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‘Pure bluff, Larry. But it’s piss down the sewage-pipe anyway. It happened and we live with it. The way I had it figured, he’d flap around in dark waters, maybe consult with his associates in the FBI – who won’t give him the time of day because he’s a limey and ipso facto a competitor in the Carlotta stakes – probably make a few dead-end inquiries here and there. And, just like the FBI, he’d get nowhere. But I didn’t foresee him getting the skinny on Bob Naderson, at least not this quickly. If the god-damn woman hadn’t taken it into her mind to shoot Burr … that’s where the trail began for Pagan.’ Skidelsky shook his head. ‘That’s the problem with her, Larry. We need her. She’s the star of the show. She’s a top box-office draw. But you have to take her the way she comes, and that includes weird, that includes volatile. She comes as she is. No way round that one.’

  ‘Where’s Pasco?’ Quinn asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I’m curious, that’s all. Is he travelling with her or what?’

  ‘I don’t see that somehow. When she goes, she goes alone. No excess baggage.’

  ‘You think Pasco’s …’

  Skidelsky waved a hand. ‘You might look into that one, Larry.’

  Quinn said he would.

  Skidelsky said, ‘There’s always the other solution to Pagan.’ He caught the stench of melting lard, blown directly at him by the blades of a high-speed fan. He needed to get out of this dump. He slid off his stool and walked outside, and Quinn followed him into the ravenous heat.

  Skidelsky walked quickly, seemingly immune to the climate. Quinn had to hurry to keep up with him.

  ‘We could make it look like the woman, of course,’ Skidelsky said. ‘She’s already blown up half a town in North Carolina, and only this morning at dawn she killed her old shrink Lannigan …’

  ‘She’s on a roll,’ Quinn said.

  ‘She’s on a roll all right,’ Skidelsky said. He paused at a Don’t Walk sign and grinned that special grin in whose confident light all problems, no matter how tricky, simply withered away. ‘So why stop her?’

  34

  WASHINGTON

  Pagan watched her, smelled her scent in the air, saw the glossy dark hair brushed back, the little thrust of hip as she moved. Her black leather jacket hung open. She wore a black T-shirt, sunglasses. He was conscious of the shape of her breasts, the gun in her hand, the way she dominated the room by her presence, as if space were a mere extension of her body. He thought again of his gun in the drawer and considered going for it, but he’d given the intention away in his expression because she opened the drawer of the bedside table and found the Bernardelli and removed the clip, emptying cartridges on the floor, click click click. She tossed the gun down and kicked it underneath the bed. Then she turned the chair around at the dressing-table and sat in a straddling position.

  ‘Welcome to Washington,’ she said.

  The triadic arrangement of mirrors behind her created views of her from different angles. Pagan realized that if you looked at the mirrors from a certain perspective you might see her multiplied and reflected to infinity. An endless number of Carlottas.

  She drummed the barrel of her gun upon her thigh. ‘It’s been a long time since you and I were alone in a hotel room,’ she said.

  ‘A long time.’

  ‘Takes me back,’ she said. She removed the sunglasses, stuck them in a pocket of the leather jacket.

  He watched the way the gun tapped against her thigh. He moved his body, propped his back against the headboard of the bed.

  ‘Does it take you back, Frank? Or don’t you like time travel?’

  ‘Some things seem to have faded in my memory,’ he said.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  He shrugged. ‘You know you’re running a serious risk coming here. The FBI are watching over me.’

  ‘Guardian angels,’ she said.

  ‘Or demons.’

  ‘They don’t impress me,’ she said. ‘Nothing bothers me right at this moment.’

  She smiled. It was a marvel, luscious and dangerous. She allowed the hand that held her silenced gun to fall against her thigh and she moved the barrel back and forth across her jeans, creating a gentle whispering friction. Pagan listened to the sound of metal on denim and tried to think himself into a safe room of the mind where he wouldn’t have to look at her.

  She released the smile, but none of her beauty went with it. Pagan detected in her some indefinable shift of mood and he wondered if she was going to turn on him suddenly and use the gun in her hand – and yet he had the feeling that the time hadn’t come, it wasn’t the moment.

  ‘We might be the only two people in the world right now, Pagan. This room could be a capsule in space. Just you and me and a great expanse of stars. Think about it. It’s a romantic thought.’

  ‘Romantic? I don’t really think so.’

  ‘One day you’ll crucify yourself on your own denials, Pagan. Look at me and tell me you don’t like what you see. Look at me and tell me you don’t want me.’

  ‘I don’t want you,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ She stretched her legs.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What you believe doesn’t concern me.’

  ‘What you believe doesn’t concern me.’ She mimicked him accurately. It was an acid little response, designed to ridicule. ‘You’ve always wanted me, Pagan. Maybe I’ve slipped your mind from time to time over the years, but I keep coming back to the surface. Why pretend? What is it with you anyhow? This wall you’ve built around yourself.’

  This wall, he thought. He wondered how solid it was. He remembered when she’d come to his apartment, how he’d responded when she’d touched him, the disgust he’d felt at himself, except it wasn’t disgust in the end, it was something else he didn’t like to consider, an attraction driven by lust. But certain attractions, in Pagan’s book, were perversities – priests buggering small choirboys, men who yearned to be dominated and made to bleed: did he fall into that category? The stigma of unacceptable needs. He remembered dreaming of her, the pulsating thrill of the dream. I keep coming back to the surface …

  ‘The wall, as you call it, protects me,’ he said.

  ‘From me.’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Your problem is you try to filter the world, Pagan. You don’t let it come at you in a great rush. You try to keep out what you believe you don’t need. I like the rush. I don’t stop to sift through details. I don’t analyse everything to death like you.’

  ‘You’re an expert on the subject of Frank Pagan, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you before. I can read you. You want to hide from me because you want to be the fine upstanding cop. Trustworthy, reliable, Mr Terrific. You like to believe you don’t want me, because the opposite is more than you can bear. But it’s inside you, and you can’t get rid of it. You want me, Pagan. You want to fuck me.’

  She said fuck in the most provocative way Pagan had ever heard. She might have coined the word; it might have belonged only in her private vocabulary. She gave it a potent intimacy, a freshness.

  She smiled and undid the buckle of her belt and slowly opened the buttons of her jeans. He saw a flash of white underwear, a lacy waistband, a soft down of pubic hair fading in the smooth stretch of skin between the band and her navel. ‘Tell me again, Pagan. Say it nice and clear. Let me hear it. You don’t want me. Let me hear you say it.’

  He didn’t speak, didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to acknowledge the power she had to make him feel the way he did. He watched her slide her hand inside her underwear, saw her part her legs a little, the motion of the hand beneath lace. She didn’t take her eyes away from his face.

  ‘What is this doing for you, Pagan? What are you feeling? Tell me. Speak to me.’

  He said nothing.

  Her hand went deeper. She slid the underwear down a little way, creating lacy disarray. He saw the soft inviting crop of pubic hair, imagined the des
cent into the cleft, imagined getting up from the bed and going toward her and, on his knees, burying his face in her flesh and losing himself there in sweetness and humiliation. After forty-six years on the planet, what do you really know about Frank Pagan? he wondered.

  ‘Tell me you don’t want me, Pagan.’ She opened her mouth, stretched her legs wider, tilted her head back just a little. He was bewitched by the angle of her face, the slope of cheek, the way her eyes narrowed as if she were directing her vision deep into herself.

  ‘You want to fuck me,’ she said. ‘We’re not separated by thousands of miles now. We’re not talking on a telephone. You want to fuck me.’ She slid her hand deeper still, reaching between her thighs, tugging the lace down to reveal the pubic cluster in its entirety, the private geography of herself, one long finger sliding gently in the slit where the hair parted. Pagan had the illusion that the room was pounding against him, perceptions roared at him, the woman touching the core of herself, her reflections multiplied in the mirror.

  She said, ‘For once in your life, Pagan, tell the truth about what you’re feeling.’

  He observed the motion of a dark red nail against her hair, saw the gun hang from her other hand. Tell the truth, he thought. What was the truth anyway? That he was capable of ignoring the cruelties of the woman for a few minutes of pleasure? That he could set aside her violent history for the sake of fucking her? What was he supposed to do? Pretend she was a stranger from an outcall agency, the kind of woman who went to men in motel rooms and brought them quick satisfaction? No, he couldn’t make-believe she was somebody else. She wasn’t a stranger. She’d lived inside his head for too long. He gazed at her stomach, the mysterious concavity of navel, followed the line of her arm upward, looked at her face. He was thinking of the hours he’d spent studying her photographs in Golden Square, that whole obsession he’d tried to rationalize away as duty.

  ‘Do you want me to order you to perform, Pagan? You get some kick out of fucking under duress, is that it? You need a gun pressed to the side of your skull?’

  He said nothing. He turned his face from her. He didn’t have to look at her. He didn’t have to sit through this performance. He could stare at the walls, the window, anything. I’m not compelled to watch, he thought.

  But you are. You are. All the signs of an orderly moral universe are awry.

  She shrugged off the leather jacket. Her unbuckled belt lay against her thighs. The blue jeans had slid from her hips. She used the barrel of the gun to push the black T-shirt up. Her breasts were firm, finely marbled with pale sky-blue veins. He shut his eyes as if he might distance himself from the sight of her, but darkness reinforced the effect she had. He heard the sound of her breathing, the way it quickened as she stroked herself. He fought against the rush of blood, the lava raging along veins. He was hard. She doesn’t even have to touch me, he thought. She doesn’t even have to come near me.

  He gazed at her hand working back and forth, the motion of her fingers. He raised his face and her eyes held his in challenging complicity.

  ‘You’ve got a hard-on, Pagan,’ she said. ‘You’re hard as a rock. I can see it. You’re big and swollen and I’m driving you up a fucking wall because you don’t know what to do, do you? You don’t know how you’re supposed to behave, do you? You want me. You want to get your cock inside me, don’t you? You want to go down and kiss my cunt, Pagan. You want it all, you want everything, but you don’t know how you can do it, because you don’t know how you can live with yourself if you do because you’ve got this prim bullshit thing … But I’ve got you going, Pagan. All this is getting to you. It’s getting to you.’ And she arched her back suddenly, violently, and halfway shut her eyes and pushed her hips forward and moaned as she shuddered, and her hand with its glistening fingertips rose from between her legs to her thigh and lay there, palm upturned lazily. Then she subsided into silence for a time, the private aftermath of pleasure.

  She looked at him. Looked between his legs. ‘You’ve still got a hard-on. And I gave it to you. I made it happen. I didn’t even have to come within six feet of you. I didn’t have to breathe on you.’

  Pagan felt no release from his own tension. Only a sense of disturbance, a massive shadow in his head.

  ‘And that gives you power over me?’ he asked.

  ‘It gives me a kick you wouldn’t believe. I had you going like some schoolkid. You were about to come in your pants.’

  You had me going, he thought. Yes. He watched her buckle her belt, tuck her T-shirt inside her jeans. For a long time he didn’t move, wasn’t sure what he felt, frustration, shame. She was able to take the map of his emotions and redraw it at will. He was still aroused.

  ‘I’ve cut off your avenues of retreat, Pagan. You don’t have any denials left. I get to you. And it’s so easy. It’s just so god-damn easy. I could have made you fuck me. I could have made you do anything. Anything.’

  Yes, he’d wanted her. Yes. If she’d insisted, if she’d forced him, held a gun to his head … He thought of her hand between her thighs, and how she’d explored herself with all the delicacy of a careful lover. He thought of the way she’d caressed herself in growing excitement, the intensity of her breathing, the final landslide of herself.

  She said, ‘Let’s call this foreplay, Pagan. The real thing lies ahead.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No?’ She picked up her leather jacket.

  ‘It doesn’t end like this,’ he said.

  ‘You still have this idea of capturing me. Bringing me to justice.’

  ‘It’s more than an idea.’

  ‘Justice. That’s funny, that’s deeply ironic,’ she said. ‘Two Pagans. One that gets a hard-on watching me jerk off in front of him. The other that wants me jailed. You’ve got a problem you need to fix before you can even think about justice.’

  ‘I’ll find a way to deal with it.’ Two Pagans, he thought. Dark set against light, warring twins. A way to deal with it – it sounded good, but he had no idea how the mechanics of it might be made to work. Right and wrong, two tributaries of the same roaring river. And you were clinging to a raft of balsa-wood.

  ‘Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.’ She stepped toward him and raised her hand and touched the corner of his mouth with the fingertips that only minutes before had been between her legs. He moved his head away from her touch, from the taste of her skin and sex. She forced his face back toward her, inserted a finger between his lips.

  ‘Taste me,’ she said.

  He felt her finger on the surface of his tongue. The intimacy was overwhelming, the way she moved the finger slightly back and forth, the way his lips closed around it. He felt as if he were ensnared in a perfumed web. He drifted a second, down into that place where all his sedimentary passions were stirred – and then he caught himself and pulled his face away. She laughed, throwing her head back a little.

  ‘A man of iron,’ she said.

  Iron. He didn’t think so. OK, so he hadn’t risen from the bed and gone to her, he’d disobeyed the dictates of his own body, he’d fought against his impulses. But he hadn’t been able to obscure them – and he was a long way from exorcizing them. Iron wasn’t quite the word. Something far more malleable than iron.

  She took a step away from him. He considered the possibility of making a lunge at her, but it wasn’t a prospect he took seriously. She had the weapon, he didn’t. As soon as he made the wrong move, she’d shoot him. It was a certainty.

  He said, ‘I know about Naderson. I know about Poole. I know they’re your targets.’

  ‘You’re a bright boy,’ she said. ‘What else do you know?’

  ‘This much. You’re cutting your own throat,’ he said. ‘Naderson and Poole will have round-the-clock protection. You can’t get near either of them.’

  ‘But you know better than that, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s still a risk. You’re not infallible.’

  ‘Risks are for other people,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, do y
ou really believe I’d let anyone but you get within an inch of me? Dream on. It’s between you and me. That’s what it comes down to. You and me. All the rest is background noise.’

  Background noise, he thought. The deaths in the hotel, the supermarket bomb, the killing of Burr. Of Pasco. ‘Capsicum – was that background noise as well? And your parents? And Lannigan?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with any of that,’ she said. ‘Somebody else is doing all that stuff, Pagan.’

  He believed her. He wasn’t sure why; but he believed her. ‘And blaming you,’ he said.

  ‘Blaming me. Strange, huh.’

  ‘I’d say more than strange. What’s the point of it all?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ve got a secret admirer out there. A copycat.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The way I see it, somebody wants the world to believe you’re responsible for those acts.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘Why is somebody going to all the trouble of all this destruction just so you can be blamed? What is there to gain from that?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Pagan stared at her. Just for a moment he imagined something gave way in her face, a yielding took place, and she seemed like a lost child, distressed, out of place in an adult world – like a kid who has wandered away from her parents at a crowded ballgame in a huge stadium. He saw softness in her, and uncertainty. But the moment passed, the illusion vanished. She was destruction incarnate. She was blood and death. She was infatuated with violence. It had been a folly on his part to imagine otherwise, even for a second. A weakness in himself, perhaps even a doomed attempt to locate something human in her, something that might justify this attraction she held for him. An excuse for his desires.

  He looked away from her, drawn to the bright window. ‘Somebody wants to panic the public. Somebody wants to make sure your name is firmly back in the headlines.’

  ‘I don’t need anybody to grab headlines on my behalf,’ she said, and there was petulance in her voice.

  ‘No, you don’t. But somebody is making bloody sure the headlines keep coming, even if you’re not responsible for them. In your position, that would worry me. Maybe somebody’s setting you up.’