Hard Light (12 page)

Back outside, I stopped to pull on the cheap gloves I'd just bought, my head down against the snow. When I looked up, I glimpsed a young woman racing past me on the sidewalk. I sucked my breath in and edged back into the doorway.

I'd only seen her for a fraction of a second, but that was enough time to recognize the worn military parka with its dirty fur hood, her cropped platinum hair and topaz eyes. It was the same woman who'd passed me and Adrian on the street last night in Crouch End, minutes after we'd left Mallo Dunfries's flat.

 

15

They say there's no such thing as photographic memory. But years of seeing the world through a viewfinder left me with the ability to reconstruct an image in my head, as precisely as if I were staring through a loupe. I waited in the doorway until a trio of customers left the cafe, then strode alongside them until I reached the corner, where I sprinted across the street the instant the light changed. I glanced back but saw no sign of the woman in the parka. It might not have been the same person. But I wasn't betting on that.

Poppy Teasel lived in Arbour Square, on a block that had survived both the Blitz and reconstruction. Snow sifted across a terrace of neat three-story brick-and-stucco structures, nearly identical save for one that sported a door painted turquoise. I double checked the address: This was Poppy's place. I glanced down a sidewalk empty except for a man walking a pitbull, hurried up the steps, and rang the bell.

No one answered. I pressed it again, this time kept my finger on the buzzer. I was sweating despite the cold, and the sound of the doorbell lanced me like a fever. I needed a drink. After a minute I heard someone moving inside the house. A shadow passed across curtained windows covered by a metal grille.

“Who is it?” a voice rasped.

“I'm a friend of Morven's.”

“What?”

“Morven Dunfries. I have, uh, a present.”

Long silence, followed by the click of bolts being drawn. The door suddenly swung toward me and something small and white darted out.

“Who are you?” a slight, white-haired woman demanded. “God damn it.”

She lunged down the steps to grab something, then raced back up and tossed a cat through the open doorway before glancing at me in irritation. “For Christ's sake, get inside.”

I stepped in, and the door shut with a muffled boom. She turned the dead bolts and straightened, gazing up at me.

As a young teenager, Poppy's intelligence and humor provided ballast to her luscious face and wolf-whistle figure. By the time I saw her at the Bottom Line, junk and cigarettes and general hard living had eroded her beauty while perversely enhancing it, like one of those ancient statues whose iconicity is associated with their deterioration, and even unimaginable without it. Smoking had coarsened her voice: If you closed your eyes in the club that night, you wouldn't have guessed the woman singing was still in her twenties. Betty Boop had morphed into Lotte Lenya.

Now, like Morven, Poppy Teasel looked like one of the Weird Sisters, if she shopped at OxFam. Offstage, she was much smaller than I remembered—almost a foot shorter than me—and much thinner. Her pale skin appeared chalky, almost friable, as if it would crumble if you touched it. Behind a pair of cheap reading glasses, the famous pansy eyes were sunken, the irises so deep a brown they appeared violet. Her once-wild dark hair was straight, bright silver and cut in a severe chin-length bob. She wore loose black yoga pants, beaten-up leather clogs, and gold hoop earrings. A baggy lavender sweater revealed a glimpse of the cleavage that had made her irresistable to every male singer who'd graced the cover of
Circus
magazine. Above her left breast was a calligraphic tattoo identical to Morven's:
FC
. Flaming Creatures.

“Who are you?” She whipped the reading glasses from her face and peered at me, frowning as she took in the scar beside my eye. She smelled of Opium perfume, with an underlying chemical tang.

“Mor—”

“I heard: Morven sent you. Who are
you
?”

I stared at the snow melting around my feet. “Cass. Here.”

I reached into my bag for the package and handed it to her. Poppy stared at it, bemused, then smiled wistfully.

“Right. It's her birthday. I'm the one should be sending a present. I've not been well. Were you there?” I nodded. “It must have been a good time.”

“It was.”

I assumed she'd turn me back out into the snow. Instead she said, “Would you like coffee? Tea? Unless you're in a hurry. I'd like to hear about it.”

I hesitated. “Yeah, sure. Coffee would be great.”

“You're American,” she said, beckoning me down the hall. “I'm from Laguna Beach originally. New York?”

“That's right.”

The flat was large but in rough shape. It reeked of cat. Scuffed hardwood floors, cracked plaster walls, a framed poster for the
Best Eaten Cold
album, Poppy resembling a black-haired Stevie Nicks after a long night. In the kitchen: chipped flame-orange Le Creuset pots and a formica-topped table. An old yellow raincoat hung beside the back door. Leggy geraniums in pots lined the windowsill, their blossoms a defiant fuchsia.

Poppy set Mallo's package on the table and began to fill an electric kettle. “Sit. So, how do you know Morven and Mallo?”

I said, “I'm a friend of a friend.”

“Which friend?”

I decided to risk the truth. “Adrian Carlisle.”

“Adrian?” Poppy started, quickly recovered, and removed a bag of coffee from the freezer. “Is he still in London?”

“As far as I know.”

“He was such a beautiful kid.” Her voice sounded strained; anguished, even. “So smart, we used to talk about Lawrence Durrell. I always wished we could have stayed close.”

I tried to hide my own surprise as I unzipped my jacket, shoved my hat and gloves into a pocket, and dropped my scarf on the table. I looked for any sign of a bottle. Nada, except for some Pellegrino on a counter by the fridge.

“Want some fizzy water?” asked Poppy.

“No thanks.”

“I don't have anything else. I quit drinking a long time ago. Quit everything. That was fun.” She made a face. “So do you live here?”

“Just visiting.”

“Have you been to London before?”

I fought the impulse to snap at her questions. I recognized the defensive maneuver, deployed by people who've spent too much time at the receiving end of a microphone. I wondered how long it had been since she'd had a visitor. The flat had a melancholy air, enhanced by its sweetish, sickroom scent.

“I've been here a couple of times,” I said. “Not in a while.”

“I miss New York. California, never. But I loved the city.”

She leaned against the sink and looked at the floor. Her bright cap of silvery hair had shifted so that I could see dark lesions on her bare scalp. A wig. Poppy raised her head to stare at me, violet eyes burning in her haggard face. She nodded, as though I'd asked a question.

“I have cancer,” she said. “Milk or sugar?”

“Black's fine.”

She poured boiling water into a cafetière, watched the grounds swirl then settle. “I lost touch with Adrian a long time ago. He stayed away from smack but got pretty badly into coke, didn't he?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Bad for the heart.” She laughed hoarsely, pressing one hand against her chest. “That and lead guitarists. He would have been better off getting heroin through the NHS.”

Her mouth twisted as she reached to pick up my scarf and traced the outline of one of its patterned skulls. “Now this never goes out of style, does it?”

She let the scarf's folds slide through her knobbed fingers, turned away to pour coffee. “Here, we can take these into the living room.” She handed me a mug and picked up her package. “Pretend it's my birthday; you can watch me open my present.”

Again, I recognized the old-style groupie manner—ingratiate yourself with strangers, confide in journalists, plead with drug dealers; then seduce all of them. In another era, she would have been an aging survivor of the Parisian Beau Monde. Now she was a relic of another lost demimonde. Beautiful People who die young become immortal. The rest just die.

The living room faced the street. Yards of dusty orange silk were draped across the windows. A once-white sofa took up most of the space, its cushions now a fungal gray. A white cat slept on one end, curled like a smaller, cleaner cushion.

“Sit wherever you like,” said Poppy.

She settled onto a Moroccan leather hassock, the package in her lap. I sat on the sofa opposite the cat. The room was overheated. I sipped my coffee and waited for the throbbing in my head to subside. I was in no hurry to rush back out into the snow, but the craving for alcohol was starting to gnaw at me. Rats in the brain, Quinn called it.

“I bought this place when the album came out,” Poppy said, as though picking up the thread of an interview. “The neighborhood was sketchy—it still is—but it was cheap. I thought I could fix it up when I had money. Only I never did have money.” She gave that raspy laugh. “I could have bought a flat in Mayfair for what I spent on smack before I moved here.”

She had a beautiful, smoky voice. Honey on sandpaper, Lester Bangs once described it. In the half light, her gaunt features made her resemble one of the Dunfrieses' carved figures as she stared past me at the window. Her skin glistened with sweat and gave off a scent like spoiled peaches. My neck prickled: Whatever damage Poppy had sustained over the decades, it was now indistinguishable from her disease.

“Shall we open this?” she said at last.

She set her mug on the floor, picked up the little box, and shook it. She smiled, not at me but at some recalled memory, and began to unwrap the package. Slowly, unraveling the long ribbons and running a thumbnail beneath each bit of tape, unfolding the bright paper with painstaking care, then smoothing it across her knees. It was like watching someone create an origami in reverse. At last she held up a plain brown cardboard box.

“What do you think it is?” she whispered, her bruised eyes huge.

I said nothing, and she tossed the wrapping paper onto the floor. The cat stirred, then coiled back into slumber. Poppy bent avidly over the little box and withdrew something wrapped in layers of white tissue that fell like a bandage unrolling at her feet. The lines in her face faded, her sunken eyes blanked into shadow.

“Oh,” she murmured. “Oh, my goodness.”

She picked up a small object and cradled it in her palm, put on her reading glasses then moved to scrutinize it under a lamp. She seemed to have forgotten I was in the room with her.

I started to sweat. What was the protocol for delivering contraband? Did you express polite interest in the product? Ask if there was a return message for the sender?

Or split as silently and quickly as possible? I had just started to my feet when Poppy glanced up at me.

“Look at this.”

She extended her hand so that I could see a small disc, about the size of a silver dollar and bone-pale. I stared at it without comprehension. I'd been expecting a ziplock bag of white powder or pills, a wad of cash.

“Go ahead,” she urged. “You can pick it up.”

I did, careful not to drop it. I thought at first the disc was plastic or maybe Bakelite. But when I leaned into the circle of lamplight I saw that it was irregularly shaped, its surface striated with fine lines easier to feel beneath my fingertips than to see. There was a small hole drilled through the center.

I looked at Poppy. “Is it bone?”

“Mammoth ivory.”

“Mammoth ivory?” I held the disc closer to the lamp, turning it back and forth to catch the light. Very faint lines were incised in the center, a pattern that was oddly familiar. “I recognize this,” I said, and frowned.

Gingerly, Poppy took the disc from my hand and turned it over. Almost the same image was engraved on the other side, only slightly larger and more rounded: a crude figure, with tiny gashes for eyes. Twin inverted triangles symbolized breasts above a pair of diagonal lines that indicated arms. The figure seemed misshapen until I realized it depicted a pregnant woman, crude arms angled protectively above her distended abdomen. The hole had been positioned where her naval would have been. I looked at Poppy.

“A goddess figure?”

“Maybe,” she said. She turned it over, so that I could again see the first image, noticeably thinner than the other, its triangular breasts narrower and its eyes larger. “Here, come with me.”

I followed her into an adjoining room that seemed to be an office. A small desk with a laptop and scattered papers, an armchair beside a chrome standing lamp, shelves filled with books. On the wall, a framed poster for a show of Ice Age art at the British Museum.

Against the wall stood an antique curio cabinet. Poppy opened one of its drawers and removed a slender length of rawhide about eighteen inches long. Carefully she threaded the rawhide through the bone disc, stepped to a standing lamp, and beckoned me over. She switched on the light, and I shaded my eyes from a halogen bulb.

“Now watch,” she commanded.

She took one end of the rawhide in each of her hands, holding it slack with the disc suspended in the middle. In one smooth quick motion she pulled the string taut. The disc spun, flipping from side to side. I stared at it, confused. “I don't get it.”

“I'll do it again,” said Poppy. “Move closer.”

I did, near enough to feel the halogen bulb's heat on my face. Once more I heard the
twang
of the rawhide string when she tightened it. Inches in front of me, the disc spun in a whitish blur. In a flicker so fleeting it happened in an eyeblink, the carved figure's abdomen swelled. I felt goosebumps rise along my arms.

“Do it again,” I said.