Bed of Nails (16 page)

“Take off your shoes and put this on. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t know Alan’s dealer. The only thing he said was that you’d used him for your research. It’s a bit late to turn up here now, worrying about his problems.”

She turned her back on him and walked over to the tins of paint. Her tight buttocks hardly shook as her heels hit the floor. John’s mouth was dry, not a drop of saliva.

“I didn’t use Alan, he was a friend. And what about you? What did you ever do for him?”

John didn’t know why he was suddenly so furious. Fear, desire, the rain beating on the studio roof. Paty had frozen, then bent over the tins of paint with legs tensed. John stared at the inviting buttocks offered to him. Her voice was a growl.

“Just shut up.”

She turned round, her nipples arrogantly thrusting up like brown pebbles. She was angry for sure. That was obvious from her voice, but she was more in control than he was.

“Alan was …”

“I never treated Alan like some experimental animal. I helped him for ten years. I didn’t use my ass to do that.”

She smiled, as if it were a hilarious remark. It was presumptuous certainly, to compare the respective pulling power of their buttocks. John wondered what was going on under that faultless skin. She looked like a woman more inclined to inflict wounds than to bandage them.

She pointed at the wall.

“Stand up against that canvas.”

John moved back, without taking his eyes off her, towards a blank canvas. She was lying, from start to finish, but he couldn’t shake himself free, or penetrate her defences. Her nudity was like armour.

“What happened in his show that night?”

Patricia Königsbauer was concentrating on the tins of paint. She lifted up the middle one, tensing her muscles, and tipped it over her head. Her body was immediately covered in brilliant red liquid. Threads of viscous paint dripped from her fingers, the scarlet fluid making her shoulders, breasts and belly glisten. She waited while the paint flowed down her legs, then came towards him. She stopped within arm’s reach, standing with her feet slightly apart,
letting him look at her as much as he wanted. The hazel eyes, their lashes now thick with paint, shone out of her glistening and expressionless face. The paint had flattened her blonde curls, covered her lips and thickened her now indistinct features. Heavy drops fell from her crimson pubis, like some kind of monstrous menstruation, attracting him. A red plastic doll, melting. He could look, but there was nothing to see. John remembered Ariel’s words, when she had described Alan losing his blood, wrapped up in a sticky cape. His eyes widened in shock. Paty flung herself at him.

His breath was taken away. By chance or instinct, she had aimed at his broken ribs and his stomach. The pain of it made him groan. Flinging her arms open, she repeated it three times. The apprehension of pain turned into anticipation of pleasure. Invisible strings tied him to the canvas. She didn’t take her eyes off his, as she drew back before launching herself at him, and she hit the canvas with her hands when their bodies touched. The fourth time, she stayed pressed up against him, moving her belly against his with short sharp blows. Her paint-drenched hair filled his mouth. He shivered with a thrill of pleasure, and put his arms round her scarlet torso.

It was impossible to grasp the cold and slippery body. She escaped his embrace, turned on her heel, and walked away across the studio. He stood, unable to move.

Patricia disappeared behind one of the doors, leaving red footprints on the floor.

He took off the smock, tried to wipe his face and threw the garment on the floor. He would have liked to fight a punch ball for a few minutes, to stop the trembling in his hands.

He put his shoes on and walked around the studio, trying to compose his thoughts. Was she in love with Alan? They were both impermeable to normal feelings. Had this handicap brought them together, creating a bond between them, even a corrupt one? Did she really know anything? Alan never said much, that was true
enough. An old hand at the game, he wouldn’t gossip about his dealers over cocktails.

As he walked in front of the canvases, he wondered which one Paty had used to crush the Kansas fakir. This kind of game would have amused him. Not exactly John’s cup of tea, though. After a winter in the tepee, something more straightforward would have been enough. But the result was the same. The urge had passed. His ribs were aching again, desire receding, and his bruised stomach was making him feel sick.

The rain had all but stopped. Behind the door he could hear a shower running. Either she was crazy, or she had managed royally to evade the issue.

Five minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom, wearing a bathrobe that offered no glimpses of flesh, a towel twisted round her head.

If this whirlwind of a woman was some kind of proxy gift from the lovelorn fakir – a final possibility after all – the casting was way off target. The hypothesis began to seem plausible. In his refrigerated locker, Alan was taking the piss one last time.

In spite of his unease, John was recovering his confidence and the blonde, draped in her cheap disdain, felt it too. Once clothed, she had lost her assured air.

“Were you at the Caveau that night?”

“You’ve no business staying here now.”

“Alan killed himself; it wasn’t an accident.”

She poured herself a Scotch at the bar, and sipped it while looking at her latest work.

“You’re too tall. You take up the whole canvas.”

It was true, on his Paty-style portrait there was less paint than on the others. A few splashes of red, Patricia’s handprints and traces of her feet. In the centre of the canvas, a big empty space. A hollow left by vanished desire? The questioning of existence?
Nothing without another person? A negative portrait. An absence where John P. Nichols had been. His sick feeling was turning to distress, and the urge to get away. The Königsbauer neurosis was catching.

“You know perfectly well it wasn’t an accident.”

No reply. A shiver. She was still looking at the new canvas. It must be annoying her that she had not managed to imprint more of herself around John.

“Just get out.”

“Do you know Frank Hirsh? He works at the U.S. embassy here. Alan was sleeping with him.”

An extra long swig of whisky made her pull a face.

“There’s no point carrying on like this.”

“Did Alan leave any of his stuff here?” John was remembering the photograph. “There is one thing I’d like to find again.”

She was almost shouting now.

“I’ve chucked it all out! Alan didn’t give a damn about that sort of thing.”

Her German accent had become more pronounced.

He walked past her slowly, not looking at her, heading for the door.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I guess he left without any regrets.”

As he put his hand out towards the door handle, the whisky glass shattered against the white-painted metal.

“Fuck off!”

The translucent alcohol trickled down the door. She was certainly obsessed with leaving traces on walls: well, at least she left a mark on your mind.
She strips off and runs at walls
. Alan had not thought to mention that she stuck someone else up against the wall first.

He glanced up at the tiny control screen above the entryphone, and went out, crushing the fragments of glass underfoot.

Rain: colourless water. The air between the drops lets ideas circulate.

A girl waiting for him, naked under her smock, when he had turned up without warning. Two closed doors, and the bedroom door ajar when he got there. Three doors shut when he left. Perhaps it was not only for
his
benefit that she had taken her clothes off. Sad, but realistic.

*

He took up position in the place Saint-Michel at 9.00 p.m. The rain had stopped, but his clothes, and the city, were still dripping wet. He stood at the back of a newspaper kiosk, holding a copy of
Le Canard enchaîné
and smoking Gitanes to keep himself warm. His face, discoloured with bruises, was lit by the rosy tip of his cigarette. A fugitive spectre in the dark.

He kept his eyes fixed on the square in front of the fountain, a favourite rendezvous point for Parisians. Men and women, mostly young, came and stood, looking around, mobile phones to their ears. Smiles of greeting, handshakes, lovers’ embraces. Couples formed and disappeared, to be replaced by single figures waiting their turn.

By 9.30 p.m. John was shivering with cold. He left his windswept corner for a covered café terrace, where there was a gas heater. He drank a coffee, sitting well back in his chair to keep his blond head out of sight. The warmth was welcome, even if his feet were still frozen.

By 10.00 p.m. he had only five cigarettes left and his upper garments at least were dry. He ordered one more coffee and stirred sugar in to it. He was watching a black car that had been double-parked for several minutes in the rue Saint-André des Arts. A long car, glistening with rain. The light reflected off the windows made it impossible to see inside.

Two traffic wardens on motorbikes and wearing fluorescent
jackets stopped at the driver’s door. The window was lowered, but now the driver was hidden from him by the jackets. They went away after exchanging a few words, and the car moved off. John waited another half-hour. The car did not return. He paid and left the café at a quarter to eleven.

No hoodies. No obvious watchers, and nobody turning up for the supposed meeting. Their absence worried him more than it would have done to meet his attackers. He was spoiling for a fight. Being the bait on a fishing line was not an alternative. Did the dealers think he had really been scared off and was far away? The beating the night before had left little room for doubt. They should have been there.

He kept close to the walls as he walked away, keeping his eyes peeled. The city, dark and damp, had become a huge stone forest. The hunt was on and he was the quarry. Nothing to do with five thousand euros. The more questions there were, the surer he was about that. Speeding up, he turned a corner, sprinted about fifty metres and ducked into a doorway. Five minutes. Nobody following. He tried it again, and in the end, feeling ridiculous, he headed back to the Luxembourg Gardens.

After one final glance round in the rue Vaugirard, he opened the gate, closed it quickly and plunged into the park. The light was on in Bunker’s hut, a relief at first, then it worried him. The isolated light amidst the trees was like an enchanted lantern. The previous evening at this time, the cabin had been dark. The wait at Saint-Michel and his walk back had made him paranoid.

He approached cautiously from one side, going round in a curve, weaving between the tree trunks and shrubs, and then kneeled down under the geraniums. Mesrine hadn’t barked. John stood up slowly to peer inside, and Bunker appeared at the window, a roll-up crushed in the corner of his mouth.

“Looking for something, son?”

The American stood up and dusted off his fatigues.

“Aren’t you asleep at this time of night?”

The old man had been waiting up for him, but wouldn’t admit that he had been worrying. An open bottle of red wine was keeping him company; by the look of his eyelids, not the first. The feeble light bulb and the alcohol combined to etch deep lines round his eyes and mouth. He filled two glasses, switched on the hotplate and put a saucepan on it.

“Mesrine, he won’t bark at night, case you’re thinking of playing cowboys and Indians. Find what you were after?”

“
No
. This afternoon I called the embassy. My friend was sleeping with some guy who works there, Frank Hirsh his name is. He was the one who took me to the morgue. And now Hirsh seems to be off some place. I called his home address, no answer. He was at Alan’s last show at the club. I really need to see him. I got this other guy in the embassy, and he told me the body’s being flown out tomorrow. He didn’t sound too friendly. Alan must really have caused a lot of trouble there. This guy didn’t want to discuss it. He said it was nothing to do with them any more, and not to call them again. Nobody wants to know, nobody will tell me anything. Even the girl he was staying with.”

“You saw a girl today?”

Bunker put the saucepan in front of John, a fork standing up in a magma of ravioli.

“I did, and she got undressed in five minutes flat.”

The old man smiled, showing his gappy teeth like those of a kid.

John wedged the piece of paper in a crack in the pine tree bark, and moved thirty paces back. The little white square was quite visible in the orange glow of Paris by night. He strung his bow and
the wood creaked as it bent. Once the string was knotted, he twanged it to make it vibrate, checking by ear that the tension was right. Bunker was sitting on a bench, Mesrine at his feet. It was one in the morning. John needed to think. He fitted the first arrow.

The improvised target was pretty close, but he wasn’t really trying for points, just exercising. His ribs were sore as he drew the bow. His whole body ached, and he had trouble controlling his breath. The arrow whistled off and he breathed out. The tip went into the bark,
thwack
, just to the left of the paper.

Mesrine flinched. The sound of the arrow had made him jumpy.

Paty had cracked twice. The first time was when he mentioned Hirsh.

“Then what happened?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“This woman. When she got undressed.”

“She poured paint all over herself and then got dressed again. There was someone else hiding in the studio.”

Bunker was disappointed.

“Nothing else?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Ah.”

“And she’s not telling the truth.”

“That figures.”

John fitted a second arrow.
Thwack!
Centred, but above the paper. Mesrine’s ears went up again. Bunker patted his head. “Quiet, boy.”

The second time was when she had started shouting … when he asked if Alan had left any of his stuff with her? No. When he had mentioned the photograph? Wrong, he hadn’t mentioned the photograph. All he had said was that he would like to get something back.