‘Sarah,’ I said briskly. ‘Is the phone secure? Your end?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’
I bent to the phone, shielding the conversation with my body, paranoid, already. I explained that Grant Wallace was dead. I told him the way it had happened and I said I’d gone to ground. I was about to brief him on Beckermann, and Polly Devlin’s son, when he interrupted.
‘Come back,’ he said, ‘tonight.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
I explained about the FBI watch on international flights. They had my name. My name was on my passport. My new persona, Frances Bevan, would get me as far as the first emigration check. After that, in Wesley’s phrase, I was dead meat. Stollmann grunted and told me to get a pen. Then he dictated a Washington telephone number.
‘The name’s Eddie Cassidy,’ he said, before hanging up. ‘Give me an hour to sort him out.’
I put down the phone, still staring at the name. Stollmann, as ever, was being careful with the extra details. I left the booth and took my bags outside to the cab rank. By the time I got to the front of the queue, it had started to rain. The first three cabs I donated to people behind. The driver of the fourth, at last, was black and more likely, I thought, to turn a blind eye to the next half-hour or so. I got in, struggling with my cases.
‘Pharmacy,’ I mumbled. ‘I need a syringe.’
The driver studied me in the mirror, totally impassive. ‘And after, ma’am?’
‘Silver Spring.’
We drove across the city and up through Rock Creek Park. Three blocks from the Walter Reed Medical Center, we stopped at a parade of shops. The one on the end was a pharmacy. It took me less than a minute to buy a pack of five disposable syringes and a $1.50 box of Bandaids.
Back in the cab, I gave the driver an address. ‘9 Marion Street,’ I said, ‘and I’d like you to wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Not sure. Depends.’
‘You know the rate?’
‘Of course.’
‘OK,’ he shrugged, ‘ma’am.’
We set off again, skirting Silver Spring. I had my jacket off by now, and I was undoing the cuff of the blouse I was wearing underneath. I could see the driver’s eyes in the mirror, flicking up and down, uncertain what to do. National Airport to Silver Spring, I told myself, was a good fare. Add the extra he’d get for waiting and the man was looking at a hundred dollars, probably more. A hundred dollars was serious money. Too serious to risk losing.
We were slowing for lights now. I rolled back the sleeve of the blouse, exposing my forearm. The car stopped and I extracted the needle of the syringe from its tiny plastic scabbard, clenching my fist and massaging the biggest vein I could find. Then I drove the needle into the knotty blue vessel, feeling it slide in, easing the handle of the syringe out, watching it fill with blood. The blood was a deep scarlet, and when the syringe was full, I pulled it out, covering the wound with my thumb, fumbling for a plaster, stemming the trickle of blood. We were off again by now, traffic everywhere, the driver still looking at me in the mirror, big white eyes, slow shakes of the head.
In Marion Street, I told him to turn round and park. Then I wrapped the syringe in a Kleenex and got out.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ I told him, ‘maybe longer.’
‘You paying me now?’
‘No.’
‘You leaving yo’ bags?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’
I set off down the street. McGrath’s red camper was still parked beside the house at the end. I knocked on the door, hearing Nghien running down the hall. When the door opened, he was obviously pleased to see me.
‘Miss Sarah,’ he said.
He let me in, still beaming, leading me straight to McGrath’s bedroom. According to the calculations I’d made in the plane, Cathy wasn’t due until mid-afternoon. With luck, McGrath would be alone. Nghien pushed the door open. McGrath was lying in bed watching television. The room, thank God, was empty. I turned round to thank Nghien, but he’d gone. McGrath was watching me from the bed. He wasn’t smiling.
‘Surprise me,’ he said drily. ‘You’re back for more.’
‘Only one thing.’ I paused. ‘Then I’ll go.’
‘I’ve told you everything I can,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more.’
I smiled at him, drawing up a chair, wondering whether Nghien would be back.
‘All I want is a name.’ I paused, leaning forward. ‘Remember we talked about the dogs? The pit-bulls? Down at Beckermann’s place?’
McGrath’s eyes flicked towards the window. The closest he got to acknowledging the question was a tiny pursing of the lips. I got up quickly, anticipating the tiny lunge he made for the gooseneck, pushing the mouthpiece away, catching his head as it tried to hinge forward. He felt thin and frail. His eyes were an inch from mine.
‘You wanna hurt me,’ he muttered, ‘you’re gonna have to work at it.’
I ignored the gibe, laying him back against the pillows, adjusting the gooseneck so it was beyond his reach. Then I took the little parcel of Kleenex from my bag and began to unwrap it. The sight of the syringe full of blood made McGrath frown. I laid it carefully on the bedside table.
‘Wesley,’ I said carefully, ‘sends his regrets.’
McGrath blinked. He wasn’t slow on the uptake. ‘Where is he?’
‘Downtown. In a hotel. Sick.’
‘And that…’ he indicated the syringe with the merest tilt of his head, ‘is his?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘OK.’ I shrugged, picking up the syringe. ‘So maybe I am. Is that a risk you want to take? Or would you prefer to hear the question first?’
I looked at him a moment, expecting a reply, but he didn’t say a word. He couldn’t take his eyes off the syringe. Every time I moved, he was there with it. I reached across as gently as I could with my free hand and pulled back the sheet. McGrath’s arm lay dead on the crisp white cotton. I began to massage the pale flesh, searching for a vein.
‘I need the name of an owner,’ I said, ‘of Mogul. Remember Mogul? Top dog?’
‘Beckermann owns Mogul.’
‘I know. But where did he get him from? Who owned him before? Before Beckermann took over?’
McGrath looked up at me. He was sweating now. I could smell it. He shook his head. ‘Can’t say,’ he muttered.
I smiled, asking the question again, mopping his forehead with a wipe from the drawer in his bedside cabinet. When he shook his head for the second time, I used another wipe on his forearm.
‘You can’t feel this,’ I said, ‘but it’s best to stick to the rules.’
‘What rules?’
‘Hygiene.’ I paused. ‘Please, listen, I mean it. You have the name. I need the name. No one will know where it’s come from. I’ll be out of your life. Wesley, too. No phone calls. No visits. Nothing. I promise.’
McGrath was staring up at me now, his eyes wild. ‘Have you done it?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Truly.’ I held up the full syringe.
‘Shit…’ he shook his head, side to side. What little colour there’d been in his face had quite disappeared.
I began to lower the syringe again, until it dropped beneath his eyeline. From here on in, he’d have to rely on his imagination. I narrowed my eyes, concentrating on his forearm, hearing his throat clearing, the name stuck somewhere in there, struggling to get out. Priddy, drunk, had told me how important Mogul was. Find the name of the previous owner, he’d implied, and the story starts to unravel. McGrath knew the name. And it was nearly more than his life was worth to pass it on. I looked at him now, my face an inch from his.
‘Ghattan,’ he whispered at last.
I lifted my head. His eyes had closed. ‘Spelling?’ I said.
‘G… H … A…’
I wrote it down. ‘First name?’
‘François.’
‘Thank you.’
I kissed him on the forehead, squeezing his dead arm. Then I stood up, turning on my heel, heading for the door. Outside, in the street, the cab began to back towards me.
I phoned Stollmann’s friend from a hotel near Du Pont Circle. I’d checked on flights out of Dulles Airport and made reservations on two of them in my false name. That way, whatever happened next, I knew there were two empty seats, eastward-bound. The number I had took me directly to Eddie Cassidy, no secretaries, no switchboard.
He was even brisker than Stollmann. ‘Where are you?’
‘Holiday Inn. Rhode Island and Seventeenth.’
‘Go sit in the bar. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
I did what I was told, ordering a plate of ham sandwiches. I was still eating them when Stollmann’s friend arrived. He was wearing a very loud jacket in electric blue. Booze had reddened his face and his hair looked prematurely grey, but the smile seemed genuine enough.
He sat down beside me, waving away the offer of a sandwich.
‘This is kinda complex,’ he began, ‘and somewhat irregular.’ He produced a long, white envelope. On the top left-hand corner, blue script, it said ‘US Customs and Immigration’. He opened the envelope with a perfectly buffed nail and shook the contents on to the table. The first thing I picked up was the British Airways ticket. It had my name on it. Sarah Moreton. I showed it to him, shaking my head.
‘There’s a problem,’ I said. ‘You may have heard.’
‘Yeah.’ He looked at me. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
He hesitated a moment, on the point of asking me a question, then he changed his mind and began to brief me on the arrangements he’d been able to make. I was to take a cab to Dulles Airport. I was to go to a public phone on the concourse and dial a certain number. A colleague of his would come down and collect me. In due course, I would find myself aboard BA 222. Eight hours later, all being well, I’d be home. I stared at him. It sounded absurdly simple, a sleight of hand, a transatlantic conjuring trick.
‘How come,’ I said, ‘it’s so easy?’
Cassidy looked at me for a long time. Then he shook his head, standing up, reluctant to extend the relationship a moment longer.
‘Eric’s a very good friend of mine,’ he muttered, ‘so let’s make sure he fucking survives all this.’
23
We landed at Heathrow at half past seven next morning, bumping down through layer after layer of cloud to a cold, wet dawn. I took the tube into London, sitting beside my cases in a near-empty carriage, reading a copy of that morning’s Sunday Times. One headline announced a seventy per cent pay increase for some captain of industry. Another speculated on the possibility of three million out of work. A secure job, ran the latter story’s opening paragraph, has now become a thing of the past. Some people are frightened, others just resigned. Looking at the occasional face on the platforms heading east – pale, slack, expressionless – that seemed about right.
Back home, at the flat, I piled the post on the television, had a bath and tried to take stock. I’d brought back everything I could – tapes, names, addresses, impressions, detailed notes on individual encounters – and I’d spent half the night on the plane trying to get all this material into some kind of order. The result was a dozen or so pages of squiggly longhand, a day-by-day account of exactly what had happened, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to convert it all into a formal source report; including the all-important ‘field comment’, my own views on the value and implications of what I’d brought back.
One of the joys of working for Stollmann was his obsession with presentation. Whatever you did, however long it took, source reports had to look sensational. Time, therefore, to ask him to find me a decent word processor. The first two calls to the private numbers I’d been using from the States got me nowhere. The numbers rang and rang, but nobody answered. Thinking he might be at work, even on a Sunday, I rang his direct line at Curzon House, but when the connection went through all I got was the unobtainable signal. Puzzled, I phoned the main switchboard, asking for him by name.
‘Who is this, please?’
‘Sarah Moreton.’ I paused. ‘Registry.’
‘A moment, please.’
There was a long silence, then a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. He sounded old and rather distracted, as if I’d interrupted something infinitely more important. ‘You’re after whom?’
‘Eric Stollmann.’
‘Then I’m afraid we can’t help you.’
‘Why not?’
‘He… ah… no longer works here.’
‘Since when?’
‘Last week, I believe.’
‘Has he been transferred?’
‘No, I believe not.’
‘What, then?’
‘Ah… reassigned, I think, would cover it.’
‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘So where is he?’
I waited for an answer but the phone went dead in my ear, and I sat on the sofa for a moment or two, a towel wrapped round my head, wondering what on earth might have happened. On the phone, the times I’d called from the States, Stollmann had sounded even flatter than usual. But reassigned? What in God’s name did that mean?
Late morning, none the wiser, I set out for the hospital. A call to Mark, Wesley’s boyfriend, had drawn yet another blank, but the people at the hospital had told me on the phone that visiting hours were unrestricted, so I went regardless.
St Mary’s Hospital is a big medical complex in West London. Paddington Station lies at one end, and there’s a brand new wing that overlooks the Grand Union Canal. Wesley, according to the admissions clerk, was in Victoria Ward, part of the original hospital.
I arrived just after midday, realizing how nervous I was. My counselling work at Charlie’s had always stopped at the hospital gates. After our clients were diagnosed as having full-blown AIDS and admitted to a hospital or a hospice, other people took over. What would I find? How much difference would a couple of weeks have made?
Victoria Ward was on the first floor, a long, cluttered, neon-lit room with a dozen or so beds. There were nurses in loose green overalls, and a handful of visitors. It was extraordinarily quiet, only the low murmur of bedside conversations, even the big television in the middle turned down to a whisper.
I hesitated for a moment in the corridor, peering in at the rows of beds. Some of them were curtained off, and I began to wonder if I’d chosen a bad moment when I recognized Wesley down the far end. He was occupying a bed by the window, exactly where his mother had described. He was propped up on a bank of pillows, enveloped in a pair of red pyjamas, pointing something out in a newspaper to a visitor sitting beside him. Infinitely more important than anything else was the expression on his face. As far as I could judge, he was smiling.
I walked down the ward, avoiding a traffic jam of drip trolleys. When I got to the foot of the bed, the visitor glanced up. He was younger than Wesley, mid-twenties. Under the tan he looked exhausted. I smiled.
‘Mark?’
He nodded, nudging Wesley. Wesley lowered the paper, the eyes even bigger in the hollowed spaces of his face. When I’d left him, at Dallas/Fort Worth, he’d been thin. Now, he was skeletal.
‘Fuck me,’ he whispered. ‘You’re back.’
Mark made space for me beside the bed. We had tea from a passing trolley. A nurse found a vase for the roses I’d brought. After the chaos of the last week or so, it was an extraordinarily peaceful moment, the weak sunlight puddling on the buffed linoleum, Wesley seemingly back from the dead.
After a while, Wesley told Mark to get his temperature chart from the foot of the bed, and he took me through the story of his last few days, pointing out the peaks and troughs, still shuddering at what little he could remember. At times, he muttered, he’d wanted to give up completely, surfing up and down through semi-consciousness, keen for the whole wretched business to be over. He’d had the sweats again, even worse than las
t time, and diarrhoea, too, so badly that he said he’d been able to feel his insides melting away, the muscles shredding off the bone, yards and yards of viscera just emptying down the pan. One last push, he’d thought, just another minute or two, and I’m gone.
Listening to him go through it again, I realized how much he’d changed. His conversation was slow and halting, the voice weak, and he’d plainly been badly frightened by the whole experience. His mortality had come home to him, a thing of flesh and blood, and the last few days had taught him, above all, that there was absolutely nowhere to hide. Booze wouldn’t do it. Nor any other drug. He’d tried everything else, every mind game he could think of, but nothing had helped. In the end, it was just you and the virus. Endgame.
‘Rough,’ he said at last, ‘fucking grim.’
Later, Mark gone, I told Wesley most of what had happened in the States, day by day, picking up at the point when he’d left me at Dallas/Fort Worth. I told him about my visits to Grant’s place and his death, and I showed him a page or two of the chronology I’d brought back. I described the drive north up to Washington, and I said how thoughtful he’d been to spare me any kind of warning about Jake McGrath. Why hadn’t he mentioned the man’s state of health, for God’s sake? Why hadn’t he told me he was paralysed? At this, Wesley’s eyes rolled towards me.
‘He OK?’ he said.
I blinked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘His state of health.’ I bent towards him, the way you would to a naughty child, someone you loved, someone you had to scold. ‘You should have told me,’ I repeated. ‘It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.’
Wesley was frowning now, trying to concentrate. ‘What?’ he kept saying. ‘Told you what?’
‘His paralysis,’ I explained patiently, ‘the fact that he can’t move. I didn’t know. It would have helped.’
Wesley’s frown deepened. ‘You talking about Grant?’ he said helplessly. ‘Some kind of accident?’
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