And yet there remained a monstrous gulf between them. In part it was the gulf of dreams, the strange intangibility of things: the book from which you have to read that opens to show pages with no print on them, the long cold drink that doesn’t slake the burning thirst, the furious dash for safety followed by the realization that you are running without movement. Worst of all, the object of desire who remains untouchably remote despite the casual, naked intimacy in which you find yourselves together.
It was partly that, but something more. He began to fear he would go mad if he couldn’t solve the mystery. What was missing? Something he was hiding from? Something he wouldn’t, couldn’t, even dare not let himself remember?
He woke turning and perspiring in his bed. Sleep had flown and could not be coaxed back, so he got up and walked down to the beach. He passed her house. There were no lights. But then—he glanced at his watch—it was three in the morning.
For a while he stood there watching in the darkness. Should he go knock at the door, tell her he knew something was wrong, persuade her to confide in him? But suppose she wasn’t alone. He hadn’t seen anybody else, but there could be other people in the house, and he might be putting more than just himself and the operation at risk by blundering in there in the middle of the night. He might be putting Kathy at risk. Better, he decided, to wait until the morning when they would meet on the beach. He would talk to her then, persuade her to confide in him.
He turned and started back toward his cottage, but he knew that sleep would not return. Instead of waiting out the long hours until he saw her again, he ran down to the water’s edge, threw off his clothes, and dived into the languid surf.
It was dawn when he eventually got home. He shaved, prepared himself some breakfast, then collected his painting things and started out once more for the beach.
He glanced at his watch for the twentieth time that hour. Anybody watching would have recognized an anxious man. It was almost midday and there was still no sign of her.
From where he sat at his easel he could see the house clearly even without binoculars. There had been no movement all morning. As the minutes ticked by, he abandoned even the pretense of painting; his concentration was shot to hell, and he knew in his bones that something was wrong. He made up his mind to get into that house and find out for himself what was going on. His only regret was that he hadn’t followed his original instinct and done so in the night.
The rear of the house was shielded from any neighbor’s view by trees. He vaulted over the fence, then slid along the back wall and peered cautiously in a window. To his amazement, he found himself looking into a completely bare room—a kitchen, in fact, but without a stick of furniture except for a sink and some fixtures on the walls. He moved along to another window. This looked into a good-sized living room with windows on the far side overlooking the sea. But again there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place, just bare floorboards and wires hanging where light fittings had once been.
Charlie began to have a very strange feeling. There was something unreal here. This was the house he’d seen Kathy enter. She had produced a key and opened the front door. So why was the place abandoned? Obviously he had to get in and check out the whole house. Maybe the upper floor was in use. He tried the back door, but it was locked, not surprisingly. What was surprising was the feebleness of the lock used. Charlie reckoned that an average teenager with a pin could have opened it in under five minutes; his own expert touch coaxed the levers into submission in seconds. He checked the door frame for metal contacts whose broken circuits might have set off an alarm in some local police station or security office. There were none. And no electric eyes or floor pads, which would anyway have been impossible to conceal without carpets.
He slipped off his shoes and left them at the foot of the stairs. Even though they were soft moccasins, a trained ear would have heard their approach. Only bare feet guaranteed silence and the advantage of surprise. Before starting up, he listened carefully to the sounds of the house. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. He started up the wooden staircase, arriving at a landing that was as bare as downstairs. He started cautiously along a corridor, checking doors as he went. The whole floor was the same: unfurnished and without any sign of life. It was not with any great final hope that he climbed the narrow back stairs to the attic. That, too, was empty. He went back downstairs, reclaimed his shoes, and left as he had entered, carefully relocking the door.
Back at his cottage he pondered what he should do. Obviously he had to report that the “mysterious woman” was gone. He made the call and did so. No questions were asked, though there were plenty he was asking himself. Had she run away because of him? But why? Or had she been taken? In which case, by whom? Maybe she needed his help, but where was she?
For a moment he even toyed with the idea that he had dreamed or imagined the whole episode. But no, that wasn’t possible. Such things didn’t happen.
And yet how strange to have met her again as he had, so soon after his memory of her had suddenly returned with a clarity that had eluded him for years. One moment he’d remembered what she looked like, and the next she was there.
Were such coincidences ever what they seemed? Was something going on?
His phone rang. He answered it. This time Control himself was on the line.
“Charlie. Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing more you can tell us about this woman?”
He hesitated fractionally, though not long enough, he thought, to make Control suspicious.
“Nothing I can think of, sir.”
“You spoke to her?”
Was that a trick question? He had definitely reported that he hadn’t spoken to her; but then he hadn’t reported directly to Control, so maybe there was nothing to worry about.
“No, sir. I just observed her.”
“Entering the house.”
“That’s correct.”
“And today you didn’t see her, so you broke in and took a look around.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“What made you suspicious?”
“Hard to say, sir. There was something wrong about that place.”
“You should have called in first.”
“I understand, sir. But then the opportunity arose, and there was no guarantee I’d get another chance.”
That was bullshit, he knew. He could have got in and out of there any time he wanted. But Control seemed to buy the story. He sensed a change of tone down the line and imagined Control nodding his head and pursing his lips the way he did as he mulled over some information and made a decision.
“All right, Charlie,” he said after a while, “it doesn’t seem like there’s much more to be done for the time being. We’ll arrange for you to fly back West. I’ll be in touch.”
Chapter 24
AS GOOD AS his word, Control summoned Charlie to a face-to-face meeting on the following day. The location this time was an anonymous office building in Santa Monica just off Wiltshire. Charlie looked at the names listed in the lobby. There were management companies, business consultants, and a handful of film and TV production companies with tortuously inventive titles. Alongside suite 304, however, which was where Charlie had been told to report, there was no name.
He rang the bell and the door was opened by a slim young man who stood politely aside to let him enter. The office suite was almost as bare as the house on the East Coast had been. Only one room of the four Charlie could see had any furniture, and then just a couple of chairs and a table with a computer on it. A fat balding man sat working at the keyboard. Control was standing a little to one side. He nodded a greeting to Charlie and told him to pull up a chair next to the fat man.
“We need to know what she looked like, Charlie,” he said. “Anything you can remember, anything at all. It’s important.”
Charlie sat down. The on-screen program was one of those used for building up pictures of suspects and most-wanteds. Charlie played the game solemnly, crea
ting an image that was close and yet not her. Control then asked him some questions, mostly the same ones he’d asked on the phone. They went again over the details of how he’d seen “the woman.” It was a routine debriefing, in which Charlie told the same lies; but it was obvious from Control’s interest in Kathy that she was involved in something that Charlie didn’t like the feel of.
“Very well, Charlie,” Control said eventually, exhaling his words on a sigh, “you can stand down. Take a few days off. We’ll be in touch.”
The past, Charlie heard once, was a foreign country. In his case it was a country he’d had no intention of revisiting, until now. But meeting Kathy had changed everything, and her mysterious disappearance left him no choice. There was nothing he’d been told not to do, so a casual stroll down memory lane seemed, in Charlie’s view, perfectly normal and unlikely to arouse suspicion.
He’d never been quite sure how much Control actually knew about him. Sometimes he wondered if he was checked on when he was off duty. Not that he was ever off duty really: He was always on call should he be needed. He carried a pager and a cell phone everywhere. These, he knew, could be used to trace him if that was what they wanted to do. The thought had never troubled him until now, because until now he’d had nothing to hide.
He wasn’t sure, now he came to think about it, that he’d ever known the name or even the general location of Kathy’s orphanage. It was just “the girls’ place” across town. They’d bused over every morning for school, then bused back at night. The school itself was attached to the boys’ orphanage that he’d been in. That was the logical place to start. He remembered that it had been way downtown. He could recall the general area, but no street names, so he decided just to drive around until he found it.
As he recalled, it had been a big dark building with a strangely permanent gloom about it, as though this were magically the one part of the city where the sun never shone. It was a building designed to break the spirit of those who lived in it. How else to explain those airless dormitories with their high barred windows, those winding corridors and endless staircases, and above all those narrow stone steps leading down to the black steel door behind which was “the hole”?
He thought of Kathy as he drove. In particular, he thought about the first time they met. There’d been a fight—which was nothing new, except this time it wasn’t just one or two kids but a gang of them who’d started in on him. He didn’t remember much about it, except that he must have gone berserk. They’d all fled, except for two who couldn’t. One was trying to crawl away on his hands and knees, the other lay whimpering with blood streaming from his mouth. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the gorillas arrived. Huge hands grabbed Charlie by the hair and throat. Others took him by the arms and legs. He found himself lifted up and held level with the ground, like a battering ram. That was when Kathy stepped in front of them.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said. “There was a gang of them. They started it.”
One of the gorillas had muttered something obscene and pushed her aside. Charlie saw her stumble and fall over. It was in that moment that their eyes met. His last memory of the outside world, before they threw him in the hole, was that look of hers. Something had passed between them in that moment. He hadn’t known what, but he’d been unable to think of anything else until he saw her again. It had been only a couple of weeks after that day that they’d run away together. Then that whole relationship, which still meant more to him than any in his life, had ended—until that strange meeting by the sea the other day.
What surprised him, as he wound his way through the same streets for the third or fourth time that morning, was the way that nothing whatever struck him as familiar. Of course it was possible that the orphanage had been torn down—best end to it, no doubt of that. But could literally everything else have been razed and rebuilt? He was sure he was in the right part of town, so why did nothing look familiar?
He parked his car by a meter and got out to look around on foot. If he couldn’t find any clue to what had happened, he was going to have to go to the city authorities. He’d been hop-ing to avoid that; it could set off all kinds of warning bells. But he was determined to do whatever it took to find Kathy.
It was then that he realized he was being followed. He hadn’t spotted them in traffic. There were two men, casually dressed, driving a dusty blue sedan. It had a couple of dents and some bad rust around the fender, the kind of car you wouldn’t glance at twice. In fact it wasn’t the car that Charlie glanced at first. As he walked past it, the two men in it sat talking. Charlie happened to notice that the one behind the wheel was wearing a shirt very like one he had himself, perhaps identical. The design was marijuana leaves on a red background. It was something he’d picked up on a trip to Maui a few months ago.
He thought no more about the coincidence until another one happened. Charlie had crossed the road and was standing on the sidewalk, trying to get a feel for which of the buildings around him might have been there for more than fifteen or twenty years and so would date back to his time. He thought he might find somebody he could talk to and ask a few casual questions about the vanished orphanage and school.
It was then that he saw the man in the marijuana shirt on the far sidewalk, gazing into the window of a TV and radio store, but positioning himself so that he could still see Charlie out of the corner of his vision. It was a stance that Charlie knew well from training and field operations, and it triggered an immediate question in his mind: Where was the other man?
Then he saw him, seated in the window of a deli, reading a paper and taking a sip from his cup of coffee. It was all the confirmation that he needed.
Charlie was under surveillance.
Chapter 25
THEY WERE, Charlie decided after about twenty minutes, competent though fairly low-level operatives. Affecting no suspicion that he was being watched, he sauntered in and out of several shops, buying a couple of ties, some socks, a magazine. Always he kept a wary eye on the movements of the two men, and soon established what pattern they were following. Then he strolled up to an amusement arcade and slipped inside.
He knew that one of them would come in after him in about five minutes. The other would by then have gone around to cover any possible rear exit. That was standard. He went straight to the men’s room, locked himself in, then forced open a rusty window of frosted glass and crawled out. He found himself in a narrow chimneylike space. The only way up would be through sheer muscle power, arms and legs braced against the walls. He decided it was worth a try.
Every fiber in his body strained almost to breaking point, but after the first few feet he knew he was going to make it. He hauled himself onto the flat roof and moved crablike to the edge. Looking down, he could see the guy watching for him by the arcade’s rear exit. Marijuana Shirt was probably still waiting out front, or might by now have started looking around inside. This gave Charlie just enough time to pick them off individually, which would be less messy. He waited till there was nobody passing the end of the alley, then jumped.
The guy didn’t know what had happened until he felt himself grabbed from behind. He tried to reach for the gun under his jacket, but Charlie twisted his arm up behind his back and made him gasp in pain.
“Who are you?”
“You’re breaking my arm.”
“Oops—there it goes.”
“Aaaaarrrggh… !”
“Relax, it’s only dislocated. Now, who are you?”
“My name’s Jack Cooper. I’m a private detective.”
“Who hired you?”
“I don’t know. Ow! Christ! I don’t know the client’s name.”
Charlie didn’t have time to get the truth out of him. He had to be ready for Marijuana Shirt, who would be out any moment. He gave a jab to the neck and the guy dropped stone cold. He’d be fine, but he’d have a headache as well as a painful shoulder for a while. Charlie dragged him out of sight, then slipped into the shadows and waited.
&nbs
p; After ten minutes he began to wonder if he’d misread the situation. Then he guessed what had happened. Suppose they’d feared that Charlie was on to them, what would they have done? Marijuana Shirt wouldn’t have bothered to make a thorough search of the arcade. He would have assumed that Charlie had given them the slip and he would go—where? To watch Charlie’s car, of course. There was only a slim chance that Charlie would return to it, but it was the logical next step in the game plan these guys were following.
So Charlie moved up the alley intending to find a cab. When he reached the street, he turned left, away from where he’d left his car. He found two cabs on the rank a little way along, and let an elderly man with a cane take the first: Haste and discourtesy were a sure way of making yourself stand out in a crowd. It was just as his own cab pulled away that he heard a distant shout of “Hey!” behind him. Looking back, he saw Marijuana Shirt running after him. The cabbie hadn’t noticed and drove on regardless. The last thing Charlie saw was Marijuana Shirt standing in the middle of the street and reaching inside his red-and-green shirt for something. Charlie couldn’t believe he was going to start shooting right there in the open. But he didn’t pull a gun. There was something in his hand, a small black object, but it wasn’t a gun. All the same, he held it like a gun, as though he was about to fire after the departing cab. But at that moment a container truck made an unexpected right turn and blocked him from view.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 11