Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  “I take it you know about Molly?” Something I had picked up in his voice; the way he anticipated the sharp effect this revelation would have on me. There was a pause—which I took for an answer. I hadn’t yet caught up to the fact that I was talking to Lamzaki, was nowhere near absorbing the totality of the news about Sula. Now I was adding even more complications with my spying allegations. “No doubt you have had me investigated.” My voice didn’t obey instructions. I had asked for firm, got the opposite.

  “It was satisfactory.”

  “How can that be? Didn’t your people tell you about the drugs, the girls, the—I don’t know—other stuff?”

  “You were arrested twice, for causing a riot, also for assaulting a photographer. But I am confused now, which side am I arguing and which one are you?” He laughed easily. I understood he was in charm mode. It could only be to put me off my guard. “You went home to San Francisco for Christmas. I had a bet that you would sleep with your Japanese girlfriend.”

  “A bet! With Sula?”

  “With myself. Call it your test.”

  He wanted me angry; that gave him an advantage. I tried to fight that down.

  He anticipated me. “Please. I apologize that I have had such investigations about you. It is not such a good thing to go through. I speak from considerable experience. You must understand how hard Sula has fought. She has used up a great lake of mental energy. She is like a cat with only one life remaining. My instinct is she has only one chance for happiness with a man. She needs to get this right. So, there are my cards on the table.” So easy, natural. I tried not to like the man.

  “This doesn’t make sense. You can’t be okay with this. I mean, even I think she can do better.” I paused for a gulp. “Better than me.”

  “You are trying to have me argue from your side—again?” He laughed. There was a flicker of a sense of getting on, of respect. He couldn’t be that good.

  “I only say this: a theory must be tested. We make our hypothesis, that you are right man for my daughter. Now we must test it. I am not a scientist but I have watched my daughter. We leave emotion out of our challenges. We remain open-minded…” He paused now, building the tension.

  “But?” I said, for surely that was coming, as was my anger. That could only be postponed so long.

  “Our theory needs to be tested with rigor. We must try everything at our disposal to disprove it. Please, do not see this as negative. If the hypothesis is correct, it will not be capable to be disproved.”

  I said, “Let’s say our hypothesis is that the world is a good place.” I held that for a long second. “We test that by providing everyone with guns?”

  “You need time with what I have told you.” He sounded natural, not at all prodded by my arms-trading allusion. “I must go now. Good-bye.”

  I sat in my pillowed leather chair, trying to absorb too many things at once. Lamzaki was so smooth and multi-dimensional; me, the opposite. I had never got over my complete surprise at his call, conversing with the great Lamzaki; its timing, on hold in a corporate conference room. It was as if I was playing Hamlet and I got a call from Shakespeare with a few pithy comments about Ophelia.

  Okay, I would permit myself a brief glimpse of Sula. Her collision rang in my head. I tried on for size the possibility that Lamzaki was making this up. No. Those micro-blank looks she could get. Her left arm, never active. The way she always liked to be on my left side when we walked. Part of me had known her weaknesses. Known but looked away. It was there if I had chosen to see it.

  I sat there, frozen. My next step was obvious; to get out of there, let the cold, wet air take the heat out of my face. I was slowed by a heavy lethargy.

  I tried to steady myself with the facts on that whiteboard. Damn, that feeling of familiarity was still there. That couldn’t be possible; it was totally corporate. Company names, amounts and percentages. Maybe some familiar string of numbers? More likely this was turning into a hallucination.

  “Are you okay?” The receptionist was standing in the door. I explained with a smile I’d had some bad news.

  “Mr. Ravenhall has been detained at a board meeting. He’s very sorry but we’ll have to reschedule.” She paused. “They rarely last this long.”

  I gave her a probably-for-the-best smile, if it had enough wattage to call it that.

  “Take your time,” she said. I rode her smile to my feet, gathered up my things, paused for one last look at that whiteboard and, bing, I had it: that handwriting was the same as the note in Claudia’s Barcelona travel guide. “Gentle lashes my ass!”

  I plopped down again. I stared at that whiteboard. How many samples of English handwriting had I seen in my life, not counting the autographs in the British Library? Was it possible that all handwriting here was uniform, a rigid conformity imposed on all citizens by a Dickensian regime of rulers across knuckles and thin gruel in cold rooms? I was strangely confident though.

  Out on the street, a complex wave of self-pity washed over me about Sula. I felt bitter, cheated, sold a bill of goods. The car with bent chassis that will never track straight again. I felt guilty that I should think so harshly, commercially, about her. I felt a huge surge of protectiveness over her. I felt even more protective of Molly, her memory, as if this story had shouldered its way into hers. I felt proud of Sula, her fight, her strength. I felt as if a veil had been lifted: the cause of Sula’s defiance, her reticence to talk about her early years. She was an ancient vase that had been sharded, then reassembled, so perfect that you were immediately lost in its line, its sweep. Yes, all of that. Even more: why me? Is someone up there playing with me? A someone I didn’t even believe in?

  I struggled for sense, for equanimity. I just had to keep those stories separate. Molly’s. Sula’s. Then I could struggle forward. Different cars, years, continents, victims, I told myself. Different stories, driver and driven. Yes, that’s better, driver and driven.

  I wandered around Mayfair, trying to regain some mental balance. I exchanged text messages with Sula, arranged to meet her at the same patisserie chain we’d been to in December. I got there first, which gave me time to remember the last time, just after Mr. Hardcastle’s stroke. So the theme of this cliché place was medical hardship. Sula sailed in—she had a talent for entering a room. I watched her take in and adjust to an unexpectedly serious version of me. This was a mistake, I realized. We needed somewhere more private to discuss something so sensitive. I suggested a walk, only to discover the rain had picked up in the last few minutes. We went back to our table.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I stalled by getting our drinks first; a coffee for me, green tea for the lady, and a tarte au citron to share, leaving Sula to adjust to the fact that I had news.

  “Your father called. He told me…‌what happened. ” I couldn’t look at her as I went into that conversation. My voice could have been steadier.

  She was silent for some time. Not with her eyes, which were on mine, disturbingly intense, a full and all-out marshaling of her resources. I wanted to go to her but her eyes fought me off. Possibly she had practiced this story many times, been on the verge of telling me. All I remember was being taken aback by the fierceness in her eyes. I think I understood. What I was seeing was her pure, unadulterated will to persist. I was yet another obstacle, or would be if I reacted negatively. This was her chance to know how alone her future would be; it was exactly why she had held back with me. You wait; you build up to the right time; somehow you cross an invisible line. It’s too late. Now she would find out whether this humiliating invasion of her privacy was worth the risk she had never been able to take.

  “Jim.” She held my eyes for a long, uncomfortable time. “I am a normal person.”

  No, you are not normal; everything about you is wildly extravagant. I looked at her thick black hair, sharp, quick eyes, another new frown. It was on me to say something now, make everything right, true between us. Words. The nuances and connot
ations, modified for her less than comfortable English. What’s not said. If she could talk with her eyes there were other eloquent non-verbal things I could do. I took her hands in mine, looked to her. She was okay with the hands part, but wouldn’t meet my eyes now. She needed time; I needed the same.

  “It is good that you talk. You must understand he allows you to have me only because he believes it won’t work. My tears will water his shoulder. He will pat my back. He will smile and think, see, I have allowed her to try her little freedom experiment.”

  For a mad second I held a competition; which part of that statement made me angrier. In one corner we have “he allows you to have me.” In the other “we won’t work out.” Well, what about “little freedom experiment”?

  “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “You know my father better than I do? My father plays to win, always. He is like a cat; he is letting you run away for now.”

  She was quiet. Her live green eyes inward, her right hand playing with a strand of her black hair.

  “Jim?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it is better for me to go.”

  I nodded emptily. She understood that I needed time. I understood the same about her. The vibe between us was still good, but there was too much noise in the background. There were times when Sula looked so impossibly foreign that it didn’t seem possible she was my girl. My quest for her was always about getting everything right to keep her from bubbling back into potential. Always the low flame, the slow pace, the quiet, mundane venues. I told myself there would be time.

  I immediately set about contradicting that. Under the awning outside I pulled her to me; kissing is a conversation that excuses the eyes. I tried for a chain reaction of passion, red-hot, core-melting, all melting. Sula met me with measured ardor, gentle, committed, yet well short of any meltdown. Yeah, now was not the right time.

  The downpour had let up by now. We walked in the cold, late afternoon drizzle, talking quietly, heading vaguely east back towards Mayfair, her hotel. As usual she had my left arm. Now I was only too aware of why. Sula filled me in on her struggle back to normality. The severe pain in her head, her amnesia, the way she had to relearn many things. Words were a particular challenge. I was so focused on her story, on that husky, low, pane-rattling voice, focused with that overheated sense of importance not unlike the adrenalin of being trapped, that we may as well have been walking in Pittsburgh.

  We waited at a bus stop in Knightsbridge. We were heading the same direction. We would do this separately.

  I tightened my pull on her, standing under the bus shelter. “Sula is normal,” I said.

  “Yes, normal.” A hint of a smile. I gave her a good-bye kiss as the bus pulled up, a reaffirmation of our contract. Then she got on the bus. Usually she would wave to me. Not this time.

  CHAPTER 17

  My phone rang early the next morning, a Tuesday, waking me. “How is that song coming along?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “Song?” I mumbled, trying to wake up. It had been a rough night. I had stayed up late, anticipating the thrashing sleeplessness at the memory of Sula, the promise of intimacy shoved away by an intimate truth, enough contradiction to fire my imagination all night. Finally I had fallen into that deep catch-up sleep in the small hours before dawn. I was nearly comatose when my cell phone rang.

  “The funeral will be on Monday.” It was Bette, the manager of Sunnydown Hills.

  Hardcastle, gone; my sleep-addled brain could only get that far. First the left jab about Sula’s brain trauma, now the right hook. I walked up to my cafe on Swain’s Lane thinking about the sharp and final arc of that death. I thought too, now that I had an espresso in me, about the power that man held over me. Another death, one more in a painful accumulation of deaths. There was something Lear-like about the man, some primal story of a leader, now not leading, of a gaping emptiness for which we have no natural successor. Well, there had been. Kirk.

  It was a long six days until the funeral. I met Sula a few times for chaste coffees. I wanted her to come to the funeral with me; she was thinking about it. All was on hold until that funeral was out of the way.

  Meanwhile, my case needed a new angle. There was one lead I hadn’t followed up. Wormsleigh had mentioned Lord Buchan. He had dated Claudia outside NE1 and been tossed out. I tried Neeta, the NE1 scheduler, on that. No, she said, the police had given him their full attention, payback for his multifarious nefarious activities to do with under-age girls and drugs. They had gone as far as sniffer dogs, she’d said. They found nothing. I couldn’t imagine finding anything the police had missed.

  All the NE1 players were still around; none had disappeared with Claudia. One of them, like Ravenhall, could have murdered her locally. I had done just about enough to convince myself that Claudia had gone off somewhere. From what I knew about her, any bad end would most likely result from passion gone wrong. If she was murdered in her flat, how could her assailant remove the body unseen, leave no clues? And leave her flat so “managed,” so equivocal as to whether she had run off or been run through? Could a murderer wash 4B clean of clues after what was likely a hot-blooded act? Coolly going through an inventory of what and what not to leave behind? What did I know about the psychology of murderers?

  In the days leading up to the funeral, I tried to work up enough enthusiasm to journey up to Oxford and see Dr. Catherine Drysdale about what Francine’s treatment called the Vial. It had to have come from her. I kept putting it off. I’d taken too many hits recently, deaths, disappearances, revelations about Sula. Also, a sixth sense told me I wasn’t ready yet, had not fully processed recent developments.

  My working theory was that Lyubanov, the former Russian spy, had been romantically tied to Claudia back in 1995. He got his hooks into her but good. Claudia either went to her client/friend Francine, or the subject came up in one of their meetings. Francine would probably know about Lyubanov—or, if not, could easily find out. She would have warned Claudia, and eventually gone much further to help her, recruiting Hardcastle to the cause.

  Presumably Lyubanov was after her money. Was it possible that Lyubanov was so smooth the police wouldn’t be able to connect him to Claudia? What kind of pressure could he put on her that she had to go all the way to Hardcastle for help?

  By some stroke of bad timing I was going to Paris the weekend before the funeral. Two weeks ago I had arranged to visit my college pal Bill, a roommate from my sophomore year. Back then, he was a curly-haired surfer, complete with microbus and some pleasant girl or other riding shotgun. Now he was a corporate lawyer who had moved up the ladder from San Francisco to New York, now to Paris. Those faraway, light blue eyes, scanning the near horizon for a looming swell, now on the fine print. How did that work?

  ***

  Natalie arrived at 11:30 on the morning of the funeral. I’m not sure why she rang the intercom rather than calling. I came down to find her dressed darkly in black; overcoat, blazer, what there was of a skirt. She tottered in high heels and overly-revealed coltish legs. Worse, she’d gone to town on her face; blush, eye shadow, red-black lipstick. Fine, I’ll roll into the crematorium with a girl-hooker on my arm. Let ‘em talk.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea? After your mom and all.” As if she was going to back out now that we were rolling south to the funeral. There, you see, I’m pretending to undo my pathetic co-opting of a schoolgirl (for school is where she should be).

  Natalie was in one of her ebullient moods. Laughing, teasing, goofy. “I don’t know this man.”

  “Still, it’s a funeral.”

  Sula had decided not to come with me. She wanted to, tried to talk herself into it, but in the end her honesty prevailed. She didn’t like funerals; they spooked her. She had, after all, once been nearly dead herself—not something you can push out of the way. I was angry with her. Logically, I didn’t blame her. Feelings, though, are not driven by logic.

  Natalie called me
when I was in Paris, and neatly offered to fill the Sula role, sensing an advantage, going as far as scheduling Frank to take us there and back. That way I’d owe her favors. Buy her an ice cream; help her with her math; find her mother.

  The services were backlogged. Already the early birds for the one after Hardcastle’s were assembling. This did not improve my already dark mood. This factory line of commemorative services, each so different, yet all the same. Our service had attracted an intent throng of civil servants. There was a logjam at the entrance. I was playing an instrumental piece at the service so would have to try to wedge both Estelle and me through the clogged-up entrance. Natalie, still in charge, got the manager. We followed his feminine waddle around the back, my guitar case our ticket to special treatment. We came in past the rollers that fed the fire. Man, I didn’t need that. They reminded me of a shipping and receiving job I had in high school. Other darker things.

  We suffered through the reception back at Sunnydown Hills. I was down all right. Hardcastle, those rollers, the delayed service, that annoying next crowd pressing up against us. Deeper, the revelations about Sula, how she had been laid out on those rollers, how that connected so fundamentally to Molly. Then there was Kirk, not only his death but how he and I were connected to suicides, to riot deaths. Add a mild case of cultural vertigo, this British ceremony with cakes and tea, songs from their earlier era, falling back on a shared culture I did not share.

  On the ride back Natalie left me alone. She had that feminine sense of tone and mood. She also had that young restlessness that was bound to prevail. Finally, she joined me in the back, plunging headfirst over her seat in a misguided mosh pit maneuver, one inadvisable in a miniskirt.

  “Mum. I keep wondering what it would have been like.”

  “Huh?” I was in a reverie, one full of black clouds.

  “If she had a funeral. What I mean is, is it better to know, or is it better to have hope?”

  I knew what she was doing, deflecting the story away from me, not for selfish reasons. With Natalie there was a generosity of spirit.