After a quick look around, I tucked my bag under my arm and hoisted myself over the seawall railing. The rope gangway sagged beneath me as I scrambled across, until I reached the deck and clambered on board, ducking into the shadows by the door.
Light fell through a grimy porthole. Through the pitted glass I could see the pilothouse, gutted of controls, and hear thrash metal. Stale cigarette smoke cut through the smells of piss and fetid water. I remained in the shadows, waiting for someone to appear in the doorway. When no one did, I counted to fifty, and knocked.
Inside, the music fell silent. A face filled the porthole, and the metal door creaked open.
A sixtyish white man stood in the doorway, his nimbus of gray hair aglow from the overhead light. A paint-stained sweatshirt hung loosely from his bony frame, and a lit cigarette dangled from fingers crosshatched with dirt and pale scars. Sun-worn face, sunken cheeks, a nose familiar with the wrong end of a fist or a barroom floor. One eye was a pure sea blue. Pale skin sheathed the other’s empty socket, the flesh drooping in soft, waxy-looking pockets.
“Yeah?” He squinted at me with his good eye.
“I’m looking for Quinn O’Boyle. Is he here?”
The man took a drag from his cigarette, twisted his head like a bird’s to look me up and down with his one blue eye. “No one by that name.”
“I’m a friend. Cass. Cass Neary. Has he been here or called or something?” I dug my fingernails into my hand to steady myself. “I thought you might know him.”
“No one by that name,” he repeated. The door closed in my face.
“Goddamn it.” I pounded on the steel frame. “Just talk to me!”
Music blasted from inside, even louder than before. I tried the door handle—locked. Abruptly it turned in my grasp and the door opened. Someone else stood there, lankier than the first man and bare chested, glaring at the floor with bloodshot eyes.
“Who the fuck is it?” He did a double take when he saw my boots, looked up into my face. “Cass?”
He dragged me inside, kicking the door closed, pushed me against the wall, and ran his hands across his stubbled scalp, shaking with anger.
“Goddamn it, Cassie, what the fuck happened? I told you to wait at Bruno’s place!”
Before I could answer, he took my chin and lowered his face to mine, his fingers digging into the flesh as he kissed me. His mouth tasted of rust and ash, a sweeter undercurrent of beer and whiskey. He withdrew and I pressed my face against his bare chest, felt beneath my fingertips the ravaged map of scars there, the rope of puckered flesh that ran down his side and the imprint of the brand upon his left breast—three creatures whose entwined limbs and teeth formed at their center a human skull: the Gripping Beast.
“Cassie.” He tilted my face up to his. “Jesus, what happened? Your hair…”
“I needed a change.”
“I like it.” He grinned, pinned me against the wall again, and traced a finger along my arm. “You look hot.”
“Get a fecking room, O’Boyle.”
The one-eyed man loomed behind Quinn, reached past us to throw the door’s dead bolt. Quinn lit a cigarette, pinched the match between his fingers, and dropped it into a beer can on the table.
“Wink, this is Cass. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Cass, this is Wink. We’ve known each other since we were in Pentonville. When was that? ’Eighty-three?”
“Nineteen eighty-four. My girl bailed us out, night before the wedding. Remember that?”
“She came through.” Quinn sat at the galley table. “But she was wicked pissed.”
Wink nodded. “I don’t blame her. All that blow was for our honeymoon.”
“She was a bitch.” Quinn pushed a chair toward me. “What was her name? Reba?”
“Rhonda.”
“Right. Help me, Rhonda, help me get the hell out of jail.”
Quinn laughed. He picked up a half-full bottle of Myer’s dark, sloshed a few inches into a grimy coffee mug, and handed it to me. Wink tugged down the window shades, went to a small refrigerator, and hooked two bottles of Bud between his fingers.
“I’ll leave you two romantics,” he said, and stepped into the adjoining room.
The thrash metal resumed, but at a lower volume. Quinn poured himself some Myer’s while I surveyed the room. A Formica-topped table and three folding chairs, boxes full of empty beer and liquor bottles, some nautical charts on the wall. I turned back to Quinn.
“Who is he?”
“Old friend.” Quinn took a final drag of his cigarette, his pale green eyes glittering. “So what the fuck happened?”
I gave him the short version of what had gone down since he’d left me four days earlier in Canary Wharf, omitting the details as to what I was doing when Harold Vertigan was killed. Quinn listened, lit another cigarette, and smoked nervously, flicking ashes onto the floor. The roar of diesel engines rose from the river whenever a large boat passed, drowning out the chain-saw roar of Slipknot and Motörhead.
Quinn’s gaze never left mine, his mouth twisted into a permanent, mirthless smile by two horizontal black lines tattooed on either side of it: relics of his time in Alaska, along with the three vertical red lines incised between his eyes. I’d asked him once what the lines signified.
“They mean I killed a man.”
Now the flickering fluorescent light turned his gaunt face into a mask as ominous as the image of the Gripping Beast. A four-day growth of gray stubble covered his skull and chin. As I poured myself another jolt of rum, he leaned across the table to press his fingers to my mouth.
“Stop. My fucking head is going to explode. If you were a cat, you’d be on your sixth or seventh life by now.”
I drank my rum. “Good thing I’m human.”
“Jury’s still out on that one.”
“So what the hell happened to you? You were supposed to be gone for three hours.”
Quinn sighed, closing his eyes. “I ran into someone I know. Things got problematic.”
He opened his eyes, and I was confronted by the same icy don’t-fuck-with-me gaze I’d first seen decades ago, when I’d photographed him holding a spoon over a lit candle in a Kamensic Village bedroom. When he didn’t continue, I asked, “What about Greece?”
“What about Greece. Like I said, things got fucked up. Wink’s contact got detained in Marseilles, they found a bunch of dead refugees in the hold of his barge. So scratch that. I can think of seven guys here in London who’ll kill me if they find me. And that’s before Interpol enters the picture. Why I quit shaving. I oughta do what you did and dye my hair. Get tinted contact lenses.”
He lurched to his feet, picked up the bottle of Myer’s. “I should never have left Iceland. Come on, I’m beat.”
I followed him through the next room, where Wink sprawled on a vinyl couch surrounded by empty bottles, a laptop on his stomach. He stared at it with his Cyclops eye, riveted by a field of exploding Humvees.
I followed Quinn down a metal ladder. Below, the only light came from an overhead fluorescent bulb. The cabin was barely ten feet wide and maybe twice as long, its walls pleached with mold. Nylon nets suspended from the ceiling held sprouting onions and potatoes. A faded school photograph of a young girl in a soccer uniform was taped above the metal sink. The air reeked of cigarette smoke and gasoline, with a pervasive note of burnt plastic. I didn’t want to think about what the wiring looked like.
Opposite the galley, a door opened onto a tiny cabin, with clothes strewn on the floor.
“That’s Wink’s berth.” Quinn pointed to a stained bedsheet that hung from the ceiling. “This is mine. Luxury quarters.”
He pulled aside the sheet to reveal a pair of bunks, the top one crammed with tools and electrical equipment, a backpack I recognized as Quinn’s. A sleeping bag took up most of the lower bunk, where Quinn’s leather jacket hung from a nail. He tossed the jacket onto the upper bunk, took off his biker boots.
“Make yourself at home.” He crawled into the lower bunk and lit a cigarette, its tip glowing like an emergency beacon.
“Is that safe?” I pointed at the cigarette and set my bag on the top bunk.
“None of it’s safe. Wink pays off someone on the local council so he can stay here, guy owes him a favor. They’ve been trying to get him out for years.”
He took a drag on his cigarette, pinched it out, and flicked it into the near darkness. I peeled off my leather jacket and draped it over Quinn’s, removed my boots, and slid into the bunk beside him. There was barely room for both of us. He pulled me close, his breath warm against my cheek.
“Damn it, Cassie,” he whispered. “I thought something bad happened to you.”
“Something bad did happen to me.”
He pressed his mouth to my temple. His tongue flicked at the star-shaped scar beside my eye as he unbuttoned my jeans. He slid his hand down my stomach, to the snarl of scar tissue left there by a zip knife when I was raped. He kissed me, then drew back to stare at me with his green-glass eyes.
“You been fucking someone?”
“Yeah. But that wasn’t something bad.”
“Not as good as this, though…”
He yanked the bedsheet drape across the opening to the bunk and tugged down my jeans. We fucked like we did as teenagers, with half our clothes on, covering each other’s mouths so we wouldn’t cry out. Later, Quinn cradled my cheek in his hand.
“What is this, Cass?” he murmured.
I ran my finger along his upper lip, a drop of blood where I’d kissed him. “What do you mean?”
“All these years and we’re still like this. How come?”
I kissed him gently. “Nobody else thinks Berlin is a better album than Transformer.”
He rested his head on my shoulder. My fingers splayed across his chest so I could feel his heart thumping beneath them.
“Hey,” I said. But he was already asleep.