Transgressions

by Sarah Dunant

  “So, that’s it. It must have been the cat after all,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada. But listen, you do what I said, okay? Tomorrow you call the cops in to look at the place, give you some security tips. Then the next time this happens you can phone them. Get some hunk to hold your hand in the middle of the night.”

  “Will do.”

  “And, Lizzie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe . . . I mean, maybe you should get out a bit more. Get used to coming home to the house empty.”

  “How do you know I don’t?” she said quietly, not wanting to get angry again, but feeling it rise up despite herself.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t bite my head off. Patrick just mentioned something about your reclusive tendencies, that’s all. I . . . er . . . Anyway, you’re all right, I take it.”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “I’m fine. I’ve just started on a book and I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Okay. Well, I . . . I just thought I’d check.”

  “And you have. It’s late. I’d better go,” she said, then immediately felt like a shit for being so brutal. “Listen, I’m sorry I went for you. I’m tired. I’ve been working too hard. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said quietly. “You always were too conscientious for your own good.”

  “Also . . . well, I wanted to say I’m sorry about the job.”

  “What job?”

  “The one in Canada. Sal said you didn’t get it.”

  “Ah, well, see, that just goes to show how much the queen of gossip knows about anything. On the contrary, right at this moment you’re talking to the new associate professor of European history at Simon Fraser University. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  “Oh, but that’s great.” And she realized as she said it that she was, indeed, genuinely pleased. “Congratulations.” Maybe that explained the change in him since last time. The good humor and the easiness. “When do you go?”

  “Next semester. Just imagine: me and five hundred nubile West Coast girls all eager for my teaching.”

  She laughed. So did someone else down the other end of the phone. The laugh sounded light and female. Tom was playing to an audience now. It was time to go. “Yes, well, you should remember they’re all politically correct these days.”

  “Ah, but that’s only because they haven’t met me yet.”

  What had her mother said about him the first time they met? “Charm the birds right out of the trees.” God help the birds, whoever they were. “Yes, well, when you get chucked out for sexual harassment don’t call me as a character witness.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I could always cite the night I saved you from the CD maniac.” And despite herself she laughed. “So what do you think, Lizzie? Maybe we could have a drink before I go. For old times’ sake,” he said, making it sound very casual.

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “I’ll call you. And remember. Ring the cops.”

  She put the phone down and sat digesting the last interchange. Between the CD panic and all their sparring she and Tom managed to have made something resembling a kind of peace. After all this time she couldn’t quite believe it. Maybe he’d take his friend with him to Vancouver. Nice place, Vancouver. Big horizons, warm currents, the chance to start it all again. Perfect for a man like Tom.

  Here, though, she still had unfinished business. On the stereo Van Morrison was taking his last applause. The album clicked off, the CD button still blinking quietly in the corner. She sat for a while staring at it, then got up and went over to the console.

  She moved the back of her hand across the control panel, pushing slightly against the start button. Nothing happened. She pushed harder, rubbing against the switch. Harder still. The light leaped up and the album clicked into place. Possible.

  Then she switched the system off at the console power button. Once again she played the cat, using her hand like the flank of the animal’s side. But this time the button was too close to the wall. To have activated it, Millie would have needed to use her paw like a finger. Absolutely not possible. But could she really swear that she had turned it off? The answer was no.

  She did so now, making doubly sure by flicking the switch at the plug. It would mean reprogramming the tuner tomorrow, but it was worth a good night’s sleep. She checked the windows and doors one more time. There was still no sign of the cat. She took a box of cat biscuits out from the cupboard and rattled it noisily next to the window. Millie had the ears of a nuclear submarine when it came to food. She waited, but the cat didn’t come. She dumped a handful into the bowl anyway and, taking the portable phone off its hook, went upstairs, locking the door behind her.

  She had been gone only a few moments when the cat flap snapped open, then shut again. But she was already too far away to hear it.

  five

  To her surprise she slept almost immediately. When she woke up the sun was out and the sky was a perfect washed blue, a line of condensation on the window testifying to an early frost outside.

  She lay in bed, feeling heavy with sleep. The clock read 10:15 A.M. She must have slept through the alarm. Downstairs she heard the thud of the mail on the mat. What the hell? It was Saturday and at least nobody had murdered her in her bed. She replayed the last hours of the night before, fingering the fear like a new bruise, seeing if she could make it hurt again. But the daylight had obliterated all manner of shadows and she couldn’t be bothered to try and find them again.

  She stretched, half expecting her feet to dislodge Millie off the end of the bed. Then she remembered that the cat had still been out, and the kitchen door would have kept her locked up. She thought about getting up and dressed, then decided not to bother. Instead she’d have breakfast in bed with the papers, take it easy. So today she’d do only five hundred words. Or maybe none at all. What was it Tom had said about her being overconscientious? After all the drama of last night she could surely allow herself a little time off from the Prague underworld. Even her American cop let himself do some sightseeing in between the bodies.

  She lay for a moment thinking about Saturdays, how they used to be when she and Tom were first together. How sometimes they would sleep till noon, then wander down to Camden Lock and have a late lunch at the Moroccan restaurant on the canal. It had been glorious to be so lazy and so comfortable with someone. Not to care what you looked like or what you did, just to hang out as if it could all go on forever. Is that how real marriages work, she wondered? People just keeping on keeping on, growing older and slower till they got to look like those happy/sad ads for pension plans. It was hard to imagine, but, then, old age always was. One thing you could say about her and Tom. They would always be young together, no paunches or liver spots, no hardening of the arteries.

  It was, she realized, a long time since she had thought of their relationship as something to be celebrated rather than regretted. What had the feckless Sally once said to her? “It’s like death, darling. You can’t hurry the grieving, it has to take its own course.” Eight and a half months. At least now something seemed to be shifting. Maybe his leaving was part of that process. Vancouver, eh? He wouldn’t come back, she knew that. He’d meet some lady—if he hadn’t met her already—and end up buying some house near the university and siring a pack of little Canadians with funny accents and a love of the great outdoors. And with any luck they wouldn’t notice the ways in which he became dissatisfied—as he most certainly would; either that or he’d grow up a bit and find a way not to take it out on them. She hoped so. She was surprised by how easy it was to wish him well. And by how clearly she could see his future, while at the same time not understanding her own.

  She thought back for a moment to Tom’s comments of last night. Had she really become so reclusive? What others saw as a symptom of pain she saw as a part of her recovery. Making herself whole again. She tried to imagine waking to another lover beside her, turning to him in sleepy lust, the world and the morning s
pread out endlessly before them. But her imagination was stubborn and the bed remained large and empty beside her.

  She pulled on her robe and went down to the kitchen. Before she entered she gave the door a little tug to make sure it had stayed locked, then opened it and swiftly walked in.

  It was exactly as she had left it eight hours before, the Van Morrisons all in their little plastic boxes on the shelf, the stereo turned off at the source, the main light still on, eclipsed now by the morning sunshine. The only thing that was different was the cat’s bowl, which was now empty. Millie had obviously come and gone in the night. She went to the French windows to see if she could spot her, but could see no sign. On the edge of the patio where the paving stones met the grass, a small brown lump caught her attention. A plump clod of earth? A wet cloth?

  She turned the key to the French doors and went out, her feet cold on the stones. It turned out to be a bird, not one of the little ones that Millie sometimes proudly pulled in through the cat flap in spring, but a fully grown thrush. The pattern on its breast was startling: perfect little nut-brown marks against downy cream feathers. It was well and truly dead, its eyes staring and glassy, its neck lying at an awkward angle. It didn’t look so much mauled as broken. She put out a finger and touched the breast feathers. Cold. A long time gone. She looked around the garden, but Millie was nowhere to be seen. She picked the little body up and carried it across the lawn to the nearest flower bed. The grass was wet and slimy beneath her toes, like walking on snail trails. She slid the bird under a bush. It was neither the time nor the climate for burials and, anyway, Millie would just have it up again. She wondered where it had come from, or, more important, where it would not go back to. Would anyone miss it? Come looking for it? No such thing as a formal identification for these little fellows. She smiled. So much for her day off. The smells of the Prague city morgue were already curling their way back into her nostrils. She made herself an industrial-sized cappuccino and gave in to the inevitable.

  The head had been savagely beaten. The flesh of the face was unrecognizable, a mash of blood and bone, the jaw crushed so badly that even the dental work might not be salvageable. The only thing that remained was the hair, soaked and matted but still intact. Blond. Long. Fine. Woman’s hair. With any luck, the torso would be in better condition, depending, of course, on how long it took them to find it.

  Jake swallowed the saliva that had gathered in the bottom of his mouth. Ten years a cop and he thought he’d seen everything. But there was always something more, always another one worse than the one before. Still, no point in throwing up. This early on in the job he had his reputation to think of.

  “ ‘If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs,’ eh?” he said, half under his breath.

  “What?”

  “Nothin’. Just an English poem.”

  “ ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ ” the officer said, his accent curling the words in on themselves. “Though in this case, I think not.”

  Christ, these European cops. They certainly had themselves an education. Some of them even knew American movies better than he did. Had studied them like some kind of lifestyle correspondence course. “So, Jake, who do you think she is?”

  He shook his head. But the fact was, he already knew. The hair had given her away.

  She had left the apartment at 4:15 the previous afternoon, the same short black skirt, the same leather jacket, only this time she was wearing sunglasses—sunglasses and no sun. At first he thought it was affectation, until she had crossed the street and shimmied straight past him into the café. Then he had seen the bruise, a great fat strawberry of a thing, puffing up under the right lens. She wore it well though, head up, a kind of fuck-you quality to the walk. Good body, he noted, lean, well kept, curved in all the right places, her breasts small and high like ripe apples. A little like Mirka’s. Jesus, how long would it take before he could look at a woman and not compare? Longer than the six months it had been.

  Anyway, this woman wasn’t worth the comparison. Within the scheme of things she was just blond trash, a carrier of other people’s messages and possessions, a gift to be used—or abused—as part of a larger seduction plan. What she would have brought him would have been the sample, a token of goodwill to show the purity and the quality: quality that could be guaranteed if he and his bosses decided to move their order. And if the Americans were going to sew up the old Soviet market they needed to get those orders.

  They. He knew them so well he could taste the salt in their sweat. Not that the big guys sweat much. They pay others to do that for them. Theirs was the brain work, the strategy, the boardroom tangos. Except it didn’t take a genius to sort this one out. With the Western market at saturation point, this was where the action was now. Their nineties business plan had them carving up the post-Soviet bloc within the next three to four years, bribing the small guys, buying out the big, and neutralizing those who couldn’t be bought. Then they slam down the price, create the appetite, and, hey presto, new markets, big profits. Proof that capitalism works.

  Czechoslovakia was the perfect place to do it all from. Germany to the left, Russia to the right, Hungary and Poland on either side, an economy moving fast enough to have money, and the kind of foreign investment that meant they could launder the profits without anybody asking. All this in a cute little city that was fast gaining the comforts of home but where American law couldn’t touch them.

  But the same didn’t go for American law-enforcement officers. This job had had Jake’s name on it from the beginning. He’d already run a couple of successful operations against these guys in the States, so when the Czech government decided to come clean and admit they had a problem, Jake’s name was high on the files. Everyone in the department knew he needed a reason to get the fuck out for a while, and what other American narcotics cop could negotiate his way through the Prague old town without a tourist map to help him? That’s what eighteen months married to a Czech beauty did for you. Visiting the family. They’d come here only twice, once before the wedding, once after, but it still made him more of an expert than the rest of the division. Not to mention the seventy words of Czech he’d picked up with which to charm the in-laws. She had laughed at his accent, but you could tell she liked it. Fuck it, if they’d been together she could have been with him now, back in her beloved city, away from the madness of New York. She’d end up back here anyway. She didn’t have the stamina for America. If she did, she would have stuck by him. What fucking cop’s wife walks out the first time the going gets rough?

  Let it go, Jake, let it go.

  He glanced back up at the apartment window. Not his beat. The guy in the car down below would check out the man. His job was the woman. She ordered a brandy, then left it on the bar while she went to the bathroom. She was there a long time. As she walked back in, she looked around to check that no one was watching. She took a long hit of her drink, then sniffed loudly, tossing her fair hair across her shoulders, as if getting something off her back. Yep, she was good-looking. But it wouldn’t take long now. Just like home. For all its fancy history and high hopes, once you started really looking, this damn city was as dirty as New York. But, then, a junkie is a junkie the world over.

  The night before he’d left home he’d stayed in Manhattan, gone down to the Village and caught a French movie in some art-house cinema; it was supposed to be a street thriller. The girl in it was a druggie, too, but far too pretty for the part, too much of a pout on her well-shaped cheeks. Jeez, hadn’t any casting director ever really looked at one of these girls, for Christ’s sake? Looked at what smack does to a body if you take it for long enough: how it digs out all the fat of the face, turns the skin yellow, wrecks the joints. Not exactly what you’d call value for money. Just as well that the brain stops counting costs.

  The woman at the bar still had a way to go, but it was only a matter of time. She finished the brandy and ordered another. Slivovice. More brandy than plum. He’d got legle
ss on it his first night at the hotel. And paid for it all the next day. But she looked like she’d been drinking it all her life. She pulled a small compact mirror from her purse, slid the glasses up, and looked at herself, assessing the damage, running a tentative finger over the line of the ripening bruise. It must be hurting now, he thought: a throb like a hammer blow to the center of the eyeball. The brandy would do nothing to smooth that away. She slid the glasses back down. He watched her carefully over the top of his magazine, working out how to begin the conversation. Strictly speaking, it was against the rules, his role was to watch not talk, but two weeks into this job and they were getting nowhere fast. And everyone knew Jake Biderman wasn’t a man known for sticking to the rules.

  He put down the magazine, got up, and walked her way, sliding himself onto a stool a couple down from her. She threw him a derisory glance, dismissing him instantly. He smiled. “Hi.”

  She ignored him.

  “Is bad?” he said, in Czech, the accent damaging the words. He tapped his eye to make sure she’d got the point.

  Again she didn’t seem to hear, putting up a hand to her chin and letting her hair fall over her cheek and eye.

  He waited. Then said, “You know him?”

  She shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe his tenacity. “Fuck off,” she said sweetly in English.

  The guy at the end of the bar cleaning the glasses laughed.

  She had style. He had to hand it to her. “Can I buy you a brandy first,” he said, grinning.

  She looked up and into the mirror behind the bar, her attention momentarily distracted. He followed her glance. A man was walking past, then he was gone.

  She got off the stool slowly, her ass sliding its way down. Nicely done. Practiced almost. Standing closer he could smell her, something rank and sweet at the same time. It didn’t put him off. “What are you, eh?” she said quietly. “American?”