Barron had arrived at the bottom step, then moved a few yards across the flagstones, pausing some feet from Pagan. ‘Assassination. A wild surmise, Pagan. Not what you’d expect from a trained cop. Or are you a hunch-player? Is that what you are?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Hunches,’ Barron said with a trace of scorn. ‘You need something more solid than that. But you don’t have anything, do you, Pagan? You don’t have evidence. You have nothing to connect me with Carlotta. You have nothing to substantiate this ludicrous notion about political assassination. You say Carlotta killed this whore in London. OK. Fine. But you don’t have Carlotta, Pagan, do you? You know what you are? You’re a lunger. Life’s one headlong rush for you, isn’t it? You jump into deep waters and you don’t know the first thing about the currents. You don’t even know how to swim. You’re way out of your depth. You’re drowning. Look how easy you drowned in our pretty little friend here …’ He swept a hand toward the girl. ‘A drowning man, Pagan. What you need is a straw. And a straw is what you don’t have.’
Pagan gestured with the gun, a small motion of menace.
‘Really, Pagan, I wish you’d put that damn thing away,’ Barron said, and looked once more at his watch. ‘If you honestly believe in this bug-eyed assassination theory of yours, why don’t you pop down to the local cops and speak your mind? Tell them what you suspect. Let them have a look at this patchwork quilt of your suspicion. You’ll find them at Parrocchia di San Zaccaria, if that’s any help to you. I’m sure they’ll listen. Better still, find Gurenko and have a quiet word with him, if you can get within an inch of the man. And even if you do, you better have a damn good story before you open your mouth.’ Barron once again looked at his watch. ‘I understand that he’s scheduled to look at some paintings shortly.’
Pagan understood he was being goaded, pushed. He tried to dredge up something he might throw back in Barron’s face, a piece of evidence, anything to defuse the man. But he had nothing to use, nothing convincing, certainly nothing that would alarm Barron. He could toss all kinds of darts – the names of Streik, Caan, The Undertakers – but none had force enough to pierce Barron. Even his earlier mention of Caan hadn’t caused Barron to blink.
Barron looked at his watch. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have a few things to attend to,’ and he moved toward the girl, raising his hand, stroking the side of her face. She pulled back from him, as if scalded. ‘You make me sad, Katherine,’ he said.
‘Goddam you, Barron. You lied to me,’ she shouted.
‘So you keep saying.’
‘You said Pagan was a danger to the Cause, he had to be killed—’
‘You dear little thing,’ he said. ‘There are so many causes these days. How can you tell them apart? No matter the rhetoric they use, they all want the same thing in the end. Control. The power to instil fear. There’s no difference between any of them. They come and they go and I give each one equal credence because by and large they don’t really understand what they’re fighting for. They dress their activities up in fine rhetoric, but they’re all gangsters when you get to the bottom line.’
‘I don’t believe you’re saying this, Barron. You and my father—’
‘I had enormous respect for the Senator. I admired him greatly. I admired the things he stood for.’
‘Even if you didn’t believe in them?’
‘What I believe never entered into it. You’re too young to understand that the most powerful motivating force in the world isn’t political belief, it isn’t spirituality, it isn’t the desire for global peace: it’s sheer expediency. One day you might grasp that. One day.’
‘And it was expediency that prevented you from mentioning Carlotta, and this assassination—’
‘Christ. What assassination? That’s a figment of Pagan’s brain.’ He sighed, reached for her again. She pushed his hand aside with a forceful gesture.
‘Katherine. Katherine. My precious little Katie.’ His voice was almost a whisper. Pagan had a flash of the girl as a child strolling across a sunlit croquet lawn with Uncle Tobias. Hand in hand, moving under a willow tree, the pungent drift of barbecue smoke: halcyon times. Dross now, and grey skies.
‘Stay away from me,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Sad, sad, sad,’ Barron said.
Pagan levelled the gun at Barron; overhead, the chandelier appeared inordinately bright, a shower of gold coins. ‘You still haven’t told me where to find her,’ he said.
‘I frankly don’t know,’ Barron said, and moved toward the staircase. He climbed a few steps. Pagan raised the gun, fired it upward. The bullet crackled in the bulbs of the chandelier and glistering fragments of glass showered the air. A cloud of plaster floated down amidst the shards.
‘That was an old piece,’ Barron said without any obvious feeling. ‘I’m sorry you did that.’
Pagan was assaulted by the need to fire the gun again and again into anything – the antique chairs, the remains of the chandelier that swung wildly above him, the paintings on the walls.
‘Eighteenth century,’ Barron remarked. ‘Very difficult to replace.’ He shook his head, turned, and continued to climb.
Out of nowhere, she materialized above Barron, her arms folded across her breasts. She was hardly visible in the poor light. Barron became aware of her and stopped halfway up the stairs. He said, ‘I asked you stay where you were. I asked you.’
She moved a few steps toward him, confronting him. Her voice was quiet, but Pagan, even from his distance, could hear a tremor of anger behind her words. ‘You’re letting him walk? You’re letting him stroll out of here? And that girl? You’re letting them leave?’
Barron answered her in a subdued way. ‘What can he do? What can he possibly do? Nobody is ever going to listen to him. He doesn’t worry me. What would you suggest? Another killing? Another murder? Will you leave another message behind?’
Her face, which Pagan realized time had barely touched, turned towards the few remaining bulbs of the chandelier. She looked directly down at Pagan, remembering him clearly, the interrogation room, the hotel, the easy way she’d stirred him. Pagan stood very still. Her surprising appearance had frozen him. She might have taken shape out of the shadows, a good conjuring trick, an illusion that for a moment left you incredulous.
‘He doesn’t worry you,’ she said to Barron, mocking him. She was still staring down at Pagan, who imagined her inside the Underground station, placing the explosive on the Tube, vanishing in the rush-hour crowds, doing her scissors number on the sad girl in Mayfair. She was all illusion. She was created by mirrors and vanished in drifts of coloured smoke.
‘He doesn’t worry you,’ she said again to Barron, her voice rising a tone. ‘You’re above all that. Is that it? You’re still untouchable. You still don’t see jeopardy. You’re out of tune, Barron. Pagan and this girl, this bimbo, walk out of here – and then what? He just forgets his whole conversation with you? You think he’s going to stop at this point? Investigation over. Dead ends. He strolls away empty handed. Is that what you think?’
Barron shrugged her words aside. ‘He’s got nothing. He can prove nothing. He can do nothing.’ He held one arm up, showing her his watch. ‘Tick tick tick. Listen. Tempus fugit.’
‘Barron, Barron,’ she said, and her voice now was softer. ‘You still live in that dream-world of yours, don’t you? After everything that’s happened, you’re still locked inside your own little tower where you think nobody can touch you. You fool. You poor sad fool. You haven’t learned a goddam thing.’
Barron turned his face in Pagan’s direction and Pagan could see it in the man’s expression: He doesn’t have the stomach for this. He doesn’t want this game to go on. He wants out. He had a sense of wills locked in conflict, Barron’s pitted against Carlotta’s, and he understood there could only be one winner. He wondered about the complexity of their world, how hard they might have warred. If there was affection between them, if there was love, it was a kind he co
uldn’t begin to understand: the raw meat of emotions tossed into an arena where Carlotta and Barron fought over the scraps and entrails like animals.
He put his foot on the first step, the gun pointed upwards. He was aware of Katherine Cairney standing nearby. He was conscious of her anger, her pale face. He went up another step.
‘Carlotta,’ he said, and he jerked the gun. Tick tick tick: Barron’s words drummed in his head. A clock was running down.
Carlotta stared at him a moment. She looked hard, determined. She had the kind of eyes you couldn’t stare into for long because they were unflinching. She seemed never to blink, another aspect of the whole chimera that was Carlotta. And then she changed again, smiling at him, the features suddenly soft. But he knew her deceptive abilities, the way her surfaces mutated.
‘Is this the bit where you arrest me, Pagan?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Do you have time for these legal niceties?’ she asked. ‘Do you have time?’
He looked up into her smile. She moved so quickly, so unexpectedly, his eye couldn’t follow her. He heard her say Catch me, Pagan, and then she laughed, a curious clipped sound, and shoved Barron in the centre of his chest and – surprised, mouth open – he lost his balance, tumbling backward and rolling over and over, arms upraised, skull striking stone. He collided with Pagan as he fell. Pagan stepped aside and Barron, calling out Carlotta’s name, continued to tumble until he came to a stop at the foot of the staircase.
Carlotta had already disappeared. He could hear her footsteps on another flight of stairs and the sound of her voice coming through the darkness at him. Catch me, Pagan. Catch me. A message in blood on a lampshade, a voice rolling through a big house. He scrambled upwards, hearing her just ahead of him on a third flight of stairs. He needed light, he was running blind, his only sense of direction the sound of the woman racing upwards. A dull bloom fell from streetlamps through windows here and there. He kept going, climbing, hearing the sound of doors slam shut, one after another, as if she were trying to confuse him, trick him into thinking she’d vanished inside one of the many rooms of the house. He was beyond thought, out of reason’s range, he was motion, nothing more, he was trapped inside Carlotta’s game of hide-and-seek and had no way of knowing quite what the rules were, whether she was intentionally leading him to some place where she’d corner him – or if she was simply using up his time. Breathing hard, he kept going, kept chasing, he had no choice other than to find her because that was what everything came down to in the end, the capture of Carlotta. He approached yet another set of stairs. Christ, this had to be the uppermost floor of the building, there were surely no more stairs after this unless you believed the structure had infinite levels, a trick place designed to cheat the senses. Another door slammed above him, then another, then another.
Carlotta was here and everywhere, and her voice floated around him as he reached the place where, finally, the stairs ended.
She stood in silhouette in the open doorway of a lit room. She was very still. He couldn’t see if she was armed, and had the thought that maybe on her ascent through the house she’d picked up a gun from somewhere: he didn’t trust Barron’s statement that there were no arms in the place. He stepped towards her. He spoke her name in a hoarse, tired whisper.
‘This is what I call a merry dance,’ she said.
‘It’s over,’ Pagan said.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not over, Pagan,’ and she stepped back inside the room, kicking the door shut even as he lunged forward at it. He charged into the room beyond, seeing her rush towards glass doors. Suddenly she stopped and turned to him.
Her arms hung at her sides in an aspect of surrender, a gesture that made him instantly wary. It was damned hard to connect this woman with her murderous history, that was the trouble Pagan had had years ago, and the trouble he was having now. She looked at him with an expression of such translucent innocence he was forced to remind himself of what she’d gone.
‘Come quietly,’ he said. He was back inside the interrogation room, he was watching her slender legs, hypnotized by her eyes, drawn down into the sight of her graceful fingers, remembering how she’d behaved in the hotel room ten years ago, the way his blood had rushed.
‘And if I don’t? Do you shoot me?’
Pagan didn’t reply.
She said, ‘I don’t think so. Most people are weak, Pagan. Like Barron. Like yourself. You have fronts you assume. Barron likes power because he finds it an elevating drug. Plug him into the power source and he feels strong, complete. That’s his front. You like law and order, because you can’t cope with chaos. That’s your front. I knew that about you years ago, and you haven’t changed. But I surprised you back then, didn’t I, Pagan? I gave you something to ponder. I showed you a dark side of yourself and you didn’t like what you saw.’
‘You’re right. I didn’t like it,’ he said.
‘But it’s part of you, Pagan. It’s a part you choose to ignore because that way you’re not inconvenienced by unwanted urges. You can sail along undaunted by your own demons. You just deny their existence. Dead simple. Frank Pagan, cop, upholder of the law, good citizen, boy scout. But there’s something else murmuring in a corner of Pagan’s heart. Something he doesn’t want to face. Relax, Frank. We all have our little monsters. The trick is to recognize them. When you’ve done that, living with them is easy. Every now and then you just turn them loose and let them do what they have to.’
‘You turned them loose in London all right,’ he said.
‘I gave them a field day, Pagan. I gave them what they wanted – their freedom. You should try it some time.’ She moved nearer to him and he was conscious of her scent, the way her silk dress clung to her body, the boldness in her eyes. ‘You’ve never forgotten our meeting, have you? It’s stuck with you. And every so often it surfaces and you wonder, you wonder what’s inside you, if you’re capable of betrayals, and lies, and infidelities, and your whole little world tilts just slightly. You wanted to fuck me that day.’
‘Yes …’ Funny: the admission didn’t embarrass him.
‘You wanted it so goddam bad I could smell it on you.’
‘It was long ago—’
‘But not so very far away, Pagan.’ She stared at the gun. ‘I left the message as a reminder. I wanted you to remember that I’d done a number on you ten years ago, and that I could still do it. I had you climbing a very uncomfortable tree back then. And I have you climbing one now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Things change.’
‘Not the underlying things, Pagan. They don’t change. There’s still the same dark corner in you. You keep it hidden. But it’s there. And I’ve got news for you: it’s never going to go away.’
The same dark corner, he thought. He wondered if she was partly right. She came closer still to him. She reached out, caught his lapel, rubbed the material between thumb and forefinger. She looked at the gun and said, ‘You’d rather fuck me than shoot me, Pagan.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Pagan said.
She smiled and it was dazzling. ‘I know you, Pagan. You don’t like to admit that, but I know you. And the reason I know you is because we’re opposites. You think of rules. I don’t. You worry about things making sense. I don’t. What you see as endings are only beginnings. It’s all a matter of perspective. Yours is very different from mine.’ She stepped back from him, raised one hand, studied her fingernails, which were glossy and pink. ‘The very things you’d find precious, I see as worthless. Love is a joke. Kindness is always self-serving. Human life has all the value of a counterfeit coin. You see a train packed with people. I see only one face. You see an eminent politician, and I see a man who means nothing in the general course of things.’
An eminent politician. ‘It’s another device, isn’t it? Like the one in the Underground.’
‘You’re the detective. You figure it out.’
‘When is it due to go off?’ he asked.
; ‘When is what due?’
‘Don’t screw with me, Carlotta. When is it due to go off?’ he asked again.
She was playing for time, stalling him. She moved back from the table and turned towards the glass door. He couldn’t see her face now. He had the feeling she was about to do something, produce a weapon from somewhere and wheel round with it in her hand, more trickery. But all she did was to point across the room to a door and say, ‘Unlock that and guess what you’ll find. The soul of Tobias Barron.’
Pagan gazed in the direction she’d indicated and in that second when his attention was diverted, she struck the glass doors with her body, burst her way through them with a force he couldn’t have imagined, and he went after her even as glass sprinkled the air around his face, he pursued her out to a small balcony and saw her leap the handrail and jump into the darkness of the canal below, avoiding his outstretched arms. He heard the splash as she struck water. He went to the rail and looked down, but the canal was black and although a few foaming circles of white water broke the surface, he could see no sign of the woman. He called out her name a couple of times, imagined he heard an incomprehensible response from a place beneath him, thought he saw a movement along the narrow ledge that bordered the canal – a cat, that was all, a white cat slinking through the night for prey.
He turned back into the room. Katherine Cairney was standing in the doorway, watching him. He was beset by the urge to move quickly.
‘I have to go—’ And he brushed past her, hurrying down the stairs, down and down, back to the first flight where Barron lay on the flagstones at the bottom, his face turned to one side. His cheek-bone had splintered flesh. His lips had been cut by his teeth, which were no longer perfect. Across his forehead was a series of blue-red indentations where his skull had struck the cutting edge of stone. Blood flowed from his ears.
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