Donnelly found time, or rather made time in the flurry of activity that filled the following days, to collect Todd from the hospital. Shimoni would have gone, was looking forward to going, but when the time came she could not leave Flynn. Not that she could do much with him, or for him. She just felt strongly that he should not be left alone.
When they were on their way and Donnelly addressing himself to the London traffic, Todd said quietly, “How is he?”
The policeman kept his eyes on the road. “He’s in trouble,” he said honestly. “I want him to see a psychiatrist, but he won’t and I can’t make him. It would be better if he’d done something I could arrest him for, at least then I could make sure he got some help to deal with this, but he hasn’t and I can’t. Leah’s been terrific with him—she got over it like a dog shaking rain out of its coat—but it’s not enough. God knows he needs his friends, but he needs professional help too. I think without it he’s going to fall apart.”
“Is he drinking?”
“Oh yes.”
It was how he was drinking that chilled Shimoni to the heart. She had seen people go on blinders before, done it a couple of times herself—to dull a hurt or draw a veil over something she wanted to forget. She had not found it much of a solution: when she surfaced the hurt and the memory were still there, still waiting for her to come to terms with them, and her head ached and her skin looked like socks washed in Brand X as well. But if others found a passing comfort in it enough to compensate for consequences as inevitable as a flung stone’s falling, Shimoni was not one to object on moral grounds.
But that was the kind of drinking she was familiar with, the kind of drinking Israeli soldiers did after failing to find an honourable way of waging war on Palestinian children directed against them like missiles. She had never seen anyone drink like this before: steadily and savagely, not merely without enjoyment but as if the stuff was creosote, without talking, without pausing, almost without getting drunk, heading resolutely for oblivion. He had been drinking for two days. He had not eaten anything for nearer three.
He had hardly spoken since the ambulance trundled silently away—no need for a siren—with the bodies of Elizabeth Baron, aka Laura Wade, and Jamil Fahad who had never got back to his important job after all. The doctor who pronounced them dead left tranquilizers for Shimoni and Flynn, but neither used them. Shimoni spent a stormy hour crying into Flute’s silky fur, and the dog cried too. After that she was on the road to recovery, unloading the horror behind her.
Flynn could not match her resilience. He had of course been much closer to it, and for longer. Once again he had been crucified by paradox, the shine stripped from his improbable survival by the death of the woman he had never got over, in front of his own eyes and at least arguably by his own hand. The charm and the curse had torn him between them to the end.
Shock and horror wrenched a cry from him as her face shattered like the image in a broken mirror. Her finger caught in the trigger-guard and he had not the sense to release the gun until Donnelly pried it out of his grasp and let the limp body with its terrible face fall away from him and find a kind of dignity among the roots and the leaf-mould. Still Flynn knelt there, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, unaware of her blood spattered on his face and shirt, until Donnelly lifted him to his feet almost bodily and steered him up the slope towards the cottage.
The shock Shimoni could understand, and the horror, even the grief, because whatever had happened in between he had loved her and she had died. What she could not understand and did not know how to deal with was this savage bleak despair he waded into like a man wading deliberately into a bog. Even the drink when he started into it was not so much an alcoholic’s crutch as a suicide’s weapon. When he looked at her at all, which he did not do often, she saw a pit in his soul filled with loathing.
It was not for her: she wished it had been, backlash hostility she could have coped with. As near as she could judge he was sick with hatred for a life bought with too much death. Now he had it safe home he did not know what to do with it. He had no use for it but nor could he give it up without making a mockery of all the sacrifice tied up in it. So he drank, alone in his savage silence, to avenge himself on a life he could neither endure nor abandon.
And Shimoni watched him covertly and wished she could take some of his hurting away. And she watched the clock and wished Todd would get here, and was afraid what would happen when he did.
When she heard the engine she hurried out to the front of the cottage and had her arms most of the way round Todd before he was fully out of the car. Shimoni was not a tall person, consequently her limbs were not long, and all of the way round Todd was a considerable distance. Most of the way was a creditable effort in the circumstances.
To his eternal credit, Todd asked about her before he asked about Flynn. His eyes were concerned. Her bruises were fading now, but not yet as if they had never been. “If I’d known what I was letting you in for, I wouldn’t have brought him within ten miles of this place.”
She stood on tip-toe and brushed a kiss lightly onto his cheek. He had shaved before leaving the hospital. So far as she could see he was none the worse for his fractured skull. His doctor must have thought so too, because he had raised no objection when Todd said he was leaving. Shimoni said, “Where else would you bring your problems?”
Flynn was in the kitchen, seated at the scrubbed pine table with no company other than an empty bottle, another going the same way and the dog Flute who appeared to have recognised a soul as mournful as his own and had taken to cramming himself under the vegetable rack.
Todd ambled into the kitchen as if he had been no further away than the livingroom all this time, and closed the door behind him. He made no acknowledgement of Flynn’s presence. He went to the cupboard and found himself a glass. He pulled out a chair and sat down solidly, facing Flynn; facing the top of Flynn’s head, rather, because he was hunched over the table and would not look up.
Todd took the bottle and poured himself a liberal measure. Fortunately it was Scotch, which he liked; he felt it could equally well have been wood alcohol or surgical spirit. He dumped another inch into Flynn’s glass, which was not in fact a glass at all but a thick pottery mug which held more.
Tapped together the Tyrone crystal tumbler and the pot mug made a homely clink. Todd proposed as the toast an old Russian saying which had proved apt on divers occasions before today. “Life is hard,” he said, “then you die.”
That low abdominal rumbling was Flynn chuckling darkly into his mug. “Ain’t that a fact.” He emptied the mug and filled it again.
Todd drank more slowly but, despite it being good Scotch, with no greater enjoyment. It had been seven years since he had seen Flynn like this, and he had not expected to see it again. Even so there were differences, and not for the better. Flynn at twenty-four drinking himself to death for lack of anything better to do had at least given the impression that there was some glory in the light of a candle burning at both ends. He might have been starving, he might have been cold; his liver might have been on its last legs and his brain too slow for the petty larceny he lived by, but there had been a kind of bravado in his dissolution, a kind of guttering style. Todd looked at him now and saw nothing like that to redeem the bleakness of his intent. Flynn at thirty-one was drinking to make the world go away, and he was drinking fast because he wanted it to go sooner rather than later.
Finally Todd said, “She’s dead then—Laura Wade.”
Flynn grinned into his mug. But his voice was thick and bitter as gall, so perhaps he was just baring his teeth at it. “Oh yeah. Laura’s dead. Fahad’s dead. Everybody’s bloody dead. Except Flynn. Good old Flynn with his charmed life, he ain’t dead yet.”
“So what am I,” asked Todd, “the ghost of Hamlet’s father?”
Flynn looked up at him for the first time. “I thought you were going to die. That bastard Fahad. I thought he’d killed you.”
“He gave me a headache, that’s all. But nothing to the one you’re going to have.”
Flynn grinned again. Almost there was a little humour in it this time. “She sent for you, did she? Shimoni? Flynn’s drinking again, come and sort him out before his breath strips the wallpaper?”
Todd smiled. “Something like that. Except it’s not the wallpaper she’s worried about.”
“No need to worry about Flynn,” he said, heavily confidential. “Flynn’s got it cracked. You want to know something?” He leaned forward over the table, peering into Todd’s face. Todd nodded. “Do you?”
“Yes, Mickey.”
“OK then. When my blood-alcohol level reaches four hundred milligrams of alcohol per hundred millilitres of blood”—he said this very carefully—”some poor sod on the Clapham omnibus will drop dead of alcoholic poisoning.” He chuckled bleakly into the whisky.
Todd laughed too, softly, fondly. “Oh Mickey, Mickey.” His gaze took in the bottles, the mug cupped in Flynn’s hands protectively, as if he thought someone might try to snatch it. “What’s this all about?”
Flynn leaned back, leaving his hands on the table. One was whiter than the other. The doctor Donnelly called had removed the wreckage of the plaster for him. It was weak and the scars of surgery livid against the sun-starved skin, but it was a working hand again. He could pour with it.
He lifted his eyes from the scrubbed pine and smiled. It was not something he did very often. Mostly he grinned, and his grin was a live thing, vibrant and wicked, that charmed and exasperated in approximately equal proportions like a fox seen high-tailing it out of a chicken-run with feathers on its nose.
The smile was different: quiet, secret, without artifice, without defences, the sweet smile of a child or a simpleton. It was the shortest distance between his soul and the outside world. Everything that he was had its reflection there. Todd who had seen happiness and hope and kindness and strength in their season was shocked by the depths of pain and sorrow and weakness he found there now.
“What can I tell you, Gil?” he said quietly, the words slurring only partly with the drink. “I think between them they have broken my heart.”
Todd’s cracked too; but all his instincts warned him that sympathy on his part now would be the unmanning of them both. Besides, Flynn could not afford the indulgence of compassion. “Mickey, I know you’re hurting. I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could do about it. But there isn’t. I can’t help you, and I don’t think anyone else can either.
“It’s your burden, son. It’s not fair, they had no right to dump it on you, but they did and now you’ve got to find some way to pick it up and carry it. Get drunk if you want to. Shout, cry, throw wild parties, bed a lot of women. But it’ll be there waiting for you in the end, and in the end you’re going to have to find a way of dealing with it.
“And I don’t want to rush you, they say time heals and maybe it does if you’re not using it to inflict new damage on yourself, but the clock’s still running and the sooner you pull yourself together the better because you have things to do—important things. You’re still the main witness in the prosecution of Byron Spalding for conspiracy to murder two hundred and twenty people, and various other crimes. Make no mistake, Hehn or no Hehn he’ll fight it all the way. He’ll have the best lawyers money can buy. And if there’s anything worth more to them than Flynn dead, it’s Flynn drunk and maudlin with it.”
Flynn seemed barely to be taking in what he said. He mumbled into his mug, “Spalding’s dead.”
Todd knew he had been told, knew his mind was having trouble absorbing details and even more in recalling them. “No, he’s not dead. Mickey, try and get your head together. Donnelly only said he died in the explosion to get you off the hook. He wasn’t even at Deerings that day, he was already in police custody. Hehn’s dead, but Spalding’s alive and he’s going on trial.
“And he’s going to go free, too, unless you get your brain out of that bottle and face up to your responsibilities. Two hundred and twenty people died, Mickey. You are their witness. If you don’t testify, their murderer goes free and their deaths unrequited. Is that what you want?”
Flynn’s head twisted from side to side; he was not shaking it so much as trying to evade the assault. His emotions had already had all the punishment they could take, and then some; now Todd of all people was turning the screw on him, and turning and turning as if he could not hear him scream and his bones crack. “Gil, I—”
“Is that what you want?”
“No.” His voice broke. His eyes travelled round the cornices of the room as if seeking an escape. “But I don’t know if—I’m so damn tired.”
“I know,” said Todd, his tone unyielding. “But you can’t rest yet. After the trial; then you can live or die as you choose. But for now you have work to do, and debts to pay.”
At last his eyes came back to Todd’s. There was no resolve there, only exhaustion and perhaps a little fear. “Oh God, Gil,” he whispered, “we’re back here again, aren’t we?”
Todd understood. “It won’t be so bad this time. For one thing you’re stronger: I know you don’t feel it right now, but you are. For another, it’s only a few days’drinking you’ve got to get on top of, not a few years’. You’ll cope. A rough day or two, a couple of bad nights, and you’ll be in the clear. And then we make Deerings pay.”
Todd sat with him until Flynn went to sleep with his head pillowed on his arms on the table. Then he went looking for Shimoni and a blanket.
Donnelly was still there. He nodded economically at the kitchen door. “Is he going to be all right?”
“Oh yes, I think so,” said Todd. “It might take a bit of time. You could leave me the number of that psychiatrist, in case we need him. But Mickey’ll come through. He’s tougher than he thinks.”
Todd saw the policeman out to his car. Pausing at the front gate he said, “There’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“Only one?”
Todd smiled. “One to be going on with. Who bombed Deerings, and killed Hehn, and why?”
“We don’t know who he was,” said Donnelly, “and it’s beginning to look as if he made a clean get-away. He was an American, probably a professional hired for the job. We know who sent him, though. Obregon.”
Todd stared. “Tomas Obregon? Mickey’s—?” He held his hand out brokenly. “The drug baron? How do you know?”
“He sent his calling card.” Donnelly extracted a slip from his wallet. The original was under bond as evidence, but he had had copies made. He passed it to Todd without comment.
On the white card was a simple black line-drawing. It showed a big white car driving away from the smoking ruins of a building, and underneath was the legend “Next time kick the bottom out of some-body else’s business.”