As he did so, his whole world was engulfed in flame. He screamed, and woke up, and suddenly felt the pain of his burning arm.
What had been strangely enticing – the beach, the night, and ‘Mr Hillary’s’ fire – suddenly became a hell on earth.
His arm – his whole fucking arm was alight. He tried to beat at it, but all he could do was burn the fingers of his other hand. Every beat seemed to do nothing more than fan the flames. What had they told him, in survival lessons? Drop to the ground, roll, smother the fire the best way you can.
He snatched a towel from the hook beside the oven, and wrapped it around his arm. He could see that his hand was gruesomely burned away ... a five-fingered pattern of bone and blackened ashes. The pain was more than he could bear, and he staggered stiff-legged around the kitchen in a state of shock, his arm still smoking, trying to find some way to come to terms with the most overwhelming agony that he had ever experienced. He had crushed his fingers in a car door once. He had burned his arm, when he was trying to light a reluctant barbecue with gasoline. He had lost a fingernail in a fight with a violent crack dealer. Pain, all pain. But nothing compared to this. He wouldn’t have believed that it was possible for a human being to suffer such pain without dying.
But he wasn’t dead. He was still alive. And he didn’t even realize that he was roaring out loud.
He heard weeping. He heard furious knocking. Then he heard gunshots, and a splintering sound. He heard somebody arguing, wildly arguing, at the top of his voice. The next thing he knew, Patrice Latomba appeared in the kitchen doorway, panting, sweaty, wearing nothing but a grease-stained vest, and jeans.
Patrice looked down at Verna, lying on her back on the floor, her face still smouldering, her body convulsing in pain, her heels juddering against the kitchen floor. Then he turned back to Ralph. His eyes were white and wild.
‘What went down here, man?’
Ralph could do nothing but grin at him, sickly. His pain was misting his eyes with scarlet, and he was right on the point of collapse.
‘What the fuck went down here, man? Where are those guys? Where are those guys?’
‘I – don’t know – they’re –’ Ralph began. Then, in an anguished howl, ‘I didn’t mean to burn her! I don’t know why! I didn’t mean to burn her, for Christ’s sake!’
Patrice waved smoke away from his face. Suddenly, he looked very serious. ‘You burned her?’ he asked. His voice had that terrible coldness of severe shock – a voice that left a taste of oil and metal on the roof of Ralph’s mouth.
‘I didn’t mean to burn her.’
Patrice raised his automatic, stiff-wristed, and fired once. The .45 bullet hit Ralph right on the bridge of his nose, and sprayed his brains all over the kitchen curtains. A flower-basket pattern of beige and bloody red instantly appeared on the window, stencilled at a velocity of 860 feet per second.
Even before Ralph had toppled to the floor, Patrice swivelled around to Verna and shot her in the head, too, one shot, straight into the smoking gristle of her face.
Bertrand appeared in the doorway, and looked around in awe. ‘You killed them both, man. What about the law?’
Patrice’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘No more law, man. No more fucking law. Not on Seaver Street. No more law.’
Bertrand looked down at Verna, and whispered, ‘Mary Mother of God,’ and crossed himself.
Patrice pushed him out of the kitchen and across the hall. ‘No more religion, man and no more law. No more nothing. This is war, man. This is war! You see one pig inside of a mile of here – you see one white face – you see a Jew, or an Arab, or a goddamned Algonquin Indian – you blow them away! You blow them away, man! With my specific permission! Because I’m the law! And what they did here today, that gives me the right!’
Bertrand hefted a nickel-plated .45 automatic out of his red fringed jacket, and fired it into the ceiling. Plaster showered down, and Bertrand brushed off his shoulders, and screamed out, ‘Christmas! Christmas come early!’
Michael was sitting in his study when there was a quiet little knock at the door and Patsy came in. It was mid-afternoon now – they had all lunched well, on chicken pot-pie, and Victor had taken Jason out onto the beach so that they could fly Jason’s new battle kite.
The sunlight brightened and faded, brightened and faded, as clouds passed swiftly over the shoreline. Michael could just see Victor and Jason in the distance, and the red-and-yellow kite whirling and dipping as they tried to get it to fly. The wind was too turbulent today, too much downdraught.
Patsy came up behind him and massaged his shoulder muscles. She said, ‘You’re tense! You haven’t been tense like this for months.’
‘It’s the job, that’s all. Just as soon as we’re done with it, and I’ve collected my pay cheque, it’ll be back to barnacle-zappers, I promise you.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it suits you, a little stress.’
He swung his chair around, and took hold of her, and sat her on his lap, and kissed her. Her hair was tied back in a yellow silk scarf, and she was wearing a short cotton dress, yellow as sunflowers, yellow as paint, yellow as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Her lips tasted of pink lipstick and freshly-sprayed-on perfume. Her large bead bracelet clattered.
When they had finished kissing they looked each other in the eye, searchingly, unembarrassed.
‘You’ve changed,’ she told him, with considerable certainty.
‘Changed? I don’t think so.’
‘No ... I can feel it, you’ve changed. You’re – what can I call it? – deeper.’
‘Deeper? And up until now, I was shallow? You make me sound like a swimming-pool.’
She flicked the tip of his nose with her finger. ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean that you seem much more sure of yourself – much more confident. I get the feeling that – all of a sudden – you know exactly where you’re going.’
He glanced across at the tattered copy of Mushing on the floor beside the couch, and he knew that Patsy was right. He did know where he was going, for the first time in nearly a year, and it wasn’t the magnetic pole with a team of huskies and four cases of Labatt’s.
Ever since Rocky Woods, he had gradually let slip all of his responsibilities as an insurance investigator, and as a husband, too – or even a man. He had tried to pretend that he was capable of being somebody completely different – not just different, but somebody luckier. He should have known that he was never lucky, in the sense that he never got anything for nothing. He had never won a competition or a lottery, he had never even made a profit on a slot-machine.
Even at work, his most inspired investigation had never won him a raise, or even a modest promotion. Take the Hunt case, for example, three and a half years ago. He had discovered that a wealthy Lynnfield wife had been dead before her car had been torched, with her inside it, because there were no smoke inhalation marks around the nose and mouth. Not even the fire department investigators had noticed it. He had saved Plymouth Insurance $1.35 million and won himself a complimentary pat on the back from Joe Garboden, and a thankful memo from Edgar Bedford, and that was all.
But Patsy was right. The John O’Brien investigation had made him deeper. It had made him realize that he was not just an observer, not just a poker-about in the smoking ruins of other people’s lives, but an individual who was capable of changing the way things were, starting with the way he was, himself.
Some of this new-found confidence had come from the hypnotic trances he had experienced ... the beach and the lighthouse and the bony white-faced man. He had the strongest feeling that the man in his trances was real, and that he was the kind of man who could shape the course of history. He was sure that the lighthouse, too, was invested with some momentous significance. The lighthouse may be real or it may be symbolic. But Michael was determined now to find out why it was so significant, and who the man was – and because of his determination, he was beginning to feel stronger.
He
could shape the course of history, too.
Patsy kissed his forehead and ruffled his hair. ‘So what’s this all about?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who were those young men who were hanging out across the street?’
He kissed her back. ‘Oh ... they were nobody.’
‘They must have been somebody.’
Michael swivelled his chair back around again, so that they were both facing his desk. It was strewn with the blown-up black-and-white photographs that Joe had hidden in his magazine. They must have been enlarged to the very limit, because they were grainy and blurred and some of them could have been entered for ‘What Is It?’ contests in the National Enquirer.
‘What are these?’ asked Patsy.
‘You recognize any of them?’
She picked up one of the photographs and frowned at it closely. ‘I don’t know ... where were they taken?’
She was looking at a picture of a fence, shaded by trees. There were several people standing in front of the fence – a woman in a spotted dress, a man in a suit and a sports coat, another woman in a short-sleeved dress, carrying a handbag, another man in a checkered shirt. Behind the fence, however, eight or nine other people were standing, their faces more difficult to distinguish because of the mottled shadow of the trees. On the far right there were three pale-faced young men, all wearing black snapbrim hats, the kind of hats that were popular in the 1960s. All three of them wore dark glasses.
‘Well?’ asked Michael, coaxing her.
She peered very close, until her turned-up nose was almost touching the surface of the photograph. Then she looked up at him and he could see the little grey flecks in her cornflower-blue irises, and the fine, fine hairs of her eyebrows. ‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.’
‘It is them,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘At least, those two are. The one on the right and the one next to him, the one in the middle. I don’t recognize the one on the left.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
She peered at the photograph again, and then nodded.
‘I’m sure. I’m sure. I’m positive. Look at his ears. I mean, he’s not exactly Mr Spock, but almost. It’s not so much that I recognize them individually, but the two of them together ... ‘
Michael kissed her ear, curled her fine blonde hair around his finger. ‘I wanted to mush to the pole,’ he told her. ‘I wanted to leave you and Jason, and fly to northern Greenland, and then sledge the rest of the way. I think I was half-hoping that I’d die of hypothermia. It’s supposed to be peaceful, dying of hypothermia ... especially with all those loyal huskies licking your face as you go to meet the Great Popsicle-Maker in the Sky.’
‘What you wanted, honey-pie, was not to think about reality. And don’t try to make a joke of it. You suffered, after Rocky Woods, and don’t try to pretend that you didn’t, because I suffered right along with you.’
‘I know,’ said Michael, squeezing her hand. ‘But this is reality.’ He tapped the photograph. ‘Those were the men who were waiting around outside; and those were the men who followed Joe when he drove away from here. I mean – I want to have these photographs enhanced on Plymouth’s computer, but I’m ninety-nine per cent convinced of it.’
‘Where was this taken?’ Patsy asked.
‘Are you ready for this? According to Joe’s inscription on the back, it was taken on November 22, 1963, from the east side of Dealey Plaza, Dallas.’
There was a very long pause. Then Patsy looked at the photographs again. ‘But Dealey Plaza, Dallas ... that was where President Kennedy was shot.’
‘That’s correct.’
She thought about that for a moment or two, while Michael watched her. At last she said, ‘But ... how could those men have been there ... in 1963, when they were here today, looking just the same?’
‘That’s what Joe was trying to find out. That’s what I have to find out.’
‘Oh, Michael ... they can’t be the same men. The men I saw were no more than twenty-four or twenty-five ... thirty at a pinch. They would have been babies when Kennedy was assassinated. Anyway ... are you sure these pictures are genuine? They don’t look like any pictures I ever saw before. They didn’t show them on that Kennedy documentary, did they?’
‘No, they didn’t. According to Joe, they were taken by a guy named Jacob Parrot, who owned a music store in Grand Prairie. He was one of the few amateur cameramen at the scene of the assassination who didn’t have his pictures confiscated by the police or the FBI. When he saw that people were having their cameras taken, he wound on the film, took it out, and dropped it into his pocket.
‘Apparently, Jacob Parrot had borrowed the camera from a friend, and he hadn’t set the focus correctly. In most of his pictures, President Kennedy is quite blurred, but the people on the grassy knoll and the fence behind it are in pretty sharp focus. And here they are.’
‘You really believe they’re the same men?’
‘Take a look at this picture.’
Michael handed her a photograph which clearly showed one of the men in dark glasses with a rifle raised to his shoulder. The other man was turning away, one hand lifted against his ear, as if he were trying to shield himself from the blast.
Patsy had only to glance at it before she dropped it back on the desk and said, ‘Yes ... it’s them. It really is. It’s them.’
‘Positive?’
‘No doubt about it. That’s Spock-ears all right. And the other one ... there’s something kind of square about him.
Even if I’d seen a photograph of just one of them, I would have said yes. But the two together? It has to be them.’
Michael gave her another kiss. ‘All I need to know now is – why did Joe leave these pictures here?’
‘To hide them, I guess.’
‘Well, that’s obvious. But why did he need to hide them here? Couldn’t he have hidden them at home, or in the office, or in a bus station locker, or something?’
‘Maybe he knew they were on to him.’
‘All the same
‘Maybe he knew they were on to him and he simply didn’t have the time to hide them anyplace else.’
Michael leafed through the grassy knoll pictures and slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t know ... I hate having these here. These are the kind of photographs that people get killed for.’
‘Why don’t you discuss it with Joe?’
‘With a mobile phone call, that even your kid sister could pick up? You have to be kidding.’
‘You don’t have to mention “Kennedy” specifically. You could always talk vague ... like, “Joe, thanks very much for that interesting file you sent me.” Or, “I really enjoyed seeing those pictures of the kids.” ‘
Michael squeezed her, and laughed. ‘What do you think this is? The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? No ... he’ll be back at the office soon, I’ll call him then.’
Through the window, they could see Victor and Jason walking back to the house. ‘Seriously,’ said Patsy, ‘what are you going to do now? Are you going to call in the police?’
‘Unh-hunh. Not yet. We’ll have to produce a whole lot more evidence than this. Besides, if these guys get wind of the fact that we’re on to them, and that we know who they are, they could very well come after us, too. Look at that guy, what’s-his-name, the one who was going to prove in court that Lee Harvey Oswald had a direct connection with Clay Shaw? David Ferrie, that’s it.
‘David Ferrie “died in mysterious circumstances” before he could take the stand. And so did scores of other people. Anybody who could prove what we can prove ... that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot President Kennedy – didn’t and couldn’t ... and that these men did. These white-faced guys in their hats and their suits and their weird little shades.’
‘Michael ... you’re not going to try to track them down by yourself?’
‘No, Joe and me are going to track them down together ... provided we get a little help from the coroner’s of
fice and the police department.’
Victor came into the study, his eyes watering from the breeze, closely followed by a grinning Jason.
‘Jesus, it’s windy out there!’ he panted.
‘Any luck with the kite?’
‘Nosedive City,’ said Jason, scathingly.
‘That’s the story of my life,’ said Victor. He sat down and took off his glasses. ‘Disappointment at every turn.’
‘Jason, you want to get yourself a Coke?’ Michael suggested.
Jason had already flung himself onto the couch. ‘Oh, I get it. You want to talk adult talk.’
Michael ruffled his hair. ‘I never realized that anyone so astute could ever have sprung from my loins.’
‘Loins? What are loins?’
‘Just get yourself a Coke, okay?’
‘I want to know what loins are.’
‘Loins are genitalia.’
‘Like, your dick, you mean?’
‘Yes, Jason, like your dick.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so? “Loins.” You can just imagine them at school, “Hey, Bradley, put your loins away!” ‘
‘God, thirteen-year-olds,’ said Michael, when Jason had left (without closing the door properly).
But Victor had already picked up the Kennedy photographs, and was sorting through them. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Patsy.
Patsy was tight-lipped. ‘I think it’s really frightening. I think you should hand it all over to the police or the FBI, let them handle it.’
‘I’m not so sure that would be a good idea,’ said Victor.
‘Oh?’
‘Think about it. Joe seems to have found a connection between these men and the killing of President Kennedy. But Joe was also strongly implying that they’re tied in with John O’Brien’s murder, too – which the Boston police are making every conceivable effort to explain away as an accident.’
‘So you’re saying that the police are involved in the killings, too?’
Victor shrugged. ‘Maybe not directly involved. But they’re certainly doing everything they can to cover up the evidence. My advice is that as far as the police are concerned we should tread very, very carefully indeed.’
The Sleepless Page 29
