Jigsaw (35 page)

‘Give me the keys,' she said.

He did so. She unlocked the door, got in behind the wheel. He sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat. His throat was ash dry. His tongue was like a dead lizard in his mouth. He watched her place the key in the ignition. He had the alarming thought that as soon as she turned the key the car would explode, a bomb had been attached to the vehicle, something that would go off when the engine fired up. Click. She twisted the key. The motor hummed. Life goes on, he thought, in a series of sentences and reprieves. He tried to relax.

The windscreen shattered. Streik flinched and cried aloud in shock.

His first thought was that a kid had thrown a stone or some other missile. Audrey snapped her head back. Streik ducked down, grabbing for her arm at the same time, as if he needed something solid to hold on to.
Oh, Audrey, Audrey, have you ever lost your touch
.

‘Jesus,' she said. She backed the car directly into the BMW behind, spun the steering wheel, edged forward. Streik peered through the splintered windscreen. The figure that had fired the shot stood about twenty feet away, face concealed by upraised coat collar, a perception barely registered by Streik. The gunman fired a second time and Streik felt something yield in his chest. The pain was brutal, and he gasped, pitched forward. He had the weird druggy sense that he was floating out across the rooftops of Lyon. He was a kite set free.

‘I'm bleeding, Audrey. I'm bleeding like fuck.'

But the voice wasn't his own. It came from another region altogether. He was dimly aware of motion, of the car lurching forward through a series of explosions, the deadening rattle of gunfire on metal, more glass breaking. Then Lyon was flowing past in a bright sequence of sparkling lights, neon, flashes. The pain was crippling; he'd never felt anything this severe in his life. It was so bad it seemed to spawn a malignant existence of its own. Like a cancer. Like a pulsating fungus. He heard Audrey say something like
Hang in there, Jake, hang in
. But he couldn't be sure, everything was misted with uncertainty. Streets, traffic signals, buildings, everything was a string on which senseless little knots of perception had been tied at irregular intervals. In the extremities of his pain he forgot his name and why he was travelling inside a car with a shot-out windscreen through the streets of a city that surely only existed in his fancy.

‘Hang on, Jake. Just don't give in. I'll get us out of this.'

They seemed to be crossing a bridge, Streik couldn't be sure. He glanced sideways at the woman. He uttered the unthinkable. ‘I'm dying, I'm fucking dying.'

‘No, Jake. You're going to be OK.'

OK, he thought. He tipped his head back against the seat. Pain was rampant in him, pain triumphed over him. He shut his eyes.

‘Jake, for Christ's sake. Stay awake. Don't drift.'

But Streik had already drifted, down and down into some whirlpooling dream, into caverns under roiling surfaces of water, a world of green tendrils and silver floating things – and there, swimming toward him, hair swept back by currents, eyes open and knowing, was Bryce Harcourt, good old Bryce.

Hi, Jake
.

Streik's last puzzle was how anyone could talk under water without drowning.

TWENTY-THREE

VENICE

G
AZING AT THE CEILING,
THE WOMAN KICKED ASIDE THE BEDSHEETS,
ran her fingertips around her nipples in a gesture of lazy interest that might amount in the end to self-arousal, then drew the palm of her hand down across the flat of her stomach. A while ago, the rumble of voices from the room below had silenced. She knew Barron's little group had been talking about Helix, a word she found strange and mysterious. She'd looked it up in a dictionary and found a plethora of meanings, but the one she liked best was its original Latin derivation – a kind of ivy. She considered spirals, vines, the shells of molluscs. Her thoughts took an abstract turn, shapes formed and disintegrated in her mind; she had the feeling that her internal gyroscope had gone out of control.

She tried to force her imagination in more specific directions, the body of a Norwegian girl she'd once met on the Cherbourg ferry, say, or Barron's tanned flesh as it glistened against her own white skin. She stroked her fibrous pubic hair in a detached way. Then she pulled her hand aside and let it linger against her hip. No memory inspired her. Nothing particular materialized. Faces, bodies, moments of brief passion: nothing.

She sat up, ran her fingers across her eyelids, closed her eyes. She was thinking of her father suddenly, the blind old man in the wheelchair whose only interest in life was his estate outside Raleigh, North Carolina. Surrounded by servants, half-crazy from the stroke that had crippled him in his mid-forties, he tended to speak in creepy racist monologues about the family history, about slavery, the old days, the sexual misadventures of his ancestors.
Goddam mulattos everywhere. Every shade of skin known to man
.

He laughed at inappropriate things. He found merriment in malice. He had a psychotic hatred of Roman Catholics for reasons he'd never specified. One time he'd said to her that he suffered from papaphobia. In the presence of a priest he found it hard to swallow and his muscles became locked. When he passed a Catholic church he always shuddered, shut his eyes.

She hadn't thought about him in years. Nor about her mother, a Southern belle in the fabulous tradition, a vague, lacy figure given to drunken speeches on the state of the nation, the way blacks and Hispanics were taking over everything and pretty darn soon whites would be a minority, just like in South Africa. Her mother was a transparency with pale glassy hands who floated ghostlike across the memory. She could still hear her say, in that zombie voice of hers,
Darling, your Daddy and myself, well, we're thinking of putting you into Doctor Lannigan's clinic, he's a wonderworker, he can perform miracles for people with problems, honey
. Problems, she thought. Honey. She wondered what had become of her parents, if they were still alive. What did it matter? She'd severed herself from her own history.

She went inside the bathroom, closed the door carefully. Under recessed lights her shadow fell across the tiled floor. She turned on the water and stepped into the shower. She heard Barron enter. Through opaque glass she watched him undress. He slid the shower door open, stepped in naked beside her.

‘Everybody's gone,' he said. ‘We have the place to ourselves.'

Ourselves, she thought. Just you and me, Barron. She wiped water from her eyes and gazed at him. She wanted him, but the yearning was in some way detached from her. She had these times in which she became a spectator at her own life.

‘You were talking about Helix,' she said.

‘And you were eavesdropping.'

‘I don't understand why you can't tell me more.'

‘Patience.'

‘It isn't one of my virtues, Barron.'

She adjusted the balance between hot and cold, let the stream run directly into her face and hair. Barron drew her closer to his body, she lowered her hand instantly between his legs, directed him inside her. She tilted her head back against the tiled wall, opened her mouth, let water splash against her lips and teeth. Barron thrust against her hips. Unlike other men she'd known, he had a sense of rhythm attuned to her needs; he was capable of intuiting her physical impulses, as if he were listening to the measure of her inner metronome. She stared into his eyes. He was looking at her, his expression one of intensity, concentration: what she wanted to see in his eyes was something else – tenderness, compassion, sympathy. Maybe these qualities were there and she didn't have the capacity to recognize them. How could she know for sure? Everything was tainted by uncertainty: even identity.

She came with surprising quickness and was at once flooded with an unexpected loneliness. She slid away from Barron, went down on her knees. He reached down and caught her by the elbows and helped her to her feet. He opened the shower door, draped a large white towel around her shoulders, then led her inside the bedroom. Damp, she lay across the bed. He held her hand, studied her face. She looked pained and sad. He stroked her fingers, touched her wet hair.

‘I'm not some fucking invalid,' she said. ‘You don't have to treat me like one.'

‘Was I doing that?' he asked. She was gone again, drifting off into that territory of self he had no way of charting.

‘Stroking my hair. Like I'm lying on my death-bed, Barron.'

Barron stretched out alongside her. He reached for her hand. Her fingers lay unresponsive in his palm. She said, ‘Take me out, Barron. I want to go out. I want to walk to the Rialto. Or take me to Harry's Bar. I want to do something normal. Something ordinary. I don't care what it is. I want air. I need air. I feel so goddamed
confined
here.'

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. It was growing dark outside.

‘We'll take the launch,' she said. ‘We'll go to Burano. To the trattoria. The Pescatori.'

He stared into her face, thinking how difficult it was to deny her anything. This weakness for her was beyond his comprehension. Her life might have been some perplexing scented maze in which he was doomed to wander. She walked round the room. Her expression was focused and hard. He'd seen that look before: she was keeping her temper in check. She could explode any time. Or she could slide off into one of those defiantly brooding silences that might last days. He found those worse than anything else.

He thought for a moment. ‘OK. This is what we'll do. When it's dark, we'll take the launch. We'll go as far as Burano. But we won't get off. No restaurants. No bars. No public appearances. Just a quiet trip to Burano and back by the Porto di Lido.'

She looked at him and said, ‘We're always waiting for nightfall, aren't we, Barron? I'm the fucking dark lady of your sonnets.' She rose from the bed. She bared her teeth at him; there was malice in the expression. ‘I'm your personal vampire.'

‘We don't live ordinary lives,' he replied.

‘Tell me about it.'

The launch, driven by Schialli, ploughed the cold black waters of the Grand Canal in the direction of the Bacino di San Marco. Barron and the woman stood at the stern. They wore heavy overcoats, scarves, gloves. The night sky was clear, starry. There were lights in the palaces along the canal. A
motoscafo
churned past and its wake caused the launch to rise and fall slightly. Barron put his arm around the woman's shoulder. The sky, the sound of water knocking upon the launch, the extraordinary buildings along the banks – these things combined to make him feel expansive, talkative.

He kissed her forehead and said, ‘You never ask me about myself. Where I come from. My background. In all the years we've known each other – why?'

‘Should I be interested?' Her face, wrapped in a headscarf, caught a passing light. She looked suddenly very young, breathtakingly so.

‘Interested or not, I'm going to tell you. Tobias Barron's secret background. I was that creature known, perhaps rather quaintly, as a foundling. My dear mother, whoever she was, left me on the doorstep of a convent in Poughkeepsie, New York. The Sisters of Mercy.' He was plunged back suddenly into a world of catechisms, confessions, incense, the stale smell of nuns' habits, the terror of priests. He remembered it as a man might recall years in a dungeon.

For a moment the woman seemed attentive. ‘I don't see you in that setting, Barron.'

‘I got out as fast as I could. Sixteen years of age, I ran away. I went to New York City. I found I had some talent for acting. A little off-Broadway stuff.'

‘Oh, you're a good actor,' she remarked. The Grand Canal opened into the Bacino di San Marco; the lights of the city receded.

‘What I didn't like was waiting tables between jobs,' he said. ‘So I took myself off to California. Land of opportunity. Where I found I had other talents.'

‘Let me guess. Women flocked to you. Rich women.'

‘Rich and lonely.'

‘And so you became a gigolo and they made you wealthy.'

‘There was one woman in particular. Amanda Wrigley. She lived in La Jolla. When she died I discovered I was her sole beneficiary. So, armed with two million dollars I didn't expect, where could I go wrong? Those were the good old days in America when you could invest money and be assured of a return. I developed market fever. Real estate. Stocks. Bonds. The market was very kind.' He laughed suddenly, and the woman, surprised by the sound, stared at him.

‘You might find this amusing. I used to keep changing my name back then. The nuns called me Paul Smith. I never wanted to be this Paul Smith person. Some of my pseudonyms were absurd. I had my pretentious French phase. Michel Leclaire. Then I wanted something vaguely British-sounding. For a while I called myself Roger Dickinson-Brown. I liked the hyphenation.' He was quiet a moment, thinking of the years of his reinvention, the way he'd smoothed his way through those clear blue waters where wealthy women in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills needed playthings, emotional flotation devices against drowning in solitude.

‘By fucking sad middle-aged women you reached your present elevated state,' she said. ‘Houses everywhere. Cars. Boats. Planes. You're another American success story, Barron. Thanks for sharing.' Barron's past depressed her, mainly because it afforded her an insight into how much she resembled him, how she'd rearranged her own identity the way he'd done. The idea that she was like Barron bugged her. Were she and Barron twinned in some ungodly way? Was it more – was she imprisoned in Barron, as if he were a mirror and she a reflection of his needs? Maybe she'd done far more than reassemble her identity. Maybe she'd lost any sense of self she might ever have had; maybe her only definition was whatever Barron bestowed on her.