Thunder in the Blood (25 page)

In Marion Street, I told him to turn round and park. Then I wrapped the syringe in a Kleenex and got out.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ I told him, ‘maybe longer.’

‘You paying me now?’

‘No.’

‘You leaving yo’ bags?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’

I set off down the street. McGrath’s red camper was still parked beside the house at the end. I knocked on the door, hearing Nghien running down the hall. When the door opened, he was obviously pleased to see me.

‘Miss Sarah,’ he said.

He let me in, still beaming, leading me straight to McGrath’s bedroom. According to the calculations I’d made in the plane, Cathy wasn’t due until mid-afternoon. With luck, McGrath
would be alone. Nghien pushed the door open. McGrath was lying in bed watching television. The room, thank God, was empty. I turned round to thank Nghien, but he’d gone. McGrath was watching me from the bed. He wasn’t smiling.

‘Surprise me,’ he said drily. ‘You’re back for more.’

‘Only one thing.’ I paused. ‘Then I’ll go.’

‘I’ve told you everything I can,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more.’

I smiled at him, drawing up a chair, wondering whether Nghien would be back.

‘All I want is a name.’ I paused, leaning forward. ‘Remember we talked about the dogs? The pit-bulls? Down at Beckermann’s place?’

McGrath’s eyes flicked towards the window. The closest he got to acknowledging the question was a tiny pursing of the lips. I got up quickly, anticipating the tiny lunge he made for the gooseneck, pushing the mouthpiece away, catching his head as it tried to hinge forward. He felt thin and frail. His eyes were an inch from mine.

‘You wanna hurt me,’ he muttered, ‘you’re gonna have to work at it.’

I ignored the gibe, laying him back against the pillows, adjusting the gooseneck so it was beyond his reach. Then I took the little parcel of Kleenex from my bag and began to unwrap it. The sight of the syringe full of blood made McGrath frown. I laid it carefully on the bedside table.

‘Wesley,’ I said carefully, ‘sends his regrets.’

McGrath blinked. He wasn’t slow on the uptake. ‘Where is he?’

‘Downtown. In a hotel. Sick.’

‘And that…’ he indicated the syringe with the merest tilt of his head, ‘is his?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘OK.’ I shrugged, picking up the syringe. ‘So maybe I am. Is that a risk you want to take? Or would you prefer to hear the question first?’

I looked at him a moment, expecting a reply, but he didn’t say a word. He couldn’t take his eyes off the syringe. Every time I moved, he was there with it. I reached across as gently as I could with my free hand and pulled back the sheet. McGrath’s arm lay
dead on the crisp white cotton. I began to massage the pale flesh, searching for a vein.

‘I need the name of an owner,’ I said, ‘of Mogul. Remember Mogul? Top dog?’

‘Beckermann owns Mogul.’

‘I know. But where did he get him from? Who owned him before? Before Beckermann took over?’

McGrath looked up at me. He was sweating now. I could smell it. He shook his head. ‘Can’t say,’ he muttered.

I smiled, asking the question again, mopping his forehead with a wipe from the drawer in his bedside cabinet. When he shook his head for the second time, I used another wipe on his forearm.

‘You can’t feel this,’ I said, ‘but it’s best to stick to the rules.’

‘What rules?’

‘Hygiene.’ I paused. ‘Please, listen, I mean it. You have the name. I need the name. No one will know where it’s come from. I’ll be out of your life. Wesley, too. No phone calls. No visits. Nothing. I promise.’

McGrath was staring up at me now, his eyes wild. ‘Have you done it?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Truly.’ I held up the full syringe.

‘Shit…’ he shook his head, side to side. What little colour there’d been in his face had quite disappeared.

I began to lower the syringe again, until it dropped beneath his eyeline. From here on in, he’d have to rely on his imagination. I narrowed my eyes, concentrating on his forearm, hearing his throat clearing, the name stuck somewhere in there, struggling to get out. Priddy, drunk, had told me how important Mogul was. Find the name of the previous owner, he’d implied, and the story starts to unravel. McGrath knew the name. And it was nearly more than his life was worth to pass it on. I looked at him now, my face an inch from his.

‘Ghattan,’ he whispered at last.

I lifted my head. His eyes had closed. ‘Spelling?’ I said.

‘G… H … A…’

I wrote it down. ‘First name?’

‘François.’

‘Thank you.’

I kissed him on the forehead, squeezing his dead arm. Then I stood up, turning on my heel, heading for the door. Outside, in the street, the cab began to back towards me.

I phoned Stollmann’s friend from a hotel near Du Pont Circle. I’d checked on flights out of Dulles Airport and made reservations on two of them in my false name. That way, whatever happened next, I knew there were two empty seats, eastward-bound. The number I had took me directly to Eddie Cassidy, no secretaries, no switchboard.

He was even brisker than Stollmann. ‘Where are you?’

‘Holiday Inn. Rhode Island and Seventeenth.’

‘Go sit in the bar. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

I did what I was told, ordering a plate of ham sandwiches. I was still eating them when Stollmann’s friend arrived. He was wearing a very loud jacket in electric blue. Booze had reddened his face and his hair looked prematurely grey, but the smile seemed genuine enough.

He sat down beside me, waving away the offer of a sandwich.

‘This is kinda complex,’ he began, ‘and somewhat irregular.’ He produced a long, white envelope. On the top left-hand corner, blue script, it said ‘US Customs and Immigration’. He opened the envelope with a perfectly buffed nail and shook the contents on to the table. The first thing I picked up was the British Airways ticket. It had my name on it. Sarah Moreton. I showed it to him, shaking my head.

‘There’s a problem,’ I said. ‘You may have heard.’

‘Yeah.’ He looked at me. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

He hesitated a moment, on the point of asking me a question, then he changed his mind and began to brief me on the arrangements he’d been able to make. I was to take a cab to Dulles Airport. I was to go to a public phone on the concourse and dial a certain number. A colleague of his would come down and collect me. In due course, I would find myself aboard BA 222. Eight hours later, all being well, I’d be home. I stared at him. It sounded absurdly simple, a sleight of hand, a transatlantic conjuring trick.

‘How come,’ I said, ‘it’s so easy?’

Cassidy looked at me for a long time. Then he shook his head, standing up, reluctant to extend the relationship a moment longer.

‘Eric’s a very good friend of mine,’ he muttered, ‘so let’s make sure he fucking survives all this.’

23

We landed at Heathrow at half past seven next morning, bumping down through layer after layer of cloud to a cold, wet dawn. I took the tube into London, sitting beside my cases in a near-empty carriage, reading a copy of that morning’s
Sunday Times.
One headline announced a seventy per cent pay increase for some captain of industry. Another speculated on the possibility of three million out of work. A secure job, ran the latter story’s opening paragraph, has now become a thing of the past. Some people are frightened, others just resigned. Looking at the occasional face on the platforms heading east – pale, slack, expressionless – that seemed about right.

Back home, at the flat, I piled the post on the television, had a bath and tried to take stock. I’d brought back everything I could – tapes, names, addresses, impressions, detailed notes on individual encounters – and I’d spent half the night on the plane trying to get all this material into some kind of order. The result was a dozen or so pages of squiggly longhand, a day-by-day account of exactly what had happened, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to convert it all into a formal source report; including the all-important ‘field comment’, my own views on the value and implications of what I’d brought back.

One of the joys of working for Stollmann was his obsession with presentation. Whatever you did, however long it took, source reports had to look sensational. Time, therefore, to ask him to find me a decent word processor. The first two calls to the private numbers I’d been using from the States got me nowhere. The numbers rang and rang, but nobody answered. Thinking he might be at work, even on a Sunday, I rang his direct line at Curzon House, but when the connection went through all
I got was the unobtainable signal. Puzzled, I phoned the main switchboard, asking for him by name.

‘Who is this, please?’

‘Sarah Moreton.’ I paused. ‘Registry.’

‘A moment, please.’

There was a long silence, then a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. He sounded old and rather distracted, as if I’d interrupted something infinitely more important. ‘You’re after whom?’

‘Eric Stollmann.’

‘Then I’m afraid we can’t help you.’

‘Why not?’

‘He… ah… no longer works here.’

‘Since when?’

‘Last week, I believe.’

‘Has he been transferred?’

‘No, I believe not.’

‘What, then?’

‘Ah… reassigned, I think, would cover it.’

‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘So where is he?’

I waited for an answer but the phone went dead in my ear, and I sat on the sofa for a moment or two, a towel wrapped round my head, wondering what on earth might have happened. On the phone, the times I’d called from the States, Stollmann had sounded even flatter than usual. But
reassigned?
What in God’s name did that mean?

Late morning, none the wiser, I set out for the hospital. A call to Mark, Wesley’s boyfriend, had drawn yet another blank, but the people at the hospital had told me on the phone that visiting hours were unrestricted, so I went regardless.

St Mary’s Hospital is a big medical complex in West London. Paddington Station lies at one end, and there’s a brand new wing that overlooks the Grand Union Canal. Wesley, according to the admissions clerk, was in Victoria Ward, part of the original hospital.

I arrived just after midday, realizing how nervous I was. My counselling work at Charlie’s had always stopped at the hospital gates. After our clients were diagnosed as having full-blown AIDS and admitted to a hospital or a hospice, other people took over. What would I find? How much difference would a couple of weeks have made?

Victoria Ward was on the first floor, a long, cluttered, neon-lit room with a dozen or so beds. There were nurses in loose green overalls, and a handful of visitors. It was extraordinarily quiet, only the low murmur of bedside conversations, even the big television in the middle turned down to a whisper.

I hesitated for a moment in the corridor, peering in at the rows of beds. Some of them were curtained off, and I began to wonder if I’d chosen a bad moment when I recognized Wesley down the far end. He was occupying a bed by the window, exactly where his mother had described. He was propped up on a bank of pillows, enveloped in a pair of red pyjamas, pointing something out in a newspaper to a visitor sitting beside him. Infinitely more important than anything else was the expression on his face. As far as I could judge, he was smiling.

I walked down the ward, avoiding a traffic jam of drip trolleys. When I got to the foot of the bed, the visitor glanced up. He was younger than Wesley, mid-twenties. Under the tan he looked exhausted. I smiled.

‘Mark?’

He nodded, nudging Wesley. Wesley lowered the paper, the eyes even bigger in the hollowed spaces of his face. When I’d left him, at Dallas/Fort Worth, he’d been thin. Now, he was skeletal.

‘Fuck me,’ he whispered. ‘You’re back.’

Mark made space for me beside the bed. We had tea from a passing trolley. A nurse found a vase for the roses I’d brought. After the chaos of the last week or so, it was an extraordinarily peaceful moment, the weak sunlight puddling on the buffed linoleum, Wesley seemingly back from the dead.

After a while, Wesley told Mark to get his temperature chart from the foot of the bed, and he took me through the story of his last few days, pointing out the peaks and troughs, still shuddering at what little he could remember. At times, he muttered, he’d wanted to give up completely, surfing up and down through semi-consciousness, keen for the whole wretched business to be over. He’d had the sweats again, even worse than last time, and diarrhoea, too, so badly that he said he’d been able to feel his insides melting away, the muscles shredding off the bone, yards and yards of viscera just emptying down the pan. One last push, he’d thought, just another minute or two, and I’m gone.

Listening to him go through it again, I realized how much he’d
changed. His conversation was slow and halting, the voice weak, and he’d plainly been badly frightened by the whole experience. His mortality had come home to him, a thing of flesh and blood, and the last few days had taught him, above all, that there was absolutely nowhere to hide. Booze wouldn’t do it. Nor any other drug. He’d tried everything else, every mind game he could think of, but nothing had helped. In the end, it was just you and the virus. Endgame.

‘Rough,’ he said at last, ‘fucking grim.’

Later, Mark gone, I told Wesley most of what had happened in the States, day by day, picking up at the point when he’d left me at Dallas/Fort Worth. I told him about my visits to Grant’s place and his death, and I showed him a page or two of the chronology I’d brought back. I described the drive north up to Washington, and I said how thoughtful he’d been to spare me any kind of warning about Jake McGrath. Why hadn’t he mentioned the man’s state of health, for God’s sake? Why hadn’t he told me he was paralysed? At this, Wesley’s eyes rolled towards me.

‘He OK?’ he said.

I blinked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘His state of health.’ I bent towards him, the way you would to a naughty child, someone you loved, someone you had to scold. ‘You should have told me,’ I repeated. ‘It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.’

Wesley was frowning now, trying to concentrate. ‘What?’ he kept saying. ‘Told you what?’

‘His paralysis,’ I explained patiently, ‘the fact that he can’t move. I didn’t know. It would have helped.’

Wesley’s frown deepened. ‘You talking about Grant?’ he said helplessly. ‘Some kind of accident?’

I looked at him for a long moment, then away down the ward. First impressions were worst impressions. Wesley wasn’t better at all.

‘Jake,’ I whispered to him, turning back, ‘in Silver Spring.’

Wesley peered up at me. I could see how hard he was trying to follow me. ‘Jake?’

‘McGrath.’

‘Ah …’ he nodded at last, ‘Washington.’

I skipped on trying to pretend nothing had happened, taking the story back to Dallas and Grant’s death. I told him about getting in touch with Raoul Delahunty when things got really tricky. I passed lightly over the fact that Raoul was a fellow journalist, but Wesley caught the word and stopped me.

‘Journo?’ he whispered.

‘Yes.’

‘And you gave him the story?’

‘Not much of it.’

‘But some of it?’

‘A little,’ I nodded, ‘yes.’

Wesley was silent for a moment, his head back on the pillow, his tongue moving slowly over his lips, moistening them. His lips were dry and cracked and a little swollen.

‘Scum,’ he said at last.

‘Who?’

‘Journalists.’

I reached out, patting his arm, trying to reassure him, telling him how clever I thought I’d been, explaining again how little I’d actually told the American and how much he’d given me in return. For the first time, Wesley’s face came alive, some nerve in perfect working order, some deep instinct, out of reach of the virus.

‘Mexicans?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Killing each other? For citizenship?’

‘That’s what Raoul says.’

‘No bullshit? He can stand it up?’

‘So he says.’

‘Christ!’ He shook his head on the pillow, bright-eyed. ‘Unreal.’

Encouraged, I began to tell him about Peter Devlin, the smiling young Englishman I’d met out at the ranch, the minister’s son. This, I said, was surely the heart of it, Peter Devlin, the conduit, the backstairs channel for all that embargoed hardware. People in the know said he was. Jake McGrath had told me so himself. I looked at Wesley. His eyes were closed again.

‘Old story,’ he whispered at last.

I frowned, engaged now. ‘What’s an old story?’

‘Devlin. Peter. Polly. The Texcal consultancy. It’s been doing
the rounds for ever, but no one’s had the bottle to see it into print. Old hat. Believe me …’

‘But if it’s true?’

Wesley opened one eye, looking up at me.

‘So what?’

‘So
what?
’

‘Yeah, so what? These spivs have been at it since ’79. Fingers in the till. Everyone knows they have. The whole fucking world knows it…’ he paused, out of breath, ‘… and fuck all ever happens.’

He closed his eyes again, shaking his head, and I reached for him, the way you do to someone you want to shake awake, the house on fire, something terrible about to happen.

‘Wesley,’ I hissed.

A patient on the other side of the ward glanced our way. I gave him an uncertain smile, lowering my voice, withdrawing my hand. Wesley was looking at me once again. The expression on his face suggested he’d found another story, infinitely more personal, infinitely more important. I smiled at him. One last try, I thought. Just one.

‘Your friend gave me a name,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure where it fits.’

‘Who?’

‘Jake. Jake McGrath. He wasn’t keen on telling me but…’ I shrugged.

Wesley was still looking at me. I think he was nearly asleep.

‘What name?’ he said.

‘François,’ I said, ‘François Ghattan.’

Wesley frowned, a heroic effort of concentration.

‘Ghattan?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Jake told you that?’

‘He told me that the two of them were close. This François and Beckermann. They were both into pit-bulls. In fact Ghattan used to own this Mogul creature I told you about.’

Wesley nodded, and then gave a deep sigh, his eyes starting to close. I touched him lightly on the face, then got up and began to apologize for banging on so much. Wesley’s hand found mine.

‘Ghattan’s dead,’ he said. ‘Jake tell you that, too?’

‘No.’

‘He died a couple of months back. In the summer.’ He frowned. ‘In Dallas, I think.’

‘Oh?’ I sat down again. ‘What was the matter with him?’

There was a long silence. Then the eyes flickered open. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said vaguely, ‘but I think he had a heart problem.’

I left ten minutes later, Wesley asleep. I took another cab back to the flat, exhausted myself, and was on the point of getting into bed when the phone rang. I went back into the living room. It was Stollmann.

‘Good flight?’

‘Fine …’ I yawned, ‘thanks.’

‘Eddie phoned. Said you were safely away. We need to meet.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘Please.’

I said nothing for a moment, remembering the call I’d made to Curzon House, the news that Stollmann had, in the office parlance, been ‘reassigned’.

‘Where are you?’ I said. ‘As a matter of interest?’

‘At home.’

I nodded. According to rumour, Stollmann lived out in the sprawl of suburbs around New Maiden. No one had ever been to his house, invited or otherwise, and no one had a clue whether he shared his life with anyone else. I stifled another yawn. According to the digital clock on the video recorder, it was half past five, though it felt closer to midnight.

‘Where?’ I said numbly. ‘And when?’

I met Stollmann at a café at the bottom of Kingsway an hour and a half later. He was sitting at a table at the back. He was hunched over a cup of black coffee and he still had his coat on. His face, when he glanced up, was grey. He looked terrible.

I sat down without saying anything. For the first time in our relationship, I realized I felt sorry for him. Something had been taken away from him, something had gone and the evidence was there in every movement he made. Whether or not I managed to type up the source report, I suspected, was now academic.

At length, he sat back, examining me across the table.

‘You’ve been reassigned,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

He looked at me a moment longer, then shrugged. ‘It means they’ve moved me. Physically, I no longer work at Curzon House.’ He paused. ‘The job’s gone, too. As of yesterday. My decision. Not theirs.’

I nodded, saying nothing. Exactly where Stollmann figured in the pecking order, I’d never quite worked out. He’d certainly been my boss for a while, but his other responsibilities seemed to have cut across some of the more traditional boundaries. In MI5 terms, that made him inter-departmental, a hybrid, an object of instant suspicion.