Linger Awhile (8 page)

We didn’t say much for a while, drinking in the quiet with the London Pride. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ve had nothing new in the vampire line.’

‘Early days,’ said Burke.

‘You’re still expecting another one?’

‘You’re the detective, not me. What do
you
think?’

‘I think I’d feel a lot better if we could catch whoever killed Rose Harland.’

‘Have you made any progress with your suspects?’ He was looking at me the way he looks when he’s waiting for me to catch up with his mental processes.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure Istvan Fallok didn’t kill her.’

‘How do you explain his saliva on her jacket?’

‘I think you know what’s in my mind about that, don’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ said Burke.

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘say it.’

‘You’re wondering if someone else left Fallok’s saliva on Rose Harland’s jacket?’

‘That’s right. How could that have happened?’

‘And you’re wondering why Justine Trimble’s saliva on the 10th of January was a match with Chauncey Lim’s?’

‘OK, why was it?’

‘This is as new to me as it is to you, but what if Justine has no cellular identity of her own?’

‘Go on.’

‘What if she needs blood in order to survive, and Istvan Fallok gave her some before she killed Rose Harland? And Chauncey Lim topped her up before we took her saliva on the 10th of January? Tell me, am I talking nonsense?’

One of the locals came out of the pub and nodded to Burke. ‘All right, Harry?’ he said.

‘All right, Mick?’ said Burke.

‘Inspector,’ said Mick. I’m known there because Burke is local and we always go to The Anchor & Hope when I visit.

‘Good evening to you,’ I said.

‘Terrible, that vampire case,’ said Mick.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘That woman as didn’t have no blood left in her,’ said Mick.

‘Don’t believe everything you read in the tabloids,’ I said.

‘Didn’t read it,’ said Mick. ‘My wife works at the mortuary and she saw the body when they brought it in. Proper drained, it was. Have you got any leads?’

‘I’m not able to say anything at this time,’ I said.

‘Right you are, guv,’ said Mick. ‘Mum’s the word.’ He nodded again and left.

‘What can I say?’ said Burke. ‘His wife
does
work in the mortuary.’

‘Small fucking world,’ I said.

‘To get back to Justine, what do you think you’ll do?’

‘I think I’ll have to talk to her and Fallok and Lim again and this time I’ll ask better questions.’

‘I’m looking forward to the answers,’ said Burke. And on that note we finished our last pints and went home.

29 January 2004. When Irv went home I felt kind of low. I dragged myself into the morning with black coffee and a stale bagel, then I sat looking at the three-legged toad on my workbench. It was commissioned by a man in his thirties who’s an investment broker in the City. He makes a lot of money and wants to make a lot more. His eyes are like rivets that keep his brain in place but the rivets are a little loose by now. He showed me a drawing of Liu Hai and the toad in a book,
Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs
. Liu Hai was a tenth-century Minister of State who hung out with this toad. Sometimes it would hide from him in a well and he’d tempt it out by lowering a string loaded with gold coins. ‘This toad attracts wealth,’ said Mr Rivet-Eyes, ‘and I’m going to put it in a corner diagonally opposite my front door for the best Feng Shui effect.’

‘Do you need more money than you have now?’ I asked him.

‘You always need more money,’ he said.

I said, ‘I think in cases of greed the toad might work against the one who asks for its help.’

‘Greed? What are you talking about? I’m not greedy – all I want is a fair share of the action.’

‘OK,’ I said. I went to the V & A to check it out and there they were on the fourth floor, Liu Hai about seven inches high in brown clay and the toad buff with brown spots. Liu Hai trying to catch the toad which was looking very sly and sneaking away with a coin in its mouth. I copied down everything on the card because you never know. It said:

Liu Hai with the three-legged toad. Mark: Made by Xu Xiutang, Autumn of Chengshen Year [Yixingy] 1980 FL32-1984

I liked that toad, it looked as if it had seen wealth-seekers come and go over the centuries and was not much impressed by them.

Another version of the three-legged toad story is that it exists ‘only in the moon, which it swallows during the eclipse. It has therefore come to be a symbol of the unattainable.’ That version made more sense to me than the wealth one, and I wondered if I wasn’t helping my client to delude himself with fantasies of wealth that he would never possess. The look on the toad’s face suggested that Mr Rivet-Eyes might well end up with a wealth of unattainable.

But there was the matter of Justine to be considered. Irv was waiting for me to get Istvan’s notes and I was waiting for Istvan to leave his place. On Friday
the 23rd I kept a close watch and I saw him go out. I waited a while to make sure it wasn’t only a local errand, then I read my bit of
The Heart Sutra
, which I always do at the start of any serious enterprise:

Here, O Sariputra. Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.

I’ve never read the whole
Heart Sutra
but if form is emptiness, then not reading it is the same as reading it, so I’m all right with that one bit. It always seems to do me good, and as soon as I say, ‘Here, O Sariputra,’ I’m up for whatever I need to do.

I let myself into Hermes Soundways and stood there listening for a few moments. Then I got to work. Istvan’s filing system was simple: he just piled the most recent thing on top of the one before it. That was the main system which included invoices, receipts, and newspaper cuttings as well as notes. There were several lesser ones consisting of backs of envelopes, various scraps of paper with writing on them and the odd matchbook cover. I separated what seemed to be Justine material from everything else, put it into what I thought might be chronological order and bundled it into the bag I’d brought with me.

Hoping not to run into Istvan I went down Dufour’s to Broadwick and over to Berwick. When The Blue
Posts pub and red-and-yellow Nicolas and the Fine Crêpes wagon with its yellow scallop-edged canopy came into view I was on my home turf and I breathed easier. GOOD NEWS, said the sign above the red
Newsweek
awning at the start of my stretch of Berwick. At Nicolas I bought a bottle of Stolichnaya, then paused at the blue canvas-roofed flower stand diagonally opposite for some yellow and mauve crysanthemums. For a moment the smell of roast chestnuts came back to me from long-gone Decembers. Careful not to step on the cracks in the pavement I made my way back to All That Glisters past my many competitors in the jewellery line and my various landmarks: Reckless Records; then Badge Sales which looks like a message drop in a thriller; above it is a tailor with a blue plaque on his window:

TOM BAKER
1966–2041
BESPOKE TAILOR
Works here but lives
around the corner

How did he calculate his life span? Will he top himself at seventy-five or what? One day I’ll ask him but I keep putting it off. The Cotton Café, The Maharani Indian Tandoori Restaurant with its splendid yellow sign (Maharani in red), followed after a decent interval by the Raj Tandoori Restaurant, also with a yellow sign like a beacon of Eastern heat in the English winter. Then I was home.

Up in the studio I poured myself a drink and sat down on the floor with my load of whatever it was. As I held the papers in my hand an invoice fell out. I took that as a sign that something was trying to tell me something. The invoice was from Thierson & Bates Biologicals in Surrey for
Rana temporaria
(3), £33. I rang up Thierson & Bates and said I was Mr Fallok’s secretary. ‘I’m going through invoices for his VAT return,’ I said, ‘and I’m not sure about this one from you. What are three
Rana temporaria
?’

‘Common frogs,’ said the man at the other end.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I assume these were … ?’

‘Laboratory-quality specimens in formaldehyde,’ said the man.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘Now I remember the project. Thanks very much.’

The next thing was a handwritten recipe for primordial soup which included 20 gallons of chicken noodle, 500 Oxo cubes, 500 mg of polypeptides, 40 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree (an obvious codename) plus quantities of ginseng and assorted multivitamins.

It was the polypeptides that convinced me that I was well out of my depth so I rang up Irv and asked him to come over. He came with a new bottle, sensitive human being that he is, and we looked the whole lot over togezzer. Together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a good thing that I have a nephew who’s a polymath. He knows everything.’

‘I don’t care if he’s a merphradomite,’ I said. ‘Bring him on.’

So the next day or some other day Artie Nussbaum
turned up. He’s at the Guy’s, King’s & St Thomas’ School of Medicine and he’s good with chemistry, biology and computers. He’s a little guy and he looks as if you added water you’d have four or five Charlie Sheens.

‘Oho,’ he said when he looked through what we had. ‘Is this legal?’

‘Artie,’ said Irv, ‘are you going to ask dumb questions or are you going to help your uncle?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. To me he said, ‘Have you got a computer with a modem?’

I led him to the computer and he sighed and said, ‘If you could order me a pizza with pepperoni and a six-pack of John Smith?’

‘No prob,’ I said. I got him what he needed and we left him to it. He had to go to lectures from time to time but after three days he gave us a shopping list for all kinds of things plus three
Rana temporaria
. We ordered the laser gear, the extra computer software, the oil drum and the rest of it. For the primordial soup there was the matter of the forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree. Artie was not bothered about that. ‘What we’re doing here,’ he said, ‘is creating a suspension of disbelief in which the visual particles of Justine Two will be held pending the zapping which will precipitate the whole woman. For Ring-Bo-Ree read any high-calorie filler that will enhance the body of the soup, say John Smith, forty cans of.’

‘Julv,’ said Irv.

‘Sorry?’ said Artie.

‘Just thinking out loud,’ said Irv. ‘I agree that John Smith can go in for Ring-Bo-Ree.’

I did too, so that was one less problem. When we got to
Rana temporaria
Thierson & Bates said, ‘Sorry, we’re temporarily out of frogs. Would you like some other batrachian?’

‘Like what?’ I said.

‘Toads?’ said the man. ‘I can do you some nice
Bufo bufo
in formaldehyde.’

‘Yes,’ I said, going all goosepimply, ‘those will do nicely.’

30 January 2004. OK, so I didn’t ask dumb questions. Actually, after a while I became completely involved in what I was doing and I stopped worrying about legality and morality. Like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb, I guess. Once you see that something is possible, you’re damn well going to make it happen if you can.

After I gave Irv and Grace my shopping list they handed me one: a whole blood transfusion kit. Irv put the cash in my hand for the necessaries and I got everything at Chiron Medical Supplies near Middlesex Hospital. ‘We’ll need it for when she comes out of the soup,’ said Grace.

When our preparations were complete there was nothing to do but Justine Two. Irv and Grace assured me that Justine One had been created by this procedure so we did the same thing with isolating the image, lasering it through the diffraction grating, printing the interference pattern, then reducing the pattern to its particles and putting the particles into the soup in the
drum. ‘There’s our suspension of disbelief,’ said Irv.

Grace said, ‘Please don’t say, “This is the moment of truth”.’

‘I’m not sure what kind of a moment it is,’ said Irv, ‘so I’m saying nothing.’ He handed Grace the 240-volt zapper we’d rigged up. ‘You do it,’ he said to her.

Grace closed her eyes and did it. There was a flash, a primordial electrical smell and somebody belched loudly. Then there she was rising out of the soup, all black-and-white in her sopping wet western clothes: Justine Two. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘where’s my fucking horse? Am I supposed to walk to El Paso?’ Then she stared wildly around and clambered out of the drum so violently that the three of us had to hold it to keep from spilling the primordial soup all over Grace’s studio. As it was, there was a big puddle and Justine Two stepped into it, sat down, and belched. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I don’t see anybody I know, so what kind of party is this?’

‘It’s not a party,’ said Grace.

‘Why are you talking funny?’ said J Two.

‘I’m English,’ said Grace. ‘You’re in London.’

‘That’s a crock of shit,’ said J Two. ‘There aren’t any London locations in this picture.’

‘You’re not in a picture now,’ said Irv. ‘This is reality.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ said J Two, and she fainted and fell back into the puddle.

‘I wonder if Istvan’s Justine started out like this,’ said Grace.

‘I wasn’t there so I couldn’t say,’ said Irv.

She was really an awful-looking thing in black-and-white,
and when we got her out of her wet clothes it was even worse. ‘I forgot about clothes,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll have to get her other things to wear. Underthings as well, tights, shoes, whatever.’

‘Then what?’ said Irv.

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Grace. We’d been working for a couple of weeks to bring this creature into the world but Grace was looking at it, at her I should say, as if the whole thing was totally unexpected.

‘Well,’ said Irv to Grace, ‘while you’re thinking about it you know what we have to do.’

‘I know,’ said Grace, ‘and I’ll go first. Bleed me, Artie.’