A Man Lies Dreaming (33 page)

I didn’t know she had a knife!

The whore stabbed me.

You fucking bitch! I yelled. I released her with the pain and stepped back, confused. I stared in horror at my own blood. She had stabbed me in the ribs. I raised my eyes and she was standing with the knife in her hand, and she was smiling.

You like that, do you? You like that? I shouted. I lunged for my coat, for the knife hidden there. She slashed at me with her own sharp little knife, missed. I tried to get my blade out but my hands were shaking. The coat was crumpled in my hands. She kicked me, catching me on the side of the head with her heel. I lost my balance and landed on my buttocks, hard. She began to kick me, viciously, and her heels tore chunks out of my skin. I tried to curl into a ball to protect myself. I was lying on the coat and I felt something cold and hard and my hand closed on the handle of my knife. Then I felt calm again, in control. I stood up with the knife in my hand.

Wolf was in a cheerful mood. He was humming a popular song without quite paying attention, then realised it was Marlene Deitrich’s ‘Falling in Love Again’. He continued humming and adjusted his fedora at a cocky angle. His cases were finished with, but so what? He had been paid. Who cared where the stupid Jew bitch Judith Rubinstein had got herself to? Today was the first day of the rest of his life. He came to his street but there was no one about. Even the whores were gone. Beyond he could hear shouts, see fireworks rise over the rooftops from the direction of the Thames. The hordes were out there, in Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly, and thronging the Embankment and the wine bars and pubs. He went to his door and found it unlocked, the lock in fact jammed, inexpertly, and his good cheer evaporated. He pushed the door open and went in.

It was dark and he climbed each step with a slow and careful footfall; each step was like another level he was climbing, on top of some ancient and enormous pyramid, a once-grand edifice now reduced by centuries of neglect and misuse. The air smelled metallic. His shoes on the faded carpet made no sound. It was so very quiet. He could hear his own breathing, but nothing else. Nothing moved. He came to the landing and stopped. The door to his office was open. The taste of rust was in Wolf’s mouth, on his tongue and in his gums. He pulled the door open all the way.

He went inside.

He saw it in snatches, not quite forming a full picture. The faint light from outside rippled on the walls and on the carpet, ancient light that had been traversing space for untold millennia and new light, born from the mysterious electrical processes housed within the streetlamp outside. The light illuminated the room in a chiaroscuro where shadows danced like the naked savages studied by Ernst Schäfer on his expeditions to prove the origins of the Aryan race. Arcs of bright fresh blood decorated the walls of Wolf’s office. Some reached as high as the ceiling, some criss-crossed each other in strange hieroglyphs, a language of death and blood. A raincoat had been tossed to the corner of the room. There were dirty red palm prints on the floor around it.

Wolf watched the toes. The toes were long and slender and the nails were painted a fuchsia colour. Furniture had been overturned in the room and one chair was broken. A woman’s high-heeled shoe lay on its side. Wolf couldn’t see the other one. A woman’s handbag, a bag he recognised, was upturned by the window and spilling out of it were dildos and a whip and make-up, blusher and lipstick, a wad of notes, keys, prophylactics, half a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, of the sort Herr Edelmann occasionally sold in the bakery downstairs.

There was a concavity in the floor where her head had been bashed, repeatedly, with cold fury, and he saw her hair, clumped with brain matter and blood, in delicate bunches like the stems of flowers. She was not like the first girl, cleanly arranged. She had struggled, had inflicted her own violence on her attacker, and was silenced, at last, for her transgression, for the crime of being a woman, or a prostitute, or for just being. Her murderer had lashed out blindly, repeatedly. Her head on the floor barely resembled something human.

There was the fading smell of semen, like wet mushrooms.

Having done this deed the killer had tidied himself up, had become a man amongst men once more. He had tidied his clothes and straightened himself and then he had dipped his finger in her blood and he had drawn a swastika on the wall, and then, beside Dominique’s head, he had left Wolf a toy: a tin wind-up drummer.

Wolf picked up the toy. Idly, he wound the little key. He set the drummer on the floor and watched it march past Dominique’s body, the tiny hands moving mechanically up and down over the drum, beating out a funeral dirge. It was the only sound in the room. He watched it go. It marched and marched.

On the desk was Wolf’s typewriter and in the typewriter was a sheet of paper, neatly inserted. Wolf went round the desk and sat down in his chair. The keys of the typewriter were smeared in blood. He pulled out the piece of paper and read.

It began,
Herr Wolf.

He read the letter, holding it at a distance and squinting at the hard black letters on the page.

The letter was a confession of a sort. It ended with a simple entreaty for the two of them to meet.

On the desk next to the typewriter was a ticket for the revue show at the London Hippodrome, dated for that night. Wolf picked it up, looked at it, turned it over, put it back down. As an afterthought he turned the typewritten page over in his hand.

Written on the back of the paper in an unsteady hand, with the same ink that only a scant time before had run through Dominique’s veins, was a single word in the murderer’s hand.

Run
.

Wolf’s Diary, 22nd November 1939 –
contd.

The door downstairs crashed open. The sound, unexpected and terrifying, made me jump. My heart beat fast in my chest.

Could it be the killer, coming back?

A madman, I thought, dazedly. I was dealing with a madman. Not for the first time I wished I had a gun. A gentleman killed with bullets, the state with gas. Only a madman used a knife.

I listened to footsteps come labouring up the stairs. Stray light from the window bounced off an object thrown beyond my desk. It was a blood-covered knife. It must have belonged to the girl. It was the weapon she had used on the killer. I picked it up and sat behind the desk again, waiting. The footsteps reached all the way to the landing and stopped.

‘Oh, it’s
you
,’ I said.

‘Well, well, well,’ Constable Keech said. ‘What have we got here, then?’ He stood in the doorway, his fat face covered in a sheen of sweat. When he grinned his big square teeth looked like coral reefs buried under a murky sea.

‘I would like,’ I said, ‘to report a murder.’

Keech bellowed a laugh. He laughed genuinely, with big heaving breaths, his face turning redder and redder, his hands supporting his weight on his knees as he almost keeled over on himself. ‘Would you now, shamus,’ he said. ‘Would you now.’

‘I didn’t do this, Keech.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’

‘I didn’t do this! You have to believe me!’

‘Don’t insult me, Wolf.’ He straightened up, glanced at the corpse, lost his good humour. ‘Jesus, Wolf. What did you do to that poor girl?’

‘Someone is trying to frame me.’

‘Well, they’ve done a bloody good job, then, haven’t they! Get up. You’re under arrest.’

‘Fuck off, pig!’ I was feeling panicked. ‘How did you get here?’ I said. ‘How did you
know
?’

He shrugged. ‘I got an anonymous call at the station,’ he said.

‘I’m being
framed
!’

‘Come along, Wolf. You can explain everything at the station.’

‘Is it that inspector again? Morhaim.’ I spat out the name. ‘The filthy Jew has been after me from the beginning.’

‘Inspector Morhaim is no longer in the employ of the Metropolitan Police. And another word from you about him like this will get you some broken teeth to complain about.’ He took out his nightstick and ran his fingers along its dark shaft almost lovingly. Still I didn’t move from the desk. Hidden from Keech’s view was the dead girl’s knife.

‘What happened to Morhaim?’ I said. I was, genuinely, surprised.

Keech spat on the floor. ‘He quit. It’s not like he was popular with the men. And well, with your boy Mosley headed to Downing Street, I don’t think it would have been long before he was pushed out anyway.’

‘Now, are you going to get up from that chair there or do I need to make you?’

‘Make me, pig.’

‘Oh, I’ll make you all right!’ he said. He advanced on me, the nightstick raised. ‘Look!’ I said. I waved the killer’s letter in my hand. ‘It’s all but a confession, it’s proof I didn’t do it!’

‘Proof?’ His stick came down on the desk, shattering the cheap wood. ‘Proof?’ He snatched it from my hand, looked at it, his fat lips moving as he read. ‘You typed this.’

‘No!’

He scrunched the killer’s confession into a ball and tossed it in the corner. ‘You’re sick in the head,’ he said. ‘You know what they’re going to call you? The greatest murderer since Jack the Ripper. You’re not right, mate. You’re not right at all.’ And he brought his stick down once again, right on the typewriter, smashing it to pieces.

Keys flew in the air; a semicolon hit me in the eye. ‘Damn you, Keech!’ I said. I rose from the chair just as he strode past Dominique’s head and reached for me, his stick descending a third time. I slashed him with Dominique’s knife. The knife missed his face, grazed his chest. The nightstick caught me on the arm and a terrible numbing pain spread through me and I could barely breathe. The knife fell from my hand. I screamed, ‘
Scheisse
!’ and raised my knee sharply, catching him unawares between the legs. Keech made a high-pitched hissing sound and fell, slowly. Somehow he was still holding the stick and he swung it as he went down, hitting me on the shin, the pain so excruciating that I screamed and went down, too.

For a moment both of us were on the floor facing each other like two lovers at the end of an intimate moment, looking deep into each other’s eyes. ‘I didn’t do it, Keech. I didn’t kill them!’

‘I will … fucking kill
you
,’ he said. He spoke with difficulty. He reached for me, those huge meaty hands, his fat fingers closing on my throat. Their weight was terrible. His thumbs found my windpipe and began to press. I reached desperately for the fallen knife, scrabbling for it, panicking, the pain growing impossible, my breath departing. I tried to fight him off; we were entwined on the floor, slick with the dead girl’s blood. His body pressed on mine; he was so heavy I couldn’t breathe. I thought, what a way to die. Then miraculously my fingers scrabbling in the blood on the floor found the sharp edge of the knife. It sliced the tip of my finger, and my blood mingled with the girl’s. Slowly, slowly I moved my fingers until I found the handle of the blade. I was so weak I could not breathe, but I could do this, just as I had cured my blindness with my mind. The power came to me, for one last desperate act, and I thrust the knife into his neck; just so.

The blood came out of the wound hot; it spurted out of him. And still he pressed on my neck, and for a moment I blacked out.

I came to, only moments later. The pressure on my neck had eased – was gone. I could breathe. The air tasted so sweet. I blinked back tears. His face swam into focus. His hand was pressed to his neck, holding back the blood, but it spurted out of him nonetheless, running between his fingers. His eyes stared into mine, and I was terrified of him. I scrambled to get away from him, from the blood. It was everywhere in the room, his blood, my blood, the girl’s blood, the murderer’s blood. I slipped and fell in it. Typewriter keys were pressed painfully against my flesh, an A and an H. Keech said nothing, just watched me, the blood still pouring out of him. I pushed myself up until I stood, supporting myself against the desk, looking down at him. The knife was on the floor. I think Keech smiled. I think he said, ‘Now they’ll get you.’ I walked backwards until my shoulder blades hit the wall and I stopped and stood there, breathing deeply, looking about me at the room and the dead whore and the dying policeman.

Keech was right, I realised, with dread.

I was a marked man, now. And there was no escape.

I watched him die. He died well. I will say that much for him.

I picked up the ticket for the revue show off the desk. I took one last look at the room. My office. I had been almost happy there, for a while.