Jigsaw Page 7

  ‘The great mystery,’ said the German.

  ‘Mystery shit. You die and that’s it. Welcome to the worm factory.’

  ‘There is no afterlife for you?’

  ‘Who needs another life?’

  Streik downed the cognac. He was dogged by the feeling he should get up and split. He looked inside his empty glass. Should he have another? The German answered the question for him by buying him a second cognac.

  ‘Here’s to you,’ Streik said, raising the glass.

  ‘Tell me this. Why do you dwell on death when life is all around us?’ The young man waved a hand airily. ‘So much is good. So much is worth living for. These are exciting times in Europe.’

  ‘Yeah? You tell me what’s worth living for, kid. You got Serbs and Croats mutilating each other. You got Nazis in Germany. You got this ethnic group choking that ethnic group, you got total corruption in Italy, you got the problems in Ireland.’ Streik ticked off each of these with a finger upon his sturdy thumb.

  ‘There are problems, I admit,’ said the German. ‘But they will be overcome in time.’

  ‘Yeah. Onward to glory.’ Streik wondered if he was talking too loud. ‘You’ll lose the Pollyana outlook when you get older. When you look right in death’s eye, you’ll see it differently.’

  Streik was overwhelmed by the urge to get in touch with Bryce. Bryce understood things, Bryce would know the way he felt. Harcourt had that gift of making you pause and take an inventory. Jacob, he’d say. You’re yielding to fear. There’s too much fear around.

  Streik stared at the young man, who was scratching his beard. His suspicions flared up afresh.

  ‘Are you the one?’

  ‘Sorry. I do not understand the question,’ the German said.

  ‘Why not? It’s simple enough. Have you been sent?’

  ‘Sent by what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘No. I am sorry.’

  ‘Right. Skip it, skip it.’ Streik felt outside of himself again, as if there were two Jacobs, the one who drank too much, the other a phantom who saw things in a critical light. Stop drinking, the phantom would say. You need a clear head. This sober puritanical Streik, this vigilant doppelgänger, watched in absolute horror as the drunken wayward Jacob took out the pistol and showed it to the young German and said, ‘I carry this. OK? If you get any funny thoughts. OK?’

  ‘Funny thoughts? I am sorry. I am not following you.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain.’

  ‘Americans and their guns,’ the German said sadly. ‘It is a long destructive love affair.’ He appeared not to be shocked by the sight of the pistol, which Jacob Streik had already tucked back in his jacket.

  ‘I just thought you should know, kid.’ Streik felt good about showing the weapon even as the voice in his head told him it was foolhardy.

  ‘And am I meant to be impressed?’

  ‘Yeah. You should be.’ Streik shut his eyes a second. There was some kind of discordant music going through his skull. The wine and cognac chorus. The shrieking sisters, the sirens.

  ‘Very well. If you wish. Then I am impressed.’

  ‘Good.’ Streik felt he’d settled something, some vague dispute. Then, filled with thoughts of Bryce, good old Bryce, he wondered if there was a phone in this joint. Clumsily shoving his chair back, he stepped toward the bar. He looked at the patron and mimed somebody on a telephone, inscribing circles in the air with his index finger and holding a clenched fist to his ear.

  ‘A telephone,’ said Streik. ‘You know?’

  The man pointed to an alcove at the other side of the room. Streik clattered into a table on his way. He was aware of the patron and the German chatting in French behind his back. He caught a word here and there. They were saying something about Americans, and it didn’t sound complimentary. They both laughed, and Streik wheeled round to look at them. They were staring at him.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he asked. He tried to make eye contact with the pair, but he was having visual difficulties. Eventually he managed to focus on the German. The kid smiled at him.

  ‘There is no problem,’ the German said.

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Jacob Streik let the matter drift. If they wanted to badmouth Americans, hey, that wasn’t his worry. He could criticize Europeans just as well. But he had other things on his mind. He turned away, went into the alcove, picked up the telephone. He spoke to an operator who had a masterly command of English. He gave her two numbers – his credit card and Harcourt’s number in London.

  He heard Bryce Harcourt’s voice. ‘At the sound of the tone, leave your name and number. Thank you.’

  Goddam machines, Streik thought. ‘Bryce. This is Jake Streik. Listen. Listen. If you’re there, pick up. OK. I need to talk with you. How are things holding up at your end? I got problems. Listen. I’ll get back to you later tonight if I can. You want my advice, get the fuck outta London. Get away from The Undertakers, understand? Walk away from all that shit. If you don’t you’re a dead man … Bryce? You there? Bryce?’ He shrugged and put the receiver down. He was disappointed. You needed a human being and what did you get instead – a bunch of electronic impulses.

  He didn’t leave the alcove at once. He looked at the two men in the bar. The patron was idly staring out into the street. The German kid was doing the same. In a distorted kind of way, it struck Streik that they had the tense attitude of men waiting for something to happen. There was a conspiratorial quietness in their bearing.

  Maybe the German was the one. Maybe the German had followed him here. And somehow the patron was involved, even though this was an association even Streik couldn’t really make.

  He moved out of the alcove. The kid was looking at him now. Streik heard something go off inside his head. A blown fuse. A firework. The kid was it. He had to be. All those questions. That superficial friendliness. None of that rang true. They’d sent a killer with a backpack.

  He returned to his table with as much careful dignity as he could summon. He sat down, picked up the remains of his cognac, turned the glass round in his fingers. Get it straight, Jake. The German might be nothing more than a student doing Europe on the cheap. But why take chances? Why run risks you don’t have to? He patted the pistol and felt its comforting weight against his chest. He’d get up, walk back to the Saab, drive away. If the German followed him outside, then that would prove his suspicion justified. He finished his drink and stood up. His balance was a delicate thing. He felt like an overweight stork one-legged on a tightrope.

  ‘Right. I’m outta here,’ he said.

  The German got up. ‘It has been interesting to talk.’

  Streik backed toward the door. Then he was out in the street. The mist had dissolved and a white sun hung behind grey clouds. It was cold, bitterly so. He walked past the post office. He was hurrying now. I can’t trust anybody, he thought.

  Just as he reached the corner of the lane where he’d left the Saab he heard the kid coming behind him. He didn’t look back, he kept going, and when he reached the car the kid was coming up the lane toward him.

  ‘You want something?’ Streik said.

  The German looked apologetic. ‘I am hesitant to ask this. You may find my request impolite. But I am wondering if there is a chance of a lift.’

  ‘A lift,’ Streik said.

  ‘I have no particular destination in mind.’

  ‘Don’t take this personally,’ Streik said. ‘I don’t want company.’

  ‘I have not found the hitch-hiking around here very easy,’ said the kid. He had his backpack hanging by a strap from one shoulder. ‘I was hopeful of hospitality. American hospitality. Forgive me.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re forgiven.’

  The kid smiled and said, ‘I have the strange impression you think I am somebody else, yes?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Streik.

  ‘Somebody you are in no hurry to meet.’

  Streik stared at the young man. He was confused. His min
d was in a state of collapse.

  ‘Allow me to reassure you,’ the kid said. He put a hand in the pocket of his coat. Streik had a rush of disconnected images, the kid’s fine-boned fingers, the flight of a rook from a bare wintry tree, a broken stone wall some feet away, the tang of cognac in his mouth – everything was infused with menace. The kid plunged his hand into his pocket and Streik pulled out the pistol. The young German had an astonished look.

  ‘There is no need,’ he said.

  Streik fired once into the kid’s chest. The German dropped to the ground and lay with his face pressed against the backpack, which had been dragged from his shoulder by the motion of his body. Streik looked at how the kid’s open mouth touched a triangular cloth badge embroidered with the word Copenhagen, a strange kiss of sorts. Streik quickly unlocked the car. He had to get away from this place. Fast. But even as he moved he had a feeling of slow motion, of suspension.

  He opened the door on the driver’s side then looked down at the German. There was blood on the guy’s blond beard. Something had spilled out of the coat pocket, a black eelskin wallet. Streik bent, picked it up, knowing at one level of awareness that he didn’t have time to go fishing through the contents of a wallet, but he was curious. He saw a laminated ID card with the name Mueller, W., and a bug-eyed mug-shot of the kid. The card had been issued by the University of Utrecht. Streik dropped the wallet, got in the car, drove until the lane joined a narrow road where there were signs of place names that meant nothing to him. Just drive. Just drive and drive. OK. So the kid had a student ID card. But that was plastic. And Streik knew you could make plastic say anything. Anything you liked.

  When he’d driven twenty miles or so he stopped the car and ran a hand across his clammy face and wondered what he’d done.

  SEVEN

  LONDON

  DOWN IN THE TUNNEL, SOME HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE PLATFORM, arc-lights had been rigged up, illuminating the ruins of the carriage. The photograph Pagan had seen in Dublin hadn’t prepared him for the reality. The carriage, disengaged from the others that made up the train, lay on one side, crumpled, gashed, windowless. It might have been picked up and crushed in some massive iron fist. It resembled an insane sculpture, the work of a madman armed with blowlamps and dynamite. Rails, buckled in the blast, had been cut back by firemen; here and there you could see the stumps of twisted metal that remained.

  Openings had been burned in the bodywork of the carriage, hatches through which the dead could be brought and carried back to the platform. Pagan had seen the body-bags laid out in depressing rows. He’d seen men examining the remains. There was a distinctive smell he didn’t want to identify: sickening and constant, deathly.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and shivered. It was cold and damp in the tunnel. He tried to picture the rush-hour crowd hurrying into the carriage, the suddenness of death. Would there have been an instant of recognition, a split second of shock? Or had the doomed passengers been engulfed before they realized anything? He shivered again. Forensic experts, those archaeologists of death, sifted the debris.

  John Downey emerged from shadows. ‘I understand all this is your baby now,’ Downey said.

  Pagan looked at Downey, at the absurd little moustache. Downey was a clod in Pagan’s book, a plodder with a nasty streak. He wore a drab overcoat and a dun scarf.

  ‘How many dead?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘A hundred and seven.’

  ‘And no survivors.’

  Downey said, ‘Look at the bloody thing. How could anyone have lived through that?’

  Pagan stepped closer to the carriage. ‘How’s identification going?’

  ‘Mainly we’re relying on people who think they had relatives on this train. Otherwise ED would be practically impossible. We’re talking about some serious burn victims. Also dismemberment.’

  Dismemberment, Pagan thought. He considered how Downey had added the word almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Get me a list of the names so far,’ he said.

  Downey took a handkerchief from his pocket. He blew his nose violently, then folded the handkerchief away. ‘Glad I’m out of it. Mind you, I don’t see why Nimmo brought you back. I thought you’d been put out to pasture.’

  Pagan didn’t have the energy to rise to Downey’s bait. This animosity went back years, back to the time when Pagan, in pursuit of the man called Jig, had been given his own counter-terrorist empire within Special Branch. Downey, overlooked, had been sullen and resentful. When the section had later been dismantled, Downey and his pals were the first to crow. They celebrated the demise of Pagan’s dominion in a pub called The Sherlock Holmes near the Strand. They were said to have sung, just before closing time, Hit the Road, Frank. Pagan’s more recent diminishment at the hands of George Nimmo had been greeted with joy among Downey and his crowd. They disliked Pagan for a number of things – the way Martin Burr had favoured him, the casual clothes he wore, his taste in colourful shirts, the Camaro he drove, his inclination to do things his own way. Fuck them all, Pagan thought. Who needs petty envies, the whole cumbersome structure of begrudgery and hostility? Who needs the approval and acceptance of braying jackasses? This was no popularity contest. He had a job to do. The rest was bullshit.

  Downey turned to look at Foxworth. He said to Pagan, ‘Hail hail, the gang’s all here. The terrible twosome. Laurel and Hardy.’

  Foxie smiled thinly at Downey. ‘You’re a prat, Downey,’ he said.

  Downey seemed to enjoy the insult. He laughed, his shoulders shook, a hoarse rattle rose from his throat. He coughed and said, ‘Well, lads. Make sure you don’t get your suits dirty. That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all.’ He wandered down the tunnel in the direction of the platform.

  ‘Sad sort of bastard,’ Foxie said.

  Pagan had already dismissed John Downey from his mind. He stared at the carriage. He hoisted himself up and peered inside through one of the openings that had been carved by firemen. The carriage was still warm to touch despite the thousands of gallons of water that had been hosed over it.

  He saw a shapeless tangle of black molten wires, seats that had dematerialized, melted plastic, bent metal, a single advertising card – an odd survivor of combustion, blackened and twisted – proclaiming the virtues of an employment agency. A charred garment of some kind was visible: you couldn’t tell what it might have been. Puddles of water glistened under the bright lights. Formless ashes suggested the remains of briefcases, purses, handbags, all half-submerged in water. He wondered what insignificant things the bags and purses had contained, the personal articles that make up somebody’s life, letters, hairpins, diaries, business cards, now scorched beyond reconstruction. The smell was harsher here; Pagan had a choking sensation. This place is a crematorium, he thought. Nobody could have lived through the smoke and flame, the unbearable intensity of heat.

  He clambered down and stood alongside Foxie on the tracks. ‘Where the hell do we begin?’

  Foxie watched the explosives experts for a moment. They worked with delicate concentration, fearful of destroying anything that might contain a clue. ‘I’d give anything for a passenger manifest,’ he remarked.

  ‘Nothing’s that simple.’ Pagan turned and walked back toward the platform. Foxie followed.

  Downey was standing among the body-bags, surveying them like a bureaucrat whose business is death. Tables had been set up against the wall, phone lines installed. Now and then one of the phones would ring and a uniformed policeman would pick up. The platform was brightly lit and busy – cops, more forensics people, explosives gurus, London Transport brass who were anxious to have the tunnel cleared and normal service resumed, although they had far deeper anxieties, such as the matter of security throughout the system – a problem of insuperable dimensions. Pagan thought the whole place resembled a ghoulish excavation site.

  He glanced at the men who were going through the remains in their hideous search. He found himself looking at one of the dead. He hadn’t intended
to, but he was drawn down unwillingly into the sight. Blackened features, hair burned from flesh, clothes welded by heat to what was left of the corpse. Dear Christ, how could you even think of identifying anything like this?

  ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Downey asked. ‘Human pudding.’

  Pagan said nothing.

  ‘Hope you’ve got the stomach for it. Here.’ Downey gave Pagan a sheet of paper. ‘Sixty-three identified so far. Some of them have already been shipped to the morgue.’

  ‘Have you checked them?’

  ‘Checked how?’

  ‘Do we have anything on any of them?’

  ‘I haven’t got that far yet,’ Downey said. ‘It’s bad enough dealing with all this, and the relatives, and the bloody press—’

  ‘You should have done a run on the names,’ Pagan said. ‘Simple procedure.’

  ‘Nothing’s simple in this inferno,’ said Downey, and fingered his moustache.

  Pagan looked at the sheet. The names of the dead. Addresses. Why had they died? What unfathomable motive lay behind it? He felt sorrow. Lives snuffed out. He had an image of the carriage going into the tunnel. Very ordinary. People travelling home from work. A mundane Underground train moving as it did hundreds of times a day. But this time it was different, a coffin train.

  ‘What about eyewitnesses?’

  ‘During rush hour? Give me a break, Pagan. Nobody’s come forward to say they saw a madman carrying a bomb, if that’s what you mean. Hundreds of people, a mob – nobody sees anything in that situation.’

  ‘Somebody always sees something,’ Pagan said. ‘They just don’t know it.’

  ‘We ran a press release anyway. Published a phone number. We’ve had calls, but you know how that goes.’

  ‘I know how it goes,’ Pagan said.

  Downey rattled change in his coat pockets. ‘Tragedy brings out this burning desire to help the law. So they call in and say they saw a suspicious man on the platform. And what do you mean by suspicious, madam? Well, he had a black beard and a kind of bolshie look. It’s thin soup.’