Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

by Sarah Dunant

  “Your nose is growing longer, Marla. Drinking coffee ten centuries before it was discovered?”

  “Very good. I was sure you wouldn’t spot it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking.”

  Once upon a time, in school playgrounds, that had been one of our stock-in-trade phrases. On that last New York night, the memory hurt. I raised my glass. “Here’s to you, Elly.”

  “To both of us.” She took a long sip. “Oooh, what a strange selection of tastes. What’s in this?”

  Adder’s fork and blind worm’s sting. “Cinnamon, sugar, and a considerable amount of whiskey—to counteract the effects of the caffeine. It’s designed to make you sleep.”

  “Yeah, into the middle of next week.” She took another slug. “And where will we be by then, I wonder?”

  “Sitting sipping Chablis on the banks of the Seine?”

  She smiled, but I could tell the image didn’t take. The air-conditioning buzzed angrily, its mood as volatile as ours. She was sad. After a while it seemed cruel not to help.

  “It might not be that bad,” I said limply. “You might even find you enjoy it.”

  “Life without Lenny, you mean?”

  Life with me, I thought, but said nothing.

  She looked across at me. “You never really liked him, did you, Marla?”

  There were already too many lies to add another. “He hurt you,” I said quietly. “Why should I like him?”

  She sighed. “I suppose it was my fault. I gave him such a lousy press. But it wasn’t that simple. He really isn’t as black as I painted him. Honestly.”

  “Is that why you’re going to London for him?”

  She looked, I thought, troubled. “Yes, maybe. That and other reasons.” I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. Instead she turned her attention to the drink and took three or four sips, as if all the time she was thinking of something else. I watched the liquid disappear. “I wonder how his father is,” she said at last.

  … Lenny would be out on the town celebrating.… J.T.’s words screeched in my head, separating us even further. “Was Lenny very upset when he heard?”

  “You know, he was, actually. It surprised me how much. He couldn’t even talk to me to begin with. After he put down the phone, he walked straight past me onto the balcony. Stayed there for a long time. When I went out to him, he turned on me, as if there was a kind of violence in the pain. I don’t know what she said to him, but it certainly got through.”

  I wondered who “she” had been. And more to the point, exactly what it was she had said. I made one last clumsy lunge toward her.

  “Come with me to Paris tomorrow, Elly. Leave him to do his own business.”

  “Marla, let it be.” And this time there was steel in it. “You’ve helped me as much as you can. Now let me end it my way. This one is between him and me.”

  I retreated into silence and studied the inside of my glass. She watched me. After a while I heard her getting up. She came over and squatted beside me. Then she put her arms around me and held me tight. It was an act of symmetry, a mirror image of that first night, when I had tried to hug the hurt out of her. We both remembered it. I stayed still in her arms.

  “I’m sorry. It isn’t meant to exclude you. It’s just something I have to do, that’s all. It’ll soon be over. Listen, I’m going to crash out now. The world is full of ghosts for me tonight. I can’t fight them. They’ll be gone in the morning. Sleep well. And thank you, Marla. For everything. I’ll do the same for you one day.”

  You already have, Elly. Don’t you know that? She would forgive me when she knew. Surely. Just as I would have forgiven her. It was all done out of love, after all.

  I don’t remember how long I sat there after she left. All I know is that when I finally got up and went to my room, the clock read 2:40 A.M. I sat and watched the hands complete another half circle. Her bedroom door was ajar. I entered quietly. She was lying curled on her stomach, one arm flung across the bed, as if feeling out for another body. Her clothes were strewn in a small heap on the chair, the bag on the floor beside them. “Elly,” I whispered. Then again more loudly. She slept like the dead. I picked up the bag and went out.

  In the living room I allowed myself the luxury of a little light. The lamp shot yellow streams across the floorboards. The suitcases were heavy as I dragged them into the middle of the room. The keys slid in, new and eager, and the locks snapped smartly open. I lifted the first lid. A mound of clothes sighed upward, on the top a flash of purple, the summer dress Elly had worn the day we had gone to Carmel. I slid my hands in and under, feeling my way through layers of cloth. I took my time. I was methodical and precise, investing the process with a kind of ritual, which, after all, it was—a separation of good from evil, a further act of white magic.

  The first bag yielded no secrets. I repacked it with equal care. Then turned to the second. It didn’t take long. They were at the bottom, to one side, stashed neatly in two plastic bags and wedged in with underwear and socks. I lifted the bags out, then removed the balls one by one, until next to me on the floor a row of twenty dark leather lumps sat in silent ceremony, unperturbed, it seemed, by their change of destiny. I counted them twice, then repacked the second case, locked them both, and returned them to their sentry positions by the door. In the center of the room, the balls were caught in the light. I was reminded of a poem about apples drying in an autumn attic—golden sunshine and old newspapers. Very English. Yet another memento from school days: poetry anthologies consumed in boring literature lessons, Elly and I above it all, reading Eliot on Saturday afternoons. It was, you might say, satisfactory.

  What had she and Lenny forged that could be put against such intimacies? How dare he think he could even try? Somewhere outside in the city, a siren whooped and wailed. It broke the spell. Out through French windows I recalled that first night visitation, lean limbs and shining hair, the world in the palm of his hand. I picked up the balls and put them back in their plastic bags. In my room I buried them at the bottom of my hand luggage, hidden deep under the bed. Then I returned the keys to Elly’s satchel and deposited it in her room again. I stood and watched her for a while. She looked lovely, like the Elly I remembered from years before, eyelashes like dark fringes on her cheeks, her eyelids flickering with dream images. Were we walking together through Paris boulevards, or was she fleeing shadows in an English customs hall? There are some places you cannot follow people, however much you love them.

  Back in my own room, I lay down and closed my eyes. I had no intention of sleeping. Dawn arrived just after 4:00 A.M. I watched the light change from ink blue to gray, and from there into a gauzy soft mauve. From a tree somewhere down the street, a band of Manhattan sparrows let rip with a hymn to morning. Someone once told me that the dawn chorus is one long wave of sound, which begins in the far north, where the light comes first, and sweeps down over the world like a kind of bush telegraph until, presumably, it hits water or the equator. I wondered about Santa Cruz, and Rhode Island, or wherever he was supposed to be. Was anyone listening there?

  Five slid into six, slid into seven and then eight. Just before nine I got up and went into the kitchen to make tea. Then I took a shower. All these things I did deliberately, making no attempt to disguise the noise. Still Elly slept on. At ten I made a cup of strong coffee and woke her. She opened her eyes and groaned as she pulled herself up on the pillows.

  “Jesus.” She pressed her fists against her eyes and blinked slowly. “What did we drink last night? I feel like someone dropped a ton of bricks on me. What’s the time?”

  “After ten.”

  “Shit, we’d better get moving.”

  I was grateful for the sense of urgency. It blocked up the day and kept us in motion. The London flight was at 8:30 P.M., the Paris one an hour later. We booked a cab for 6:00 P.M. Before that there were cases to be labeled, phone calls to be made, bank accounts to be closed and charge cards canceled; the systematic unplugging
of one life in preparation for connection into another. If any of it disturbed her, she didn’t let it show. There was a kind of courage to her that day, as if the vulnerability of the night before had been stored away with the packing cases and now there was just the present to be getting on with. She was bright and busy, and in the whole day there was only one moment when the world shook.

  It came midafternoon, as we were waiting for the man from the apartment agency to come and pick up a set of keys. Just as the doorbell rang so did the telephone. Lenny. Or maybe even J.T.? Either way my fingers itched to pick it up. But it was not my job—my job was to answer the doorbell and make small talk with a man with glasses while Elly took the call in her bedroom. And when she finally emerged, her face grave, it was still my job to keep the conversation going until business had been concluded and the door closed behind him.

  “Lenny,” she said frowning. “It looks as if his father’s going to pull through. If things stabilize within the next twenty-four hours, he’ll try to make it to England. He sounded funny. A long way away.” She smiled wryly. “He asked to be remembered to you.”

  Remembered. I liked that one. Did he really think I’d forgotten? I nodded sympathetically, and the angel of death moved on. Time was running short. Elly went off to change. I kept myself amused with Lenny’s library, picking out a few slim volumes from the packing cases. Plane reading. Mementos in lieu of a lock of hair.

  Six-fifteen P.M. The cab was late, and she was standing by the window peering down into the street, tapping a neat impatient foot on the wooden floor. Elly Cameron, newly designed for departure. I had got over the shock of the transformation. She was dressed in dollar bills: the linen suit had money in every seam, cool and warm, smart and casual. Top to toe, the image coalesced, from the matching court shoes to the hair carefully flicked back and lightly sprayed into place. E for elegance. But not for Elly. She looked, I realized later, like Lenny’s girl.

  God knows what the cabdriver made of the two of us: this pert, polished little figure with her lumpen proletariat companion clutching a large canvas bag to her chest. Luckily, he had his own problems. Twenty minutes late and the New York rush hour to contend with. The first half hour was horrendous. The traffic moved so slowly that Elly’s anxiety became contagious as she sat forward in her seat, nervously playing with her small gold watch while the minutes ticked away. But she was meant to catch the plane, and once we had crossed the bridge the road opened up and the driver put his foot down. We reached JFK with almost too much time to spare.

  In the BA terminal, we parted company briefly, separate trolleys to separate destinations. My flight had not yet opened, so I stuffed my bags into a twenty-four-hour locker, rattling the door to make sure the lock had taken. At the ticket counter, Elly had graduated to the top of the queue and was communing with the check-in agent, her neat little head bent to catch a question, smiling back an answer, clearly enjoying herself. I watched. Now it was begun, I realized the script suited her. There was an energy field around her, the right kind of nerves. It struck me that I was witnessing a performance which had been given before. Now, when it was too late, I began to understand some of the attraction between them. She bent down and heaved the two suitcases onto the scales. The man slapped labels on them and they were gone, chugging their way along the conveyor belt toward the hole at the end, through which they would fall into the airport underworld, to reemerge halfway across the world, spewed out onto another revolving belt. But that was something I would not think of now.

  When she joined me, there was half an hour to kill. We wandered around the building, making airport small talk, saying nothing at all, sitting in plastic scooped seats rechecking timetables and telephone numbers. At last the Tannoy boomed instructions for her departure. We both stood up immediately. She caught me in a clumsy bear hug, then pushed me away. I did not watch her go.

  Back at the locker, I retrieved the canvas holdall and deposited another quarter to keep watch over the rest of my luggage. Together the holdall and I paid a visit to the ladies’ loo. Once safely ensconced in a cubicle, door locked and Muzak seeping all around, I sat down and put my mind to the question of what was to come.

  The logic of events, as far as it went, was incontrovertible. For reasons which it was not in my power to know, Lenny had been traveling to London with four sets of juggling balls. Originally, in theory at least, those balls would have been just what they claimed to be, circus paraphernalia, filled with beans, sawdust, or whatever. They would not have been filled with cocaine. Lenny didn’t take those kinds of risks. Wasn’t that what Elly had told me? So somehow, somewhere, someone had made the substitution. How, where, and who were not my immediate business. What to do with them was.

  However much Lenny did or did not know, he had learned enough to realize that it was not safe for him to travel with them. That surely had been the news which had come through to him by telephone two days ago, in the person of his “mother’s” voice. What that voice must also have intimated was that someone had betrayed him, and that that someone was close to home. Why else would he possibly have asked Elly to go in his place? But how, if that was the case, could he possibly have interpreted her acceptance? If indeed she had known, agreeing to go would have been suicide. It didn’t make sense. But there was no time to waste over questions I couldn’t answer. Back to the facts. Lenny had passed the buck to Elly; I had taken it from her. Whatever went down in the Heathrow customs hall tomorrow, she would walk away from it. Which left me.

  I lifted out one of the balls from the plastic bag. It sat in my hand, firm, full, and heavy. The leather was soft and malleable, the stitching fine, the deception high class. It would not have taken much to slide a penknife in through the side and disembowel them one by one, dig out the tightly packed bags of cocaine, slit them open, and watch while the snowstorm tumbled into the toilet bowl. Like tearing up fifty-pound notes and setting fire to them, the idea was seductive, satisfying, thrilling. Why not destroy them? Whoever had planted the coke must have assumed they would never see it again. Customs officers are not in the habit of returning contraband. No, it had been meant as a sacrifice, a small price to pay for the pleasure of Lenny’s downfall. Ah, but there was the rub. If I did indeed flush it away into the New York sewage system, I also flushed away any other chance of his destruction. How that chance might come about was something else I couldn’t answer. But for now it was enough to know that it existed.

  One further question remained. If it couldn’t be got rid of, where could it be kept? It could hardly stay in an airport locker. Twenty-four hours and it would be dug out by a security officer. Lenny’s flat was all locked up and in the hands of an agent, and J.T. would, I knew, not thank me for mailing it registered post to Santa Cruz. When it came down to it, there was only one thing to do. And I had, of course, known it all along. It had simply been a question of dismissing all other alternatives.

  I got up from the seat, packed the ball carefully into the bag, flushed the loo, and went out to the washbasins. On a side wall was a full-length mirror. I turned to face it. Canvas holdall in hand, I considered what I saw. A large, plain woman in a somewhat crumpled trouser suit. Square face, unnaturally aged in the strip lighting, but otherwise remarkable only in its ordinariness. A face in the crowd, one you would not look at twice. Certainly not the face of someone with the flair or the chutzpah to earn her living by smuggling drugs. I was Ms. Ordinary, Ms. Awkward, Ms. Uncharismatic. I had led a dull life, and it showed. ENGLISH ACADEMIC CAUGHT WITH KILO OF COCAINE—the headline was not written for me. No way. I was just one of a few hundred tourists coming in from New York. Not an incriminating passport stamp to be seen. What would be the logic of carrying this particular illicit cargo on such a route? What I knew about smuggling could be written on the back of a razor blade, but I knew enough to know this was not the kind of haul you built empires on. The profit margin made no sense. Unless, of course, someone knew. Or had been told. But what they “knew” in London, they didn�
�t know in Paris.

  I stood to attention, and my reflection smartened up. It was simple. If I wanted to destroy Lenny, I had to have the power to do it. And the power, to coin a phrase, lay in Lenny’s balls. I smiled at the image of the criminal I was about to become and marched out into the airport compound.

  I rescued my luggage and set off for the check-in desk. I had not gone more than thirty yards when I spotted her, hunched into her plastic seat, smooth black head bowed over a copy of Vogue. There was something about that head that brought back Iowa City. I stopped right in front of her.

  “Indigo,” I said, because there really was absolutely nothing to lose. “What are you doing here?”

  To be fair, I’m not sure that even Meryl Streep would have got away with it totally—and Indigo had been resting for a while now. She made a valiant stab at Complete Surprise but missed by the best part of a mile. By the time the eyes had settled back into Friendly Innocence, I knew that I had been watched.

  “Oh … oh, hi there. God, I jumped right out of my skin. Wow, this is a coincidence … it’s … er … oh, forgive me, I—”

  “Marla. Elly’s friend. We met at the shop a couple of weeks ago.”

  Light dawned in Technicolor. “Oh, oh yeah, now I remember. Marla. How are you?”

  “Spiffing,” I said. “How about yourself?”

  “Oh, fine … fine.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Here? I’m—I’m meeting my mother.”

  “Really, how interesting. Where’s she been?”

  She was so nearly on cue. Someone else would not have noticed the shimmer of a pause. “Paris. Paris, France. Among other places. She’s been doing a trip. Europe.”

  “How adventurous. Is she with your father?”

  “No. No. She’s with a group. A package.”

  “How lovely for her.” It may sound cruel, but just for those few moments I was having fun, watching her jump through the hoops. “How long will she be staying in New York?”