Pagan said, ‘She’s been inactive for years. Years. Why make a comeback now? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘We’re not even sure this is the woman, Frank,’ Foxie said. ‘We don’t have fingerprints. We don’t have evidence. All we’ve got is Gunderson’s hypothesis that the message was left by a female – that, plus your memory. And memory isn’t always reliable.’
It’s reliable in this case, Foxie, Pagan thought. Believe me. The attic made him feel claustrophobic. Ten years ago the windowless interrogation room he’d shared with the woman had made him feel the same, but even more so, because she dominated the space, she controlled the mood, she played on his tensions as if they were keys on a clarinet. I unsettle you, don’t I? I can’t think why I should bring that response out of you. Why don’t we relax, try to make this easier? Her voice had a sultry quality, sometimes a low-pitched whisper, sometimes the half-hoarse cadence of a torch-singer. He remembers: she crushes her cigarette on the floor and reaches across the table to touch his hand, a moment of intimacy unnerving in its unexpectedness, her flesh is soft and warm and her fingertips slide across the ridges of his knuckles, and he doesn’t pull back his hand, doesn’t move, he simply lets her skin remain in contact with his, because he likes it, because he enjoys the feeling, because for a few crucial seconds he’s completely lost in the woman’s force field. And he recognizes in himself the unmistakable sensation of desire. She says: It might have been fun to meet under other circumstances, don’t you agree? I think we might have had a fine old time of it. He turns his face to the side, embarrassed because she’s intuited his desire. And then he feels her foot under the table, she’s kicked off a shoe and is stroking his leg with her toes—
Foxie pressed a button. Pagan opened his eyes. The image on the screen was almost black, lacking contrast. ‘I need to adjust this gismo, Frank. A minute.’
Pagan leaned against the wall, a web touched his forehead, he brushed it aside. From tunnels to attics, he thought. This investigation was all over the place, which he certainly didn’t like. Give me form. Shapes. He felt like a man puzzling over an abacus on which somebody of malice had rearranged all the beads. And one of those beads was a woman he hadn’t seen in ten years, hadn’t thought about in a long time, somebody shipwrecked in his memory.
‘Ah,’ Foxie said. ‘There we are.’
On the screen was a photograph of a long-haired woman of about twenty-three. It had clearly been taken without the woman’s knowledge. Her face was turned to one side; a good profile, beautiful and strong and determined. She was dressed in the style of the early seventies, beaded jacket, flared jeans. A ribbon flowed from her hair. The background was that of a European city, evidenced by the kinds of car and licence-plate numbers that were also in the shot.
Foxie said, ‘Nineteen seventy-eight. Athens.’
Yes, Pagan thought. ‘Keep going.’
‘Click,’ said Foxworth.
The second image was ostensibly that of the same woman, but the difference between the pictures was remarkable. Her hair was shorn in an irregular way and she appeared boyish. She wore a two-piece suit that might have been tailored for a man. She had a necktie loosely knotted at her throat. Androgynously lovely. There was even an element, altogether misleading, of vulnerability about her in this shot. Behind the woman was another figure, shadowy, slightly out of focus. Whether he was in her company or merely a pedestrian who’d come into range, it was hard to tell.
Pagan moved, took a closer look.
Foxie said, ‘Taken in nineteen eighty-two, Rio de Janeiro. Photo courtesy of Brazilian police surveillance. I’m not quite sure how we came by it.’
‘Who’s the fellow just behind her? The one with the shades?’
Foxie shook his head. ‘Can’t say he looks familiar, Frank. Not even sure he’s in her company.’
Pagan went directly to the screen. He studied the man’s features. He had an irritating sense of familiarity, a murmur at the back of his mind, but it slipped away from him before he could define it. ‘He reminds me of somebody.’
Foxie scrutinized the shot. The man in the picture was blurred. The photograph had clearly been taken with a long-distance lens. Pagan snapped his fingers, a measure of frustration. He’d seen the face before, he was sure of that, but where in his memory did it belong? He played with vague associations in his head – was the man connected in some way with the fashion industry? cosmetics? movies? – but these produced nothing fruitful. Why had he come up with these areas of activity? What random linkage was floating free in his mind? He had the distinct impression, based on no observation in particular, that the man was definitely in the woman’s company.
‘Skip it. Keep going,’ he said. But the man’s face nagged him.
‘This is the last one, Frank.’
A police mug-shot appeared on the screen, a picture sliced in two: one side showed only the profile, the other was full face. She looked defiantly pale in these images, contemptuous of the police photographer. It was a marvellous face, filled with cavalier resonance, a flare of sexuality that would initially incite a man and then ultimately undermine him. You could imagine that the business of being her lover would be an endless war fought on terrain of her own making. There would be skirmishes, battles, frail, unreliable truces, blood in the trenches. The depths in the eyes were a little scary. But she could do anything with those eyes, he remembered. They could be ice, they could be alluring, they could be incongruously innocent, childlike.
‘Nineteen eighty-four,’ Foxie said. ‘New York City. Arrested on charges of sedition. Plotting the overthrow of the US Government.’
Pagan stared at the face. ‘Then she escaped. Went underground.’
‘Correct.’ Foxie flicked through the pages of a manila folder. ‘She belonged to an organization – some splinter group of the Weathermen – responsible for planting bombs in Washington. One was discovered close to the Washington Monument, another was defused in a parking garage next to the House of Representatives. She was sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury and managed to disappear within a matter of a few weeks. Thin air. Reported sightings include Los Angeles nineteen eighty-seven, Frankfurt the same year. She had an apparently close call in a hotel in Deauville in nineteen ninety-one where she was recognized by a retired FBI agent on vacation. The hotel was promptly surrounded by the local heat. But the lady had vanished. She’d registered under the name of Charlotte Pike. She appears to have a fondness for aliases involving creatures. God knows why, but she’s called herself Caroline Starling, Cara Raven, Carola Fox.’
Pagan stepped in front of the projector beam. ‘Carlotta. That’s what we always called her. That’s what the press always called her.’ Carlotta, he thought. The name had the timbre of a bell rung in a far-off steeple, a puzzling summons.
Foxie was quiet for a moment. ‘Do you want to fill me in on the personal background, Frank? What makes you certain it was Carlotta who left you the message?’
‘I have to go back a bit, Foxie. Ten years. Nineteen eighty-five. There was a tip from Belfast. She was supposed to be jobbing for a fringe of the IRA. She was suspected of trying to smuggle explosives into the UK. We had everybody watching the ports, railway terminals, airports. I’d just begun working with Martin Burr then. I spent six days behind a one-way mirror at Heathrow watching everybody coming through customs. A yawn of a job. But the tip was supposed to be the genuine article. Carlotta was coming to England to finalize the details of the smuggling. I had her photograph in front of me for a week.’ He looked at the mug-shot on the makeshift screen. ‘That does her absolutely no justice. She was – the word is gorgeous, I suppose. But that’s not quite right either.’
He pressed his hands together. He could recall obsessing over the woman’s picture. He’d lived and breathed Carlotta for days, establishing a queer kind of intimacy with her image even before he’d met her.
‘What happened?’ Foxie asked.
‘I intercepted her at Heathrow on the sixth
day of my surveillance.’
‘And?’
‘I took her in for questioning. Keep in mind the fact that everybody wanted her. Everybody wanted the glory of capturing Carlotta. Special Branch. The CID. The FBI was waiting in the wings. She was an escaped felon, after all. Careers would have been made overnight. I had this bright idea I’d be an instant hero. Instant promotion. Watch my jet-stream.’ Pagan laughed at himself; the brashness of old ambitions, of youth.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t exactly know how to describe her. She projected – I can only call it a kind of bewitching sexuality, Foxie. OK. Like a spell. I was stuck with her in an interrogation room for two days. She had an answer for everything. She was in London to visit a dying aunt. That story checked out nicely. The strange thing is, it was damn difficult to imagine anyone with her looks being involved in the sordid business of terrorism. When I spoke to her I had the unsettling sense of interrogating an angel. A sexy angel, admittedly. But that’s how she looked. She charmed us all. She seduced us. Even Martin Burr, who knew his way around an interrogation. I think she fluttered old Martin’s heart. I know she did a small number on mine.’ He was editing his story for Foxie, sanitizing it. Her hand on his, the heat in his blood, the abrupt fissure of lust she’d released in him – how could he tell Foxie any of this? Ten years ago he’d been a different person. Ten years ago he’d been married only five or six months, in love with his wife – and Carlotta, like a messenger from the abyss, had forced him to recognize, quite deliberately, that he was capable of entertaining notions of infidelity and betrayal. Is this a wedding band, Frank? Tell me about your wife. Is she smart? Pretty? Is she faithful? Are you true to her? He remembers her fingertips closing over the thin gold ring, the palm of the hand clasping the finger in an undeniably suggestive way. He remembers the feel of her palm on bone, his reluctance to have her stop. You have to learn to relax, Frank. You have to learn a whole lot of things, don’t you? But then you’re what – thirty-three, four? You haven’t really begun to live.
‘We couldn’t hold her,’ he said. ‘We had no reason. So we decided to turn her over to the FBI, who had more positive reasons for wanting her.’ Pagan paused. ‘They sent a couple of agents from Washington.’
‘And?’
‘We put her in a hotel under guard while our friends from Washington were on their way to fetch her. Nobody knows exactly how she got away. There was some speculation she dressed as a maid and just walked out. Another story has her bribing a room-service waiter into helping her. Who can say for sure? A few days after she vanished, there was an explosion at an RAF base in Norfolk. Was she behind it? Nobody ever knew.’
He remembered the hotel room, the corridor where half a dozen uniforms kept watch, he remembered ushering Carlotta inside the room. She sits on the bed and says: This feels fine, Frank. Not too soft, not too hard, just right. She raises her eyes, looks at him, stretches a hand out toward him, fingers stretched. The short skirt reveals the softness of thigh; he looks at the breasts under the white silk blouse. A bad moment, time turned upside-down, the turbulence of feelings. Why don’t you lock the door, Frank? Sit down beside me, have a cigarette. Nobody’s going to disturb us. He takes a couple of steps toward her, fevered, emboldened by his desire, unthinking, career jettisoned, wife forgotten, all his responsibilities tossed into a bonfire of amnesia, and he watches her hand stroke the quilt, watches the way she spreads her legs, stretches them, sees how one hand moves to her own thigh, fingertips caressing her own flesh. And then her hand disappears under the hem of the skirt into darkness. She tosses back her head, lips parted, eyes still focused on Pagan as if she sees straight through him, divining the nature of his arousal. He knows it’s a game, but it’s a desperate one, and reckless, because he can’t see the consequences of it, and he takes another step toward her, a step closer to the edge. Her hand, invisible to him, moves between her legs, and she says his name a couple of times in a breathless way. She keeps watching his face. What is this doing to you, Frank? Is this turning you on? Is this getting to you? In somebody else the whole thing might have been crude and tawdry, but she carries it off. What are you waiting for, Frank? Come on, what the hell are you waiting for? Lock the door. And then he’s standing over the bed, looking down at her, gazing into her face and going out of control, yielding to berserk notions, watching the rise and fall of her breasts, the tantalizingly slow movements of her hand, the shadows in her thighs.
Then she reaches out toward him. Frank, Frank.
He had no way of knowing what might have happened next because Martin Burr chose that moment to come inside the room, and if the old man sensed anything sexually conspiratorial, any charge in the air, he made no remark. Must keep the prisoner comfortable, was what he said. She’s going back to Washington in the morning. Carlotta smiled and smoothed her hands on her legs, Pagan stared uncomfortably from the window, and Burr surveyed the room, as if assessing the security of the place. Then, locking the door, Pagan and Burr had left.
If no physical contact had taken place, the realization that he’d betrayed Roxanne – at least in his intentions, his yearnings – altered his perceptions of himself for a time, depressed him. He’d wanted this woman, this Carlotta; he’d wanted, for lack of a better expression, the debasement of indulging himself in an infidelity. Lust, commonplace, banal, was finally inexplicable; and it was demeaning to realize you could surrender to it so easily. Everything you held in esteem – marriage, career, loyalty – had flown like crazed birds from open cages. He recalled returning the woman’s photograph to the files, and thinking at the time that it had been a tiny act of exorcism. But the face had lingered for weeks in his head. The touch had remained on his hand. And he’d been unsettlingly aware of a hitherto unknown side of himself, a destructive urge in his character.
Pagan moved away from the projector. The attic had a small oval window directly overlooking Golden Square. He peered down into the early afternoon activity. Office workers buzzed to or from lunch. A solitary eccentric in a raincoat sat with a thermos flask on a cold bench.
‘Carlotta,’ Pagan said, as if to himself. There was a time when her name had been synonymous with terrorism, like Baader-Meinhoff. Or Danny the Red. Or Jig. Nothing had been heard of her in years, if you didn’t count the various sightings that were always reported when it came to enigmatic terrorist figures who’d somehow captivated the public’s interest. She was said to have been working with Khadaffi, organizing training-camps for potential terrorists in the desert. She was reported to be ‘counselling’ the IRA in County Armagh. Nothing had come of these allegations. Legends flourished around people like Carlotta; notorious terrorists were sighted like UFOs, strange configurations in the sky.
Foxie said, ‘She’s quite a piece of work, Frank. This file contains stuff from the prison shrink in Danbury. Our girl was born into a family of considerable wealth, ran away from boarding-school at the tender age of ten after stabbing a friend with a kitchen knife. You wouldn’t want to be her chum, would you? More boarding-schools, more unhappily violent incidents. She drifted into the radical underground when she was sixteen. She did the rounds. A bombing in Denver. A bank job in Des Moines. The sabotage of a train carrying a shipment of arms to a naval base in San Diego. According to the shrink’s report, she has an extraordinary IQ. Fluent in French, Russian and German. She has – and I quote – a penchant for violence. Which is to say she doesn’t always have to be politically motivated to do her thing. She’s probably not even interested in politics as such. They’re merely a pretext for her acts of violence.’
‘And now she turns up in London,’ Pagan said in a flat tone.
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Foxie said.
‘The reference to Heathrow. The thing about smoking. She kept telling me I smoked too much, which was true enough in those days. She kept saying it was bad for my health, I ought to give up. Foxie, nobody else fits. Nobody.’
Weary, he gazed down into Golden Square. H
e’d relegated Carlotta into a forbidden zone of recollection; a crypt of memory he never visited. It was damp and unpleasant down there.
‘I get the impression …’ Foxie started to say.
‘What impression?’
‘You’re not telling me everything. You’re holding something back.’
Pagan was silent. What was he supposed to say? Look, I wanted the woman, I wanted to fuck her, I wanted to play her game.
‘I think you got to know this woman better than you’re prepared to say,’ Foxie suggested.
‘You spend forty-eight hours almost non-stop in somebody’s company, you learn a few things,’ Pagan said. ‘Why don’t we leave it at that?’
‘As you wish.’ Foxie fidgeted with the projector in a slightly sullen way. Pagan’s secret heart: an impenetrable shield. ‘Let’s say Carlotta killed the girl. Let’s go with that for a moment. Let’s take the speculation a little further. On the very day of the girl’s murder, a bomb goes off in a Tube station no more than a mile away from the girl’s flat. Given Carlotta’s terrorist background, is that coincidence?’
‘I seriously doubt it.’ Pagan walked away from the window, gazed at the mug-shot again. He remembered the scent of the hotel room, the furniture polish, the smell of apples in a wicker basket. The encounter with Carlotta was a bleak episode in his life – so why was there still some relish in the memory? A shiver of pleasure, a frisson of self-dislike?
Foxie said, ‘She puts a bomb in the Underground then walks a few blocks, picks up this wretched girl, goes back to her flat and stabs her to death with a pair of scissors. Why? A hundred or so people aren’t enough for her. Is that it? She needs another kind of satisfaction. Hands-on stuff. She needs to see the blood and the suffering. She needs personal involvement.’
Pagan said, ‘Maybe you’re right. She’s unfulfilled because she can’t get to watch the faces of her victims in the Tube. So she wants a bigger and better rush. She wants to look right into the eyes of somebody dying.’ Hands in his pockets, he strolled round the attic. ‘If she put the device on the Tube, it doesn’t tell us a damn thing about the purpose behind it. So what are we looking at, Foxie? An unmotivated piece of destruction? I don’t buy into that one. I don’t see Carlotta placing the device on the Tube because she was having a bad day. She had some reason. And then to leave the message …’
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