by Nevill, Adam
‘Oleg, like I say, he die of a broken heart. I pay the Moroccans to go and see Oleg and snuff him, but they find his body, under the old church that him and Semyon used for their witchy bullshit. They showed me photos. There was no mistake. Oleg was dead. No pulse.’
Yonah closed his eyes and gasped. A curious shudder passed through his entire body. His one open eye looked terribly bleary now. ‘Strange men, Oleg and Semyon. They see too much. Both of them. The queers. Two of them together, they were looking in other places for a long time to try and see something. They look in afterdeath, to see if it have a face. A face no one should see. But they both see things that send them crazy, or they take too many drugs, who knows? So they take more and more drugs . . . One could not live without the other. The junkie bastards who followed them, down there, they think Oleg and Semyon were prophets. Down there in the old church, the junkies put Oleg under it when he dies. In a . . . in a . . . crypt . . .’ Yonah’s testimony was becoming garbled, confused.
The father thought of the painting in the other room, the picture on Bowles’s wall, the stretched arms of bone outside Rory’s hovel. The connections were unsettling. ‘What did they see? What is this fucking face?’
Yonah’s open eye settled on the father, and widened. ‘Maybe you see this too . . . you would be like them. Maybe you are already . . .’
The father wondered what he should do. He worried he might lose his voice before he could ask more questions. But what questions? And Yonah was delirious with pain and no longer making much sense. The father’s mind was becoming a blank, wiped clean from shooting a man in both knees, and from killing a woman. But he believed some of what Yonah had said, just like he’d believed Murray Bowles and Rory Forrester. He got results in the same way these men had, because he’d used a language they understood. This made him feel absurdly better about the nurse and all of the blood swiping, smearing and staining the floor and rug of the living room.
He thought of the girlfriend with the sock tied tight inside her painted mouth. He needed to check on her. Now! But could not move his feet. If she had heard the names her lover had just confided to him . . . If she had, she would tell others, associates, or the police, whoever arrived here first, and it would be known why he had made a move tonight, and who he was prepared to become a bestial killer for: a child. Had she overheard the names, Oleg Chorny, Semyon Sabinovic? If she’d heard of the connection to this lawyer, this go-between, Oscar Hollow, then the other man who had paid for his daughter would also be warned. They would all know that the father was coming.
She was taken for so much money. Why?
The father clutched his cotton-skinned head to try and still the small explosions inside his skull. His mind offered problems aplenty but no solutions other than . . . what he couldn’t face now. They all had to go. Another woman. As well as Yonah. Two more murders on top of the nurse. Another spree. The police would surely intervene. Both sides of the law would want rid of him.
You go in and you gotta be the only one who comes out alive. But he had not been told about the girlfriend, and the nurse shouldn’t have been on duty. ‘Oh Jesus Christ Almighty.’
The father moved around the room looking for weapons and cameras. The handgun he had removed from Yonah’s jacket in the garage was already inside his rucksack. He had found a third handgun in the master bedroom in a bedside drawer and slipped it inside his bag. He was playing for time, delaying the inevitable.
Back inside the master bedroom he closed the door. The girlfriend had not moved. Her no longer so lovely eyes watched him. He put his fingers to her lips, listened hard. Through the closed door he could hear Yonah moaning, sometimes shouting. But his voice was muffled through the door. The father struggled to recall how loud their voices had been during the exchange about who had taken his daughter.
And, my God, he knew now. He knew. He had the names of the two men who took his daughter. Men apparently deceased. Men paid to snatch his daughter, but then murdered by their own boss. And the lawyer who brokered the deal, he had that name too. He had never been so close. No one had been so close. A loose word from Bowles, then Rory’s sand-blasted face confessing at gunpoint, and now this fat criminal bound on the floor of a mansion. ‘I am justified. I am justified,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Did you hear what was said?’ he asked the girlfriend.
She didn’t understand. He repeated the question twice, then embellished it with, ‘What we discussed? Did you hear the names? You know of these people that were mentioned by your pig?’
She frowned, shook her head vigorously.
The lawyer. He had the lawyer’s name: Oscar Hollow. Yonah had his details, idents, an address: the next move. The father rose from his knees, went back into the living room and removed the gun from the nurse’s hand. She had small hands, silly hands, dead hands.
Yonah sat up and stared at the wet ruin that was the front of his trousers around the knees, the silk now sopping black. The father wiped his forearm across the man’s wet eyes, but the second one was still closed, the first as red as fresh blood. ‘You come here for your daughter, yes. I respect that. You are a man who has been wronged. Oui, oui. You will do anything for your family. It is all we really have, family. Am I not right? My father . . . Are you a man of honour? A man of your word? Your daughter, if she is . . . I can get her back. I make the call. I can do it now. Call the lawyer. He is your only hope. He knows where she was taken. We go straight through him and to the fuck who give us money to take a child. Had I known she was the child of such a man, I would not have let them take her. I have little to do with this snatch. I am just taking the money for the Georgian faggots. You think I can make these things happen? Just me here? I hear things. Know people. Nothing else.’
The father realized the bedroom door was open. He’d left it that way, was slipping now, couldn’t coordinate so much inside his head. ‘Shit.’ If she hadn’t heard Yonah before, then what had she just heard? Though Yonah had only just mentioned Oleg and a lawyer, he thought, but couldn’t fully remember.
The father went and closed the door of the master bedroom without going back inside. Yonah’s voice followed him. ‘The lawyer. We call him now, yes? Yes. Come. We tell him the deal is off. I buy her back tonight. If she is alive, you will have your daughter in one day. What you say?’
‘The number. The address.’
‘I do it for you . . . In my office.’ Yonah paused in his frantic monologue to wince and shudder white from the fresh onset of agony inside his devastated legs. ‘My office . . .’ The sweat-covered head nodded at the hallway before the front door. ‘There is a safe.’
A ringtone trilled again from somewhere inside the house.
‘Marie! Marie!’ the old man called from his room.
Yonah’s face screwed up. He wiped again at the cold sweat that pulsed from under his hair. ‘No! I cannot move. My legs. Don’t touch me. Please.’
Hands under the man’s sopping armpits, the father dragged him quickly across the floor, out of the living room, and across the hall. ‘Which room?’
Yonah was breathing heavily, his good eye had shut again. Drool had made an appearance at the sides of his mouth. The man was in hell. His legs had left draglines right through the house. ‘This door,’ he whispered.
‘This one? This one!’
‘Non. This . . .’
By the time the father backed him into the office Yonah had passed out. He knelt beside the man and slapped his cheeks. Pulled out a bottle of water that bumped against the weight of so many handguns inside the rucksack, and doused the man’s head and face in water. Slapped him again. Yonah did not respond with anything but the vague movement of his bottom lip.
‘Christ.’ The father laid him on the ground. The lawyer, the lawyer’s name was Oscar Hollow. It might be enough. His eyes flitted about the room looking for a safe, and saw the shrine. Squinting, he moved closer. Took it all in, then looked away.
On the wall of the office the screen pinged with an incomi
ng call. Deeper inside the house another screen trilled. A third beeped from inside the kitchen. The house was being besieged by requests for contact, for signs of life, and at such an early hour of the morning. The sounds grew and swelled in urgency. The chirrups and bells pinpricked the father’s sparking nerves. He needed to leave and fast. A two-mile walk to the car through the rain-doused darkness awaited.
From the distance the elderly man called for Marie again. In his mind the father saw the heavy-set nurse running sideways through the lounge, near-gibbering with fear, firing a gun wildly into the walls of the devil’s palace. He imagined men rushing through the night too, coming to the house, holding black guns inside the unlit interiors of fast, expensive cars; all of them ready and able to smash vertebrae with hammers and electrocute testicles until they’d been cindered to olive pips, but only as a prelude to lopping through a neck with an oily machete.
The father stepped away from the unconscious figure on the floor. Withdrew his handgun from the side pocket of his trousers.
The closed eyelids made Yonah Abergil look dopey. Thick lips and a double chin gave him the appearance of being harmless and too ordinary for depravity.
He has to go.
The father squatted three feet clear and aimed the pistol at the man’s faintly pulsing temple. Closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.
EIGHTEEN
Back inside his shabby room at the guest house, the father stood upright and naked, his wet and soiled clothes strewn about his feet. In the age-speckled glass of the dresser mirror, he looked like a half-starved torture victim, superimposed onto an old page of history. But as he assessed the damage sustained in his retreat from Abergil’s villa, he made sure not to look at his own face, the face of a killer that had its daughter’s eyes.
After he’d dropped from the main gate of Yonah’s villa, he’d seen distant white headlights shining across the black fields, no more than a mile away. If those had been reinforcements, he’d escaped with minutes to spare.
Nor would he ever learn how assistance had been summoned to Yonah’s house: a panic button depressed by the nurse before he shot her, the failure to raise an answer from the incoming calls, an offsite detection through hidden cameras on the property? And as he staggered from the property the father had wondered whether those rushing into the breach after midnight were private security personnel or Kings. Home owners were permitted to use deadly force against intruders; it was close to the most popular policy introduced by the first emergency government, eight years earlier. A fear of which he’d carried on every move, churning like an unstable gas inside his shivery bowels.
Fleeing back to his car he’d been forced to go off-road, knocking and scraping his legs against tree branches, fences, fallen logs, and the bristling brackens engulfing the woods. Livid weals and scratches now flecked the angry bruises the length of his legs. A hot and insistent ache around a deep crack in his shoulder suggested the scaffolding of repaired tissue and sinew had come undone; the long pink knife wound in his hand transmitted the muscle-deep sensation of a fresh hole, as if Rory’s blade had bloodlessly passed through his body that very evening. His lungs were peeled meat, depleted black wings cupping a near-expended heart. How many times could he go through this?
It had taken him two hours to find the car. The terrain on his retreat had been near-impenetrable, his feet hidden in darkness as he kept to narrow bands of woodland protecting crops from the road. Energy shortages forbade street lighting at night, but there had been few settlements or houses near Abergil’s property. Dense, sopping clouds had covered the meagre iridescence of the heavens. Twice he’d stumbled in the wrong direction and crouched to catch his breath and re-orientate his retreat. But despite the discomfort of his wounds, and the fresh horror of killing two people, it was the lingering sense of being followed through the dark that now gave his hands a slight palsy.
Bedraggled and bleeding, rent and grazed, he had eventually returned to his lodgings. The grey-toothed and mute landlady had still been awake. Appearing crushed beneath some permanent weight of personal misery, which dimmed her eyes to a watery blue and sank the flesh at the sides of her mouth, she’d not said a word to him and only watched him stumble up the stairs to the room he’d now need to evacuate by morning. But all he’d mind for was the thing in the trees.
Deciding against his torch, which would have been seen for miles, unless absolutely necessary when he was caught on a spiny branch, or after he’d stumbled into a dead end, he’d hauled himself through the undergrowth at the side of the crop fields, and splashed through ditches already knee-deep with rain water, at the side of the roads that took him away from the criminal’s home. And he’d become certain he’d been tracked all the way back to the car he’d parked earlier, tight to the hedgerow of a strawberry field. Only then did he stop casting fearful looks backwards, prepared to shoot whatever it was that seemed to be skittering through his disorderly wake.
Once the possibility of a pursuer had infiltrated his thoughts, he’d never stopped sensing it nearby. Every ten steps, he’d paused to peer about in a din of rainfall and heart thuds, ready to shoot at the closest crackle, snap, or the most immediate flurry of wet motion. But he’d seen nothing save the jagged outlines of black tree branches, the sway of leaf clusters buffeted by the wind, or the smudge of the stone walls bordering the road.
Onwards he’d pushed, more quickly each time, only slowing again when catching anew the rapid rushings of a thing scraped by twigs and flapped by wet leaves close behind him, or to one side. Twice he’d hissed a challenge and been answered only by heavy splashes of water funnelling above his head. But whatever was disturbing the branches and verdure behind him had consistently failed to reveal itself, as if it were invisible.
Over the last half-mile he’d blindly run into trees, scratched and speared himself, had his face repeatedly branch-whipped, his knuckles tugged at by brambles. He’d then continued with his face upturned, trying to catch a better sight of the suggestion of thin limbs that began launching from a tree branch to disappear into another silhouetted clump of cover; nearly seen swoops and winged flashes, beneath a black sky, or sudden bustles amidst the ocean sounds of the wind, shrieking through the tallest oaks and mountain ash, as if something large had periodically thrashed about, and directly above his head. Falling several times, and twisting onto his back, his gun hand wavering in the wet, inky atmosphere, he’d been convinced he’d become the quarry of something of the air.
Back in the room, hindsight assured him his flight had been marked by nothing more tangible than paranoia and the after-effects of traumas, the shock of ending lives with a handgun, from scaring a beautiful woman witless. All before seeing the collected artworks of Yonah Abergil in his office, as if that private viewing had been the apex of a terrible momentum, the final layer in a ritual he’d unwittingly attended.
The horrors of his actions travelled back through his limbs like vibrations. He felt again the ghostly imprint of Yonah’s soft face against the top of one foot, heard the crack and crump, the glassy tinkle, after bringing down the whisky bottle against the back of the man’s skull; tactile spectral imprints of the violence he’d inflicted.
Again, in his thoughts, the nurse’s tunic punctured and filled red.
An old man called for Marie in the deepest fissures of his ears.
Ochre smears upon white marble.
The moist temple of Abergil’s head, the quiver of the pulse.
And the bones he had seen upon the walls danced again in the father’s mind. He covered his eyes as if that could shut such visions out. But once seen, the most terrible things remain inside forever. He knew that better than anyone.
Behind the polished glass protecting an alcove in the wall of Yonah’s office, red candles had burned before a mess of photographs in a crude shrine: they depicted shots of waste ground, concrete walls, stained tarmac, darkened timbers and cement, even the sea’s surface. The case had been stuffed with votive offerings of pape
r money, dimly glowing jewellery, a bottle of vintage champagne, an old wooden crucifix, a primitive-looking machete dull with age, and all arranged about the centrepiece: a human skull.
But amidst the sinister pictures, and arrayed like playing cards stood on end between the candles, he’d also looked upon photographs of people. Faces mostly, and captured in black and white: sullen with hunger, famished and empty-eyed, the scruffy-headed dead on pillows of their own black blood, faded uniforms on clay, greying fabric collapsing on papery bodies, antique crime photographs and holocaust panoramas, African genocides. Though which conflicts and atrocities they captured he couldn’t guess. The pictures could have been taken from any number of crises over the last thirty years, and even intermingled with those from previous centuries.
The wall of the bar had also been dominated by a gaudy picture, transmitting a not-dissimilar message to that of the shrine. The painting was reminiscent of the art that illustrated garish religious pamphlets, dispersed by the innumerable varieties of evangelists. In the painting there had been a great figure with an open maw, empty eye sockets, its flesh blemished and withered by emaciation. The expression had been one of an unseemly joy, or a cruel excitement. The ragged thing was also crowned in wood, its form below the head comprised of dirty smoke as much as actual cloth and limbs.
Tinged a bruised apricot like a sulphurous dawn, the skies behind the head of the tattered central figure had broiled with opal cumulous, edged black as if charred. A sickly jaundice had glowed in the gaps between the clouds as if a heavy, nauseating, yellow light was struggling to come through from beyond. It had made the father think of water-borne diseases and cheap shrouds.
The cityscape the father didn’t recognize, but it was haloed in a ruddy orange to suggest fire. The painting had a ribbon of scarlet painted along the bottom. The text was French: L’Homme devant la mort. The father didn’t know any French.
