Death and Other Lovers

by Jo Bannister

  Todd phoned Shimoni. When she asked why he was whispering he told her. There was a momentary pause. Then she said, “Gil, I’m so glad,” and he had no doubt she meant it.

  He thought probably he ought to call Donnelly too, but decided that could wait. Until he got some rest Flynn would not make enough sense to be worth talking to, and it was hard to see what he might have to say that would urgently affect the police investigation. First thing in the morning was time enough. If Flynn would sleep slumped in the chair, Todd could contain his own curiosity until then.

  But the click of the phone, or possibly Todd’s eyes on him, reached Flynn where he slumbered and Todd watched him struggle awake. His face creased up along the lines that had always been there when he grinned but some time in the last three years had become permanent. The discoloured skin around his eyes contracted in a frown and the meter of his breathing changed, roughening. Then he grunted, blinked his eyes open and was back. “Oh, hello.”

  Todd smiled. “Who were you expecting—Obregon?”

  Flynn’s eyes flinched at the name. But he said, “It wasn’t him, Gil. The plane. Maxine Faber was carrying crack, not a bomb.”

  “What happened?”

  Flynn told him—about waiting, and then the party. About what he had said to Obregon, and what Obregon had done to him. Very faintly he grinned. “The bastard smashed my camera-hand with a snooker cue. Mustn’t know photographers are ambidextrous.”

  Todd scrutinised the plaster. “Will it be all right?”

  “Oh yeah, should be.” He was not using any more words than he had to. That, and the drawl that was almost a slur, betrayed the tiredness even more than his eyes. “Got it set in Bogotá. I’ll have it X-rayed some time.”

  “And Obregon—denied it? The plane, I mean?”

  Flynn twitched half a grin. “Yeah, sort of. He broke my hand instead of my neck.” He explained. “Apparently, speculation that he was responsible for bombing a passenger jet is damaging his good name. If he killed me, nobody’d believe he hadn’t tried it before. I reckon he hoped that if he let me go whoever it was would try again and let him off the hook.”

  “You believed him?”

  Flynn had considered the possibility that Obregon had been lying. He could have been. But instinctively, at gut level, Flynn knew it was the truth—if for no better reason than the one Obregon gave when Flynn asked why he should believe a man of so few principles. This was when he was back on the snooker room floor, hunched over his knees and sweating, talking to keep his mind off the strapping the man was now calmly applying to his hand. Obregon had replied simply, “Because it doesn’t matter to me whether you believe me or not.”

  “It’s the truth, all right. He knew nothing about it, either the plane or the apartment.”

  “Neither did Loriston,” said Todd. “He was the only one of your four that I knew how to find, so I thought I’d go and see him while I was waiting to hear from you. Donnelly wanted my eyeballs on cocktail sticks, but actually Loriston had nothing to tell either of us. It was news to him that you were involved. But he sent you a message. He said, if he comes after you it’ll be pistols at dawn, not a knife in the back.”

  Flynn regarded his plastered right hand. “Somehow, that’s not as reassuring as it might be.”

  Todd smiled. “Go to bed, Mickey.”

  “Tell you what,” said Flynn, climbing laboriously out of the chair. “I’ll go to bed.”

  In the morning, when twelve hours’ sleep had wiped about ten years off Flynn’s face, Todd took him to see Donnelly, then took him to see a doctor.

  Donnelly listened to his story without interrupting, almost without expression, and at the end had no questions and only one observation. “If you’re going to go on behaving like this, you and the Boy Wonder there”—he meant Todd, who could have won prizes for the least probable sight in tights—“it’s only a matter of time before whoever started this finishes the job, or someone else finishes it for him.”

  Flynn smiled at him quite strangely: not his manic grin that made people cross the street, nor his rare gentle smile that made those who thought they knew him think again, but a variant Todd had not seen before and which rather disturbed him. There was a remoteness about it that was not native to Flynn, a kind of indolence, a cynicism, like a man becoming a satire on himself.

  He drawled, “That’s what I thought. The first time—the fire? Then again when the plane crashed. Even when I went up against Obregon I was still thinking it—you know, that this had to be the time, the luck had to have run out by now. But it hadn’t.

  “You want to know what I think now? I don’t think it matters if they come after me with flame-throwers. I think if they drop a nuclear bomb on London, it’ll turn out there’s just one safe place to be standing and I’m standing there: I think if they try to hang me the rope will break, and if they throw me off a tall building there’ll be a lorry delivering interior spring mattresses stuck in traffic below.

  “I think, Superintendent, that I have one of these charmed lives you hear about. People around me drop like flies; buildings burn, planes crash, megalomaniacs grind their heels in a myriad faces, but none of it quite touches me. Somehow all I get is the backwash. Even when I go to sup with the devil, somehow the old guy’s got reasons of his own for supplying long spoons.

  “So don’t worry about me, Superintendent. My life is charmed. Somebody up there likes me. Or else somebody down there is playing silly buggers.” The smile glittered like sunlight on a glacier.

  The hospital X-rayed Flynn’s hand and the doctor studied the results with much lip-pursing and sucking of teeth. Then he admitted the unpalatable truth: that he could not have made a much better job of it himself. He expected the broken bones to knit strongly enough, and though the hand might remain a little misshapen its function should be substantially unimpaired. Lacking a good excuse to intervene in any other way, he shoved a cocktail of assorted antibiotics into Flynn via a hypodermic needle that reminded him of the Alaska pipeline.

  When they returned to Todd’s flat, the first thing Flynn did was try the answering machine. But there was still no message from Laura Wade.

  He could not understand it. “She should have called by now. She was going to call you as soon as she was settled, leave an address for me. She’s got to have found some place by now.”

  Todd had never more than half expected her to contact him and no longer expected it at all. He had hoped Flynn might realise why, but emotion was still clouding his thinking on the subject. Todd sighed. “Mickey, I don’t think she’s going to call. You can’t blame her: not everyone can live the way you do. Somebody tried to kill her, for no better reason than that she was your friend. That must have terrified her—I mean, normal people get really frightened about things like that. I expect she meant to call, but—well, when she found some-where she felt safe, you can’t blame her for not wanting to reopen the episode.”

  Flynn was staring at him. “She wanted to come with me.”

  “Of course she did. I’m sure she felt about you the way you feel about her. But—hell, Mickey, I’m sorry—you must have seemed like a dangerous addiction that could get her killed. Getting you out of her system was a matter of life and death to her.”

  He could see Flynn thinking about it. Then he said, “She might at least have checked to see if I was all right.” If he sounded a little hurt, he was already growing philosophical.

  “It may not have occurred to her you were on that flight. Or maybe it did and she checked with the emergency number.”

  “My name was on the first list they gave out.”

  “So maybe she didn’t call till later.” Or maybe she called right away and was told Flynn was among the dead, and that was why she never contacted Todd: she thought there was no point. Both of them were thinking it; neither of them gave it words. She thought he was dead, and it would take a coincidence of cosmic proportions for Flynn to find her again.

  “You don’t reckon whoever d
id this—Fahad, Wylie, whoever—has—?”

  “Found her? No. I don’t think he’d be interested in her after you split up. And if she had come to any harm, Donnelly would have heard.”

  Flynn nodded slowly, coming to terms with his loss. “I wish you could have seen her, Gil. She was something.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  At the end of the tape there was a message for Flynn, but it was not from Laura or anyone he wanted to talk to. His face screwed up in dismay. “Oh Jeez no—not him, not again!”

  “Who?” Todd had stopped listening when he realised the message was not for him. Now he came and listened again.

  A man’s voice was saying, “—to hear about the fire at your place. Hope no-one was hurt. Got this number from a policeman. Don’t even know if you’ll be able to help now.

  “Thing is, could really use another copy of that picture of Dr. Hehn. You must think we eat the things. Thing is, he’s giving a lecture in Geneva next month—big thing, quite an honour—wants to send them a copy of your picture for the programme. We’d lend them ours but you know what the post’s like, wouldn’t like to lose it. So—any chance? Be awfully grateful if you could oblige.”

  “What the hell”, said Todd when the tape finished, “was that?”

  “That”, said Flynn, “was our Mr. Spalding from Deering Pharmaceuticals. Our Mr. Spalding handles public relations for the great Dr. Dieter Hehn, prize-winning chemist, incipient deity and narcissist of the first order. I’ve made so many prints of that bloody photograph, I thought they were papering the bloody building with them.”

  Todd remembered seeing the picture and being surprised by the byline. “Hardly your usual line of work, is it—beaming portraits of scientific genii?”

  Flynn looked sheepish. “It wasn’t him I went there to photograph. I wanted the use of their roof, that was all—it overlooks the river.”

  He had picked up word, at the last possible moment, of a police operation in the London river. A River Police launch with officers of the Drug Squad on board was moving to intercept a yacht heading upstream on a passage from Jersey where she had been moored alongside a powerboat out of Rotterdam. There was no time for him to organise river transport of his own, so he stuffed his biggest telephoto lens in his biggest pocket and looked for a high building with views to the river.

  “They were very accommodating. I had half the top floor watching with me, they got quite upset when it looked the action was going to take place up-river. Then the police launch made its move and they all cheered.”

  Then as he was leaving there had been more sounds of jubilation lower down the building, and Mr. Spalding had ambushed him at the lift with news that their Dr. Hehn had just been notified as the winner of the prestigious Sondheim Prize for chemistry. After the assistance he had received it seemed churlish to leave without taking photographs of the happy chemist posed, all twinkling eyes and dentures, beside the blackboard in his laboratory. Also, of course, he had a market for the picture.

  But ever since then Mr. Spalding had been calling at intervals looking for extra prints. Flynn did not feel he could refuse and made him some. Then he made him some more. Then, after a brief respite, he made him another one. By now even Mr. Spalding was getting a little embarrassed and offered to buy the negative; Flynn refused on principle, but that meant printing some more enlargements of the beaming Dr. Hehn. If the negative had not been destroyed in the wreck of Flight 98 Flynn might have been reduced to burning it himself to get Deerings’Mr. Spalding off his back.

  The idea of Flynn, whose career had been built on brilliant, dangerous photographs that he had often risked his life to obtain and occasionally risked again to publish, disturbing images that held readers spellbound for a week and later cropped up in textbooks, being haunted to despair by the expensively educated tones of a public relations executive over a jolly snapshot he took as a favour amused Todd. It was a welcome interlude in the grim reality of the past week.

  He said, “You could always go round and take another photo of his chemist.”

  Flynn’s glance was eloquent. He knew Todd was laughing at him; any other time he would have joined in. “No. I shall call him, now. I shall tell him the negative was destroyed. I shall tell him all my equipment was destroyed. I shall tell him my camera-hand is in plaster. I shall give him the number of Aiden McNally, who will photograph anything for anyone as long as the price is right. After that, if I hear from him again, I shall go and kick in the headlights of his BMW.”

  Mr. Spalding was fulsome in his apologies for bothering Flynn yet again, horrified to learn what had happened to his darkroom and his negatives, and grateful for McNally’s number. He hoped Flynn would feel free to use Deerings’roof any time that suited him. Flynn did not say so, but he had already decided that if he had to pass within a hundred yards of Deerings’front door again he would wear dark glasses and a false moustache.

  “Are you going on with this?” asked Todd.

  Flynn knew what he meant. “Yes.”

  He expected an argument, a reiteration of Donnelly’s views couched in less formal language. He was mistaken. “Can I help?”

  Flynn avoided looking at him. He did not want Todd to see how grateful he was for the offer, how little persuading he would need to accept it. “No. Thanks.”

  “I could watch your back.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “So what the hell is this,” growled Todd, “an investigation or a crusade?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Flynn, who knew exactly what he meant.

  “You don’t want justice for the two hundred and twenty people who died on Flight 98. It’s more personal than that. You want revenge on whoever tried to kill you, and cost you your girlfriend. You don’t want any help because you want to take him on and beat him at his own game. Just you and him: duelling, like Loriston said. You’re crazy.”

  “Why?” Flynn rounded on him. “Why crazy? If it’s the only way I can get him? The police would have found him by now if they were going to. I don’t think the police, anybody’s police, are capable of dealing with people like Fahad, like Wylie.”

  “And you think you can?”

  “Yes, maybe. I’ve as good a chance of finding them and a better chance of getting to them.”

  “Then what?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. I’m playing by ear.”

  “Mickey, one of those two men probably killed two hundred and twenty people in an attempt to kill you. All right, you confronted Obregon and got away with it—because Obregon didn’t do it and in his own peculiar way he has a certain position to uphold. I got away with talking to Loriston on the same basis—he was always the least likely suspect and anyway what could he do in his own club in the middle of London?

  “The same won’t apply when you find the other two. One’s a mercenary, the other a terrorist—both by definition operate outside the law of any country. Both are wanted men in large parts of the world. Killing you would cost them nothing, not even sleep. Suppose one of them says, ‘Yes, it was me.’ What will you do then?”

  “I keep telling you, I don’t know!” Flynn heard himself shouting and stopped, and shoved his good hand so deep into his trouser pocket he could have pulled his sock up. The plastered one would not fit and hung round awkwardly like an embarrassing relative. He went on more quietly, “Gil, I don’t have any answers. I know that somehow this thing is about me, and that’s all I know. Fahad’s involved in it, Laura saw him, but I don’t know how deeply. Oh, I can see him burning me out; I can see him burning the apartment with me and maybe even Laura in it. I wouldn’t have said he was a vindictive man but there are no gentle terrorists and he’s probably killed people who’ve done him less harm.

  “But the plane? I don’t know. I can’t see him doing that. Maybe, if it was an El Al flight. But that plane was carrying British and U.S. nationals, and the Palestinians are doing all they can to round up support in Britain and the States. It’s only
opinion in London and Washington that’s stopped Israel dealing with the intifada as the hawks in the Knesset would like. I can’t see Fahad wanting, or being allowed, to jeopardise Anglo-American sympathy for the Palestinians. Not now, not when they’re getting somewhere.”

  Todd said slowly, “I know what it looks like—what it’s looked like all along—but do you think we could have read this wrong? That the fire was Fahad, but the plane wasn’t him or anyone else after your blood? I mean, I’m not a great believer in coincidence, but in a way it would make more sense if the two things weren’t connected—if the bomb on the plane had nothing to do with you.”

  Flynn whispered, “I thought of that.” He would have given everything he owned, and everything he could borrow, to believe it. The two hundred and twenty people on Flight 98 would still be dead, but no longer for him. It would not affect the grief he felt—still felt, though the practicalities of living one day after another had buried it and begun to grass it over—but it would lift the guilt from him. “You think it’s possible? I don’t think it’s possible. Do you?”

  Todd spread large hands in a helpless gesture. “Mickey, I just don’t know. None of it makes any sense. Perhaps coincidence is as good a theory as conspiracy. But listen, if that bomb wasn’t meant for you, it’s even crazier for you to go round renewing old quarrels with people who once wanted you dead. One of them may be unable to resist the temptation, even if he knows no more about Flight 98 than we do. You could die for something as pointless as scratching open an old wound.”

  “Pointless?” echoed Flynn. Something akin to hope was beginning to flicker like candlelight in his eyes. “Gil, you don’t understand. If Wylie didn’t do it, and if Fahad did the apartment but not the plane, that lets me off the hook. It means it wasn’t me all those people died for. Jeez, Gil, think about that.”