Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘No, the apartment’s fine, I just needed to check something with you. It’s been preying on my mind. About the paintings.’

  ‘What about them?’ Caution crept into Julie’s voice.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘What do you mean? They’re where they always are, on the lounge walls.’

  ‘Yes, I know the big pictures are there, the oils, but where are the watercolours, the valuable ones? I wanted to check that you’d stored them away somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, they’re on the walls right beside the others. You must be able to see them.’ The tone had notched up to one of panic now.

  ‘What am I looking for, exactly?’

  ‘This is what you called me for? Wait, let me think. Six ‘Don Quixote’ lithographs by Salvador Dali, four French watercolours from around 1850, I forget the artist but they’re all blues and greens, a Matisse sketch, a study for Orpen’s ‘The Absinthe Drinker’ and two small ink drawings by Millais.’

  My stomach turned. ‘I didn’t know –’

  ‘Wait, I haven’t finished. There are two Delauneys, a Chaim Soutine, a pair of small drawings by Villon I think, four Hockney sketches, a Wesselman and a matching set of eight Warhol prints.’

  There were no such pictures anywhere in the apartment. I had checked every cupboard after returning from Elliot’s. Nothing was locked away.

  ‘I think I’d better to talk to Malcolm,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Why? Don’t tell me there’s one missing.’

  ‘No. That is... there aren’t any at all. No lithographs, no watercolours, no sketches.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Jesus, the place is stuffed full of them, why do you think he was so paranoid about leaving the apartment this weekend?’

  ‘You don’t understand, there were none when I arrived, not a single one. There are just four big ugly oil paintings.’

  Julie wasn’t listening; she’d gone into some kind of fear spin-cycle. ‘I don’t know anything about the other pictures. It’s the small ones you’re there to look after. You’re telling me they’ve gone? Oh Christ. Oh Christ.’

  ‘You’re sure he didn’t put them in storage?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. He didn’t want to draw any kind of attention to them, they’re not –’ I suspected she was going to say legitimate.

  ‘Listen, Julie, someone came into the apartment last night, two people actually, three if you count the paramedic, but they didn’t steal anything.’ Unable to hold back any longer, I found myself telling her the full story, piecing it together in the wrong order of events, knowing that this was absolutely the worst thing you could do when someone was far from home.

  ‘This is crazy, you’re telling me some tart dropped dead in the flat? A complete stranger?’ Julie all but shrieked.

  ‘I think she came to me for help, but it was too late by then.’

  ‘How did you meet this person?’

  ‘I was out on the balcony and looked across to the next penthouse, and there she was.’

  ‘Wait, back up, what the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The apartment has no balcony.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Malcolm’s apartment hasn’t got a balcony. You’re talking about the penthouses on the top floor, do you know how expensive they are? He couldn’t afford one of those. It costs him a fortune to insure all the art he inherited from his family.’

  ‘Well, what could he afford?’

  ‘The next floor down. The sixth.’

  ‘I’m on the seventh.’

  ‘Then you’re in the wrong apartment.’

  ‘Oh my lord.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Move

  I THOUGHT BACK to my meeting with Madame Funes. The old woman had handed me the key while arguing on the phone. This was the same person who had confused Elliot’s mail. For all I knew I could be living in the apartment Jeffrey Archer had earmarked. ‘That means your paintings are still in the flat below,’ I told Julie. ‘I thought I was seeing things.’

  ‘You’d better get down there quickly and check to make sure that everything’s intact. He’ll kill me if anything’s missing. God, that means you have the wrong key. Malcolm wanted to get a better lock fitted, it wouldn’t hold if someone put their shoulder against it.’

  I apologised profusely and rang off, breaking into a run as I crossed into the lee of the bridge. Go back to the suburbs before you make things worse, the city was saying, but I was determined not to obey.

  A heavyset woman with strong Slavic features was disconsolately sliding a broom around the atrium. I examined the latch holding the glass doors of the concierge’s office shut. The one thing I had in my pocket that would fit between the panels was my World Of Wood discount card, but the steel latch was held in place by a hand-turned ratchet. There had to be another way in. At the rear of the office was a narrow wooden back door, new and still unpainted but barred shut. The unsealed lobby entrance meant that any passer-by could get this far into the building. If I broke into the office and simply switched the keys, nobody would ever have to know.

  I had seen people kick doors open on TV. Half-heartedly booting the lock, I nearly broke my foot. What am I doing? I thought, I’ve never broken a law in my life, unless you count Barclaycard repayment terms and the odd Winona Ryder incident in department stores.

  Hobbling over to the cleaning woman, I eyed the roll of keys at her waist. ‘I’m sorry,’ I lied, growing a touch more glib with each attempt, ‘I’ve left my key in the concierge’s office. Could you let me in?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to.’ The woman leaned on her broom. If she was waiting for a tip, she was out of luck.

  ‘But surely if someone’s locked out of their own apartment.’

  ‘Building’s empty. Nobody here this weekend.’

  ‘You’re wrong, I’m staying here and there’s at least one other person. Please, I can call Madame Funes if you want to check on me.’

  The cleaner thought for a moment, then made her way to the office with a weary sigh. She stood watching me muddling at the telephone. ‘Do you have her number?’ I asked, stalling for time.

  The cleaner pointed to a printout stuck on the wall. I punched the numerals but kept my finger on the cut-off.

  ‘You’ve not got a line,’ said the cleaner. ‘Press nine first.’

  To Hell with it, I thought. I’ll have to call her.

  ‘Madame Funes? June Cryer, we met yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘No, I met no-one yesterday afternoon, I was busy.’

  ‘Yes, we did meet. You meant to give me the key to Malcolm Phillimore’s apartment but gave me someone else’s by mistake.’

  ‘Yes, maybe I remember you but I no make mistake,’ shouted Madame Funes.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid you did.’

  ‘I never make no mistake,’ she yelled. ‘They always say I make mistake but they lie, they all lie.’

  I wondered how long this was going to go on. ‘The key you gave me is to apartment 701.’

  ‘IS IMPOSSIBLE,’ Madame Funes explained loudly in a tone reserved for times when she could not imagine being wrong. ‘701 is Dr. Azymuth and he is away in China. He tells me if anyone stay with him.’

  ‘He’s a doctor?’

  ‘That’s right, he does the plastic for the faces. A-Z-Y-M-U-T-H. A plastic surgeon,’ Madame Funes explained.

  ‘And you’re sure he’s away at the moment?’

  ‘Yes, I tell you already, he is in China, he call me to ask if the electric is fix this weekend. Who is this?’

  ‘She said it’s okay to get the key,’ I smiled at the cleaner as I replaced the receiver. I unhooked Malcolm’s set and was going to replace the others, but the headline of the Ziggurat’s brochure caught my eye.

  DREAMING OF LONDON LIFE?

  The Ziggurat is a city dream come true.

  State of the art construction that combines c
lassic architectural elements with cutting-edge design in the heart of London.

  I picked up the sales leaflet and studied the computer-rendered illustrations. Beneath a fierce cyanic sky more suited to Luxor than London, an impossibly sleek computer-rendered building rose beside the Thames, unencumbered by scaffolding, transit vans, plastic rubbish sacks, yelling drunks, sleeping-bag-people or abandoned washing machines. Other colour photos showed Harrods, Hyde Park, a guardsman’s busby and Buckingham Palace. Leafing through the glossy pages, I realised I had yet to discover the sauna, swimming pool and basement gym that would be used by these royalty-obsessed Harrods-shopping high flyers. A car park on the great flat roof was operated by a hydraulic lift; this was presumably out of action, as was the ‘eco-unit’, whatever that might be. I studied the map on the back of the brochure. Apparently the basement housed the eco-unit, an automatic electronically-fired incinerator capable of flash-burning the building’s rubbish within minutes and compacting biodegradable ashes for collection, with vents accessible from the end of every corridor.

  Suddenly I was sure I knew what had happened to the girl who had been tagged outside Dr. Azymuth’s apartment. I slipped the correct Yale, 603, into my pocket along with a brochure and the key to 701. The cleaner relocked the office behind me.

  Back upstairs, I unlocked Dr. Azymuth’s door as quietly as possible and checked that the flat was still empty. My clothes took just a moment to repack. I remade the bed and hung the doctor’s dressing gown in his wardrobe. I had intended to leave immediately, but when I sat on the end of the bed, the girl’s face returned to prevent me. If 701’s occupant was out of the country I could afford to take my time, but his call to the Funes woman meant he could be planning to return home at any moment.

  I carried my bag down to Malcolm’s apartment. The Yale unlatched the door, but I could see why Malcolm had been worried; it would have been easy to break in. The rooms on the sixth floor were smaller, darker and yes, filled with little pictures. Dali’s etchings of Don Quixote, scratched scars in copper and black, lined the lounge, a beautifully simple Matisse, the sumptuous Delauneys, some innocuous Hockneys. No balcony, no separate kitchen, just a steel counter in a corner, but the same vast windows dominating the lounge.

  The storm was moving in fast across the river. The water of the Thames now had a brownish pummelled look, like flooded flagstones. I paced the apartment, unsettled and unsure of my next move, knowing I must do something. I felt stranded between two worlds, belonging in neither the vacuum-sealed lifestyle of my past or the shifting shadows of the present.

  Two courses of action suggested themselves. I could get Mr. Ashe to check out the eco-unit facility, but fear of what he might find lying there dampened my enthusiasm. Or I could go back up to the flat. Thinking that it belonged to Malcolm, I had assumed that its owner was innocent of any involvement, and had respected his privacy by not looking in any of the private drawers. Now I wanted to see what kind of man could live here.

  As I headed up to 701, each step unsettled me further. I had failed someone who had turned to me for help, and the fact that she was a total stranger only made it worse.

  I admit I was being nosy. I didn’t think it was going to get me killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Flesh

  701 LOOKED DIFFERENT to me now. The bedroom walls were shades of discoloured flesh. The great cubes of light I had admired by morning light seemed glacial and bruised with shadows. There was no longer any sense of normal life lived within these walls. The kitchen pots glistened because they had never been used. The medical textbooks no longer appeared to be articles of scientific reference but catalogues of a disarranged mind.

  I began in the kitchen, sorting through drawer after drawer, finding only steel utensils, unopened instruction booklets for the new cooker and freezer, mats, cutlery. No item except foodstuffs to betray a hint of personality. One thing hadn’t changed; it was still a single man’s home, barely inhabited. The lounge yielded no more items of hospitality than a hotel room.

  One high cupboard turned out to be sealed, but a small key left on the shelf below opened it. Here a dozen further medical volumes were concealed, probably because their colour plates were livid horrors; illustrations from the Firefighters Burn Center in Florida, operational procedures for the Heal the Children foundation, volumes from the European Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the Injection Therapy Unit, the Lipoplasty Society, the Anglo-French Burns Association, the American Cleft Palate Association.

  The images would have made Dr. Frankenstein blanch; torn lips, burst eyes, leaking aqueous humour, sliced gums, rolls of yellow fat dripping from liposuction tools, spikes through skulls, flayed faces, shredded muscles in every shade of scarlet, pink, brown and purple like close-up porn shots. I wished I hadn’t looked.

  On the topmost shelf was a booklet outlining services offered by the Azymuth Harley Street Cosmetic Surgery Clinic. Dr. A. L. Azymuth specialised in facial reconstruction, but his clinic could handle ‘thighs, bums and tums’, as the brochure coyly put it. Azymuth was pictured on the back, slim-jawed, bony, fortyish, Indian or possibly Egyptian, a trustworthy face for any insecure patient.

  I searched his wardrobe. White shirts and bland navy suits, several pairs of identical black-toed Oxford shoes, nothing to mark out a man as a lunatic or an accessory to murder.

  I dragged over a chair and climbed up, searching the tops of the built-in wardrobes. The cardboard box was not concealed, merely awkward to reach.

  It contained over thirty pages of barely legible eight-point print from internet sites in Hungary, Siberia, Romania and the Ukraine. The names and addresses were occasionally accompanied by webcam pictures of young faces fast growing old with lousy diet and the stress of poverty.

  A file followed every name, each page carrying the personal details of men and women: nationality, address, height, birthdate, weight, colour of eyes. The names appeared exotic to me: Omar, Valya, Jaspinder, Sergei, Lata, Anuradha. Medical histories followed, half-filled forms and pages frequently marked INCOMPLETE. Diabetes, HIV status, history of heart disease. It didn’t seem likely that they were overseas patients coming to England for treatment. For a start, the few photos that yielded any detail showed cheap clothes, self-inflicted haircuts, bad skin, poor posture. I’d seen enough footage of asylum seekers running across government land to recognise the signs of long-term hardship.

  Perhaps it was some public-clinic sideline of Azymuth’s private practice. I knew that many private doctors worked in them one or two days a week. I was preparing to give up when I came across the photograph of the young girl whose bloodstained head I had cradled the previous night. Her hair was shorter and tucked under a white scarf, but I could tell it was her. The name on the file was Petra, but there was a second name beneath her photograph – ‘Cleo’. Some of the other files bore pairs of names.

  Petra, too, had undergone a medical examination, but the handwritten notes accompanying her form suggested that surgery had been carried out on her face, specifically rhinoplasty, mole-removal and an eye-lift. Her form had been stamped: FOR PLASTIC.

  It made no sense for impoverished Eastern Europeans to come to Azymuth for expensive cosmetic surgery. For a moment my mind filled with gangsters switching identities, changing their faces to escape conviction, the curse of watching too much TV. Then I thought, you know, white slavery. People trafficking. Perhaps it was just difficult to accept the fact that the doctor might simply be keen to help others.

  Disappointed, I replaced the box. Or at least I tried to, but something was blocking the space at the back of the shelf. Standing on tiptoe, I reached in and closed my fingers around a waxed-cotton sack, pulling so that it fell into my upturned hands.

  With the sack on the floor I stepped down and tugged open its drawstring. It took me a moment to realise that the currency bore the bridge symbols of euros. Even by my own poor calculation, I could tell there was about forty thousand pounds at my feet. The
varying condition of the notes suggested they came from a number of sources. What kind of man kept so much money loose in his bedroom?

  They come from Eastern Europe, I thought, they pay him cash for cosmetic surgery operations, cash because they can’t transfer savings from bank accounts. He takes their money, promising to help, then murders them, stuffing their bodies into the Eco-Unit.

  This theory, I had to admit, was even more absurd than the last. The internet photographs featured men and women who were already attractive in their own ways. They just needed the glow of wellbeing that a few months of good diet, some sun and better dentistry would bring. They required a little grooming, not new faces. It made no sense. I studied the pages again. Not one of the featured patients was over twenty-five. Azymuth was doing something to them, why else would he be hiding their details in the back of a cupboard? Why else would one of them turn up in the building on the very weekend that no-one would be there to see her die?

  I set out the pages in rows across the bedroom floor, looking for links as the first spatters of rain hit the windows. Distant thunder rolled across the heathlands of North London. The room grew darker as the battery on the garage torch began to dim. I was about to look for more candles when I heard a key in the front door. I’d known that Azymuth could come back at any time, but this was more than inconvenient. It looked like burglary. The money was spread all over the bed and the floor.

  I caught the flash of a torch in the hall, heading away to the lounge. I couldn’t trust myself to explain my presence in the apartment, but where to hide? Getting under the bed would trap me in the room. Besides, he would only have to glance at the chaos to see that someone had been rifling through his personal belongings. I slipped into the shadowed L-bend of the corridor and ran lightly toward the kitchen, pulling open a tall broom closet and shutting myself inside.