The Damnation Game Part 38

"The European," he murmured to it. "He sent them."

The fly zigzagged, excitedly. "Of course," it buzzed.

"I'll kill him."

The fly laughed. "You don't have any idea what he is. He could be the Devil himself."

"f.u.c.king fly. What do you know?"

"Don't get so grand with me," the fly replied. "You're a s.h.i.+t-walker, same as I am."

He watched it rove, looking for a place to put its dirty feet. It landed, at last, on Charmaine's face. Atrocious that she didn't raise a lazy hand to swat it away; terrible that she just sprawled there, leg bent, neck slit, and let it crawl on her cheek, up to her eye, down to her nostril, supping here and there, careless.

The fly was right. He was ignorant. If they were to survive, he had to root out Mamoulian's secret life, because that knowledge was power. Carys had been wise all along. There was no closing your eyes and turning your back on the European. The only way to be free of him was to know him; to look at him for as long as courage allowed and see him in every ghastly particular.

He left the lovers in the kitchen and went to look for the heroin. He didn't have to search far. The packet was in the inside of Flynn's jacket, which was casually thrown over the sofa in the front room. Pocketing the fix Marty went to the front door, aware that stepping out of this house into the open sunlight was tantamount to inviting a murder charge. He would be seen and easily recognized: the police would be after him-in hours. But there was no help for it; escaping by the back door would look every bit as suspicious.

At the door he stooped and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the pamphlet that had slid from the letterbox. It bore the smiling face of an evangelist, one Reverend Bliss, who was standing, microphone in hand, raising his eyes to Heaven. "Join the Crowd," the banner proclaimed, "and Feel the Power of G.o.d in Operation. Hear the Words! Feel the Spirit!" He pocketed it for future reference.

On his way back to Kilburn he stopped at a telephone box and reported the murders. When they asked him who he was he told them, admitting that he was a parole jumper to boot. When they told him to turn himself in to the nearest police station, he replied that he would, but first he had to attend to some personal business.

As he drove back to Kilburn through streets now littered with the aftermath of the march, his mind turned over every possible lead to Whitehead's whereabouts. Wherever the old man was, there, sooner or later, Mamoulian would be. He could try to get Carys to find her father of course. But he had another request to make of her, one that it might take more than gentle persuasion to get her to concede to. He would have to locate the old man by his own ingenuity.

It was only as he drove back, and caught sight of a signpost to Holborn, that he remembered Mr. Halifax and the strawberries.

61

Marty smelled Carys as soon as he opened the door, but for a few seconds he mistook the scent for pork cooking. Only when he crossed to the bed did he see the burn on her open hand.

"I'm all right," she told him very coolly.

"He's been here."

She nodded. "But he's gone now."

"Didn't he leave me any messages?" he asked, with a crooked smile.

She sat up. Something was horribly wrong with him. His voice was odd; his face was the color of fishmeat. He stood off from her, as if the merest touch would shatter him. Looking at him made her almost forget the appet.i.te that still consumed her.

"Message," she said, "for you?" She didn't understand. "Why? What's happened?"

"They were dead."

"Who?"

"Flynn. Charmaine. Somebody slit their throats."

His face came within an ace of crumpling up. This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.

"Oh, Marty . . ."

"He knew I was going back to my house," he said. She looked for accusation in his voice, but there was none. She defended herself nevertheless.

"It couldn't have been me. I don't even know where you live."

"Oh, but he does. I'm sure he makes it his business to know everything."

"Why kill them? I don't see why."

"Mistaken ident.i.ty."

"Breer knows who you are."

"It wasn't Breer who did it."

"You saw who?"

"I think so. Two kids." He fished for the pamphlet he'd found behind the door. The a.s.sa.s.sins had delivered it, he guessed. Something about their sober suits, and that glimpsed halo of blond hair, suggested doorstep evangelists, fresh-faced and lethal. Wouldn't the European delight in such a paradox?

"They made an error," he said, slipping off his jacket and starting to unb.u.t.ton his sweat-soaked s.h.i.+rt. "They just went into the house and murdered the first man and woman they met. Only it wasn't me, it was Flynn. " He pulled his s.h.i.+rt out of his trousers and slung it off. "It's so easy, isn't it? He doesn't care about the law-he thinks he's above all that." Marty was forcibly aware of how ironic this was. He, the ex-con, the despiser of uniforms, cleaving to the notion of law. It wasn't a pretty refuge, but it was the best he'd got at the moment. "What is he, Carys? What makes him so certain he's immune?"

She was staring down at the fervent face of the Reverend Bliss. "Baptism in the Holy Ghost!" he promised, blithely.

"What does it matter what he is?" she said.

"Otherwise it's over."

She made no reply. He went to the sink and washed his face and chest in cold water. As far as the European was concerned, they were like sheep in a pen. Not just in this room, in any room. Wherever they hid he'd find their refuge in time, and come. There might be a small struggle-do sheep fight the oncoming execution? he wondered. He should have asked the fly. The fly would have known.

He turned from the sink, water dripping from his jawline, to look at Carys. She was staring at the floor, scratching herself.

"Go to him," he said without warning.

He'd tried a dozen ways to open this conversation as he drove back, but why try to sweeten the pill?

She looked up at him, empty-eyed. "What did you say?"

"Go to him, Carys. Go into him, the way he goes into you. Reverse the procedure."

She almost laughed; there was a sneer mustering in reply to this obscenity. "Into him?" she said.

"Yes."

"You're insane."

"We can't fight what we don't know. And we can't know unless we look. You can do that; you can do it for both of us." He started across the room toward her, but she bowed her head again. "Find out what he is. Find a weakness, a hint of a weakness, anything that can help us survive."

"No."

"Because if you don't, whatever we try to do, wherever we try to go, he's going to come, him or one of his cohorts, and slit my throat the way he did Flynn's. And you? G.o.d knows, I think you'll be wis.h.i.+ng you'd died the way I did." This was brutal stuff, and he felt dirtied by the very saying of it, but he knew how pa.s.sionately she'd resist. If bullying didn't work, he still had the heroin. He squatted on his haunches in front of her, looking up at her.

"Think about it, Carys. Give the idea a chance."

Her face hardened. "You saw his room," she said. "It'd be like locking myself in an asylum."

"He wouldn't even know," he said. "He wouldn't be prepared."

"I'm not going to discuss it. Give me the smack, Marty." He stood up, face slack. Don't make me cruel, he thought.

"You want me to shoot up, and then wait, is that it?"

"Yes," she said, faintly. Then more strongly: "Yes."

"Is that all you think you're worth?" She didn't reply. Her face was impossible to read. "If you thought that, why'd you burn yourself?"

"I didn't want to go. Not without . . . seeing you again. Being with you." She was trembling. "We can't win," she said.

"If we can't win, what's to lose?"

"I'm tired," she replied, shaking her head. "Give me the smack. Maybe tomorrow, when I'm feeling better." She looked up at him, eyes s.h.i.+ning in the bruises of her eye sockets. "Just give me the smack!"

"Then you can forget all about it, eh?"

"Marty, don't. It's going to spoil-" She stopped.

"Spoil what? Our last few hours together?"

"I need the dope, Marty."

"That's very convenient. f.u.c.k what happens to me." He suddenly felt this to be indisputably true; that she didn't care what he suffered and never really had. He'd run into her life and now, once he'd brought her dope, he could fade out of it again and leave her to her dreams. He wanted to hit her. He turned his back on her before he did.

Behind him, she said: "We could have some dope-you too, Marty, why not? Then we could be together."

He didn't reply for a long moment. When he did he said: "No fix."

"Marty?"

"No fix until you go to him."

It took Carys several seconds to register the full impact of his blackmail. Hadn't she said, a long time ago, that he'd disappointed her because she'd expected a brute? She'd spoken too soon.

"He'll know," she breathed, "he'll know the moment I get near him."

"Tread softly. You can; you know you can. You're clever. You've crept into my head often enough."

"I can't," she protested. Didn't he understand what he was asking?

He made a face, sighed, and crossed to his jacket, which was where he'd dropped it on the floor. He rummaged around in the pocket until he found the heroin. It was a pitifully small packet, and if he knew Flynn, the stuff was cut. But that was her business, not his. She stared, transfixed, at the packet.

"It's all yours," he said, and threw it over to her. It landed on the bed beside her. "You're welcome to it."

She still stared; now at his empty hand. He broke her look to pick up his stale s.h.i.+rt, and slip it back on.

"Where are you going?"

"I've seen you high on that c.r.a.p. I've heard the garbage you talk. I don't want to remember you like that."

"I have to have it."

She hated him; she looked at him standing in a patch of late-afternoon sun, with his bare belly and his bare chest, and she hated every fiber of him. The blackmail she could understand. It was crude, but functional. This desertion was a worse kind of trick altogether.

"Even if I was to do as you say . . ." she began; the thought seemed to shrink her. ". . . I won't find out anything."

He shrugged. "Look, the smack's yours," he said. "You've got what you wanted."

"And what about you? What do you want?"

"I want to live. And I think this is our only chance."

Even then it was such a slim chance; the slimmest crack in the wall through which they might, if fate loved them, slip.

She weighed up the options; why she even contemplated his idea she wasn't certain. On another day she might have said: for love's sake. Finally she said: "You win."

He sat down and watched her prepare for the journey ahead. First, she washed. Not just her face, her whole body, standing on a spread towel-at the little sink in the corner of the room, with the gas-fired water heater roaring as it spat water into the bowl. Watching her, he got an erection, and he felt ashamed that he should be thinking of s.e.x when so much was at issue. But that was just the puritan talking; he should feel whatever felt right. She'd taught him that.

When she'd finished she put her underwear back on, and a T-s.h.i.+rt. It was what she'd been wearing when he'd arrived at Caliban Street, he noted: simple unconfining clothes. She sat on a chair. Her skin rippled with gooseflesh. He wanted to be forgiven by her; to be told that his manipulation was justified and-whatever happened from now on-she understood that he'd acted for the best. She offered no such disclaimer. She just said: "I think I'm ready."

"What can I do?"

"Very little," she replied. "But be here, Marty."

"And if . . . you know . . . if anything seems to be wrong? Can I help you?"

"No," she answered.

"When will I know that you're there?" he asked.

She looked at him as though his question was an idiot's, and said: "You'll know."