter, because Frank had said in a misleadingly vague way that he had certain other business to attend to … Yes, Foxworth thought. You have. The jetstream.

  Sally said, ‘You’ll find him alert enough. We spike the morphine with an effective stimulant, you see. The idea here is to die with dignity. To be alert, but not to be in pain.’

  Foxie made a sympathetic sound as Sally opened a door and showed him inside a small room where Anthony Trotter was sitting up in bed and gazing at a TV, which he at once switched off with a remote control. He was frail and practically transparent. His hands were almost fleshless, appendages of bone. He turned his face as Foxie entered. Sally withdrew from the room.

  ‘Ah-hah,’ Trotter said. ‘Fellow from Special Branch. Told me you were coming.’

  Foxie pulled a chair up to the bed.

  Anthony Trotter nodded at the window where a rose-bush pressed against the pane. ‘Couldn’t ask for a better place to kick the bucket. All sweethearts around here. None of that business of waking you up at some ungodly hour for a pill. Civilized, you see.’

  Foxie watched the head of a pink rose, disturbed by a quiet breeze, knock almost cheerfully upon the window. ‘Very civilized,’ he said.

  ‘Do me a favour, would you? Pour me some of that orange juice there. Good fellow.’

  Foxie obliged.

  Trotter sipped through an angular straw. ‘So, laddie. How is Special Branch? Still the same old cesspit of ambition and backbiting, eh? Same old slurry-tank of bad feelings?’

  ‘There are some rivalries,’ Foxie said.

  ‘More than rivalries, I’d say. Fellows there would cut one another’s throats.’ Trotter gazed out at the rosebush.

  Foxie was quiet a second. Death and rose-bushes. Sunlight coloured the old man’s sparse hair. He’d obviously made an effort to comb the few remaining strands across his bald spots. A little attention to appearance at death’s door: Foxie was touched.

  ‘Expect you’re here about Martin.’

  ‘It’s connected with Martin, yes,’ Foxworth said.

  ‘Bad business,’ Trotter said. ‘Very bad. You couldn’t ask for a finer fellow to work under.’ He shook his head, frowned. He finished his orange juice and looked at Foxworth a moment. His blue eyes were lively. ‘Well. You have questions, fire away. Memory’s still functioning, you know. I may be standing on the edge of eternity –’ and here he tapped his skull – ‘compos mentis just the same.’

  Foxie felt like an intruder. This was wrong, this interruption of a dying man’s fragile little world. He hesitated.

  ‘No need to hold your fire, laddie. Ignore my condition and blast away. Ask me anything you like. You’ll get a straight answer.’

  ‘You worked with Martin as his assistant in the Drug Squad, right?’

  ‘Before he was kicked up the ladder, yes.’

  ‘Do you remember ever having heard the name of a man called Richard Pasco?’

  ‘Pasco Pasco. Give me a moment.’ Trotter squeezed his eyes shut. ‘American fellow, yes?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Arrested in Moscow?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘For cocaine smuggling.’ Trotter emitted a ragged laugh. ‘I spent years fighting the people who traffic in cocaine and here I am imbibing it myself on a regular basis. It’s in the cocktail they give you, you see. Morphine and a dash of liquid cocaine. Ironic rather.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

 
; ‘Keeps the head clear. I gather some people consider it a highly controversial treatment. Godsend, if you ask me. Recommend it to anyone in this condition.’

  Foxie leaned a little closer to the bed. ‘Pasco travelled through Heathrow with the cocaine in a suitcase. You remember that?’

  ‘Most certainly do. Martin was very unhappy. But we had instructions to let Pasco slip out of London unmolested by customs officials.’

  ‘These instructions. What do you remember about them?’

  Trotter said, ‘Martin was fuming. I remember that very well. It wasn’t so much an anger directed at the instructions. It seemed to me at the time that it was more of an inner business, as if he were raging at himself. I couldn’t for the life of me think why he would have reason to be angry with himself.’

  ‘Do you recall where these instructions originated?’ Foxie asked.

  ‘Oh. CIA. Definitely. CIA fellow came to us.’

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  Trotter bent his straw and crammed it inside the empty orange juice glass. ‘Do let me ponder that a moment, laddie. Every now and then there’s a hiatus in the old memory cells. I always think of them as vacant rooms in the Replay Hotel.’

  ‘Please. Take your time.’

  Trotter tilted his head back against his pillows. Foxie wondered if he’d need to prod the old fellow along more vigorously. No, be patient. He’d wait for Trotter to remember. Earlier, when Marcia Burr had shown a certain reluctance to talk about her late husband, Foxie had been surprised by the aggression in Pagan’s questions. It was restrained, and Marcia may not have noticed it, but it was evident to Foxie, and it had annoyed him just slightly. Pagan’s impatience often took him in the general direction of discourtesy.

  Trotter snapped his brittle fingers and said, ‘Poole. That was the name. Christopher Poole.’

  Foxie scribbled this in his notebook. ‘Do you think he’s still active?’

  ‘I haven’t kept in touch with that world in recent years. He’d be rather close to retirement, I’d say. I only met him once. Martin wasn’t entirely expansive in his introduction. It was all rather hurried, I remember. He wanted Poole in and out quickly. He acted as if he were embarrassed by the fellow.’