Sextet (29 page)

‘Don’t get upset,’ Angelica said, to his surprise. In this respect, of course, they were at one, he thought, turning back to look at her, and seeing on her face an expression not of hostility, but sympathy.

‘Don’t,’ she said again. ‘It
could
be him; it could be. I don’t see that this proves otherwise. He’s crazy. I always said he’d kill himself one day—so maybe he did. He jumped, but he had to leave one final message…’

‘You could read it that way, and Natasha does.’ With a sigh, Court returned to his chair and sat down. ‘But you see, I haven’t explained about the permit.’

‘The permit? I don’t see…’

‘Think, Angelica. They issue those permits for a
reason
. If someone doesn’t come back and check in, the rangers raise the alarm and send out a search party. They have to do that: someone could be hurt, or lying injured somewhere…But that didn’t happen in this case. You want to know why there were no alarms, no search parties when that permit
wasn
’
t
handed back in? The answers are all there in the record books at the rangers’ station. On Independence Day, the day the permit expired, the day Jonathan and I left Glacier, a man calling himself Joseph King rang the rangers’ station. He apologized for not returning the permit, said it had slipped his mind, but he was perfectly safe and had left the park. Now, why do you think he did that, Angelica?’

Angelica hesitated. ‘So you’d know he was alive? Dead men don’t make phone calls?’

‘Partly, perhaps. But it’s more than that—don’t you see? He didn’t
want
search parties. He didn’t want the body found too soon. The sooner it was found, the easier it would be to identify, so it suited him just fine that it lay there for over four months. That’s what I think, anyway.’

‘But if he placed that call…’ Angelica frowned. ‘That must mean he’s alive after all…’

‘No, it doesn’t. It means someone
calling
himself Joseph King placed the call. It might have been King himself; it could have been some friend.
Think
, Angelica.’ Court rose again, with an impatient gesture. ‘He
wanted
there to be doubts and uncertainties, don’t you see? How many ways can you script this? I can think of at least five ways, straight off, and they’re all equally plausible.’

There was a silence. Watching her, he saw the realization slowly dawn. She rose to her feet and looked at him uncertainly.

‘Then if it isn’t his body, whose is it?’

‘I don’t know; no-one knows. It could be his—it could equally well be someone else’s. Some walker; some hitchhiker he picked up; some vagrant, even.’

‘But that would mean he
had
killed someone—not just talked about it, not just threatened, but actually done it. Oh, Jesus, I see now…’

‘It’s possible, Angelica. I think that. For what it’s worth, the police also think that way, and so does the agency.’

‘That bastard. That son of a bitch bastard.’ The blood rushed into Angelica’s face. ‘So we just have to go on waiting—that’s his idea? Waiting, the way we always did? That’s what we have to live with? Jumping every time the phone rings, having traps on the line, checking the mail, checking the locks…’ She drew in her breath, pressing her hand against her chest. ‘
That’s
what we have to do—go on living with the bodyguards, looking over our shoulders every minute of every live-long day, waiting for that bastard to
resurrect
?’

‘It would amuse him to play Lazarus.’ Court turned away to disguise his unease. ‘So, yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly what we have to do. We go on being careful; we go on being vigilant—for as long as it takes.’

He moved away, feeling suddenly exhausted. He looked around this pale dull room where his wife had chosen to live for the past year; his longing for her presence intensified. He began to wish that he had never had this conversation, necessary though it was. He began to wish that he was alone, and that of all the words Angelica could have used, she had not used the word ‘resurrect’. That word made him deeply uneasy.

Angelica made a strange and ugly sound—a harsh, rasping intake of breath. Turning to look at her, he saw that she was trembling; the force of her animosity came off her like heat.

‘I’m going to fix him, and this time I’m going to fix him
good
. There’s something I have to do—it won’t take long. I’ll be back…’

She hastened from the room. Court looked at his watch. It was past eleven. Should he leave now, or stay? His wife would have only just left the theatre. She would be on her way to have dinner with Jules McKechnie, possibly alone, possibly with others; it might be hours before she came back.

He began to move about the room in an irresolute way, trying to find in it some trace of the woman he knew and loved. Its neutrality and its tastefulness appalled him. The room was white on cream on beige—a thousand permutations of colourlessness. Natasha had hung some of her own paintings, he saw—and his wife’s taste in paintings was not his.

Since the divorce, she had begun to collect eighteenth-and nineteenth-century watercolours; the vaguer and washier they were, the more she liked them. Court stared at what might have been a seascape—a wash of indigo, a wash of yellow-white, some inky hieroglyphs that might have been trees, or birds, or ships.

On the opposite wall, she had hung some of her own artist mother’s oils—paintings he had always refused to give house room. Natasha’s mother, now dead, had been a flower-child of the Sixties, and like many children of that particular decade, never grew up. Her amateurish paintings, large and violently coloured, were all depictions of monstrous flowers, close up. Their stamens, sepals and pistils had a moistly sexual insistence; Natasha said they were powerful and reminded her of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. To Court, who loathed O’Keeffe’s work too, but could see its strengths, this proved how curiously blind his wife could be. She could see so much sometimes, yet she could also be, or affect to be, myopic. ‘I will get her back. I will take her back,’ he said to the throaty flower in front of him, and he began to see ways in which that might be done, if he was careful, if he scripted them correctly.

It was unbearable to remain in this room any longer, he found; its quiescence and opacity oppressed him. He could still hear his own voice, explaining uncertainties to Angelica, and the air here was filled with uncertainty, ambivalence and doubt. Also, he could now smell burning, a peculiarly unpleasant burning smell too, like hair singed. He could hear, faintly, the sound of rustling and crackling.

He could not bear the jealous hours of waiting, he decided. He would prefer not to know how late it was when his wife returned; he would prefer not to stay here and speculate as to her activities. He went out into the corridor and paused by the entrance to the small bedsitting room which was Angelica’s. Here, the smell of burning was stronger; he could glimpse, through the open door, the cluster of crucifixes and saints’ pictures and religious knickknackery with which Angelica adorned every space in which she lived.

‘I cursed him,’ she said, appearing in the doorway from nowhere, and startling Court. ‘I cursed him—and this time I cursed him real good. I got through. I could feel it; I could feel
him
, like some fish wriggling on a hook…’

‘Yes, well you’ve cursed him plenty of times before,’ Court said coldly, ‘and without conspicuous success.’

He looked at Angelica’s flushed face; a vein stood out on her temple; her heavy body was giving off heat like an electric plate. He tried, as he had often done before, to tell himself that Angelica was an ugly, overweight, vindictive virgin of fifty-five, whose sole redeeming feature was her love for his son. She was
without powers
, he told himself, and he was the last person in the world to be impressed by the mumbo-jumbo of her semi-Catholic, semi-pagan prayers, curses and jinxes.

He told himself this, but as before, it did not convince. She muttered a few more words, lapsing as she always did, from English to her native Sicilian, to a dialect filled with liquid threat, with razor-sharp sibilants, with saints’ names and obscenities intermixed.

She was trembling; the light in the hallway was poor. Court, acknowledging his fear, backed away from her.

‘I
fixed
him,’ she said, turning her bright black eyes on Court. ‘He’s starting to die right now—but slow, from the inside out. I’m going to let him suffer awhile, and then I’m going to finish him off. I fixed him. I had him on-line. He tried to hide, but he couldn’t hide from me this time. I summoned him up.’

The last phrase had a hissing sound to it. Court turned, and without speaking further, quickly left. He felt followed the instant the door closed, and he blamed Angelica and her dramatics for this. The sensation remained with him when he left the Carlyle; he could not shake it off. He decided to walk to the Conrad building, as he sometimes did at night, and it pursued him there. He stood outside the Conrad, on the north corner, looking up at the dark windows of the apartment his wife wanted—and he knew he was watched.

He swung around, staring towards the shadows and shrubbery of the park; nothing moved; no-one spoke. He looked up at a thin and sickly moon, riding high above that many-eyed roof-line, and then, some time after midnight, hailed a cab and directed it back south.

The sensation of being pursued remained. He could blame it on fatigue, on lack of food, on superstition, on the conversation with Angelica which still rippled through his mind—but he could still sense some watcher, some follower in his street; he could sense eyes as he stepped into the elevator.

Instinct, recognition, the influence of some sixth sense—whatever the explanation for that sensation of unease, he saw how timely its warnings had been as soon as the elevator doors opened.

He felt his body come alive with adrenalin shock; the door to his loft stood open, its locks smashed. He could see that in the room beyond vandalism had been at work. The lights were on; the floor was a sea of paper, and the perpetrator of this, whose identity he did not doubt for one second, was still present. He could hear that low, pedantic, murmuring, Midwestern voice, and it was murmuring an old message. ‘Under the left breast,’ he heard. ‘Under the left breast.’

He hesitated, flexing his hands, summoning his strength; then, with the eagerness of one greeting an old friend, a familiar not seen in a long while, he moved forward and pushed the door back.

‘B
REEDING,’ COLIN’S GREAT-AUNT EMILY
said, with an air of getting straight to the point. She leaned forward and tapped Lindsay on the knee. Lindsay, who had been day-dreaming, jumped.

‘She’s bred once—will she breed
again
?’ Emily asked, in a sharply interrogative manner, glancing towards Colin. For one confusing moment, Lindsay thought this particular question might refer to her.

‘
Fecundity
,’ Emily continued, turning back to Lindsay, and giving her a glare. ‘She is unquestionably
fertile
. In my opinion,
that
is what’s giving them the heebie-jeebies—bunch of old women. But, darn it, do they have a point? I want to know what you think, Lindsay. Advise me, my dear.’

Lindsay did not know what she thought. To give advice was a little difficult, as she did not have the least idea what Emily was talking about. She tried hard to think of some noncommittal reply. For at least the last ten minutes, she realized, Aunt Emily had been rattling away to Colin, and Lindsay had allowed her own attention to wander away.

She had been looking at this room, which was large and packed with a glorious accumulation of
stuff
. Some of this stuff was superb and some was tat. She had been wondering why Emily chose to put a vase of green ostrich feathers on a Hepplewhite desk; whether the magnificent portrait above the fireplace was a Sargent; whether the two strikingly beautiful women depicted in it could be related to Emily, who was strikingly plain; and whether the grand piano in the corner was supporting fifty-five ancestral photographs in silver frames, or fifty-six.

She had also been wondering why Emily had reminded her of Miss Havisham, since she could now see that, beyond a tendency to pursue a private agenda in conversation, Emily did not resemble her in the least. This was no mad Dickensian bride, but a tall, lean woman, with a shock of white hair, bright, iris-blue eyes, and a good line in tweeds. She was wearing three pairs of spectacles on leather thongs about her neck, yet so far had used none of them; she was seated at one end of a gigantic sofa—Colin, looking nervous, was seated at the other end—and somewhere among the plenitude of its exquisite tapestry cushions there was at least one, possibly two, pug dogs. The lighting was subdued, which made the number of pugs difficult to confirm; they, or it, snuffled and snored constantly. Lindsay and Colin were drinking prudent mineral water; Aunt Emily was knocking back a serious bourbon on the rocks.

Inattention, as Rowland McGuire had often remarked, was Lindsay’s besetting sin. She was always too busy examining the leaves of each tree in the forest to notice where the forest road led. With a woman like Emily, whose conversation was given to abrupt swerves, this tendency was disastrous. Emily was still waiting for a reply to her question, and Lindsay’s brain was in mid-skid. Breeding? Fertility? Lindsay eyed the pug, or pugs; it came to her that Emily was discussing the breeding of dogs, or, more specifically, bitches.

‘Pedigree very dubious
indeed
,’ Emily now said, rattling off again, to Lindsay’s relief. ‘Who
sired
her? No answer to
that
question, my dear. And then there’s the matter of her
fame
. She is excessively
famous
.’ Emily cocked a sharp eye at Lindsay. ‘What’s our reaction to that, my dear? Is famous bad or good?’

Dogs could be famous, Lindsay thought—if they won Crufts, or something like that. Yes, she was almost sure she was on track. Emily was on the subject of dog-breeding, of pedigree, about which Lindsay, who liked only strays and mongrels, knew nothing and cared less. Still, old ladies had to be humoured. She gave Emily what she hoped was a smile of bright intelligence.