by Mark Russell
Michelle glanced at a crumpled Calvin Klein shirt on a seat opposite. 'It's proved a good deal for Terence too. He's got his coke stashed here. A big batch on credit. Keeping it here makes him less paranoid dealing out of his Wisconsin Avenue apartment.
'Men.' She rested her cigarette on the ashtray and looked into Goldman's eyes. After a searching moment, she whispered, 'But you're different, aren't you, Scott?' Before he could reply, she goaded him. 'I think you are, mate,' she said in girlish mimicry of his Australian accent. 'Yeah mate, I really think you are.' She poked him in the ribs and ruffled his hair. Goldman chuckled and was drawn into her tension-breaking mood, hardly believing how well she parodied his speech and mannerisms. She continued with her kittenish romp, giggling and poking and clipping the end of his nose with her finger. But she soon tired and nuzzled against him. 'Hmm, I think you are different.' Sounding confident she hadn't misjudged him.
'Oh, I don't know.' He put on his best smile, but the strain of recent hours threatened to crush him as he looked into her finely sculpted face.
'Hmm, I know you're different ... cause you sure ain't from around here,' she jested in a twangy accent. However her jocularity faded and she let out a loud sigh, as if prey to a disturbance that had overcome any feelings of companionship. 'Listen, there's something I must tell you, Scott. I – '
'No,' he cut in, suddenly conscious of the lies and half-truths he'd told since meeting her. 'There's a few things I must tell you.'
'Shh.' She pressed a finger to his lips. 'No, you listen. There's time later for whatever you have to tell me ... as long as I straighten this out with you.' She turned toward him, her face tauntingly close. Her outgoing breath caressed his cheek and her chestnut brown eyes drew him to her like overpowering magnets.
'Okay,' he replied, being all he could do not to lean forward and taste her lips. How he longed for the ecstasy of her embrace, for them to forsake this world of hardship and secrets.
'Scott,' she said, 'what I want to say is.' She placed her hand on his and garnered thought. 'It would be right to say you and I are attracted to each other. I barely know you, yet I feel remarkably close to you, as if I've known you for ... well, for a long time anyway. 'She clasped his hand and released it, as if wanting to say something important. 'Listen, it's only fair I warn you that Terence will probably come here tomorrow morning.'
'I ...' he started.
'Shh,' she said, taking his hand again. 'He won't come tonight, I'm quite certain. He doesn't like driving at night with his merchandise on him. But he'll turn up in the morning to replenish for his usually brisk weekend trade.' She paused solemnly and her doe-like eyes radiated a vulnerable intelligence. 'When he comes here, I must warn you he'll raise quite a bit of hell should you be here with me. He's prone to violent outbursts lately.' She twisted about, as if forcing him note the light bruise about her eye.
'So if you want to stay with me tonight, I must warn you there's an element of risk involved. I fully understand if you want to leave and arrange a more suitable time for us to meet.' She straightened his hair and collar and gazed absently at his parted lips. 'I do like you but' – she sighed wearily – 'I don't think I can drive anywhere else tonight. I'm just too exhausted. The last few days have been trying.'
Goldman was relieved this was all that was worrying her. He liked her. Immensely. And couldn't find it in him to leave at this juncture. Besides, where would he go? Being with Michelle was an agreeable buffer from the chaos of what had to be the worse day of his life. He wanted to stay with her in this warm, safe apartment. He wasn't too concerned about Terence; though a bud of apprehension had taken root – he was yet to meet the man.
'Michelle, I want to stay here with you, regardless of any possible disturbance. I simply can't leave ... unless you want me to?' He looked down at her, suddenly vulnerable by way of the question. He sensed the cold, wet streets outside. The cruising police cars.
She met his uncertain gaze and a flash of panic showed in her eyes from being put on the spot. Before long encouraging words spilled from her mouth. 'No, I'd like you to stay. I'm sure everything will be ... okay. 'She cast him an affable smile then picked at the sofa's armrest, as if contemplating the repercussions of her decision.
He bent forward and pecked her cheek. 'Don't worry, everything will work out fine ... Hmm, I should try this nice Irish coffee you made.' She flashed another smile as the fugitive chemist blew on the hot surface of his drink.
TWENTY-THREE
Haslow yanked off his Paragini leather shoes and collapsed onto the bed. Exhaustion reigned supreme. How had his life taken this merciless veer? The mainstays of his former world were no longer dependable securities. He was adrift on treacherous waters that required new skills and logics. In any case with a new identity all but under his belt, it seemed the gods had favoured his first move.
He pressed his head into the pillow and closed his eyes. His aching midsection relished the support of the inner-spring mattress, his weary mind finding solace in the locked room. After farewelling Peter and Candy out front of Purple Haze, he'd hailed a cab and asked the chattering Sikh driver to find him budget-priced accommodation. He'd left his BMW in a remote corner of an all-night car park. On Monday morning he hoped to find a downtown auto-dealer not greatly disposed to paperwork and questions once a suitable cash price was struck.
His stressed mind wasn't able to shut down. He picked up a remote from the night table and surfed the room's bolted-down television, finally stopping on a late-night newscast.
“... Congress has given a $100 million dollars in economic aid to Nicaragua's Sandinistas. However, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega recently travelled to Cuba to meet the man he openly calls 'Comandante and Comrade Fidel Castro'...”
“... another wave of drug-related violence has hit Little Havana, Miami, formerly the domain of Cuban-exile group Alpha 66. Early this evening unidentified gunmen raked a car with automatic gunfire as it waited at a traffic light, killing the two men and one woman inside the vehicle. Police have identified the deceased as known drug traffickers ...”
Propped on the bed, Haslow became conscious of his soiled socks. The musky odour was redolent of times past. The Delaware orphanage. Shuttered windows. Wooden bunks. Locker rooms and communal showers. Pervasive glandular scent. Adolescent. Willful. Hint of competition at all cost. He thought again of his brother, of his fractured childhood. Cheerless crucifixes in shadowy hallways. The inculcation of purgatory and salvation ...
A Washington D.C. news item showed on the TV. The gruesome murder of two addict prostitutes in Anacostia park. Footage of the cordoned-off crime scene. A police investigator saying there weren't any leads at this early stage.
Haslow killed the TV and looked at his change on the night table. Coins and a dollar bill highlighted in the conical light of a bedside lamp. He looked at the unfolded bill: the one-eyed pyramid of the Great Seal emblematic of ancient ritual and order. The familiar Latin: Novus Ordo Seclorum. The open-winged eagle, clasping an olive branch and a clutch of arrows, spoke equally of control and cloaked dominions. E Pluribus Unum.
He breathed heavily and grabbed a Gideon's Bible from off the night table. He flicked the pages, wondering how many hotel rooms in the Occident contained the work. Was it dried chocolate specked on its vinyl cover or dried blood? He slapped the book shut and stared at the blank TV. Why had his workaday life been stripped away from him? Had he incurred the wrath of the numinous that the ancient text in his hands loudly trumpeted?
He didn't know, but his ears rang from exhaustion and his limbs ached like he'd walked from one end of the country to the other. He closed his eyes and thought about Roswell's hired guns, about his brother's rewarded criminality, about the drug murders just reported. From a remote part of his orphaned childhood, he easily recalled a verse from Revelations: the fall of the Great Babylon. The city haunted by demons and unclean spirits. All kinds of filthy and hateful birds nesting in her.
The bleak walls pressed i
n on him. He sensed the decay of his life and adoptive country. Any future a fractured afterlife. A manful part of him wanted to jump up and comb the streets and late-night bars for the likes of Manuela, Candy and the frizzy-haired girl in the short black dress who'd stood near his table in the nightclub. He needed the release only flesh afforded. But as he shored up the courage to embark on such a quest, he became slumberous and relinquished his hold on the day. The Bible slipping from his hand and landing skew-whiff on the floor.
He grabbed her waist. She groaned and pushed down on him, savouring the ecstasy of the moment. He pulled her toward him and the warm wetness of her mouth excited him further. She sat back up and arched her back, his hands fondling her breasts.Their writhing had pushed aside the bed covers, and the light of several votive candles made for a pleasing ambience. Goldman looked into the large oval mirror mounted above the bed. Michelle writhed on top of him, her shaking buttocks accentuated by candlelight. The reflected image filled him with a burning need. He rolled on top and pushed her toward the head of the bed, pressing her lithe form into the pillows. She looped her legs about him and clawed his shoulders and tossed her head from side to side. Then she gasped and shrieked as if in death throes. Her body shook uncontrollably. Her bird-like cries pierced the early morning quiet. Goldman shuddered with abandon and joined her. And for a blinding unaccountable moment they discarded the cumbersome world of separate bodies ... They cuddled and kissed and laughed, wanting to prolong the thrilling new energy between them. Goldman glanced at his spent body in the overhead mirror and looked about the room, hardly believing how far down the candles had melted. Michelle re-propped pillows before lighting a much-needed cigarette. She nestled against him and both were suffused with the incomparable bliss of new lovers.
Pilar Artarmon cried out as her husband gripped her from behind. He mashed her buttocks with iron-like thrusts. She couldn't recall Stephen being so brutal, not while sober. Such domination was usually reserved for those rare times when he would consume a hard man's share of liquor, the fire in his loins equating his willful consumption. He's definitely worked up over something, she thought from the back of her mind. Maybe that work issue with Scott Goldman. Her honey-brown torso jerked back and forth as Stephen bore down on her like a merciless automaton. She gritted her teeth and countered his thrusts. His rising breaths spoke of conclusion, exciting her further, and he soon lost his will to the extracting grip of her shaved mound. He clasped her narrow waist and drove her toward the top end of the brass bed. She grasped a shiny rail for support as he pulled out of her and pressed down on her tail bone to right himself.
Pilar gulped down air. Her heart thudded against her ribs, her ass cheeks sore from where Stephen had kneaded them. Strands of hair lined her cheeks and a filmy juice stringed her thighs. She wheeled about and dropped onto the bed. Before long worldly concerns claimed her attention. Namely the appointment with Terence Cruise the following morning. The privileged Filipino was hopeful some high-quality cocaine was coming her way. Memory of cocaine-enhanced sex with Stephen washed over her in tantalizing waves (how more considerate of her needs he'd been back then). She gasped as Stephen pushed back into her. He probed her warm banks, squeezed her dark rubbery nipples.
She stared at the lamp-lit ceiling and relived the cloying sterility of Dr. Porter's room. The nondescript walls, the metal-framed desk, the strip of overhead light beating down on her brow as she struggled to digest the test results. As yet she hadn't told her husband about the bud of life growing inside her. She'd placated any concern about not telling him with the notion she was waiting for the crowning moment to surprise him with the delight of her condition. A spontaneity that had thus far eluded her. Stephen had been sullen on the way to Dr. Porter's, and had hardly improved since. She'd lived with her husband long enough to know his moods weren't long lasting, that he never woke up in the same state. Still she couldn't delay it any longer. She would tell him in the morning.
Stephen withdrew from her, pecked her cheek, and headed for the bathroom. She toyed with her breasts as he urinated in the bowl. He returned to bed, and after stumbling moments of pillow talk, fell into a snoring slumber. She sensed much that was unspoken between them as she brought herself to orgasm. She sighed, fluffed her pillow and like her husband was soon taken by a blanketing sleep.
Carmen Michaels Costa watched a late-night music show on television. She fidgeted and squirmed, struggling to keep the ravaging demands of her addiction at bay. She tried to focus on a black and white video of a New Romantic band. Banal drumming and soporific keyboarding swam about her ears like the incessant bickering of nocturnal birds. The name of the band lit up the bottom of the music clip, which depicted a misty grey meadow and a girl in a long dark cape.
Astrophane.
Hmm, she remembered sharing drinks with the keyboard-dominated outfit after a gig one night at the ultra-chic Blitz Club in London? Or had it been at that dreadful electronica club in Berlin?
Oh, what did she care? She shifted in her eighteenth-century seat and felt the likes of acupuncture needles being inserted between her vertebrae (her drug addiction having stripped natural stores of dopamine from her brain's dopaminergic system).
The Russell Mulcahy-made video ended. She swallowed a mouthful of cola and rubbed her feet on the edge of the coffee table, hardly admiring her silver anklet from Morroco or the tattooed initials of her fiance on her ankle. Paulo Jr ... so far across the waters and from her present condition.
God, dare I go? ventured her racy mind. A Black Roses video started on the television, highlighting Brian Duran's trademark vocals. Memories of her recent time with the band should have surfaced, but failed to. Her attention was elsewhere, riveted on one thing only.
Dare she go?
No, she wasn't that far gone, at least not yet. Pride. She still had a lot of it. It counselled retreat from the premise, however inviting, of climbing into her BMW and driving nonstop to Cruise's DC apartment. Calling at this hour would certainly send the wrong signal. Very likely Cruise would bring out his glass pipe and tempt her to freebase with him, giving her as much as she liked in the hope she might open her legs to his fine but insistent advance. God knew he had tried it before.
Damn. Why hadn't she set up an alternate source of supply? But she knew why. She'd worked her butt to the bone, and with recent time off had partied hard, blowing off steam like never before. One day of partying had led to another, then another, and she hadn't given much thought to replenishing what she would need once her partying high came crashing back to earth ... like it had now.
Well, here she was at a rock bottom that made all others seem like a simulacrum of the real thing. Groan, groan, just deal with it. It's not called the Devil's Dandruff for nothing. But behind her tin foil bravado, she was scared. Cold turkey wasn't an option. No way. She had to get more of the accursed stuff. So she could ease herself off it on her own terms. Take her time and have a smooth landing ...
She made soldierly plans. Tomorrow morning she'd go to Cruise's apartment at a time that wouldn't betray the extent of her need. She would take whatever he had off his hands – well, much of it, anyway. She'd tell him it was for a rich, out-of-town friend, a producer from the west coast. That would work. She swallowed the last of her Diet Coke and thought about Michelle. Terence would certainly ask about her, what with the couple having had a doozy of a fight. Carmen would tell him about Michelle's transgression, about the woeful Australian she'd picked up from the side of the road. You bet. Little blond 'chelly deserved it after all. She'd really got under Carmen's skin this time. Dumb little floozy.
The Nicaraguan model singlehandedly crushed her drink can. However corrupt, she was still spirited. An old Bob Dylan song started on the TV. Scratchy black and white footage of the young folksinger blowing on his harmonica. His jangling backwoods vocals put her on edge and she threw the crumpled can at the screen, scoring a direct head shot. She gritted her teeth and had to stop herself from kicking everything off the c
offee table.
Yes, morning was still a long way off.
General Turner sat in the panelled study of his Bethesda home. He glanced at a faux eighteenth-century clock at the back of his desk (his wife Betty had bought the timepiece in Marseilles while on tour of the Continent the previous year). Its gilded hands moved ever closer to one a.m. Turner fingered a glass of Chivas Regal and was glum, partly because Betty hadn't returned from the Olsens' dinner party. It wasn't like his wife to keep such hours, but then again it was usually Turner who insisted on not making too late a night of it.
And what a night it had been.
Goldman and Haslow had escaped, were sequestered somewhere in the shadowy labyrinth of streets crisscrossing the eastern seaboard. How had it happened? The general drained his scotch. Put the glass down heavily on the desk.
Goldman.
Anger rose in him like a bubbling skein of lava. In another part of him, though, respect had taken root. The Australian chemist had proved worthy prey. He'd beaten Armstrong and his associate, only to escape from his apartment. Turner pressed his throbbing temples and wished the bothersome chemist dead. Still instinct that had seen him through the ups-and-downs of his long-spanning career warned him he better resolve the issue, or else.
In any event, the game was far from over. Many pieces remained on the board. Formidable stores were yet to be employed. He would have his country's enforcement agencies hounding the Silverwood chemists as if they were the greatest threat to national security since Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy's perceived army of communist infiltrators in the early fifties.