In the Skin of a Lion (26 page)

Caravaggio catches Patrick’s eye and raises his glass. “Here’s to impatience,” he toasts, “here’s to H.G. Wells,” then flings his glass overboard. It is a hot night and he removes his cloak. The woman touches his costume earrings with her fingernails.
Ting
. “Ting,” she mouths at him. “Are you hungry?”

Down below she opens the fridge door. He sits and swivels in the chair round and round passing the blur of her salmon-coloured dress, the drink spilling from his glass. He rotates to a halt and she is there by the fridge holding ice against her face for the heat, unhooking the brooch at her shoulder so a part of the dress falls revealing a doorway of skin to one side of her. The smell from the gas lamp beside him fills his head. He puts all his effort into his shoulders and bends forward so he can get up out of the chair and stand. Now he must be still. Music everywhere. He starts laughing. Can a man lose his balance with an erection? Deep thoughts. He turns to face her. Dear
Salmon. She steps forward to hold him. His cheek on the moist skin under her arm, at the rib, about where they pierced Jesus he thinks. He falls drunkenly to his knees. He holds her dress at the thighs as she slips down, slips through the dress so there is a bunched sequin sheath in his hands. The music ceases. A serious pause. They jerk with the swell of waves and he holds her hair from the back. He pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket and in direct light brings it to her face and chloroforms her.

Patrick’s hand comes round the large face in the night air and chloroforms the husband.

Caravaggio is on the floor of the hold, the unconscious woman in his arms, the dress around her waist. She dreams of what, he wonders. He lies there comfortable against her, in the silence left by Giannetta’s hand lifting the needle off the record. He slides from under her, looks around, puts a blanket on top of her, and goes up on deck.

The husband lies nestled in the ropes. In his tuxedo he looks like a prop, a stolen mannequin. Above him, balanced on the rail of the boat, Patrick stands and pisses into the waves. Caravaggio mans the boat as Giannetta turns out the deck lights. “Is this the prow?” Patrick yells. “Am I pissing off the prow? Or bow?” Giannetta laughs. “I better get you ready.” “Yes,” he says. He walks to the back of the boat, scoops up the gramophone, and flings it overboard.

Caravaggio aims the yacht towards the east end of the city, towards the lights of Kew Park and the waterworks. Patrick and Giannetta go below deck. He takes some food out of the fridge, steps past the unconscious woman, and sits at the table. He is like a bullet that has been sleeping. That is how he has felt all
night, in the slipstream of Caravaggio, fully relaxed, calm among his two friends. They have stopped him from thinking ahead. He wants the heart of the place. He wants to step in and destroy meticulously, efficiently. This is not to be a gesture of an egg hurled against a train window.

Throughout the night the giant intake pipe draws water into the filtration plant at a speed faster than during the day. Patrick knows that. From the plans Caravaggio has stolen for him, he knows its exact length, slightly under two miles, knows its angle and grade, knows the diameter of the pipe and the roughness of the metal inside and the narrower bands where the sections have been rivetted together. He knows all the places he should assault once he is in the building.

On deck Giannetta watches Patrick, a small lantern beside them, the only light on the boat. He takes off his shirt and she begins to put grease onto his chest and shoulders. He watches her black hair as she rubs this darkness onto his body. The sweat on her collarbone. Her serious face. She suddenly leans forward and he feels her mouth briefly on his cheek. Then she pulls her head back into mystery and smiles at him, covering his face with the thick oil. When Caravaggio joins them, carrying the heavy
SWAG
bag, Patrick is ready. Giannetta embraces Caravaggio. With her fingers she plucks a sequin out of the darkness of his hair. Then the men climb down into the row-boat, absolute blackness around them. Only the filtration plant blazes on the shore a half-mile away. They pull free as Giannetta veers the yacht away, back towards the island.

Now the two men sit facing each other, knees touching. They are twenty or thirty yards from the floating structure where the intake pipe begins. “This is a charm,” Caravaggio says, putting a metal spile attached to a leather thong around Patrick’s neck. Caravaggio begins to dress Patrick with water-resistant dynamite – wrapping the sticks tightly against his chest under the thin black shirt. They both wear dark trousers. Patrick is invisible except by touch, grease covering all unclothed skin, his face, his hands, his bare feet.
Demarcation
. Caravaggio can sense his body, can feel and distinguish the belt straps, the button-locks that secure the fuses. The floating structure has sentries. They see lit cigarettes as they row towards them, Caravaggio leaning forward to touch Patrick’s right arm to gesture him right, his left to gesture him left. No words. Only Caravaggio it seems can see into the weak spots of this absolute.

He attaches the tank onto Patrick’s shoulders. Just one tank. They have estimated the speed of the water and the length of the tunnel. He could travel its distance in twelve minutes, but there is one risk. At some point in the night, pump generators are switched and for three minutes there is no suction at all. Then the water in the pipe does not move, it lies still. It would be the effect of a moving sidewalk stopping. They both know this could happen, have imagined Patrick no longer caught in the speed of the intake but languid, in a shock of stillness. The tank gives him only fifteen minutes of air. If the suction pump is off, the level of water in the normally full pipe might recede for a while and Patrick could possibly move to the top and breathe the air there. Neither of them is sure about this.

Just below the tank Caravaggio straps on the blasting-box and plunger. Small, brown, the maximum size Patrick can carry in order to get through the iron bars at the mouth of the intake pipe, which is there to stop logs and dead bodies from being
drawn in. An animate body can squeeze through. In one of Patrick’s nightmares while waiting for this evening he has imagined that in the pipe somewhere is a dead body which has magically slipped in and that he will clutch it during his journey.

At the far end of the tunnel is another barrier of iron bars which he will have to squeeze through. Then he will enter a forty-foot well where just above the water level will be a metal screen to keep out small objects and fish when the water is made to rise. He has the wire-cutters to get through this. Then he will be among the grey machines of the waterworks.

Caravaggio straps the battery lamp onto Patrick’s head, then he embraces him.
“Auguri, amico mio.”

Patrick nods, puts the mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus between his lips, and rolls out of the boat. He holds on, treading water. Caravaggio leans over and switches on the lamp. They have choreographed this carefully for they knew there would be men near the entrance to the intake pipe. As the light goes on Patrick drives his head under water and his body follows downwards in an arc.

This is July 7, 1938. A night of no moon, a heat-wave in the city. The lemon-coloured glare from the waterworks delineates the east end. Caravaggio could lean forward and pluck it like some jewel from the neck of a negress. He rows in a straight line towards the waterworks, knowing Patrick is underneath him in the five-foot-diameter pipe racing within the current, his movement under water like a clenching fist, doubling up and releasing to full length then doubling up, awkward because of the weight he carries.

In all of his imagining Caravaggio sees Patrick move with the light glancing wildly against the sides of the pipe. Whereas Patrick, having crawled through the iron bars, nearly unable to because of the tank, having done that and begun to swim, has discovered the lamp slows him too much so within seconds he has discarded it and it sinks to the foot of the pipe, the light still on, burning out an hour later. Patrick swims in darkness, just the pull of the water to guide him, clenching and releasing like that fist Caravaggio imagines, but banging his legs and hands against the sides of the pipe, doing this so often they are already bleeding from the blows and scrapes. Grease moves from his hair down his cheeks into his mouth. Most of all his body fears no air if the tank runs out, and the danger of silence among the pumps a mile away so he will suddenly move only at human speed. These fears are greater than the fear of no light or the remembered nightmare where he embraces the lost corpse. So his body, moving without thought, listens for silence. If the pumps stop, Caravaggio has told him to dynamite the pipe and climb out, leap from the water and yell. He will be there. But both know there is little chance of climbing out of that gashed metal while the whole lake pours in.

The searchlights from the filtration plant glance over the water. Now Caravaggio has to leave Patrick. He changes direction and rows towards Kew Beach a half-mile further west. The lights of the amusement park are slowly being turned off, past midnight. The outline of the Ferris wheel disappears.

Patrick swallows the first flutter of the dying tank.

He heaves faster along with the current and he takes deeper breaths from the tank. In the middle of the third breath he
crashes against bars. He is almost there. Gasping, the mouthpiece dry, empty, torn out of his mouth. He is almost there with an empty tank. Now he needs the light. He slips off the tank, an arm painful from the crash, and dives through the bars and swings up, no air in him, no light, up into the brick of the well, avoiding the suction of the side-screens built into the walls. If these catch his body fully the suction can hold him and never release him. He swims up by feel till he reaches the barrier screen. Thinking where should he go, down again? How to get up further? For precious seconds, his chest vacuumed and almost imploding before he realizes he is
in
air. His shoulders and head and forearms are in the delicious air. This is the screen he is supposed to cut himself through. He can breathe if he opens his mouth. He is in the natural air of the waterworks.

He hangs, his fingers hooked through the wires of the screen, everything below his waist in water. The wire-cutters must have fallen in the crash against the bars or when he unstrapped the tank. For a while he doesn’t care. He has air now. He knows he can never fight his way back against the current, down to the foot of the well. He is caught.

He hangs from one arm. A very small explosion to dislodge the firmly rivetted screen and he will be out. He has five detonators. Sacrifice one location. How
small
an explosion can someone make? He attaches a blasting cap to the screen with a clip fuse, sets it off, and dives down as far as he can go. He does not hear the sound at all, he is just picked up and flung hard against the brick and then sucked upwards in a hunched ball with the water towards the buckled screen so his back and face are lacerated. Then he falls back down. There has been no sound for him, just movement, sideways and up, skin coming off his cheek and his back. There was, he remembers, temporary light. He can taste blood if he puts his tongue outside his
mouth. And he can taste blood which comes down his nose through the roof of his mouth.

Patrick climbs out of the well and stands on the floor of the screen room among the grey machines, touching them to see if any are hot, a faint light from the main pumping station coming through a high window. He begins unwrapping the sticks of dynamite from his body and lays them in a row on the floor. Finding some cloth he wipes them dry. He removes from his pockets fuses, crimpers, timers, and detonator caps, which are wrapped in oil cloth. He unwinds the electrical wire and begins to assemble the blasting-box and plunger.

Stripping completely naked he squeezes the water out of his clothes and lays his shirt and pants against the hot machines. He lies down now and tries to rest. Trying to control his breathing, even now he desires to take large gasps in case this will be his last air.
King Solomon’s Mines
. He smiles up in the darkness.

Harris, half-asleep on the makeshift bed in his office, has heard the thump, one thump that didn’t fit into the pattern of noises made by the row of water pumps. He walks onto the mezzanine of the pumping station. It is brilliantly lit and stark. In his dressing-gown he descends the stairs to the low-level pumping station, walks twenty-five yards into the Venturi tunnels, and then returns slowly, listening again for that false thump. He has seen nothing but the grey-painted machines. On the upper level he looks out of the windows and sees the military patrols. He relaxes and goes back to his room.

Patrick rests without closing his eyes, his gaze on the high window that brings light into this dark screen room. Soon he will go along the corridor where he had searched for her and found her, bathing beside a candle among all those puppets … years ago. He cannot touch his own face because of the pain. He has no idea what he has broken.