by Glen Duncan
Wallet. Police ID. Cuffs. Two mobile phones. Condoms. Camel filters. Lighter. Change. Keys. Notebook.
“Over to the stove,” Augustus tells Paulie. “Move. I know how much that hand hurts but I’ll hit it again, as hard as I can. Move. Morwenna, the handcuffs.”
Paulie, dragging himself backward to the stove, starts laughing. This, Augustus knows he’s meant to infer, is Paulie enjoying the certainty of his future revenge. This is Paulie tickled pink by letting these two have their moment. A gesture of vital self-comfort.
“Facedown on the floor,” Augustus says. “Left hand on the leg of the stove. You don’t need me to spell this out.”
Paulie, still chuckling, complies. Augustus kneels on his neck. There’s the option of giving the gun to Morwenna for a moment but he doesn’t like it. Better to struggle one-handed himself. He knows cuffs, of course. In any case Paulie’s past trying something.
“Okay, sit up.”
Augustus helps him get his back to the stove, legs stretched out in front of him. From here he can reach the logs and toss them on the fire. Enough for maybe a day. Then cold. Augustus checks how much blood to make sure it’s not an artery.
“We should get going,” he says to Morwenna. “Warm clothes, no more than you can carry in your shoulder bag.”
“He’ll find me,” she whispers.
“Not this time.”
She closes her eyes. Replaying the worst of it, Augustus assumes, the footage, the episodes. He doesn’t want to know. She’ll have to tell someone, eventually, but he’d rather it wasn’t him. “Come on, let’s get out of here. How much money in the wallet? Might as well have that, right?”
While Morwenna stuffs clothes into the shoulder bag Augustus builds up the fire, making sure Paulie gets to see his wallet, ID, condoms and notebook going into the flames. The two cell phones and car keys go into Augustus’s coat pocket.
Morwenna’s ready, but stands staring at Paulie. Augustus wishes he could shoot him for her, since there’s blood on his hands already and nothing will happen to him after he’s dead (though habit imagines a bulge in the ether even as he thinks it—and where or what is the invisible collective he’s been in confab with? Just him, he tells himself. Juliet, Selina, Harper—it’s all him); but Paulie dead will do her more harm than Paulie alive. Paulie dead will set the unpredictable Law in motion. He has no faith in the Law.
“You’re a piece of shit,” Morwenna says to Paulie. Augustus worries she’s going to kick him or spit on him, hopes not because such things go awkwardly and you end up with aesthetic horror and disgust with yourself and the inadequacy of the act. But she turns her back on him and goes to the door.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Augustus tells her, quietly. “Just want to make things secure here. Wait for me outside.”
When Morwenna closes the door behind her Augustus lights one of the Camels and drops the lighter and pack in Paulie’s lap. Paulie has difficulty with the damaged hand but manages eventually. Augustus pulls the one chair up and sits down.
“You have to understand something,” he says. “If it was just me I’d shoot you. Point-blank, in the face, the mouth, the back of the head. Right now you’d be looking at death. Actually I think you’ve worked that out. Your instincts are fine and you know the sound of a liar. You’ve got the nose for character, you’ve got the psychology.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“No one important. A rancid old coon who turned out to have a gun.”
“You can’t fucking leave me here like this.”
“Don’t waste time, just listen. If you come after us, I’ll kill you. No hesitation. I’ll kill you. Look at me, closely. Understand: I’ll kill you because I’m not afraid to die. Do you see this? Look at me. Do you see it?”
Paulie doesn’t want to look at Augustus in the way Augustus wants to be looked at, but when their eyes meet for a moment Augustus feels the rejuvenating purity, sees Paulie, knows Paulie sees him. Nothing’s had this quality since the night of his escape. This is the only version of himself that feels familiar, as if he’s briefly sober in an epic of drunkenness. “She’s told me everything,” he says. “And within the next twenty-four hours my lawyers will have the same information. Which will remain inert, unless anything happens to me or the girl, anything at all, the slightest suspicion you’re trying to reach us. In which case an investigation will begin. Look at me.”
“Get fucked.”
Augustus stamps on the broken hand and keeps his foot there. Paulie screams and twists against the cuff, his feet slither in the little pool of blood.
“Okay okay please, fuck, please—”
Augustus presses harder. Paulie’s scream turns to silence, face scrunched, bearing the unbearable.
“You feel that force there on your hand? That’s the world. The story of the world is the story of force. It’s just some people are better at applying it than others.”
Augustus stands, releases Paulie’s hand. There’s an almost full bottle of Glenfiddich on the table. Augustus sets it down within the policeman’s reach. “The farmer or his boy’ll be down. Maybe a couple of days.” He feels tired, suddenly, remembers the doctor sitting in the drain cleaners’ van on the dead forecourt, door open, smoking. You never know what you’ve got in the tank. Halfway through a sentence it’s empty. The doc, as far as he knows, got his flight out of Casablanca, but it’s hard to believe there was a life for him. He hopes he made it somewhere like Mexico, got absorbed into a small town or village, has a doorway he can sit in watching the dust swirl in the sunlight. Romantic fantasy. The old man will have drifted into vagrancy. Sores and sour clothes. He was already at the end of himself at the gas station.
Augustus pauses at the door, takes a last look at the room it seems he’s seeing for the first time. The fire blazes in the hearth. He has no conclusions. This all feels, approximately, like an accident. Life’s dervish mass spins erratically and sometimes snags you on a spur. It might have come nowhere near him had he not let the girl in, or a dozen times near-missed and passed by in the night. But he concedes he did let the girl in. This is the source of his weariness now, the thought that all along the living part of him has been meticulously plotting, that the dead part has had no control over it. Not an accident. A setup. A sting.
He has no resolution. Inertia nuzzles and he knows it’ll offer itself at every step from here out and up the hill, into Marle, onto the ferry, the mainland and beyond. He isn’t fortified. Already the reactive momentum’s spent, adrenaline on the ebb. In fact he regrets what he’s done, or rather resents how unthinkingly he’s done it. No qualms about Paulie, but a feeling of being shystered by spontaneity, carried away by impulse. Art would demand an epiphany (quiet admission or Carlylean Yea) a realization that life’s worth living. He doesn’t have any of that, only the rueful feeling of having hoodwinked himself into action. Absurd action, moreover. Paulie handcuffed to the stove looks like a life-size ventriloquist’s dummy. Yet the man has a childhood, dreams, memories, a history. There are moments you glimpse everyone’s cluttered uniqueness, the endless particularity that requires so much effort, too much effort. The thought of the long trudge with Morwenna (who, back in the world of demand and exigency will be different, possibly irritating, at the very least more talkative) exhausts him where he stands, brings the brutal realization that he doesn’t have to stick with her, owes her nothing, could shoot her in the head and consign her body to the sea. And yet God has not said a word!
Oh come off it.
Not God but the self-conjured cabal of ghosts says this—Juliet, Selina, Cardillo, Elise—all the good dead or all the bits of him their living fashioned. At his center is what Harper helped him find, the solitary eye that sees the void and the darkling plain, that knows the dead don’t speak, that no one’s keeping score, that earth receives the bodies of the evil and the good with null equalizing silence. This is his center, to which he’ll go when his time comes. He supposes until then the ghosts prove his ple
asure in remembering them. He could put a bullet in the girl’s brain, cut off her head, gouge out her heart and wolf it down—but it would spoil his pleasure in remembering the ones he loved. There’s nothing necessary about this. The presence or absence of love in a life is purely contingent, which if it points to a grand narrative points to one of spectacular natural injustice. But the fact remains that contingently, he, Augustus Rose, had these people, had that love, takes this pleasure in remembering. Contingently, he’s doomed to live under the rule of certain durable habits.
There’s nothing more to say to Paulie. The policeman will either come after them or not. That’s out of Augustus’s hands now. If he wants a project it’s getting the girl away. Again the thought leaves him leaden. Even the struggle up the hill seems beyond him, though he’s made it a dozen times at least since the snow.
Heaving against sleepiness, Augustus opens the door, steps out and pulls it shut behind him.
Morwenna’s waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, woolen-hatted, scarved, hands in the leather jacket pockets, shoulder bag bulging. The rib’s keeping her from straightening up properly. Now he’s outside Augustus feels wide awake, horribly alive to the difficulties crowding ahead. Remember to toss the phones into the sea. That’s the least of it. The car key on Paulie’s bunch is for an Audi. With luck you find that where the track comes off the lane. If not there won’t be many Audis in the ferry car park. No choice but to take it and switch on the mainland. It occurs to him Morwenna isn’t likely to have a passport. Her look over the scarf says she’s not sure how or if this has changed things between them, what he might want from her, what he might do. It gives him a small pleasure (as when he noticed Selina’s broken silver chain and knew he could spare her its loss) to know she’s got nothing to fear from him, since he’s made his decision, since the habits, thus far, have endured.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I told him not to come after us. He’ll be stuck there for a while anyway.” He holds up the Audi key. “We may have transportation.” It’s just striking him that he’ll never see Calansay again. He feels the need for a gesture of acknowledgment, but it passes.
“It’s up to you,” Augustus says, “but if you want, I can help you for a while.”
Morwenna’s nostrils are raw. The last hour’s left her eyes bright. Her lip’s split and swollen.
“Thanks,” she says—and suddenly tears well and fall. Augustus understands: not because she’s suffered but because he’s helping her. When you’re a child people’s cruelty makes you cry. When you’re an adult it’s their kindness. Seeing her making this shift he feels ancient, flimsy as a paper lantern, for just a second or two wholly not up to the job.
“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. It’s okay. We better get going, though.”
But she can’t, for a moment. Things have caught up with her. She goes down on her knees and vomits in the snow. No stopping the effect on her ribs. In solidarity rather than because there’s anything he can do Augustus gets down on one knee next to her, puts his hand gently in the small of her back. The sky above the snowline is deep blue. You can see how people lie down in snow to die and eventually it feels warm.
“I’m all right,” she says after a little while. “Juss needed to do that. Sorry.”
They get by ridiculous degrees to their feet. “Here,” Augustus says. “Take these.” Ibuprofen. Four left in the bottle in his pocket. Morwenna swallows two with a mouthful of snow. Augustus is thinking of New York. He has a vivid mental picture of Darlene sitting at the window table in Ferrara, drinking a double espresso and looking over the numbers Maguire the accountant’s run for her on a possible new purchase, a prime spot on Third Avenue and 7th Street. You find something you like and go into it.
A few paces ahead of him Morwenna slips, but recovers her balance. She stops for a moment, adjusts the shoulder bag, looks back at him.
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to a collection of essays, Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2004), for diverse illuminations of this very old and very new phenomenon. In particular, “Breakdown in the Gray Room: Recent Turns in the Image War,” a transcript of the lecture by David Levi Strauss, first given at the Los Angeles Times Media Center, June 17, 2004; “Abu Ghraib and the Magic of Images” by Charles Stein; “Feminism’s Assumptions Upended” by Barbara Ehrenreich; and “Abu Ghraib: A Howl” by Richard Grossinger.
Augustus’s version of the arrest and treatment of Johnson Hinton derives from Malcolm X’s account in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, London, 2001).
Selina’s story of her accidental ingestion of the ant belongs to Andrea Freeman, who has very kindly lent it to me.
Many thanks to my agents, Jonny Geller in London and Jane Gelfman in New York, for keeping the faith, and to my editor at Ecco, Abigail Holstein, who brought to this book immediate understanding, fierce enthusiasm, and consistently sound judgment. I am much in her debt.
For editorial guardianship during the writing of this novel, and for patience with my delays, thanks to Millicent Bennett. For tactical support and an incisive first read, I’m grateful to Paige Simpson. For Italian and Spanish language help, I salute Mike Loteryman, Eva Vives, and Nicola Harwood.
Last but not least, thanks to Kim Teasdale, for being cheerful first thing in the morning, and for gently forcing me to experience the world outdoors every now and again.
About the Author
GLEN DUNCAN is the critically acclaimed author of six previous novels, including Death of an Ordinary Man; I, Lucifer; and, most recently, The Bloodstone Papers. He lives in London.
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ALSO BY GLEN DUNCAN
Hope
Love Remains
I, Lucifer
Weathercock
Death of an Ordinary Man
The Bloodstone Papers
Credits
Jacket design by Allison Saltzman
Jacket photographs: woman’s face © Gareth Munden/WildCard; man’s face © Matt Caplin; Barcelona © Andrea Pistolesi/Getty
Copyright
A DAY AND A NIGHT AND A DAY. Copyright © 2009 by Glen Duncan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition December 2008 ISBN: 9780061984211
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