Jigsaw (6 page)

She broke free of him, strolled the room, then she paused at the foot of the spiral staircase which led to the bedroom above. She gazed up along the intricate design of wrought iron to the shadows overhead. She thought of Barron's oversized bed, the silken canopy, the tapestry on the wall. Turning, she parted the curtains and walked out on to the balcony overlooking the canal.

Barron followed her. They stood together in silence for a time. A couple of tarpaulined gondolas shivered like glassy black coffins on the water. The moon was flint, frosty. The night had an immeasurable density to it.

He kissed her. She turned her face to the side, gently pushed him away, shook her head.

‘It's worse than ambivalent, I guess,' he said.

‘You taste of gin.'

‘Since when was that a problem?'

She ran her hand over the cold balcony rail. She peered out into the darkness. She sensed the night as one might sense nearby the presence of a large, dangerous cat. Venice seemed to have a peculiarly feline quality just then, its passageways and darkened
campos
the hunting-grounds of foraging leopards.

He took her hand, stroked it softly. ‘Let's go inside. Upstairs.'

She hesitated before following him. She started up the spiral staircase, then stopped halfway. She turned to look down at him, at the impossibly tanned face, the exquisitely handsome features. The sheer perfection of him scared her in some way. Nobody had any right to look like Barron. His beauty was unreasonable. And how had he stopped his internal clocks from marking their passage?

She kept climbing. When she reached the bedroom she lay down, sprawled across the bed, one leg upraised. ‘I'm not in the mood, Barron.'

‘You keep saying so.' He stood over the bed, gazing down at her. She looked vulnerable all at once. But the trouble with her vulnerability was how it could change and become hard-edged. She was in that sense like the weather. And he had no barometer for measuring her changes.

He lit a red candle on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the mattress, slid his hand up and down the lower part of her leg. ‘Tell me what you feel,' he said.

‘What I feel …'

He cupped his hand around her kneebone. With his other hand he picked up the candle and held it over her.

She turned to look up into his face. She knew she'd succumb to him, she understood the inevitability of it all. She watched the flame. She felt the first drip of red wax on her arm and then, as he moved the candle, the second fell across her knuckles. The wax burned, hardened on her skin as the heat dissipated. She drew the hand that held the candle closer to her face, and the shapeless hot wax slid against her cheeks, drip drip drip, each touch of heat bringing her momentary pain. She thought she felt some mild resistance in Barron, as if he wanted to set the candle aside.

‘Nearer,' she said. ‘Closer.'

He eased her blouse away from her shoulders; hot waxy rivulets slithered toward her breasts. He worked the tips of his fingers along her inner thigh, back and forward, a gentle brushing motion. She shut her eyes and concentrated on his touch and the way wax spluttered upon her skin. She could still see the candle in her head, could still feel the heat against her face and neck.

She was losing her breath. His hand moved across her stomach and rested in the smooth flat area below the navel. She brought her hand down so that it covered his and she manoeuvred his fingers between her legs. She half-opened her eyes, drawn into the hypnotic shifting flame. She raised a hand, seized Barron's wrist, made him bring the candle closer to her nipples. She experienced the exquisite intensity of the flame's core, wax running and stiffening beneath her breasts, rolling and congealing on the surface of her stomach. The flame was searing, brilliant. She wanted to be sucked down into the explosive heart of it – but he set the candle back on the table and lowered his face toward her stomach. She felt his lips on her skin, his breath in her navel, and she caught his head between her hands, pushing him lower, down into herself, down into the secrets that were no longer secrets to him, but places so familiar he might have drawn maps of them from memory alone.

As if she were blind, robbed all at once of a sense, she guided his face between her legs, felt his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. It was free fall now, that loss of will and wisdom, balances upset, awareness no more than a series of fierce jolts to her nervous system. She drew herself up, her eyes still shut, and then she kneeled, pressing her face down into his groin, her fingers moving quickly, it was all haste, everything was grounded in the possibilities of the moment. Making a soft funnel of her tongue, she took him inside her mouth before he brought her face up with a mildly persistent gesture.

He gazed at the fine hair of her eyebrows, then he undid the buttons of her blouse more slowly than she liked, so she hurried him, helped him, then the room was shimmering away out of control, tilting on an unlikely axis, a contrary turning of the world outside her senses.

She felt him at the edge of entrance, that second before penetration. She heard herself say something, but the voice that emerged from her mouth wasn't her own, she was speaking as if for somebody else, a distinct entity that existed outside of who she was. She was a disconnected sequence of impulses and thrills, a thing fragmented like stained glass struck by a shotgun. She felt him enter her. A dark scented breeze blew through her mind.

She hung to him, held him, rocked furiously against him. She clawed his spine, dug, wanted him deeper inside her, to feel him in her womb. Indifferent to anything around her, she had the feeling she might suddenly rise and go on rising from the bed, uplifted by an enigmatic current of air. She spoke his name aloud, hearing the syllables break inside her mouth, listening to the crazy collision of vowels and consonants. But passion had no grammar, no logic, no meaning beyond itself. She drifted out over a dark promontory, a place of madness. The fall was long and heartbreaking and when it was over she lay in the kind of silence that might be the aftermath of a dream, the juncture where waking thoughts trespass on the constructs of sleep.

She didn't move for a long time. She was aware of Barron staring at her. She edged slightly away from him now, dismayed by the disarray of her clothes, by the sight of his cock glistening against his thigh, the dark crown of hair in his groin. Her appetites devoured her; she had no escape from the boundaries of herself.

She gazed at Barron, then looked into the flame of the candle. She ran her fingers through her hair. She hated that look of content on Barron's impossible face. That satisfaction. It was as if she'd given him a gift she never intended. Rather, it was more like he'd plundered it, seized it from her.

‘Why do you make me behave like this?' she asked.

He said, ‘I've never made you do anything you didn't want to do.'

She got up from the bed. ‘You have a hold over me and I don't understand it. But it makes me despise myself.'

‘What hold? You're a free agent,' he said. ‘I don't own you.'

She laughed at this one. A free agent. ‘All I am, Barron, is your dirty little secret. The woman who comes and goes after dark.'

He picked a flake of wax from his fingertip and said nothing.

‘We never walk together in the daylight. We don't go to restaurants. Theatres. What the hell. I don't think I give a shit. Not in the long run. You want to be the hot-shot. You like to have people kissing your feet.'

Barron said, ‘You're back in that weird mood again.'

‘How would you know anything about my moods?'

‘From experience,' he said. ‘From watching you. From caring.' He considered how defensive she could be when the whim seized her. ‘You're capricious. You veer from one extreme to another.'

She walked round the bed, heading toward the bathroom. ‘You can get inside me, Barron. But you can never get
inside
me.'

She stepped into the bathroom. Her image came back to her from the mirrored walls, strange angles, diminishing reflections. She didn't recognize herself in any of them. The hardened wax shapes on her flesh suggested fresh scars.

She locked the bathroom door, entered the shower, ran scalding water over her flesh, soaped herself vigorously, cleansed herself of wax, of Barron's touch. But was it Barron she was trying to clean away: or was it that dark aspect of herself he managed always to explore? She closed her eyes and listened to the drumming of water.

FIVE

DUBLIN

J
UST AFTER DAWN
, F
RANK
P
AGAN BOUGHT A COPY OF
T
HE
T
IMES
AT
Dublin Airport. He found the story on the front page, together with a smoky photograph of what looked like the crushed and blackened remains of an Underground carriage. Without the accompanying caption it would have been difficult to tell. Rails, bent and uprooted by the blast, created pincers round the carriage, which had lost all shape and form. Firemen labored in the wreckage, their faces bleached of features by harsh lamps. The picture had the grainy feel of an old wartime photograph of atrocities.

Pagan stared at it for a long time; it defied understanding. It was painful and chaotic, brutal and tragic. It vibrated with loss. His eye drifted across the story. He registered key words and phrases.
Rush hour. Underground. Piccadilly. The number of casualties has not been estimated. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the outrage, believed to have been caused by a sophisticated explosive device
.

Responsibility, he thought. He tried to imagine a bomb blast in the London Underground system during rush hour. Why would anyone want to claim
that
as their own work? He'd encountered many acts of terrorism before, too many, but he'd never been able to comprehend to his complete satisfaction the heart of them, not even when they came wrapped in tedious political dogma. Nor was he immune to the anger they induced in him. Did those lunatics believe extreme violence brought sympathy for their cause, whatever it was? Did they think the massacre of innocents won them some kind of bloodstained respectability? He knew he might have had more composure, more professional detachment, but he'd never achieved that state of disinterest.

He wandered around the terminal impatiently. He had half an hour before his plane boarded. He bought a cup of coffee, spread the newspaper out on his table and looked at the photograph again. So. He was going back to London to deal with this. This was why Nimmo – Mr Nimmo, as Foxworth pointedly called the upstart – had commanded him to return. My line of work, he thought. My speciality. Blood and death. Carnage. Did he have the heart for it? Did he have the protective armour it took to cope with destruction? He was eager to get back into the stream of things, but he wondered if his spell of recent inactivity, and the shabby way he'd been treated during Nimmo's ‘reconstruction', might have diminished his appetite.

He sighed, closed the newspaper, set it aside, and then picked it up once more, drawn irresistibly back to the photograph. He was sucked down into it, as though he were trapped inside the frame and stood alongside the wreckage, a prisoner of violence. He imagined he felt the heat of the lamps against his face and that if he were to reach out a hand his fingers would be scalded by molten metal. Troubled, he folded the newspaper so that the photograph was no longer visible. He pushed it aside and thought: I am going back to a world where everything that moves does so in shadow.

LONDON

Foxworth was waiting at Heathrow when Pagan's plane arrived before noon. He'd been Frank's assistant for years, give or take those times when he'd been shuffled off into other areas of criminal investigation. He'd been in Art Fraud, that cut-price basement of police activities, for a while. Once, briefly, he'd worked in Internal Affairs, an unhappy interlude in his life: he didn't make a good spook. He belonged with Pagan in counter-terrorism, that nebulous zone populated by spurious little groups who bestowed acronyms upon themselves as if these might impart dignity to motives that were often grubby. He also enjoyed working with Pagan who, like God, sometimes moved in mysterious ways.

‘It's great to see you, Frank.' He shook Pagan's hand and thought Frank looked fatigued, rather pale and sunken, although you could never quite douse the little light of determination in his grey eyes.

‘Here. Make yourself useful. Take my bag.'

‘Always one to oblige,' Foxie said. He grabbed Pagan's suitcase. ‘You travel light.'

‘What's the point of excess baggage? God knows, I carry enough of that as it is.' He walked ahead of Foxie in the direction of the exit. The wintry sun over London was cold, drained of colour, assailed by clouds.

‘I have a car waiting,' Foxie said.

They went toward the car park. Pagan said, ‘You look different, Foxie. I can't quite put my finger on it.'

Foxie remarked that he'd had his hair cut, but Pagan saw only the usual gingery brush effect.

‘Perhaps the new threads,' Foxie said. He was wearing a pinstriped suit similar to all the other suits he owned. He favoured the Savile Row thing, three-piecers, old-school tie, a clubby appearance. Pagan liked more casual gear, jeans, bright shirts, linen suits he had made up for him by a tailor with basement premises in Greek Street. The Youthful Look. Keeping time at bay on a strict budget. Foxie at least had the benefit of income from a generous trust fund.

The car was a black Rover. Foxie stashed the suitcase on the back seat and got behind the wheel.

‘Bloody cold,' Pagan said.

Foxie turned the heater on. ‘It's been the worst winter in twenty-five years, they say.'

The weather, Pagan thought. Those poor bastards in the Tube were beyond any weather. ‘Tell me what you know about the explosion, Foxie.'

Straight to business, Foxie thought. Characteristic of the man. Small talk made him irritable. ‘What we know is that somebody put a bomb in the Tube. We don't know yet what kind of device. The lab will come up with that information. The usual time-consuming reconstruction. I'll say this – I haven't seen anything quite like it in my life. The bodies are burned beyond recognition. It's an unholy mess down there.'