2006 - Restless

by William Boyd

  He pushed her in and followed her, making her slide over behind the wheel. The headlights were on. There was no sign of the person who had delivered the car.

  “Drive,” he said, looping his arm along the back of the front seat, the muzzle of his revolver now pressing into her ribs. She put the car in gear—the shift was on the steering column—and they pulled away slowly from the Mesilla Motor Lodge.

  As they left the compound and turned on to the road to Las Cruces she thought he gave a sign—a wave, a thumbs-up—to someone standing in the shadows on the verge under a poplar. She glanced over and she thought she saw two men there, waiting by a parked car with its lights off. It looked like a coupe but it was too dark to tell what colour it was. And then they were past them and he told her to drive through Las Cruces and take Highway 80 heading for the Texas line.

  They drove on Highway 80 for about half an hour. Just when she saw the city limits for Berino he told her to turn right on a gravel road sign-posted to Leopold. The road was in bad repair and the car bucked and juddered as she hit the ruts and the ridges, the Mexican’s gun banging into her side painfully.

  “Slow down,” he said. She cut the speed to about ten miles per hour and after a few minutes he told her to stop.

  They were at a sharp bend in the road and the headlights lit up a section of scrub and stony ground crossed by what looked like a deep-shadowed arroyo.

  Eva sat there, conscious of the adrenalin surge running through her body. She felt remarkably clear-headed. By any reasonable calculation she would be dead in a minute or two, she realised. Trust your animal instincts. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  “Get out of the car,” the Mexican said. “We’re going to meet some people.”

  This was a lie, she thought. He just doesn’t want me to think this is the end of the road.

  She reached for the door latch with her left hand and with her right looped a stray lock of hair that had fallen, back behind her ear. A natural gesture, a womanly reflex.

  “Switch the lights off,” he said.

  She needed light.

  “Listen,” she said, “I have more money.”

  The fingers of her right hand that were in her hair touched the rubber eraser on the Mesilla Motor Lodge pencil that she had slipped in amongst her bunched and gathered folds of hair—one of the half-dozen new, sharpened, complimentary pencils that had been laid out on the blotter beside the notepaper and the postcards. New and newly sharpened with the name Mesilla Motor Lodge, Las Cruces, stamped in gold along their sides. This was the pencil she had picked up and slid into her hair as the Mexican peered briefly out of the door, checking on his car.

  “I can get you another ten thousand,” she said. “Easy. In one hour.”

  He chuckled. “Get out.”

  She grabbed the sharp pencil in her hair and stabbed him in the left eye.

  The pencil went in smoothly and instantly without resistance, almost to its full six-inch length. The man gave a kind of gasp-inhalation and dropped his gun with a clatter. He tried to raise his trembling hands to his eye as if to draw the pencil out then fell back against the door. The end of the pencil with the rubber eraser stuck out an inch above the punctured jelly of his left eyeball. There was no blood. She knew immediately from his absolute stillness that he was dead.

  She switched out the lights and stepped out of the car. She was shivering, but not excessively, telling herself that she had probably been a minute or two from her own death—the moment of life-or-death exchange—she felt no shock, no horror, at what she had done to this man. She forced herself away from that topic and tried to be rational: what now? What next? Run away? Perhaps there was something to be salvaged from this disaster: one step at a time, use your brain, she said to herself—think. Think.

  She climbed back into the car and drove it a few yards off the road behind a clump of greasewood bushes and killed the lights. Sitting there in the dark beside the dead Mexican she methodically considered her options. She switched on the interior light above the rear-view mirror and picked up the gun, using her handkerchief to keep her prints off it. She opened his jacket and replaced it in his shoulder holster. There was still no blood from his wound, not even a trickle—just the end of a pencil sticking out of his unblinking eye.

  She went through his pockets and found his wallet and his identification: Deputy Inspector Luis de Baca. She also found some money, a letter and a bill of sale from a hardware store in Ciudad Juárez. She put everything back. A Mexican policeman would have been her killer: it made no sense at all. She switched off the light again and carried on thinking: she was safe for a short while, she knew—she could flee back to her friends one way or another now—but tracks had to be covered.

  She stepped out of the car again and paced about thinking, planning. There was a sickle moon casting no light and it was getting colder. She hugged her arms to her chest, crouching down at one stage when a truck bumped along the road to Leopold but the sweep of its headlights didn’t come close. A plan began to form slowly and she teased it out in her mind, second-guessing, raising objections, considering advantages and disadvantages. She opened the boot of the car and found a can of oil, a rope and a spade. In the dashboard glove compartment was a flashlight, some cigarettes and chewing gum. It seemed to be his own car.

  She walked a few paces along the road to Leopold where the corner was and saw, with the flashlight, that the arroyo at the bend was little more than a gulley about twenty feet deep. She started the car, switching on the headlights and drove to the edge, gunning the engine as she left the road, making the wheels spin, scattering gravel. She let the car roll to the very edge of the gulley and put on the handbrake. She made a final check, picked up her bag and stepped out, releasing the handbrake as she did so. The car began to move forward slowly and she ran round the back and pushed. The car toppled over the gulley rim and she listened to the heavy thump and tear of metal as it nosedived to the gulley floor. She heard the windscreen pop out and the shatter of glass.

  With the flashlight she picked her way down to the wreck. One headlight was still on and the hood had buckled and sprung open. There was a smell of petrol leaking and the car had canted over forty-five degrees on the passenger side. She was able to wrench open the driver’s door and put the gear lever into fourth. Luis de Baca had fallen forward in the descent and smashed his forehead on the dashboard. A small trickle of blood was now running from his eye to his moustache. The moustache filled and began to drip blood on to his shirt. She hauled him over to the driver’s side noticing that one of his legs looked broken, skewed at an odd angle. Good, she thought.

  She took the map out of her bag and carefully tore a large corner off it, leaving ‘LUFTVERK’ and the lines for San Antonio and Miami. She put the rest of the map in her bag, then, taking out a pen and spreading the torn corner on the bonnet, wrote notes on it in German: “Wo befinden sich die Ölreserven für den transatlantischen Verkehr?” and “Der dritte Gau scheint zu gross zu sein.” In the margin she wrote a small sum adding up some figures: 150,000 plus 35,000 = 185,000 then some meaningless letters and numbers—LBF⁄3, XPD 77. She smeared the torn corner against de Baca’s bloodstained shirt and crumpled it up, then she slipped it under the shoe of his unbroken leg. She put the 3,000 dollars in the glove compartment in the dashboard under a road map and an instruction manual. Then with her handkerchief she wiped down the surfaces and the steering wheel, taking particular care with the gear lever. Finally she heaved de Baca up and propped him against the steering wheel so she could see his face. She knew that what she had to do next would be the hardest but she was so involved in the construction of the accident that she was operating almost automatically, with conscious efficiency. She scattered some windscreen glass over him and snapped off a bent windscreen wiper, tearing away the rubber blade.

  She reached for the pencil in his eye and drew it out. It came easily, as if oiled, and with it blood welled up and flowed over the lids. She jammed the end of
the windscreen wiper into the wound and stepped backwards. She left the door open and made a final check with the flashlight. Then she picked up her bag, scrambled up the gulley side and walked back along the road towards Highway 80. After about half a mile she left the road and buried the remains of the map, the flashlight and the pencil under a rock. She could see the lights of cars on the highway and the glow of lights from Berdino’s main street. She headed off again. She knew what she had to do next: call the police and anonymously report a crashed car in a gulley between the highway and Leopold. A taxi would take her back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She would pay her bill and drive through the night to Albuquerque. She had done everything she could but she could not stop thinking as she walked into a Texaco gas station on the outskirts of Berdino—the truth had to be faced: someone, somehow, had betrayed her.

  TEN

  Meeting Lucas Romer

  I STOOD IN FRONT of David Bomberg’s portrait of Lucas Romer for a good twenty minutes, searching for clues, I suppose, and also trying to identify the man my mother had met in 1939 in order to distinguish him from the man I was about to meet in 1976.

  The portrait was virtually life-size—a head and shoulders on a canvas of about 12 inches by 18. The simple broad black wooden frame made the small painting look more imposing but it was still, none the less, stuck away in a corridor on an upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery. The artist in this case was more important than the sitter: the notes on the wall were all about David Bomberg—the sitter was identified simply as ‘Lucas Romer, a friend’—and its date was given as ‘1936’(?)—three years before Romer had met Eva Delectorskaya.

  The picture was clearly a sketch, notable for its fluent impasto surface—perhaps a study that might have been worked up later to something more polished had there been more sittings. It seemed to me a good painting—a good portrait—the sitter’s character emerged from it powerfully, though I had no idea if it were a good likeness. Lucas Romer stared out of the canvas at the viewer—making emphatic eye contact—his eyes a pale grey-blue, and his mouth was set, not relaxed, almost slightly pushed to one side, betokening reluctance, impatience at the posing procedure, the time spent being still. His hair was thinning at the front, as my mother had described, and he was wearing a white shirt, a blue jacket almost the same colour as his eyes and what looked like a nondescript greenish-beige tie. Only the knot of the tie was in the frame.

  Bomberg had outlined the head with a thick band of black that had the effect of concentrating your eye on the painted surface within that boundary. The style was bold: blue, verdigris, chartreuse, raw pinks, browns and charcoal combined to render the flesh tones and the incipient heavy beard. The brush strokes were broad, impetuous, confident, loaded with pigment. I had an instant sense of a personality—a strong one, perhaps an arrogant one—and I didn’t think I was bringing any privileged knowledge to that assessment. Big hooded eyes, a conspicuous nose—perhaps the only sign of weakness was in the mouth: full, rather slack lips, pursed in their temporary tolerance. A bully? An over-confident intellectual? A complex neurotic artist? Perhaps you needed all these qualities to be a spymaster and run your own team of spies.

  I wandered down to the gallery lobby and decided to walk to Brydges’. But first I went to the ladies’ lavatory and considered myself in the mirror. What did this portrait say of the sitter? My hair was down, thick and long and freshly washed, I was wearing a pale pink lipstick and my usual dark eyeshadow. I had on a newish black trouser suit with ostentatious white stitching on the seams and the patch pockets—and I had my platforms on under the trousers. I was tall—I wanted to be tall today—and I thought I looked pretty damn good. The worn leather briefcase I was carrying added a nice incongruous touch to the picture, I felt.

  I walked across Trafalgar Square towards Pall Mall and then cut up through St James’s Square to the network of small streets between the square and Jermyn Street, where I would find Brydges’. The door was discreet, glossy black—no nameplate, just a number—with a fanlight with elaborate tracery, all curlicues and ogees. I rang the brass doorbell and was admitted suspiciously by a porter in a navy-blue frock coat with red lapels. I said I had an appointment with Lord Mansfield and he retreated into a kind of glass phone box to consult a ledger.

  “Ruth Gilmartin,” I said. “Six o’clock.”

  “This way, Miss.”

  I followed the man up a wide swerving staircase, already aware that the modest entrance concealed a building of capacious and elegant Georgian proportions. On the first floor we passed a reading-room—deep sofas, dark portraits, a few old men reading periodicals and newspapers—then a bar—a few old men drinking—then a dining-room being set up for dinner by young girls in black skirts and crisp white blouses. I sensed it was very unusual ever to have a female in this building who wasn’t a servant of some kind. We then turned another corner to go down a corridor past a cloakroom and a gentleman’s toilet (a smell of disinfectant mingled with hair oil, the sound of urinals discreetly flushing) from which an old man with a walking-stick emerged and, on seeing me, gave a start of almost cartoon-like incredulity.

  “Evening,” I said to him, becoming at once both calmer and angrier. Angry because I knew what was obviously, crassly, going on here; calmer because I knew that Romer could have no idea that it would not only not work, but that it would be counter-productive as well. We turned another corner and arrived at a door that had written on it: ‘Ladies’ Drawing Room’.

  “Lord Mansfield will see you here,” the porter said, opening the door.

  “How can you be sure I’m a lady?” I said.

  “Beg pardon, Miss?”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  I pushed past him and went into the Ladies’ Drawing Room. It was poky and cheaply furnished and smelt of carpet shampoo and polish—everything about its decor signalled disuse. There were chintz curtains and puce shades with saffron fringes on the wall sconces; a selection of unread ‘ladies’ magazines’—House & Garden, Woman’s Journal, the Lady itself—was fanned out on the coffee table; a spider plant was dying of thirst on the mantelpiece above the unlaid fire.

  The porter left and I moved the largest armchair over a few feet so that the solitary window was behind it; I wanted to be backlit, my face in shadow, so that the summer evening light would fall on Romer. I opened my briefcase and took out my clipboard and pen.

  I waited fifteen minutes, twenty, twenty-five. Again I knew this was deliberate but I was glad of the wait because it made me confront the fact that, unusually for me, I was actually rather nervous about meeting this man—this man who had made love to my mother, who had recruited her, who had ‘run’ her, as the parlance went, and to whom she had declared her love, one chilly day in Manhattan in 1941. Eva Delectorskaya, I felt for perhaps the first time, was becoming real. But the longer Lucas Romer kept me waiting, the more he tried to intimidate me in this bastion of aged establishment masculinity, the more pissed off I became—and therefore the less insecure.

  Eventually the porter opened the door: a figure loomed behind him.

  “Miss Gilmartin, your lordship,” the porter said and melted away.

  Romer slipped in, a smile on his lean, seamed face.

  “So sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, his voice gravelly and slightly hoarse as if his larynx were choked with polyps. “Tiresome phone calls. Lucas Romer.” He extended his hand.

  “Ruth Gilmartin,” I said, standing up, tall as he was, and gave him one of my firmest handshakes, trying not to stare, trying not to gawp, though I would have loved a good few minutes’ scrutiny of him through a one-way mirror.

  He was wearing a perfectly cut, single-breasted midnight-blue suit with a cream shirt and a dark maroon knitted tie. His smile was as white and immaculate as my mother had described, though there was now, in the recesses of his mouth, the gold gleam of expensive bridgework. He was bald, his longish oiled hair above his ears combed into two grey sleek wings. Though he was slim he was a l
ittle stooped but the handsome man he had been lingered in this 77-year-old like a ghostly memory: in certain lights it would have been hard to guess his age—he was, I suppose, still a good-looking older man. I sat down in my positioned armchair before he could claim it or wave me into any other seat. He chose to sit as far away from me as possible and asked if I wanted tea.

  “I wouldn’t mind an alcoholic drink,” I said, “if such things are served in a Ladies’ Drawing Room.”

  “Oh, indeed,” he said. “We’re very broad-minded in Brydges’.” He reached for and pressed a wired bell push that sat on the edge of the coffee table and almost immediately a white-jacketed waiter was in the room with a silver tray under his arm.

  “What will you have, Miss Martin?”

  “Gilmartin.”

  “Forgive me—an old man’s imbecility—Miss Gilmartin. What is your pleasure?”

  “A large whisky and soda please.”

  “All whiskies are served large, here.” He turned to the waiter. “A tomato juice for me, Boris. A touch of celery salt, no Worcestershire.” He turned back to me. “We only have J&B or Bell’s as blends.”

  “A Bell’s, in that case.” I had no idea what a J&B was.

  “Yes, your lordship,” the waiter said and left.

  “I must say I’ve been looking forward to this meeting,” Romer said with patent insincerity. “At my age one feels wholly forgotten. Then all of a sudden a newspaper rings up wanting to interview one. A surprise, but gratifying, I suppose. The Observer, wasn’t it?”

  “The Telegraph.”

  “Splendid. Who’s your editor, by the way? Do you know Toby Litton-Fry?”

  “No. I’m working with Robert York,” I said, quickly and calmly.

  “Robert York…I’ll ring Toby about him.” He smiled. “I’d like to know who’ll be correcting your copy.”

  Our drinks arrived. Boris served them on paper coasters with a supplementary saucer of salted peanuts.