ALONE IN HIS LOFT at TriBeCa, earlier that evening, Tomas Court had also been conducting a dialogue about the Conrad building, a dialogue none the less forceful for being imagined. The two speakers were himself and his wife, and the dialogue began as soon as Thalia, Mario and Colin left.
The minute the door closed on them, it burst out in his mind, a cacophony of contradictions, interruptions and pleas, of ill-phrased assertions and ill-timed non sequiturs. Court stood quietly in the shadows of the room, outside the circle of bright light that lit the work table, and let this chaos into his mind. He was used to this form of possession; when he ceased working, a process that demanded all his energy and will-power, he always felt drained and bloodless, emptied and lightheaded; an energy vacuum had been created, and into this vacuum anything, including malevolence, might rush.
Today it was to be the Conrad. So be it, he thought, and waited, not allowing his breathing to quicken or tighten. He knew that, given time, this cacophony and havoc would resolve itself. He fixed his eyes on one feature of the room—it never mattered which feature, and in this case it happened to be the bars of the window, opposite which he stood. The bars, eight feet tall, and at least six across, formed a crucifix shape, which amused him distantly, since he was without religious belief. He looked at this cross, and was aware that outside in the street some absurd commotion was taking place; he could hear that his English location manager was giving vent to his feelings, but as far as Court was concerned he might just as well have been shouting his protests in Urdu. Lascelles’s laments were a cry from another country and Court felt an absolute lack of curiosity in anything Lascelles said.
After a while, as Lascelles’s voice died away and silence fell in the room, the dialogue with his wife quietened; her interruptions became fewer, then ceased altogether; he was left listening to his own voice. Why? said his voice. Why, why, why? Why live there? Why invite rejection? Why do this?
He felt stronger at once, the moment of mental palsy over and done with, he told himself. The why questions were familiar demons; they had been plaguing him for months. It was now safe to move, safe to begin functioning again, although he truly functioned, as he well knew, only when he worked. He picked up one of the cardboard boxes which littered the loft, and carried it across to the circle of light on his black work table.
He took no second look at the welter of coloured papers still strewn across its surface; he had not the least inclination either to re-examine them or tidy them up. Each day, embarking on work, whether here, on location, or in a studio, he would know, before he began, exactly where he aimed, and how much expenditure of spirit, energy and will-power would be necessary that day to take him there. When he reached that preordained point, he stopped, and had been known to do so in mid-sentence, or mid-take. If necessary, he would drive or drag others on with him to this stopping place; if necessary, he would manipulate, annoy, abuse, frighten, trick or charm them en route, but get there he would.
He opened the lid of the box and moved the tumble of shooting schedules to one side to make space. During the day, these papers held magic, for they were the raw materials of his art, as essential to it, in their way, as celluloid, cameras, actors and light. Now, since he was at rest, they were inert, and merely his instruments; they were without power until tomorrow at seven in the morning, when he again picked them up.
From the box he took out the material which various researchers had been gathering for him for months. Every scrap of information here concerned the Conrad building. There were old architectural journals; batches of photographs new and old; photocopies of the original plans for the building, plans which had been lying in some city hall archive for decades. Court laid them all out on the table and began to examine them minutely; it was not the first time he had done this.
He examined the, to him, grotesque façade of the Conrad, with its baroque excesses and its Gothic turrets. It seemed to him that the architect had given the building a forbidding and secretive look. He disliked the extravagance of its great gaping maw of an entrance; he disliked the oeil-de-boeuf windows which ornamented those turrets and punctuated the roof-line, and which gave the building a menacing, many-eyed look, as if it were continuously hungry, and continuously vigilant.
His wife was seeking to buy apartment three, situated on the north corner of the building, overlooking Central Park. She had already viewed this apartment several times; she had refused to allow him to accompany her—proving to be obstinate on this point.
‘Tomas,’ she had said, ‘you don’t want me to live there and you don’t believe I’m going to be allowed to live there. No. What’s the point?’
Thwarted in this desire, he had turned to this research material instead. Now, he inspected the architectural plans, drawn up by Hillyard White over eighty years before. He traced the walls of apartment three, examined its orientation, dimensions and fenestration. He could see the disposition of the rooms; the photographs and descriptions in the various books and journals gave him an idea of how this interior might look. He could half see some rich space with many closets, with rooms which led into further rooms, and with yet more rooms beyond that. The apartment was very large; he now realized for the first time that it was a duplex. Towards the rear, there was a Second storey, secreted away; this would be the site of the main bedrooms; this was where his wife would sleep. His wife I had her final meeting with the board of the Conrad, with the committee who would decide her fate, the following morning; she would be given their decision then. Suppose that decision, against all the odds, was yes? How did you reach that second storey, that bedroom?
He bent more closely to the plans, which, to a non-expert, were not easy to decipher. There was the staircase—he saw it now—but how did you reach the staircase?
He only half saw, half glimpsed, he realized. It was like looking into some marvellous lighted room from the street outside, and then, just when all its secrets were about to be revealed, some officious person came along and closed the shutters in his face.
He was suddenly seized with anger; his hands began to shake. With a furious, violent gesture, he swept the papers to the floor. Immediately, the chaos returned, and those two voices began arguing again in his head. ‘Oh, it torments me, Tomas, it torments me,’ his wife said. This time, he shouted his wife down and drowned her out, anger giving him an eloquence that, when they actually had this argument, he rarely possessed.
He spelled out to her the insanity of this plan, a misconception from the first. Why was she continuing with the shaming procedures inflicted on her by the Conrad board, who for months now had been vetting her finances and every other aspect of her life? Why had she hired, at huge expense, first a real-estate broker, then one of Manhattan’s most expensive law firms to press her suit? All this money and effort would be wasted, he shouted, raining his reasons down on her now-bowed, imagined head. Neither money nor lawyers turned the key of admission at the Conrad, and if the broker—some man called Jules McKechnie—was claiming otherwise, she was being taken for a ride. Could she not see that?
The Conrad, he reminded her, was a co-operative; its board could choose whom to refuse and whom to admit. For decades, the Conrad board had weaselled its way around the law, in particular the laws regarding discrimination on grounds of colour, race or sex. It was a bastion, and it did not raise its drawbridge to actresses, divorced women with young children, or the nouveau riche. Did she not know, had her precious broker and her over-priced lawyers not checked: no member of the acting profession, let alone a movie star of her fame, had ever lived in the Conrad, though many had sought admission. And no young children had been brought up in the Conrad for a quarter of a century at least.
The occupants of the Conrad, he continued, were ageing, rich, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They believed in the Social Register, since they, and everyone they cared to know, were listed in it; they believed in money, provided it was inherited, and thus disinfected of all taint; and they believed in an Episcopalian God, while failing to practise any of His teachings. They are evil, he thundered; that building is evil, and I will not allow my son to be brought up in that place.
‘Our son,’ his wife’s voice quietly corrected him, and he heard again her one attempt to justify her decision. ‘I want to live there, Tomas. I see it differently from you. I shall feel safe there. This has nothing to do with you. It’s my choice.’
That reply, which had infuriated him when she gave it, and which infuriated him now, explained nothing. It was in his wife’s nature to explain herself and her actions as little as possible, and it was this intransigency in her, this refusal ever to allow him to be sure he understood her, which bound him to her—or so he sometimes thought.
In a sudden rage with her and with himself, he slammed out of the apartment, wearing only a jacket and unprepared for the cold of the streets. He had a car available to him, and a discreet, reliable driver whom he could have called upon, but he disliked others knowing his movements as much as he disliked them knowing his thoughts, so he flagged down a cab, knowing he should go back for a coat, but refusing to do so. He had to be careful of cold air, of course, just as he had to be careful of dust, pollen, pollution, smoke and a thousand other hidden substances in the air; this disability he loathed and resented. His anger deepening, he told the cab driver to take him uptown to the Carlyle, where his son would be waiting for him. Then, changing his mind, and knowing he needed something else, he told him to go to the Minskoff theatre, where his wife would be on stage, and that night’s performance of Estella would now be taking place.
Why? Why? Why? This question pursued him uptown in the cab; it pursued him across the noisy, crowded space of Times Square, where he abandoned the cab, and it pursued him to the theatre, where he paused, looking at the lights that spelled out his wife’s name on the theatre front.
Why live there, and why exclude him in this way, when he was sure she still loved him and wished for a reconciliation as much as he did? Why, when she was eager to work with him, did she still refuse to live with him? Did her continuing fear of Joseph King explain this decision—or was there some other, hidden reason? He glanced over his shoulder, having, as he often did, the sensation that he was being watched. No-one appeared to be watching him, so he turned down the small alleyway leading to the stage door and entered the theatre, feeling as he had done on many occasions that he would find the answers to all his questions here, that they lay very close, within reach.
He was known at the stage door, and no-one detained him there, for these visitations of his were frequent. He went first to Natasha’s dressing-room, where his way was blocked, first by the strange androgynous creature Natasha insisted on having as her dresser, and then by one of the bodyguards—the favourite bodyguard, the Texan.
Court was a tall man himself, but the Texan was even taller. Court looked coldly at his blond, muscled good looks. He looked like an overgrown child, and was possibly more intelligent than he appeared.
‘I don’t see that you can offer my wife much protection if she’s on stage, and you’re here by her dressing-room,’ he said.
‘I agree. But Ms Lawrence insists.’
‘Give my wife a message, would you? Tell her I need to talk to her. I’m going up to the Carlyle now to see my son. I’ll wait there until she gets back after the show.’
An expression of doubt passed across the man’s face. ‘I’m afraid she’s going out after the show, sir. She’s having dinner with her property broker, Jules McKechnie. I think it was mentioned…’
‘Ah, so it was. Then tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.’
‘I surely will.’ He paused. Tomas Court felt his blue eyes, eyes which appeared as innocent as a summer’s sky, rest on his face. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr Court?’
‘No, there is not.’
Court turned away. He went into the backstage maze at the Minskoff, along corridors, through fire doors, up flight after flight of stone stairs. He paused on one of the upper landings, a warning constriction beginning to tighten around his chest. Then he went on, up more stairs, until, right at the top of the building, he came to the place where he had to be next.
He opened a series of doors and stepped into the lighting box, high at the back of the auditorium, above its top-most tier seats. This dark, boxed-in coffin of a room, glass-fronted, sound-proofed, jutted forward over the heads of the audience and gave him an eagle’s eye view of the stage. The two technicians there, used to these unannounced visits of his, looked up, nodded, then returned their attention to the winking lights of their computer consoles. One silently passed him a pair of headphones, and Court stood there, holding them, watching the console, watching their hands moving back and forth among the switches and slides and myriad tiny green and red cue lights. He had a confused sense of being piloted, of being in flight; they were taking off, banking, gaining height. He felt that at any minute, all the answers to his questions would be there in his mind, and he would understand his wife.
He took a step towards the glass wall, felt a second’s vertiginous fear of falling as he saw the deep, dark declivity of the auditorium open out beneath; then moved again, and saw across the gulf of the audience, infinitely distant, silent and gesticulating, the figure of Estella, the figure of his wife.
He watched her lips move, her mouth open and close, and her throat pulse. He watched her tenderly as, beautiful in her young girl’s first-act white dress, she moved centre stage. He savoured her silence, then, with a slow reluctance, he put on the headphones. The music hit him in a wave; soaring up through the currents of the song came the sound of Estella’s voice.
They had reached the fourth scene of the first act; he was hearing the duet between that cruel child, Estella, and poor, humiliated, confused, besotted Pip. Court had no liking for musicals, most of which he despised, and scant admiration for the composer of this one. He had advised Natasha against taking this part, and had had forebodings of failure for her when she did. None of those factors was relevant now.
This particular song, one of the great hits of the show, was not even a song he liked. He could see that technically it was difficult, and that melodically it was intricate—it interwove major and minor keys in a haunting way—but he had always found its bittersweetness not to his taste. Even so, it left him defenceless. To his anger and incomprehension, the power of his wife’s song bypassed his mind and sent a shock to his heart, just as—no matter how he resisted—it always did.
Again he felt that warning constriction in his chest; he heard himself make some strange wounded sound; he removed the headphones and fumbled his way out of the darkness of the box. He descended the stone staircases without seeing them, still hearing the voice of his wife, both on the Tannoy system and in his head. Halfway down the stairs, he took a wrong turn and found himself lost in that labyrinth of backstage passageways. He turned, leaned against a wall, retraced his steps, descended again, and found himself, at last, at the stage door. He ignored the man on duty there, who, on seeing him, rose with an exclamation of concern. Pushing his way through the doors, he fought to control his breathing and fought to control the anxiety which always made these paroxysms worse. Finding himself in that dimly lit alleyway, he blessed its darkness; he moved away from the door, away from prying eyes, and slumped back against a wall, now gasping for breath.
It was a bad asthma attack and the pain was acute. He listened to the sirens of this city, to the incessant growl of automobiles pumping out their poisons, as he fumbled for the inhaler he always carried. He tilted his head back and depressed the plunger once, then again, sucking hard. At the third attempt the beta-adrenoceptor stimulants at last took effect. They soothed his breathing, if not his mind, and that fist which had been squeezing his lungs slackened its grip.
He waited, breathing quietly and shallowly. Two women entered the stage door; one man came out. No-one took the least notice of him and perhaps no-one saw him; Court, who hated others to witness these attacks, was grateful for this.
He watched the man, the unremarkable man, walk down the alleyway, turn into the street beyond and disappear. It came to him, in the clear but distanced way that ideas often did after an attack such as this, that the man could be Joseph King, who—as he had informed his wife—could be alive or dead. That man could be King, and so could any other man he encountered today, tomorrow, any day of the week.
King could be driving his taxi-cab, or taking his order in a restaurant; King could be the man he sat next to in a screening-room, or met briefly at some movie festival. King might have worked for him, or with Natasha in the past—this last suspicion, that King was connected with the movie industry in some way, having deepened recently, for King’s knowledge of movies, he had come to see, was as deep and as intimate as his knowledge of Tomas Court’s wife.
King was no-one, and could be almost anyone; indeed, when Court slept badly and had nightmares, as he often did, it was in Court’s own mirror that he often manifested himself. And King, who had administered his poison so well, pouring the substance into his ear drop by drop, was not a man who was easily killed off. Court thought of him as immortal and invisible; even if he were dead—and Court never felt he was—he lived on in the minds of those he persecuted. In this capacity lay his peculiar evil and his peculiar strength.
Tall, short, dark, fair, old, young? After five years he still could answer none of these questions. He leaned back against the wall, waiting for his heart-rate to slow and his breathing to relax. When it had done so, he moved away from the protection of the wall and began to walk slowly up the alley. He stationed himself at the kerb in the street beyond, averting his eyes from the flash of his wife’s name on the theatre front. He watched the flow of traffic, waiting for the one cab with its light lit which would take him out of this cold foul city air and uptown to his son. Cab after cab, all occupied, and he could sense that although the pain was subduing, his disquiet was not.
Natasha had claimed, closing her bedroom door to him some months before their separation and divorce, that it was he himself who gave King power by believing, or half-believing, by dwelling on all the lies King wrote or said. She further claimed that his obsession with King had not only poisoned their marriage and permeated his work, but was slowly but surely eating away at his health. ‘That man will be the death of you,’ she had once said.
Court did not view his concern with King as an obsession, and if it were, that was excusable—presumably he was allowed to be obsessed with a man who knew his wife’s and son’s movements so precisely, and constantly issued threats? But he did acknowledge some truth in her remarks: he admitted that, for several years now, it had been King’s actions or communications that brought on the worst of his asthma attacks.
The cure, then, ought to be to forget King, to put out of his mind all those whispering suggestions King wrote, or said—a process that should become easier if King had been silenced and was actually dead. Yet Tomas Court was not sure he wanted to be cured; there was a part of him, and a vibrant part, that clung to King, even as he watched him destroy his marriage and endanger his health. He now missed King’s communications; sometimes, at night, when he lay on his bed, listening to replays of King’s past calls, he found himself frustrated at the five months of silence. What he wanted was a new message, another revelation, an up-date.
He needed that dark side, he thought, as a cab finally pulled in at the kerb. He needed to listen to the unspeakable. He wondered, in a distanced way, as the cab eased forward into grid-locked traffic, whether he ought to explain that to his wife. Not necessary, he decided; such ambivalences lay at the very heart of his marriage, as he had been reminded when assaulted by the power of his wife’s singing, tonight.
‘So this is the Conrad,’ Colin Lascelles said to Lindsay, coming to a halt beneath a huge encrusted entrance portico. ‘Now do you see what I mean? It is powerful, don’t you think?’
‘I certainly do see what you mean. Dear God, Colin…’ Lindsay looked up at the portico, which towered over them both. The architect of the Conrad, as Colin had just been telling her over dinner, had been a strange man; the twin Conrad brothers, both financiers, who had commissioned him to design the building, had been equally strange, and—if Colin’s account was accurate—the building had a strange chequered past. It boasted several ghosts, the most fearsome and vengeful of which was said to be Anne Conrad, unmarried sister to the twins, who in 1915, or thereabouts, had leaped to her death from one of the windows of the apartment she shared with her brothers. Stepping back to examine the Conrad’s façade, Lindsay wondered which window this was.
Anne Conrad’s manifestations were infrequent but ill-omened, Colin had said. Further details had not been forthcoming; Lindsay had intended to prompt Colin, but now she saw this building, she changed her mind. She was too suggestible: if Colin described these hauntings, she might imagine herself into an encounter with the dead woman, who had been young, beautiful—and deranged, or so people said, Colin had added, by way of an afterthought.
She must have passed the building dozens of times, Lindsay thought, yet she had never paused to look at it. Now she did, and at night too, she realized just how magnificent and grim it was. This was how she had always imagined the House of Usher might look. She glanced across, over her shoulder, to the great tract of darkness at the heart of Manhattan that was Central Park, then looked back more closely at the Conrad building’s huge entrance mouth.
A cluster of liver-coloured Corinthian columns flanked its approach steps, giving it the air of a sombre classical temple. These columns supported a vast dark carved pediment; even Lindsay’s untrained eye could see, however, that the proportions here were infelicitous, for the pediment was oversized, so that the pillars seemed oppressed by its weight. They looked squat, and their appearance was not enhanced by the surface treatment of their massive stone plinths. ‘Vermiculation’, according to Colin, was the correct term for this doubtful form of decoration; to Lindsay’s eyes, the plinths looked as if their stone had been eaten away by millions of blind, hungry worms—or maggots, perhaps.
She gave an involuntary shiver. She began to see that Hillyard White’s heart had not been in the rigours of classicism in any case. There might be a suggestion of a Greekish temple, but the whole façade was a monstrous and heterogeneous sprouting of embellishments. This detail had been plundered from the French, this from the Venetians, this from the Egyptians, that from the Spanish; a smorgasbord of past centuries and architectural styles had been gobbled up and spewed forth.
‘Dear God, what’s that?’ she said, realizing that even the pillars were not unadorned, and that from some clustering stone vines mounting the wall behind them, a dark face was peering out.
‘A gargoyle of sorts.’ Leaning across, Colin patted its ugly head with affection. ‘I shouldn’t look too closely, Lindsay—some of the detailing is quite nasty.’
‘What’s that in his mouth? Oh—’ Lindsay frowned; from one angle the gargoyle was biting the head off a snake; from another angle it was possibly not a snake, and the gargoyle was otherwise employed.
‘In we go,’ Colin said, somewhat hurriedly, taking her arm.
He drew her into a foyer (Citizen Kane, Lindsay thought) and greeted first a doorman, then a porter. It took Lindsay some while even to see the porter, who was dwarfed by the altar that served as his desk. They approached a wall of linenfold panelling, and Lindsay realized that although she knew how she had entered this cathedral—the entrance maw was somewhere at the other end of this nave, several miles back—she could see no other way out of it.
‘Full of tricks, this building,’ said Colin, delighted at this. ‘I did warn you. Not easy to find your way around unless you know it. Even Hillyard White’s plans are deceptive—which is one of the reasons why it’s so secure, of course.’
He glanced around at the porter, then smiled at Lindsay.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it gets worse, or better, depending on your point of view. Are you of a nervous disposition?’
‘Very.’
‘Hold my hand.’ He nodded at the porter. ‘We’ll go up by the main stairs, Giancarlo.’
There was a low buzzing sound, and the linenfold in front of them opened up. They walked through into an inner hall, the panelling closing behind them with a hiss.
‘There is an elevator,’ Colin said, ‘but I thought you wouldn’t mind walking up. Emily’s only on the second floor, and I didn’t want you to miss this.’
‘No, indeed,’ Lindsay said.
She walked forward a few paces, across a cold paved floor. She looked at the wide blood-red-carpeted oak staircase rising in front of her, which was lit at intervals by statues of blackamoors holding lamps aloft. It rose before her, then twisted back, and was cantilevered, storey by storey, so she found she was looking at the undersides of the stairs as they mounted up and up to a huge domed space which settled over the stairwell like a lid. She was in the gut of the building, she realized, and all the apartments must lead off this vast central digestive tract. The dome was at least ten storeys above her head, each floor was galleried, and an army could have marched up the stairs ten abreast, yet the effect was claustrophobic. The space was hushed, warm and curiously expectant, as if the stairs, blackamoors and shadowy galleries were waiting to see what these two new arrivals might do next.
‘What do you think? Monstrous, isn’t it?’ Colin was looking around him with affection and pride. ‘Sublimely monstrous. I never get over it.’
The fat coils of the radiator next to Lindsay emitted a digestive gurgle, then a faint, satisfied hiss. She shivered again.
‘Hitchcock would have killed for that staircase,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t he just?’ Colin sighed. ‘Embarrassing, those blackamoors. There was a move to get rid of them, a few years back. Emily nipped that in the bud very quickly…’
‘She likes them? Colin—she can’t possibly like them.’
‘I’m afraid she does. She’s not exactly politically correct.’ He hesitated. ‘The thing is, she was right, from a purist point of view; they are original. And Emily’s lived in this building all her life. In fact, she was born here. In fact…’
Lindsay, who was growing less keen on this visit to Aunt Emily by the second, sensed that Colin, too, might be having second thoughts. His manner, confident a moment before, was now becoming doubtful. She was beginning to recognize the symptoms of Colin’s insecurities, she thought.
‘I’m just wondering,’ she began, ‘isn’t it a bit late, this visit, Colin? We stayed longer in the restaurant than we meant to do, and…She’s eighty-five years old, after all…’
‘Oh, that’s not the problem. Emily’s a nightbird; she keeps very strange hours. She nods off during the day, though she denies that, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to know when she is asleep. She’ll be in her chair, I’ll tiptoe about, and then suddenly she’ll speak and make me jump like hell…So this is early evening for Emily. Around midnight, she gets very lively indeed…’
Lindsay was now sure she recognized the symptoms of nerves, which included loquaciousness.
‘But there is a problem,’ she said. ‘Come on, Colin, what is it?’
‘Well, she’s a bit deaf…’
‘And?’
Colin considered. ‘She can be a bit odd,’ he said finally.
Lindsay wondered whether he might mean senile. Dotty? Eccentric? Slightly demented? Ninety-five per cent crazed? Since Colin was given both to overstatement and understatement, his remarks could be difficult to interpret. He was now looking both anxious again and downcast. Lindsay took his arm. ‘Well, I’m very glad you’re with me,’ she said. ‘With you here, I feel safe.’
Immediately she had said this, it struck her that she truly meant it; Colin’s presence, for reasons she could not exactly define, was reassuring. Her compliment, or perhaps the fact that she took his arm, seemed to allay his anxieties; his confidence returned at once.
‘Not very odd,’ he amplified, leading her towards the staircase, ‘just odd occasionally. A bit of a tease, you might say. You may find it helps if you remember that
Lindsay braced herself for this teasing great-aunt. The stairs were not really Psycho material, she decided—more Gone With the Wind, more Tara. Hello, Scarlett and Rhett, she thought, as they began to climb them, dreamily imagining herself as a feisty O’Hara, and Rowland McGuire as an improvement on Clark Gable. Hello, Polanski, and hello Repulsion, she thought, as they turned into a long, galleried corridor, where hands thrust from walls holding lamps. Colin rang the doorbell to Emily’s apartment and Lindsay waited for Dracula’s servant to answer it. Instead, Mrs Danvers opened the door, and led them into a very large and daunting drawing-room with a du Maurier whisk of her skirts.
An old, a very old, very wrinkled, and very imperious woman held out her hand; introductions were made. Lindsay looked at Aunt Emily narrowly; Well, hello Miss Havisham, she thought.
‘I want a word with you. You’re late,’ Angelica said, as Tomas Court entered the quiet living-room of his wife’s Carlyle suite. Court moved past her without greeting her or looking at her, but his manner was often curt, even rude, and Angelica was used to this.
‘I’ve been talking to the bodyguard…’ he said.
‘Which bodyguard?’
‘The one here.’ Court’s manner was irritable. ‘John. Jack—whatever his name is.’
‘Jack.’ Angelica gave him a dismissive glance. ‘That’s why you’re over an hour late? You’ve been talking to the bodyguard for an hour? Jonathan’s been waiting up for you…’
‘I was delayed. I got held up.’
‘He won’t go to sleep until he’s seen you.’ She paused; Court had not looked at her once and had now turned his back. She sighed. ‘Maria stayed on to sit with him. He’s showing her his new animal books. He wanted to show them to you. There’s one on big cats…’
‘Maria?’ Court said.
Angelica sighed again. ‘You’ve met her. You met her the other week. The one who comes to give Natasha her massage before the show sometimes. The aromatherapist. Dark hair, glasses. Jonathan likes her; she’s a nice girl…’
‘Well get rid of her. There’s enough women in and out of this apartment as it is…’
Angelica, used to this complaint, did not reply. She left the room, and in the distance, Court heard the sound of women’s voices. The aromatherapist, the voice coach, the two secretaries, the Yoga expert who taught Natasha relaxation techniques, the personal trainer, also female; Natasha’s days seemed to him spent amidst a retinue of female helpers and supporters, and he loathed the way in which they treated her with a reverent concern, tending the hive, tending their queen, cosseting and protecting, grooming, feeding and honing. He found it unhealthy; Natasha had always had a tendency to surround herself with priestesses, and since their divorce, the tendency had worsened; he had often told her this.
‘Hi. Good evening,’ said a woman’s voice. Court glanced round to see Angelica and this Maria, who was being helped into her coat. Like most of Natasha’s priestesses, she was ugly, Court noted; overweight, cheaply dressed, with greasy hair tied back in an untidy bun, and hideous thick-lensed spectacles. He was making her nervous, he saw, as she glanced at Angelica in a faltering way, and then gave him a shy smile that was not, he supposed, unsweet.
‘Your son’s still wide awake,’ she said. ‘We’ve had a lovely time. He’s a really bright little kid. He’s waiting to show you his whale book, Mr Court…’ She glanced again at Angelica. ‘I thought—better avoid the fairy stories tonight. You know, if he’s still having those nightmares…so we just looked at the animal books. He’s so cute. Hey, it’s late…I’d better be off…’
Tomas Court gave her a curt nod; he listened to the sounds of female conversation and laughter as Angelica showed her out.
‘Nightmares?’ he said, when Angelica returned, closing the door behind her. ‘What nightmares? Natasha never mentioned that.’
‘He wakes up sometimes.’ She avoided his gaze. ‘It’s been going on for a while now…’
‘How long?’
‘Well, it started around the time of the divorce, then it got better for a bit. Now it’s started up again…’
‘He never gets nightmares when he comes out to Montana. He was fine last summer. It’s this place. Cooped up here; his mother out night after night…’
‘She has to work. The run’s nearly over anyway. She’ll be leaving the show any day now, then…’
‘Well, it can’t be soon enough. I don’t know why she did it in the first place.’ He gave an irritable sigh. ‘I’ll have to talk to her about this. If Jonathan has nightmares, I should be informed. Why wasn’t I?’
‘You didn’t ask, I guess.’
Angelica’s tone was insolent, but then she never bothered to disguise her dislike of him. It was, indeed, more than dislike; Angelica’s hostility to him had always been unwavering and forceful; it was returned in good measure. The best that could be said of their relationship was that they eyed one another with the respect of combatants fighting their own weight.
In their contests, unceasing since his marriage, Tomas Court had had one supreme advantage: he was male, and he was the husband, with all the husband’s rights. This advantage, as they were both aware, had diminished since the divorce.
‘Are you OK?’ Angelica said now, looking him up and down. She always delighted, as Court well knew, in the least evidence of his physical disability. ‘You’re white. You don’t look so good. You had an attack?’
‘I’m fine.’ He turned away. ‘The pollution’s bad. The traffic was bad. I’m tired. I’ve been working since five-thirty this morning. You can make me some coffee. Bring it through to Jonathan’s room…’
‘You want it black?’
‘Yes, I do. I’m going to wait for Natasha—’
‘I wouldn’t do that. She’ll be late. She told you, she’s having dinner with that fancy broker of hers after the show, then she has an early start in the morning. The trainer comes at seven. She’s having breakfast with Jules McKechnie, then…’
‘Dinner and breakfast? Why’s that necessary?’
Angelica gave a small gloating smile and a shrug.
‘It’s the committee meeting at the Conrad tomorrow, and they have to get the details right. It’s important to Natasha—and she’s nervous. She doesn’t want anything going wrong, and it’s Friday the thirteenth tomorrow—not too auspicious, right?’
Tomas Court profoundly hoped it would not be auspicious. He might have liked to say this; he might have liked to question Angelica further; he would certainly have liked to know whether Natasha was dining with Jules McKechnie alone, or with others. Just the mention of McKechnie’s name set off those Joseph King whisperings in his head; King, his very own Iago, was always prompt on occasions such as this. Such questions, evidence of weakness, would have delighted Angelica. He looked at her bulk, at the flat hard planes of her face, at her small and malicious black eyes, and an exhaustion close to anguish flooded through him. Sometimes, especially after an asthma attack, he no longer had the energy to fight.
‘There’s something you wanted to say to me?’ he asked quietly.
‘Sure. I want to know some things. About Joseph King. About what happened in Glacier.’ She paused. ‘I know what you told Natasha…’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘And I want the truth.’ She hesitated, the hostility in her face softening a little. ‘I’m here with Jonathan. I’m the one who’s right by his side, day and night. I need to know these things.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that. I had intended—’
‘I won’t tell Natasha. But I need to know…’
Across the space of the room, their eyes met. Court turned to the door.
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll explain when I’ve seen Jonathan. Bring the coffee through here instead, Angelica. I won’t be long…’
‘Don’t be. It’s way past his bedtime; he should be asleep.’
‘I want to show you the bat book now, Daddy,’ Jonathan said, ‘and this one on whales. They talk to each other, bats and whales, they have this special language, look…’
Court looked at his small son with sadness and with love; he made an effort, fighting fatigue.
‘What, the bats talk to the whales? I didn’t know that.’
‘No.’ Jonathan laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy. They talk to each other. Bats talk to bats; whales talk to whales. It’s excellent how they do it. Look—’
Court bent to the books. His son had a touching didacticism, a longing to educate, and a passion for facts. He looked at the diagrams his son was indicating; these diagrams explained bat radar to him, and the frequencies of bat squeaks; similar diagrams, accompanied by a barrage of information, explained the communication systems of whales. His son chattered on and Court sat quietly, holding his hand from time to time, or stroking his hair, and waiting for this room, and his son’s presence, to bring him the peace it usually did.
In the recesses of his mind, images stirred; he saw dark leathery shapes flit through a jungle night; he watched lianas coil like pythons, and he saw, rearing up from this terrifying fertility, the hot mouth of some orchid-like flower. ‘Oh, it torments me; Tomas, it torments me,’ his wife’s voice said. The words had been said many years before, when his wife had been six months pregnant with Jonathan, and had discovered that her husband’s infidelities were continuing. Court could not now remember the details of that particular infidelity; he rarely could. It might have been with a man, or with a woman, and it would have been brief, for Court never had prolonged liaisons, and with the exception of his wife, who came into a completely different category, he never had the same sexual partner twice.
These sexual encounters he could walk away from without rancour or regret; they were a brief sharp need, which he could satisfy as quickly and easily as he could hunger or thirst. His wife knew—he had told her often enough—that they in no way impinged on his love for her; that love, the determining force of his life, and the inspiration for much of his work, was unchanging; it would neither alter nor diminish with time. It was one of the many mysteries of his marriage, he thought, turning a page of his son’s book, that Natasha both believed in and doubted this love. Perhaps also, like him, she preferred the lightning flash of uncertainties to the long, calm summer of faithful married love. He was not sure on that question. During the course of his marriage, he had given Natasha periods of fidelity and periods of infidelity: he had come to believe that the periods of infidelity, with all their attendant pain, insecurity and indeed torment, were the ones when their marriage was most alive to her—though he was less certain of that preference since his divorce.
‘Look, Daddy,’ Jonathan said, picking up the whale book again and turning to its photographs. He began to speak of ice floes, of the Arctic, of the unimaginable depths to which, with one flick of their vast tails, these wondrous creatures could dive, and, as he spoke, Court became a little more tranquil; into his mind eddied the memory of his wife as she had been on the day he first met her. She had already been famous; he had been unknown; he had sent her a script, and through the offices of a shared friend, she had agreed to meet him. She had come to the small, humid, cramped office he had been renting in downtown Los Angeles. He had known what was going to happen, and he knew she had also, from the moment she quietly entered the room. Her beauty had astonished him; he had been unprepared for it, even though he had seen her many times on a screen. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, her face was without make-up, and she had been wearing—he could still see its every detail—a simple, cotton, Madonna-blue dress.
‘Daddy. Daddy.’ Jonathan tugged at his sleeve. ‘You’re not concentrating. I’m telling you about the whales. They sing to one another—it’s like singing. And they can hear one another through the water, from miles away sometimes…’ he smiled. ‘And you’re miles away too, Daddy.’
‘I’m sorry, darling. I just drifted away a bit. I’m tired, I expect. I was thinking about the first time I met Mommy, and how beautiful she was…Now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You should be lying down, young man. You should have been asleep hours ago. Down you go. Let me tuck you up.’
He hugged his son tight against him, some emotion he could not define welling up: a rich mixture of love, pain, loss and fear for his son—none of which could be expressed. His son, small for his age, clung to him; he felt so thin, his father thought, and so light and frail. Tears came to his eyes, and he laid his son down in the bed and tucked him in, averting his face.
‘Now tell me,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking his son’s hand in his, ‘what’s all this about nightmares? Is something worrying you, darling?’
‘A bit.’ His son lowered his eyes and began to pleat the edge of his duvet. ‘It’s Thanksgiving soon. Mommy says we’ll be living in the Conrad by then…’
‘It’s possible, darling. It’s not fixed.’
‘Will you be coming for Thanksgiving, Daddy? I hoped you might.’
‘If you want me there, darling, I’ll be there. I’ll arrange it with Mommy. You know you don’t need to worry about that.’ He paused. ‘And just think, very soon after that, we’ll all be in England together—for three whole months. I’m looking forward to that.’
‘I am too.’ His son’s face brightened, then clouded again. ‘It’s just…’
‘Tell me, darling.’
‘I don’t really like that Conrad building, Daddy. Mommy says I’ll get used to it, but it’s spooky. I’ll have a big room there, Mommy showed me, with all these closets for my toys, and Mommy knows this artist man, and while we’re away in England, she says she’ll get him to paint these animals for me, on the walls. Any animals I like…’
‘Well, that sounds good, darling.’ Court looked closely at his son. He had a small, somewhat melancholy face, expressive, with its fears and its joys easily read. He pressed his son’s hand and added, as if it were an afterthought, ‘Which artist man is that?’
‘He works at the theatre; he painted some of the sets for Estella. He made that horrible spooky room Miss Havisham has…’ He hesitated. ‘I hated that Miss Havisham. Nasty spooky old witch.’
‘Well, you know there’s no reason to be frightened of her,’ Court said gently. ‘That’s just an actress playing her—and Miss Havisham doesn’t exist; she’s just someone made up, for a story…’
‘I didn’t like the artist man much either…’ his son continued, in a low voice. ‘I met him one day when Mommy was rehearsing. He looked at me in this funny way. He shook hands, and he had this horrible damp hand…He looked at Mommy too; he stared. She didn’t notice, but I did.’
Court felt a quickening of alarm then, but controlled it. He would find out the man’s name, he thought wearily, and get him checked out, just as he always did. But Jonathan’s reaction probably meant little; it was not the first time he had expressed feelings of this sort. They were a by-product of the restrictions that encompassed him, of the bodyguards, of the constant, unremitting suspicion of every male who came to this apartment, every male who lingered, or approached on the street. King had imprisoned his son, Court thought, as effectively as he had imprisoned Natasha and himself, and Jonathan’s fear of strange men, exacerbated by Natasha and Angelica, was a legacy he deeply regretted.
‘Jonathan, people do stare at Mommy,’ he replied now, in as reassuring a manner as he could. ‘It’s because she’s famous and because she’s beautiful; it doesn’t mean anything. Now I want you to promise me—no worrying about this. I’ll have a word with Mommy. If you don’t like this man, maybe she won’t use him. Besides, remember that these Conrad plans may not work out; the people at the Conrad may decide to let someone else have the apartment…’
‘It’s very big, Daddy.’ His son clasped his hand more tightly. ‘There’s all these rooms. I thought, maybe you might come back and live there too. I wish you would…’
The plea in his eyes and in his voice cut Tomas to the heart. He leaned forward to kiss him, and it was a few minutes before he felt able to trust his voice.
‘We’ll have to see, my darling. These things—well, they’re complicated, you know that. Mommy likes this city more than I do, and it’s not very good for my asthma. I expect we’ll sort it all out in the end. Meanwhile, just remember how much I love you and Mommy. Now, lie back and I’ll read to you for a bit…Which book? This one?’
Jonathan nodded. The book, one with which Tomas Court was not familiar, was The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. His son found the chapter he wanted and the section he wanted. The story took place in Yorkshire, he said, which was where they would all be going shortly; Court agreed that this was so. It took place in a large house, Jonathan went on; there was a little orphan girl called Mary, who was plain and sour, but got nicer as the book went on; and there was a little boy, called Colin. Colin was ill, his son explained, pointing to the paragraph where his father was to begin reading, and this section here was Jonathan’s favourite. Court could see why that might be so, as soon as he began reading. Like Jonathan, the boy in this story was isolated and troubled; the chosen chapter concerned Mary’s reaction when she awoke to the sound of Colin’s cries in a strange house at night. The girl went in search of him, Court noted, and—he found the tone sentimental—they began on a mutual process of healing.
‘I need the facts,’ Angelica said, pouring coffee. ‘Tell me the things you left out when you spoke to Natasha.’ She gave him one of her black-eyed, scornful glances. ‘I know your techniques. You never tell a story straight; you fast forward past the awkward facts; you back track; you throw in these diversions—well, that won’t work with me. I’ve seen you do it too many times. You do it all the time in your movies.’
‘Yes, well you’re not too likely to understand my movies.’ Taking his coffee and moving away from her, Court gave her a dismissive glance. ‘Stick to your women’s magazines if you want a simple story.’
‘Romance, crime; that’s what I like.’ She gave him an unapologetic stare. ‘I like true love. I like a mystery solved. I like happy endings.’
‘You surprise me. And life isn’t like that unfortunately, so, no romance, no ending yet—happy or otherwise. I fear this mystery may not be solved, but I’ll give you the facts, such as they are, including the ones I didn’t tell Natasha, and you can play detective.’
Angelica gave him a look of sour amusement. She sat down heavily and spread her hands on her thighs, turning her slab of a face towards him.
‘So why didn’t you tell Natasha the whole story?’
‘Because I want to protect her. I don’t want her to worry any more than she needs…’
‘And?’
‘And, all right, the more worried about King she is, the more convinced she is that he could still be alive, the likelier she is to make this move to the Conrad. I don’t want her going there.’
‘I don’t like it there either,’ Angelica said, surprising him. ‘No point in saying so. The more you argue with her, the more she digs her toes in. I figured—keep my mouth shut. They probably won’t let her take that apartment anyway.’
‘Jonathan’s afraid of it. Does Natasha know that?’
‘She knows and she doesn’t know. I guess she thinks he’ll come round to it.’ She paused. ‘And it is secure; it’s a real secure building. Famous for it. Keep anybody out, that building would. I guess that’s why she chose it.’
Court gave her a pale glance. The taunt under her words was obvious enough, and she made little attempt to disguise it.
‘Well, it won’t keep me out,’ he replied quietly, ‘not as long as my son’s there, and Natasha would do well to remember that.’ He turned away. ‘Now, do you want these facts, or don’t you?’
‘Sure I do.’ She paused. ‘What Natasha told me, I couldn’t really understand. Why all these tests and checks? It seems pretty clear to me—I mean, they found the body…’
She continued speaking for some while, and Court listened, interested to see just how accurately his explanation to his wife had been reported back. As he had expected, few details had been left out—but then Natasha had always confided in Angelica minutely. He had never had any privacy in this marriage, he thought with a flare of anger. Natasha ran to Angelica the way a good Catholic ran to the confessional; he was certain that Angelica knew Natasha’s version of every one of his infidelities.
It had always seemed to him that Angelica would find them undisturbing, and just what she would expect from a member of the male sex. Angelica did not judge, he sometimes felt, she just watched, and very little either surprised or shocked her. He wondered now, watching her as she spoke without emotion of violent death and the details of that body in Glacier, whether Angelica knew of, and understood, the final paradox: that it was the advent of Joseph King that had cured him of the need for adulteries.
Had Angelica’s keen hard mind made that connection? He thought it probably had. He thought Angelica would have seen the link between a letter or call from King and his own haste, immediately afterwards, to get his wife back upstairs to their bedroom. He felt sometimes that Angelica had been able to see through those walls and locked doors, and that she had known, as precisely as he did, what then provoked the ensuing excitement, desperation and physical abandon.
‘He’s sick,’ Angelica was saying now, gazing off into space, her slab of a face hard with concentration. ‘He’s sick and obsessed, and the way I figure it is, he went out to Montana because he knew Jonathan was there, then he finally cracked. He went out to Glacier and found a real quiet private place, and he jumped. Good riddance. It took him a while to die—I hope it did. I figure…’
Had Angelica made that connection? Court wondered, looking at her, then moving away as she continued speaking. Sometimes he felt she had not only seen the link, but pointed it out to Natasha. At other times, he felt that his wife had understood that link and had done so alone and unaided. It would not have been difficult; besides, it had seemed to him that Natasha shared his needs initially. He had been able to see a certain dark excitement in her eyes, which, on occasion, she had disguised with weeping.
‘Oh, I can’t bear this,’ she would say, letting one of King’s letters fall from her hands. ‘Take me upstairs, Tomas. I want to be with you.’
Being with him was a euphemism. The instant the door had closed and they were alone, he had seen her face light; she might not admit it, but he had known that she responded as strongly as he did to promptings others might have judged perverse or transgressive.
‘So he finally went over the edge,’ Angelica was now saying, still frowning off into space. ‘But what I don’t understand is, how come he was always so well informed? How come he knew where you’d been? Where Natasha had been? I mean, that wasn’t guesswork. He must have been following. He must have been watching…’
Court turned his back to Angelica. He leaned up against a table; he could hear his wife’s voice very clearly. ‘He must have been watching, Tomas.’ She closed the bedroom door, and, beginning to tremble, turned to face him. ‘How else could he have known that? He must have watched you with that boy. In a parking lot? Tomas, how could you do that? It makes me ache. I can’t bear—you let him? What did he do? Is it different when a man does that to you? Did he do it more than once? How long did it take him? Tell me…’
Her husband had told her. Her response, agitated and disguised, was immediate; he had been able to feel the electricity in her hands when, bolder than the boy had been, she began to touch him.
‘But what I can’t figure out,’ Angelica was saying. ‘I can’t figure out why it stopped. I mean, why would he give up so suddenly? Like this has been going on five years, and then he ups and kills himself? How come?’
Court passed his hands across his face. He stared at a pale wall hung with watercolours. For three of those five years this new charged relationship with his wife had continued; then he had made a very foolish mistake—he had admitted, under close questioning from his wife, that for the last two and a half of those years he had had no other sexual partners; he had neither wanted nor needed them; he had desired only her, and had been faithful. She had wept in his arms with apparent joy; her bedroom door had been closed to him thereafter.
Separation had ensued; divorce had swiftly followed. In the period since the divorce—and it was nearly two years—he had remained celibate, if not in the strictest sense, at least in the sense of having no other sexual partners. He was beginning to see that this too was an error; when it was admitted to his wife, here in this room, a week ago now, her lovely eyes had darkened with an expression of sympathy and disappointment. He had reacted as he always did: angry yet filled with longing for her, he returned to TriBeCa and lay there alone in the darkness, listening to those tapes, finding some release as he communed with ghosts and took his wife by proxy.
‘You still keeping all those King tapes?’
Angelica voiced the direct question suddenly, as if even while speaking she had been able to follow his thoughts with unerring accuracy. ‘You still listen to them the way you used to do?’
Colouring, Court kept his back to her.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘the police have most of them. I never listen to them now. I’m over that.’
‘He had you hooked.’ There was a malicious triumph in her voice; in this weakness of his she also exhulted.
‘Night after night you used to listen and reread the letters. I told you then, it wasn’t healthy.’
‘I can remember what you said.’
‘It was all lies anyway. Filthy lies.’ She spoke with sudden venom. ‘All those lies about Natasha. She isn’t like that—never has been.’
She paused, as if waiting for confirmation of this statement. When she received none, she gave a sigh.
‘Accurate about you, though. Chapter and verse. Where you’d been, who you’d been with…’
‘Accurate in some ways.’ He turned and gave her a pale steady look. ‘And those tapes told Natasha nothing that I hadn’t already told her. You might remember that, Angelica.’
‘You’re honest with her, I give you that.’ She paused,—eyeing him. ‘She won’t take you back, you know.’
‘Then I shall have to find a way of taking her back,’ he replied evenly. ‘Believe me, I will. And when I do, I won’t be consulting or informing you, Angelica.’
That angered her; he saw the blood creep up into her neck and suffuse her face. Her expression became set.
‘She’s free of you now.’
‘I wouldn’t count on that.’
‘She’s free of King as well. She can start a new life. He’s dead; he has to be dead. Not one call, not one letter, in nearly five months. They found that body. They found the ID with it.’ Her voice had risen. ‘I have to know, is it finished? Is he dead, or isn’t he?’
Court gave her a long, still look. He wondered if she were aware of the duality of her own question; he thought not. She wanted to believe King was dead because, for some primitive reason, some reason buried deep in her mind, she believed that if King were dead, Natasha’s marriage would similarly be dead. It was himself, he thought, as well as King that she wanted to eradicate from Natasha’s future.
‘The indications are that he is dead,’ he replied, ‘as you’ve been saying, and as I told Natasha.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t believe he is. I believe he’s very much alive…’
‘Biding his time?’ Angelica leaned forward.
‘Precisely.’
‘But they found the body…’
‘They found a body,’ Court corrected.
Giving her what Colin Lascelles would have described as one of his Prospero looks, he crossed the room. With a sigh, seating himself opposite her and speaking quietly, he began to tell her the story.
‘I didn’t tell Natasha this,’ he began, ‘but I know the place in Glacier where they found the body—and I know it well. I went there, Angelica. I went there last July first, with Jonathan, while he was staying with me in Montana. We went with a bodyguard, because I’d promised Natasha I would do that, and we took a back-country trail. It takes you through the mountains and on down to Kintia Lake…’
‘You camped.’ Angelica nodded. ‘I know, Jonathan loved it there; he told me.’
‘We were away three days. It’s a very beautiful part of Glacier and it’s remote—hardly anyone uses that trail. Even in high season you can walk all day and not see a single person. We had…’ He hesitated, looking away and seeing the place in his mind’s eye as he spoke. ‘They were three of the best days of my life. We walked, we fished, we had cook-outs—it took me back to my childhood. We slept out under the stars; we didn’t even need the tents. We had three days and nights of perfect weather and absolute peace, and I was glad of that—for Jonathan.’
‘He’d spent months cooped up here in this city,’ he continued. ‘I wanted to show him that there’s another America; a place where he could breathe pure air, where he didn’t have to worry about telephone calls, or what the mail might bring. A place where he didn’t have to keep looking over his shoulder.’
He paused. ‘At the end of those three days, we went back to the ranch, and then, months later, when the body was found, I discovered we hadn’t been alone in Glacier. We’d been watched and followed—and someone went to considerable lengths to ensure I knew that. Do you know where they found the man’s body, Angelica? What was left of his body?’
‘By some water, in scrub. Right under this great wall of rock—that’s what you told Natasha.’
‘Yes—and that was accurate, up to a point. What I didn’t tell her was where that rock wall was located. The trail we took goes over it, Angelica. They found that body by the lake shore, not two hundred yards from one of our overnight camping sites. The body had been smashed up by the fall and left there to rot; and I’m certain that wasn’t accidental. It was a place where I’d been happy, where Jonathan had been happy—and anyone watching him there could have seen how happy he was. So they took that place and they polluted it. They’ve certainly ensured I’ll never go back there.’
‘Ah, Jesus.’ Angelica made one of her superstitious little signs. ‘He’d followed you there, then.’
‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about that, as you’ll see in a minute. Wait a while. Look at the chronology. In October, the rangers patrol the park before the snows come, and it’s closed for the winter. That’s when the body was found; by which time, it had been lying there, they think, for around four months, in the heat of a Glacier summer. There are bears in Glacier, Angelica. You can imagine; there’d been decomposition, animal interference, some bones were missing. The only way they’re going to make an identification is through dental chart records. It could take months, longer, before they find a match—if they ever do. At the moment, they’re going through the records for missing persons state by state—it’s slow, and it may well lead nowhere. Meantime, shortly after the body was found, I was contacted. You know why? Because someone had gone to considerable lengths to suggest an identification for that body. Someone wanted to suggest, to the police, to me, to Natasha, that the body was Joseph King’s. Now, you know how careful King is, and how ingenious. How do you think he did that?’
‘There was a rucksack,’ Angelica said, with some eagerness. ‘They found a rucksack near the remains, and in the rucksack…’
‘In the rucksack, Angelica, or in what was left of the rucksack, was something that wouldn’t decay, or rot away—something that would be preserved, and could communicate a message however long it had to lie there. There was a plastic box. A very ordinary plastic box; the kind you might use to pack sandwiches in. Only this one, of course, had rather more unusual contents.’
There was a silence. Court looked around the room, knowing he would continue, yet reluctant to do so. To speak of Joseph King, he always found, was to empower him. He could almost sense his presence now, and so, he knew, could Angelica. He saw her face tighten, and he knew she was remembering, as he did, various little packages Joseph King had despatched in the past—packages with suggestive and unpleasant contents.
‘Tell me,’ she said. She rested her large, square, ugly hands on her thighs. ‘Tell me. Was there a photograph?’
‘Yes. I’ll come on to the photograph in a moment. First of all, inside the box, there was a hunting knife; the kind you can buy in a thousand stores across America—a thin-bladed knife, the sort you use to debone animals. Then there were some shotgun cartridges, though no gun was ever found. And, just to make sure I knew that I’d been watched in Glacier, there was a T-shirt of Jonathan’s. He’d been wearing it the day we camped there by Kintia Lake; it went missing overnight, and we’d thought no more about it. He’d taken it on and off ten times that day—we’d been swimming, and we assumed it had simply been mislaid; it wasn’t. Someone had been down to our camp-site, while we were sleeping—and he wanted me to know that. He could have killed Jonathan then; that’s how close he was.’
‘That bastard.’ Angelica flushed with anger. ‘That bastard. I want to kill him…’
‘Wait, Angelica, that’s not all that was in the box. There was also a wilderness permit—they issue those in Glacier if you’re going to walk the longer, more dangerous trails, or if you’re going to camp out. That permit was in the name of Joseph King; issued for the same three days we were there. The home address was some street in Chicago that doesn’t exist, and never did exist.’ He paused, his voice becoming less steady. ‘And finally, Angelica, there was a photograph. Not one of the publicity pictures of Natasha that he’s used before, but a family photograph, of Natasha and Jonathan—a photograph I took, when Jonathan was still a baby, in the garden of that house we had years ago in California.’
‘A photograph you took?’ Angelica stared at him. ‘But that’s not possible…’
‘A photograph I took over five years ago now.’ Court gave a weary gesture. ‘Jonathan was about eighteen months old. Natasha and I had just finished work on The Soloist—you remember?’
‘I remember.’ She looked at him in confusion. ‘But I don’t see—how could he get hold of it? That’s got to be before we got any letters or calls from King…’
‘Exactly. The police have checked; I’ve checked; the agency has checked. I know exactly when I took that photograph; it was two months before the first of the calls and letters from King—so we have to re-date the start of his obsession. Except, for all I know, he’s got pictures I took even earlier, and he’s just waiting to produce them…’
‘But how did he get it? He stole it somehow?’
‘No, easier than that. That photograph was the last on a reel of family pictures I took. Jonathan was walking by then, beginning to talk—Natasha loved that house…’ He broke off, then after a pause, continued. ‘Anyway, I had it developed at the same laboratory in LA that I always used. They sent back the prints and the negatives, and I still have them—but, of course, for anyone working in that lab, it was easy enough to run off extra prints, and no-one would be any the wiser…’
He gave a sigh and rose to his feet. ‘So, they’ve now launched a new set of checks: who worked at that lab then? Where they are now? There were over thirty employees who could have had access to that film. It’s over five years ago. Most of them have since left the firm, moved out of state, married, changed their names, dropped out of sight…It’s going to take months, yet again, to trace them and question them. And it will probably lead nowhere. It will probably be another dead end.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘You know what he’d done to the picture?’
‘Cut it up? Like the others?’
‘Yes. He’d cut it up.’ He gave an angry gesture. ‘Cut it up into these neat squares, each one about a quarter of an inch. It was very precise. Natasha’s face was on one little square; Jonathan’s was on another. And they both had crosses on them, gouged across their faces. When I saw that…’
He turned away, feeling his breathing start to tighten. He could feel King’s presence in the room acutely now. He felt the old helpless instinct to open doors, search closets, look for a man who was not there—and stay by his son’s bedside in case he came through a locked door or a barred window.
‘Don’t get upset,’ Angelica said, to his surprise. In this respect, of course, they were at one, he thought, turning back to look at her, and seeing on her face an expression not of hostility, but sympathy.
‘Don’t,’ she said again. ‘It could be him; it could be. I don’t see that this proves otherwise. He’s crazy. I always said he’d kill himself one day—so maybe he did. He jumped, but he had to leave one final message…’
‘You could read it that way, and Natasha does.’ With a sigh, Court returned to his chair and sat down. ‘But you see, I haven’t explained about the permit.’
‘The permit? I don’t see…’
‘Think, Angelica. They issue those permits for a reason. If someone doesn’t come back and check in, the rangers raise the alarm and send out a search party. They have to do that: someone could be hurt, or lying injured somewhere…But that didn’t happen in this case. You want to know why there were no alarms, no search parties when that permit wasn’t handed back in? The answers are all there in the record books at the rangers’ station. On Independence Day, the day the permit expired, the day Jonathan and I left Glacier, a man calling himself Joseph King rang the rangers’ station. He apologized for not returning the permit, said it had slipped his mind, but he was perfectly safe and had left the park. Now, why do you think he did that, Angelica?’
Angelica hesitated. ‘So you’d know he was alive? Dead men don’t make phone calls?’
‘Partly, perhaps. But it’s more than that—don’t you see? He didn’t want search parties. He didn’t want the body found too soon. The sooner it was found, the easier it would be to identify, so it suited him just fine that it lay there for over four months. That’s what I think, anyway.’
‘But if he placed that call…’ Angelica frowned. ‘That must mean he’s alive after all…’
‘No, it doesn’t. It means someone calling himself Joseph King placed the call. It might have been King himself; it could have been some friend. Think, Angelica.’ Court rose again, with an impatient gesture. ‘He wanted there to be doubts and uncertainties, don’t you see? How many ways can you script this? I can think of at least five ways, straight off, and they’re all equally plausible.’
There was a silence. Watching her, he saw the realization slowly dawn. She rose to her feet and looked at him uncertainly.
‘Then if it isn’t his body, whose is it?’
‘I don’t know; no-one knows. It could be his—it could equally well be someone else’s. Some walker; some hitchhiker he picked up; some vagrant, even.’
‘But that would mean he had killed someone—not just talked about it, not just threatened, but actually done it. Oh, Jesus, I see now…’
‘It’s possible, Angelica. I think that. For what it’s worth, the police also think that way, and so does the agency.’
‘That bastard. That son of a bitch bastard.’ The blood rushed into Angelica’s face. ‘So we just have to go on waiting—that’s his idea? Waiting, the way we always did? That’s what we have to live with? Jumping every time the phone rings, having traps on the line, checking the mail, checking the locks…’ She drew in her breath, pressing her hand against her chest. ‘That’s what we have to do—go on living with the bodyguards, looking over our shoulders every minute of every live-long day, waiting for that bastard to resurrect?’
‘It would amuse him to play Lazarus.’ Court turned away to disguise his unease. ‘So, yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly what we have to do. We go on being careful; we go on being vigilant—for as long as it takes.’
He moved away, feeling suddenly exhausted. He looked around this pale dull room where his wife had chosen to live for the past year; his longing for her presence intensified. He began to wish that he had never had this conversation, necessary though it was. He began to wish that he was alone, and that of all the words Angelica could have used, she had not used the word ‘resurrect’. That word made him deeply uneasy.
Angelica made a strange and ugly sound—a harsh, rasping intake of breath. Turning to look at her, he saw that she was trembling; the force of her animosity came off her like heat.
‘I’m going to fix him, and this time I’m going to fix him good. There’s something I have to do—it won’t take long. I’ll be back…’
She hastened from the room. Court looked at his watch. It was past eleven. Should he leave now, or stay? His wife would have only just left the theatre. She would be on her way to have dinner with Jules McKechnie, possibly alone, possibly with others; it might be hours before she came back.
He began to move about the room in an irresolute way, trying to find in it some trace of the woman he knew and loved. Its neutrality and its tastefulness appalled him. The room was white on cream on beige—a thousand permutations of colourlessness. Natasha had hung some of her own paintings, he saw—and his wife’s taste in paintings was not his.
Since the divorce, she had begun to collect eighteenth-and nineteenth-century watercolours; the vaguer and washier they were, the more she liked them. Court stared at what might have been a seascape—a wash of indigo, a wash of yellow-white, some inky hieroglyphs that might have been trees, or birds, or ships.
On the opposite wall, she had hung some of her own artist mother’s oils—paintings he had always refused to give house room. Natasha’s mother, now dead, had been a flower-child of the Sixties, and like many children of that particular decade, never grew up. Her amateurish paintings, large and violently coloured, were all depictions of monstrous flowers, close up. Their stamens, sepals and pistils had a moistly sexual insistence; Natasha said they were powerful and reminded her of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. To Court, who loathed O’Keeffe’s work too, but could see its strengths, this proved how curiously blind his wife could be. She could see so much sometimes, yet she could also be, or affect to be, myopic. ‘I will get her back. I will take her back,’ he said to the throaty flower in front of him, and he began to see ways in which that might be done, if he was careful, if he scripted them correctly.
It was unbearable to remain in this room any longer, he found; its quiescence and opacity oppressed him. He could still hear his own voice, explaining uncertainties to Angelica, and the air here was filled with uncertainty, ambivalence and doubt. Also, he could now smell burning, a peculiarly unpleasant burning smell too, like hair singed. He could hear, faintly, the sound of rustling and crackling.
He could not bear the jealous hours of waiting, he decided. He would prefer not to know how late it was when his wife returned; he would prefer not to stay here and speculate as to her activities. He went out into the corridor and paused by the entrance to the small bedsitting room which was Angelica’s. Here, the smell of burning was stronger; he could glimpse, through the open door, the cluster of crucifixes and saints’ pictures and religious knickknackery with which Angelica adorned every space in which she lived.
‘I cursed him,’ she said, appearing in the doorway from nowhere, and startling Court. ‘I cursed him—and this time I cursed him real good. I got through. I could feel it; I could feel him, like some fish wriggling on a hook…’
‘Yes, well you’ve cursed him plenty of times before,’ Court said coldly, ‘and without conspicuous success.’
He looked at Angelica’s flushed face; a vein stood out on her temple; her heavy body was giving off heat like an electric plate. He tried, as he had often done before, to tell himself that Angelica was an ugly, overweight, vindictive virgin of fifty-five, whose sole redeeming feature was her love for his son. She was without powers, he told himself, and he was the last person in the world to be impressed by the mumbo-jumbo of her semi-Catholic, semi-pagan prayers, curses and jinxes.
He told himself this, but as before, it did not convince. She muttered a few more words, lapsing as she always did, from English to her native Sicilian, to a dialect filled with liquid threat, with razor-sharp sibilants, with saints’ names and obscenities intermixed.
She was trembling; the light in the hallway was poor. Court, acknowledging his fear, backed away from her.
‘I fixed him,’ she said, turning her bright black eyes on Court. ‘He’s starting to die right now—but slow, from the inside out. I’m going to let him suffer awhile, and then I’m going to finish him off. I fixed him. I had him on-line. He tried to hide, but he couldn’t hide from me this time. I summoned him up.’
The last phrase had a hissing sound to it. Court turned, and without speaking further, quickly left. He felt followed the instant the door closed, and he blamed Angelica and her dramatics for this. The sensation remained with him when he left the Carlyle; he could not shake it off. He decided to walk to the Conrad building, as he sometimes did at night, and it pursued him there. He stood outside the Conrad, on the north corner, looking up at the dark windows of the apartment his wife wanted—and he knew he was watched.
He swung around, staring towards the shadows and shrubbery of the park; nothing moved; no-one spoke. He looked up at a thin and sickly moon, riding high above that many-eyed roof-line, and then, some time after midnight, hailed a cab and directed it back south.
The sensation of being pursued remained. He could blame it on fatigue, on lack of food, on superstition, on the conversation with Angelica which still rippled through his mind—but he could still sense some watcher, some follower in his street; he could sense eyes as he stepped into the elevator.
Instinct, recognition, the influence of some sixth sense—whatever the explanation for that sensation of unease, he saw how timely its warnings had been as soon as the elevator doors opened.
He felt his body come alive with adrenalin shock; the door to his loft stood open, its locks smashed. He could see that in the room beyond vandalism had been at work. The lights were on; the floor was a sea of paper, and the perpetrator of this, whose identity he did not doubt for one second, was still present. He could hear that low, pedantic, murmuring, Midwestern voice, and it was murmuring an old message. ‘Under the left breast,’ he heard. ‘Under the left breast.’
He hesitated, flexing his hands, summoning his strength; then, with the eagerness of one greeting an old friend, a familiar not seen in a long while, he moved forward and pushed the door back.