Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  She straightened her leg. She tucked her thumbs back in her belt, fingers splayed near her groin. The gesture, she knew, was provocative. She stared at him. His face was lined with tension. How easy it was to get to him. She had the urge to go down on her knees in the mud and draw him inside her mouth and suck him and feel him flood her throat and experience his passion and release. She wanted to hear him groan as he came. She wanted to expose his vulnerability.

  She had to act soon. She moved a little closer to him, and he stepped back.

  ‘We’re all alone. We don’t need to let the moment pass,’ she said.

  ‘The moment passed in the hotel room,’ he said. ‘The moment’s gone.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She stretched out her hand, reached for his sleeve. He backed off again. ‘You’re running away from me, Pagan. You don’t have to do that.’

  He considered the fragility of distance. He saw her hand fall an inch or so short of his sleeve. You’re taking her back to London, he thought. Anything else isn’t a consideration. He heard the trees stirred by slowing rain. In the weak light of dawn her face was rendered soft and curiously youthful; if he hadn’t known better he might have considered her features those of an innocent girl. He had to keep reminding himself of who she was and what she’d done. He had to keep remembering, an act of silent incantation. Carlotta, Carlotta. She’s Carlotta.

  He saw her hand go up to his face, felt the palm against his cheek. He didn’t move this time. He wasn’t going to back off. He wouldn’t give her that satisfaction. It was a matter of concentration, pretending he felt nothing. He kept his grip on the gun.

  He felt her fingertips touch the lobe of his ear, then she drew her index finger to the corner of his mouth and parted his lips and touched the tip of his tongue, then worked the finger gently inside his mouth, along his gums. Just as she’d done in the hotel.

  There was an instant when he realized he could still pull free, but it passed like a match terrifyingly snuffed out. He was drifting away from himself. He saw her face come close to his. The kiss when it happened was as shocking as stained glass shattering, more than a collision of lips and tongues; it was a connection taking place at a level beyond consciousness, a place he’d never been. He was swimming through mist. There was an ocean in his head. He had his own tides running in full spate. The kiss scared, brutalized, aroused him. He was aware of her wet hair, the intense scent of her damp flesh, her breath on his flesh, her fingers working at the buckle of his belt. She was saying his name as a lover might, giving it secret inflections, personal resonances. This is Carlotta, he thought, and the recognition had the fleeting urgency of a feline creature scurrying into darkness after prey, and then it was gone. It was all madness, and he was dissolving into it.

  He couldn’t help himself, he pushed her leather jacket back from her shoulders, pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts, there was no way out of this, no direction but forward. Clutching one another frantically, they sank together down into the mud. She had his cock in the palm of her hand and he was hard. There were transformations here, identities lost, lust stripped you down until there was nothing of you left but the overpowering need to be inside the woman. He dragged her jeans down over her hips, unconscious of the wet earth on which he lay, unaware of the discomfort of mud, the way it pressed against his skin. She tore open the buttons of his shirt with one rough gesture and he ripped aside her underwear. She tugged his jeans down and all the while she kept saying his name as if it were a word designed to trigger an hypnotic trance. Rain dripped from leaves, mud adhered to their bodies, sucked at them, yielded under them when they rolled over together. He stared down into her face and she said, ‘Give it to me, Frank. Give it to me hard. Hurt me, fuck me until I bleed.’

  Yes, he thought. Until you bleed. This was beyond lust. Lust was too simple. This was a marriage of blind physical impulse and retribution, as if by bringing her the pain she wanted he was in some way avenging all the dead, as if by hurting her he might cancel out the destruction she’d caused. Until you bleed. He saw streaks of mud on her face and throat and breasts, felt his knees sink into soft saturated dirt, felt her fingers, grainy with particles of soil, reach down and guide him inside the private warmth of herself. His head was filled with bright flashes. She moved, rolled, straddled him, face thrown back slightly, mouth open. She was wild and unfettered and he felt as if windows long shut tight in himself had been opened and daylight poured through and she was saying Harder than that, harder, harder. He thrust his hips upward, staring into her face and seeing absences in her eyes, and then her hands were rubbing his bare chest with wet earth as if she were drawing patterns in his skin, pictures of a primeval sort, tribal marks, mystic ideographs inscribed on the walls of hidden caves. He caught her wrists, forced her body underneath his own, heard the way his breathing quickened, felt the fuse of orgasm begin to burn far inside him. It was the release of all releases, scorching, and even as he began to soar he understood at one level of himself there was a price to pay, an aftermath to face, the crash of his damaged self—

  But she’d moved. She’d shifted out from under him. She’d slid away from his body. He ejaculated into the void of wet earth, and he was attacked by despair, understanding he’d been fooled, this was another of her games, another way of humiliating him. He saw her hand fumble toward the gun he’d let slip in his insanity and he lunged on his knees toward her, and before she could reach the gun he clubbed her fiercely across the wrist. He grabbed her, pinned her in the mud, struck her again and again and again with his knuckles until her mouth bled and the taut skin of her cheek-bones had split. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to beat her until she was dead. He wanted to crush all the life out of her. He battered her face and head more times than he could count and he stopped only when his knuckles hurt and he wondered what he was turning into, what kind of metamorphosis had gone on, how profound was the erosion that had reduced him to mindless savagery.

  He watched blood slither across her lips, run beneath her chin to her neck and create a tiny rivulet slicking between her naked breasts. He was breathless, weary, empty. He was conscious of a strange frontier where sex and violence met, a border town where odd kinships were forged and unruly alliances made. And she’d led him to this place, she’d taken him there, she’d shown him the squalid territory where she lived her life.

  This is me, Pagan. This is Carlotta.

  He fumbled around in the dirt until he located the gun, then sat hunched in the gloomy silence of self-reproach. The leaves still dripped. The stream was still running. The landscape murmured. The light was forlorn. His hands hurt, but that was only a superficial pain.

  She licked blood and dirt from her fingertips. ‘Welcome to my world, Pagan,’ she said, and although she spoke in a muffled way through swollen lips she managed to infuse her voice with a tiny note of triumph.

  He moved toward her. He found it from somewhere deep inside himself, leftover rage, a fresh upsurge of anger that rushed to his head like a dense pall of hot smoke, and he raised his hand high in the air and brought the gun down hard into the soft little hollow at the base of her neck, and she slumped to one side, her face pressed into the mud, her bloodied lips open.

  Shaking, straining with effort, he reached down and gripped her under the shoulders and dragged her unconscious body across grass and through trees. He hauled her this way for what seemed a very long time, and he stopped only when he realized that he was drained of energy and that some essential part of himself was lost for all time in the wet hostility of this landscape.

  48

  LONDON

  Summer had gone. Early October, autumn descending in its languid way: the parks of London were browning and melancholy. A hibernatory mood gripped Pagan. He stayed inside his flat with the curtains drawn and sipped malt whisky. He didn’t feel a need to play his music. He developed a fondness for silence. He’d submitted a report to Nimmo, and then shut himself away.

  He hadn’t been able to get Car
lotta out of the United States because a stubborn airline ticket-clerk wasn’t pleased with the fact that she lacked a passport and, moreover, obviously wasn’t in a terrific shape to travel, and Pagan’s belligerent attitude had only exacerbated the situation. The clerk called the FBI and, after an argumentative scene, Carlotta was handcuffed and led away by stern-faced men in charcoal suits. She was their property now.

  The FBI had her in the end. Despite everything. Despite Skidelsky’s ambitions.

  She was incarcerated, and had refused any form of legal representation. At her trial, a hastily-arranged affair, a three-day circus, she had pleaded guilty to all the charges the FBI could bring against her. Pagan had read in a newspaper that she’d spurned the attentions of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, that she refused to give interviews, that she was resigned to the death sentence the judge had passed. This didn’t sound like her. This acquiescence, this passive attitude, this embrace of her own execution. He didn’t trust this Carlotta, brooding in her cell. He couldn’t imagine her going silently to her death.

  But he wanted to forget, which was the hard part.

  Nimmo was caught between the need to congratulate Pagan in the press: How wonderful that a British policeman tracked her down, and to rail against him in private: She is ours and I don’t give a damn what the FBI think and you shouldn’t have surrendered her so easily. A jurisdictional feud: Pagan didn’t need it.

  He liked to sit in the living-room and watch daylight fade beyond the curtains. The world was a permanent dusk. There was a lull all through his life, a cessation of curiosity. A graph of his existence would have shown an abrupt plunge, then the flat unbroken line of a silent heart.

  He had days when he looked at himself in the mirror and failed to recognize his reflection. He didn’t shave. His telephone rang unanswered. He thought too often of the woman, who paraded in and out of his memory as if he had no means of filtering his own recollections. At night he sometimes remembered the smell of mud.

  One afternoon, Foxie came to the flat. ‘When can we expect you to emerge from this bizarre little cocoon?’ he asked with forced cheer.

  Pagan said, ‘When I’m ready.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  Pagan shrugged the question off.

  ‘It doesn’t do any good to sit around, Frank. What the hell is wrong with you anyway?’

  ‘I caught the woman,’ Pagan said.

  ‘And that depresses you?’

  ‘No, that doesn’t depress me, Foxie.’

  ‘Do you want to explain?’

  Pagan clutched a tumbler of whisky and wandered around the room. ‘I can’t explain.’

  ‘What are you hiding, Frank?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m hiding anything,’ Pagan said.

  ‘You know what I think? You should pull yourself together and get back into the fray of things. Forget whatever it is that’s bothering you and get on with your bloody life.’

  ‘The cheer-leader speaks.’

  ‘You’re a hero, Frank. You caught the wicked witch. You did what nobody else could do. Start with that. Build on that. Get a bloody grip.’

  ‘Get a grip on what, Foxie?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Too vague, Pagan thought.

  Foxie’s expression was one of concern. He observed Pagan wander the room. More than the stubble on the jaw, the pallor of the skin, something intangible had changed in the man. Call it spirit. Fire. It just wasn’t there. Foxie had the feeling he was in the company of a counterfeit, a stand-in for the real thing. He wondered what had happened when Frank had finally captured the woman, what had taken place between them. Whatever it was, it had cut deeply into the fabric of Pagan.

  Foxie tried to think of something that might lure Frank out of this strange, disaffected mood and back into the world. He said, ‘You might be interested to know that the FBI has compiled a confidential report on this Skidelsky character, a copy of which was sent to Special Branch. It appears he had ambitious plans that extended beyond his drastic and rather extravagant idea of reforming the Agency. The Feds have uncovered a stack of documents that suggest he intended to use what you might call the “post-holocaust Agency” as a platform for a general reconstruction of law enforcement in America. He foresaw a time when the Agency would have ultimate control over all police and FBI activities. He had wide-ranging and somewhat sinister plans to put in place a vast network of domestic surveillance, using only Agency personnel – whose numbers, naturally, would have to be boosted enormously if such a spying operation was to be successful … Apparently he’d even speculated about the eventuality of the Agency controlling the daily decision-making processes at the Pentagon. One would have to say he was a man of no small ambition, Frank.’

  Foxie paused, waited for a reaction from Pagan, but saw no sign, no flicker of interest. He simply stared inside his whisky glass.

  ‘Of course, the FBI could have invented some of this stuff,’ Foxie said. ‘The blacker they paint Skidelsky, the better they look. A dangerous power-seeker, an egomaniac, unhinged and unbalanced … Besides, they’re also claiming that they were responsible for his death. The woman isn’t mentioned in the report. Nor are you.’

  Pagan raised his face and said, ‘It all seems so far away, Foxie. Far away, long ago.’

  Foxie sighed and, seeing that further communication was useless because Pagan wasn’t about to emerge from his baffling place of retreat, went toward the door. Before he left he grasped Pagan’s hand and said, ‘Phone me if you need me.’

  Alone, Pagan slumped in his armchair. He was stricken by the feeling that nothing existed out there in the world. Not Nimmo, not Foxworth, not Golden Square. And Carlotta – maybe Carlotta was just a creature he’d conjured up out of the dark realms of his imagination, from those caverns where, like guano, the undesirable elements in himself collected.

  Three days later, Pagan drove his Camaro out of London and headed south. Marcia Burr had telephoned to invite him down to Sussex; an afternoon in the country will do you the world of good, she’d said. As if he were an invalid. As if he were tubercular. He ignored the motorways, kept to the old back roads. The landscape was beginning to decay. He felt he carried the change of seasons inside himself. What was it? he wondered. What was this dying fall he experienced? Depression? Guilt? He’d caught the wicked witch, but at what price to himself? How did you make such an accounting anyway?

  He drove to Lewes, asked directions at a post office for Marcia’s cottage, then headed out of the town, passing thatched houses, cosy pubs, a tangle of narrow streets.

  The cottage was situated in a quiet country lane. It was surrounded by roses and bramble bushes. Blackbirds crowded the trees, rooks scavenged in harvested fields. A ragged scarecrow stood askew in barren ground.

  Pagan parked the car. Marcia Burr was standing in the open doorway of the house, a tiny whitewashed dwelling with trellises pressed against walls, window-boxes, fresh-painted frames. Bucolic tranquillity.

  ‘I heard your car,’ she said. She wore a two-piece suit, brown cardigan and pleated skirt, and her hair was pinned back by tortoiseshell clasps. Pagan embraced her briefly, then followed her into the tiny sitting-room where cakes had been laid out on a table. The walls were painted a pale yellow; wooden beams, blackened by time, criss-crossed the ceiling.

  ‘I’ll pour tea,’ she said.

  Pagan sat.

  ‘I’m glad you came down, Frank.’ She slid a cup toward him. ‘You look dreadful. No colour in your face. And those circles under your eyes … Aren’t you sleeping well?’

  ‘I sleep too long,’ he said. Which was true. Sometimes twelve hours, even more. Waking was an effort. His sleep was usually dreamless, placid. He reached for the china cup and picked it up. The tea was unexpectedly fragrant.

  He surveyed the room. There was a menagerie of small glass animals on a shelf. An antique hunting horn hung on the wall. A cluster of framed photographs.

  ‘I baked the cakes mys
elf,’ she said. ‘Try one.’

  He chose a confection decorated with a chocolate leaf and tasted it. ‘Good, very good,’ he said.

  ‘I have a lot of time these days for trying out new recipes.’

  Pagan tasted his tea again. It was like drinking the liquid essence of flowers. He pretended to enjoy it. ‘Are you happy down here?’ he asked. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation. But he felt obliged to force it along.

  ‘I’m fine, Frank. Really. Some days … There are ups and downs.’ She smiled at him. She patted his knee. ‘But what about you? You’re to be congratulated. You found the woman.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know all the details, of course,’ Marcia Burr said. She fidgeted with her pearls a second. ‘I understand she’s being held in a maximum-security prison in the States. Are these places really secure, Frank?’

  Pagan let the question drift unanswered. Secure, he thought. Secure was only a word; words carried no guarantees.

  ‘She’s going to die in the electric chair,’ he said.

  ‘She deserves to die, Frank.’ There was an uncharacteristic venom in Marcia’s voice.

  He gazed at the leaded windows and imagined he was staring through the glass of an execution chamber and seeing Carlotta strapped to an electric chair. She deserves to die. His mind drifted to Burr, to the unanswered question that had troubled him all along – Pasco’s unhindered passage through Heathrow, Burr’s favour for Christopher Poole, the condemnation of an innocent man.

  He wiped crumbs inside a paper napkin. He finished his tea. Why did he feel so uncomfortable? he wondered. Maybe it was just his own unsociable mood. Maybe it was because Marcia reminded him of Martin, and he didn’t need reminders. He looked at her face, which was turned just slightly away from him, and downcast.