Nova Swing (20 page)

“Emil,” she whispered. She meant:
I’m here
. She meant:
It’s OK
. She meant:
Don’t go
. After a moment he opened his eyes and smiled.

“Where’s Vic?” he asked.

“Vic won’t be coming to see us any more,” Edith said.

Later that night, down by the seafront, the wind dropped. The rain turned to drizzle and then stopped; in its place, fog stole in across the Corniche, muffling the sounds of merriment from the Café Surf. A man who looked like the older Albert Einstein sat on the cold seawall for a while, content, it seemed, to watch the rickshaws come and go in the oystershell lot, or exchange scraps of talk with the Monas in their lime-green tube skirts and orange fake-fur boleros. He liked them to flirt with him, and in return showed them pictures of someone they took to be his granddaughter. The limits of visibility fell, give or take, at a pleasant twenty or thirty yards, describing a comfortable, colourful space lit from within by flocks of smart ads. Everyone, really, was having fun, when into the lot wheeled a pink 1952 Cadillac custom roadster, blessed or cursed, according to where you stood on the subject, with the low skirts and frenched tail lights of a later, impure aesthetic, a giant vehicle which blunt-nosed its way between the rickshaws, scattered the ads and see-sawed to a halt on its real mechanical suspension, while from an unimpeachable white leather interior the sounds of WDIA, Radio Retro, Station to the Stars, thugged their way in solid blocks across the voice of some hysterical commentator at Preter Coeur.

“Very impressive,” Lens Aschemann congratulated his assistant. “I’ll just fold my wet raincoat before I get in, if you don’t mind, and put it in the back here.”

“Those Monas seem to know you well,” the assistant said.

“It’s charity work. Let’s drive a little before you take me in.” He fastened his seatbelt. “Go anywhere you like since we’ll only be killing time. By the way,” he said, “are you back at Sport Crime? If not, you needn’t listen to this indifferent music the fighters like.” He leaned across and switched off the radio. “Later we can have a proper breakfast, maybe you’d like to go to Pellici’s, which I know you enjoyed before. Then I’ll let you do what you always wanted: arrest Vic Serotonin.”

He chuckled. “That Vic,” he said, “Betrayed three times in the same night. It’s hard not to laugh.”

They took the coast road. At first, when the assistant looked up into the driving mirror all she could see was the nacre reflection of her own headlights diffused around the car; further along, though, the fog, stirred up by temperature differentials out at sea, broke into patches. As soon as Aschemann saw where she was taking him, his mood changed. He folded his arms and stared ahead. “You drive too fast,” he complained. “How can anyone enjoy themselves?” About fifteen miles out, they got perfect visibility. Shortly afterwards, the assistant pulled into a headland viewpoint and stopped the car facing out to sea.

“It’s a long time since I sat here,” Aschemann said.

Cold air filled the Cadillac, but he wouldn’t allow her to close the roof. Instead, he stood up with his hands on the top edge of the windscreen and watched the big ocean waves shovelling the remains of themselves into the bay. Far out, the assistant could see the single, desolate fluttering blue light of some lost rickshaw advertisement: otherwise, the headland was black, the sky and the sea different shades of grey. “Was this place on the record?” he said eventually. “I’m surprised. It was never part of the investigation.”

“You’re thorough,” she said. “Everyone says that. You came here the day they found her, so you had it recorded.”

“It looks nicer in daylight.”

There he stuck, staring out over the sea.

Alerted by neighbours, the uniform branch had found the body of his wife, six o’clock on a hot summer evening, sprawled among the broken furniture, boxes of clothes, the piles of local dope-sheets, fashion magazines and old record albums which had divided the floor of the bungalow into narrow waist-high alleys, filled at that time of day with the rich yellow light filtering between the millefeuille slats of the wooden blinds.

“They called me immediately,” Aschemann said. “It was hot in there.” Up from all the yellowed pages, stronger than the smell of the corpse, came a stifling odour of dust and salt. “It got in your mouth as well as your nose.” She had fallen awkwardly, wedged sideways with one arm trapped beneath her and the other draped across a copy of
Harpers & Queen,
her left hand clutching an empty tumbler, her cheap sun-faded print dress disarranged to show a yellow thigh: but not one of those piles of repro-shop junk, the uniformed men remarked, had been disturbed by her fall. There were no signs of a struggle. It was as if her murderer had been as constrained in here as anyone else. Tattooed in her armpit were the lines:
Send me a neon heart/Send it with love/Seek me inside
.

When they turned her over, she proved to be holding in her other hand a letter Aschemann had sent her when they were still young. Invited reluctantly to the scene by an investigator several years his junior, Aschemann examined this for a moment—giving less attention, it seemed, to what he had written than to the thin blue paper he had written it on all that time ago—then went and stood puzzledly in the centre of the maze. The assembled uniforms spoke in low voices and avoided his eyes. He understood all this but it was as if he was seeing it for the first time. If he peered between the slats of the blind, he knew, he would be able to see Carmody, Moneytown, the Harbour Mole, the whole city tattooed stark and clear in strong violet light into the armpit of the bay.

“What could I do?” he now asked his assistant.

“They were right not to allow you to investigate.”

“Were they?” He shrugged, as if at this distance it didn’t matter. “I told them, ‘Do a good job.’ I said, ‘Bring me the details to my office later.’ Then I had someone drive me up here, someone as bright and ambitious as you, who could speak just as many languages. I was a suspect, though I never worked Carmody or knew tattooing.”

He looked around.

“It’s nicer in the day. Nice light.”

Nice light, a warm wind at the edge of the cliff, the whisper of the tide far below. A few eroded bristle-cone pines, a patch of red earth bared and compacted by tourists’ feet. An extraordinary sense of freedom, which he had regretted every day since.

“Take me back,” he told her. “We won’t have breakfast after all.”

On the drive back he was as preoccupied as he’d been when Vic Serotonin left his office the previous afternoon. At the bungalow he stood with his sodden raincoat over his arm and watched her K-turn the Cadillac so she could head back up Maricachel towards the centre of Saudade.

“You got this from my shadow operators,” he accused, “that was clever. I hope it was what you wanted.”

“I will never understand you.”

“No one ever understands anyone,” he said. “We should both get a little rest.”

All her ambush had achieved was to drive him further back inside himself, a place the assistant now understood as a maze which made the one his wife had lived in look simple. Instead of going home, she made her way across town to C-Street and the tank farm. Against reason, she had begun to enjoy the flabby, rather slow-witted version of herself the tank had proposed. She cleaned 1950s house; chose 1950s clothes, especially silk knickers; and waited for 1950s man to come home, wondering what he’d say to her if he ever did. Mostly, she imagined his blunt, nicotine-stained fingers on her. The tank’s flexible programming enabled her to do the shopping in Aschemann’s Cadillac, though she refitted it with a rolled, peaked and vented hood, reshaped rear-quarter scoops and lowered skirts; and—after considering paint chips both authentic and inauthentic—resprayed it the pearlescent blue of a boiled sweet. She had the steering wheel chromed, but otherwise kept the chrome down to the fenders and grille. The front bench seat was long enough to lie full-length on in the fairground parking lot, so she could watch the Meteorite spin violently above her while she masturbated, and after ten minutes or so come with a deep sigh. It was as good as a sleep.

While she was telling herself that, Aschemann sat listening to the sea and trying to fit what he knew about himself and his wife into what he knew about the event site. As part of giving up Vic, Edith Bonaventure had rickshawed her father’s site journals over to him. It was something, she said, she needed to do. Leafing through them (a little puzzledly, because, despite all his experience on the other side, Emil had so clearly lacked the one understanding Aschemann now came to), he fell asleep almost as if by accident, and for the first time in fifteen years found himself dreaming of something other than the dead woman: water flowing as cool as early daylight over his feet and around his ankles; voices laughing in excitement. It was, he assumed, some memory of childhood.

By the time the
cats began to pour back into the event site, up Straint Street and past the yellow window of Liv Hula’s Black Cat White Cat bar, it was raining again. Five in the morning. A few people would be out once the street had cleared, workers who used Straint as a short cut through to the ion works. A few shop assistants and clerks with rooms nearby, making their way down into the city proper; a few fighters making their way back from Preter Coeur. But generally Straint was unfrequented, and every morning at that time, the light seemed less to be coming back into things than leaving them for good. Liv Hula’s window was the only lively thing in that part of Saudade. It illuminated the sidewalk. Seen from outside, two or three all-night drinkers, isolated by its rectangularity so that they seemed to have nothing to do with one another, could look like a warm crowd. They looked like people you might enjoy to know.

Liv, watching the cats go past and wondering why her life seemed like a lot of separate pieces of reasonable worth which hadn’t yet added up to anything, would include herself in that picture: she was someone you thought you might like to know when you were walking up Straint, when the colour was bleached out of everything else, the kerbstones, the cats, the two-storey buildings with their chipped, greying storefronts. That was the sum of her.

“The cats never get wet,” she said. “You notice that? Whatever the weather is, they never get wet.”

Vic Serotonin, who had come in about ten minutes previously, now stood with his elbows on the zinc bar, staring hard at his hands as if it was an effort for him to remain alive. His client had walked in five minutes before him, and was sitting at a table on her own. Vic had a small bag with him, and he was wearing a dark-coloured watch cap. Mrs Kielar had on a short belted leatherette jacket over fitted black slacks; she looked tired. They were drinking coffee with rum and pretending, for the nanocameras, not to know each other. It wouldn’t have fooled a dog.

When Vic didn’t answer, Liv poured him more coffee, adding milk from the covered jug, and said, “You’re in early, Vic. It a jump-off day? You’re always in early on a jump-off day.”

No answer to that either. She shrugged and went behind the counter, which she wiped carelessly with a rag. She looked over at Mrs Kielar and raised her voice. “Don’t say anything, then, Vic,” she said. “I don’t want to hear what you say about yourself. I heard enough about that.” She switched the lights off, then on again, then off. Without them, the air in the bar reverted to a sepia colour—although the objects it picked out often seemed without colour themselves and as if they were lighted in some way from inside. “Is that bright enough for you, Vic? Can you see well enough in this light?”

When Vic refused to take the bait, Liv moved away and stood in the shadows at the back of the bar.

The travel agent and his client continued to ignore one another in their obvious way. They were there about fifteen minutes more, then Mrs Kielar pushed her chair back, turned up the grey fur collar of her jacket and left, and Vic threw some money on the zinc counter and he left too. As soon as he’d gone, Liv Hula stepped out of the shadows and counted the money. Her hand went to her mouth. She rushed to the door and called, “Vic, it’s your whole tab. There’s no need to pay your whole tab!” But they were already too far up Straint to hear her, following the black and white cats into the aureole of the event site.

“Good luck, Vic!” Liv Hula called. “Good luck!” But neither of them looked back.

If it was cats on Straint, it was dogs across the city at Suicide Point: Lens Aschemann woke just before dawn, with the confused impression that he had heard them barking as they lollopped through the surf. A trip down the hall and into the kitchen, which had the best seaward view, showed him the tide was on the turn under fast grey clouds, while rain blew suddenly this way and that across an empty beach. He stood for a minute or two listening for the loose sound of the swash; he could still hear the dogs, but they were moving away. It occurred to him that he wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. This idea made him smile faintly and dial up his assistant.

“Do you hear dogs?” he asked her.

“What?”

Sand, blown in under the kitchen door during the night, had stuck to the soles of Aschemann’s bare feet. He brushed at them ineffectually, first one then the other, with the palm of his hand. “Every part of the year,” he told her, “is filled with unacknowledged acts of memory, cued by the smell of the air, the seasonal fall of the light. Do you follow?” Silence in the pipe. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t. “There are dogs in everything. They aren’t real, but neither are they only a metaphor. We’re dogged by the things we’ve forgotten.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Do you see what I’m saying? The investigator must always allow for this. The older we grow, the louder their voices, the more inarticulate they are.” She made no further attempt to reply, so he said, “At least I don’t hear them in this datapipe, that’s a blessing,” and then asked her to run the nanosurveillance from Straint Street, which she seemed relieved to do. After a few minutes following the life of the bar, he shook his head.