Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

  'I don't want you to. It looks like a wedding dress. Rather like the one you filmed.'

  'Filmed?' Paula sat up, trying to free herself. 'What the hell are you up to?'

  'You filmed Anne Hollinger in Crawford's apartment. I've seen the video. In fact, it's over there, I could play it for you. You filmed her in a wedding dress. And you filmed her being raped by those two men.' I held Paula's shoulders as she struggled against me. 'That was a real rape, Paula. She wasn't expecting that.'

  Paula bared her teeth, fingers clawing the shawl from her breasts. I forced her thighs apart with my knees. Raising her hips from the bed, I pulled the pillow from behind her head and rammed it under her buttocks, as if preparing to rape her.

  'All right!' Paula lay back as my hands held her wrists to the headboard, the tattered shawl between us. 'For God's sake, you're making a hell of a meal out of it! Yes, I was at Bobby Crawford's apartment.'

  'I recognized the scar.' I released her arms and sat beside her, brushing the hair from her face. 'And you took the film?'

  'The film took itself. I pressed the button. What does it matter? It was only a game.'

  'Quite a tough one. The two men who burst in – were they part of the script?'

  Paula shook her head, as if I were an obtuse patient querying the treatment she had prescribed. 'Everything was part of the game. Afterwards Anne didn't mind.'

  'I know-I saw the smile. The bravest and strangest smile I've ever seen.'

  Paula searched for her clothes, annoyed with herself for having been ambushed by me. 'Charles, listen to me – I wasn't expecting the rape. If I'd known I wouldn't have taken part. Where did you find the tape?'

  'In the Hollingers' house. It was in Anne's VCR. Did Frank know about the film?'

  'No, thank God. It was three years ago, soon after I came here. I'd always been interested in cine-photography and someone invited me to join a film club. We didn't just talk about films, we went out and made them. Elizabeth Shand put up the money. I hadn't even met Frank.'

  'But you'd met Crawford.' I passed her shoes to Paula as she slipped on the jacket of her trouser suit. 'Was he the pale-skinned man who led the rape?'

  'Yes. The other man was Betty Shand's chauffeur. He spends a lot of time with Crawford.'

  'And the first man she had sex with?'

  'Sonny Gardner – he was one of Anne's boyfriends, so that seemed all right. He nearly had a fight with Crawford afterwards.' Paula sat down and drew me on to the bed beside her. 'Believe me, Charles. I didn't know they would rape her. Crawford's so excitable, he was carried away by it all.'

  'I've seen him with his tennis classes. How long had he been making the films?'

  'He'd just started the club – we were going to make a series of documentaries about life in Estrella de Mar.' Paula watched me massage her bruised wrists. 'No one realized exactly what sort of documentaries he had in mind. He pointed out that sex was one of the main leisure activities here and that we ought to film it taking place, just as we filmed the theatre clubs and the Traviata rehearsals. Anne Hollinger liked a challenge, so she and Sonny volunteered to be first.'

  I wiped the smeared mascara from Paula's cheeks. 'Even so, I'm still surprised.'

  'At me? For God's sake, I was bored stiff. Working at the Clinic all day, and then sitting on the balcony and watching my tights dry. Bobby Crawford made everything seem exciting.'

  'Paula, I understand. How many movies has he shot?'

  'A dozen or so. That was the only one I filmed. The rape scene frightened me.'

  'Why were you wearing a swimsuit-you look as if you're about to join in?'

  'Charles…!' Exasperated with me, Paula lay back against the pillow, scarcely caring whether I approved of her or not. 'I'm a doctor here. Half the people seeing that film were my patients. Crawford had masses of copies made. Taking my clothes off was a way of disguising myself. You were the only one who wasn't fooled. You and Betty Shand – she loved the film.'

  'I bet she did. You didn't help to make any others?'

  'No fear. Crawford was talking about snuff movies. He and the chauffeur, Mahoud, were going to pick up some dim tourist in Fuengirola and bring her to his apartment.'

  'He wouldn't have gone that far. Crawford was turning you on.'

  'You're wrong!' Paula took my hands, like a serious schoolgirl at her first biology class who had glimpsed the realities of the living world. 'Listen to me, Charles. Bobby Crawford is dangerous. He set fire to your car, you know.'

  'Possibly. This fellow Mahoud or Sonny Gardner would have carried it out. The fire wasn't what you think it was. It was a playful gesture, like some off-beat recorded voice on an answer-phone.'

  'A playful gesture?' Paula turned to grimace at my neck. 'And the strangling? How playful was that? He could have killed you.'

  'You think that was Crawford?'

  'Don't you?' Paula shook my arm, as if trying to wake me. 'You're the one playing the dangerous games.'

  'Perhaps you're right about Crawford.' I put my arm around her waist, remembering with affection how we had embraced, and thought of the hands clamped over my throat. 'I assumed it was him, part of the hazing that new recruits go through. He wants to draw me into his world. One thing puzzles me, though, and that is how he got into the apartment. Did he arrive with you?'

  'No! Charles, I wouldn't have left you alone with him. He's too unpredictable.'

  'But when we collided in the bedroom you said something about not playing that game any more. You took for granted it was Crawford.'

  'Of course I did. I assumed he'd let himself in with a spare set of keys. He likes jumping out on people – especially women-coming up behind them and grabbing them in car parks.'

  'I know. I've seen him at it. According to Elizabeth Shand, it keeps you on your toes.' I touched the almost vanished bruise on Paula's lip. 'Is that one of Crawford's little efforts?'

  She lowered her jaw and revolved it in its sockets. 'He came to see me on the night of the Hollinger fire. The idea of all those terrible deaths must have excited him. I had to wrestle him off in the elevator.'

  'But you picked him up from the beach after the speedboat chase? I saw you at his apartment the next day, bandaging his arm.'

  'Charles…' Paula hid her face in her hands, and then smiled at me with an effort. 'He's a powerful figure, it's not easy to say no to him. If you've once been involved with him you find that he can draw on you whenever he wants to.'

  'I understand. Could he have started the Hollinger fire?'

  'He might have done. One thing leads so quickly to another – he can't control his imagination. There'll be other fires like your car and that speedboat, and more people will be killed.'

  'I doubt it, Paula.' I stepped on to the balcony and gazed at the ruined mansion on its hill-top. 'Estrella de Mar is everything to him. The speedboat fire and my car were pranks. The Hollinger deaths were different – someone set out coldly to murder those people. That isn't Crawford's style. Could the Hollingers have been killed in some turf war over drugs? There are silos of cocaine and heroin sitting here.'

  'But all controlled by Bobby Crawford. No other supplier gets a look in. Betty Shand and Mahoud see to it. That's why the heroin here is so pure. People thank Crawford for that-no infections, no accidental overdoses.'

  'So the dealers work for Crawford? That didn't help Bibi Jansen and Anne Hollinger. They ended up in your Clinic.'

  'They were addicted long before Bobby Crawford met them. But for him they'd both have died. He isn't trying to make money from drugs – Betty Shand takes all the profits. Medicinal-quality heroin and cocaine are Crawford's answer to the benzo-diazepines we doctors love so much. He once told me I was putting people under house arrest inside their own heads. For him heroin and cocaine and all these new amphetamines represent freedom, the right to be a crashed-out bar-kook like Bibi Jansen. He resents Sanger for taking her away from the beach, not for having sex with her.'

  'He denies that he did.' />
  'Sanger can't face that side of himself Paula began to remake her lips in the dressing-table mirror, frowning at a still-loose canine under her bruise. 'For some people, even in Estrella de Mar, there are limits.'

  She began to brush her hair with strong, efficient strokes, eyes avoiding me while she mentally prepared for her meeting with Frank. As I watched her through the mirror I had the sense that we were still inside a film, and that everything taking place between us in the bedroom had been prefigured in a master script that Paula had read. She was fond of me, and enjoyed making love, but she was steering me in a direction she had chosen.

  'Frank will be sorry not to see you,' she told me as I carried the case to the door. 'What shall I tell him?'

  'Say that… I'm meeting Bobby Crawford. There's something important he wants to discuss.'

  Paula pondered the stratagem, unsure whether she approved. 'Isn't that a little devious? Frank won't mind you meeting Crawford.'

  'It might trigger something if he thinks I'm trying to take his place. It's a long shot.'

  'All right. But be careful, Charles. You're used to being an observer, and Bobby Crawford likes everyone to take part. You're getting too interested in him. When he sees that he'll swallow you whole.'

  After a moment's reflection she leaned forward and kissed me, lightly enough not to disturb her lipstick, and long enough to leave me thinking of her for an hour after the elevator doors closed behind her.

  18 Cocaine Nights

  The porsche turned into the Calle Oporto, pausing to inspect the sunlight like a shark orientating itself above an unfamiliar sea-bed. I lay back in the Citroen's passenger seat, a copy of the Wall Street Journal over my chest, unnoticed among the dozing taxi-drivers who used the shadow side of the street for their after-lunch siestas. The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.

  Crawford moved the Porsche at walking pace down the street, and stopped to glance at the silent villa. I could see the tendons working in his neck, jaws clenched while his lips mouthed whatever harsh words he had prepared for the psychiatrist. He accelerated sharply, then braked and reversed through the open gates. He stepped on to the unswept gravel and stared at the windows, waiting for Sanger to emerge and confront him.

  But the psychiatrist had abandoned the villa, resettling himself a mile down the coast in one of his bungalows at the Residencia Costasol. I had watched him leave the previous afternoon, sitting with the last of his books in a Range Rover driven by a middle-aged woman-friend. He had closed the gates before leaving, but during the night vandals had jemmied the locks on both the gates and the garage.

  Crawford walked to the roller door, seized the handle and pulled it from the ground, like an installation artist rolling up a hinged metal painting. He strode across the empty garage, avoiding the oil-stains on the concrete floor, and let himself through the kitchen door into the house.

  My eyes turned towards the villa's chimney. For all my belief that Crawford was innocent of the Hollinger murders, I was waiting for the first wisps of smoke to lift into the sky. Frustrated to find that Sanger had evaded him, Crawford would soon work himself into a state of tension that only a quick blaze could assuage. I started the Citroen's engine, ready to swing the car into the drive and block the Porsche's escape. Fire and flame were the signature that Crawford would write once too often across the skies of Estrella de Mar.

  For ten minutes I sat behind my newspaper, almost disappointed not to see smoke billowing from the eaves. Leaving the car, I quietly closed the door and walked across the street to the villa. As I ducked into the garage I heard a shutter open on an upstairs window. I hesitated in the kitchen, listening to Crawford's feet on the floorboards above my head. He was pulling a wardrobe across the room, perhaps adding a last piece of furniture to his bonfire pile.

  I stepped through the kitchen into the hall, its pale walls lit by the sunlight in the garden, once again the Piranesi antechamber where the psychiatrist had felt so at home. The vandals had continued their work inside the house, and aerosol slogans covered the walls and ceilings. On the stairs the paint was still wet, the tiled steps smeared by Crawford's trainers.

  I paused on the upstairs landing, listening to the noise of scraping furniture. The bedrooms were daubed with graffiti, a riot of black and silver whorls, a demented EEG trace searching for a brain. But one room had not been vandalized, the maid's bedroom above the kitchen, where Crawford was easing a heavy Spanish dresser from the wall. Hands gripping the carved oak panels, he forced the castle of polished wood across the floor.

  Lying down in the narrow space behind the dresser, he reached to some inner ledge and retrieved a schoolgirl's diary bound in pink silk. Sitting against the dresser, he held the diary to his chest, smiling with the bitter-sweet regret of a schoolboy lover.

  I watched him as he untied the diary's bow and began to read its pages, fingers playing with the ribbon. He looked up at the little room, eyes lingering on the mantelpiece where a clutter of forgotten objects waited for the dustbin. A signed photograph of a punk rock group was taped to the wall, beside a family of frizzy-haired trolls, a collection of shells and beach stones and a postcard view of Malmo. Crawford stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, running a hand across the stones, and then sat at the dressing-table below the open window.

  'Come in, Charles,' he called out. 'I can hear you thinking. Don't hover out there like a ghost – there's one too many here already 'Crawford?' I stepped into the room, and squeezed past the massive dresser. 'I thought you might be…'

  'Starting a fire? Not today, and not here.' He spoke softly, and seemed almost dreamy and lightheaded, like a child discovering a secret attic. He explored the empty drawers of the dressing-table, lips moving as he described the imaginary objects he had found. 'This was Bibi's room-think of the hundreds of times she stared into this mirror. If you look hard enough you can just see her He began to leaf through the diary, reading the large looping script that rolled across the pink pages.

  'Her moods and hopes book,' Crawford commented. 'She started it while she was living with Sanger. She probably wrote it here. It's a pretty little room.'

  I assumed that he had never visited the house, let alone the bedroom. Concerned for him, I said: 'Why don't you rent the house from Sanger? You could move in.'

  'I'd like to, but why be mawkish?' Crawford closed the diary and pushed it away. A narrow servant's bed stood against the wall, stripped of everything but its mattress. He lay down, broad shoulders almost wider than the headboard. 'Not exactly comfortable, but at least they wouldn't have had sex here. So, Charles, you thought I was going to burn the place down?'

  'It did occur to me.' I stared at him through the dressing-table mirror, noticing that his features were almost perfectly symmetrical, as if his face's asymmetric twin was hiding somewhere behind his eyes. 'You set fire to the speedboat and my car. Why not this place-or the Hollinger house?'

  'Charles…' Crawford clasped his hands behind his head, deliberately revealing the surgical plaster on his forearm. He watched me in his level but friendly way, eager to help me over a minor difficulty. 'The speedboat, yes. I have to keep the troops in good heart, it's a constant worry. A spectacular fire touches something deep inside us. I'm sorry about the car; Mahoud misheard me and took off on his own. But the Hollinger house? Absolutely not, for one very good reason.'

  'Bibi Jansen?'

  'Not exactly, but in a way.' He left the bed and riffled through the diary, trying to restock his memories of the dead young woman. 'Let's say a very personal way 'You knew she was pregnant?'

  'Of course.'

  'Were you the child's father?'

  Crawford paced around the room, carefully leaving a handprint on the dusty mirror. 'Perhaps she'll see that the nex
t time she looks out… Charles, it was scarcely a child. No brain or nervous system, no personality. Not much more than a parcel of genetic tissue counting to a hundred. Not really a child.'

  'But it felt like a child?'

  He pocketed the diary, took a last look at the room and stepped past me. 'It still does.'

  I followed him to the staircase, past the airless bedrooms with their graffiti and stink of paint. I accepted Crawford's word that he was not responsible for the Hollinger fire, and felt curiously relieved. For all his restless swerves and undirected energy, there was no trace of malice about him, no hint of the dark, lurking violence found in the kind of psychopath who had planned to kill the Hollingers. If anything, there was an artless strain in him, an almost earnest need to please.

  'Time to go, Charles. Do you need a lift?' He noticed the Citroen across the street. 'No – you were waiting for me here. How did you know I was coming?'

  'Just a guess. Sanger moved out yesterday afternoon. First the graffiti, then the…'

  'Torch? You underestimate me, Charles. I hope I'm a force for good in Estrella de Mar. Here's an idea – we'll go for a drive along the coast. There's something I want you to see. You'll be able to write about it.'

  'Crawford, I have to-'

  'Come on… Just give me half an hour.' He took my arm and almost frog-marched me towards the Porsche. 'You need cheering up, Charles. I see a kind of lingering malaise coming over you – beach fatigue, pretty much endemic to the Costas. Fall into the clutches of Paula Hamilton and you'll be brain-dead before you can reach your next gin and tonic. Now, you drive.'

  'This car? I'm not sure…'

  'Of course! It's a puppy in wolf's clothing. It only bites out of enthusiasm. Hold the wheel like a leash and say "sit".'

  I guessed that he had seen me in the Citroen when he first arrived, and that a spin at the controls of the Porsche was a gentle revenge. He watched me encouragingly as I eased myself into the driver's seat. I started the engine, missed the forward gears and propelled the car towards the garage door. I braked in a swirl of litter, hunted the gearbox again and eased the over-eager car down the drive.