“I don’t want you near me, actually,” Jonathan said, in a prepared speech. “I’ve got nothing to explain and nothing to apologize for. Just leave me alone.”
Corkoran lowered himself gratefully into the armchair. They were alone in the bedroom. Frisky had once more been ordered to remove himself.
“Your name’s Jonathan Pine, formerly of Meister’s, the Queen Nefertiti and other emporia. But you are now traveling as one Thomas Lamont on a bona fide Canadian passport. Except that you don’t happen to be Thomas Lamont. Contest? No contest.”
“I got the kid back. You’ve had me patched up. Give me my passport and let me go.”
“And between being J. Pine of Meister’s and T. Lamont of Canada, not to mention J. Beauregard, you were Jack Linden of remotest Cornwall. In which capacity, you topped a mate of yours, to wit one Alfred alias Jumbo Harlow, an Aussie boat bum with sundry convictions for drug-running down under. Whereupon, you did a bunk before the law could have its way with you.”
“I’m wanted for questioning by the Plymouth police. That’s as far as it ever got.”
“And Harlow was your business partner,” said Corkoran, writing.
“If you say so.”
“Dope-running, heart?” asked Corkoran, glancing up.
“It was a straight commercial venture.”
“That’s not what the press cuttings say. It’s not what our little dickybirds say either. Jack Linden, alias J. Pine, alias you, ran a load of dope for Harlow single-handed from the Channel Islands to Falmouth, what the hacks called an impressive sail. And Brother Harlow, our partner, took the dope to London, flogged it and bilked us out of our cut. Which miffed us. Understandably. So you did what any of us would do when he’s miffed with his partner: you topped him. It wasn’t the neat piece of necessary surgery it might have been, given your proven skills in the field, because Harlow churlishly offered resistance. So you had a fight. But you won. And when you’d won, you topped him. Hoorah for us.”
Stonewall, Burr had said. You weren’t there, it was two other blokes, he hit you first and it was with his consent. Then yield ungracefully and make them think they’ve got the real you.
“They’ve no proof,” Jonathan replied. “They found some blood, they never found the body. Now for Christ’s sake get out.”
Corkoran seemed to have forgotten the whole subject. He was grinning reminiscently into the middle air, all bad thoughts abandoned. “Do you know the one about the chap applying for a job in the Foreign Office? ‘Look here, Carruthers’ they say, ‘we like the cut of your jib, but we can’t overlook the fact that you’ve done a spot of time for buggery, arson and rape. . . .’ Really not know it?”
Jonathan groaned.
“‘Perfectly simple explanation,’ says Carruthers. ‘Loved a girl who wouldn’t let me diddle her, so I banged her on the head, raped her, shafted her old dad and set fire to the house.’ You must have heard it.”
Jonathan had closed his eyes.
“‘Okay, Carruthers,’ say the selector chaps. ‘We knew there’d be a reasonable explanation. Here’s the deal. Keep away from the girls in the typing pool, no playing with matches, give us a kiss and you can have the job.’”
Corkoran was really laughing. The chubby wreaths around his neck went pink and shook; merry tears ran down his cheeks. “I feel such a shit, you being in bed, you see,” he explained. “And the hero of the hour to boot. So much easier if I had you under a bright light with me playing James Cagney and walloping you with a dildo.” He adopted the high-flown tones of a court policeman. “‘The wanted man, M’lud, is believed to ’ave a revealin’ scar on ’is right ’and!’ Show,” he ordered in a quite altered voice.
Jonathan opened his eyes. Corkoran was standing at the bedside again, his cigarette held to one side and upward like a grubby yellow wand, and he was holding Jonathan’s right wrist in his damp hand, examining the broad scar curling along the back of it.
“Oh dear,” said Corkoran. “You can’t have done that shaving. . . . All right, be like that.”
Jonathan had snatched back his hand. “He pulled a knife on me,” he said. “I didn’t know he carried one. He wore it on his calf. I was asking him what was in the boat. I knew by then. I’d guessed. He was a big man. I couldn’t trust myself to throw him, so I went for his throat.”
“The old Adam’s apple, eh? You’re quite a brawler, aren’t you? Nice to think Ireland’s been some use to somebody. Sure it wasn’t your knife, old love? You do seem quite partial to a knife, from all one hears.”
“It was his knife. I told you.”
“Who did Harlow flog the dope to—any idea?”
“None. Zero. I was just the sailor. Look, go away. Go and persecute someone else.”
“The mule. Mule is the term we use. Mule.”
But Jonathan kept up his attack. “That’s who you are, then, is it? You and Roper? Drug-runners? That’s perfect. Home from bloody home.”
He dropped back on the pillows, waiting for Corkoran’s response. It came with a vigor that found him unprepared. For, with remarkable agility, Corkoran had sprung to his bedside and helped himself to a substantial handful of Jonathan’s hair, which he was now pulling very hard indeed.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured reproachfully. “Old love. Little boys in your position do well to watch their fucking language, actually. We are the Ironbrand Gas, Light & Coke Company of Nassau, Bahamas, shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Respectability. The question is, who the fuck are you?”
The hand relinquished Jonathan’s hair. He lay still, his heart thumping. “Harlow said it was a repossession job,” he said huskily. “Somebody he’d sold a boat to in Australia who’d welshed on the debt. Jumbo had traced the boat to the Channel Islands through some friends, he said. If I could bring it to Plymouth we could flog it and get ourselves off the hook. It didn’t seem such a tall story at the time. I was a fool to trust him.”
“So what did we do with the body, old love?” Corkoran inquired chummily, back in his chair. “Dump it down the proverbial tin mine? The great tradition?”
Change the rhythm. Let him wait. The voice gray with despair. “Why don’t you just call the police, extradite me, claim the reward?” Jonathan suggested.
Corkoran removed his makeshift ashtray from his lap and replaced it with a buff, army-style folder, which seemed to contain nothing but faces.
“And Brother Meister?” he inquired. “How did he offend?”
“He robbed me.”
“Oh, you poor lamb! One of life’s true victims. . . . But how?”
“Everyone else on the staff got a piece of the service money. There was a scale, so much for rank and how long you’d been employed. It came to quite a lot each month, even for a newcomer. Meister told me he wasn’t obliged to pay it to foreigners. Then I found out he was paying the other foreigners, just not me.”
“So you helped yourself from the safe. Well, he was jolly lucky you didn’t top him too. Or unzip his whatnot with your penknife.”
“I did overtime for him. Day work. I did the fine-wine inventory on my day off. Nothing. Not even when I took guests sailing on the lake. He charged them a fortune and didn’t pay me a cent.”
“We left Cairo in a bit of a hurry too, one notices. Nobody quite seems to know why. No hint of foul play, mind. Not a stain on our escutcheon, according to Queen Nefertiti. Or perhaps she just never rumbled us.”
Jonathan had that fiction ready. He had worked it out with Burr. “I got mixed up with a girl. She was married.”
“She have a name?”
Fight your corner, Burr had said. “Not for you. No.”
“Fifi? Lulu? Mrs. Tutankhamen? No? Well, she can always use one of yours, can’t she?” Corkoran was leafing lazily through his faxes. “What about the good doctor? Did he have a name?”
“Marti.”
“Not that doctor, silly.”
“Then who? What doctor? What is this, Corkoran? Am I on trial for saving Daniel? Where?
??s this leading?”
This time Corkoran waited patiently for the storm to pass. “The doctor who stitched up our hand at Truro Casualty,” he explained.
“I don’t know what he was called. He was an intern.”
“A white intern?”
“Brown. Indian or Pakistani.”
“And how did we get ourselves there? To the hospital? With our poor bleeding wrist?”
“I wrapped it in a couple of dishcloths and drove Harlow’s jeep.”
“Left-handed?”
“Yes.”
“The same car we used to remove the body to other premises, no doubt? The law did find traces of our blood in the car. But it seems to have been a bit of a cocktail. There was some of Jumbo’s too.”
Waiting for an answer, Corkoran was busily writing himself little notes.
“Just get me a lift to Nassau,” Jonathan said. “I’ve done you no harm. I’m not asking for anything. You’d never have known about me if I hadn’t been such a fool at Low’s. I don’t need anything from you, I’m not applying for anything, I don’t want money, I don’t want thanks, I don’t want your approval. Let me go.”
Corkoran worked his cigarette while he turned the pages on his lap. “What say we do Ireland for a change?” he proposed, as if Ireland were a party game for a wet afternoon. “Two old soldiers having a chin-wag about better times. What could be jollier than that?”
When you come to the true parts, don’t sit back, Burr had said. Better to flounder, forget a line and correct yourself, make them think that’s where they should be looking for the lies.
“What did you do to that bloke, anyway?” Frisky was asking, with professional curiosity.
It was the middle of the night. He was stretched on a futon across the door, a masked reading light and a heap of pornographic magazines beside his head.
“Which bloke?” said Jonathan.
“The bloke who borrowed little Danny for the evening. Screaming like a stuck pig he was, up there in the cookhouse—they could have heard him in Miami.”
“I must have broken his arm.”
“Broken it? I think you must have screwed it off him very slowly against the thread. Are you one of these amateur Japanese martial artists, then, one of your hari-suchi merchants?”
“I just grabbed and pulled,” said Jonathan.
“Fell to pieces in your hand,” Frisky said understandingly. “Happens to the best of us.”
The most dangerous moments are when you need a friend, Burr had said.
And after Ireland they reconnoitered what Corkoran called “our days as upwardly mobile flunky,” which meant Jonathan’s time at catering college, then his days as sous-chef, then as chef and then as graduate to the staff side of the hotel business.
After that again, Corkoran needed to hear about his exploits at the Château Babette, which Jonathan related with scrupulous regard for Yvonne’s anonymity, only to discover that Corkoran knew that story too.
“So how in Gawd’s name do we come to stick a pin into Mama Low’s, old love?” Corkoran asked, lighting himself another cigarette. “Mama’s has been the Chief’s favorite waterhole for donkeys’ years.”
“Just somewhere I thought I’d go to ground for a few weeks.”
“Keep our head down, you mean?”
“I’d been doing a job on a yacht up in Maine.”
“Chief cook and bottlewasher?”
“Majordomo.”
Pause while Corkoran rummaged among his faxes. “And?”
“I caught a bug and had to be put ashore. I lay up in a hotel in Boston, then called Billy Bourne in Newport. Billy gets me the work. He said, Why not devil at Low’s for a few months, dinners only, take a rest?”
Corkoran licked a finger, fished out whatever he was looking for and held it to the light.
“For heaven’s sake,” Jonathan muttered, like a prayer for sleep.
“Now, this boat we went sick on, old love. That would have been the Lolita, née Persephone, built in Holland, owned by Nikos Asserkalian, the celebrated show business personality, God-thumper and crook, two hundred feet of bloody awful taste. Not Nikos; he’s a midget.”
“I never met him. We were chartered out.”
“Who to, my heart?”
“Four California dentists and their women.”
Jonathan volunteered a couple of names, which Corkoran wrote down in his scruffy penny notebook, having first flattened it on his ample thigh.
“Balls of fun, were they? Laugh a minute?”
“They did me no harm.”
“And you didn’t do them any?” Corkoran suggested kindly. “Bust their safe or someone’s neck, or do a knife job on them or anything?”
“Actually, go to hell,” said Jonathan.
Corkoran considered this invitation and seemed to decide it was a good idea. He packed together his papers and emptied his ashtray into the wastepaper basket, making a frightful mess. He peered at himself in the mirror, grimaced and tried to pull his hair straight with his fingers, but it wasn’t a success.
“It’s too bloody good, dearie,” he declared.
“What is?”
“Your story. Don’t know why. Don’t know how. Don’t know where. It’s you, I think. You make me feel inadequate.” He gave his hair another disastrous yank. “But then I am inadequate. I’m a savage little poof in a grownup world. Whereas you—you’re just trying to be inadequate.” He wandered into the bathroom and peed. “Tabby’s brought some clothes for you, by the by,” he called through the open doorway. “Nothing earthshaking, but they’ll clothe our nakedness till the Armanis come through.” He flushed, and reappeared in the bedroom. “Left to myself, I’d roast you, actually,” he said, zipping himself up. “I’d deprive you, hood you and hang you up by your fucking ankles till the truth fell out of you by gravity. Still, can’t have everything in life, can we? Toodle-oo.”
It was the next day. Daniel had decided that Jonathan was in need of entertainment.
“What’s a Grecian urn?”
“A pot. A jug. Art form of the ancient Greeks.”
“Fifty dollars a week. What goes through a tortoise’s brain when it’s being hit by a Mercedes?”
“Slow music?”
“Its shell. Corky’s talking to Roper in the study. He says he’s gone as far as he can go. Either you’re squeaky clean or you’re the biggest con in Christendom.”
“When did they get back?”
“At first light. Roper always flies at first light. They’re talking about your question mark.”
“With Jed?”
“Jed’s riding Sarah. She always rides Sarah as soon as she gets back. Sarah hears her and gets in a rage if she doesn’t come. Roper says they’re a pair of dykes, What’s a dyke?”
“A woman who loves women.”
“Roper talked to Sandy Langbourne about you while they were in Curaçao. No one’s to discuss you on the telephone. Radio silence on Thomas until further notice. Chief’s orders.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t eavesdrop on people so much. You’ll wear yourself out.”
Daniel arched his back, flung up his head and yelled at the punkah: “I don’t eavesdrop! That’s not fair. I wasn’t even trying. I just can’t help hearing! Corky says you re a dangerous riddle, that’s all! You re not! I know you’re not! I love you! Roper’s going to feel your bones for himself and take a view!”
It was just before dawn.
“Know the best way to make a bloke talk, Tommy?” Tabby asked from the futon, offering a helpful tip. “Infallible? One hundred percent? Never known to fail? The fizzy-drink treatment. Bring his mouth up so he can’t breathe except through his nose. Or her. Get a funnel, if there’s one handy, and pour the fizz into his nose. Hits you right in the switchboard, like your brain’s boiling. Bloody diabolical.”
It was ten in the morning.
Walking uncertainly at Corkoran’s side across the gravel sweep of Crystal, Jonathan had an exact memory of crossing the main
courtyard of Buckingham Palace on the arm of his German Aunt Monika the day she took him to collect his dead father’s medal. What’s the point of prizes when you’re dead? he had wondered. And school while you’re alive?
A stocky black manservant admitted them. He wore a green waistcoat and black trousers. A venerable black butler in a striped cotton waistcoat came forward to receive them.
“For the Chief, please, Isaac,” said Corkoran. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We’re expected.”
The immense hall echoed like a church to their footsteps. A curved marble staircase with a gilded handrail rose into the cupola, making three landings on its way to a blue-painted heaven. The marble they were walking on was pink, and the sunlight lifted from it in a rosy dew. Two man-sized Egyptian warriors guarded an arched doorway of carved stone. They passed through it and entered a gallery dominated by a gold head of the sun god Ra. Greek torsos, marble heads, hands, urns and stone panels of hieroglyphics stood or lay about in disarray. Brass-bound glass cabinets ran along the walls, crammed with figurines. Hand-painted signs declared their provenance: West African, Peruvian, pre-Columbian, Cambodian, Minoan, Russian, Roman, and in one case simply “Nile.”
He plunders, Burr had said.
Freddie likes to sell him stolen artifacts, Sophie had said.
Roper’s going to feel your bones for himself, Daniel had said.
They entered the library. Leather-bound books reached from floor to ceiling. A rolling spiral staircase, unmanned, stood by.
They entered a prison corridor between arched dungeons. From their solitary cells, antique weapons glimmered in the twilight: swords and pikes and maces, suits of armor posed on wooden horses; muskets, halberds, cannon balls and green cannons still barnacled from the sea.
They passed a billiards room and came to the second center of the house. Marble columns supported a wagon roof. A tiled blue pool mirrored them, bordered by a marble concourse. On the walls hung impressionist paintings of fruit and farms and naked women: can this really be a Gauguin? On a marble chaise two young men in shirtsleeves and twenties baggy trousers talked business across open attaché cases.