Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Shall I do it for you?’

  For a moment she stared at me with astonishment. She made a strange gasping sound.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Nobody but me feeds Rex. That is how it has always been –’

  ‘Look, it was just a suggestion.’

  ‘I have always prepared his food.’

  I lit a cigarette. I reached out and took her hand. I imagined her suddenly undressing the way Agnes had done earlier – or tried to imagine, but no pictures came. Why was it that I couldn’t get sexual images with Bella? I looked at her hand. It lay there between my fingers flabbily.

  She was looking down at the pattern on the carpet, as if tracing its mazy pattern with her eyes.

  ‘I called earlier, but you were out,’ I said.

  ‘I have every right to go out,’ she said.

  Christ, she was touchy at times. I stubbed out my cigarette and sighed. Conversation seemed impossible; beyond us, circles of words out there that we couldn’t quite reach.

  ‘Of course you have every right to go out,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t disputing that.’

  She looked at me. ‘Why do you keep coming here? Why? Sometimes I think it is because you want to sleep with me, but sometimes I also think that you want to take my Rex away.’

  The bloody dog! I wished that I could put my hands around its throat and press. Press hard. Crush the breath out of its lungs.

  ‘Of course I don’t want to take him away,’ I said. I stroked her wrist. I lowered my voice until it was little more than a broken whisper. ‘Why should I want to take him away?’

  ‘Because you know that I shouldn’t have him here. It is against the law for him to be here, you know it is.’

  ‘Let’s forget the law for a moment,’ I said.

  She was crying. Great Italian tears dropped from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. I put my arm round her shoulder and dropped one hand on her knee. She sobbed, trying desperately to keep her body still.

  ‘I wouldn’t take Rex away,’ I said.

  I kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t respond. I pushed my tongue against her teeth. Still, she didn’t return the gesture.

  ‘Let’s go through to the bedroom,’ I said. She didn’t answer at once and then, with considerable force, she thrust me away.

  ‘That is all you want,’ she said.

  ‘At least you know I don’t want your dog,’ I said.

  We stared at each other. Why hadn’t she Agnes’s mentality in these things?

  ‘You will not enter my bedroom,’ she said. ‘You will not go in there at any time.’

  ‘Well, this sofa’s quite comfortable,’ I said.

  She got to her feet. ‘Please go. I think that Rex will be getting hungry.’

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Do whatever you wish.’

  She didn’t look at me. She was staring straight at the floor. I went along the hallway and opened the front door. Outside, I felt the frustration build up in me to the point of rage. It didn’t help when I heard the rattle of bed-springs from Agnes’s room. It didn’t help to hear the muffled moan of Agnes and her lover.

  I went upstairs. Eric was sitting at the table drinking his whisky.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  Master of the obvious. I dropped down on the bed. Rage, rage … I listened to Eric mumble about the dog and its impending doom. But I said nothing. My time was running out, along with my patience.

  5

  On the Sunday morning Eric went out for his newspaper and I stayed in bed, picking at a rind of bacon on my plate. In Eric’s favour it must be said that he cooks reasonably well: solid, digestible stuff, if unimaginative. He serves it nicely too; tomato cut into slices, toast exactly right, a touch of mixed herbs on top of the scrambled egg. I put the empty plate on the bedside table and lay back, smoking a cigarette.

  Sunlight was burning on the window. I stared out, up at the sky. If I didn’t think of Bella, if I forced out of my mind all those bloody endless questions, then the day could be a pleasant one. But sexual images have a habit of returning, like the taste of good food. They come up before you, brilliant colours in the mind’s eye, orgies that take place on the ghostly stage of some interior theatre. The creature of my imagination, while she had Bella’s body, she had Agnes’s face and manner.

  The door opened at that point and Roderick came into the room.

  ‘Fine morning,’ I said.

  ‘I was looking for Eric, actually,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ I said.

  Roderick hovered in the centre of the room. His long hair was tied at the back with a pink ribbon and he was wearing a brocade jacket sewn with floral patterns. He looked just what he was – an aristocratic hippy.

  He went to the window and stared out.

  ‘Good view?’ I said. I fumbled around and found my trousers.

  ‘The dog lives yet,’ he said.

  ‘These things take time,’ I said.

  I got out of bed and dressed.

  ‘I don’t see why they should take such time, man,’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘I mean, it’s just a case of going down there and over the wall and doing it.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. I stood beside him at the window. He smelled of turpentine and camphor. Down in the yard the damned dog was pacing back and forth, extending the chain until it would go no further, and then turning, he shook his head, yawned, and lay down.

  ‘These things have to be planned,’ I said. ‘The major difficulty is in getting rid of the corpse.’

  ‘Yes, I see that,’ he said. He hummed and hawed. ‘You’d have to cut the chain from the wall somehow.’

  I sat down on the sofa. I lit another cigarette and sprawled, just gazing up at the ceiling. There was something about the room that niggled me. Was it the colour scheme? It was a dark shade of pink, somehow a depressing colour, especially when stretched over chipped plaster. Or was it rather the claustrophobic feelings that the room induced?

  Roderick went to the mantelpiece and picked up Eric’s golliwog.

  ‘I used to have one of these,’ he said. ‘But they took it away from me when I was sent to boarding school. I don’t suppose I’ve ever really gotten over it. You know how it is – you get like attached to something and then it’s snatched away from you. It was just the same with Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, Batman, and God. I mean, I really believed in those cats and then, God, they were all knocked down.’

  ‘That’s how it is,’ I said. I watched him as he tapped his fingers on the wall, as if he were waiting for someone to answer him from the other side. His long body drooped somewhere in the middle, so that the upper part of him came out at right angles to the lower. He looked as though he was in pain.

  He stopped tapping and said, ‘I remember once speaking to Mr Peluzzi about it. Just before he died. He felt exactly the same as me. He said it was a rotten world and that because we were human beings we always looked at it through rose-coloured glasses. I mean, I see his point. But –’

  ‘Peluzzi? Did you know him?’ I sat forward, interested.

  ‘I spoke to him once or twice. He had a passion for badminton. He was always asking me to play with him. But, Christ, it’s such a bourgeois sport. I mean, all sports are, because there’s no point in playing unless you want to win. And I don’t care a fuck about winning anything.’

  ‘What did he die from?’ I asked.

  Roderick looked at me oddly. ‘They said it was his heart.’

  ‘And was it?’

  Roderick began tapping again. He didn’t say anything for a long time. I became more and more conscious of the irritating noise of his fingers on the wall, the only sound – like a hundred insects creeping – in the silent room.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘It was his heart, all right. I mean, he looked healthy enough on the surface. He was a big fellow with huge arms. He was a bit excitable I suppose. But then I didn’t really know him.’
>
  ‘It must have been a great shock to Mrs Peluzzi when he went,’ I said.

  Roderick smiled. He shook his head back and forward.

  ‘They didn’t get on, man. They had a dead scene going.’

  I smoked another cigarette. I was aware of the sound of my own blood beating inside my ears. The silence that fell into the room was strangely terrifying. For some reason my fingers were uncontrollably trembling. But why? Roderick hadn’t said anything. Yet in the way he had paused before answering my question I sensed something, something that suggested – or did it really? – he wasn’t absolutely confident in the explanation that Peluzzi had died of heart failure. In my game you develop a capacity for hunches: sometimes right, sometimes not. I drew on my cigarette and watched him.

  In an agitated way he was tapping noisily.

  ‘He was a big man,’ he said. ‘But when you looked at him closely he had an unhealthy sort of look. I don’t know, I can’t remember.’

  And then, as suddenly as it had happened, the moment passed. Everything was in its place again. The mood that had inspired the hunch was gone. The room, the ordinariness of things, the sun on the window. And there, fixed firmly in the past, was an historical fact: old Peluzzi had died of heart failure. That was that.

  Roderick was talking about the dog.

  ‘If I were you, I’d get it over with quickly.’

  ‘You’re not doing the job,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t seem to be doing it either,’ he said.

  ‘Time,’ I said. ‘When you get to my age, you’ll see the folly in haste.’

  He looked at me with some scorn, not that I blamed him when I thought of my last remark. He went to the door.

  ‘I’ll see Eric later.’

  I sat for a time on the sofa after he’d gone, trying to work out what it was about the conversation that had struck me as so odd and that had affected me so strangely. But it’s impossible to pin down a mood that no longer exists. It was in the past. I went to the window and looked out at Rex.

  Was it just a trick of light?

  Or was he staring at me?

  Later that night Eric went berserk.

  5

  Eric

  Sometimes a thing like that just gets into your mind and stays there, eating away at you like a worm, eating through your brain right down into your guts until you can’t think straight about anything and everything seems to be centred round the awful feeling of emptiness. It happens sometimes. It happened to my mother. You see, she had this idea in her head that she was going to die of cancer and sure enough she did, she did, not that her drinking helped her much, it only made holes in her liver. But what I’m trying to get at is that because a thing gets into your head and stays there, you can’t do anything to get rid of it until in the end you become blind to everything else.

  And that’s what happened to me.

  It was what she said to me, you see. She said, You’ll die before my dog does. She actually said that. Well, with some people you could ignore a remark like that because it’s a joke or just an empty threat or even sheer carelessness, but not with her, not with Mrs Peluzzi.

  It was the look in her face, the way her eyes came up mad and bright and fixed, not into my eyes, but in a way into the very depth of my skull. Mad, crazy eyes. You see eyes like that on Wanted for Murder posters. I felt scared. I wouldn’t have minded so much if Matt had put me at my ease, but he didn’t even try. He ignored it. He laughed. Oh, she’ll get you all right before that dog goes. That’s what he said.

  When I came back with my paper that Sunday morning he seemed funny and sort of faraway, not really in the room, not really with me. But miles away. I told him what she had said. I told him. The words went round and round in my head and I was screaming them at him. But he didn’t listen. I felt like a ship signalling SOS on a dead radio with the storm battering against it, dragging it on to the rocks. I wanted to get down on my knees and ask for his help, for anything, anything to save me from her. But he was sitting there, looking up at the window, and his eyes were glazed.

  I’m not easily scared. I know how to look after myself. But it was just as if she had laid the hand of death on my shoulder and said, Your time’s up. Say your prayers. It was just like the feeling men used to have when they were walking to the gallows and saw the faces staring up at them and seeing the shadow of the rope and knowing that in a minute they’d be dead unless something ridiculous happened like the trapdoor not working.

  If I hadn’t gone for the paper, if I’d stayed in the room, if if if. But what’s the point in wishing? I had walked straight into her and heard what she said and saw that crazy look in her eyes. And now the words were running and running through my head. You’ll die before my dog does.

  I looked out of the window. The dog was sleeping. You could just about see him, because he was tucked in near the wall. I didn’t want to die. I had my whole life ahead of me.

  Of course you might say that I was being bloody stupid getting worked up over what a woman said to me. After all, she was weaker than me. I could have beaten her easily. If it came to a fight, I would’ve won. I know that. But it was that expression in her eyes. She really meant what she said.

  Down there in the yard the dog was sleeping.

  And then she came out. She had a big white bowl filled with chunks of red meat. She called the dog’s name and he jumped up, his ears all stiff, and she started to throw him the pieces. Raw meat. I felt sick. I went and sat on the edge of the bed. Matt was looking up at the window. He took out his whisky and gave me a drink.

  ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ he said.

  It wasn’t funny. It just wasn’t funny. A man’s life isn’t a laughing matter. But I’ve noticed before that he treats things lightly sometimes. He should be more serious.

  ‘She threatened me,’ I said. ‘You could see she meant it. I’m not joking.’

  I could hear her words buzzing about in my head like flies round a lightbulb. I closed my eyes and felt the whisky bum into my chest.

  ‘Roderick was looking for you,’ he said.

  Roderick. I couldn’t stop to think about Roderick now. I opened my eyes. The room was moving about in front of me. It wasn’t every day that you got threats.

  Matt was looking down inside his whisky bottle.

  He had his eyes half-shut. I wanted to talk to him about the whole thing and make him see the seriousness of it all, but what was the point if he wouldn’t listen? I’d never felt so alone. When a thing like that happens, when a woman, an insane woman, stops you in the street and says she’s going to kill you, you expect your friends to support you. Otherwise, what are friends for?

  But Matt wasn’t really my friend if he didn’t want to help me in my time of trouble.

  I finished my drink and coughed.

  ‘You won’t think it a laughing matter when they fish my body out of the river,’ I said.

  ‘Ha-ha,’ he said, not looking at me.

  I went to the mantelpiece and looked at the objects there. It was like I was already dead. I could picture somebody from the council going through my belongings, touching all these things that mean so much to me and then saying, Put these odds and ends into the garbage can. I didn’t want that to happen. Whenever I’ve felt lonely I’ve got some comfort from these bits and pieces, it might be childish, but I don’t think so. What’s wrong with liking things that you liked when you were a child just because you’re grown up? Nothing, nothing at all. These things mean a lot to me.

  Then, a funny thing happened. I was looking at the golly when all of a sudden I saw her eyes burning away there. Not the golly’s own eyes, but her mad, hateful ones. I looked away.

  Matt said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit.’

  I didn’t ask where. I knew. He was going next door, to see her. He put on his jacket and looked at me. For a minute I just thought that he was going to reach out and help me, there was a sad sort of shine in his eyes, but he didn’t. He did nothing, he turn
ed and went out of the room.

  After a bit I went across the landing to see Roderick. He might listen. He might help. I knocked on his door. But there wasn’t any answer. I went downstairs and tried Agnes’s door. She came out, tying the cord of her dressing-gown.

  ‘What d’you want?’ she asked, all nasty.

  I couldn’t speak. It was as if the world was empty all of a sudden. I couldn’t turn anywhere. And there was that echo in my head. I should’ve controlled it. I should’ve sat down and said. Stop, stop, forget it, it means nothing.

  ‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Stop mumbling and say what it is you want.’

  I felt my mouth opening and closing but there was nothing to come out and she was staring at me in a hard way, her face sharp, staring, not trying to help. Then she shook her head and said,

  ‘What a bloody waste of time.’

  She closed her door. I could hear her laugh. I went out on to the street and started to walk. I must have walked a long way. I found myself in a place I’d never seen before. It was an industrial estate. It was empty because it was Sunday. Everything was dead silent. I sat down on a wall.

  At the end of the road, coming round the corner, I saw a woman with a dog on the end of a leash. I couldn’t move. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t move a single muscle. She came nearer and nearer. I could do anything. Just look.

  But it wasn’t Mrs Peluzzi. It was another woman altogether. And the dog was a black spaniel, not a mongrel.

  ‘Quiet up here,’ the woman said.

  The dog lifted his leg and pissed on the wall.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I say, you’re trembling.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. It was all I could say. You can’t speak when there’s nothing but fear in your head. What was I supposed to say?

  ‘I can give you an asprin,’ she said.

  She was a little woman with white hair and warts on her face. The dog sniffed my feet.

  I got off the wall and walked away. You’ll die before my dog does. It kept running through me. It wasn’t just in my head. No, it was moving through my blood now, through my bones. It was everywhere. I came to a field and I lay down in the grass. I stared up at the sky. I remembered when I was a little boy we used to go on picnics and I’d lie in the grass and think about the length of the sky and how high it was and my father would stroke my head with his fingers. That was a long time ago. Another world, it seems now. Why do good things have to come to an end? That’s what puzzles me. When I was a boy I never had anything really bad happen to me. I never had anything like this.