Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

  Eric was sitting mournfully by the window when I got in. He looked up, blinking like one of those ponies that used to work down pits.

  ‘I saw her a minute ago,’ he said. ‘She came out and kissed that dog. It was disgusting.’

  ‘Everyone to their own taste,’ I said.

  There were times when he annoyed me to the point of murder. It was partly the slow way he spoke, and the cumbersome manner in which he moved. I remembered how I had enjoyed hitting him, and though I had resolved to be as kind to him as I could be, it was always difficult. Bloody difficult. In a sense, he provoked me. His very existence was provocation. I lay down on the bed and took a drink of my watered-down whisky. That was a trick he had picked up only recently. I didn’t say anything. He kept drinking the stuff and adding water to it afterwards. No doubt he thought it the height of cunning.

  He began to whine about how the dog was still alive – the old story.

  I said, ‘For God’s sake shut up and give me some peace.’

  I lay in the darkness thinking about Bella. The Italian widow – perhaps a variety of snake. I imagined her undressed, but somehow the pictures that came were blurred ones. My thoughts had taken an indecent turn. Why, in any case, did I want her so badly? Agnes was always on offer. Perhaps to choose the easiest is the worst possible thing. Perhaps Bella Peluzzi embodied something of a mystery. Widow with dog. Pictures. Perhaps I wanted to puncture, to penetrate, the mystery. Yet when I thought, What the hell do I mean by mystery? it evaporated. And then there was nothing but me and this room and Eric Shootler Billings.

  What a combination.

  2

  On the Friday night Eric found the money in my coat. I had been careless, leaving it there, but somehow I hadn’t anticipated him blundering across it. Earlier I had gone to Bella’s for supper. We had listened to the inevitable records and talked about the RSPCA and found between the talk uncomfortable silences. I knew that she was physically conscious of me and of what I wanted from her and I suspected that in spite of herself she wanted exactly the same thing. But we sat in mutual embarrassment, waiting for something to happen.

  She said, ‘Why have you never married?’

  I said, ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was left waiting at the church. But she never came.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame.’

  She ran her fingers through my hair. She mothered me for a moment. When I looked at her I saw that she was crying. That was a good sign: a red sky in the sexual night. Play on their sympathy and Aladdin’s cave will surely grind open.

  But she got up and walked around the room.

  ‘I had a beautiful wedding,’ she said. ‘How can I tell you how beautiful it was?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘But it turned sour, it went wrong.’

  And then another silence. She was striking a fist into the palm of her other hand. She did this several times.

  ‘Now I am a widow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Was that an invitation?

  ‘What does life mean? What is death?’

  If anything kills sex, it is philosophy. I felt myself subside. She sat down at the other side of the room, half-smiling.

  ‘It is because you can never know how people will turn out,’ she said.

  ‘True,’ I said.

  She turned over the record. She wiped her eyes with a piece of tissue. The music, the loud drumming of voices, filled the room. It was like being in a cathedral. For Christ’s sake, I thought, what’s wrong with her?

  I thought about the bedroom at the end of the hall. I guessed then that it was simply a matter of frustration, that all she needed was a little horseplay and all would be well.

  She didn’t speak until the music had finally stopped.

  ‘How can I be sure that you will not take my Rex away from me?’

  ‘I give my word,’ I said.

  ‘I have had words before,’ she said.

  ‘But not mine,’ I answered.

  ‘Words are always the same.’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  She raised her eyebrows. Her plump hands fluttered about like two bats.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  She sighed for a bit and I wondered, for no reason, if she was frigid. That would have fitted. Her old man occupied only a bitter place in her memory, she didn’t think of him with love in her mind, and when he had been alive he had tortured the dog. Probably the poor bastard had been kept waiting at the door, unfulfilled. Probably he had never crossed the threshold of their marriage. I imagined him (faceless since there wasn’t a photograph) standing in the doorway and gazing down at the plump Bella under the blankets. What had passed between them? What was said and done?

  She sat down beside me on the sofa.

  She said, frowning, ‘You see, I cannot live without my dog. I do not want you to take him from me.’

  I vowed that such a thing would never happen. But that didn’t seem to please her much. Her face was dark and clouded. She was working her plump little fingers together, massaging them, knitting them, as if she were coaxing dough into shape for an oven.

  I took her hand in mine and kissed her gently on the mouth. Her arms went round my neck, drawing me into her face, drawing me closer to her body. I pushed my hands under her blouse. The breasts were firm, the nipples hard. There was a smell, I remember, of garlic and lemon.

  And then she pushed me away and rose from the sofa.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘He is hardly cold yet.’

  ‘Don’t be morbid,’ I said. ‘He’s dead. Does it matter if he’s cold or warm?’

  She said nothing more. She flicked her eyes round the photographs, as if she were again seeking the missing one, the great omission. After a bit I got up and left. She didn’t see me to the door that night. I stood on the cold street for a time, stamping my feet on the pavement, looking this way and that.

  For Christ’s sake, I thought, what was I doing here? I should have packed up and cleared out, should have been long gone from this pitiful street, from the widow, from moaning Eric and his predicament. Yet there I was. Involved. Unintentionally involved in a situation that I didn’t particularly like and that was surely bad for me.

  When I got in Eric was stretched out on the sofa. He looked up and said,

  ‘Where have you been?’

  There was no point in answering him. I lay down on the bed and covered my face with my hands. Between my fingers was the smell of the woman. An intolerable reminder of my frustration.

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ he asked.

  I took off my jacket and yawned. I lit a cigarette and stared at him. Again, the question: Why didn’t I clear out?

  He was gazing at me blindly, his mouth hanging open a little way, his tiny teeth (the size of a child’s milk-teeth) shining with saliva. His eyes were bulging.

  ‘Don’t ask such stupid bloody questions,’ I said.

  ‘I thought we were friends,’ he answered.

  Friends! I turned my face to the wall. Was it possible, barely possible, that he imagined there to be some sort of relationship between us? I undressed and turned off the light and listened to him stumble around the room in the darkness. He collided with an article of furniture and cursed. After a time he went out. He was gone an unusually long time. When he came back I got out of bed and turned on the light – perhaps I was curious to see what he was up to, I don’t know.

  He was standing there with the package containing my money in his hand. We just looked at each other for a time, while I tried to think of how to handle the situation.

  I said, ‘I didn’t think you were a thief, Eric.’

  His face was red. ‘No, I wasn’t going to steal anything – you see, it was an accident.’

  I gripped his wrist and twisted it. The package fell to the floor. I picked it up and threw it on the bed and then I turned to him.

  ‘It isn’t nice, is it, to be caught in the act of
going through someone else’s belongings?’

  He shook his head, very slowly, from side to side.

  For a second, I felt like striking him. But part of me was too exhausted to care. I sat down on the bed and shoved the package under the pillow.

  ‘Did you see what was in it?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot of money,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I might as well tell you the truth,’ I said. ‘I won the money playing roulette. I didn’t want you to know this in case you have any religious objections, but I’m a professional gambler.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asked. ‘Well, that’s interesting. I wouldn’t mind having a job like that.’ He sat down and placed his hands on his knees. He kept staring at me for a while, his jaw slack.

  There was such an open stupidity in his look that I had to turn away. When a man has a stupid expression, generally he will attempt to disguise it – either by smoking a pipe, setting his jaw firmly, narrowing his eyes, or wearing glasses with heavy black frames. But Eric was blissfully unaware of how he looked. Blank and stupid. I turned out the light and got back into bed.

  ‘A professional gambler,’ he mumbled in the dark. ‘I wish I did something like that. It sounds really interesting.’

  But I wasn’t listening to his voice. I was thinking of Bella Peluzzi. I tried to imagine how it would be when she came across. I dreamed of the naked thighs white in the dim light of her bedroom and her arms stretched across the sheets and her hair stranded on the pillow. Her lips would be slightly parted, slightly damp, and the poor light would make her thin moustache seem nothing more than a playful shadow. Or so I dreamed. But is there anything inherently wrong in dreaming such things?

  As a child my fantasy life had been restricted to acts that I couldn’t conceivably have performed in the real world. I mean, some kids dream of playing at Wembley and some even make it – but my fantasies didn’t have the least feasibility. Stemming single-handed an attack of enemy soldiers, dropping from an aeroplane without a parachute, landing on Mars with a cellophane-wrapped Union Jack to plant in the sore, red soil – these were some of my actions.

  But now, dreaming of Bella Peluzzi, the dream had acquired a strong element of actuality. It was within my grasp, it was nothing I couldn’t do.

  3

  I visited her again at midday on the Saturday. She opened the door wearing only a dressing-gown and a nightdress. Her feet were bare. I observed the stunted ugliness of her toes – like trees blasted by a sea wind. Yet, strangely, the more I discovered in her that I didn’t care for, the more I seemed to care. She allowed me to kiss her on the side of her face and then she went into the bathroom to get dressed.

  I waited in the depressing sitting-room. At night the photographs are only just tolerable because electric light reflects from the glass frames and the faces beneath have a tendency to disappear – but in a natural light they can be seen in all their frozen horror. What was it that I didn’t like about them? Was it simply the fact that they existed? No, it couldn’t just be that. Was it then the fact that some of the faces were now dead while the others had changed unrecognisably since the shutter had first nailed them on to film? I was thinking about this when Bella returned.

  She was wearing a pair of slacks that did very little for her figure. She asked me for a cigarette, the first I had ever seen her smoke.

  ‘You come here so often that the neighbours will soon be talking, eh?’ she said.

  ‘Let them talk,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t good that they should have something to talk about.’

  ‘They don’t have anything to talk about though – do they?’ I loaded the question heavily, to make my meaning plain, but she simply spread her hands and shrugged and turned her eyes up to the ceiling.

  She walked up and down the room, puffing on the cigarette without inhaling it. And then she stubbed it in an ashtray.

  ‘My husband used to smoke a hundred cigarettes every day,’ she said. ‘His nerves were bad.’

  I thought about poor Peluzzi. In the circumstances, I almost felt sorry for him. I imagined him trying every night to get her to bed and failing more and more miser-ably with each attempt. No wonder, I thought, he beat hell out of the bloody dog.

  ‘Why don’t you have a photograph of him?’ I asked.

  Without answering, she went out of the room. I could hear her potter around in the kitchen, dishes clacking, water dripping. She came back with a jug of coffee and a plate of ham sandwiches. At least, she fed me. It was small consolation, but I never left her with an empty stomach.

  ‘Since you’ve got the whole of bloody Italy in this room anyway, why isn’t there a picture of your husband?’ I asked.

  Whether it was the noise she made in placing the coffee and cups on the table that prevented her from hearing me properly, or whether it was because she chose to ignore my question, I’m not sure – but she didn’t answer.

  Instead she said, ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Oh, not far away,’ I said.

  ‘Then you do not have to do much travelling to visit me?’

  ‘I always walk,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps I can come and visit you some time,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She poured coffee and gave me a plate with a pile of sandwiches on it.

  While I was eating, I looked at her. She was seated facing me, her legs apart. I noticed the marvellous thickness of her thighs – yet again, yet again – and the way the belly protruded a little, softly, before it dropped down to her crutch. She was opening and closing her mouth on a sandwich. She performed this action in an odd way: first she nibbled round the crust, taking in about an inch at a time; then she bit a small hole in the centre of the sandwich, through which she looked, as if it were the end of a telescope or a keyhole; after that she ate from the hole outwards and seemed to roll each bite around her tongue for a long time before swallowing it. When she was left with only a very small piece of bread she put it on a plate and cut it into six or seven even smaller pieces with a knife. These she put into her mouth one at a time. Then she wiped her hands on a napkin and drank some coffee.

  I had the strong feeling that she had been dissecting the sandwich, as if to analyse its contents. As if, in some very peculiar way, to be sure of what was in it before she digested it.

  I remarked that she had a strange way of eating. But she didn’t comment on it. Instead she said,

  ‘Shall I play a record now?’

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache this morning, if you don’t mind –’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘You left here last night in a very black mood, Edward Carson, didn’t you? I didn’t think you would come again.’

  ‘You’re fatally attractive,’ I said.

  ‘You mean that my bed attracts you. Why don’t you be honest?’

  ‘I’m always honest,’ I said.

  ‘Hah,’ she said. ‘I have still to meet the honest man.’

  Although she said this in a light-hearted sort of fashion, I felt – as I had felt before – that she meant it, that somehow she liked, even enjoyed, the feeling of not being able to place her trust in anyone or anything – except of course her bloody Rex.

  She said, ‘Shall we go and have a look at my dog now? After all, that is really your business in coming here, isn’t it?’

  I followed her into the yard.

  The creature jumped at her as soon as she approached. She went down on her knees and, oblivious of my presence, caressed the dog. She pushed her fingers through the black fur, kissed the ears, tickled the belly. The dog enjoyed it, even if I didn’t. And then she took a piece of paper from her slacks. She opened it and removed a bone which she threw up for the beast to catch. The huge mouth opened and closed like a spring.

  I watched all this with a strange mixture of excitement and nausea. There was something definitely sexual in the way she handled the dog, something that I could feel myself. On the other hand, the scene was basically all wrong.
I should have been receiving these attentions – not the bloody dog.

  She hugged the black head to her chest and whispered,

  ‘Nobody is going to hurt you now.’

  But the dog by this time was more interested in the bone. He gnawed it, chewed it, ground his pointed white teeth into the thick meat until raw blood spurted out.

  Inside the house again we were just passing the bed-room door when on an impulse I caught her by the arm. I forced her against the door and ran my hands across her body. She kissed me with her lips tight shut, her hands against my arms. I tried to turn the handle of the bedroom door, but it wouldn’t open. She was struggling against me. I felt her fingernail in my flesh and a second of sharp pain.

  ‘The door’s locked,’ I said.

  She stepped away from me, smiling triumphantly.

  ‘You take all the bloody precautions, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘I keep it locked,’ she said.

  I followed her into the sitting-room. We finished the rest of the coffee in silence.

  ‘Your face is bleeding, Edward,’ she said.

  I got up and left. It seemed fruitless to stay.

  Some women will play games with a man; like opening flybuttons and fingering tentatively as if the thing were electric and likely to be lethal, but all the time keep themselves buttoned up in a puritanical straitjacket. Others will kiss with their throats open, as if to devour you, but would no more open their thighs than shit on a pavement. The point of these games is simply to demonstrate mastery of the weaker over the stronger. To show that although the male lives in a world where all the power lies, he’s a fumbling helpless bastard when he’s battering his head against a fallen portcullis.

  Was it so with Bella Peluzzi?

  No, no, it couldn’t be. I refused to entertain the possibility. Of all beliefs, surely the belief in the ability of the self to conquer all adverse factors is the most important. I would conquer Bella.

  In the end.

  4