by Hocking, Ian
When she awoke, it was still night, but the train had stopped. She plumped her sweaty pillow and waited for the beat of the wheels to resume. After some minutes, they did, and she let the movement wash her to the edge of sleep. But she had a headache where the plates of her skull met, at her crown, and the pain in her abdomen refused to let her move from doziness to true sleep. Her eyes wandered over the sooty shapes in her room and she named them, in order, as the overhead luggage basket, the laminated fire safety poster, and the door. A glimmer winked from the lock. The other beds, the bottle of water, the ladder. Her eyes returned to that glimmering lock. Something was wrong.
Like the sudden falling away of the sea before a tsunami.
Like everything was about to go wrong.
The tab was vertical. Unlocked.
She heard a sound from her nightstand. In the pile of coins she had scooped from the pocket of her duffle coat and placed there, an unnoticed bead the size of a breath freshener rolled – impossibly – over the raised edge and bounced twice on the carriage floor. She heard it cross to the door.
Blood hissed in her ears. Her muscles reeled tight. She could not move anything but her eyes. She found a shape in the darkness. Incidental light shifted in the tell-tale pattern of another person, reaching down to pick up the white bead.
Her struggle resolved to a thought. It condensed on her lips.
‘Cory?’
Suddenly, the cabin was filled with light.
Cory was wearing a black overcoat. There was a dash of white at his neck. She stared at it, conscious of the absurdity but not sure why, until she released that he was disguised as a priest. His hair was wet and his eyes had lost the depth of their blue. White stubble dusted his cheeks. He looked like a man in the last days of an illness. His finger remained on the light switch. As she looked from his hand to his face, Cory nodded slowly. It was the nod of a boxer before a round.
Jem recoiled from this propriety. She repeated the line she had rehearsed with Ego.
‘I thought you were dead.’
Cory moved forward. Jem recalled the moment she had first seen her brother at the TV tower. He had seemed to swoop upon her, like a bird of prey to her arm. Cory’s eyes, this close, were bloodshot. He gripped her head by the ears. This was at odds with the elegance of the man in Saskia’s apartment. She gasped and put her hands over his.
‘Jem, do you understand the danger you’re in?’
He won’t kill me, she thought. Ego had been certain. She had information. She might be able to cooperate. But there was a blankness in his eyes that suggested the professionalism of an executioner.
‘How did you find me?’
Cory blinked. Wrong answer, the movement said. He lifted her head and dashed it against the metal rim of the window. Jem heard the sound as though it came from outside the train. She almost laughed. Cory had wanted to hurt her, but she was fine. He had underestimated the toughness of her nut.
‘I know exactly how much energy your head can take before the skin splits, or the bone cracks, or your brain is damaged. Do you understand?’
‘Yes–’ A sudden dizziness made her head feel hollow. There was a little blood in her eye. ‘Yes, you cunt.’
‘Where is the Ego unit?’
‘Where do you think? I posted it to my Aunt Mavis in Scunthorpe.’
Jem thought once more of the debonair spook who had told her the story of the Star Dust in Saskia’s apartment. She tried to count the distance between that image and the man before her, as one might count the seconds between lightning and thunder.
‘I’m going to ask you a question. Think carefully before you answer. Now, where is the Cullinan Zero?’
‘Wait. I...’
‘What?’
‘Saskia survived the crash. She knows, doesn’t she? About...’ She struggled to remember the word Cory had used. ‘The Coolinan?’
All movement ceased in Cory’s expression. He leaned forward, as if he was going to bite.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
He put his lips on hers. Jem frowned but did not recoil. Well, she thought, if that will... and her consciousness flatlined like a leaf pressed beneath the iron wheels of the train.
~
August, 1947, Buenos Aires
It was the evening after Cory had met Jennifer. Cory and Lisandro were alone in an alley alongside the restaurant where, not minutes ago, he had treated the boy to a farewell treat of ice-cream. Now he had Lisandro in his arms, crushed too tightly to draw breath – a snake’s trick – and the white knife pierced the boy’s chest.
He remembered Jennifer’s advice. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’ The last two words looped in Cory’s mind. Zoom out. Zoom out. Now he spoke them aloud.
‘Zoom out. Zoom out.’
‘Ah,’ said Lisandro. He might have been grasping a mathematical principle at last.
Zoom out.
Cory would never be the same. He knew this.
He watched blood well over his shaking knuckles as the factor probed the heart through those ribs, those little fishbone ribs dressed in cast-off clothes. The boy’s heart valves were fluttering. Cory could feel them. He levered the blade again. A tremor shook Cory’s neck and he felt tears run from each eye. Entrada. Lisandro: held too hard to shout. Abrazo. Ice-cream bubbling on his lips. Cory crouched and let the dead Lisandro come to rest in the puddles and feathers of the alley. Volcada. The boy had passed into the forever one-dimensional.
‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Cory whispered. He coughed to recover his voice. ‘But you were already dead. I could have read that newspaper at any time. It was archived long before I was your age. You were always dead.’
Cory checked the alleyway. With his augmentations, the rats were clear shapes among the rubbish. He saw no people. There was a blue pinstripe suit in his gunny sack, and he changed into it.
‘Forgive me, Lisandro. Le llegó la hora.’
He squatted and took the one-hundred peso note from the boy’s bloodied trouser band.
Where the alley opened onto the street, he paused. Martín, the overweight owner of the restaurant next door, was standing on its porch. He described a shape with his cigar to a group of men who were dressed for an expensive dinner, which ruled them out as customers of Martín. Cory turned and put footsteps between him and Martín and Lisandro. His suit’s blue pinstripes complemented the rich colours of this night, though his shoes were bone-white beacons.
Cory remembered the bloodied one-hundred peso note. He changed direction and passed into the crowd. The trinket sellers jostled him and he barked gruff idioms drawn from Lunfardo slang. The throngs multiplied, and he avoided the improvised clearings where dancers moved foot-against-foot, belly-to-belly. Abrazo, the embrace. Entrada, the entrance. Volcada, the capsizement: the dancer tilts his partner, then, at the last moment, catches her.
~
To judge by the light in the door’s frosted glass, Lisandro’s mother was awake. Cory did not knock. He pushed the bloodied one-hundred peso note under the door. Turning away, making zeros in the dirt, subtracting himself, he heard laughter behind the door, and it might have been Jennifer laughing at the sentimentality of a fool.
Chapter Sixteen
In her dream, Jem had accepted the invitation of a gentleman suitor to travel in his carriage through a twilit city. They passed roadside mourners: her mother, her dead father, Danny. She was cold in her nightgown and shawl. She smelled coal and chrysanthemums through the open window, and horse sweat. When the suspension ceased its rattle, the day had passed, and the gas lamps were like moons. Her suitor hooked his cane in his elbow and helped her from the carriage, and, with that, his winged collar became priestly and his dark eyes amused. As her bare foot touched the snowy road, the cobbles vanished. She wor
e Cossack boots again, and her nightgown had become a duffle coat. She turned to the horses but they had vanished, replaced by a stolen BMW. Its four corners winked. Groggily, Jem let Cory take her arm.
Through a tall gate and up a gravel path.
Watching a cat watch her as a keypad was tapped.
A hallway.
Darkly.
No sounds of clockwork.
(A poem.)
No smell of food.
(Because I could not stop for death.)
An unoccupied house.
Cory removed a glove and slapped her face.
Jem’s eyes opened fully and she coughed. There was a bitter taste on her tongue.
~
It was late in the evening of the day that Cory had murdered Lisandro when he stopped beneath a gas lamp to re-read Jennifer’s newspaper of the next day. He looked for clues about his immediate future. Finding them, he walked to the docks and located a tall, crumbling warehouse. He slipped into the shadowed alley on its eastern side. The alley formed a space narrow enough for him to launch off one wall and reach out for the lower rung of a fire escape. He swung for a moment. His heart surged. He climbed steadily towards the roof until his view became one of scintillating lights.
Cory slid his cane between the attic door and its upper hinge. The wood split and he moved inside. The attic was long and low. There was a zinc bath beneath a skylight. So too a bed, a couch, a changing screen, and a lamp. Cory stepped between the lamp and the bed. He pulled the cord and his shadow pounced across the prostitute.
Her wigless head was downy, not bursting with the mane so beloved of the Argentines, and her sad, thunderous face was hollow at the eyes and cheeks. She sat up and her blanket slipped to the tips of her breasts; she might have been a debutante in a curtsy. Her tinctures and condoms were arranged on the dressing table in a croupier’s semicircle: expert and honest, no cheating.
‘Get out,’ she said. There was a hunting knife in her slim hand.
He laid a German accent light as silk over his Spanish and said, ‘Where is Patrick Harkes?’
‘Turn around. Go.’
‘Harkes.’
Cory wound her bedsheet in his forearm and flung it away. She scooted into her pillows. Naked, she was gangly. All the play anger from her eyes. ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Do what you want, then get out.’
Cory knelt on the bed and took her knife. ‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’
She assumed a pout. ‘Something special, my dear? Here: Whisper in my ear.’
‘Harkes told you I would come for him, didn’t he? Otherwise, you would have cut me without asking.’ At this, she shrugged, one-shouldered. Cory let his thoughts progress. ‘You didn’t want to kill me, but you wanted to look prepared. So I wouldn’t be suspicious. You want to deal.’
She was smiling. ‘Deal?’
‘So innocent. You must be the oldest virgin in the house.’
‘Play fair, Mr Cory.’
Cory reached behind him and
a gun, to me
brought the snout of the weapon to her nose.
‘You know my name? It changes things.’ Straight Rioplatenese Spanish now, his German accent gone: ‘What’s yours?’
‘Paloma,’ she whispered. Her pupils were huge. ‘I liked the trick with the gun. How it flew to you! Are you a magician?’
‘Cory the Great. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She frowned at the formality, then, seeing something in his eyes, giggled. ‘Now, Paloma. Deal. Let’s say four hundred pesos for the information.’
‘Eight hundred,’ she mumbled.
‘A thousand.’
She dropped her head back and purred. Cory moved alongside her.
‘Harkes leaves for Santiago tomorrow,’ she said.
‘He told you that?’
Paloma looked at the skylight. ‘I found myself in his pockets. There was a ticket.’
‘Time? Flight number?’
‘I didn’t notice. But it will leave early. Nothing crosses the Andes at night.’
‘With whom will he fly?’
‘There was a logo with a star man.’ She stretched her legs. ‘He looked like you, Cory the Great. Will you show me another trick?’
‘Only if I believe you.’
‘Harkes told me that you know when people lie.’
Cory rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes as Paloma unbuttoned his shirt.
‘The star man had a strong jaw like yours. Ah, your teeth are beautiful.’
She drew her lips over his, and down, tracing the ridge of his Adam’s Apple.
Cory stared upwards. ‘Harkes would choose a small company. Harder for me to find.’
‘No small companies fly to Santiago. One needs a big plane. Wait, I just remembered the name.’
‘What?’
‘‘Star Dust’. Like the song.’
‘There’s a song?’
‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’
‘I don’t know it.’
She sang the song in lisping English.
~
When the sickness that followed Cory’s slap had faded, Jem found herself sitting in a winged armchair. The lounge was small and lit by three frosty lamps. Its brown scheme took her back to never-ending visits to elderly relatives in the late 1980s. She recognised a painting above the fireplace, but its name, like the falling snow, now dissolved in the warmth of her attention. Her lips were still numb from Cory’s bitter kiss. Was he venomous, like a blowfish?
‘This used to be a safe house,’ said Cory. ‘It was forgotten. We won’t be disturbed, and it was designed to make escape difficult.’
‘KGB or CIA?’
‘What’s the difference?’
Jem let her head loll against the headrest. Cory placed his gloves on the coffee table and sat opposite, still the priest.
‘Jem, you are in love with Saskia. You think about her. It’s natural. Her body. Her eyes, the way they look green in sunlight. You’d do anything to wake her memory. But is she alive? No, Jem. She is nothing more than cold cuts. However, I would like to hear why you think differently.’
‘Who are you? Is Cory your real name?’
~
Cory washed his hands and got dressed. He watched the dozing prostitute. His automata made a liquid metaphor of the electrical resistance on her scalp, showed him peaks and troughs. He might drop a word in her ear and see the ripple of its effect. He might wait for the spike that signalled her intention to blink; and he would know that intent before she did.
Then he recalled the newspaper article that Jennifer had shown him. By morning, ‘The Englishman’ would be suspected of Lisandro’s murder. He would also be sought for the murder of a bordello madam, past her prime but fighting fit, found naked on her bed with skull grit in her changing screen. But there would be no bullet. And no powder burns.
Her eyes opened.
‘You think I’m scared of you, Cory the Great?’
The pupils were wide with something home-brewed.
‘Paloma, let’s play a game. I’m thinking of either night or day. I want you to tell me which. If you are correct, I leave and you never see me again.’
‘That’s easy. I have the touch.’
~
‘I never wanted to kill you,’ Cory said. His words came with enough insouciance for Jem to recognise the lie. The implication was clear: she was in immediate danger. Yet, to her surprise, she did not collapse. ‘I only want information.’
‘I’ll tell you everything. But I need to use the toilet.’
‘Be my guest.’
There was a falling line of red on Cory’s upper lip.
‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.
Cory produced a handkerchief and pressed his nostril. Then he walked to the wide fireplace, took a match from the mantel, flicked it alight, and put it to the lattice of paper and wood. Jem paused in the doorway.
‘I heard,’ she said, ‘about Saskia’s apartment.’
‘One is nev
er too old to play with matches,’ he replied, not turning. ‘The bathroom is down the hall.’
~
Once upon a time, a woman called Catherine had consented to marry Cory over pan-fried bread in a field outside Jesup, Georgia. The ring – the very ring whose undeclared mass had almost ended his mission – had been warmed by his anxious hands that day. Her fingertips were cool as he slid it on. ‘Yes,’ said the soldier’s daughter.
Cory smiled.
Now, in 1947, he rose from the prostitute’s bed and walked towards the door of the attic. Paloma seemed to drift alongside him. Her footsteps were soundless. She stopped in the neon glow beneath the skylight. She was changing colours.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s raining again.’
They stopped and looked at the veins of water on the window. Cory heard the glug-glug of filling gutters. For South America, this was subtle rain.
He looked at her. The neon light gave her no shadow and her quicksilver eyes were translucent opals and her mouth had a lunar shimmer like water whirling colgada into a drain. As Cory reached for her shoulder, the apparition disappeared. His eyes refocused on the bed.
Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.
‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’
Haunted, young Cory closed the door.
~
Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.
In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.
So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.