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  A mosquito landed on John’s face, humming its blood song.

  39

  Dansk stepped inside the confessional. He noticed a scab of pink chewing-gum pressed to the wall and a crayoned item of graffiti close to the floor: ‘Jesus Saves at Citibank’. And here on the floor was a wrinkled condom dumped by some moron with a distasteful sense of humour. These signs of decline in the national fibre were everywhere – in churches even.

  ‘I’ve sinned, Father. Fornication, hookers, call-girls.’

  A thread of sunlight sneaking from somewhere illuminated the priest’s skull on the other side of the grille, outlining a frizz of white hair, a halo effect. Dansk heard the priest yawn. Even priests suffered from the general malaise of things.

  He thought of his mother and her unlimited piety. She lived in Patterson, New Jersey, occupying three brown twenty-watt rooms over the workshop of a blind violin repairman called Chomsky. To the accompaniment of plucking sounds coming up from below, she prayed a lot in front of a plaster statue of the Virgin that stood on top of the TV. Under the base of the statue were the words, Souvenir from Knock, Ireland. You grow up, Anthony, be an accountant, an optometrist, something people will respect.

  Respect was her mantra. And always go to confession when you can.

  Three or four times a year he phoned her, told her he was moving around from place to place, going where the oil company sent him in his capacity as a surveyor. He made up names for things that didn’t exist. The calsidron broke down yesterday. There’s one site near Amarillo that’s probably the world’s biggest deposit of vobendum.

  His mother never asked questions, not even if he had a girlfriend and if she could look forward one day to being a grandmother. Whenever he thought about her he saw her stooped in front of that statue with her eyes shut, praying for her dead husband, Albert, who’d succumbed to a cardiac arrest on Dansk’s fourth birthday. All Dansk could remember of his father was the smell of fried food that clung to his clothes from the fourteen-hour days he spent as a short-order cook in a truck stop on the edge of Patterson. Some memory. Some life.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ the priest asked.

  ‘I believe,’ Dansk said. Confession boxes made him apprehensive. They were filled with the echoes of millions of sins, ghostly voices asking forgiveness.

  ‘Ten Hail Marys,’ the priest said.

  Dansk said, ‘Thank you, Father.’

  ‘Bless you.’

  Business done. Religion was a hurried affair like everything else in these days of acronyms and sound bites and nobody with the time to listen. Dismissed, Dansk stepped out of the box. I pay for sex, I consort with call-girls. I’m Chief Surveyor for Transamerica Explorations Inc. A man to be respected in spite of his sexual inclinations. I have nothing to do with death.

  Ten Hail Marys, low-impact aerobics for the soul. You wouldn’t even break sweat. He dropped some coins in a collection box for a Patagonian mission and went out to the street. He moved towards his car where a tall black man was leaning with folded arms against the hood. Dansk kept going, slowing his pace just a little, hearing the drone of imminent danger.

  ‘You Dansk?’ the man asked.

  Dansk reached the car. He studied the man quickly. Black silk bomber jacket, black polo-neck, the face with the monstrous overhanging brow, huge hands, no rings. Dansk had the general impression of brutality.

  ‘I wanna word,’ the guy said.

  Dansk said, ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘You’re about to,’ the guy said.

  Dansk could feel it in the air around him, a kind of static, and somewhere in his head a sound that reminded him of Chomsky stretching a violin string to breaking-point.

  The black guy had his hands clasped in front of him. ‘Let’s you and me walk over there,’ he said.

  Dansk looked, saw an entrance to an alley, dumpsters, plastic sacks, one of which had broken and disgorged its contents. He saw chop-bones and a lettuce oozing brown slime. ‘I don’t walk into alleys with strangers,’ he said. ‘Rule of mine.’

  The black man said, ‘We can do this right here on the street.’

  Dansk gazed the length of the street. He saw quiet houses, empty sidewalks, palm trees, and a few blocks beyond, the high-rises of downtown. Nobody moving. This was one of those upmarket streets, reclaimed from disrepair by lawyers, ad executives and local media types.

  The black guy prodded Dansk’s chest with a thick finger.

  ‘This a mugging?’ Dansk asked.

  ‘You’re gonna wish.’

  Dansk looked into the man’s eyes, which were the colour of smoked oak. What he saw there was a palpable dislike. ‘So it’s personal?’ he asked.

  The guy kept prodding, and Dansk backtracked.

  ‘What you done to that girl’s fucking shameful. Cretins like you need some serious discipline.’

  The call-girl, Chaka, Dansk thought. She runs to her personal enforcer. She sets free the brute from her zoo. Dansk stepped a few paces back but the guy kept prodding. Keep this up, Dansk thought. I’m in the mood, and I’m one fit son of a bitch.

  ‘The alley or right here. You choose,’ the guy said.

  ‘Touch me one more time.’

  ‘And you’re gonna what, Dansk? Slap me? Punch me a coupla times? I ain’t some skinny little whore, if it ain’t escaped your notice.’

  The guy stuck his finger in Dansk’s breastbone again. ‘The joke’s over,’ Dansk said.

  ‘Ain’t no joke, asshole.’

  ‘See if you find this funny.’ Dansk had the Swiss Army knife out of his pocket in a flash, and before the big man could react he’d stuck the corkscrew attachment directly into the guy’s right eye, hearing it puncture the gelatinous orb, a squelching sound. The guy said, ‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ’ and Dansk twisted the corkscrew round then pulled it free and the big man took a couple of unsteady steps to one side, his hand clamped over his eye and blood seeping between his fingers. Dansk kicked the guy’s legs out from under him and he went down like an axed tree. He lay rolling around on the sidewalk and Dansk dragged him into the alley.

  ‘What you need is a matching pair,’ Dansk said.

  The black man raised a hand to protect himself, but Dansk was way too fast for this cumbersome asshole and was already driving the corkscrew into the left eye, where he twisted it as if he were opening a bottle of cheap wine. The guy dropped his hands from his bloodied face and turned his head this way and that, his mouth open, no sound coming out, unless you counted the weird noise that suggested difficulty in breathing, some kind of shock reaction to his pain.

  Dansk stood up, stepped back, feeling very calm, very detached. ‘You fucking pimp,’ he said. ‘You piece of shit, worthless maggot.’

  The guy started to groan. Bewildered, he stretched his hands out as if to grab something solid. Dansk crushed one hand with his foot, stomping it into the ground, then he walked to his car. Inside, he cleaned the knife with a tissue and stuck the tissue inside the ashtray.

  He rolled down his window and called to the guy, ‘You can always find work as a trainee violin repairman, jack.’ He drove away amused, pleased with himself. He looked at his reflection in the rear-view mirror and laughed.

  His phone rang, it was Pasquale. ‘You oughta see her, Anthony. Pacing round outside the hospital and looking like her womb just fell out. It’s a picture would break your heart.’

  A picture.

  ‘You know what to do next,’ Dansk said.

  ‘I’m moving.’ Pasquale cut the connection.

  Dansk laughed again and looked at himself laughing until all sense of self-recognition had left him and he was looking at somebody else, a roaring wet-eyed red-haired stranger, hugely satisfied with the day’s work so far. A guy on a roll that didn’t end here.

  40

  The physician was a stern young woman whose name tag identified her as Dr Clara S. Lamont. She wore her hair in the tight bun of a pioneer’s wife. She clearly didn’t consider sympathy an implem
ent in the practice of medicine. She spoke like someone reciting from a low-budget mail-order catalogue.

  Two fractured ribs. Broken humerus. Three fingers of the left hand broken. Haematoma in the knee. A few blows to the head, but no internal damage. The patient would recover, given time and rest. He’s not going to be mobile for a while. Clara S. Lamont had obviously seen every kind of human disaster and been numbed by calamity.

  Amanda asked if Rhees was conscious and whether she could see him. Clara S. Lamont told her it might be hours yet and suggested Amanda make herself comfortable in the waiting-room.

  Make myself comfortable, Amanda thought. Tell me how, doc. Guide me a little before it’s screaming time.

  She watched Lamont turn and walk down the corridor.

  The hospital was a maze of passageways and rooms painted in pastels designed to minimize the dread inherent in these institutions. The colour scheme didn’t work for Amanda. This was no nursery. This was a place of pain and death, where screens were drawn round beds and people were rushed on rattling gurneys to operating rooms to be cut open and sewn up again. Two fractured ribs. Three fingers of the left hand broken. Haematoma. She thought about this, a subcutaneous swelling filled with blood, the pain of it.

  She was aware of nurses and orderlies, but only in a dim far-away fashion. She slouched towards the waiting-room where a strict no-smoking policy was in force. This was useless to her in her present state. She needed nicotine, vast quantities.

  She went outside, and with a hand that trembled, lit a cigarette. She thought of the ambulance that had brought her here with Rhees. Rhees lying in silence, the orderly checking his pulse and blood pressure and flashing a light into his eyes, the slackness of Rhees’s eyelids, the pupils that looked dead, the whites bloodshot.

  I’m coming apart, she thought. Rhees is broken, and so am I, just in a different way.

  The uniformed cops who’d come to the house had asked some questions in a manner that might have been desultory or delicate, she was too stunned to tell the difference. Had she seen anything? Did she know anything? Was anything missing?

  Like I have time to search the fucking place looking for missing baubles, she’d said. Shock stripped you of basic manners, atomized your responses. You were raw all over.

  The cops had talked to Clara Lamont, and then somewhere along the way they’d contrived to disappear. Reports to write. Narratives in triplicate. Get down the details while the blood is still fresh.

  She walked up and down. She smoked and squinted into the sun. She sat on a wall, hands dangling between her knees. She couldn’t stop herself shaking. What were you supposed to do in a situation like this anyway? How were you supposed to comport yourself? Endure. She closed her eyes. She didn’t see Willie Drumm approach.

  ‘Amanda.’ Drumm’s expression was sympathetic. He put his arms around her shoulders and she pressed her face into his plaid jacket. It smelled of dry-cleaning solvents.

  ‘I came as soon as I heard. What’s his condition?’

  Amanda said nothing.

  ‘The two uniforms say he took a bad beating,’ Drumm said. ‘You got any idea who’d do something like that to him?’

  Amanda’s mind was sand and silence, her own little Kalahari. She hadn’t collected enough strands of herself to even think of apportioning blame. She shook her head and looked at Willie. She couldn’t talk.

  Drumm said, ‘Hang in there, kid.’

  That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s the phrase for every rotten situation. Hang in there. But what were you meant to hang from?

  Drumm stepped back from her, a hand on her shoulder. ‘You came home and found him, I understand.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Is he conscious?’ Drumm asked.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘When’s he expected to be in a condition to talk?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll wait. For as long as it takes I’ll stay right here.’

  ‘You got anything of value in the house, Amanda?’

  ‘I had, only he’s in this goddam hospital now.’

  Drumm was quiet a moment. ‘Things: jewels, money, that kind of stuff.’

  She thought about the house and found she couldn’t remember it exactly. How many rooms it had, what they contained. She knew it intimately but she couldn’t force it into her head.

  Drumm said, ‘Maybe we should sit inside.’

  ‘No. They don’t let you smoke. I need to smoke.’

  Drumm tapped a foot on the ground. ‘People going round breaking into homes, beating the shit out of some poor bastard. It’s an epidemic.’

  Amanda looked up into the sun. It was strange to be part of the world and yet not, as if you were in a purgatory where you waited for Christ knows what. The sun in the sky, for instance, looked odd to her, shaped like a lozenge. And why did it make her feel this cold? She shivered and said, ‘I can’t get a handle on it, Willie.’

  ‘Here.’ He took a little pack of Kleenex out of his pocket and gave it to her.

  She blew her nose and said, ‘I can’t get my head round it.’

  Drumm was of the old school that believed in the mystical power of blowing your nose to feel better. He eased a fresh Kleenex into her hand. He was being kind and it touched her.

  ‘John wanted to come with me when I left this morning,’ she said, ‘but I drove away. I just drove away. I should have taken him along, Willie, then this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘You don’t have a crystal ball, Amanda. You couldn’t predict anything was gonna happen to him.’

  Amanda walked in tight little circles. It was movement, something to keep the circulation going. ‘I’ve been neglecting him lately. I haven’t been paying attention to him. It’s not like he demands much from me.’

  Drumm took her hand. His palm was unexpectedly soft. ‘Let’s go inside, Amanda. Maybe we should think about talking to one of the doctors. Get something to settle you down.’

  She allowed herself, without resistance, to be led back inside the hospital. Drumm told her to sit in the waiting-room while he went off in search of a physician. She glared at the no-smoking posters and a diagram of a human skeleton that adorned one wall. She looked at the word humerus, known also as the funny-bone. She imagined it was Rhees’s skeleton. Poor John. He’d never hurt anyone in his life. He wasn’t at war with anybody.

  Fuck the warning sign. She lit a cigarette.

  The only other occupant of the room, a man with an insurance-collar, said, ‘I don’t mind, you smoke all you want.’

  Amanda said, ‘I intend to.’

  The man got up and set an empty Coke can on the table beside Amanda and said, ‘Here, use this as an ashtray.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘I’m here on account of this neck.’ He sat alongside her and leaned across her lap to adjust the position of the Coke can. His hair smelled faintly of crushed grapes. There was a brief contact of bodies she didn’t like.

  ‘Happened in a work-related incident,’ he said.

  ‘Really,’ Amanda remarked. She didn’t want to hear the guy’s medical history. She looked elsewhere and edged slightly away from him.

  ‘I’m suing because it wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘That’s what the law’s for,’ he said.

  The guy smiled at her and went out of the room. A moment later Drumm came back carrying a dixie cup of water. ‘Here.’ He gave her the cup and a small blue pill.

  ‘What’s the pill?’ she asked.

  Drumm said, ‘The nurse said it would calm you.’

  ‘Assuming I want to be calm, Willie.’

  ‘Take the damn thing.’

  Amanda stuck the pill in her mouth and washed it down with a sip of water. ‘I want to see John,’ she said.

  ‘So do I,’ Drumm said. ‘Meantime, let’s wait here.’

  He patted her arm. She sat in silence for a long time, and when the pill kicked in she felt lethargic and lightheaded. S
he must have dozed for a while because the next thing she knew Drumm was shaking her shoulder and saying, ‘We can see him now.’

  She was dry-mouthed and groggy, and when she stood up she was a little unsteady. She followed Drumm down a corridor to an elevator.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  OK in what way? she wondered. Physical mental spiritual. Delete what doesn’t apply.

  She stepped inside the elevator. Drumm said, ‘He’s in room three sixty. We’ve got five minutes, doctor’s orders.’

  She listened to the quiet whine of machinery and pulleys. She wondered about the kind of noises Rhees had made when he was being attacked. She didn’t want to think. Some things were located just outside the scope of your imagination, like shadows beyond the reach of a camp-fire.

  41

  Rhees had a room to himself. He was propped up in bed with his eyes shut. The shades had been drawn against the sun and the only light came from a low-wattage lamp in a corner. Amanda went close to the bed and Willie Drumm lingered behind her.

  ‘John,’ she said.

  His head turned slowly. ‘I am high. Great drugs in here.’

  She smiled at him even if it was the last thing she felt like doing. His left arm was in plaster. His left hand too. His face was bruised. His knee was an angry scarlet colour and bloated, and the ice-pack that had been wrapped around it had slipped out of position.

  When he spoke, his words were lifeless, as if they’d travelled a very long and awkward distance to reach his mouth.

  She wanted to touch him, she wasn’t sure where. She decided on the back of his right hand, where she placed her palm gently.

  Drumm asked, ‘Can you answer a couple of questions, John?’

  Rhees shut his eyes again. ‘There were two guys, I think.’

  Drumm waited. Amanda rubbed Rhees’s hand. She wanted to tell Drumm that this wasn’t the right time, Rhees needed to be left in peace.