“How much of you is you?”
“I’m waiting to find out.”
“What will they do to him?”
“Catch him. Put him on trial. Lock him up.”
“How can you volunteer for a job like that? Jesus.”
No training covered this contingency. He gave himself time to think, and the silence, like the distance between them, seemed to join rather than divide them.
“It began with a girl,” he said. He corrected himself. “A woman. Roper and another man arranged to have her killed. I felt responsible.”
Shoulders hunched, the cape still gathered to her neck, she peered round the room, then back to him.
“Did you love her? The girl? The woman?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “She was my virtue.”
She took this in, uncertain whether to give it her approval. “When you saved Daniel at Mama’s, was that a lie too?”
“Pretty much.”
He watched it all going through her head: the revulsion, the struggling to understand, the mixed moralities of her upbringing.
“Dr. Marti said they nearly killed you,” she said.
“I nearly killed them. I lost my temper. It was a play that went wrong.”
“What was her name?”
“Sophie.”
“I need to hear about her.”
She meant here, in his house, now.
He took her up to the bedroom and lay alongside her without touching her while he told her about Sophie, and eventually she slept while he kept watch. She woke and wanted soda water, so he fetched some from the fridge. Then at five o’clock, before it was light, he put on his jogging gear and led her back along the tunnel to the gatehouse, not letting her use the flashlight but making her walk a pace behind him on his left side, as if she were a raw recruit he was leading into battle. And at the gatehouse he put his head and shoulders right into the window for one of his chats with Marlow the night guard, while Jed flitted by, he hoped unseen.
His anxiety was not eased when he returned to find Amos the Rasta sitting on his doorstep, needing a cup of coffee.
“You have a fine, upliftin’ experience with your soul last night, Mist’ Thomas, sir?” he inquired, pouring four heaped spoonfuls of sugar into his cup.
“It was an evening like any other, Amos. How about you?”
“Mist’ Thomas, sir, I ain’t smelt no fresh fire smoke at one a.m. of a Townside morning not since Mist’ Woodman liked to entertain his lady friends to music and fine lovin’.”
“Mr. Woodman would have done a lot better, by all accounts, to read an improving book.”
Amos broke out in a wild chuckle. “There’s only one man ’cept you on this island ever reads a book, Mist’ Thomas. And he’s ganja stupid and stone blind.”
That night, to his horror, she came to him again.
She was not wearing her cape this time but her riding gear, which she had evidently decided gave her some sort of immunity. He was appalled but not particularly surprised, for by then he had recognized Sophie’s resolution in her, and he knew he could no more send her away than stop Sophie from going back to Cairo to face Hamid. So a quiet came over him, and it became a quiet shared. She took his hand and led him upstairs. She guided him around his own bedroom, opening drawers and showing a distracted curiosity about his shirts and underclothes. Something was badly folded, so she folded it better. Something was lost, and she found a partner for it. She drew him to her and kissed him very exactly, as if she had decided in advance how much of herself she could afford to give him, and how little. When they had kissed, she went downstairs again and stood him under the overhead light and touched his face with her fingertips, verifying him, photographing him with her eyes, making pictures of him to take away with her. And in the incongruity of the moment he remembered the old emigré couple dancing at Mama Low’s on the night of the kidnapping, how they had touched each other’s faces in disbelief.
She asked for a glass of wine, and they sat on the sofa drinking it and relishing the quiet they had discovered they could share. She drew him to his feet and kissed him once more, laying all her body along him and spending a lot of time looking at his eyes as if to check them for sincerity. Then she left him because, as she put it, that was the most she could cope with until God pulled another trick.
When she had gone, Jonathan went upstairs to watch her from his window. Then he put his copy of Tess in a brown envelope and addressed it in illiterate capitals to THE ADULT SHOP, care of a box number in Nassau given him by Rooke in the days of his youth. He dropped the envelope in the mailbox on the seafront for collection and shipment to Nassau by Roper jet next day.
“Enjoy our aloneness did we, old love?” Corkoran inquired.
He was back in Jonathan’s garden, drinking cold beer out of a can.
“Very much, thank you,” said Jonathan politely.
“So one hears. Frisky says you enjoyed it. Tabby says you enjoyed it. Boys on the gate say you enjoyed it. Most of Townside seems to think you enjoyed it.”
“Good.”
Corkoran drank. He was wearing his Etonian Panama hat and his disgraceful Nassau suit, and he was talking out to sea. “And the Langbourne brood didn’t cramp our style at all?”
“We managed a couple of expeditions. Caroline’s a bit down-in-the-mouth, so the kids were rather pleased to get away from her.”
“So kind we are,” Corkoran reflected. “Such a sport. Such a proper pet. Just like Sammy. And I never even had the little sod.” Pulling down the brim of his hat, he crooned Nice work if you can get it as if he were a mournful Ella Fitzgerald. “Message from the Chief for you, Mr. Pine. H hour is upon us. Prepare to kiss Crystal and everybody else goodbye. Firing squad assembles at dawn.”
“Where am I going?”
Jumping to his feet, Corkoran marched down the garden steps to the beach as if he couldn’t stand Jonathan’s company anymore. He picked up a stone and, despite his bulk, skimmed it across the darkening water.
“In my fucking place is where you’re going!” he shouted. “Thanks to some very classy footwork by some shitty little queens unfriendly to the cause! Of whom I strongly suspect you to be the creature!”
“Corky, are you talking through your arse?”
Corkoran pondered the question. “Don’t know, old love. Wish I did. Could be anal. Could be spot on.” Another stone. “Prophet in the wilderness, me. The Chief, though he’d never admit it, is a fully paid-up unredeemable romantic. Roper believes in the light at the end of the pier. The trouble is, so did the fucking moth.” Yet another stone, accompanied by an angry grunt of exertion. “Whereas Corky here is a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. And my personal and professional view of you is, you’re poison.” Another stone. And another. “I tell him you’re poison, and he won’t believe me. He invented you. You plucked his baby from the flames. Whereas Corky here, thanks to persons unnamed—friends of yours, I suspect—is used goods.” He drained his beer can and tossed it onto the sand while he searched for another pebble, which Jonathan obligingly handed him. “Well, let’s face it, heart, one is going a tad to seed, isn’t one?”
“I think one is becoming a tad deranged, actually, Corky,” said Jonathan.
Corkoran brushed his hands together to get the sand off them, “Jesus, the effort of being criminal,” he complained. “The people and the noise. The sleaze. The places one doesn’t want to be. Don’t you find the same? Of course you don’t. You’re above it. That’s what I keep telling the Chief. Does he listen? Does he, my Khyber Pass.”
“I can’t help you, Corky.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll sort it out.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled gratefully. “And now this,” he said, waving a hand at Woody’s House behind him. “Two nights running, my spies tell me. I’d like to peach to the Chief, of course. Nothing would please me more. But I can’t do it to our lady of Crystal. Can’t speak for the others, though. Someone will bubble. Someone always does.” Miss Mabel Island became a black stencil against the
moon. “Never could do evenings. Hate the fuckers. Never could do mornings either, for that matter. Nothing but bloody deathbells. You get about ten minutes in a good day, if you’re Corky. One more for the Queen?”
“No thanks.”
It was never going to be an easy departure. They assembled on Miss Mabel’s airstrip in the early light like so many refugees, Jed wearing dark glasses and deciding to see nobody. On the plane, still with her dark glasses, she sat hunched in a back row, with Corkoran on one side of her and Daniel on the other, while Frisky and Tabby flanked Jonathan up front. When they landed at Nassau, MacArthur was hovering at the barrier. Corkoran handed him the passports, including Jonathan’s, and everybody was waved through, no problems.
“Jed’s going to be sick,” Daniel announced as they climbed into the new Rolls. Corkoran told him to shut up.
The Roper mansion was stucco Tudor and creepery and wore an unexpected air of neglect.
In the afternoon, Corkoran took Jonathan on a grand shopping spree in Freetown. Corkoran was in an erratic mood. Several times he paused to refresh himself at nasty little bars, while Jonathan drank Coke. Everyone seemed to know Corkoran, some people a little too well. Frisky trailed them at a distance. They bought three very expensive Italian business suits—trousers to be adjusted by yesterday, please, Clive, darling, or the Chief will be furious—then half a dozen town shirts, socks and ties to match, shoes, and belts, a lightweight navy raincoat, underclothes, linen handkerchiefs, pajamas and a fine leather sponge bag with an electric razor and a pair of handsome hairbrushes with silver T’s: “My friend won’t accept anything that isn’t done to a T—will you, heart?” And when they got back to the Roper mansion, Corkoran completed his creation by producing a pigskin wallet full of mainline credit cards in the name of Thomas, a black leather attaché case, a gold wristwatch by Piaget and a pair of gold cufflinks engraved with the initials DST.
So that by the time everyone was assembled in the drawing room for Dom, Jed and Roper glowing and relaxed, Jonathan was the very model of a modern young executive.
“What do we think of him, loves?” Corkoran demanded with a creator’s pride.
“Bloody good,” said Roper, not much caring.
“Super,” said Jed.
After Dom, they went to Enzo’s restaurant on Paradise Island, which was where Jed ordered lobster salad.
And that was all it was. One lobster salad. Jed had her arm round Roper’s neck while she ordered it. And kept her arm there while Roper passed her order to the proprietor. They were side by side because it was their last night together, and as everybody knew, they were these terrific lovers.
“Darlings,” said Corkoran, raising his wine to them. “Perfect pairing. So incredibly beautiful. Let no man put asunder.” And he swallowed a glassful at a gulp, while the proprietor, who was Italian and mortified, regretted there was no more lobster salad.
“Veal, Jeds?” Roper suggested. “Penne’s good. Pollo? Have a pollo. No, you won’t. Full of garlic. Put you out of bounds. Fish. Bring her a fish. Like a fish, Jeds? Sole? What fish you got?”
“Any fish,” said Corkoran, “should appreciate the sacrifice.”
Jed had fish instead of lobster.
Jonathan also had fish and pronounced it sublime. Jed said hers was gorgeous. So did the MacDanbies, commandeered at no notice to make up Roper’s kind of numbers.
“Doesn’t look gorgeous to me,” said Corkoran.
“Oh, but Corks, it’s far better than lobster. My absolute favorite.”
“Lobster on the menu, whole island stiff with lobster, why the hell haven’t they got it?” Corkoran insisted.
“They just goofed, Corks. We can’t all be geniuses like you.”
Roper was preoccupied. Not in a hostile way. He just had things on his mind, and his hand in Jed’s lap. But Daniel, soon to go back to England, chose to challenge his father’s detachment.
“Roper’s got the black monkey on his back,” he announced to an unfortunate silence. “He’s got this mega-megadeal coming off. It’s going to put him beyond reach.”
“Dans, put a sock in it,” said Jed smartly.
“What’s brown and sticky?” Daniel asked. No one knew. “A stick,” he said.
“Dans, old chap, shut up,” said Roper.
But Corkoran was their destiny that night, and Corkoran had launched himself on a story about this investment consultant chum of his called Shortwar Wilkins, who at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq thing had advised his clients that it would all be over in six weeks.
“What happened to him?” Daniel demanded.
“Gentleman of leisure, I’m afraid, Dan. Pooped, most of the time. Bums money from his chums. Bit like me in a couple of years’ time. Remember me, Thomas, when you drive by in your Roller and chance to see a familiar face sweeping out the gutters. Toss us a sovereign, for old times’ sake, will you, heart? Good health, Thomas. Long life, sir. May all your lives be long. Cheers.”
“And to you too, Corky,” said Jonathan.
A MacDanby tried to tell his story about something or other, but Daniel again interrupted:
“How do you save the world?”
“You tell me, old heart,” said Corkoran. “Dying to know.”
“Kill mankind.”
“Dans, shut up,” said Jed. “You’re being horrid.”
“I only said kill mankind! That’s a joke! Can’t you even understand a joke?” Raising both arms, he fired an imaginary machine gun at everybody round the table. “Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah! There! Now the world’s safe. No one in it.”
“Thomas, take Dans for a walk,” Roper ordered down the table. “Bring him back when he’s sorted out his manners.”
But while Roper was saying this—without too much conviction, since Daniel on this evening of departure was deserving of indulgence—a lobster salad went by. Corkoran saw it. And Corkoran grabbed the wrist of the black waiter who was carrying it and wrenched him to his side.
“Hey, man,” the startled waiter cried, then grinned sheepishly round the room in the hope that he was part of some weird happening.
The proprietor was hastening across the room. Frisky and Tabby, seated at the gunmen’s table in the corner, had risen to their feet, unbuttoning their blazers. Everybody froze.
Corkoran was standing. And Corkoran with unexpected power was bearing down on the waiter’s arm and making the poor man twist against his inclination so that the tray tipped alarmingly. Corkoran’s face was brick red, his chin was up and he was shouting at the proprietor.
“Do you speak English, sir?” he demanded, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear. “I do. Our lady here ordered lobster, sir. You said there was no more lobster. You are a liar, sir. And you have offended our lady and her consort, sir. There was more lobster!”
“Was ordered in advance!” the proprietor protested, with more spirit than Jonathan had credited him with. “Was special order. Ten o’clock this morning. You want be sure of lobster? You order special. Let go this man!”
Nobody at the table had moved. Grand opera has its own authority. Even Roper seemed momentarily unsure whether to intervene.
“What is your name?” Corkoran asked the proprietor.
“Enzo Fabrizzi.”
“Leave it out, Corks,” Roper ordered. “Don’t be a bore. You’re being a bore.”
“Corks, stop it,” said Jed.
“If there is a dish our lady wants, Mr. Fabrizzi, whether it’s lobster, or liver, or fish, or something very ordinary like steak, or a piece of veal—you always give it to our lady. Because if you don’t, Mr. Fabrizzi, I shall buy this restaurant. I am vastly rich, sir. And you will sweep the street, sir, while Mr. Thomas here purrs past in his Rolls-Royce.”
Jonathan, resplendent in his new suit at the further end of the table, has risen to his feet and is smiling his Meister’s smile.
“Time to break the party up, don’t you think, Chief?” he says, awfully pleasantly strolling to Roper’s end of the table
. “Everyone a bit travel weary. Mr. Fabrizzi, I don’t remember when I had a better meal. All we really need now is a bill, if your people could kindly run one up.”
Jed stands to go, looking nowhere. Roper lays her wrap over her shoulders. Jonathan pulls back her chair, and she smiles her distant gratitude. A MacDanby pays. There is a muffled cry as Corkoran lunges at Fabrizzi with serious intent—but Frisky and Tabby are there to restrain him, which is fortunate because by now several of the restaurant staff are spoiling to avenge their comrade. Somehow everybody makes it to the pavement as the Rolls pulls alongside.
I’m not going anywhere, she had said vehemently, as she held Jonathan’s face and stared into his solitary eyes. I’ve faked it before, I can fake it again. I can fake it for as long as it takes.
He’ll kill you, Jonathan had said. He’ll find out. He’s certain to. Everybody’s talking about us behind his back.
But, like Sophie, she seemed to think she was immortal.
20
Quiet autumn rain is falling in the Whitehall streets as Rex Goodhew goes to war. Quietly. In the autumn of his career. In the mature certainty of his cause. Without drama or trumpets or large statements. A quiet outing of his fighting self. A personal but also an altruistic war against what he has come inevitably to refer to as the Forces of Darker.
A war to the death, he tells his wife, without alarms. My head or theirs. A Whitehall knife fight, let’s stay close. If you’re sure, darling, she says. I am. His every move carefully considered. Nothing hasty, nothing too young, too furtive. He is sending clear signals to his hidden enemies in Pure Intelligence. Let them hear me, let them see me, he says. Let them tremble. Goodhew plays with open cards. More or less.
It is not only Neal Marjoram’s disgraceful proposition that has spurred Goodhew into action. A week ago, he was nearly crushed to death cycling to his office. Selecting his favorite scenic route—first west across Hampstead Heath, respecting the permitted cycle paths, thence by way of Saint John’s Wood and Regent’s Park to Whitehall—Goodhew found himself wedged between two high-sided vans, one a dirty white color with flaking lettering he couldn’t read, and the other green and blank. If he braked, they braked also. If he pedaled harder, they accelerated. His perplexity turned to anger. Why did the drivers eye him so coldly in their wing mirrors, then eye each other as they edged ever closer, boxing him in? What was this third van doing behind him, blocking his escape?
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