Jigsaw (15 page)

‘Anyhow,' she said. ‘You've been very understanding about the accident. I appreciate that. You've been nice.'

Nice, he thought. It wasn't a word he would have applied to himself. He had a generous streak, and he tried to bear no malice, but nice was something else, it was for little old women in the Home Counties who sent money to needy children in Third World republics.

She rose from the table. ‘I better get some sleep.'

‘I just realized I don't know your last name,' he said.

‘It's Carberry.'

‘Brennan Carberry. It has a ring.'

‘You think so? I always thought it too masculine. I don't know. Too many ‘r' sounds. Harsh.' She flicked a length of hair from the side of her face. Pagan set his glass down; he'd reached that point where he couldn't stall his departure. He got up from his chair. He felt a mild depression coming on, the sense of something crashing in his system.

‘How much longer are you going to be in London?' he asked. Impetuous, he thought. But sometimes solitude, of which he'd had too many unbearable weeks, brought out a bold streak.

‘Why?'

‘I don't want a menace like you driving the streets of London on your own. If you're going to spend a few days in town, I'll give you a number where you can reach me – if you feel like it. Maybe we could find some time to do something together. On one condition. I drive.'

‘Sure,' she said. ‘I'd like that.'

He wrote his home number on a matchbook. She walked with him towards the door of the bar, where they both hesitated; for a moment he had the pleasing feeling that she was about to raise her face and kiss his cheek, but instead she took his hand and shook it briefly. A kiss, he thought. A heady notion, a possibility blown out of all proportion because his loneliness had been punctured briefly by the girl's company. In the foyer he plunged his hands into his pockets.

‘Good night, Frank.'

He walked in the direction of the doorway, paused, turned around. But she was already gone. Dematerialized. The lobby was empty. He went outside, glanced at the impenetrable expanses of Hyde Park, then strolled slowly to his damaged Camaro.

ELEVEN

LONDON

D
ETECTIVE
-S
ERGEANT
S
COBIE LOOKED AT THE BODY ON THE BED
. The wrists and ankles had been bound by a sheet torn into strips. The face had been lacerated, obviously by the bloodstained scissors that lay on the bedside rug. The sheet beneath the body was saturated, dark red turning to brown. Scobie thought of the killer's sick frenzy, the brutality of repetition. It was hard to tell how many times the body had been stabbed.

He raised his face, gazed at the bedside lamp, stared at the blood-red hieroglyphics inscribed on the shade. The words were easy to decipher because they'd been written with obvious care, as if the killer knew he had all the time in the world to leave his mark. Scobie tried to imagine an index-finger dipped in blood moving across the paper surface of the shade. But some things you couldn't envisage. Some things were just beyond your grasp.

He turned to the girl with the white make-up and eyelashes so black and thick they might have congealed. She was smoking a cigarette frantically.

‘I came in and I found her like this,' the girl said. ‘She was just lying there. Looking like that. Oh God.'

‘What's her name?' Scobie asked.

‘Andrea Brown, I think.' The girl spilled ash down the front of her coat.

‘You think?'

‘She used different names. I didn't know her that well.'

‘But you lived with her?' Scobie asked.

‘Sort of, yeh.'

Scobie stepped back from the bed. ‘Either you lived with her or you didn't. Which is it?'

‘We shared, see. We weren't close, nothing like that.'

‘Does she have family?'

‘I don't know.'

Scobie, a cop for twenty-three years, looked at the girl's ashen make-up, which rendered her features masklike. She took a pack of Benson and Hedges from the pocket of her jeans and used the old cigarette to light the new. Her hand shook. She inhaled smoke with a tiny wheezing sound.

‘Where's she from?' Scobie asked.

‘She never said. Once she mentioned something about Hove, I don't remember what. She might've lived there, might not. Can't say really.'

‘You're a right little encyclopedia,' Scobie said.

‘Well. I can't help it if I know nothing, can I? She never talked about family or boyfriends.' The girl stared at the lampshade and shuddered.

Scobie walked to the window and looked down into the street. This corner of Mayfair, defined by alleys located at the rear of business premises, was shabby. He gazed down into a lane where plastic bags of rubbish lay in a pile. He considered the fact that a mere half-mile from this grubby room a bomb had exploded in an Underground station. There was too much violence in the world. When he was a boy the worst that ever happened was that somebody got their lights punched out on a Saturday night outside a pub after a piss-up.

He returned to the bed. The dead girl was naked. Nakedness always shocked Scobie. Somehow he could handle the dead better when they were clothed. The naked dead had no dignity, especially when they were in the appalling condition of this poor girl. The whole room seemed to vibrate with the drumming reverberations of murder. Scobie imagined scissors rising and falling, tearing flesh, the savagery of it all.

He stared once again at the lampshade, at the crazy writing. Odd – but you couldn't expect to find reason in this room. ‘That writing mean anything to you?' he asked.

The white-faced girl shook her head.

‘Maybe one of her customers had a bad turn,' Scobie suggested.

‘Customers? What's that supposed to mean?'

‘Don't play games with me, love.'

‘You insinuating something?'

Sometimes Scobie had an avuncular manner to which people responded. He put out a hand and touched the girl on the shoulder and said, ‘I'm not wet behind the ears, darling.'

The girl blew smoke at him. ‘I've got a lawyer,' she said.

‘You and half the population.'

‘I'll call him.'

‘You do that.'

The girl didn't move. Scobie took out his notebook. ‘Let's get it down on paper, shall we? What's your name?'

‘Do you really need to know that?'

Scobie sighed. ‘This is a murder case. I need to know all there is to know.'

‘Sandra,' the girl said reluctantly.

TWELVE

NEW YORK CITY

I
N
M
ANHATTAN A THICK SWIRLING SNOW MADE HAZY WHITE FUNNELS
around streetlights. The storm blew from upstate, from Syracuse, Albany, Saratoga Springs. The General, stepping quickly from his Buick, turned up the collar of his coat and hurried inside a building in the Tribeca area. It had once housed a garment-manufacturing company, but that sweatshop had gone under long ago and the place had lain derelict for years. The new owner had refurbished it entirely. Where once archaic machines had clacked and clattered, and ill-paid seamstresses laboured myopically over stitches, now there were walls of teal-shaded ceramic tiles, genuine palm trees in great earthenware pots, a Southwestern conceit.

The General dusted snowflakes from his overcoat as he strode to the elevator. His mood was uncertain. For one thing, he wasn't altogether at ease in the United States, so long an enemy of his own country that old suspicions still lay close to the surface of his emotions. For another, the business on hand was not altogether pleasant, and the General, by nature a man of reasonable good humour, had no real heart for distasteful matters. In his long career he'd been obliged to make painful decisions that had condemned men and women to death because the system had demanded it of him. He had signed papers and issued decrees, though it sometimes seemed to him that the hand holding the pen wasn't his own but an instrument of the State. He'd been detached from the process of condemnation.

He rode up in the elevator to the top floor. A man greeted him when the doors opened, a cheerful fellow in a check suit and red necktie. He smelled so much of aftershave it was almost audible.

‘General Schwarzenbach,' the man said.

The General nodded.

‘This way, General.'

The General followed the man along a corridor, a long peach-coloured passageway that led by means of a glass-enclosed walkway to an adjoining building. The General stopped to admire the view of the city. The scene was lovely, although it struck him as prodigal that any great city should be so brightly illuminated after dark. But much of this society was wasteful. It had a lot to learn in the ways of abstinence.

‘Nice view, huh,' the man said.

‘Unusual,' said the General.

‘Follow me,' and the man continued to the end of the bridge, went through a door leading to a short flight of stairs. Pheasants and partridges had been hand-painted on the wall in elaborate detail. All this renovation, this reconstruction, the glass bridge, the ceramic tiles and the mural – how much had it cost?

The General had a lifetime of parsimony behind him. Even in the great days of his career in East Berlin, he'd spent hours pinching pennies, balancing budgets, imposing controls. He supposed he ought to let this old habit die, but it was difficult to change one's pattern of thinking. America – was it not the land of plenty? If so, it presented him with a paradox. Why were so many people sleeping in doorways and cardboard boxes? Why were so many killed by robbers for the sake of a few dollars, sometimes even cents?

‘In here,' said the man, smiling vaguely. He opened a door. The room beyond was white, explosively so, whiteness without seams. A white canvas hung above the fireplace. The bright sterility of the room reminded the General of a Mormon film of the afterlife he'd seen in the Tabernacle during a tour of Salt Lake City. He blinked. The man in the check suit shut the door and withdrew.

Another man sat on a white leather sofa. The General had met him before. He was called Saxon and he acted with an air of quiet self-importance. ‘Good evening, General.' He rose from the sofa. He wore heavy eyeglasses of the kind that enlarge the eyes, giving them a constant startled expression.

The General said nothing, simply nodded. His fleshy eyelids imparted a certain hooded quality to his face.

Saxon said, ‘I'm afraid our friend would seem to know nothing after all. We've grilled him, if you follow my drift. It's very disappointing.'

Saxon took off his glasses, held them to the light. He fogged the lenses with his breath, then wiped them in a fussy manner on the end of his necktie. ‘But see for yourself, General.'

A door on the far side of the room opened in a flash of reflected white. A man dressed in plaid shirt and jeans was ushered in, his arm twisted by a muscular figure in a black T-shirt. The man in jeans was made to sit in a chair. His hair was dishevelled. Under both eyes were blue-black bruises. The corner of his mouth was bleeding. He'd clearly been mistreated, though with a certain amount of expertise. The General had long experience of men whose talents lay in the kind of physical abuse that leaves only passing blemishes.

Saxon said, ‘Are you ready to tell us what you know about Jacob Streik, Charlie?'

Charlie said, ‘Jesus. I already told you and this goon everything I know. If Streik's gone, he sure didn't leave any forwarding address.' Charlie dredged up a little defiance. ‘This is fucking absurd. You set this muscle on me, but what the hell good is it if I can't tell you anything?'

‘We may not believe you, Charlie,' said Saxon.

‘Tough shit,' said Charlie.

‘Bad attitude,' Saxon remarked. ‘You and Streik were close, as we understand it.'

‘All I know about Streik is I married his sister, who happens to be a walking disaster. It's like being married to the San Andreas Fault. He never came round. Never visited.'

‘You were seen in his company about six weeks ago,' Saxon said. He had something lawyerly about him, a courtroom bearing. The General understood that Saxon at one time had been with the Justice Department, that he'd held a number of senior government positions of an advisory nature. Perhaps he still did.

‘You were seen with him in HoJo's on Times Square. Enlighten us, Charlie. Give it a shot,' Saxon said.

‘Who the hell are you guys anyway?'

‘What did he tell you, Charlie?'

‘Nothing.'

‘A half-hour in his company and he told you nothing? What did you talk about?'

‘Horses.'

‘You and Streik talked about horses?'

‘The track. The ponies. The only thing we got in common is an enthusiasm for losing money. It was an accidental meeting.' Charlie rubbed his chest; an expression of pain crossed his face. ‘Listen. If you're through with me, I'd like to go home.'

The General spoke now. ‘Charlie. We are perfectly serious here. It will be in your own best interest if you tell us where Streik has gone.'

‘How many times I gotta say it? If I knew I'd tell you, Christ's sake. You think I'd protect Jake Streik. You think I'd risk my neck for that fat dickhead?'

Dickhead. The term was new to the General. He liked to learn something new every day. Dickhead was good.

‘What's he supposed to have done, anyway?' Charlie asked.

‘That is not of any interest to you,' the General said. He sat on the arm of Charlie's chair, laid a hand on the man's shoulder: Charlie was shivering. All this trouble over Jacob Streik, who had never been anything more than a messenger. But he'd turned out to be a weakness, a liability.

‘We simply want to know where he is, Charlie. Think of yourself. He is not worth protecting.'

‘I'm not protecting him. Why would I protect that lardass? He doesn't mean anything to me.'