Flashback

Chapter Sixteen

In her dream, Jem had accepted the invitation of a gentleman suitor to travel in his carriage through a twilit city. They passed roadside mourners: her mother, her dead father, Danny. She was cold in her nightgown and shawl. She smelled coal and chrysanthemums through the open window, and horse sweat. When the suspension ceased its rattle, the day had passed, and the gas lamps were like moons. Her suitor hooked his cane in his elbow and helped her from the carriage, and, with that, his winged collar became priestly and his dark eyes amused. As her bare foot touched the snowy road, the cobbles vanished. She wore Cossack boots again, and her nightgown had become a duffle coat. She turned to the horses but they had vanished, replaced by a stolen BMW. Its four corners winked. Groggily, Jem let Cory take her arm.

Through a tall gate and up a gravel path.

Watching a cat watch her as a keypad was tapped.

A hallway.

Darkly.

No sounds of clockwork.

(A poem.)

No smell of food.

(Because I could not stop for death.)

An unoccupied house.

Cory removed a glove and slapped her face.

Jem’s eyes opened fully and she coughed. There was a bitter taste on her tongue.

It was late in the evening of the day that Cory had murdered Lisandro when he stopped beneath a gas lamp to re-read Jennifer’s newspaper of the next day. He looked for clues about his immediate future. Finding them, he walked to the docks and located a tall, crumbling warehouse. He slipped into the shadowed alley on its eastern side. The alley formed a space narrow enough for him to launch off one wall and reach out for the lower rung of a fire escape. He swung for a moment. His heart surged. He climbed steadily towards the roof until his view became one of scintillating lights.

Cory slid his cane between the attic door and its upper hinge. The wood split and he moved inside. The attic was long and low. There was a zinc bath beneath a skylight. So too a bed, a couch, a changing screen, and a lamp. Cory stepped between the lamp and the bed. He pulled the cord and his shadow pounced across the prostitute.

Her wigless head was downy, not bursting with the mane so beloved of the Argentines, and her sad, thunderous face was hollow at the eyes and cheeks. She sat up and her blanket slipped to the tips of her breasts; she might have been a debutante in a curtsy. Her tinctures and condoms were arranged on the dressing table in a croupier’s semicircle: expert and honest, no cheating.

‘Get out,’ she said. There was a hunting knife in her slim hand.

He laid a German accent light as silk over his Spanish and said, ‘Where is Patrick Harkes?’

‘Turn around. Go.’

‘Harkes.’

Cory wound her bedsheet in his forearm and flung it away. She scooted into her pillows. Naked, she was gangly. All the play anger from her eyes. ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Do what you want, then get out.’

Cory knelt on the bed and took her knife. ‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’

She assumed a pout. ‘Something special, my dear? Here: Whisper in my ear.’

‘Harkes told you I would come for him, didn’t he? Otherwise, you would have cut me without asking.’ At this, she shrugged, one-shouldered. Cory let his thoughts progress. ‘You didn’t want to kill me, but you wanted to look prepared. So I wouldn’t be suspicious. You want to deal.’

She was smiling. ‘Deal?’

‘So innocent. You must be the oldest virgin in the house.’

‘Play fair, Mr Cory.’

Cory reached behind him and

a gun, to me

brought the snout of the weapon to her nose.

‘You know my name? It changes things.’ Straight Rioplatenese Spanish now, his German accent gone: ‘What’s yours?’

‘Paloma,’ she whispered. Her pupils were huge. ‘I liked the trick with the gun. How it flew to you! Are you a magician?’

‘Cory the Great. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She frowned at the formality, then, seeing something in his eyes, giggled. ‘Now, Paloma. Deal. Let’s say four hundred pesos for the information.’

‘Eight hundred,’ she mumbled.

‘A thousand.’

She dropped her head back and purred. Cory moved alongside her.

‘Harkes leaves for Santiago tomorrow,’ she said.

‘He told you that?’

Paloma looked at the skylight. ‘I found myself in his pockets. There was a ticket.’

‘Time? Flight number?’

‘I didn’t notice. But it will leave early. Nothing crosses the Andes at night.’

‘With whom will he fly?’

‘There was a logo with a star man.’ She stretched her legs. ‘He looked like you, Cory the Great. Will you show me another trick?’

‘Only if I believe you.’

‘Harkes told me that you know when people lie.’

Cory rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes as Paloma unbuttoned his shirt.

‘The star man had a strong jaw like yours. Ah, your teeth are beautiful.’

She drew her lips over his, and down, tracing the ridge of his Adam’s Apple.

Cory stared upwards. ‘Harkes would choose a small company. Harder for me to find.’

‘No small companies fly to Santiago. One needs a big plane. Wait, I just remembered the name.’

‘What?’

‘‘Star Dust’. Like the song.’

‘There’s a song?’

‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’

‘I don’t know it.’

She sang the song in lisping English.

When the sickness that followed Cory’s slap had faded, Jem found herself sitting in a winged armchair. The lounge was small and lit by three frosty lamps. Its brown scheme took her back to never-ending visits to elderly relatives in the late 1980s. She recognised a painting above the fireplace, but its name, like the falling snow, now dissolved in the warmth of her attention. Her lips were still numb from Cory’s bitter kiss. Was he venomous, like a blowfish?

‘This used to be a safe house,’ said Cory. ‘It was forgotten. We won’t be disturbed, and it was designed to make escape difficult.’

‘KGB or CIA?’

‘What’s the difference?’

Jem let her head loll against the headrest. Cory placed his gloves on the coffee table and sat opposite, still the priest.

‘Jem, you are in love with Saskia. You think about her. It’s natural. Her body. Her eyes, the way they look green in sunlight. You’d do anything to wake her memory. But is she alive? No, Jem. She is nothing more than cold cuts. However, I would like to hear why you think differently.’

‘Who are you? Is Cory your real name?’

Cory washed his hands and got dressed. He watched the dozing prostitute. His automata made a liquid metaphor of the electrical resistance on her scalp, showed him peaks and troughs. He might drop a word in her ear and see the ripple of its effect. He might wait for the spike that signalled her intention to blink; and he would know that intent before she did.

Then he recalled the newspaper article that Jennifer had shown him. By morning, ‘The Englishman’ would be suspected of Lisandro’s murder. He would also be sought for the murder of a bordello madam, past her prime but fighting fit, found naked on her bed with skull grit in her changing screen. But there would be no bullet. And no powder burns.

Her eyes opened.

‘You think I’m scared of you, Cory the Great?’

The pupils were wide with something home-brewed.

‘Paloma, let’s play a game. I’m thinking of either night or day. I want you to tell me which. If you are correct, I leave and you never see me again.’

‘That’s easy. I have the touch.’

‘I never wanted to kill you,’ Cory said. His words came with enough insouciance for Jem to recognise the lie. The implication was clear: she was in immediate danger. Yet, to her surprise, she did not collapse. ‘I only want information.’

‘I’ll tell you everything. But I need to use the toilet.’

‘Be my guest.’

There was a falling line of red on Cory’s upper lip.

‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.

Cory produced a handkerchief and pressed his nostril. Then he walked to the wide fireplace, took a match from the mantel, flicked it alight, and put it to the lattice of paper and wood. Jem paused in the doorway.

‘I heard,’ she said, ‘about Saskia’s apartment.’

‘One is never too old to play with matches,’ he replied, not turning. ‘The bathroom is down the hall.’

Once upon a time, a woman called Catherine had consented to marry Cory over pan-fried bread in a field outside Jesup, Georgia. The ring—the very ring whose undeclared mass had almost ended his mission—had been warmed by his anxious hands that day. Her fingertips were cool as he slid it on. ‘Yes,’ said the soldier’s daughter.

Cory smiled.

Now, in 1947, he rose from the prostitute’s bed and walked towards the door of the attic. Paloma seemed to drift alongside him. Her footsteps were soundless. She stopped in the neon glow beneath the skylight. She was changing colours.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s raining again.’

They stopped and looked at the veins of water on the window. Cory heard the glug-glug of filling gutters. For South America, this was subtle rain.

He looked at her. The neon light gave her no shadow and her quicksilver eyes were translucent opals and her mouth had a lunar shimmer like water whirling colgada into a drain. As Cory reached for her shoulder, the apparition disappeared. His eyes refocused on the bed.

Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.

‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’

Haunted, young Cory closed the door.

Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.

In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.

So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.

In the lounge, where the fire crackled drily, Cory had slouched in the winged armchair. His eyes moved under their lids. Murmured words were caught in bubbles of reddish spit.

‘Paloma,’ he whispered. ‘Where is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘You know what. The Cullinan Zero.’ He coughed. ‘Tell me.’ His fingertips fluttered and Jem saw the discarded cane twitch. ‘I have Jem.’

She closed the door. The hallway was quiet and empty. This would be like her escape from the apartment in Berlin, easy doing it. She crept down the hallway and touched the keypad. A heartbeat throbbed in her palm. If only she could impart her desperation to the door, beg it to unlock. She remembered Cory’s lips on hers. Death as a suitor whose carriage kindly stopped. Death as Saskia, with full, relaxed lips, wanting her. Her short hair. Yes, Jem had shorn Saskia lock by lock. Wind had played with the clumps of hair.

Ssssss. Saskia.

Calm as, Jem, she thought. Arctic effing calm.

She looked at the door. Her attention snapped to Cory’s reflection in the cold, black finish and she sighed, sagged against the wood.