In the Flesh (9 page)

  'Girl?' he said.

  The sight of her nudity, and the shock in her eyes, made him eager for her.

'Girl?'

  The flame of the second match failed to penetrate more than a yard or two down the corridor.

  'Are you there?'

  She could not be far, he reasoned. Lighting a third match, he went in search of her. He had gone a few steps only when he heard somebody behind him. He turned. Torchlight lit the fright on his face. It was only the Italian Shoes.

  'There's no way in.'

  'There's no need to blind me,' Garvey said. The beam dropped.

  'I'm sorry.'

  'There's somebody here, Coloqhoun. A girl.'

'A girl?'

  'You know something about it maybe?'

  'No.'

  'She was stark naked. Standing three or four yards from me.'

  Jerry looked at Garvey, mystified. Was the man suffering from sexual delusions?

  'I tell you I saw a girl,' Garvey protested, though no word of contradiction had been offered. 'If you hadn't arrived I'd have had my hands on her.' He glanced back down the corridor. 'Get some light down there.' Jerry trained the beam on the maze. There was no sign of life.

  'Damn,' said Garvey, his regret quite genuine. He looked back at Jerry. 'All tight,' he said. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

  'I'm interested,' he said, as they parted on the step. 'The project has potential. Do you have a ground-plan of the place?'

  'No, but I can get my hands on one.'

  'Do that.' Garvey was lighting a fresh cigar. 'And send me your proposals in more detail. Then we'll talk again.'

  It took a considerable bribe to get the plans of the Pools out of his contact at the Architects' Department, but Jerry eventually secured them. On paper the complex looked like a labyrinth. And, like the best labyrinths, there was no order apparent in the layout of shower-rooms and bathrooms and changing-rooms. It was Carole who proved that thesis wrong.

  'What is this?' she asked him as he pored over the plans that evening. They'd had four or five hours together at his flat - hours without the bickering and the bad feeling that had soured their time together of late.

  'It's the ground-plan of the swimming pools on Leopold Road. Do you want another brandy?'

  'No thanks.' She peered at the plan while he got up to re-fill his glass.

  'I think I've got Garvey in on the deal.'

  'You're going to do business with him, are you?'

  'Don't make me sound like a white slaver. The man's got money.'

'Dirty money.'

  'What's a little dirt between friends?'

  She looked at him frostily, and he wished he could have played back the previous ten seconds and erased the comment.

  'I need this project,' he said, taking his drink across to the sofa and sitting opposite her, the ground-plan spread on the low table between diem. 'I need something to go right for me for once.'

  Her eyes refused to grant him a reprieve.

  'I just think Garvey and his like are bad news,' she said. 'I don't care how much money he's got. He's a villain, Jerry.'

  'So I should give the whole thing up, should I? Is that what you're saying?' They'd had this argument, in one guise or another, several times in the last few weeks. 'I should just forget all the hard labour I've put in, and add this failure to all the others?'

  'There's no need to shout.'

  'I'm not shouting!'

  She shrugged. 'All tight,' she said quietly, 'you're not shouting.'

  'Christ!'

  She went back to perusing the ground-plan. He watched her from over the rim of his whisky tumbler; at the parting down the middle of her head, and the fine blonde hair that divided from there. They made so little sense to each other, he thought. The processes that brought them to their present impasse were perfectly obvious, yet time and again they failed to find the common ground necessary for a fruitful exchange of views. Not simply on this matter, on half a hundred others. Whatever thoughts buzzed beneath her tender scalp, they were a mystery to him. And his to her, presumably.

  'It's a spiral,' she said.

  'What is?'

'The pool. It's designed like a spiral. Look.'

  He stood up to get a bird's eye view of the ground-plan as she traced a route through the passageways with her index finger. She was right. Though the imperatives of the architects' brief had muddied the clarity of the image, there was indeed a rough spiral built into the maze of corridors and rooms. Her circling fingers drew tighter and yet tighter loops as it described the shape. At last it came to rest on the large pool; the locked pool. He stared at the plan in silence. Without her pointing it out he knew he could have looked at the design for a week and never seen the underlying structure.

  Carole decided she would not stay the night. It was not, she tried to explain at the door, that things between them were over; only that she valued their intimacy too much to mis-use it as bandaging. He half-grasped the point; she too pictured them as wounded animals. At least they had some metaphorical life in common.

  He was not unused to sleeping alone. In many ways he preferred to be solitary in his bed than to share it with someone, even Carole. But tonight he wanted her with him; not her, even, but somebody. He felt sourcelessly fretful, like a child. When sleep came it fled again, as if in fear of dreams.

Some time towards dawn he got up, preferring wakefulness to that wretched sleep-hopping, wrapped his dressing gown around his shivering body, and went through to brew himself some tea. The

ground-plan was still spread on the coffee-table where they had left it from the night before. Sipping the warm sweet Assam, he stood and pondered over it. Now that Carole had pointed it out, all he could concentrate upon - despite the clutter of marginalia that demanded his attention - was the spiral, that undisputable evidence of a hidden band at work beneath the apparent chaos of the maze. It seized his eye and seduced it into following its unremitting route, round and round, tighter and tighter; and towards what?: a locked swimming pool.

  Tea drunk, he returned to bed; this time, fatigue got the better of his nerves and the sleep he'd been denied washed over him. He was woken at seven-fifteen by Carole, who was phoning before she went to work to apologize for the previous night.

  'I don't want everything to go wrong between us, Jerry. You do know that, don't you? You know you're precious to me.'

  He couldn't take love-talk in the morning. What seemed romantic at midnight struck him as ridiculous at dawn. He answered her declarations of commitment as best he could, and made an arrangement to see her the following evening. Then he returned to his pillow.

  Scarcely a quarter hour had passed since he'd visited the Pools without Ezra Garvey thinking of the girl he'd glimpsed in the corridor. Her face had come back to him during dinner with his wife and sex with his mistress. So untrammelled, that face, so bright with possibilities.

  Garvey thought of himself as a woman's man. Unlike most of his fellow potentates, whose consorts were a convenience best paid to be absent when not required for some specific function, Garvey enjoyed the company of the opposite sex. Their voices, their perfume, their laughter. His greed for their proximity knew few bounds; they were precious creatures whose company he was willing to spend small fortunes to secure. His jacket was therefore weighed down with money and expensive trinkets when he returned, that morning, to Leopold Road.

  The pedestrians on the street were too concerned to keep their heads dry (a cold and steady drizzle had fallen since dawn) to notice the man on the step standing under a black umbrella while another bent to the business of undoing the padlock. Chandaman was an expert with locks. The shackle snapped open within seconds. Garvey lowered his umbrella and slipped into the vestibule.

  'Wait here,' he instructed Chandaman. 'And close the door.'

'Yes, sir.'

  'If I need you, I'll shout. You got the torch?'

Chandaman produced the torch from his jacket. Garvey took it, switched it on, and disappeared down the corridor. Either it was substantially colder outside than it had been the day before yesterday, or else the interior was hot. He unbuttoned his jacket, and loosened his tightly-knotted tie. He welcomed the heat, reminding him as it did of the sheen on the dream-girl's skin, of the heat-languored look in her dark eyes. He advanced down the corridor, the torch-light splashing off the tiles. His sense of direction had always been good; it took him a short time only to find his way to the spot outside the large pool where he had encountered the girl. There he stood still, and listened.

  Garvey was a man used to looking over his shoulder. All his professional life, whether in or out of

prison, he had needed to watch for the assassin at his back. Such ceaseless vigilance had made him sensitive to the least sign of human presence. Sounds another man might have ignored played a warning tattoo upon his eardrum. But here?; nothing. Silence in the corridors; silence in the sweating ante-rooms and the Turkish baths; silence in every tiled enclave from one end of the building to the other. And yet he knew he was not alone. When five senses failed him a sixth - belonging, perhaps, more to the beast in him than the sophisticate his expensive suit spoke of- sensed presences. This faculty had saved his hide more than once. Now, he hoped, it would guide him into the arms of beauty.

  Trusting to instinct, he extinguished the torch and headed off down the corridor from which the girl had first emerged, feeling his way along the walls. His quarry's presence tantalized him. He suspected she was a mere wall away, keeping pace with him along some secret passage he had no access to. The thought of this stalking pleased him. She and he, alone in this sweating maze, playing a game that both knew must end in capture. He moved stealthily, his pulse ticking off the seconds of the chase at neck and wrist and groin. His crucifix was glued to his breast-bone with perspiration.

  At last, the corridor divided. He halted. There was precious little light: what there was etched the tunnels deceptively. Impossible to judge distance. But trusting to his instinct, he turned left and followed his nose. Almost immediately, a door. It was open, and he walked through into a larger space; or so he guessed from the muted sound of his footsteps. Again, he stood still. This time, his straining ears were rewarded with a sound. Across the room from him, the soft pad of naked feet on the tiles. Was it his imagination, or did he even glimpse the girl, her body carved from the gloom, paler than the surrounding darkness, and smoother? Yes!; it was she. He almost called out after her, and then thought better of it. Instead he went in silent pursuit, content to play her game for as long as it pleased her. Crossing the room, he stepped through another door which let on to a further tunnel. The air here was much warmer than anywhere else in the building, clammy and ingratiating as it pressed itself upon him. A moment's anxiety caught his throat: that he was neglecting every article of an autocrat's faith, putting his head so willingly into this warm noose. It could so easily be a set-up: the girl, the chase. Around the next corner

the breasts and the beauty might have gone, and there would be a knife at his heart. And yet he knew this wasn't so; knew that the footfall ahead was a woman's, light and lithe; that the swelter that brought new tides of sweat from him could nurture only softness and passivity here. No knife could prosper in such heat: its edge would soften, its ambition go neglected. He was safe.

  Ahead, the footsteps had halted. He halted too. There was light from somewhere, though its source

was not apparent. He licked his lips, tasting salt, then advanced. Beneath his fingers the tiles were glossed with water; under his heels, they were slick. Anticipation mounted in him with every step.

  Now the light was brightening. It was not day. Sunlight had no route into this sanctum; this was more like moonlight - soft-edged, evasive - though that too must be exiled here, he thought. Whatever its origins, by it he finally set eyes on the girl; or rather, on a girl, for it was not the same he had seen two days previous. Naked she was, young she was; but in all other respects different. He caught a glance from her before she fled from him down the corridor, and turned a corner. Puzzlement now lent piquancy to the chase: not one but two girls, occupying this secret place; why?

  He looked behind him, to be certain his escape route lay open should he wish to retreat, but his memory, befuddled by the scented air, refused a clear picture of the way he'd come. A twinge of concern checked his exhilaration, but he refused to succumb to it, and pressed on, following the girl to the end of the corridor and turning left after her. The passageway ran for a short way before making another left; the girl even now disappearing around that corner. Dimly aware that these gyrations were becoming tighter