‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I walked into something sharp,’ he said.
I sat down on the couch and looked at him. He rinsed the handkerchief in cold water, squeezed it out, and then laid it flat on the draining board.
‘The plaster will heal it,’ I said.
‘Will it?’ he said and touched his cheek. ‘What a remarkable little invention.’
‘It’s very useful,’ I said. I kept getting this image of him and the mad Italian woman sitting together in her room, chattering to each other.
He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette.
I said, ‘I was coming down the street just now when I thought I saw you.’
‘You might have done,’ he said.
‘I thought I saw you coming out of Mrs Peluzzi’s.’
He looked at me a moment as if he was surprised and then he laughed.
‘So. You’ve discovered my secret.’
‘You were in Mrs Peluzzi’s, weren’t you?’
He took a draw of his cigarette and looked over at the window. After a time he said, ‘I didn’t want to alarm you, Eric. I didn’t tell you that I’ve been seeing her because I didn’t want you to jump to the wrong conclusions. Who knows, you might have got hold of things in quite the wrong perspective.’ He took a drink from his whisky bottle. Drips of blood ran down under the piece of plaster.
‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he said. ‘I intend to plan this assassination in a military manner. I intend it to go off like clockwork. Like a bloody well-oiled clock, if you see what I mean. I have, if I may say so, vast experience of military procedure. And an elementary step in this kind of logic is to make your enemy think that he has nothing to fear from you, that you are in fact a friend. In this way you lull him into a false sense of security and at the same time provide yourself with a perfect opportunity for probing, exploring and assessing his various weaknesses. This is exactly what I’m doing in the case of Mrs Peluzzi, you see. Now, do you follow all that?’
I thought about it for a bit. I had to admit that it was complicated, but that it sounded a very good idea.
‘That’s marvellous,’ I said.
‘It’s cunning,’ he said. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’
‘What do you say to her?’
‘Oh, we talk on endless topics, Eric. But I always bring her back to the dog in the end.’
I went to the window and looked down. Rex was asleep, his great black head between his paws.
‘Why does she keep him in that yard all the time?’ I asked.
‘Because she doesn’t want him indoors,’ he answered.
That was reasonable, I thought. I sat down. We didn’t say anything for a long time. He was lying on the bed smoking, looking up at the ceiling.
I said, ‘She’s mad, isn’t she? She’s off her head.’
He looked at me and smiled.
He said, ‘It looks that way.’
3
My mother used to say never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it. I thought about this when I was looking at Matt. He fell asleep on the bed though it was just afternoon. His mouth was hanging open and he was snoring a bit and blood was dripping out from under the Elastoplast.
I mean to say, it’s funny how someone can just walk into your life and no matter what happens, nothing can ever be the same again. Ten days ago I’d never even heard of Matt Churchill. And now there he was, lying on my bed in my room, sleeping. I walked over to him and looked down. Like a baby. Sound asleep. I could easily have choked him to death without a murmur, if I’d wanted to. Because when you’re asleep you can’t feel anything. You can’t struggle properly until you’re awake, so you’re at a disadvantage right away. I touched his shoulder, but he didn’t move.
The skin of his face is smooth and pink and when he shaves he cuts right into the roots of the hair so that his flesh always has this same smooth look. The lids of his eyes have little veins on them, running up and down and crisscrossing. His hair is brown and black, brown at the sides, black from the front to the top and then brown again. His fingers like his face are smooth and pink, not at all like mine, which are hard and corny. When I compared myself to him, he seemed very superior.
I went and sat on the couch and drank some of his whisky. I would never have touched the stuff before he came to the room. Now it tasted good and warm. I poured some into a cup and went to the window and looked out.
Agnes was in our yard hanging clothes on a line. First she hung a skirt and then a corset and then several pairs of knickers. The light came up through the thin material, showing the stains that hadn’t quite been washed out. Now and then when the wind blew, the knickers moved as if there was little legs dancing about invisibly inside them.
When she bent down to the basket I saw that her skirt ran up her buttocks. But the area was covered in shadow and I couldn’t see anything. Then she went indoors.
Never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it.
Had my mother been bitter when she’d said that?
Matt was still asleep on the bed. I took another good look at him. It’s a funny thing, but when he’s asleep all the strength goes out of his face just as if it’s never there in the first place. As if under all his talk there isn’t really anything else. What a stupid thing to think.
I’m always thinking stupid things. I see now that all my life I’ve had stupid thoughts. But I hadn’t known before. I mean, I hadn’t known until Matt came. He plans everything out, you see. Every single move he works out in advance. Nothing is left to chance. He thinks. When did I ever think?
Once, I remembered working out that the universe must be infinite. It must just go on and on, for ever and all time, and endless darkness. When you think about that everything else seems so silly and pointless. Well, it does. I mean, the business about the dog. It seems so small and tiny compared with the universe. It seems so frail. If you were up there, at the farthest comer of the universe, you wouldn’t hear him bark, would you? You wouldn’t even think about it, and if you did think about it you’d say to yourself, Bloody ridiculous.
When I looked out of the window and saw Rex in the yard next door I thought, Bloody ridiculous. It only needed one knife in his neck or a cord pulled tightly and that would be that. That would be the end of everything for him.
But he was still alive.
Never trust a living soul.
I looked at Matt and I wondered if I could trust him. Not just trust him to kill the dog but trust him in everything. In everything.
He opened his eyes and stared at me.
‘I hope you don’t mind me drinking a drop of your whisky,’ I said.
He said, ‘I didn’t know you drank.’
He got up from the bed and rubbed his face with his hands.
Looking at him I asked, ‘Can I trust you?’
He didn’t answer me straight off. He took out a cigarette and lit it and took a deep draw on it.
‘That’s a damned funny question,’ he said.
He picked up the whisky bottle and held it up to see how much was left.
‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘Can I trust you?’
It seemed all of a sudden very important to know the answer. I didn’t know what trust was. Didn’t really know.
He laughed. ‘Of course you can trust me, Eric. I’m surprised you even asked.’
That was all I wanted to hear, really, and now that he’d said it I didn’t know why I’d asked in the first place. But there you are. It had just suddenly filled my brain, like a huge light. Trust. I could trust him.
I finished my drink and lay down on the couch. I didn’t sleep but I felt myself sort of float about the room. I couldn’t really hear anything either. Bits and pieces of the afternoon light came through the window in a kind of broken way, breaking into the room. Peaceful. Matt was moving around but I didn’t look to see what he was doing.
Later, when I sat up I felt light
-headed as if I was going to be sick. I ran cold water all over my face and pressed my head against the cool glass. Matt wasn’t in the room.
I could see him down there in the yard. Mrs Peluzzi’s yard.
Mrs Peluzzi was there too. They were talking together. At one point I saw him stroke Rex’s head. And I thought of how cunning he was and how clever of him to get so well in with the widow.
The dog licked his hand.
4
On the Sunday morning I walked to the shops to get the Sunday Mirror. There was a queue in the newsagent’s and because I had something of a hangover I waited outside until the shop was empty before going in. It was a stuffy little place that usually gave me a headache.
The little man behind the counter had my newspaper lying in front of him. I was a regular customer.
‘Well, Mr Billings,’ he said. ‘And how is work?’
I picked up the paper and put down my money.
‘Busy, you know,’ I said.
‘It’s a busy time of year,’ he said.
I looked at the headline.
‘More trouble in the Middle East, I see,’ the little man said.
Beside the headline was a picture of this girl in a swimsuit, kicking up splashes of water. The swimsuit was very small. It hardly covered her breasts.
‘You do look a bit rough this morning, Mr Billings. Been on the tiles, have you?’
‘I had a few drinks last night,’ I said.
He sucked in his breath and shook his head. I didn’t like him much. I always had the funny feeling that he was smirking all the time.
‘Drinks, whoooosh,’ he said, sucking away.
‘It’s a free country,’ I said.
‘I’m not denying that,’ he said. ‘But drinking. Well.’
And he shook his head some more.
I tucked my paper under my arm and went out of the shop.
Mrs Peluzzi was just going in.
For a moment we looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say. I kept thinking about the poisoned chop I’d thrown down one day in the hope that Rex would eat it, but he hadn’t. It had been a foolish thing to do. I mean, she could easily have gone for the police.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How you have the nerve to show yourself around this district is over my head, I swear it.’
She was wearing a lemon dress that made her look fat.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said.
‘You know damn well what I’m talking about,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘No, honestly –’
‘My Rex,’ she said. ‘You want to kill him.’
I laughed. ‘He makes a bit of a noise at night, but –’
‘There is no noise,’ she said.
‘No noise! He keeps me awake every night, my nerves are shot to pieces –’
‘There is no noise,’ she said. And she tapped her head. ‘That’s where all your noise is.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘What do you think I’m saying?’ she said. ‘Huh? Huh?’
I stepped away from her. Obviously she was mad. Out of her head. There was this strange look in her eyes.
‘You will die before my dog does,’ she said.
I walked away quickly. I didn’t like the way she’d said that.
When I got into the room I was trembling. I opened the paper but I couldn’t read it.
I said to Matt, ‘I met Mrs Peluzzi just now.’
He looked at me, saying nothing.
‘She threatened me,’ I said.
He began to laugh.
You will die before my dog does. Well, that wasn’t any laughing matter. What was he laughing for?
‘It isn’t very funny,’ I said.
‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ he asked.
‘But she really threatened me. She really did.’
He laughed a little more. Then he took a drink of his whisky and passed the bottle over to me.
‘That should make you feel better.’
I drank some and it burned my chest.
He said, ‘You don’t want to take her too seriously, Eric.’
I said, because I was suddenly irritated by everything.
‘It’s high time that dog was killed.’
Matt didn’t answer.
4
Matt
I had never met a woman quite like Bella Peluzzi. I can say that without wishing to impart a totally wrong impression – namely, that I was head-over-heels in love with her or something equally false. The plain fact of the matter was that she interested me, intrigued me – and teased me to the point of distraction.
Probably if you were to go back into my childhood far enough you would find some reason for this odd compulsion of mine to martyr myself. Did some thoughtless babysitter finger me, thus drawing attention to my inadequacy at a tender age? Or is the explanation even more banal – namely, that I was playing out the act yet again in the theatre of my own vanity? Christ knows.
I had gone to visit her that first time from sheer bloody expediency and I had lied about my purpose. I can’t explain why I went the second time, except perhaps by reminding myself of the unbroken boredom of Eric’s room. The third visit came about when I invited myself to supper. Fourth and subsequent visits happened because our relationship – as I conceived of it – simply had to move on to a physical plane. Namely, bed.
Or is there something in the Latin temperament that attracted me? Something obscure, something of the sun, something that we in this frozen northern country have forgotten about, if we ever knew at all? A sense, perhaps, of passion coiled up like a tense spring.
On my seventh visit – my ninth day with Eric – Bella had cooked a pot of spaghetti and a pan of meat sauce. We sat down in her sitting-room, those dreadful photo-graphs staring all around us, and ate. Half-way during the meal she suddenly stopped and she said,
‘I know that you want to find your way to my bed, Edward. But this I can never allow. Do you understand?’
I allowed strands of pasta to slip from my fork.
‘You misjudge me,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not trust you.’
Trust. The whole world wants to know what it can trust. I never understand why. Shifting things are ultimately more satisfying. I finished the meal and sat on the sofa drinking my wine. She played some of her operatic records on the old-fashioned gramophone. There was another door leading from the sitting-room into the hallway. At the end of the hall was her bedroom. Once, when I had attempted to coax her in there, she had refused with a strange violence. You don’t expect widows to be so moral. After all, they’ve been used and surely there is something to spare for the rest of us.
That night she sat beside me and we held hands like a courting couple under the bulldog eye of a chaperone. I kissed the damp palm of her hand and bit her wrist. It was like kissing a bowl of luke-warm rice.
But how do you explain a fascination anyway? Possibily it was just my bloody vanity. I wanted her. I had to have her. I had to know her just once. Forget the moustache and the belly like sponge – a belly filled with curled and rotting strands of spaghetti – and think about the massive breasts and the huge hips. And so I hung around her.
When the record had stopped playing I said,
‘Why don’t we go down to the coast this weekend?’
‘To a hotel?’ she asked.
‘The best hotel.’
‘Separate bedrooms, of course?’
I didn’t answer. I should have known better. You can’t win them all, but God, you ought to be able to win some of them. At nine-thirty she went into the back yard. I watched her from the window. She went through the business of caressing the wretched dog, kissing it, throwing her arms around its neck. When she came back I put my hands on her hips and drew her down on the sofa. I could feel that she was trembling. I thought, At last. At last. But as soon as I had moved my hands across her front
and up, she pushed me away.
I took out a cigarette and smoked furiously. That sometimes brings a woman to her senses, that look of frustrated agony, that impatient silence. But not Bella. She turned over the damned record and sat down well away from me.
At half-past ten I stood up to go.
‘Why are you rushing?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. She brought out another bottle of wine and we sat drinking it. She had an enormous capacity. When I was on the verge of drunkenness she was still clear-eyed.
‘Do you like your work?’ she asked.
‘I love animals,’ I said.
She didn’t say anything. She sipped her wine and looked at the many photographs. The he was a difficult thing to sustain. In the end, I dropped it, mentioning it only in a mumbled response to her questions. I thought about the dog, Blessed Rex (who came in for her attention more than me), and I thought about poor Eric. I was the assassin, the hired gun. I wondered what she would have said if I’d told her.
‘Animals are beautiful,’ she said. ‘Humans are so ugly.’
‘A matter of opinion,’ I said.
‘No, it is not,’ she said. She was waving her arms in the air in a theatrical way. ‘With an animal, there is never any doubt.’
She loved her dog. She loved it in what seemed to me a perfectly unnatural way. Yet, if she loved it so, why did she keep it shivering in that yard? A real RSPCA officer might have had something strong to say to her about that.
‘With an animal, you always know.’
‘Know what?’ I asked.
‘Everything there is to know,’ she said.
That night, when she showed me to the door, she allowed me to kiss her. She kept her mouth tight shut, she pressed her body flat against mine. Before I had time to respond, I was out in the cold street. I waited on the steps until she had closed her door, before I went into number fourteen. It was an absurd situation.
Thinking about her, I found it difficult to know why I found her so attractive. Breaking her down into individual parts, only the eyes, the curves of the hips, and the large firm breasts were appealing. The rest could have been discarded – including the legs, which were thick, and for some reason the sort of legs you might expect to find in an industrial area where all the women work lathes and tread machine controls. Industrial legs.
Assassins and Victims Page 10