Mazurka
Page 51
Penny Ford hadn’t been able to tell Pagan why Ruhr was in Cambridge or how he had travelled there or where he was living. She knew nothing about him. She was informative only when it came to his sexual demands. Pagan remembered the girl’s quiet voice. We had sex, and I thought that was the end of it … I went inside the lavatory and when I came back he was sitting up on the edge of the bed and looking at me … well, in a funny kind of way … And he was making this dry whistling sort of noise, you know, tuneless like, but weird, like he wants to whistle only he doesn’t know how … He asks me to come over. Which I did, because I thought he wanted another go. He asks me to sit on his knee. Which I also did.
And then?
He has this terrible disfigured hand, of course. That made me sympathetic to him at first. I see him take something out of his jacket, which is hanging on the back of a chair. It’s a metal contraption with a leather strap, strangest thing I ever saw. And ugly as sin.
Ugly as sin, Pagan thought. What had so spooked Penny Ford was an unusual artifact consisting of a strap and two long steel protuberances, both sharpened at the end. At first glance the contraption had no apparent function, until you realised – as Penny Ford did – that it was the prosthetic device Ruhr fastened over his deformed hand. The two sharp metal columns, each about six inches long, took the place of the missing fingers.
He wants me to spread my legs so he can stick that bloody thing inside me, honest to God … Can you imagine what that sharp steel would have done to me? I mean, sex is one thing, but that was evil …
Evil: Pagan remembered thinking it was an impressive word. Penny understandably resisted Ruhr’s request and the German had become threatening, catching her by the hair and trying to force her to obey him. She’d struggled and screamed. Ruhr might have been able to silence the girl and slip away easily, but by sheer chance two plainclothes detectives were already inside the house questioning a first-floor tenant about a recent burglary. They responded to the screams immediately, imagining at worst a domestic dispute. They hadn’t expected to corner the world’s most wanted terrorist with his trousers hanging round his knees and his underwear at half-mast. Pagan had found this image very entertaining before. In the shadow of recent events it didn’t seem remotely amusing now. Ruhr was sick and vicious. Worse, he was also at liberty, and Frank Pagan was not.
Pagan sat upright. “Christ, I want out of here.”
Martin Burr shook his head. “There are persons in the morgue with more colour than you. Accept your fate and be still.”
“I need some fresh air, that’s all.”
Burr smiled. “Even if you were able to leave, you don’t have anything here to wear. When they brought you in, your suit was totally ruined.”
“Ruined?”
“Bloodstained and torn.”
The suit, made specially for him by a tailor with basement premises in Soho, had cost Frank Pagan a month’s salary. In normal circumstances he would have lamented the wreckage of a fashionable beige linen suit, but not now. “I’ll leave in a bloody bedsheet if I have to.”
“Frank Pagan wandering the West End in a bedsheet. The mind is boggled.”
“All I do is lie here and feel useless. Sometimes Ghose teaches me new words. I just learned ‘haemothorax’, and that’s the highlight of the whole day.” Pagan looked at Martin Burr with disarming intensity. “I need to be in on this one. You know that.”
Martin Burr ignored Pagan’s plea and took a pocket watch from his waistcoat. He flipped the silver lid open. “I must be running along, Frank. Busy busy. Things to do. I’ll see if I can come back again tonight. Can’t promise.”
“And I stay right here?”
“Exactly.”
Pagan watched Martin Burr go toward the door. “Is that an order, Commissioner?”
Martin Burr sailed out of the room neither answering Pagan’s Mambo question nor acknowledging it, even though he must have heard it. Was it some sly tactic on the Commissioner’s part? Was he telling Pagan to take total responsibility if he discharged himself? Pagan listened to the click of Burr’s cane as it faded down the tiled corridor. Then he lay very still for a time before he smiled and reached for the telephone at the side of the bed.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Major R. B. Claybourne (USMCR) for his fine technical help; Mr Bruno Laan for being an indefatigable source of information who patiently answered my questions even when they were on arcane matters; and the Joint Baltic American National Committee for generously providing information that helped with the background to this novel. I would also like to thank Harriette Pine for kindly showing me Brooklyn and Brighton Beach in the dead of winter.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” by Hank Williams. Used by permission.
Copyright © 1988 by Campbell Armstrong
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0707-8
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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