Assassins and Victims Read online

  I had been with Eric longer than I had originally intended. From time to time he still asked how the plans were coming along for the assassination of Rex. Although I wouldn’t have minded seeing Rex killed, I certainly didn’t intend to do the job myself. But the game had to be played out. Normally, I would tell Eric to mind his own business or threaten him with my departure, but when I returned to the room that Saturday afternoon he showed such consideration for the wound on my face that in a brief moment of weakness I told him of my liaison with Mrs Peluzzi, explaining it – not in terms of physical attraction, which he wouldn’t have understood anyway – but as part of the strategy I proposed to follow through. He listened while I explained that my knowing her gave me a great chance to study the enemy and its weaknesses at very close quarters, thus enabling me to plan accordingly. He was impressed. His rounded eyes – which look as if they’re going to burst from behind at any moment – lit up.

  ‘What a marvellous idea,’ he said.

  ‘Common military sense,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t in the army for nothing.’

  ‘I used to be in the Territorials,’ he remarked.

  ‘Did you really?’

  He went on for a bit about the exercises he had learned there, the marching he had done, and the annual camp he had once attended. Someone stole his trousers in the middle of the night and ran them up the flagpole.

  ‘There’s no future in the Terries,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘That’s why I left, you see.’

  I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. The afternoon was warm and the room, in the direct glare of the sun, like the inside of a glove. When I woke up Eric was lying on the couch asleep. When he’s unconscious he looks strangely childlike. His mouth was open and the thumb of his right hand was pressed against his teeth. He breathed slowly and regularly and his body was curled in the foetal position. In a sense, I thought, he hadn’t really left the womb. The fanatical desire to remain living in this room, in spite of the inconvenience of the noise, and the dull routine of travelling back and forth to work by the same route every day (like a slug leaving a crystalline trail, was my fanciful image) suggested the attachment to the warmth and stability and sameness of the inside of the womb. He was soft and weak and dull. His attitudes – for what they are worth – were already frozen, never to be changed.

  Again I was struck by the impression that I’d received on first meeting him – that his entire existence was a symbol of waste.

  I left the room and went downstairs. I intended to go back to Bella, to try my luck another time.

  Agnes came out of her room just as I was walking down the hallway.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.

  I stopped and smiled at her. Briefly, I compared her with Bella. In objective physical terms there was really very little to choose between them; a casual observer – unconscious of Bella’s mystique – might even have opted for Agnes as the more attractive of the two.

  ‘Popping in for a drink?’

  I hesitated a moment before going into her room. The place was in a state of disarray; several pairs of knickers lay on the floor amongst tangled nylons and discarded bras. She took a bottle of gin from a cupboard and found two glasses which she wiped hurriedly with a handkerchief.

  She handed me a glass and then she sat down on the bed, looking up at me.

  ‘Well, we haven’t seen very much of each other lately,’ she said.

  ‘The book, you know,’ I said. Lying is for some the most difficult of human activity, the difficulty being in remembering what you said to any given person. But I never find this. For me lying is easy. I rarely forget my lines. ‘I’m going through a somewhat rough spell at the moment. This gin’s nice.’

  She was smiling at me as if she were in possession of a harmful secret.

  ‘What do you do with your spare time?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t get much spare time,’ I said.

  She crossed her legs. Running one hand through her thick red hair, she said,

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come. You said you would. I get lonely sometimes, darling.’

  ‘Loneliness is the specific problem that I’m working on at the moment,’ I said, hoping to turn the conversation.

  ‘You’re not working very hard on my particular loneliness, are you now?’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. I sat down in an armchair and took in the room. It was drab and faded – as if it had witnessed too many orgiastic scenes, too many late nights. I could picture the succession of men who had come, like a line of soldiers, to share the bed and the pleasures of the body. In and out, in and out. The curtains that hung on the window were frayed, streaked with dirt.

  ‘Have you gone off me?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t understand the question. Any more gin?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  I took the bottle from the cupboard and poured another glass. While I was doing this I could feel her eyes burning into my back.

  ‘What I mean to say is that at first you seemed quite keen on me,’ she said. ‘But now I hardly ever see you.’

  I sat down. I placed the tips of my fingers together in a scholarly sort of way, as though I was working out Great Problems. After a bit I said, ‘We academics are a funny lot.’

  ‘I don’t know about funny,’ she said.

  She finished her drink and stared at me.

  ‘Are you frightened of me, love?’

  ‘Frightened?’

  Still staring, she began to undo the buttons of her blouse. She took it off, threw it across the bed, and sat there in her bra. After a moment she unzipped her skirt.

  ‘Do you want me to go on?’ she said.

  I kept thinking about Bella. But this was Agnes before me, undressing herself, and I couldn’t imagine – try as I might, and I’d tried bloody hard – Bella behaving in the same way. The frankness, the open randiness, the sheer lust – while these were present in Agnes, they were absent in Bella.

  ‘Go on, if you feel like it,’ I said.

  ‘What do you feel?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m interested in – what do you feel?’

  The skirt lay wrinkled around her ankles. I looked beyond her to the window. A passing car was reflected on the ceiling. To be honest, I didn’t feel a thing. I had been concentrating my energy on Bella Peluzzi for what seemed like such a long time that there was nothing left over for Agnes. I had always been that way – one woman at a time, nothing excessive. I looked at her and shook my head.

  ‘Perhaps another time.’

  ‘There won’t be another bloody time,’ she said. ‘You’ve had your chance.’ She began to put on her clothes again. ‘You’ve really had your chance.’

  I got up from the chair. I had insulted her.

  When she was dressed again she poured some more gin from the bottle and looked out of the window. She was annoyed, not just with me, but with herself for going on open offer in that way. But was she really that desperate?

  ‘What are you hanging about for?’ she said.

  She turned to look at me. Her expression had changed. She looked mean and petty.

  ‘Do you intend to live in this house much longer?’

  I shrugged; ‘It depends.’

  ‘Double rooms cost extra,’ she said. ‘I can’t have people sharing rooms without paying more rent.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ I said.

  As I turned to leave she said, ‘I think you’re a right bastard.’

  I went into the hall. Her comment didn’t worry me in the least. She had probably spent her life calling men bastards – what difference would another one make?

  Outside in the street I hesitated before ringing Bella’s doorbell. The incident with Agnes had depressed me. Women are great enigmas. I remembered Rose, Swansea Rose, and her allegiance to the great middle-class ideal: suburban home with central heating, children asleep in a nursery, bills falling with a soft swish on the doormat. She thought she could ac
hieve the ideal by giving herself to me, by living with me until I saw sense, until I saw the beauty in her vision. Women will do almost anything to hold on to what they have or to obtain what they have not. Rose sinning to achieve the beatific state of non-sin; Agnes undressing to attract to her body a man she wants, even if the desire lasts only for the moment; and Bella … But there I could not find the formula. What did Bella want? Or rather, what did she not want? What sort of game was she playing? And how would the scoreline read at full-time?

  I rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. It was the first time I had ever called unsuccessfully. I waited a bit, thinking she might be asleep or in the back yard with her dog, and then rang again. When nothing happened, I walked away.

  I should have returned to the room and to Eric, because the district wasn’t a safe place for me. With the passing of time and the increasing anger at his failure to find me, Ed Sharp’s patience would be very thin. I could imagine him – those tiny green eyes burning, his white unworked hands clasping and unclasping, his fingers tugging at his tie, and a hole in his heart where his three thousand quid had been. But the prospect of Eric wasn’t an attractive one, so I walked round the streets for a bit, taking care to choose only those that looked as if they weren’t lived in. Narrow, grey, mean.

  I found a pub at the end of a one-way street and I went in. Apart from a couple of old men bent over dominoes, it was safe and empty.

  I bought a double whisky and sat down away from the door, facing a mirror that reflected the faces of anyone who might come in. I drank the whisky and listened to the faint strains of music coming from a radio in the other bar. Other than this there was only the occasional shuffle of dominoes on the surface of the table and the sniff of one of the old men.

  I thought about Bella. I tried to reconstruct her marriage. It had been a beautiful wedding, she said, but it went sour. That could only mean that she had fancied herself in love at first, but that something had happened to make her change her mind. What? The sight of old Peluzzi’s organs? Had she been shocked out of her virgin mind when she realised what was expected of her? Or perhaps Peluzzi drank and she couldn’t tolerate his drunken behaviour? Or was it that he hated the dog which she so clearly loved? I could imagine the tension. No, darling, it isn’t right to have Rex sleeping between us. But, dear, it’s so cold in the yard at night.

  Yet this puzzled me. It had struck me before as odd, but I kept returning to it. If she loved the dog – and she did, otherwise she wouldn’t have cuddled him so demonstratively or cared that some irresponsible RSPCA officer could impound the beast – if she loved her darling Rex, then why did she keep it chained to the wall in a draughty back yard, why did she keep it there without shelter, why did she never exercise the beast? It was odd: but nothing more really than the sort of mental exercise you practise to while away tedious minutes in a lonely bar. She could have constructed a kennel, or some form of shelter. She could have taken the dog indoors at night. She could have had him in her bed even, now that old Peluzzi, who apparently despised the animal, was out of the way. But she chose not to.

  I returned to her marriage. Was it just possible that it had been unconsummated? Was it feasible that she had refused to sleep with him? Had this led him to the blind frustration of whipping the dog? If the marriage had gone wrong – and she had said as much – then what factors had contributed to this state? Incompatibility? Impotency? Frigidity? Fear? I finished my drink and went to the bar to buy another.

  Suppose then that she was still a virgin. Would that explain her unwillingness to sleep with me? Was it just an excuse, a flimsy one, to invoke the memory, the sacred remembrance, of her dead husband? But if she were still a virgin – at her age, which must have been around thirty-five – then surely she would have been all too eager to shed this burden?

  But it was fanciful to suppose that she was still unpunctured, and that the flower – as they say – hadn’t been plucked. If she weren’t a virgin, then what reason could she have for not sleeping with me? She couldn’t plead fear of the unknown, or act out a terrified ignorance. She couldn’t say that she was inexperienced and wanted to keep it that way. Perhaps, I thought with some surprise, she simply didn’t like sex. I hadn’t considered that possibility before, because I hadn’t wanted to, since the possibilities seemed endless and complex enough in any case. But how was it possible not to like sex? If she didn’t care for it, then that placed her in a category beyond my experience and totally beyond my interest. Because all my interest was centred round the likelihood of getting her into bed – provided, of course, I could coax her to hand over the key to the bedroom door.

  It was all a shade unhealthy, I thought. There was too much in the situation that was strange and unaccounted for. She had no photographs of Peluzzi – why not? She had, after all, pictures of everybody from Pope Pius XII down to Aunt Sophie in Sicily. So why not old Peluzzi himself?

  If it hadn’t been for the fact – something to do with my vanity – that I wanted to get her to bed, that I had counted on it coming about, and that there was a challenge in the situation, I would have packed up and cleared off. There were other and more attractive women in the world, and I had three thousand quid to squander on the beaches of Europe – so why Bella? It was a question I had continually asked myself to the point of meaninglessness, and I was convinced that really there wasn’t an answer to it.

  I finished my drink and went outside. The pub had become crowded, and therefore dangerous. I walked back to Ponsonby Gardens and rang Bella’s door again. But there still wasn’t a reply. Frustrated, and a little irritated, I returned to the room.

  Eric was sitting on the bed. He had a pack of playing-cards spread out on the blankets and was playing the game of Pairs. I watched him for a time. He was hopeless at doing it.

  ‘Put on the kettle, will you?’ I asked.

  He went over to the sink. While he was filling the kettle, he said,

  ‘I was thinking how much easier it would be if there wasn’t a wall down there. If there was only a wooden fence, there wouldn’t be the same problems, would there?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I knock the wall down?’

  ‘No,’ he said, serious. ‘But it would make a difference.’

  ‘Don’t put too many sugars in my tea,’ I said. ‘One of our main problems is to get rid of the corpse of the dog after the job’s done. If we just left it there, you’d be suspected at once. Bella – Mrs Peluzzi, that is – knows how you feel about the animal and she’d put the finger on you right away. But if we remove the corpse, then she won’t know that it’s dead and she won’t be able to say very much because she won’t be in a position to prove anything.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, bringing me my tea. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  He took a half-bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured some of it into his tea.

  I said, ‘I didn’t know you were a secret drinker.’

  He turned a deep shade of red. ‘I bought this because it helps me to sleep, you see. It makes everything a bit easier.’

  ‘Does it now? Well, you’d better be careful that you don’t start getting into any bad habits.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. He drank his tea, screwing up his face at the taste.

  Then he went back to his cards and when he had finished playing he put an elastic band round them and shoved them into a drawer.

  ‘What’s it like being a gambler?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not an easy profession,’ I said. ‘It’s not like being a joiner or a plumber, because you serve a long apprenticeship. But once you get the hang of things, and know your way around, well, it’s a job like any other.’

  ‘It isn’t like my job,’ he said. There was a certain amount of frustration in his voice. ‘I just put pieces of cardboard into cardboard boxes, you see. I used to like it. But I don’t like it so much now. I mean, I’ve mastered it. I’m really on top of it now, and the fun’s gone out of it.’

 
‘That happens in any job,’ I said. I lay down on the bed. He muttered about how he would like a change, except that he had been at King’s for twelve years and change wasn’t really a good thing, was it, etc., etc., but I found his monotonous tone a sedative. I closed my eyes. For some reason I felt fatigued. It was the sheer lack of physical activity.

  I opened my eyes when I heard this odd gurgling noise. Eric was hunched over the sink, a finger probing inside his mouth.

  ‘I was a bit sick,’ he said. ‘I felt like vomiting, but nothing came. It must have been the whisky.’

  I sat up. It was just before nine o’clock. I wondered where Bella had gone to. I put on my jacket.

  ‘Are you going out?’ Eric asked. ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘This is business,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  I heard noises coming from Agnes’s room as I walked along the hall. A man was singing drunkenly. She was shrieking with laughter at some obscenity. At least, she wouldn’t be lonely tonight. With some relief I thought: there but for the grace of God.

  It was almost dark outside. A wind had come up. I rang Bella’s doorbell and waited. After a minute she answered, opening her door only a little way.

  She just looked at me, saying nothing.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No. Please go away.’

  ‘But why?’

  She kept shaking her head. I stood on the top step, looking at her. But there was nothing in her expression to indicate any sudden change of heart, or any trauma. In fact I could hardly see her face in the bad light.

  ‘Why can’t I come in?’ I asked.

  ‘Please, I’m tired. I have to feed Rex and then I am going straight to bed.’

  All the more reason for getting inside, I thought.

  ‘I won’t stay for long,’ I said.

  She sighed and opened the door and I stepped into the hall. We went into the sitting-room where I sat down on the sofa. We looked at each other in silence for a long time.

  And then she said, ‘I am tired.’

  ‘I won’t stay for long,’ I said again.

  ‘There is Rex to feed,’ she said.