‘I promise,’ Gurenko said.
FIFTEEN
BURGUNDY
JACOB STREIK WAS CONFUSED, DIDN’T KNOW HOW MANY HOURS HAD passed since he’d shot the kid, understood only that a wicked weariness was clawing away at him. Once or twice he stopped the car and was sick by the side of the road. The second time he had to throw up, the fierce headlights of a passing truck had picked him out and he thought he must have looked ghostly and stupid retching into a grassy bank.
He hadn’t a clue where he was, hadn’t looked at the map in hours, he could only think of driving, just on and on, mile after bleary mile. At some points he was bugged by a weird loneliness. He wanted to park in a tiny French town and jaw with the locals, talk about soccer and whether Paris St-Germain was good enough to win the league or whatever it was, maybe drink some more of the red dreck, but he wasn’t sure if the cops were after him now as well. The lane where he’d shot the kid was lonely enough, but who could tell? Somebody might have seen him drive away, noted the registration number of the Saab, called in the gendarmerie. Everybody and his brother could be hunting in this region of France for an overweight American. A good disguise would help – yeah, if he could magically lose about eighty pounds he wouldn’t feel so goddam conspicuous, but they hadn’t invented that kind of diet yet. So he kept going, eyelids heavy, stomach churning, a fat man running nowhere through the hours before daybreak.
He didn’t realize he’d hit anything until he heard a thud against the front of his car and even then he swerved, although he knew it was too late. He braked, got out, stumbled back down the darkened road. The dog was a black mongrel. The Saab had knocked it about twenty feet from the point of collision and it lay awkwardly, hind legs broken, head twisted sorrowfully to one side. Its pink mouth hung open and bloody. Appalled, Streik bent down over the wretched creature, which turned its eyes toward him.
Streik thought: This thing pities me, this dying dog actually pities me. You’re going out of control, Jake, you’re beginning to imagine absolution in the eyes of a dying animal.
He put his hand on the dog’s head a moment. The fur was sticky with blood. You can’t leave it lying here, he thought. You can’t just leave it in the road for a truck to mangle. He raised the animal in his arms, carried it with grunting effort to the verge and set it down among stalks of grass, then he hurried back to his car. He didn’t move for a while. Dense shadows of sleep were congregating inside his head. If he didn’t cop a few zzzs damn soon he’d be a zombie.
He peered at the first light of morning visible through barren trees. It was then he realized his jacket was covered with the dog’s blood. How the hell could he turn up at some pension streaked with blood? Bienvenu, sign the register, here’s your key, room ten second floor – and as soon as your back was turned they’d be on the blower to the gendarmes before your head hit the pillow.
He stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, fished around in the piles of clothing for something to wear. He found a crumpled black blazer and a pair of old flannel bags and a grey shirt. He went into the trees and, shuddering in the cold air, discarded the bloodied suit. He stood in his mustard-coloured boxer shorts like a frightened man on the edge of a high diving-board. He put on the shirt and struggled into the flannels – they were too tight – and then the blazer with the silly Ralph Lauren badge. He tucked his pistol in the inside pocket of the blazer. He picked up the soiled clothes and wandered further into the trees where he buried the useless suit under a heap of brittle leaves. Then he went back to the car and drove away.
Eventually, when he couldn’t hack any more mileage, when his eyes had begun to pop and his vision fail, he came to a small village where a café in the tiny central square was the only place open. He had to stop, take the chance, rest somewhere, eat. He parked the Saab at the side of the square and, hitching up his flannels, waddled inside the café. Sit, have a sandwich, something to wash it down with. Relax.
But when he entered he was jumpy, couldn’t stand the sullen early-morning peasant faces that turned to look at him. He wondered if he was already on wanted posters and TV screens. His imagination did a tricky little dance. What were all these guys doing in a café at this ungodly hour?
He walked to the bar, ordered a ham sandwich in his bad French, jambon sur le pain, then asked for a cold lager. He had a killing thirst. He waited for the old woman in the hairnet to serve him. A TV played in the room. Two guys in khaki suits were digging carefully in some ruins. They had unearthed shattered bits of pottery. Very engrossing, Streik thought. If all I had to worry about were the shards of old Greek vases, wouldn’t life be hunky-dory?
His order came, he carried it to a table in the corner, munched the sandwich down quickly. The beer was a gaseous joy and went speeding at once to his brain along the same worndown track wine and cognac had taken earlier. He rose, ordered a second lager. Slow now, he thought. Speak to nobody. Do your thing and get the hell out.
The lager was beginning to make him drowsy. He wondered if they had accommodation here, but maybe that was risky. For a minute or so he floated off into a light sleep, waking with a start when he realized his head was sinking down to the table.
He thought: I’ll go to Audrey Roczak, I’ll find her, she always had good advice. What the hell was the name of the place where she lived? Memory was a flawed fishing-net now, slippery images and recollections dripped through it like herrings. He could see her face and remember the big hooped earrings she’d always worn in the old days in Prague and East Berlin, back when the Cold War hadn’t begun to thaw – so why couldn’t he remember where the hell she lived?
Then it popped back into his head: Lyon. That was the place. Lyon. How far away was he from Lyon?
The door of the café flashed open and a uniformed cop came in. He walked straight to the bar, ordered coffee, and with his elbow propped on the counter glanced round the room. He greeted a few people, a bit of cheerful banter was exchanged, and then he turned his face in Streik’s direction.
Streik thought of the German kid in the lane. He thought about the gun he carried in the inside pocket of his blazer and for which he had no permit, no papers of any kind, a gun he’d purchased illicitly in Montmartre from a small-time hood in a bar. He blinked, laid his hands on the table, caught the cop’s eye, then stared at the TV. The cop finished his coffee, then said his goodbyes and walked out.
Streik thought: He’s probably waiting for you on the street, Jake. Doesn’t want to make a scene arresting you in front of everybody. Dear Christ. It was a mess, a fucking mess, but it had been a mess from the very start; he’d sensed it months ago when he’d first encountered Bryce Harcourt, he’d felt a specific doom about the whole business, he’d known it couldn’t come to any good in the long run. Why hadn’t he listened to his inner self back then? Why hadn’t he paid attention to the wise old fart that occupied a small place at the back of his brain?
There were all the usual reasons. Money. Good money. A sense of adventure. Some foreign travel. Activity. Involvement. Some of the old tingle, the pizzazz. But now it was shit soup.
He got up from the table, paid his bill, walked slowly outside. The square was empty and a couple of lamps still burned against the remnants of darkness. Streik went in the direction of the Saab, unlocked the door and was about to get inside when the cop appeared out of nowhere and Streik’s heart, already an overburdened organ, was filled with a rushing fizz of terror.
‘Bonjour,’ the gendarme said. He was smiling and seemingly friendly, but Streik knew that when it came to the cops you couldn’t tell anything from their appearance.
‘Tourist?’ the cop asked.
‘American,’ Streik said, as if a declaration of his national identity were protection against the law and order of foreign countries.
‘Ah,’ said the policeman. ‘I have some little English.’
‘Hey, all right,’ Streik said enthusiastically. What now? Do I confess to killing a fucking dog in the hope that I’ll divert him f
rom any other line of inquiry? Did somebody see me change my suit in the woods? Was I observed shivering in my boxers?
‘And your destination, where is she?’
‘She?’
‘Yes.’
Streik thought about genders in the French language. Everything was either male or female, a fact that had to do a number on your brain if you were French. How were you supposed to remember if an envelope or a bicycle was a guy or a woman? Who decided the sexes of inanimate objects anyway?
‘Marseille,’ he answered, still smiling. It was the first name that popped into his head.
‘Marseille. Ah.’
He studied Streik’s face with some curiosity and then asked to see a driver’s licence. This request startled Streik, who fumbled for his wallet, produced his New York state licence, which the cop examined with more attention than Streik needed.
The cop didn’t give back the licence. Instead he said, ‘Passport, please.’
Passport, Streik thought. What is this? What’s going down here? He took his passport from his blazer and the gendarme flipped through the pages.
The cop, whose red neck was nicked from a recent shave, compared the passport photograph with Streik’s face, as if he might stumble upon a discrepancy between the picture and reality. Streik held his hand out for the return of the document but the cop was in no great hurry to oblige. He flicked the pages in a leisurely way. Streik grew agitated: he imagined a small panicked bird in his throat. He suspects me, Streik thought. He knows something.
The gendarme said, ‘It is not the best time of the year for the touring.’
‘Yeah, but it’s quiet.’ Streik kept the smile going, even as he wondered if this cop meant to detain him deliberately while reinforcements were on their way. ‘Like, it’s cheaper. Hotels. Restaurants. Cheaper all round and less crowded.’ He had an urge to babble.
The gendarme shrugged. Maybe he thought Streik odd to be driving around in freezing weather. Streik, trying to restrain his impatience, jiggled the keys in his hand.
‘I have questions,’ the cop said.
‘Questions?’
The cop held up a hand. ‘How long are you in this country?’
‘Coupla weeks.’
‘And where have you been?’
Streik laughed and sounded totally manic. ‘Here. There. You know how it is. Say, is something wrong? My brake lights not working or something?’
The cop seemed not to understand this. ‘I will need you to come with me—’
‘What?’
‘I have other questions.’
‘Hold on,’ Streik said. ‘I’m a US citizen. I’m only passing through. Gimme the passport. Gimme the licence.’
The cop tucked both documents in the pocket of his jacket. ‘Later. Now, please. Come with me.’
The fuck, Streik thought. Panic throbbed inside him. Had the cop been notified about the German’s death? Had a bulletin been circulated? His mind was filled with wanted posters. Dead or Alive. He looked up and down the square. This was bad. This was sour. There was no way he was going anywhere with this goon. But what would happen if he refused? He looked at the car, wondered if he could make it inside, turn the key, drive the hell away; the element of surprise offered only the most slender of margins. He listened to a mournful wind blow across the square, the quiet rattle of crisp dead leaves.
‘Let’s be reasonable,’ he said. ‘I gotta right to know what you want to detain me for. Correct?’
‘I have questions,’ the gendarme said.
‘Questions, yeah. You already said that. So ask. Ask them right here. I don’t mind answering anything.’
The cop stubbornly shook his head. ‘Come. Come with me. My car,’ and he pointed to the other side of the square.
Streik hesitated. He had to act, act quickly. If this uniformed asshole thought he was going to get a medal for bringing in a killer, he was barking up all the wrong trees. Streik moved his arm with an alacrity that belied his bulk. He whipped the gun out of his waistband and pointed it directly at the cop, who took one step back, his expression fearful.
‘I’ll blow you the fuck away,’ Streik said.
‘Put the gun down,’ the cop said.
‘Yeah. Right. You take me for a complete moron?’
Streik, his pistol still pointed at the cop, clambered inside the Saab, stuffed the key in the ignition, rolled down the window, drew the door shut: how far am I going to get, for Christ’s sake? For a moment he considered surrendering to the cop, undergoing the ordeal of imprisonment in some French jail – but he’d be trapped behind bars, and one day somebody would get to him, somebody would smoke him: end of Jacob Streik. Even if he didn’t go to jail a trial would expose him, and the American Embassy would be informed, and Streik wanted absolutely no involvement with any embassy. No goddam way. He had no such thing as a death wish.
He thought about shooting the cop, but he didn’t. The German hitcher was bad enough; a dead cop would bring all kinds of shit down on him. He stuck his foot hard on the gas pedal. He drove out of the square, compelled by the need to get as far away from the cop as he could. In his rearview mirror he watched the gendarme rush across the square to his own car.
Streik hit the open road, which was narrow and twisted treacherously. He forced himself to concentrate. He’d always been a good driver. That was one thing he could say for himself. He had an affinity with cars. He’d been hot-wiring and driving them since he was thirteen years old in The Bronx.
He swung into bends, an eye on the rearview mirror. He saw the cop car half a mile behind him. He gave the Saab more gas. He heard his tyres scream on concrete and felt the car bounce when it struck potholes and ruts. He imagined the cop jabbering into his car phone, I’ve got a suspect in the German murder case, he may be heading in the direction of Route 89, erect roadblocks, send in the cavalry. Jacob Streik, marked man, a target. A fugitive in a foreign country with neither driver’s licence nor passport, but what the hell. Let’s go for it, he thought. Let’s take this sonofabitch for a trip. And he gassed the car as hard as he could but the cop was still on his tail, bend after bend.
The road was straight for a couple of miles. The speedo was reading ninety-seven miles an hour and the Saab was beginning to vibrate under pressure. Streik struggled for more speed, pushed the pedal into the floor. Come on, come on, gimme something extra! Another bend, another swing of the wheel, another peek in the rearview mirror. The cop was about a hundred yards back and gaining and Streik strained, strained to get more juice out of his car. His hands were tensed on the wheel, his throat was as parched as prairie grass in a season of drought.
The cop was coming up fast. Streik realized he couldn’t outdrive the French car. The Saab didn’t have the balls. The cop’s Renault was some souped-up affair. OK. What now? Pull over? Give up? He kept going. The landscape was a series of absurd impressions, a goat chained to a fence, swarms of pink pigs lathered in mud, an abandoned château with broken windows and slats nailed across the front door. None of it made sense. Animals and trees and houses all seemed to be spinning off the face of the earth because gravity no longer applied.
The cop car was alongside him now on the narrow road. Streik glanced at the stressed face of the gendarme, who was waving one hand in a gesture that meant pull over to the side, but Streik swung the car and heard metal grind on metal as wheel touched wheel and a hub-cap flew off with a clanging noise. Yahoo! Keep going!
The cop dropped back, came again, and Streik wondered about the possibility of shooting the man. He had the automatic in his lap, he could pick it up, try his luck through the window, but accuracy was unlikely at this speed. He twisted the steering wheel and the Saab struck the Renault, and the cop skidded to the side but didn’t lose control. Tenacious fuck, Streik thought. You aren’t going to shake this character. He picked up the pistol and, trying to steer one-handed, fired a shot in the general direction of the other car but it went whining off harmlessly into trees.
The Renau
lt came alongside him again. The cop was screaming what Streik took to be obscenities. Up yours too, Frère Jacques.
Desperate, Streik fired the gun again and this time he scored a hit on the French car, puncturing the hood which immediately released a fireworks display of sparks. Gotcha, Streik thought. The wiring, the electric connections, something had been disabled. The Renault slowed, the cop’s face receded, and Streik watched in the rearview mirror as the French car slithered miserably into a clump of trees at the side of the road, where it sent up a delicious column of black smoke.
Streik didn’t lose speed, didn’t pause to ponder this small accidental victory, didn’t dwell on his good luck, no, no, he kept trucking, he had to get as far away from the cop as possible, to which end he began seeking out ever more obscure side roads that invariably passed through somnolent hamlets or tracts of barren agricultural terrain where an occasional farmer could be seen pottering mysteriously in a dismal field.
Go go go. Keep going.
When he reached that state of mind where he knew he didn’t have the adrenalin to drive any further and total inner collapse threatened him, he pulled over into a field, parked under dead trees, reclined his seat and, hideously cramped, fell into a light sleep.
He dreamed of Audrey Roczak, who was dressed in her customary gypsy threads and who, in the quiet comfort of the dream, was hugging him and saying You’re safe with me, Jake. Safe as houses. But the dream, which began so peacefully, took a nasty turn in the course of which Streik had the distinct feeling that Audrey had stolen his passport and driver’s licence. You’re a man without a country now, Jake. How does that feel?
SIXTEEN
LONDON
THE ROOM SMELLED OF DEATH AND CIGARETTE ENDS. BEDSHEETS HAD been drawn over the girl’s body. They were streaked with blood already turning from scarlet to a dark funereal brown. Pagan drew the top sheet back, looked into the pale drained face. The young girl’s dull eyes were open; the indifference of death. He stared at the thin lips, the smudged mascara. A tooth was missing. He experienced a small sadness; what he needed was a vaccination of sorts to render him immune to violent death. Confrontations with murder, which seemed to harden some cops and induce in others a sense of black humour, still threw him off balance, plunged him into pessimistic reflection on the general malaise of the species.
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