The pain she had suffered must have been unbearable – for the first few minutes, anyhow. But by now most of her nerve endings must have burned away, so she was feeling hardly anything at all. She looked ecstatic – beatific, even – as if this was something she had always wanted.
Jim stayed where he was, watching her. The last of her blood hurriedly boiled away, with a snap and a crackle and a pippety-pop-pip. Then, as the remaining fats of her body flared up, she actually sizzled, with the same sound as a hamburger patty on a hotplate. The flames that were crawling all over her body gradually jumped up higher and higher until they completely engulfed her head. A strong warm draft was drawn in through the doorway and it warbled and moaned like a ghost train.
Every breath that Jim took was filled with the eye-watering smell of charred human flesh. He cupped his hand over his mouth and his nose but it made no difference, and he couldn’t stop himself from retching. In the distance, he could hear patrol car sirens scribbling and wailing, and the stentorian bellowing of fire trucks, but all he could do was watch as the flames that engulfed Mrs LaFarge’s remains gradually died down.
Just as the first firefighter came hurrying up the steps, her blackened figure fell apart and collapsed on to the hallway rug, her skull rolling one way, with smoke pouring out of her eye sockets, her arms and legs falling across each other like pick-up-sticks. Jim leaned against the railings, his stomach clenching and unclenching, but unable to vomit anything but strings of half-digested cheese because he had eaten only those two slices of pepperoni pizza.
Three more firefighters appeared, unreeling a hose as they came. Almost immediately they started blasting away at Mrs LaFarge’s apartment with a high-pressure jet of water, so that the blackened coats hanging in the hallway flapped like vampire bats in a thunderstorm, and the burning chairs in the living room tumbled over and over.
One of the firefighters laid a hand on Jim’s shoulder and shouted in his face, ‘Are you all right, sir? You didn’t inhale any smoke?’
‘No, no.’ Jim coughed. ‘I didn’t go inside. By the time I got down here, the whole apartment was burning like a goddamned crematorium. Too late to do anything.’
‘OK, sir, let’s get you out of here. I think the fire marshal will want to ask you a few questions.’
‘That’s fine.’ Cough. ‘Whatever.’ Cough.
The firefighter helped Jim down to the parking space in front of the apartment block, where a bulky fire marshal with short-cropped gingery hair and a gingery yardbrush moustache was standing with three or four firefighters, looking up at the fire with an expression of professional detachment.
‘Are you hurt in any way, sir?’ he shouted as Jim approached. The pumper close behind him was roaring so loudly that Jim could hardly hear him.
‘I’m OK, thanks. I didn’t try to be a hero, I’m afraid. I saw Mrs LaFarge but it was too late by then. I couldn’t have saved her.’
‘You live here?’
‘Top floor. My name’s Rook.’
‘You live alone?’
‘Just me and my cat. Well, just me now. My cat died a couple of days ago.’
‘How about this Mrs LaFarge?’
‘Violette? She lived alone, too.’
‘When did you first become aware that Mrs LaFarge’s apartment was on fire?’
‘I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago, I guess. We heard glass breaking and then we heard somebody screaming.’
‘We?’
‘Me and the young lady from Apartment Two. We were having kind of a late-night get-together.’
The fire marshal looked down at Jim’s stripy undershorts and said, ‘Sure you were.’
It was almost 10 a.m. before the firefighters finally left. They criss-crossed the front of Mrs LaFarge’s burned-out apartment with yellow tapes and warned Jim and Summer not to go inside, because an arson investigation officer would bring a dog round later to sniff for accelerants.
‘You think this fire was started deliberately?’ asked Jim.
The fire marshal shook his head. ‘Hard to tell. I can’t see any of the typical signs that somebody used an accelerant here. All the same, it started very quick and it burned very hot, so it wasn’t like your victim left a cigarette smoldering on the couch or something like that.’
‘Apart from which, she never smoked.’
They were still talking when two firefighters came down the steps, carrying a black body bag on a stretcher. Jim and the fire marshal watched as they took it over to a khaki van from the coroner’s office and slid it inside.
‘You don’t know anybody who might have borne a grudge against her?’ asked the fire marshal.
Jim said, ‘Absolutely not. She was kind of a busybody, but she was harmless enough.’
‘Well . . . I’ve known people set fires for all kinds of petty reasons,’ the fire marshal told him. ‘Maybe their neighbors played their music too loud, and refused to turn it down. Maybe they let their dog poop on the grass verge. A couple of months ago there was a family of five who got burned to death up in Canyon Oak Drive because the guy next door objected to the smoke from their barbecue. He didn’t mind the smoke per se, but he was Jewish and he was angry that the smoke came from pork wieners and wasn’t kosher.
‘The trouble is, even in this town, people don’t understand how quick a fire can get out of control. A whole house can go up in forty seconds flat.’
He turned to leave. As he did so, Summer came down the steps. She linked arms with Jim and said, ‘How are you feeling, Jimmy?’
‘Sad. Upset. They don’t make ladies like Violette any more.’
They went back up to Summer’s apartment. Every room reeked of smoke, so she threw all the windows open. ‘How about some coffee?’ she asked him.
‘No . . . I’d better get back upstairs and see if that demon woman’s gone.’
‘What if she hasn’t? What if she’s still there, waiting for you?’
‘I’m pretty sure that she’s not. She’s trying to scare me, that’s for sure, but I don’t think she’s actually going to hurt me. Not just yet, anyhow.’
‘So . . . why do you think she wants to scare you?’
‘I don’t know for certain, but I get the distinct feeling that there’s some kind of game being worked out here – like chess, but with living people instead of pawns. The only trouble is, I don’t know who I’m playing against and I don’t know what the stakes are and I don’t even know if I’m black or white.’
‘You know what I think?’ asked Summer. Completely unselfconsciously, she stepped out of her short denim skirt and walked through to the bedroom to hang it up again. ‘I think this demon woman is trying to make you feel that your life just isn’t worth living.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She showed you what you’re going to be like when you grow really old, didn’t she? Sick, half-blind, pissing your pants. You said yourself that you felt like taking every pill on your bathroom shelf.’
‘So?’
‘So you’re talking about playing a game of chess, right? It’s like any game; you only want to play it because you think you have a chance of winning, even if you know that your chance of winning is practically zilch.’
‘OK . . . so you’re saying . . . what?’
Summer came and sat down beside him at the kitchen table, resting her chin in her hand. She looked almost like a medieval saint – Saint Summer of the Enormous Breasts. The morning sunlight reflected from the red Formica surface and made her hair shine in fraying golden filaments.
‘I think this demon woman wants you to give up hope,’ she said. ‘If tomorrow turns out to be total shit, that’s one thing, right? But if you know today that tomorrow is going to turn out to be total shit, you’re going to think to yourself, why the hell bother? Why go on? My grandmother, she would never go to a fortune-teller or read her stars in the paper, and do you know what she used to say? If it’s bad, and it’s true, it’ll happen anyhow, and there’s nothing you can do ab
out it; but if it isn’t true, and it doesn’t happen, then all you’ve done is worry yourself sick for no reason. Either way you’ve wasted your money.’
Jim sat looking at her for a very long time without saying anything. Then he said, ‘You’re not just a pretty face, are you? That is a very, very shrewd analysis.’
‘A what?’
‘A very intelligent way of looking at all this crap.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ smiled Summer. ‘I’m just speaking from bitter experience. The first boyfriend I ever lived with, Bryan, he was like insanely possessive and if he saw me even smiling at another guy he used to beat me black and blue. He used to call me when I was at work and say, “I know you’ve been seeing this schmuck behind my back and when you come home I’m going to make you wish you’d never been born.”’
‘So why did you go home?’
‘Ask me and every other woman who gets knocked about. You go home because it’s home, and you don’t have any place else to go. You go home because you think that your boyfriend must love you, because he’s so jealous. But in the end you lose all hope that tomorrow is going to be different. It’s like that game of chess that you’re never going to win. In the end, finally, you quit.’
Jim stood up. ‘I’d better go. I’m over an hour late for college already. Maybe I’ll catch you later.’
‘Jimmy, you don’t have to.’
Jim took hold of her hand. ‘Summer – let me tell you this. Sometimes, without any warning at all, somebody arrives in your life who changes it for ever. They change you for ever. They do it because they have a totally different point of view on life. It’s like they hold up a mirror so that you can see yourself from a different angle altogether, and you think, my God, do I really look like that?’
‘Are you talking about me?’
‘I don’t know anybody else who can do the Backwards Showgirl.’
Jim trudged back upstairs and unlocked his apartment door. He pushed it open, but before he ventured inside he stood on the worn-out welcome mat outside, listening. He couldn’t hear anything, apart from the breeze in the bushes, but that wasn’t any guarantee that the fox-woman wasn’t standing behind his bedroom door, waiting to jump on him and bite off his head, like Charlie’s, leaving him with nothing but a bloody windpipe.
‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anybody there?’
He waited and waited. A truck came grinding up Briarcliff Road, with three Mexican gardeners sitting in the back. They looked up at him and for some reason one of them crossed himself. It was almost as if a priest had given him the last rites, and Jim couldn’t think of anything that could have unnerved him more.
Inside the hallway, on the floor, lay a lavender-tinted envelope. Jim picked it up and squinted at the spidery handwriting on the front. Jim Rook, it said. Apt #3. Je vous attendrai, mon ami.
He went through to the kitchen first. Everything appeared to be normal, and untouched. No fox-woman. Tibbles’ bowls were still lying on the floor, even though the milk in his saucer had turned sour and lumpy.
Jim used a cheese knife to open the lavender-tinted envelope. Inside he found a lavender-tinted sheet of paper, with deckled edges. There were five lines of handwriting on it, and it was signed Violette.
‘Mon cher Jim,’ she had written. ‘I came to pay you a visit this evening, but sadly you were not here. However I met your friend, and your friend showed me what is to become of me in two years’ time. I prefer not to wait for what is inevitable, and so I have decided to embrace my fate now. Tonight I am joining my beloved Antoine and I shall be truly happy at last. I am sad to leave you, mon cher Jim, but my spirit will always be waiting for you, like a cat’s spirit.’
Jim frowned. ‘I met your friend,’ Mrs LaFarge had written. What friend? As far as Jim was aware, only the fox-woman had been here, and whatever she was, she was very far from being a friend. But the fox-woman had shown Jim how much he was going to deteriorate as he grew older, both physically and mentally, and it seemed likely that she had shown Mrs LaFarge her future, too. At some time, sooner or later, Mrs LaFarge was fated to be burned to death.
Jim went through to the living room. He stood there for a while, with one hand on the back of his armchair, feeling exhausted. It was still gloomy in there, but there was no sign of the fox-woman. Eventually he crossed over to the windows and drew back the drapes. Out on the balcony he could see the battered cardboard box in which he had placed Tibbles’ rotting remains. Hundreds of crows were still clustered on the roof of the apartment block opposite, and they gave him the feeling that they were watching him, waiting to see what would happen to him next. They had pecked out Tibbles’ eyes and pulled out his intestines. Maybe they were waiting to do the same to him.
His phone warbled and made him jump. He picked it up and cleared his throat. ‘Jim Rook.’
‘Mr Rook? This is Doris Handy, Mr Rook. Dr Ehrlichman wants to know if you intend to honor us with your presence today. Apparently Special Class Two is beginning to sound like the Battle of Shiloh. Dr Ehrlichman’s words, not mine.’
Jim said, ‘I’m sorry, Doris. I meant to call in, but things have been totally crazy. We had a real bad fire at my apartment building last night, and I’ve been helping the fire marshal to figure out what happened. Listen – I’m just going to take a shower and I should be into college around eleven-thirty at the latest. Could you ask Bob Nussbaum to take over for me, if he’s free? Tell him I’ll buy him a bottle of Hevron Heights. Tell him I’ll buy him a bottle of Hevron Heights and a Canter’s knish.’
‘I’ll ask,’ said Doris disapprovingly.
Jim hung up. Then he prowled around his apartment, checking in the bedroom and the bathroom and all of the closets to make sure that the fox-woman was no longer there. He even got down on to his hands and knees and looked under the bed. After all, even kids know that boogie-persons always conceal themselves under the bed.
He undressed, wearily, and took a long, hot shower. He dressed in a black shirt, as a gesture of respect for Mrs LaFarge, and khaki chinos. Then he slid open the window to the balcony and picked up Tibbles’ cardboard coffin. As he carried it inside, he looked across at the crows and shouted out, ‘Get the hell out of here, you sons-of-bitches!’
The crows shifted and cawed and ruffled their tatty black feathers but none of them flew away. Jim locked the balcony window behind him and closed the drapes. It would probably be dark by the time he got home tonight.
He took the cardboard box into the kitchen and put it down on the counter. He opened the fridge and looked inside to see what he could find to make sandwiches. Half-a-dozen slices of bologna, well past their sell-by date, with dark curled-up edges. Two Kraft processed cheese slices. A wrinkly apple that looked like it needed Botox. A jar of pickled beetroot. He would have to have lunch at the college commissary today, even though he hated it. All the food they served up was so goddamn healthy. Everything that wasn’t sprinkled with wheatgerm was covered in pine-nuts, and everything gave him gas.
He closed the fridge door, but as he did so he heard a sharp scratching noise from inside the cardboard box. He froze, and waited, and listened. There was no way that Tibbles could have come back to life again. His eye sockets were empty and half of his guts had gone. But on the other hand, he had been crushed almost totally flat when Jim had run him over, and he had come back to life then, hadn’t he? It really depended when then really was. Had it been yesterday, or the day before, or was it going to be tomorrow?
He heard the scratching noise again. He went up close to the box and said, ‘Tibbles?’
A long silence. Then a few light scratches, followed by a sudden flurry.
‘Tibbles? Are you in there? You haven’t come back to life again, have you?’
This time the scratching was furious, as if Tibbles were desperate to be let out of his coffin. Jim quickly untucked the flaps at the top of the box, and folded them back. This was only a cat, after all, even if he was supposed to be a dead cat. He looked in
side and saw Tibbles lying on his back, his eyes still blind, his upper lip still curled in a snarl, his stomach a tangle of bloody fur and rope-like intestines.
‘Tibbles?’ Jim coaxed him, but there didn’t seem to be any question at all that he was dead. ‘Tibbles, I’m sorry, dude, but you have permanently gone to swallow the great furball in the sky.’
Tibbles didn’t move. Jim couldn’t understand how he could have made those frantic scratching noises. Maybe his muscles had been relaxing. Cats generally went into rigor mortis about four hours after death, and their rigidity lasted between eighteen to thirty-six hours, but it all depended on the ambient temperature, and how the cat had died. Jim had learned that from the vet, when Tibbles’ predecessor had been killed.
Jim was closing the last flap of the box when Tibbles’ stomach exploded, and a huge crow came bursting out, its feathers bloody and shreds of intestine hanging from its beak. Jim shouted out, ‘Jesus!’ and toppled backward against the fridge. The crow attacked him with its claws and its beak, its wings beating wildly. It scratched and pecked at his upraised hands, and it seemed to be determined to go for his eyes.
‘Get away, you bastard!’ Jim yelled at it. But his shouting seemed to excite the crow even more. Its wings flapped faster and faster, and it lunged its head forward again and again. It pecked Jim just below the left eye with its beak, and then it raked him with its claws across his right cheek. No matter how hard Jim slapped at it, it kept on attacking him, more and more ferociously, until he began to feel that he was never going to be able to beat it off.
He backed away until he reached the far side of the kitchen, where all of his pans were hanging up on hooks underneath the cupboards. The crow continued to lunge at him, and now it started to let out harsh triumphant cries in the back of his throat, as if it felt that it had beaten him. It darted with its beak at his forehead, close to his eye, and he felt as if he had been jabbed in the face with a pointed stick. A fine spray of blood flew across the kitchen worktop.
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