Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘Jesus,’ says Devlin again, reversing the car in a tight left-hand curve off the road, across a shallow waterlogged ditch and onto soft ground which sucks at the tyres.

  The cart goes past. The hooves fade into the distance.

  The six columns shiver in the rain-soaked rear window. They are set into a raised stone floor around a huge statue, pale against the dark land. A stone face with almond eyes and a square beard looks at me, the cracks in the white marble show as veins on the white eyeballs. Rain runs down his face to his massive shoulders and planes off the arms bent along his legs, rain drips from the palms cupping the giant knees. In front of him is more white marble: a heavy square block with a twisted crown of snakes – or are they thorns? – carved on the front. It must be shadows made by the rain which stain the tabletop.

  I stop rubbing the window.

  ‘What is it?’ says Devlin.

  ‘A ruined temple. A sacrifice table.’

  ‘Really? Well, you’re the expert.’ He doesn’t sound convinced.

  ‘I was good at what I did.’

  He is silent.

  ‘I could have been good,’ I say. ‘If they’d let me.’

  I wind down the window. New gravel encircles the temple; three shallow steps lead up to the dais and the table.

  When I open the door, Devlin reaches across and yanks it shut. I push at it. He grabs my hand with his right hand and punches down the lock with his left.

  ‘Do you have to see every goddamn thing?’ he says. ‘Do you have to touch it?’

  He is leaning across me. I look up at him. His face changes.

  This is the first time he has touched me directly since the night we met. Time enough for me to wonder if my information had been incorrect. Time enough to become irrevocably trapped in that inner circle of rage.

  Even when he was arresting me the next morning, he was careful never to make contact with my skin; he snapped the handcuffs around my wrist with only his fingers on the metal, cuffing my hands in front. He held the chain between the cuffs as he led me out of the palazzo to the motorboat. At the time I thought it was to humiliate me, to show me off – the prize – in front of the paparazzi huddled along the Branintini Bridge. The Bridge of Sighs. Later he told me it was to get the front pages, to make the story plausible for Pietr.

  Now I think there was another reason. I am so sure of it that I raise my free hand and place my thumb in the cleft of his lip. He lets go of the lock, grabs my hand as though to knock it away and – he doesn’t move. Rain slices in through the open window, there is mist in the car, the grey light from outside clouds his eyes, rain hits my cheek. He holds my hand, not painfully, not like a jailer. I sway towards him, I can’t believe it, after what he did to me, he can’t believe it, he can do nothing but wait, not trusting me. I don’t trust him either but I want him so badly I am turning to water.

  His phone rings. He lets go, stares at the incoming number.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Mitch.’

  He takes three deep breaths and answers the call.

  Even with the plastic tight against his ear, I sense the dark energy seeping out. I wind up the window. As the smeared glass rises, I see silhouettes in the low swollen grey clouds. They match the faint, malevolent echoes from the phone. I see rabid sky dogs, howling.

  Devlin says, ‘We’re on track. Half an hour. Maybe less.’ Without blinking, his eyes travel down my body. There is nothing sexual about it; maybe he is looking for weapons. He looks at me the way a vivisectionist examines the body on the slab. It happens every time he talks to Mitch.

  ‘She said she was going to cut it but she dyed it blonde,’ he says now. ‘Yeah, as slutty as hers. Pietr is expecting a delicate grieving Audrey Hepburn lookalike and now he’s getting – yeah, damaged goods.’ He stares at me, unblinking. ‘Yes, it is still on. Yes, Mitch, the panel is green. Well, the tech-heads must be screwing up at your end.’ He lifts the receiver slightly away from his ear. More dogs howling. ‘Yes, I’ve still got her passport.’

  He listens then he shifts his gaze, staring out through the windscreen. He puts one hand to the glass as though to push it away and says, ‘I don’t think we can do that, Mitch.’

  He drops his hand. ‘Let me check my diary.’ He covers the receiver and counts silently. ‘That should be all right. I’ll call you from Trepani. But you tell Accounts that the October expenses go in on the first of November. So they should get off their arses and input it.’ He puts the phone away.

  He looks at his watch and takes out his small notebook. He says, writing, ‘If you can’t get your act together, Mitch is coming down.’

  I turn to stare, obviously, over his arm. He stiffens but keeps writing. The day’s hours are listed down the left-hand side of the page; all the ones until now are crossed off. He has an odd way of crossing out: a broad horizontal stroke through the word then a quick nearly vertical slash. It marks the page with little crucifixes. I see 3 pm – Arrival. House. He has crossed out the 3 pm and written 3.30 pm.

  ‘You write like a soldier,’ I say, trying to see what comes next. I hear his quick, furious intake of breath. He hates that I deliver these accurate judgements about him. It makes a mockery of his own files.

  He puts his thumb over the writing below.

  ‘Four o’clock appointment,’ I say. ‘Torture cheeky girls.’

  ‘You think I’m bad,’ he says. ‘Mitch is a thousand times worse.’ He closes the notebook.

  ‘You’re as bad as each other,’ I say, without thinking.

  Either he has taken another sharp breath or he has actually winced. He pushes his mouth into a smile and turns the key. ‘Thanks,’ he says, letting out the handbrake.

  I want to say: I didn’t mean it.

  Instead I say as the car rolls forward, ‘Buckle up.’

  Ribbons of mist stream across the wet brown ground, the scrubby bushes, the black fingers of trees. But nothing is as thick as the strange mist which rings Pietr’s house. ‘It’s too regular.’ I touch the cluster of broken squares which spill down from the hill opposite and read the name beside the fragments. Santa Margherita. ‘So Pietr sits in his house and looks straight across to this Santa Margherita. Through his own personal hedge of mist.’

  ‘I told you,’ says Devlin, ‘it’s a misprint.’

  A gust of wind hits the car and a last fierce spatter of rain. I turn slowly in my seat. Devlin is staring at the road but I know he is watching me out of the corner of his eye, like the hunting scenes on the Assyrian stone tablets I saw in my father’s warehouse. The scenes where the hounds are bringing down the desert leopard. But is it the leopard which looks back over its shoulder, the gleam of white in its eye, or is it the hounds?

  The heating seems almost quiet now. Even though we are on nearly level ground, he has made no attempt to increase the speed.

  I look at him. I see the ridge at the corner of his mouth, the older man ridge, the over-forty ridge, the ridge I see coming in my own face, the moment when the smooth planes begin to fall inwards, the shadows that don’t leave even after a good night’s sleep. The point of no return. Where years passing become years remaining.

  I see the beginning of drinker’s veins around his nose, the grey flecks in his sideburns, the dark stubble on his chin. All those schedules and watches and notebooks can’t stop the inevitable. I think, We’re in the same boat, Devlin. A huge longing swells through me. At first I think it is the old addiction: the lump in my throat, the dark hole growing out from under my heart into my stomach, my lungs, the itch under the skin you can never quite scratch, the constant barking of the black dogs in the sky, the whole world turning to black water. I have immense longing for the instant fix, desperation for the sweet rush of what I always thought was pleasure but which I learned – eventually – was infinite layers of something far more mundane. Or maybe something irreplaceable.

  I lean in. My lips part. I lean further, closer. I almost feel the rough tips of the growing-in beard along his jaw when h
e says, his mouth barely moving, ‘Don’t.’

  I say as soothingly as I can, ‘I was just – ’

  ‘Don’t.’

  I sit back. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I was trying to get my diary.’

  He puts his foot down. The car surges forward. ‘Exactly,’ he says.

  The road passes between two tall stone columns and the start of a stone wall which wraps around the peak. Full-size metal sculptures of wolves spring off the columns, their iron hind legs melded to the top.

  The car rolls onto a paved oval dotted with black Mercedes cars. Ahead is an archway between long concrete boxes with clear views down the mountain and road. The flat buildings look like garages or storage places or –

  ‘Guardhouses,’ says Devlin.

  A man stands in the archway; he waves at us.

  ‘Trusting,’ I say.

  ‘They’ve probably been watching us all along the coast,’ says Devlin.

  As we creep through, Devlin winds down his window and says, ‘Signor Devlin and Signorina – ’

  But the man does not want to hear. He puts up doughy hands and waves us on.

  We drive through and stop before the shallow steps which rise through three stone terraces to the house on the summit. The sky presses down. Behind and below us, the sea chews at the rocky shore. Around us, the mountain falls sharply away. The paved courtyard ends in thin air, as though we are sitting in clouds.

  The house. In the low light, the structure appears wrapped in gauze threaded with bars of silver. The rain slides down and catches colours reflected from far away, so the house seems to be moving slightly. Steel beams gleam through the gauze like the ribs of the cargo plane that brought me to the deserted airfield outside Palermo.

  The wind buffets the car, the house sways over us.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Devlin. ‘It’s made of glass.’

  Steps rise through a terrace of manicured lawn, the hedges dark black now in the rain. The next terrace has a tennis court on one side, wrought-iron benches and tables on the other, with concrete cylinders where the summer umbrellas would be inserted.

  Beyond are the steps to the last terrace: a massive block of white concrete – or is it marble? – on which sits the house.

  I wind down my window.

  The house is barely a structure to be recognised: a flying galleon made of beaten silver, grey metal and glass. There are windows and partitions and glass spines and soaring roofs at odd angles and even – I blink – some kind of tower.

  The front left of the house begins as a conventional glass box defined by large glass windows set in steel frames, the whole cleanly and geometrically divided. But then the lines distorted, recklessly, crazily, with a supreme confidence I had only ever seen in the most headstrong art. I think, This is a house meant never to be sold.

  Midway, the glass panels jut out at increasingly severe angles to become a series of huge parallel shelves slanting over like spines on some mystical animal’s back. Gradually, the spines folded over to make the beginning of the right-hand section of the house: a giant two-storeys-high extension curved like a snail’s shell and moulded in textured silver metal. The shell reflects the clouds, so that now, under the sullen sky, the whole section is a deep grey.

  ‘Beaten titanium,’ I say. ‘They must have brought it in by helicopter.’

  Devlin says, ‘It’s preposterous.’

  I get out of the car, unaware of the cold.

  ‘It’s Frank Gehry,’ I say. ‘Or one of his disciples.’

  I study the second floor. On the far left, the glass box is covered with a steel lattice: a purer, whiter steel than the silver which gathered across the front of the building until it met the tip of the silver shell on the right. There is a sense of sturdy white walls behind the lattice, of rooms which must look away from the sea, over the plain to Santa Margherita.

  Caught between the silver lattice at its sharpest and the silver shell at its highest is a hexagonal glass tower, delicate and insubstantial until you saw the steel posts behind the broad panes. Its pointed roof is unexpectedly tiled black like a Bavarian castle’s. A black steel staircase curved around the tower to meet a small walkway which ran along the back of the house. In the centre of the walkway is a flag, the material whipping back and forth in the wind.

  Devlin gets out of the car. ‘Polish flag. I pity the fool who has to go up there and change it.’

  ‘What makes you think he wants to change it?’

  Devlin grunts. ‘Where’s the bloody front door?’

  I laugh. ‘Between the glass spines?’ I point at the broad white marble terrace which runs around the house. ‘Maybe a door at the side?’

  ‘Handy to have,’ says Devlin, staring up at the walkway. ‘Shoot your enemies as they flail around trying to get in.’

  ‘It’s aesthetic, Devlin. It’s art. Beautiful things don’t always have to have a function.’

  ‘Like your precious poetry. No purpose.’

  ‘Poetry’s different. Poetry’s a way of talking.’ The silver shell changes colour again, pulsing whiteness, as the dark clouds part briefly and the sky lightens. ‘Besides, I think there is a purpose to this.’

  Devlin takes out his briefcase, slams the door and stands, staring up at the house.

  I wonder whether he wants to open the case, to have a drink. I should know him well enough. But I have an uneasy feeling that I don’t. Files don’t constitute a person. Ashes from a photo can’t resurrect the subject; water is the only substance that regenerates itself after use. I had thought the way he drank that night we met was due to me, to the tenseness of the situation, to the intolerable layers of disguise we were both floundering through. I wonder if the sight of me now makes him want a drink. I don’t think so. Or, not me alone. He is almost convinced of who I am, of how I can be categorised and filed. He is – he was – confident enough not to care what I think if I catch him drinking. But he also doesn’t want to be seen to be doing anything compromising. Anything recorded.

  He looks at my hair. An expression almost of pain crosses his face.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Have that drink. I won’t tell.’

  ‘Charming,’ he says, but his hands tighten on the case.

  ‘Can I get my diary back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Well then, you brought it on yourself.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ He’s fumbling at the lock, so furious that he forgets to key in the combination. He is trying to open it with thumbprint identification only. I should look away. My watching makes it worse. But this wave of anger fascinates me – this heat that flares up from nowhere. It’s so at odds with how he likes to see himself. Calculating. Cold. Unemotional.

  I know you better than you know yourself, Devlin. I am betting on it.

  ‘How did your hair become my fault?’ he says, hitting the identification pad.

  ‘I told you what would happen if you kept taunting me about my brother.’

  He finally remembers the combination, jabs at the keys and wrenches the briefcase open.

  On top of the files is my diary.

  He says, ‘You’ll get that when you start behaving.’

  I make a grab for the diary. He’s faster – I’ve barely moved when he seizes my wrist, forces it down, pins it on top of the pale cover. The metal bracelet cuts into my hand, casts a mossy shadow over the marbled cream cardboard.

  His hand is tightening, definitely a jailer’s this time. His eyes are black, shiny, unreachable. He is waiting for me to retreat but instead I press myself against him. As he feels the full length of my body – as he takes a quick breath but doesn’t move – I say, ‘That’s what you did when we met.’

  He lets go immediately.

  ‘You never fight fair,’ he says and slowly closes the briefcase.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know the half of it,’ I say and pull off the long blonde wig.

  He is stilled by shock
. Loathing rises off him like miasma in a drowned graveyard.

  I throw my head back. The wind is cool against my shaved scalp. I feel raindrops hitting the bare skin like small hard blows. Every blow is sharp and stinging, a welcome pain. The rain runs down my forehead, into my eyes, down my cheeks. I am so relieved to be free of it, all that dead hair. To be rid of at least one disguise.

  ‘Every time you box me in, I hurt myself,’ I say. The rain runs into my mouth, down my throat, through my veins. It cools the burns on my wrist.

  ‘That’s fucking ridiculous,’ he shouts. ‘Like what, that’ll teach me?’

  The rain is in my eyes. He is behind black bars again. ‘No,’ I shout. ‘Because I enjoy it. Because you’ve made me enjoy it.’

  I open the car door, throw the wig onto the back seat. Devlin hasn’t moved. He is rendered beyond stillness with the inability to move.

  I slam the door. ‘I descended black impassive rivers,’ I say, ‘I sensed haulers were no longer guiding me. That’s what I said when you arrested me, Dev. Screaming Redskins had taken them for their targets . . . nailed nude to coloured stakes . . . barbaric trees. It fits. Doesn’t it fit, Dev?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  The front door opens. A stocky man I don’t recognise, dressed in black, comes out and stands on the terrace, in the rain. After a moment of watching us carefully, he puts up a big black umbrella, like a raven putting up its wings.

  Devlin hunches his shoulders. ‘What will Pietr say when he sees you?’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ I shout. ‘I’m your spy, not your play-doll.’

  He has the set, miserable look of a man who loathes every moment of what he is doing. I know that look. My brother had that look.

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ I say. ‘I’ll tell them I made you go.’

  He shakes his head. He can’t think of me as an ally. It’s beyond him. And he can’t walk away. My brother couldn’t either.

  ‘You’re more trapped than I am,’ I say, but he can’t hear me.

  ‘What?’ he shouts.

  At the first terrace, I stop next to a stone lion grimacing in the rain, heavy water drops hanging like icicles from its gaping mouth and its sharp teeth. Black dirt crusts its face.