Jigsaw

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘No names. Faces.’ Streik has a flutter in his chest. He imagines small sharp teeth gnawing on the bloody tissue of his heart, claws hooked into his liver. He’s out on a tide now, floating to a dead estuary. He thinks he sees Montgomery Rhodes in his black shades waving to him from the shore.

  ‘What was the money for, Jake?’

  Streik remembers but before he can say anything the sheet lightning of pain convulses him, and he moans, clutches his chest, tries to vomit, his mouth filling with sticky strands of saliva. Now Audrey is holding a wet rag to his forehead and the pain ebbs for a time and Pagan’s face, which had gone out of focus, comes swimming in again, and Streik has a wondrous moment of clarity in which everything seems suddenly very, very simple.

  ‘Bryce and me,’ he says. ‘We had it figured.’

  ‘Tell me, Jake,’ says Pagan. ‘Tell me what you figured.’

  Streik looks at Audrey, and she nods, it’s OK, you can talk to this man. There’s some real odd weather in Streik’s head, first a blizzard, then dippy rainbows. He looks into Pagan’s grey eyes. He hears Audrey say something to Pagan about quitting with all the questions, can’t you feel the guy’s pain for Chrissakes, but Pagan isn’t about to stop, you can see it in his face, he wants the rest of Streik’s death-bed narrative.

  ‘Money all over the place,’ Streik says. ‘Spread like fucking manure.’

  ‘What was the money for?’

  Memory seeps like sewage through a leach bed. Memory dies with the body. Streik thinks of all the blackness awaiting him. A no-state. A nothing. He looks into Pagan’s face.

  ‘Oh, man,’ says Streik. Why isn’t this Pagan grasping the fucking point? Does he think there’s all the time in the world? ‘Chaos … weapons … you name it …’ Streik feels a deepening lethargy, which has to be death, has to be, no two ways about it, and he’s panicked again, doesn’t want to go, isn’t ready, hasn’t prepared himself for a confrontation with The Maker, but maybe there isn’t a Maker, and if there isn’t he doesn’t have to carry the guilt about the German into eternity with him, does he …

  Streik has the need to touch something, to anchor himself, so grips the sleeve of Pagan’s wet overcoat. ‘The way these guys think. Peace is bad for business. You don’t do business when you got stability …’

  Hold the coat, Jake. Keep holding. Don’t let go.

  Pagan asks, ‘Where does Carlotta come in, Jake?’

  Streik opens his mouth. Carlotta, he thinks. Carlotta rhymes with oughta. Carlotta oughta mean something, but it doesn’t. Petrified by darkness, he stares into Pagan’s face, shakes his head, he’s slipping, he’s going, his candle is being snuffed out, O God don’t let it be like this, I don’t want to go, please please don’t take me, let me dally and linger and I promise to be gooooood from now on … But his hand slips from Pagan’s sleeve, falls to his side, his head rolls on the pillow, he gasps, shudders, feels the quietly insistent pressure of oblivion.

  ‘I didn’t mean to shoot the kid,’ he says, and closes his eyes. His thick lips part with a soft fleshy sound.

  Audrey Roczak, her eyes red-rimmed, drew the sheet across Streik’s face. Pagan stepped back from the dead man, listened to rain on the window. He was conscious of Foxie at his side. Nobody spoke for a time. Then Audrey Roczak, lighting a Gitanes, said, ‘I knew he wasn’t going to make it. At least I thought he could die here, where nobody could find him. I guess the old busybody la Chanteuse told you I might have come here. Old fraud. All those photographs. She signed them herself. She never knew any of those people. Even her dead husband’s a fiction. She’s a spinster from way back.’ Audrey Roczak looked more sad than angry. ‘Jake had papers stuffed in the trunk of his car. You’re welcome to them. He sure as hell doesn’t need them.’ She picked up a bag from behind an easel and, reaching inside, pulled out a wad of sheets, which she handed to Pagan as if they were distasteful to her touch. It was a bulky collection.

  ‘Maybe they’ll be some help to you. Maybe they’ll clarify things. I don’t know.’

  Pagan folded the papers, tucked them carefully in the inner pocket of his coat. He’d look at them later, when he was out of the dead man’s presence.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ she said. ‘All he ever really wanted was to belong to something. And half-assed espionage was the only club that would have him. Terrific, huh?’

  Pagan gazed away from the body of the fat man. Death had compressed the room. He stared at the canvases stacked against one wall. They were as sombre as Deirdre Chapman had said, infinitely depressing in a way that had nothing to do with their artless quality.

  Audrey Roczak sucked on her cigarette. ‘One thing’s damn sure. You work for The Undertakers, you can’t count on a fucking pension at the end of the day.’

  Pagan could still feel the pressure of the dead man’s fingers on his sleeve. He wanted to get out of this wretched room, out into the rainy air.

  ‘Well, Frank Pagan,’ the woman said. ‘Have you learned anything? Or do you have questions for me?’

  It happened before Pagan had time to answer, the shattering of glass, the frame of the window buckling, the curtain blowing back – it happened quickly, frighteningly, an outburst of red-purple flame, a cracking sound followed by dense smoke that sucked everything out of the world.

  TWENTY-NINE

  VENICE

  IN CHOPPY DARKENED WATERS BEYOND THE ISLAND OF MURANO, THE engine of the launch was silenced. Schialli stepped down to the stern, balancing himself delicately against the robust sway of the vessel. Barron watched him reach down to grab the General under the shoulders. He grunted with the weight of the dead man. Carlotta, in long black waterproof coat and sou’wester, took hold of the General’s ankles.

  Barron tried to think of the General as something that had never been human, but pictures kept flickering through his mind, staccato images, the knife going into the General’s back, the dying man’s hands on the turn-ups of his trousers, the way Carlotta had looked at him and said It’s reality. It’s no abstraction. Reality now was the sight of Carlotta and Schialli raising the corpse of the General and lowering it over the stern and letting it slide into deep water, where it drifted away on unpredictable currents like a great dead fish.

  Schialli clambered back to the wheel, started the motor, turned the launch round in the direction of Venice. Carlotta took off her sou’wester and shook her hair free and leaned her body against Barron. By the pale stern light she looked vibrant; the whip of rain had coloured her cheeks. Her eyes were bright.

  ‘You see, Toby. Easy. Simple.’

  ‘Yes,’ Barron said.

  ‘When he washes up on some beach, nobody will be able to identify him. No papers. Nothing. An accident. A suicide. A pauper’s grave. The matter is ended. The menace is over.’

  Yes, yes. Barron gazed toward the lights of Venice. He imagined the General’s body twisting and turning on tides, sucked under by whirlpools, snapped at by predatory sea creatures. He heard water splash against the hull of the launch and for a moment imagined the General rising from the dead, fingers on the handrail, white face emerging. The reality. He closed his eyes. He had a sense of things getting away from him. He felt the slick material of Carlotta’s wet coat against his flesh as she raised a hand to the side of his face in a gesture of intimacy. He didn’t move. Did she think this murder enhanced their relationship? That he was somehow closer now to her own dark world? That the death of the General was a bridge between them? Welcome to my world, Tobias. Be my partner in the unhallowed places I haunt. Waltz with me at the gravesides of all the dead.

  He thought about the death of Bryce Harcourt, although he didn’t want to, remembered Carlotta’s voice. You want rid of a guy and you don’t want it to be obvious, right? So how do you achieve that? Most people would go with the idea of an anonymous gunman, say, a guy that comes and goes in the dark. Boom and over with. But that’s banal, Barron. That lacks imagination. Besides, it draws highly focused attention. You get cops crawling all over the pl
ace because you’ve given them one corpse, and one corpse is manageable, they can cope with that, they can investigate that. So, you create a situation that isn’t manageable, you give them an investigation that has them stretched to their fucking limits, that’s how you do it. You confound them, Barron. You give them a goddam catastrophe. You make it so they can’t see the wood for the trees.

  A catastrophe. The wood for the trees. You confound them. He tried to see this reasoning from her point of view, but it was like looking into a distorted mirror. Her logic was beyond him; and because he couldn’t comprehend it, it was unassailable. For a second he had a flash, a glimmer into her reasoning, but then it became eclipsed. All he could think of was the train exploding, all he could think of was pain and death.

  It was brilliant. Everybody thinks the Irish or some other terrorist outfit did it. Everybody leaps to that conclusion. So they’re off and running in all the wrong directions. He’d seen in her eye a light of demonic intensity such as you might associate with people who have undergone a holy experience. Her fervour was religious, her focus so narrow it suggested a laser beam incinerating everything before it.

  To kill Bryce Harcourt she’d killed more than a hundred people.

  He tried to get his mind round that fact but all he could hear was Carlotta’s voice ringing in his ears. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, don’t play in the mud, baby. Stick to what you do best. Lock yourself in your little room and read your faxes and make your phone calls and hold your clandestine meetings and keep track of your messengers and go out and do those good deeds you seem to believe in – but when it comes to death, Barron, leave it. Leave it to other people. I’ve tried to shield you, but I can’t keep on doing that. I’ve been trying to keep you out of the dirt.

  Leave death to other people, he thought. She was correct, of course. She was perfectly right. He was an organizer, not a killer. He was an orchestrator, not an assassin. People died: that was not his responsibility. It was an abstraction, a matter of numbers. People died in all kinds of ways, in earthquakes and accidents, by bomb and gunfire. The world went on. That’s what it came down to in the end.

  But—

  He opened his eyes and stared at the lights of the city, and he shivered. Venice seemed distant, a trick of light, a mirage of sorts. He thought: You made all the connections yourself. You established the networks. You passed on instructions and commands, joined the wires together. You. Only you. You wanted the power that comes from being at the centre of things. You enjoyed putting together the building-blocks, all the toy soldiers at your disposal. You moved in elevated circles, magic restaurants and exclusive clubs where restaurateurs shook your hand and club-owners ushered you to your own table, you walked in the hushed hallways of power, and the boy who’d begun life dumped on the doorstep of a convent in goddam Poughkeepsie to be raised by nuns was dead and buried, he’d ceased to exist, he’d risen like a rocket without leaving traces of his origins. Yes, yes.

  But in the beginning it had all been so simple, paper transactions, abstractions, discreet meetings with men like Rhodes and Kinsella and Willie Caan, disembodied voices on phone lines, We think you can help us with this one, Tobias. We think your networks can be useful to us. It’s going to be a licence to print money. It had involved incidents in distant cities, events you might have watched, in a detached fashion, on a newsreel in a darkened cinema. He remembered once seeing a scratchy old film of British soldiers, faces masked against the stench of decay, bulldoze the victims of Belsen into pits, and he’d felt at the time he was watching something staged, an affair with only a tangential connection to the real world. He’d never been truly connected to anything, he thought, not to history, not to himself, not to the women who’d paid for his services.

  And now, he thought. Now.

  ‘Forget it, Barron. It’s over. It’s done. It’s luggage, Barron. Let it go.’

  Yes, he’d let it go, he’d have to, what choice did he have? He looked into Carlotta’s face, stunned by her expression of innocence. This was nothing to her, a boat ride through darkness to a fabled city, a quick pleasure cruise. Already the General had been consigned to memory.

  The woman touched the back of his gloved hand. ‘Poor Tobias. You didn’t really understand, did you? You marshalled money and men, you spun your little web, but you never once saw the true picture. Now you smell the blood, babe.’

  A night bird flew above the launch, circled hungrily, then was gone. Barron looked at the lights of Harry’s Bar and of the Bauer Grunwald Hotel and thought of Kinsella and Rhodes in their suites. He thought of them waiting for Helix to happen, Rhodes sipping cognac, Kinsella tossing down whisky sours as he walked up and down his big comfortable sitting-room, perhaps fielding phone calls from his associates, his colleagues who waited anxiously for news in Bermuda or Coral Gables or Washington or wherever men of inconceivable wealth and devious political ambitions gathered. Men who wanted chaos, who wanted the profits to be harvested from turmoil.

  And he was one of them.

  Carlotta turned her face toward him, kissed him passionately. The kiss disturbed him, and not just because the night air had chilled her lips. He was drawn down into her mouth, he felt the restless flick of her tongue against his gums, heard her excited breathing; he had a sense of being embraced in the depths of a sepulchre. Her hands moved inside his overcoat, fumbled with his belt, searched for him, found nothing. The kiss seemed to set a seal on his corruption.

  ‘Something wrong, Tobe? Equipment failure?’ She drew away from him, laughing quietly. ‘Can’t quite cut it, huh? Not in the mood? Too much on your mind?’

  He said nothing. He looked back the way the launch had travelled and he was thinking again of the General rising and sinking in waters the colour of a black moonless night.

  Carlotta slung an arm round his waist. ‘Never mind. It’s only a small failure. You’ll get over it. Everything passes, Barron. Everything decays. Remember that.’ She stepped away from him, leaning against the rail, studying the water. Everything decays. She was so very composed, so certain of herself.

  Schialli turned off the Grand Canal, docked the launch, moored it. He assisted Carlotta to disembark. Barron followed. They went to the apartment where Schialli unlocked the door. Inside the lift the silence was interrupted only by the creak of pulleys as the cage rose in the shaft. The apartment was cold. The room in which the General had been stabbed smelled of the cleaning fluid Schialli had used to remove bloodstains from the carpet.

  Schialli disappeared in his solemnly quiet manner, leaving Barron alone with Carlotta. ‘You see,’ she said, gesturing round the room. ‘Life goes on. Nothing’s changed.’

  Barron poured himself a shot of bourbon and walked to the fireplace where with one swift motion of his hand he swept aside all the photographs from the mantelpiece, causing them to fly through the air and settle here and there in mounds of broken glass. Marcos, Arafat, Castro, Willie Caan, the others – they lay in a shattered heap.

  ‘Breaking free, are we?’ she asked. ‘Destroying the past? Or just yourself?’

  Barron looked across the room at her. The chemical smell assaulted him. He wanted to say something, but no words came. He sat in an armchair and tossed back the drink and surveyed the wreckage on the floor. She dropped her coat, came toward him, lowered herself on the arm of his chair and ran fingers through his hair in a manner that seemed to him somewhat maternal. He pulled his face away from her.

  ‘Qualms, Tobias? The arrows of conscience? Oh, God. To think I had you down in my book as the kind of guy nothing ever touched. Mister Cool in the transcendental white suit. You sailed along, you could walk on water, you could even fly. Now something’s singed your poor old wings. Now you can’t get off the ground. Poor Tobias. You don’t see the world the way it is. It’s violent. Violence comes more naturally to the beast than charity, or spontaneous acts of kindness, or love.’

  He looked past her, seeing the place where the General had finally come to re
st. Where Schialli had doused and scrubbed, the rug was discoloured, pinkish. She moved her body, spread her legs, sat on his lap with her skirt drawn up to her thighs. He felt the warmth of her against his knees.

  ‘Come on, Tobe. Come on. Touch me. Feel me.’ She took his reluctant hand and slid it under the skirt and drew it up the soft texture of her inner thigh. She directed his fingers inside her and tossed back her head. ‘Come on, what are you waiting for, you want to fuck me, don’t you? You want to fuck it all out of your system, don’t you? Come on, Tobe. Screw me. Screw me.’ She pushed aside his coat and unzipped him. He was horrified by the fart she could excite him in this room of death. He remembered the knife going in and out, the ripping of flesh, the old man crawling across the carpet. He thought of an Underground carriage blasted into nothing.

  She tugged at him, drawing him from the chair, pulling him to the floor. He allowed himself to be drawn on top of her, felt his fingers push her skirt up beyond the waist, and then – possessed by a dreadful need – he clawed at her underwear, tore it aside, entered her, rolled over and over with her as he fucked her with brute determination, without tenderness, feeling, seeking an unattainable release from the violence he’d seen in this room. He stared into her eyes, she looked back without flinching, as if she were saying: Go on, fuck me, hurt me if you think you can. And he wanted to, he wanted her to feel pain. He forced himself deep into her and she kept saying Harder harder harder, as if nothing could satisfy her need.

  He shuddered inside her and then lay silent and still. He listened to his heartbeat and the way his blood drummed. Depleted, he saw that he lay in the precise place where the General had died. He saw the discoloured patch of carpet under him. He held his breath. Carlotta was looking at him, as if she were wondering whether he was struck by the juxtaposition of murder and sex. She’d drawn him to this spot deliberately. She’d designed it this way.

  Barron didn’t move. He lowered his face into her neck. He felt imprisoned by the woman’s presence.