by John Harvey
‘Promised.’
‘Yes.’
Valentina tore off a piece of bread. ‘It would have been easy to say the words. Let her hear what she wanted to hear.’
‘Not for me.’
‘And you have time to do this?’
‘All the time in the world.’
‘And money?’
‘Enough.’
‘Because if you do not …’
‘It’s fine.’
For several minutes they ate without speaking, the silence broken only by the scraping of a chair, a child’s laughter rising up from the valley. Valentina looked back towards the house. ‘I don’t think it will be long now. I think she waited for you to come.’
Sloane drank more wine. ‘It must make you really angry.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Jane and I. The way she’s dredging it all up now.’
Valentina smiled. ‘When you are dying, you see things in a different light.’
‘Even so.’
‘Okay, I was angry when she said she would write to you. Ask you to come here. But then …’ Still smiling, she poured more wine into his glass. ‘… I have had more than twenty years, and you… What was it? One?’
Sloane nodded. ‘More or less.’
‘Then perhaps I should not – what is the word?’
‘Begrudge?’
‘Maybe I should not begrudge you this. These hours with her. Your quest.’
Lunch over, they went back into Jane’s room where she was still sleeping, head to one side, one skinny arm thrust out across the sheets.
‘She looks better,’ Sloane said. ‘More peaceful.’
Valentina shook her head. ‘It’s the morphine. I increased her dose.’ Reaching down, she touched the tips of her fingers to Jane’s cheek. ‘There has been no better for a long time.’
‘Was there never any chance?’
‘If it had been caught earlier, perhaps. Even then, I’m not so sure. But for a long time she felt unwell, nothing special. Sweating at night. Sore throats, one after another. The doctor, he gave her medicine and always they came back. When finally she had a blood test the leukaemia was advanced. They treated it with busulphan and talked of bone marrow transplant. By the time a match was found that was too late also.’
As if at some level she had been listening, Jane stirred and her eyelids fluttered without opening.
‘We’re disturbing her,’ Valentina said. ‘Let’s go outside. There’s one more thing I have to show you.’
When she led him back up the stairs and into the studio, Sloane thought there was another of Jane’s paintings Valentina wanted him to see, but instead she crossed the room and pressed both hands, outstretched, against the wall and when she did so it swung slowly backwards to reveal another room.
‘Here. Come through.’
Several paces in, Sloane stopped and turned and stared. Valentina adjusted the level of the light. Displayed around the room were a dozen canvases – Sloane thought a dozen, he was too stunned to count properly – by the giants of American abstract art. De Kooning, Larry Rivers, Pollock – not one Pollock, for Christ’s sake, but two – Franz Kline. All those he knew as effortlessly as breathing. And that was a Joan Mitchell, facing. Helen Frankenthaler. What could be Robert Motherwell. Sam Francis. Lee Krasner? The view across the city through a window, Jane Freilicher, he was sure.
‘Some of them,’ Valentina explained, ‘Jane bought when they were inexpensive, but mostly they were gifts, pictures taken in exchange. Her friends.’
Glorious, Sloane thought. Magnificent. All his masters, most of them, gathered in the same room.
‘One of the Pollocks,’ Valentina said, ‘the tall, narrow one, it’s going to MoMA in New York. The Rivers is a gift to the Phillips in Washington. The rest, as soon as arrangements can be made, they will be sold.’
‘Jesus!’ Sloane breathed softly. The de Kooning alone would fetch millions of dollars.
‘The money will be used to set up a foundation in Jane’s name. There will be grants for students who will come and work here, study. Her studio will remain as it is today. We hope also to set up a permanent collection of Jane’s painting somewhere else, possibly in America, maybe here in Italy.’
‘And that’s it?’ Sloane asked. ‘That accounts for everything?’
Valentina shook her head. ‘Within the terms of the will, once the foundation is established, a sum will be set aside for Connie and myself.’
‘How big a sum?’
‘That will depend on the trustees. And how much is left. But enough for me to live on here in Tuscany, I would hope.’
Slowly, Sloane walked from canvas to canvas, pausing at each. Most of his life had been spent striving to achieve something comparable to this.
For more than an hour that afternoon he sat with Jane, listening to the rhythm of her breathing catch and change. He was sitting opposite her in Jim Atkin’s diner on Sheridan Square, watching her wolf down a second helping of hash and scrambled eggs; listening to Bird on a record player in some poet’s apartment, while Jane argued, laughed and danced. Beyond happiness, the pair of them. Or so it had seemed. Shifting position, she moaned and said what might have been his name. Her fingers sought and found his hand.
‘I’ve been looking at your paintings,’ Sloane said. ‘The three by the fireplace, landscapes I almost want to call them …’
A small, nodding movement of Jane’s head.
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘Have them.’
At first he thought he hadn’t heard.
‘Have them, please. Please.’ Like feathers, her fingers fluttered against his.
‘Thank you,’ Sloane said and bent to kiss her face.
Valentina drove him just beyond San Romano and he said he would walk from there. He could smell the flowers now as well as see them; see the hills with Jane’s eyes as well as his own. When he had told Valentina that Jane wanted him to have the paintings, she did little more than grunt and nod. In the town he bought milk, more bread, bacon and eggs. He had borrowed a catalogue of Jane’s paintings from a show at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and, sitting near the quince tree in the garden, he turned slowly through the pages, drinking coffee, committing the reproductions, almost, to memory. Later he walked back up the hill and bought a bottle of local wine. Later still he cooked eggs and bacon, turning the eggs carefully as the bacon fat sizzled in the pan. When the wine was all but gone, he lay down in his clothes and fell asleep. He was awake, it seemed, before the telephone had finished its first ring, stumbling towards it from the bedroom, knowing what he would hear.
As he looked down at her face, first light was slanting through the room. He would have said she was at peace, except that there was no one there. A skull. Some skin.
9
The 10th Precinct of the New York Police Department was situated in midtown Manhattan, its headquarters a flat-fronted cement and stone building in an otherwise mainly residential street. A flagpole – flag currently wrapped tight about it by the east wind – angled out several storeys above the wooden door which, clearly but discreetly, bore the Precinct’s name. To any casual observer, hurrying past, head down against the driving rain, only the blue and white patrol cars parked out front would have drawn attention to the building’s purpose.
Dry and relatively warm inside, Catherine Vargas caught herself looking at her watch for the third time in as many minutes. The squad room was empty save for herself and a fellow detective sitting by the far wall, hunched over a stack of case files, humming to himself and tapping the end of his ballpoint erratically against the desk. At least a dozen phones in the room and all of them silent. To Vargas, the second night of duty since her transfer, it didn’t seem real. Back in the Bronx there’d scarcely been time to go to the bathroom.
She knew it couldn’t go on like this, some kind of phoney peace, but for as long as it did she felt all wrong. Vargas in Wonderland. Any minute now the guy across the room
would kick into the lobster quadrille and Grace Slick would come loud and strong through the air-con, that song she did with the Airplane, the first time psychedelia hit big. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small. ‘White Rabbit’. What her grandfather had called her when she was just starting to walk, when he was still alive: rabbit, little rabbit. Because she loved her greens.
When her late colleagues had heard about her transfer to Manhattan, they’d laughed and accused her of chickening out, said it was a sure sign she was getting old.
Vargas didn’t think so. She was on the tall side for a woman, five seven, square-shouldered and square-jawed, brown eyes and thick, arching eyebrows, dark hair usually pulled back from her face and held in place with a barrette: she was thirty-seven years of age and worked out at the gym four times a week. One thing she didn’t feel was old. Catherine Vargas, Detective First Class, wearing Gap chinos and a maroon tank top over a cream shirt, her maternal grandmother’s gold ring on the third finger of her left hand, the only place it fitted perfectly. Let people think what they liked.
She stared at the phone on her desk and willed it to ring. Thirty seconds and if nothing happened she’d pour some more quarters into the drinks dispenser in the hall.
She was on her way back across the room, polystyrene cup filled almost to the brim, when a phone suddenly burst to life behind her and she jumped, spilling hot coffee over her wrist and the back of her hand.
‘Shit!’
The other detective casually turned his head before resuming humming and tapping as before.
Vargas set down the cup and lifted the receiver, identifying herself as she wiped her hand down the outside of her chinos. A woman’s body had been found off the West Side Highway, between 42nd and 43rd.
It was raining just enough for Vargas to keep her wipers working as she drove west and north from the precinct house on West 20th, finally parking behind two patrol cars; cold enough at nearly four in the morning for her to grab her well-worn thrift shop leather jacket from the rear seat.
Traffic swished along the highway, ever present, slowing for the emergency repairs that were taking up the best part of two lanes and would cause havoc come rush hour if they were still unfinished. Contractors’ floodlights illuminated an area on the far side, a jumble of upturned concrete and excavated hardcore, bags of sand or cement and temporarily abandoned machinery. She waited for a gap between vehicles and ran across, lifting the yellow police tape lettered DO NOT CROSS and ducking beneath.
Not recognising her, the nearest of several uniformed officers moved quickly across to intercept, one arm raised and fingers spread. When Vargas showed him her ID he took a pace back and gave her a look.
‘Something wrong?’
‘I guess not.’ He was pushing forty, Vargas thought, maybe forty-five; sliding towards his pension like a sack of flour on a slow conveyor. All he wanted right now was to be out of the rain and home in bed.
‘You’ve got a problem?’
‘No, ma’am.’
Off to one side, two of his colleagues were talking earnestly to a small group of workmen; they could have been gathering evidence, but from their demeanour Vargas thought they could equally well have been discussing sports.
‘How about a body?’ Vargas said.
‘Over there.’
She followed the line of his pointing finger and saw something protruding over the edge of a pile of rubble, some twenty yards back from the highway. Closer to, she saw a woman’s leg partly clothed in shredded pantyhose, a low-heeled shoe on the ground nearby. The uniforms would have secured the scene and carried out a preliminary search, leaving any evidence undisturbed. The body would not be moved until the arrival of the medical examiner and whichever detective caught the call.
Vargas hunkered down and, slipping her Maglite from her pocket, snapped it to life. The woman’s other leg seemed to have folded awkwardly beneath her, the now sodden fabric of her dress covering hips and waist. The head and upper part of the torso were tilted backwards and partially obscured from view, though Vargas could see what looked like dried blood, contusions, swollen skin.
‘Who found her?’ she asked, straightening. The rain was falling harder now, the wind off the Hudson slanting it into her face. Fine lines shining silver in the floodlights, the roadway slick and dark.
The officer indicated one of the workmen, a stocky, slope-shouldered man standing a short way off from the others, faint red glow from the cigarette cupped at his side.
Vargas nodded; she would take a statement from him later. She was wondering how long the body could have lain where it was undiscovered. Maybe days.
Paying too little attention to the warning signs, a truck approached at speed and was forced to brake, rear wheels losing their grip momentarily on the wet surface.
‘Hit and run?’ Vargas asked, speculating aloud.
The officer shrugged and tugged at his collar.
‘How about her purse? Personal effects? Anyone come up with a bag of any kind?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘But you looked?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I suggest you look again. Instead of standing around with your thumb up your ass. And find something to cover her with. Now.’
‘The ME’ll be here any time.’
‘Right. And until he is, let’s get her under cover.’ Vargas waited, looking him full in the eye, until, grudgingly, he moved off to do her bidding.
The medical examiner wore three-piece suits in Harris tweed, the vest normally undone, all the better to display a natty line in striped silk ties – when he wasn’t in scrubs, that is. No matter how many small, bullet-shaped mints he sucked, how much L’Occitane Pour Homme eau de toilette he sprayed, nothing would rid him of that faint yet persistent smell of chemicals, that sense of recently rendered flesh.
Vargas, doing her best to ignore what lay on gurneys to either side, opened her notebook and uncapped her pen.
The dead woman was between thirty-five and forty, five five, one hundred and forty pounds. Hazel eyes, the original colour of her hair mid-brown. A pregnancy which had not gone to term. A small tumour, the size of a finger end, lay, most likely undetected, in the subcutaneous tissue of her left breast. There was evidence of numerous injuries to the body, all of them recent. Three cervical vertebrae and four lumbar vertebrae cracked, with adjacent signs of internal haemorrhaging; the right patella shattered; the right wrist and all the fingers of the right hand broken. Significant signs of bruising and trauma around the area of the pelvis, in addition to a fracture of the skull and concomitant damage to the brain. Coffee, alcohol, aspirin. Semen. Nothing to suggest that any sexual activity was other than consensual.
‘Questions?’ The ME popped another mint.
‘I suppose what killed her’s too straightforward?’
‘Not necessarily. Any serious head injury of this nature causes the brain to swell and compress its base against the skull; enough pressure there and breathing becomes difficult, the flow of blood to and from the heart stops. That’s where my money would be.’
‘The blows to the head,’ Vargas said. ‘There’s no way of knowing how they were caused?’
‘A collision with something hard and solid …’
‘So she could have been struck by a passing vehicle, knocked off the roadway and rolled?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘And could that account for the rest of her injuries?’
The ME gave it due consideration. ‘The shattered kneecap certainly, possibly the hand …’
‘But not all?’
‘I think not.’
She could have been beaten up, Vargas thought, then dumped; thrown from a moving car. In which case was she already dead when that happened? She wondered if there was any way of proving that for certain. Hard and solid. She wondered why, unbidden, the same image kept forming in her mind, a woman being swung, full-force, against a wall.
There was nothing on t
he body that afforded identification; what clothes the dead woman had been wearing were so common as to be untraceable. Vargas ran the description through the computer, contacted the various agencies and failed to come up with a significant match. Or, rather, she came up with too many. White, medium height and build, on the cusp of middle age: Jane Doe. Vargas chased down all the missing persons reports she could without results. And by then her wish had come true and the phoney peace was over: no more sitting at her desk, waiting for the phone to ring. Now she glared at it and swore at it to stop. The woman from West Side Highway was one unsolved case among too many.
10
Dumar’s café was busy today, busier than it had been before. The usual working men eating lunch and swopping stories, drinking tea; a young woman in velvet and faded denim, rings and studs on her face and hands, smoking roll-ups as she read about inner health and calm.
Sloane had dropped off his duffel bag at home, changed his shoes, splashed water on his face and cleaned his teeth. Ten minutes later he was on his way round the corner to the café, seeking company. Much of his adult life he had lived alone and happy that way, sought solitude. Now he was getting jumpy at the sight of four walls and the sound of his own breathing. Maybe it was one of the things prison did to a man. Maybe it was something else.
Breaking a piece of bread in two, he wiped first one, then the other around the inside of his bowl, Dumar’s soup too good to waste. Yellow and thick with yam and sweet potato, spices and split peas.
‘You like?’ Dumar asked. He was standing by the table, blue and white striped apron tied at his waist, sleeves rolled back. His dark hair was beginning to grey at the temples. Sloane had not noticed before the length of his fingers, the breadth of his hands.
‘Great,’ Sloane said.
Dumar grinned with pleasure. ‘You want something else?’
Sloane shook his head.
‘Your friend, how is she?’
‘She died,’ Sloane said.
‘I am sorry,’ Dumar said solemnly, before turning away.