Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (18 page)

 
          
When the time
came, Jim opened the door
to the monitor room softly. Sorensen sat with his back to the door, reading his
eternal magazine. On the little screen a tiny Weinberger lay on his bed studiously
ignoring the camera eye and whatever might transpire behind it.

 
          
Sorensen
looked round and saw the gun in Jim’s hand.

 
          
“Don’t
make a sound,” said Jim. “Don’t touch anything.

 
          
Don’t
move. Or you’ll be dead — by murder.” He closed the door behind him.

 
          
Sorensen
moved rather more than previously. He shook.

 
          
“If
you shoot me, it’ll make a noise!”

 
          
“And
that’ll be the noise of your own death. But you won’t hear it.”

 
          
“You’re
crazy. You’re fucking crazy.”

 
          
“That’s
as may be. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you’ll be on the receiving
end of my craziness. And I just told you to
shut
up
!”

 
          
Why
did he have to speak to the man? Jim felt that he should be just grunting or
barking at him. He resented the absurd melodrama.
Worse,
holding up a man at gunpoint felt like suddenly having a big glass ball or soap
bubble balanced in mid-air.
Once up, you couldn’t put it down of it
would break under its own weight. Once begun, the thing wouldn’t go away.

 
          
“Don’t
do this, Mr Todhunter, sir!
Just because I called in Mr
Resnick?
I had to do that.”

 
          
“Shut
up.”
The
glass ball was making too much noise. “If you
do what I tell you, I won’t kill you.” Jim felt like an oversized child playing
at some adult activity which he only half understood. He waved the gun.

 
          
“Pull
your chair over by the wall — next to that pipe.”

 
          
Sorensen
began jumping his chair towards the pipe while still sitting on it — which
caused an almighty scraping and screeching.

 
          
“Lift
it, you fool! Just off the floor, no higher. Now set it down. And catch this.”

 
          
Jim
produced a fat roll of adhesive tape, which he tossed to the man. Sorensen
fumbled the catch. The tape rolled away across the floor.

 
          
Keeping
his gun on the man, Jim retrieved the tape and rolled it back in the direction
of Sorensen’s feet.

 
          
“Right,
pick it up. Open it. Now tape your mouth shut. Good. Next, tape your ankles to
the chair legs . . .

 
          
“Right,
now tape your left arm to the chair arm.”

 
          
This
was not as easy as it sounded, but eventually Sorensen succeeded in binding his
left wrist. The tape roll hung loose; Sorensen couldn’t tear the perforations
with one hand. He mumbled through his gag apologetically.

 
          
Jim
edged over to him. He removed the tape roll and bound Sorensen’s right wrist
quickly, cursorily. Then he put the gun down on the floor and methodically
began to retape his prisoner’s mouth, wrists and ankles firmly till he had used
up all the tape. He produced cord and bound the man. Next, he tipped the chair
back carefully till Sorensen was lying like an astronaut of old, waiting for
lift-off, and he knotted the chair to the pipe. Waiting for lift-off by an
angry Resnick . . .

 
          
“Mmm-mmm,”
said Sorensen.
Uncomfortable?
Pipe
too hot?
Blood running to his head?

 
          
Jim
wondered whether he should bang Sorensen on the head with the gun butt, but he
had no idea how hard to hit him.
Or how softly.
He
contented himself with threatening him.

 
          
“Shut
up. I’m going to be here behind you quite a
while,
and
I don’t want to hear a peep — or I’ll hit you on the head. And that might bust
your skull!”

 
          
He
removed the key to the rear door of the House and left silently, retrieving his
packed valise from outside the room.

 
          
When
Jim had checked the front foyer of the House earlier on a woman attendant had
been sitting there, teasing coloured threads into a half-embroidered sampler.
It was a picture of a sperm whale sounding in the open ocean. Apparently she
was going to be there all night. Jim hoped that the woman and Sorensen weren’t
lovers, in the habit of phoning each other or paying sneak visits. But why
should they be? Not everyone loved everybody else.

 
          
Really,
it was a nuisance that he had needed to immobilize the spy Sorensen. But, key
aside, the man couldn’t be trusted to respect a request for all-night privacy.
Not any longer. And at least the exercise of mastering the man at gunpoint —
despite the gaucherie of it — had given Jim confidence.

 
          
An
hour later an electric runabout toiled up over the ridge separating
Lake
Tulane
from Egremont. A half moon and cold stars
lit the scene faintly in blue: not so much a light as a lessening of darkness.
The headbeams picked out the winding road for a little way ahead, and washed
against the trees. Behind, the valley was an empty bowl, its pearly
spider’s-web of lights extinguished some time ago.

 
          
Jim
glanced at his watch, but couldn’t read it in the instant during which he dared
take his eyes off the road. He knew the time, anyway: shortly after
midnight
.

 
          
“Turn
right here.” Weinberger, pencil light in hand, spotted a little yellow circle
of lines and symbols upon the otherwise black map sheet. The map would be some
help in getting them smoothly away from Egremont, then of increasingly little
use as they tried to lose themselves so successfully that nobody else could
find them either. So it was a map for getting lost by.

 
          
Shortly
after the turn-off, Jim glanced through an opening in the trees and thought
that he recognized, though from a different angle, the chalet by the waters
where trout had been grilled to celebrate his arrival. A light showed down
there. If Noel Resnick was sporting in the chalet with Mary-Ann and Alice while
Jim and Weinberger slipped by, this indeed added spice to their escape!

 
          
But
why should it be Resnick with his ladies? Maybe it was a different chalet
entirely, sheltering some solitary yachtsman afflicted with insomnia . . .

 
          
‘I’m
obsessed with sex/ thought Jim grimly. ‘But I haven’t been to bed with anyone.
Only with Weinberger, inside his
contraption,
and that
doesn’t count. Is Death my only real sexual encounter, of which all the others
are mere echoes and shadows? Is the real act of conception not the engendering
of a child in the womb but the fertilisation of one of those crystal prisons by
my soul? So here go I, like a self-denying monk, an obsessed St Anthony, into
the desert to triumph over that crystal temptation — or succumb to it . . .

 
          
‘Yes,
I’m a monk.’ He had been sleeping in his coffin or close by it for years now.
The House of Death was the coffin that they all lived in. Yet how the others
enjoyed themselves in it! How everybody enjoyed themselves now that they all
knew how to die . . .

 
          
‘Except for me.’
Somewhere, somehow, he had lost out on
enjoyment. Maybe it was when he drowned. The joy of that drowning had been so
much more intense than any subsequent drowning in the flesh of another . . .

 
          
‘‘We
stay on this route.” Weinberger whispered, as though sensing his reverie and
not wanting to interrupt it but at the same time wishing to be part of it.

 
          
The
metalled road became pocked and bumpy. The electric runabout lurched on at
twenty-five miles per hour, its top speed.

 
          
*
* *

 
          
A
little over an hour later the engine began to fade.

 
          
By
now they were bumping along a forest road which seemed to be proceeding
satisfactorily from nowhere to nowhere, though generally northwards. They had
already passed off the edge of the local map. Losing the car might not,
however, be so simple. Black fir trees hemmed the road.

 
          
Clouds
covered the half moon which only occasionally floated clear, a phosphorescent
bone. Jim slowed, to hunt for a crack in the darkness of the forest. He had
imagined that they might come across a deep little lake with water like oil,
and scuttle the car in it. But now he had no means of telling whether there was
such a lake fifty yards away, let alone any hope of reaching it on wheels.

 
          
Finally
he found something wider than a crack and swung the runabout hard into it.
Branches scraped the windows. A tree stub screeched across the underside. The
wheels spun, and the engine died. Both men had to force their way out through
the driver’s door. A needle-studded branch slapped Jim across the cheek.

 
          
“Nobody
might come along for days,” said Weinberger encouragingly.

 
          
And
thus they set off along the road.

 
          
Five
minutes later, Jim shifted his valise to his left hand. Five minutes after that
he tried hanging the bag over his shoulder; and another five minutes later he
thought of wearing it on his back, rucksack style, with his arms through the
handles. But this cramped his shoulders, and the bag butted his spine. He
returned it to his right hand.

 
          
Presently
they arrived at the top of a great clearing. Felled trees cascaded down the
hillside like matchsticks spilled from a box. A log cabin crowned the rise,
dark and empty. The road ran nowhere else.

 
          
“My
arm’s two yards long,” Jim complained.

 
          
“Well,
we can’t stop here. We’ve only
come
a couple of
miles!’’

 
          
Aided
rather more, now, by the glowing bone in the sky, they struck off and up into
the wild.

 
          
To
Jim’s surprise, Weinberger had reserves of strength. It was as though the man
had converted all the pain dealt out by the creature Death into some
honey-energy in his body cells. Now the terrain was rougher, but this very
roughness was a help to them since reefs of rock broke through the forest,
parting the trees. After half an hour Weinberger allowed them to halt in the
lee of a junior crag. He sank down.

 
          
“I’m
pooped.”

 
          
Jim
dropped his leaden valise, which had fused his fingers together.

 
          
“I’ve
been sleepwalking.”

 
          
“Okay,
let’s sleep.”

 
          
“Where?”
Jim peered into the night.

 
          
“It’s
quite easy in theory. Animals do it all the time. You just lie down, curl up
and go to sleep.”

 
          
“Oh, you funny fellow.”

 
          
From
his bag Jim pulled the two lightweight capes which he had bought that morning.
He spread them on the ground. Weinberger shuffled on to one of them and made a
pillow of his arms. Jim copied him, worrying about how crumpled their clothes
would look by the time they crossed the border. That border was still
immeasurably far off; it felt like a whole country away.