Jigsaw (43 page)

‘Maybe. I meet a lot of people,' Carlotta said. ‘But I'd remember you, General.' She nudged the old man with her elbow. ‘If you're a General, where's your army?'

‘Gone, alas.'

‘AWOL?'

‘AWOL. I don't understand.'

‘Doesn't matter,' she said.

‘No. Tell me. I am anxious to improve my English.'

Carlotta got up from the sofa, stared at Barron, then drifted to the window. ‘Absent without leave, General.'

‘Ah.' The General appeared to absorb this term before he looked at Barron. ‘We must talk, Barron. We must talk privately.'

Carlotta turned from the window. ‘Why? Tobias wouldn't send me out of the room. Would you, Tobias? You wouldn't eject your poor little Carla, would you?'

She was playing a game, enjoying herself. She came close to Barron, placed a hand on his thigh. ‘Don't send me away,' she said. ‘You aren't some kind of male chauvinist beast, are you, Tobias? You don't subscribe to the notion that the place of women is in the kitchen, do you?' She kissed his cheek with an exaggerated smacking sound.

Barron said nothing. He heard an alarm in his head. What had caused some vague sense of familiarity in the General? Was it possible that somewhere in the past Carlotta's path had crossed his?

The General was rising from the sofa. ‘Is there a place we can talk alone?' he asked.

‘Of course.'

Carlotta stepped in front of the General. She seemed flushed, excited. Barron knew this mood of animated mischief; it was a kind of high for her. When she was determined to provoke reactions, when she was flying wilfully into a scenario of her own design, he had no way of dealing with her. The General appeared bewildered and irritated.

‘Boys will be boys,' Carlotta said. ‘I'll make myself scarce. What do you want me to do, Tobias? Rustle up some chicken soup? Make tea? Do tell.'

‘Carla,' he said.

‘I do a wonderful gateau, General. You should taste it. Want me to whip one up, Tobias?'

‘Carla, please.' She was heading toward the outrageous and he wasn't sure how to stop her.

‘Please? I take it that's an acceptance? Let me go find my apron. I can't bake a cake dressed in one of your good shirts, Tobias. Can I? Not one of your best linen numbers. I'm so messy in the kitchen, General.' Her voice was high, her sentences quick.

Barron looked at the General, who was shaking his head.

‘This is not a good time for us, Barron.'

‘Whaddya mean, General? It's a great time.' Carlotta danced in front of him, poked him in the chest. ‘You were listening at the door, weren't you? You naughty old General. Tsk-tsk. Bad boy.'

‘I'm sure the General is too good-mannered to listen in on other people's conversations, Carla.' Why didn't she leave? Why did she continue to play-act?

‘Yeah? You too good mannered, General? He doesn't look it to me, Tobias. I think he's an old rascal.' She prodded him again, laughed in a theatrical way. The General stood very still, glaring at Barron, holding him responsible for this woman's unacceptable behaviour. But there was more in the General's expression, a certain guarded slyness Barron didn't like.

‘I'll make coffee,' Carlotta said. ‘Don't you run away, General, you hear?' She was drawling her words in a Southern fashion now. She walked into the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

Barron stood against the spinet. ‘She's an old friend,' he said, thinking up lame excuses. ‘She's been through some bad times recently. Divorce, you understand. She's visiting me from America, a short vacation, a couple of days. I apologize for her behaviour.' He wanted to steer the subject away from Carlotta. ‘I have news of Streik.'

The General said, ‘Streik. Yes. It was Streik I came to ask about—'

‘We found him. It's taken care of. You have nothing to worry about now.'

‘Nothing to worry about,' the General remarked.

‘Streik's out of the way. He's gone. He needn't concern us.'

The General made a gesture of finality, as if Streik were consigned to history, an unimportant matter. ‘The world is too small these days. People come and go. They meet, they part, they live their separate lives.'

Barron wondered what the old boy was talking about.

‘And sometimes we forget the people we've met. The places we've seen. I had a position of great authority at one time in life—'

‘I know, I know—'

‘Let me finish. My work involved a great number of acquaintances, assistants, associates, informers. Their names were kept on record, their photographs filed. I sat on top of a vast mountain of information. Another man might have found it too much to digest. But I was blessed, you see, with an astonishing memory. And it served me well. It served me very well.' The General nodded in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Your strange friend, Barron. Divorced, you say. Just arrived from America to forget her marital distress, is that it?'

‘Yes.'

The General smiled and tapped the side of his skull in a knowing way. ‘I think not.'

‘I don't follow you, General.'

‘Barron, Barron. Do you take me for a fool?'

‘Never,' said Barron.

The General took a step toward Barron. He was still tapping his head. ‘In here, Barron. All locked away in here. All very easy to open, if you have a key.'

The kitchen door opened. Carlotta came out carrying a tray. Barron sensed immediately a change in her mood, a lowering of the temperature in the room.

‘Instant coffee,' she said. ‘I couldn't find the tea.'

She laid the tray on a coffee table, smiled at the General. This is wrong, Barron thought. On two small counts. Two small domestic counts.

There is no instant coffee in the kitchen. And she knows where the tea is kept.

She knows this place, this apartment.

It is going wrong
.

‘I brought biscuits. You like biscuits, General?' she asked. ‘Chocolate chip cookies. Tobias has a weakness for them, don't you, Tobias?'

The General stared at the tray. Carlotta moved quietly behind him. Barron's point of view was obscured by the old man's bulk for a moment. He didn't see Carlotta move, he was conscious only of the way the General gasped suddenly for breath, how his expression changed from one of keen attention to pained astonishment, how he swung around, turning toward Carlotta, a hand raised in the air, the gesture of a man clutching for support where no support is to be found.

‘Dear God,' the General said. ‘Dear God.'

He went down on his knees, gripped the edge of the coffee table, toppled the tray, biscuits fell around him, little brown discs in disarray. He tilted his head toward Barron, his eyes large with horrified surprise. Barron watched the knife go in a second time, then a third, heard flesh tear, saw the General slump to his hands and knees and try to crawl out of Carlotta's range, saw blood spurt and drip across the carpet.

The General slithered toward him as Carlotta struck again and again. Blood covered the General's face, ran over his scarf, spilled from the side of his face. He crawled as far as the place where Barron stood and he clutched the cuffs of Barron's trousers, smearing them. Carlotta brought the knife down directly into the back of the General's neck and the old man moaned, dropped his hands from Barron, turned over on his side, said something inaudible in German, and then lay still. But he was breathing, if you could call it that, his chest heaving, mouth open, throat rattling thickly. Carlotta shoved the knife between the old man's ribs and drew it downward in a ragged line, an autopsy performed by a psychotic.

She stood over the body. Her white shirt was streaked with the General's blood; her legs were daubed with red. It was in her hair, her face, as if she'd been targeted by spray paint. Immobilized, Barron watched her go down on her knees alongside the General.

‘I met him once,' she said. She might have been speaking to herself. ‘The only time I was ever in Berlin. He had a job he wanted me to do. It didn't work out. It didn't suit me. And I didn't like those STASI types. I could never have worked with them. He knew me as soon as he saw me, Barron. What else could I do?' She raised her face, looked at him. ‘You wouldn't want me to be revealed, after all. You wouldn't want to put your precious plans in jeopardy, would you?'

Barron stepped back, appalled, stricken by a sense of having stepped inside a viciously bad dream. None of this was real, none of this had happened. He couldn't take his eyes away from the lurid sight of the dead man, the red-stained carpet, the blemishes in the General's clothing. He was transfixed, paralysed, trapped in a vision of red, red everywhere. The whole room might have been leaking blood. It was changed in his perception now, altered by murder, the echo of violence.

‘Forgive me. I forgot,' she said. ‘You have no taste for this kind of thing.'

He couldn't speak. He closed his eyes. He had an after-image of blood. He saw it all over again, the General crawling across the carpet, Carlotta following him, the knife rising and falling, the cutting sound of steel on flesh, the ripping of cloth. He couldn't breathe. He had a barbed feeling around his heart. The air in the room seemed to reek of blood. The stench of the abattoir, the stuff of death.

Carlotta stood up. She let the knife fall from her fingers. It dropped against the side of the General's face where it reflected red light drably. Barron opened his eyes, turned his face away.

‘Well?' she asked. ‘What was I supposed to do? Let him walk? He couldn't be trusted, Barron. Maybe he wouldn't blow the whistle immediately. He'd wait until Helix was accomplished. I know only one thing – one day he'd talk, he'd say I was associated with you, he'd know about my role in this. Don't you see? He would have had a lock on us for as long as he lived. I did this for you as much as for me.'

Was she trying to say that this act of murder was a means of protecting
him?
He couldn't accept this. With trembling fingers he poured himself a large shot of cognac, which he tossed back rapidly; the fierce heat of the brandy made him feel sick and unsteady. His arms and legs tingled. He set his empty glass down, ran his hands across his face.

‘Queasy?' she asked. ‘Are we upset, Tobias?'

He looked inside his glass, seeing tiny amber slicks adhere to the sides. They trapped light, inverted it; the world was upside-down. He glanced at the knife that lay propped against the General's cheek. Then he looked at Carlotta, whose face was expressionless. She came across the floor and pressed her bloodstained body against him, her arms circling him, her damp red hands touching his skin.

‘Now you know,' she said.

What did he know? he wondered.

‘It's no abstraction, Barron. It isn't fax messages and phone calls from distant places. It isn't men droning around a table and weapons being fired in faraway countries. It's here and now. It's reality. And you don't like it, do you? Just what the hell did you think, Barron? Did you just imagine you were immune, you had some kind of protection, you could pass on instructions and sleep easy and make-believe you didn't have any direct responsibility? Sweet Christ.'

I did this for you as much as for me
. Carlotta's words rang in his head, and he wondered in horror if the act of murder were an expression of love, the only vocabulary of emotion she knew.

‘Look at him, Barron. Look at him.' Her tone was strident.

Barron had a bizarre feeling of dislocation, as if his skull were not attached to his body, as if his body were elsewhere, a disconnected conglomeration of reflexes, none of which constituted a human being.

She pressed her hands on either side of his face and turned his head so that he couldn't avoid looking at the body of the General who, in death, appeared to have deflated, cast off a dimension.

‘Welcome to the world,' Carlotta said. ‘I think you're ready now to hear the real truth about the death of Bryce Harcourt.'

TWENTY-EIGHT

LYON

I
T WAS NINE O'
CLOCK AND RAINING WHEN
P
AGAN AND
F
OXWORTH
took a cab from Lyon Airport. Foxworth gave the cab-driver Audrey Roczak's address on the Rue de Marseille, which lay on the east bank of the Rhône, close to the university. They crossed the river by the Pont Galléni. Where the Rue de Marseille intersected the Rue Salomon, the driver stopped the cab. Foxie stepped out first and erected his umbrella and held it over Pagan's head, but umbrellas were useless in this kind of downpour. Foxie paid, and the taxi pulled away.

‘Bleak,' Foxie said.

‘If you're a tourist,' Pagan remarked. ‘What number are we looking for?'

Foxworth had it memorized. They walked a few yards, passing the darkened window-fronts of various stores, a plumbing-supply shop, a glass-cutter's, a small shuttered bistro in which chairs were inverted on tables and a man pushed a broom back and forth.

Audrey Roczak's apartment was situated over the bistro. Tiny nameplates were stuck on a door. Pagan flicked his cigarette lighter and held it against the names and when he found
Roczak
he pressed the bell, holding his finger upon it for a good thirty seconds. There was no response, nothing from beyond the door.

‘Now what?' said Foxie, shivering under the umbrella.

Pagan looked the length of the dismal street. Rain ran down the side of his face, pounded his overnight bag. ‘Either we find a warm place to sit or we ring every bloody bell on this door until somebody answers.' The street didn't look too promising. There were no welcoming café lights nearby, no
pension
, no signs of life save for passing traffic. He turned his attention back to the buzzers, of which there were six, and he rang each in turn.

The door was eventually opened by a small woman dressed in what seemed to be a garland of ostrich and peacock feathers. The face that peered from the centre of this flamboyant arrangement was small and nut-brown, shrivelled. The reek of camphor overwhelmed Pagan.