Sextet (34 page)

He rose to his feet and tried to focus his mind on the realities of this room. It looked as if a fight had taken place in it, as if Tomas Court had surprised an intruder, yet the damage here, it seemed to him, was greater than any fight could explain. A fight might account for the broken chairs, smashed china and glass, but surely not for this blizzard of torn papers covering the floor, and not for a leather sofa, oozing rubberized stuffing, a sofa that someone seemed to have tried to disembowel.

He passed his hands across his face and turned back to Thalia.

‘I still don’t understand. What can have happened? When Tomas called you, did he explain?’

‘No. He could scarcely speak. He just asked me to come over. When I got here, the door was wide open and Tomas was on the floor, like I said. There was no-one else here—’

‘But who would do this? Has anything been stolen?’

‘There was nothing to steal.’

‘Is it just this room?’

‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘He’d been in the bedroom too. I—I closed the door. You’ll have to deal with that. I’m not going in there.’

Her tone was flat. Colin bent and picked up at random some of the papers torn and scattered at his feet. He leaned towards the light on the table and began to examine them. The first was a copy of the
New York Times
Arts section, dated a few days previously; it was folded back at an interview with Natasha Lawrence he had already seen, an anodyne piece written by someone called Genevieve Hunter, whom Lindsay had mentioned she knew. The photograph of Natasha Lawrence had been smeared with some whitish substance. The quote referring to her future home in the Hollywood hills had been circled in green ink; the words LIAR BITCH CUNT had been written next to it in capitals.

He began to feel sick. He dropped the newspaper and examined the other fragments of paper one by one. Some he recognized as the various revised shooting schedules that had been littering the table the previous day. There were several others which concerned the Conrad building, some torn from books, others, to judge from their paper and wording, from architectural journals. Finally, there were scraps of what appeared to be letters, handwritten, again in capitals, and again in green ink. He peered at the words, which seemed to concern Natasha Lawrence and bodyguards; then he came across the first reference to animals. He crimsoned and let the scraps of paper fall.

Thalia, who had been watching him in silence, gave a gesture towards the sea of fragments covering the floor. Colin saw there were more communications in green ink, hundreds of them, perhaps more, all of them ripped and shredded and trampled upon.

‘You’ve heard about Joseph King?’ Thalia said, her face expressionless.

‘Yes. Mario told me.’

‘You heard he might have died, last June—killed himself maybe?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘That was what people hoped. Those are his letters. Five years’ worth of letters—’

‘But he can’t be dead,’ Colin picked up the newspaper, then held it out to her. ‘Green ink, the same writing. This paper is dated four days ago.’

‘I know. I saw it before you arrived. In fact…’ Thalia paused, ‘it’s partly why I called you. I got afraid. I think he’s been here tonight. I think Tomas caught him in the act of going through these letters. I think he’s been listening to the tapes of his phone calls as well…’

‘Those tapes in the bedroom? Those are
his
?’ Colin stared at her. ‘I saw them yesterday—the door was open. Thalia, why would Tomas keep them? I don’t understand.’

‘He likes listening to them. Don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t dare ask him and I prefer not to know. But those tapes were playing when I arrived and they’re probably still playing now. I wasn’t going to go into that room and I won’t now.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘So you’re going to have to do it. You’re going to switch the fucking thing off, then we’re taking all the tapes and we’re going to box them up along with the rest of this filth. Then I’m taking it all away and I’m getting it burned, which is something I should have done a long time ago…’

‘Thalia, we can’t do that; we don’t have the right. This is Tomas’s property, in the first place—and in the second, it’s evidence. We have to call the police.’

‘This stuff is killing Tomas.’ She turned away. ‘I’ve watched it poison him and I’m not watching it any more. And we
don’t
call the police. We do that and this whole story’s splashed across the tabloids tomorrow. There’ll be reporters and photographers crawling all over this. They’ll have tracked Tomas down to that clinic by tonight. Some ass-hole cop will be slipping those tapes to some contact of his, and before you know it, this shit will be all over the front pages, and the
National Enquirer
will be taking their marriage apart…’

‘Thalia—I said call the police, not Reuters.’

‘Same thing in this city.’

‘Thalia, no newspaper would print this stuff.’ Colin gestured towards the sea of papers. ‘They
couldn
’
t
print it—and they wouldn’t. Why would they? King isn’t sane, that’s obvious. Who would print this kind of sick allegation?’

‘You’ve been reading the wrong newspapers.’ Thalia gave him a derisive look. ‘And don’t make the mistake of thinking King’s just some crazy fantasist; he isn’t. He likes to mix a little fact in with his fictions. You think this would have obsessed Tomas the way it has if it was all sick lies from start to finish? No way. King’s
better
than that, and a whole lot smarter. It’s because Tomas knew King was telling the truth about
his
activities, that he thought he just might be telling the truth about Natasha as well.’

Colin felt that sick unease begin to rise in his stomach again. He picked up a scrap of one of the letters, then quickly let it fall.

‘He couldn’t have believed this—
surely
he couldn’t have believed this…’ he began.

Thalia gave him a tired look. ‘I think he believed some of it, some of the time. Maybe he even
wanted
to believe it. I’m not arguing with you about this; I’m getting rid of this stuff, the tapes
and
the letters, so you’ve got a straight choice: either you help me or you go.’

She sat down at the table as she said this, as if suddenly exhausted, and ran her hands through her frizz of grey hair. Colin hesitated. His instinct was still to call the police, to believe that they could bring order, justice and due punishment to whatever crime, or crimes, had been committed here. He looked at the blood splashed on the floor and the sea of incriminatory paper.

‘Let me check the bedroom,’ he said. ‘I’ll switch that tape off, then I’ll decide.’

He crossed to the far end of the loft, opened the door in that bare, brutal brick wall, and moved into the corridor, feeling for the light switch. The ugly neon flickered into life; he could hear a low; level, Midwestern voice, speaking with a pedantic insistence, as soon as he opened the door.

He paused in the bedroom doorway, feeling suddenly afraid, watching the small red warning light come on above the bed. The room was tidy and apparently untouched. That brownish bed cover was uncrumpled; the pillows bore the faint impress of a head, but might have been that way before.

Although the havoc of the outer room was not repeated here, he could sense disturbance in the air. It emanated from the tape recorder and the quiet murmuring voice, and it made him feel he was breathing in contagion; he could sense it as soon as he entered, some toxicity breeding here.

He moved across to the surgical table and the large, outdated machine. He began to fumble in the half light with the machine’s unfamiliar switches and dials. ‘Hot, hot and moist,’ said a voice, very loudly, right in his ear; he started back, realizing that by mistake he had turned up the volume control.

He backed away to the door, trying to close his mind to this spillage of words. He found the light switch and depressed it, but no light came on. He returned to the machine and bent over it, his hands now unsteady, trying to make sense of its battery of controls. He began pressing switches at random, but the twin spools continued to rotate and the voice continued speaking. ‘Naked in bed,’ Colin heard. He turned another dial and the voice sank to a whisper, a whisper he found more insidious and more discomfiting. ‘Absolute lust, shall I tell you what she did next?’ whispered the voice, and to his horror Colin found he wanted to know.

He slammed his palm against a whole row of switches, then, when that produced no effect, began a frantic search for the mains’ plug. The machine’s cables snaked away from the surgical table and disappeared under the bed. The electric point seemed to be at the head of the bed, under the
Dead Heat
altarpiece. He began to push and pull at the bed in order to reach behind it, but the bed, monstrously large, monstrously heavy, mounted on some box-like plinth, refused to move.

Abandoning this, he straightened, stared at the machine and found himself mesmerized. ‘
Such dexterity…were satisfied…the supervisor grossly…swallow them up
.’ Colin watched the tape wind from the right spool to the left. The room seemed to be growing hotter and hotter; he could feel himself being lured down some whispering corridor of words, around this corner and into room after hidden room.

He knew that the words were affecting him; his body began to stir in response to the description of acts he abhorred. He felt a giddiness, a compulsion to continue listening, then the voice made a small mistake: ‘She loved it,’ it pronounced with a sigh, and Colin’s senses returned, for love was not the emotion being described here.

A sudden cleansing anger surged through his body. Reaching across, he grasped hold of the tape and wrenched it out of the machine. It coiled about his wrist and voided itself with a high-pitched squeaky scream. He pulled harder, and yards of the stuff spilled out like entrails; he caught hold of the machine, which proved immensely heavy, picked it up bodily and flung it down. Its casing cracked open, sparks flew, there was a blue, scorching, flashing tongue of light, a smell of burning, then a fizzling sound.

Colin returned to the main room of the loft. Thalia, who was kneeling on the floor, stuffing handfuls of papers in boxes, looked up at him.

‘You’ll help me?’ she asked.

‘I’ve already started. I’ll find a trash can,’ Colin replied.

They worked side by side, in virtual silence, for several hours. Shortly before six, Thalia telephoned Mario to cancel that morning’s meeting and to inform him that Tomas Court had returned to Montana; Mario received this information without surprise.

Half an hour later, when the first thin light began to tint the sky, their task was completed. The bags and boxes of toxic waste, as Colin now thought of them, were stacked at the door awaiting disposal. Thalia was about to call the clinic, to check on Tomas Court’s progress; Colin, exhausted and troubled, was standing at the tall loft windows, watching a slow Manhattan dawn. A thin cat, he saw, was emerging from an alleyway; he watched it nose the trash cans. He was trying to think of Lindsay, and finding he could not do so here, when the telephone rang.

‘Tomas never picks up. He always lets the answer-phone field the calls.’ Thalia looked at him uncertainly. ‘But it could be the clinic…’

Colin crossed to her side, feeling a sudden unease. They both waited as the telephone rang three times. The intercept kicked in. ‘Leave any message after the tone,’ said a tinny mechanical voice; silence ensued. Thalia gave a nervous gesture; Colin leaned close to the answering machine. He thought he could hear breathing, then a strange rhythmic sighing sound, like the sea. When the now familiar Midwestern voice finally spoke, it startled him.

‘Testing, testing, testing,’ said the voice. ‘Just checking your machine, checking your machine…’

‘
N
OT
A NICE PLACE
, that labyrinth,’ Markov was saying to Lindsay, at 9.23 the same morning. ‘All those sacrifices, Lindy. A definite reek of blood and bone. Even I could sense it, and Jippy didn’t like it at all…’

Not for the first time in her life, Lindsay cursed Markov’s addiction to the telephone. Since 8.55, the entire world had decided to call her. First it had been Pixie; then, on the dot of nine, Gini Lamartine, wanting to cancel Thanksgiving in Washington (‘I’ll call you back,’ Lindsay had cried); next, Max had called and received very short shrift. There was then two minutes of agonizing silence, before the next caller proved to be that mumbling person from Lulu Sabatier’s office, wanting to speak to Ms Drummond urgently.

‘She’s
dead
,’ Lindsay cried. ‘She died suddenly. Go
away
.’

At 9.15, it had been Markov. Lindsay had already had four minutes on the subject of the lunch he and Jippy had just finished—retsina and moussaka; delicious, but Jippy had no appetite at all—and four minutes on the palace of Knossos; she did not intend to have any more.

‘Markov,’ she interrupted, ‘will you get off this line? I’m not
interested
in minotaurs. I told you, I’m waiting for a very important call.’

‘You’re insensitive, you know that, Lindy?’ Markov yawned. ‘Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, darling, this is your friend calling you from the other side of the world. How’s Gotham City? Whose call?’

‘I’m hanging up, Markov. I’m hanging up in twenty seconds…’

‘Tell me, Lindy, just to set my heart at rest, sweetling—this call wouldn’t be from a certain Rowland McGuire, would it? You remember him? The answer to every maiden’s prayer? Otherwise known as Mr Blind, Mr Unobtainable and Mr Conspicuously Bad News?’

‘No, it damn well isn’t. It’s—it’s work, that’s all. Go
away
, Markov. Ten seconds and counting…’

‘Jippy wants a word.’

Jippy might have wanted a word, but as usual he had difficulty in pronouncing it. Desperate now, Lindsay stared at the hands of her bedside clock; she could hang up on Markov without compunction, but not Jippy—that would be too cruel. She listened to Jippy fight sounds; she saw his gentle, steady, brown-eyed gaze, that expression of dog-like fidelity; she remembered the last time she had spoken to him and felt the brush of unease. It took Jippy one and a half minutes to utter a sound.