Blood Wine

by John Moss

  “Come on, everyone works for someone.”

  “How very cynical.”

  “Even freelancers work for someone. Is that what you are, an independent agent? Independent from whom? The wine syndicate? Is there a connection with drugs? The Mafia? What?”

  “Morgan, I’ll tell you who I’m not working for.”

  “Who?”

  She handed him her gun, slipping the safety on as she did so.

  “Them.” She nodded toward the Embankment. There was a car in shadows at the end of the bridge. It was rolling slowly in their direction.

  “Who are they? What’s with the gun?”

  “The gun is to prove we’re on the same side. And them? They followed you.”

  “Why?”

  “To get to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Morgan, in ten seconds they’re going to break out of the shadows, then watch the rubber burn, they’re coming to get us. Perhaps we should leave.”

  “One car, two directions. They can’t get us both.”

  “Very gallant, Morgan. They don’t want us both. They could have taken you out anytime. Here they come.”

  As the large sedan at the end of the bridge suddenly accelerated, Morgan and Elke both looked around them. There was nowhere to hide. Morgan could see what looked like the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun protruding from a window of the onrushing car.

  “Come on,” he yelled above the engine roar.

  They both swung over the rail of the bridge, dangling precariously below the stonework, ducking their heads as the shotgun exploded. Another shot, and another shattered the air.

  The car screeched to a stop. Car doors snapped open and slammed. Morgan and Elke exchanged desperate glances.

  They reached out and grasped hands, released their grip on the bridge and leaned into the air, plummeting toward the water, falling down, falling down, and the air above them rained shot pellets all around.

  When they hit, their grasp on each other was torn by the force of the fall. Morgan went deep and could see up through the murky water the radiance of London’s night sky, and he could see Elke’s legs flailing above him. He grabbed hold of her ankle and hauled her under, touching her body to reassure her it was him.

  She stilled in his arms, and they drifted underwater. Finally, both desperate for air, they surfaced. London Bridge was receding. They could see figures at the centre, but there were no more shots. The water was cold, but for northerners, a Swede and a Canadian, it was not a shock, and they swam gently so as not to attract attention, and came ashore at stone steps leading down from the Embankment close to Tower Bridge.

  When they stepped up out of the water, Morgan was incredulous to see Elke had clasped firmly in one hand her new shoes from Harrods.

  Nothing could have redeemed her more in his eyes than this wonderfully irrelevant gesture of an inveterate survivor.

  “Now what?” he said, acquiescing to her superior knowledge of the situation. He did not have any idea who was trying to kill them. She obviously did, and was not surprised.

  “Do you have money?” she asked.

  He felt for his wallet. It was still in his hip pocket.

  “Yeah, did you lose your purse?”

  “It’s okay. There was nothing in it. We lost the gun, I imagine.”

  “No,” he said,” as he struggled to fish it out from where it had slipped down into his pants. When he retrieved it, without thinking he handed it to her. She held it in her open palm.

  “No,” she said, handing it back to him. “You hold on to it for now. I’ve nowhere to put a gun.”

  He looked at her in the mottled illumination from a light standard. Her clothes were wet and slick to her body. Even as she pulled them away to create a layer of warmth close to her skin, the cloth slumped back in a clammy caress, leaving no place on her form not fully defined.

  “We’d better get you out of those clothes.”

  She looked up at him with a wry smile. “And you out of yours?”

  “Honestly,” he said, feeling awkward, “you can get hypothermia in the middle of summer. Water drains away body heat forty percent faster than air.”

  “Morgan, you are a sweet man. Miranda was right.”

  “Miranda? What did she say?”

  It did not matter what she had said. Bringing her into the scene, Elke aroused in Morgan a feeling of constraint, the sexual intimations suddenly inappropriate. Still, as he began to shake, and as Elke shivered, he could not help but respond to her radiant and dangerous allure.

  “Come on, Morgan. We can’t go to my place, and yours isn’t a good idea, they’ll be watching the Vanity Fair. Let’s grab a taxi, explain we’ve tipped our canoe, and get him to drop us at a comfortably anonymous hotel by Victoria Station.”

  In the morning, Elke was gone. They had washed their clothes in the small bathroom at the Excalibur Hotel, using the hair dryer to dry them. Elke towelled her hair after a long, hot shower. Morgan let her towel his hair dry as well. No one had done that since he was a child. Sometimes his father used to. He did not remember his mother touching him, except for the occasional cuff, although he had long since forgotten why.

  He was not surprised she was gone. Nor did he regret not following her or trying to prevent her from going. They had flagged down a taxi with no trouble, in spite of looking like they had just emerged from the Thames, and the driver had been very English and pretended not to notice. The only thing the concierge asked when they checked in was how long they were staying. As they climbed the narrow stairs, Elke giggled that Morgan had answered only one night. She explained he was being asked how many hours. It was that kind of hotel.

  He glanced around for the note he knew she would have left. Beside his wallet, he found a scrap of paper on which she had written, I.O.U. £10. Taxi Fare. Thanks for a good night. Elke. There was no other evidence that she had been in the room, apart for a lingering fragrance that clashed as he inhaled with the stale tobacco smell emanating from the furnishings, although the room was designated a non-smoker.

  He lay back on the bed with his head propped on both pillows. They had had a restless night, touching at arm’s length, the nerve ends in fingertips burning, and then careening into each other, soaring and humping and roaring their pleasure in each other’s bodies and minds. They dozed, wrapped in one another’s arms, desperate to avoid falling away. Each brought out in the other something of the loneliness and longing that no one else had discovered. And then they fell deeply asleep, and then she was gone.

  Coming into the room they had made straight for the bathroom and helped each other out of wet, clinging clothes and into the shower as casually as if they had been lovers for years. They washed and rubbed with soap and hot splashing water until their skin, sallow from their swim in the Thames, glowed pink and flush, and they dried off in a flurry of towels and suddenly, stepping into the bedroom, they became shy and climbed into bed quietly and touched each other with tentative and gentle deliberation — not with the innocence of virgins, he thought, which is another name for not knowing what you are doing, but that different kind of innocence that comes only from experience, making love with the full knowledge of how much they could do for each other.

  She was gone and it was Sunday. He had nowhere to go. He would spend the day walking through London the way he had when Susan would go home for the weekend. She used to invite him but he always resisted. Meeting her family might somehow bring an end to his adventure, and he still had too much to do. He was in the process of losing and finding himself, and she, with her copper-red hair and her full lips and her eyes filled with hope and forgiveness, was perfect, as long as she wasn’t too real. Parents and bedrooms and kitchens and siblings were more reality than he could deal with, back then.

  Now he missed her. He wondered if the woman he had bumped against in Beaufort Gardens could possibly be her? He wondered where Elke Sturmberg had got to, and how Francine Ciccone was getting on in her splendid and solitary widowhood. />
  Morgan never envisioned himself a lady’s man. In fact, he was rather contemptuous of the notion. He was certainly not a man about town nor casual in his occasional affairs. Since Lucy, he had had no lasting relationships with women, apart from Miranda. Now, in a few days, he had made love with a beautiful friend of his childhood and with a stunningly dangerous blond who had exploded into his life only the week before, with whom he shared no other past and virtually no chance of a future.

  He wondered about Miranda, whether she was recuperating or back in Toronto.

  From the end of Thackeray Street, Morgan could see a large dark car parked in front of the Vanity Fair. He had no choice about returning to his room and caught the tube from Victoria Station up to the British Museum. His clothes, his passport, and his notes on the Humber Bridge shooting and the Ciccone execution were there. He was not about to leave them behind because some maniacs were trying to kill Elke.

  It’s all about why, he thought as he walked slowly up the street toward the parked car. We know who killed the kid under the bridge and who killed Vittorio Ciccone and who killed Philip Carter. We even know who killed the old lady, Mrs. Peter Oughtred at Bonnydoon Winery. But we don’t know why. When we do, maybe we’ll know who killed the ex-boyfriend in New York, and who killed Carlo Sebastiani, and who tried to kill Elke and me.

  Morgan had Elke’s little pistol tucked into the front of his pants, with his shirt out to hide it. He rapped on the closed window of the parked car. It rolled down. A man sporting a neat mustache gazed up at him with an annoyed look on his face.

  “May I help you?” he said to Morgan in a tone suggesting they could not possibly have anything in common.

  “You tell me,” said Morgan.

  “I am sorry,” said the man. “There seems to be some mistake.”

  The car window started to roll up. Morgan lifted his shirt so the gun showed. The window stopped halfway.

  “See here,” said the man, “I really am awfully sorry, I don’t think I can be of much help. I’ve never even talked to an American before, not on the street.”

  Morgan could not make sense of the man’s statement.

  “Roll it down,” he demanded.

  The window descended. The man’s face glowed a deep red. His mustache twitched. “Perhaps I could pay you,” said the man.

  “What for?” Morgan asked.

  “In lieu of whatever it is you want,” said the man.

  “What I want? What I want is to know what you want.”

  “My dear fellow, I want nothing more than to leave. Providing you don’t shoot me.”

  “You’re waiting for me, right?”

  “I’m waiting for Flo.”

  “What flow, what the hell are you talking about?” Morgan nudged his hand against the gun through his shirt.

  “Flo, my dear fellow. Florence. She is my friend, she is up for the weekend.”

  “Your friend?”

  “Yes, my ‘friend.’ You know, in quotation marks. Are you here from my wife? Is she behind this? Good God, she hired an American.”

  “Canadian.”

  “Canadian? I didn’t know you people carried guns.”

  “We don’t.”

  “You are.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Here’s Flo. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind. Thank you. Flo, this gentleman and I have been chatting.”

  “Hello,” said Flo.

  “Hello, Flo,” said Morgan as Flo walked around and slipped into the passenger side.

  “It’s been nice meeting you,” said Morgan to the man with the mustache. “I’m not from your wife. I’ve never met her.”

  “Well, good for you, old chap. It’s not something one easily forgets. If I may, we have an engagement.…”

  “Yes, of course, tally-ho,” said Morgan. He waved them off and stood in front of the Vanity Fair, gazing up and down the street, trying to see if there were any other people sitting in parked cars. Then he decided he did not care and went in.

  Morgan decided to have a pub dinner in The Bunch of Grapes and then, although he had walked all the way over from his hotel, he decided on a postprandial stroll up and down the length of Beaufort Gardens. Several times. But of course a woman his own age with copper-red hair was nowhere to be seen. He left, trying to put Susan Croydon out of his mind.

  Morgan slept soundly through the night. When he woke up and had breakfast in the small dining room of the Vanity Fair, he was feeling himself for the first time since arriving in England. He looked forward to his meeting with Alistair Ross at New Scotland Yard.

  As he walked over past the British Museum and down Charing Cross Road, he passed one of the pubs where he had worked some twenty years earlier, but he did not glance in. He was done with nostalgia, and he had a job to do. It amused him that he was not certain what his job was.

  It was still early when he reached Trafalgar Square and sat down on a bench to watch the fluttering of pigeons. Horatio Nelson looked dapper on the top of his column, staring off into the distance at the oncoming French and ignoring the gathering of tourists below.

  Morgan was having what he thought of as an existential moment. Everything around him was defined by his own position in the scene. On a corner to his right was Canada House. Behind him, the steps leading up to the National Portrait Gallery, behind to the left, St Martin-in-the-Fields, then down on the left, The Strand, leading to Fleet Street, and straight ahead, past the lions, Whitehall, with Big Ben barely visible, and hidden to the right, past Pall Mall and Canada House, just a narrow garrison of buildings away, were St. James Park and Green Park and Buckingham Palace.

  So familiar was the panorama, he knew every aspect without looking. He felt very much alive, surrounded by the substantiality of things. Paradoxically, he also felt ephemeral, knowing if he were not here, everything would be exactly the same. Being and non-being, he thought — you can only deal so much with things like this, then you go mad or get bored.

  At New Scotland Yard he was given complicated instructions on how to find his way through labyrinthine corridors to a door marked ALISTAIR ROSS. At last, he thought, as he knocked with the assurance of a man who had achieved his goal, it is all going to make sense.

  Ross rose to meet him as he entered a surprisingly nondescript room. Morgan strode forward and thrust his hand out in greeting, aware as he did so that there was someone else in the room, revealed behind him as the door swung shut in his wake.

  “Ross,” said Alistair Ross, “liaison.”

  Morgan wheeled around without shaking hands and stared into the eyes of Elke Sturmberg. She had changed into a light cotton dress and looked almost demure.

  “Detective Morgan,” she said.

  “Ms. Sturmberg.”

  “You two know each other? Good,” said Alistair Ross. “That should make things easier. Perhaps between the two of you, you can explain what’s going on, what you want me to do. New Scotland Yard is at your service — within reason, of course.”

  19

  Cambridge

  On Saturday, Seymour Clancy came to visit Miranda. It was after lunch and she was sitting outside, wrapped in a hospital gown that in both fabric and cut was generically cheery. He brought her a small bouquet of spring flowers, although it was the beginning of summer. When she saw him approach, she settled low in her chair and gazed up through lowered eyes.

  “Help me, help me,” she said plaintively.

  “What? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course,” she responded, sitting upright. “Help me break out of this joint. They’re all so bloody nice, it’s making me sick. It’s time to go back to Kansas.”

  “Kansas?”

  There’s no place like home, but she didn’t want to go home, just somewhere else.

  “It’s time to move on,” she explained.

  “Yeah, lets see if we can’t get you out of here.”

  New Jersey seemed happy to release her into the care of a New Yorker, and she was out within a
n hour. Only after they were on the road did Miranda remember she’d left the flowers behind.

  On their way through the Henry Hudson Tunnel, she closed her eyes and did not open them until they emerged in Lower Manhattan.

  “We’re right near the Best Western I was staying at,” she said. “I can stay there.”

  “You want to get your clothes from Elke’s?”

  “Sure, let’s go there first.”

  The building superintendent let them in when Clancy identified himself as a cop. Opening the door into Elke’s capacious loft, Clancy whistled.

  “She was doing all right in the wine racket, wasn’t she?”

  “You think she was part of the scam?”

  “No, I don’t think she was part of the scam. I think she got in over her head precisely because she was not part of it. She was an expert, and that made her dangerous.”

  “To whom?”

  They sat down on an improbably long sofa, then Miranda got up and went into the kitchen area and returned with a couple of imported beers.

  “From the bottle okay?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  They settled in side by side on the sofa. Both put their feet up on the coffee table, sliding a couple of heavy wine books and a stack of Vogue magazines to the side.

  “Why don’t you stay here for the night,” Clancy suggested.

  “You think so?”

  “Why not. You were here as a legitimate guest. You’re not breaking any laws just because she’s taken off. If she’s a felon, it’s on your turf, not ours.”

  “How’s Tony doing?”

  “He lost his arm.”

  “I remember.”

  “He’s lucky to be alive. What about Elke Sturmberg?”

  “What about her?”

  “She might have done it. I understand it wouldn’t be her first.”

  “Her first hand! Tony’s forearm was shattered and hacked, the hand in the bag was severed with a single blow at the wrist.”

  “A definitive distinction.”

  “Probably by the nefarious Mr. Savage. We told you about him, and I think he was sending a message.”