Mambo Page 48

The woman stared at him, then was swept down the escalator by the crowds pushing at her back. Puzzled, Harcourt watched her disappear. He’d seen her before, he was sure of that. He couldn’t remember where or when. He ran into a great many people through his work with the Embassy; he couldn’t be expected to recall every one of them. He went to dinner parties and receptions and first nights. He was sought out by anxious matrons in Knightsbridge and Swiss Cottage when an amiable bachelor was required for dinner or as an escort. He was deliberately visible, a charmer known to enjoy the company of women.

  When he stepped off the escalator he saw the woman again. Her black hair was cut very short and side-parted. She had a strange white-tinted shock on the right of her skull, a touch of punk. Kinky even. She wore small round glasses. Attractive, Harcourt thought, in spite of the curious hair style. An idiosyncratic loveliness, high-cheekboned, bold, intelligent.

  There was more than appreciation to Harcourt’s reaction. Something buried and forgotten, an old bone. His memory was normally a sharp instrument and this unexpected failure concerned him.

  For a second she looked round, caught his eye through the crush. He thought he saw recognition in her expression, perhaps even an element of anticipation, as if she expected him to approach and engage her in conversation. Don’t I know you from somewhere? But the very idea of stopping to talk was crazy. He had no choice except to keep moving, squeezed towards the platform by the single-minded momentum of the moles. Maybe she’d get on the same train and stand very close beside him, which would be a good opportunity to clarify this feeling of familiarity in circumstances of forced intimacy. A captive audience, so to speak. She might even be obliged to press against him, especially when the train lurched.

  Where have we met before? he’d ask. It was a bad line, but you did what you could to divert yourself from the horror of the Underground rush hour. And maybe she’d remind him, and they’d strap-hang together, and her breasts would touch his arm, and who could predict where that might lead …

  The air in the tunnel was hot and unbreathable. The train would be even worse, a clammy ordeal, a sauna on wheels. He wondered about the woman. He wondered why, out of nowhere, he was at once filled with uneasiness. Was it a result of his own nervous state?

  Lately he hadn’t been sleeping well. The apparent calm he demonstrated daily at the Embassy was all surface. He’d been smoking too many cigarettes, sitting up late at night scanning magazines in the fretful manner of a man whose aids to sleep – brandy and downers – couldn’t quite push him over the edge. Insomniac moments, pockets of drowsiness, and then before dawn the blessed vacuum of sleep, albeit shallow and chaotic with dreams. Sometimes Jacob Streik was in these dreams, fat and scared.

  Whenever he dreamed of Streik, Harcourt always woke tired. The weary mind, that prankster in the head, played games after a time. You started to imagine things, you were being followed or your phone was bugged. And then you reached a point where you couldn’t tell the real from the illusory.

  The woman. In which compartment of his life did she belong? Or was this mere imagination, the result of fatigue? She was memorably good-looking and she appeared to recognize him. How could he have misplaced her?

  The train was heard rolling in the darkness of the tunnel. The crowd moved expectantly toward the edge of the platform. Harcourt was urged forward. He felt powerless. A stick on a tide.

  He saw the train appear and slide to a halt. The carriages were already overcrowded, every seat taken, every strap seized, aisles packed. He wondered why he hadn’t tried to catch a taxi home, instead of suffering this. He’d begun to vary his routine during the past few weeks – bus, Tube, taxicabs, his Mercedes; although the Merc was presently off the road, courtesy of some recent vandalism.

  He didn’t travel the same way two days running. Given the uncertain nature of his situation, it was a simple precaution. Sometimes he thought Streik’s decision had been correct, and that he should have followed Jacob into obscurity. But there were many differences between himself and Streik. He had a position to maintain at the Embassy, Streik didn’t. He was also less prone to panic than the fat man. Streik jumped at the least thing, yielded to intimations of doom, and saw devils after his fourth martini. The last time they’d met, four weeks ago underneath an ancient viaduct in Camden Town – the fat man had a thing about unusual settings – Streik had said: They are going to kill us, Bryce. They are going to put us on ice. Jacob had been drunk that day, and desperate, possessed by dark menace.

  Why would they kill us, Jake? Harcourt had asked.

  Because we know too much.

  What do we really know, Jake? We shuffled some papers, that’s all. That’s all we did.

  Streik guzzled vodka. We didn’t just shuffle papers, Bryce. Get your head outta the clouds Chrissakes. It was money, Bryce. Cash. These guys play for keeps. If they think we know too much, that’s good enough for them. I’m being followed. Some pretty weird things are going on. I think we’ve kinda outlived our usefulness and now, shit, we’re a threat.

  Streik had never expanded on the nature of these pretty weird things he’d mentioned. He’d been drunk and babbling. The rest of the conversation had drifted off into vagueness.

  Later, Harcourt had thought about the money. It had been irregular, sure, but he’d done as he was asked, nothing more. You took orders. You didn’t probe, didn’t raise needless questions. But it had begun to trouble him since Streik had seen fit to vanish, and only a few days ago he’d asked for an appointment with the Ambassador, William J. Caan, who wasn’t always approachable. So Harcourt had been shuffled into Al Quarterman’s office and Al, the Ambassador’s lackey, had seemed impervious to his misgivings. It comes with the territory, Bryce. You should know that by now. It’s a bit late in the day to be having qualms, don’t you think?

  Qualms, Harcourt thought.

  Now, briefcase jammed against his chest, he was forced into the carriage, thrust against a tall West Indian girl and a man attempting to hold a fragile bunch of flowers aloft. Harcourt had always been acutely conscious of smells, and they came to him now in a clamour – roses, sweat, bad breath, damp clothing. Bit late in the day, he thought. Quarterman’s words had seemed to contain some kind of inner warning, as if locked inside a very simple statement was something deeply sinister.

  More paranoia, Harcourt thought.

  The fluorescent tubes in the carriage flickered a moment. He thought: Terrific. A power failure. All we need is for the train to stall and the lights go out. All we need is anarchy.

  He twisted his head in the direction of the doors. He saw the woman with the red wool scarf on the edge of the platform, watched her thrust out her hand as the sliding doors began to close, saw a dark leather purse fall from her fingers and drop inside the carriage. She made no effort to recover the purse, showed no sign of panic or loss. Instead, she hastily withdrew her hand before the doors finally shut. And then the train lurched forward and Harcourt saw her staring at him from the platform. She drew her scarf from her mouth and smiled at him as the carriage pulled away and she was drawn slowly out of sight.

  Something is wrong, Harcourt thought. Something doesn’t make sense here. He wasn’t sure what.

  A skinhead close to the doors had picked up the purse and held it uncertainly. It was too late to return the thing to its owner – what was he supposed to do with a lady’s purse, for God’s sake? A woman’s purse didn’t go with the tattooed arms and the gold ring through his nose.

  The train cranked into the blackness of the tunnel, then came to an unexpected stop. Passengers lost their balance, collided with one another, shook their heads with restrained impatience.

  Harcourt considered the woman. That smile. He had the feeling it had been intended only for him. He ransacked his memory. For God’s sake, where had he seen her before? And if there was meaning in the smile, what was it? The train jumped forward abruptly. The man with the bouquet of flowers said, ‘Bloody hell. Where’s this train going? Dachau?’
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  Harcourt turned his face away from the man, who had the irrational look of the frustrated traveller. Bodies pressed against unfamiliar bodies; the people in the carriage might have been guests invited to an overcrowded party none had any desire to attend.

  The train halted yet again. Harcourt’s face was jerked towards the bouquet of flowers: stop and smell the roses, Bryce. Who was the woman?

  ‘It’s just like the Nazi transports,’ the man with the flowers said. ‘A journey to hell.’

  The overhead lights blacked out for about five seconds. The dark was hot and total. When the lights came on again, the train was still motionless. To distract himself, Harcourt stared at a map of the Underground system, all those coloured lines leading to obscure destinations. Cockfosters. Harrow-on-the-Hill. Rayner’s Lane.

  The mysteries of the grid.

  The mystery of the woman with the red scarf and the strange white streak of hair and the way she’d smiled. You’re making too much of this, he thought. You haven’t been yourself lately.

  Sweat had begun to collect on his forehead. He tried to raise a hand to loosen his necktie but his arm was jammed between the West Indian girl and a sturdy long-haired young man in a fawn duffle-coat. Harcourt experienced a passing light-headedness. He concentrated on the map. The Victoria Line. The Circle Line. The Jubilee Line. Colours shimmered in his vision.

  The woman.

  It came forcefully back to him them, a name, a photograph stapled to a document, a file in the Security section. The certainty of recognition jolted him. His throat was dry. He had a desperate urge to get off the train. She’d changed her appearance, the hair was different, the glasses were a new attachment, but he knew. Panicked, he stared into the roses, absently noticing droplets of water trapped in the petals. Sweat slid into his eyes and blinded him. He thought of the purse, the way it had fallen from her hand into the carriage just before the doors closed.

  No. He opened his mouth as if he were about to address the man who held the flowers.

  There was a sudden searing flash of light and for a second Harcourt wondered if he were undergoing a form of seizure, a visual hallucination, but the flash became a fireball that flared the length of the carriage and the West Indian girl screamed, the man with the bouquet looked astonished, the youth in the duffle-coat cried aloud in anguish.

  The roses burst into flame.

  And Harcourt himself, even as he remembered the woman’s name and its disagreeable connotations, felt an excruciating friction burn through his body. All around him was chaos, screaming, heat, flying glass, and the scent – obscene, redolent of an ancient smell long forgotten – of human flesh on fire.

  TWO

  LONDON

  THE WOMAN, WHO CARRIED AN AMERICAN PASSPORT IN THE NAME OF Karen Lamb, had reached the street when she heard the explosion. It was far off, muffled, but she felt it more than she heard it; it might have been the aftershock of a small earthquake. She walked quickly, turning away from Piccadilly in the direction of Shepherd Market.

  She entered a crowded pub, all brass and open fires and businessmen trying to get a little extra-curricular activity going with their secretaries. She immediately headed for the toilet. She locked the door and took off the wig, which she tossed up into the cistern. She removed the glasses, snapped the frames in several places, then dropped the fragments inside the toilet, which she flushed. One lens was sucked away, the other floated back and lay on the surface of water like a strange transparent eye.

  She left the pub and continued to walk the narrow streets of the neighbourhood in the general direction of her hotel. Although it wasn’t quite dark, a few girls were already trawling the alleyways and passages, black girls mostly, with moussed hairdos and too much lipstick and street expressions – something of boredom, something of nonchalance. They were hard girls. They’d seen everything and were beyond shellshock. Nothing about human behaviour astonished them.

  Karen Lamb thought of the Underground train. She thought of fire and destruction and the massacre of passengers trapped in a metal tube hundreds of feet below street level. An extravaganza, a light-show of death. She was suddenly buzzing, heart hammering, adrenalin humming through her.

  She stepped into an alley. Lost in the glow of her own imagination, she was unaware of the chill on the early evening air. Lights illuminated shop windows, people drifted in and out of pubs, a few bars of synthesized rock music floated a moment through an open doorway. Life went on in little moments, cameos, apparitions. She felt distant from the general flux of things, a spectator. She looked in a shop window, gazed without interest at framed prints of Victorian hunt scenes.

  She pressed her forehead against the glass. All at once she was aware of a familiar sense of crashing. Anti-climax. You were tense and electrified before the event, but afterwards there was something unfinished, a craving. It was always this way. The edge had gone and there was a downward rush. Destruction, a craft in which she’d served a long apprenticeship, wasn’t enough. It kindled other urges.

  She wandered down the narrow street, moving slowly now. The sense of urgency she’d had before was gone. The planning was over, the work accomplished. She entered a call-box, stuck a phonecard in the slot and dialled. On the second ring a man picked up.

  Karen Lamb said, ‘I scored.’ She pictured him in his hotel suite. He always had suites, never rooms. The idea of him in a simple room was inconceivable.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. He paused before adding, ‘See you soon. Take care of yourself.’ He hung up before she could respond. She replaced the phone and continued to walk. She reached a corner, stopped, observed one of the hookers strolling along the pavement.

  The girl wore a short black leather skirt and a jacket of imitation leopardskin. Her hair was piled up on her scalp and her lipstick was glossy pink, almost luminous: she had a mouth that might shine in the dark. She was maybe sixteen, seventeen, you couldn’t tell. A child. Karen watched her for a time before she said, ‘You must be very cold.’

  The girl looked at her. ‘Freezing,’ she said. ‘You American?’

  ‘God. Does it show?’

  ‘The accent,’ said the girl, drawing the collar of her jacket up to her chin.

  ‘You can’t hide anything.’ Karen Lamb touched the girl’s sleeve and let her hand linger. She was thinking of the man’s parting statement. Take care of yourself. What did that really mean? Stay out of trouble? Keep cool? How typical of him not to ask questions, not to ask after details. Somewhere along the graph of his life he’d developed the capacity for shunting distasteful images into a remote siding of his head where they became unreal. He had places where he was able to park unpalatable matters, as if they were worn-out cars. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

  ‘You got something to hide, have you?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Don’t we all,’ Karen Lamb said, and laughed.

  The girl smiled and looked for a moment oddly innocent. In the expression you might imagine her background, school drop-out, pregnant, family squabbles, a quick abortion followed by flight from somewhere like Luton or Northampton to the streets of London where the only thing she had going for her was her body.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Candice.’

  Candice. Sure. She would be a Rita or an Angela. Candice would be her working name. They always had working names, fanciful or exotic, dream names. ‘Do you have a place, Candice?’

  ‘Yeh. I got a room.’

  ‘Where?’

  The girl appeared hesitant, licked her lips, looked sideways at Karen Lamb, who wondered: Does she smell blood? Is there danger about me, something of desperation? Maybe the girl saw into a core of loneliness and didn’t like it.

  ‘This way,’ the girl said. She moved off. Karen Lamb, watching how the leather skirt attracted creases of light from windows, followed.

  The girl turned. ‘I don’t get many like you.’

  ‘Like me?’ Karen Lamb asked.

  ‘You know.’


  Karen said nothing. She walked with the girl down an alley and through the doorway of a narrow building. A corridor led to a wooden staircase. A wall-light in the shape of a clam shell threw out a thin glow. Cans of paint were stacked against a wall. The air smelled of fried bacon, turpentine, bleach. Signs of cluttered lives, scuff marks, footprints on the steps. Karen climbed after the girl. On the landing she put her hand against Candice’s thigh.

  ‘Now now, patience is a virtue,’ the girl said and stuck a key in the lock of a door.

  ‘What would you know about virtue?’ Karen asked.

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  The room was furnished plainly. A double bed, a nightstand on which lay combs, hairbrushes clamped together, mouthwash, a jar of moisturizing cream, an ashtray filled with cigarette ends. A simple brown velvet curtain hung at the window. The girl dumped the ashtray into a rubbish bin.

  ‘Sandra,’ she said.

  ‘Sandra?’

  ‘I share with her. She smokes and I get the dirty work.’

  Karen Lamb put her gloved hands on Candice’s hips and drew the girl towards her. She heard the buzz of blood in her head.

  ‘Let me get out of this first.’ And Candice took off the jacket, placing it carefully over a chair as if it were genuine fur.

  Karen sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Take everything off,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

  ‘You’re in a right old rush,’ said the girl. She stripped briskly, stepping out of the leather skirt, then removing her blouse. She wore dark-green satin underwear, which she discarded quickly. She balanced nimbly on one leg as she slipped out of her panties. With no sign of self-consciousness she stood in front of Karen, who looked at the white breasts, the nipples that were barely visible, the bony angle of hip. She ran her palms across the girl’s stomach, passing over a small appendectomy scar. She moved her hands between the girl’s thighs.

  ‘You shave,’ she said.

  ‘It’s healthier,’ the girl remarked.

  ‘I like it.’ Karen pressed her face against the girl’s stomach and shut her eyes. For a long time she didn’t move. She enjoyed the faintly soapy scent of flesh, the softness. In this place it was possible to imagine you never knew solitude, that your world wasn’t one of disguises and fake passports, that you had no connection with violence and death. A fragile illusion. The trouble was you kept coming back to yourself in the end. All you know is destruction, nothing of love. The blood in her head roared now.