Jigsaw (45 page)

‘Miss Roczak,' he said again. The gun could go off. Quite easily. ‘We're looking for a man called Jake Streik.'

‘Never heard of him,' she said.

Pagan sighed. ‘Try a little harder,' he suggested.

‘You're not listening to me, fella.'

‘On the contrary. I'm listening hard. But I'm not believing.'

‘You don't quite get it, do you? I never heard of Jake Streik. Never. You've got thirty seconds to back off before I employ this,' and she waved the pistol at Pagan, then at Foxie.

‘You and Streik,' Pagan said. ‘Old comrades in arms. Prague, was it? Warsaw? Come on, Audrey. You're not going to fire that gun. You know it. We know it. All we want is some information about your old pal Jake. We believe he's in trouble—'

‘Yeah, right, and you want to help Streik, whoever he is.'

‘If we can,' Pagan said.

‘Twenty seconds,' she said.

Pagan raised his hand. ‘I'll show you some identification.'

‘All the ID in the world wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to me. Keep your hand away from your pocket. Don't take chances, I'm not in the mood.'

Pagan said, ‘We've come from London. From Scotland Yard—'

‘And I'm Anastasia.'

‘Audrey,' Pagan said. ‘
You
know Jake's in trouble.
We
know he's in trouble. The Undertakers want him, don't they?'

Audrey Roczak was quiet a moment. She kept the gun level, but the expression in her eyes altered just a little. The mention of The Undertakers appeared to have softened her somewhat, caused her a small flash of doubt.

‘OK. Let's see your plastic,' she said. ‘Do it slowly.'

Pagan took out his wallet, handed it to the woman, watched her flip it open and glance at it in the light.

‘Frank Pagan,' she said. ‘Good old Special Branch.' She looked at Foxworth. ‘Who are you?'

Foxie produced his own ID, passing it to Audrey Roczak, who scrutinized it carefully, as if all forms of laminated identity cards were suspect: hers was a world in which plastic could be made to say anything. Pagan wondered how many times in her own history she'd used false documents. She clutched both cards and looked from Pagan to Foxworth, then back again. You could see uncertainty working through her, little fissures opening.

‘You're not from The Undertakers,' she said.

Pagan shook his head. ‘All we want is to talk to Jake Streik.'

She was silent for a long time. With her face tilted to one side, she appeared to be listening to the rattle of rain falling on plastic rubbish-sacks. ‘You say you want to help him.'

Pagan nodded.

Audrey Roczak, with a slight gesture of the gun, indicated for them to step inside. She kicked the door shut quickly, then walked to the foot of a staircase, where she paused.

‘You're probably too late,' she said in a dry manner.

Knock knock knock
. Streik thinks the sound is coming from the unspeakable pain in his chest but then in a moment of clarity understands it issues from the external world, whatever that is nowadays. Edges are fudged, things come and go, there are tidal movements in his head. Pain has this diabolical way of diminishing your humanity, you dwindle until you're nothing more than the goddam embodiment of your hurt, you're a tiny figure spied through a keyhole of agony.
Knock knock knock
. The sound changes along the way to
Rap rap rap
, thunderous, echoing, urgent, and although he is possessed by the desire to get up and do something about it – what? he doesn't know – he finds he's crippled, incapable of moving, his mouth and throat dry, limbs wasted, and even his heartbeat, to which he tries to listen, is as faint as the footfall of a mouse. I am dying, he supposes. The thought, initially so gratifying, turns around, and then he panics, opens his eyes, looks round a room he's never seen before, unlit candles stuck in dusty wine bottles, stalactites of wax, easels, jars of paintbrushes, old crushed paint-streaked newspapers on the floor.

Dying. Well. It isn't so good. You couldn't say a lot in its favour. You wouldn't want to write home about it. Hello, folks, wish you were here. His head slumps back against what is presumably a pillow, then he calls out hoarsely for Audrey –
he remembers Audrey now
– but there isn't an answer. He gazes feebly into light from a ratty fringed lampshade hanging low from the flaky ceiling. He's never,
never
in his entire life, felt so utterly alone.

But here she is. Here's Audrey now. She comes to the sofa where he lies and stoops over him, fusses with the sheet that covers his body, a red sheet in fact, and her earrings dangle forward from her face and create glassy flickers of light.

‘Jake,' she says, and she's a long way off, oh babe. ‘Jake. Can you hear me?'

He nods his head, but what an effort.

‘Jake, listen. This man is from Scotland Yard. Special Branch. He wants to talk to you.'

Streik raises a hand, but it falls back. The trap of gravity. Scotland, he thinks. His head is filled with confused images of lonesome mountains and bagpipes and whisky, then he makes the true connection. The guy who looks down at him is OK, concerned grey eyes, firm mouth, but Streik sees his own death in the man's look of pity.

‘Aud,' Streik says. ‘Something. For the pain.'

Audrey looks helpless, goes away, comes back with tablets which she places on his tongue. A bolt of pain – you couldn't call it pain, it's gone way beyond that now – crucifies him to the sofa.

‘Frank Pagan,' the guy says.

The name's remotely familiar to Streik. But then again, any name might be
remotely
familiar when you're dying, when your memory's shot. How can you say for sure you've ever heard the name before?

‘Can you hear me, Jake?' Pagan asks.

Streik moves his head, blinks, licks his lips. He sees Audrey in the background somewhere, her big reliable body shimmering under the light.

‘You and Bryce Harcourt,' says this Pagan.

‘Bryce,' Streik mumbles.

‘I need to know what you were involved in. Can you tell me that, Jake?'

Audrey says something in a tone of voice that is one of vague complaint. Streik can't catch the words. Anyway, he's thinking about Bryce, about London.

‘Bryce,' he says. ‘He OK?'

‘Bryce is dead,' says Pagan.

Dead? Streik wonders. Somehow he isn't as surprised as he wants to be. He feels only a slight regret. When you're dying, maybe you want everybody else to join you. Come, share the amusement of it all, participate in the big black party, this way to the horrors.

Pagan leans closer. ‘Can you talk to me, Jake?'

‘Yeah.' Streik's voice is a croak.

‘What did you and Bryce do together, Jake?' Pagan's breath has a faintly sweet smell, a light boozy aroma.

‘Money,' Streik says.

‘Money?' Pagan seems to be bringing his face closer all the time to Streik.

‘Millions.'

‘You took it to Bryce, is that it? You took it to The Undertakers.'

Streik tries to nod, thinking how complicated this dying is, it isn't the simple business everybody tells you it is, but under that there's the deeper complexity of communicating to Pagan the intricacies of arrangements between himself and Bryce, the trips from America to London, the diplomatic bag routine, they were sacks not bags, sacks and sacks, all tagged, all secure, beyond the penetration of customs agents.
Property of the United States of America
. He panics again, and says, ‘Aud, help me, Aud, I'm fucking dying, I'm dying.'

She is holding his hand. He thinks of priests and sickbeds and last rites and the smell of death and suddenly he wants absolution for the German hitch-hiker, but priests are like cops, you can't find one when you need one.

“You'll pull through,' she tells him.

The lie is enormous in her eyes.

‘Yeah yeah,' Streik says. The second
yeah
– that's a wasted word, a ruined breath.

‘Who gave you the money in the first place, Jake?' Pagan asks.

Streik thinks Bryce is suddenly in the room, he sees Bryce's face float above him, a pale looming balloon. ‘Bryce,' he says. ‘What's it like, old buddy? What's it like?'

Pagan says, ‘Try and concentrate, Jake. You were saying where the money came from. Remember?'

‘Money?' Back to earth, bump, no Bryce, no cheery word, hallucination.

‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?'

‘Yeah, well,' Streik says. Lips cracked. Tongue swollen. ‘Different … guys.'

‘You know any names?'

‘Guy called Monty Rhodes …'

‘Rhodes? Is he connected to The Undertakers?'

Streik groans. ‘Runs the US end.'

‘Anyone else? Any other names?'

‘No names. Faces.' Streik has a flutter in his chest. He imagines small sharp teeth gnawing on the bloody tissue of his heart, claws hooked into his liver. He's out on a tide now, floating to a dead estuary. He thinks he sees Montgomery Rhodes in his black shades waving to him from the shore.

‘What was the money for, Jake?'

Streik remembers but before he can say anything the sheet lightning of pain convulses him, and he moans, clutches his chest, tries to vomit, his mouth filling with sticky strands of saliva. Now Audrey is holding a wet rag to his forehead and the pain ebbs for a time and Pagan's face, which had gone out of focus, comes swimming in again, and Streik has a wondrous moment of clarity in which everything seems suddenly very, very simple.

‘Bryce and me,' he says. ‘We had it figured.'

‘Tell me, Jake,' says Pagan. ‘Tell me what you figured.'

Streik looks at Audrey, and she nods, it's OK, you can talk to this man. There's some real odd weather in Streik's head, first a blizzard, then dippy rainbows. He looks into Pagan's grey eyes. He hears Audrey say something to Pagan about quitting with all the questions, can't you feel the guy's pain for Chrissakes, but Pagan isn't about to stop, you can see it in his face, he wants the rest of Streik's death-bed narrative.

‘Money all over the place,' Streik says. ‘Spread like fucking manure.'

‘What was the money for?'

Memory seeps like sewage through a leach bed. Memory dies with the body. Streik thinks of all the blackness awaiting him. A no-state. A nothing. He looks into Pagan's face.

‘Oh, man,' says Streik. Why isn't this Pagan grasping the fucking point? Does he think there's all the time in the world? ‘Chaos … weapons … you name it …' Streik feels a deepening lethargy, which has to be death, has to be, no two ways about it, and he's panicked again, doesn't want to go, isn't ready, hasn't prepared himself for a confrontation with The Maker, but maybe there isn't a Maker, and if there isn't he doesn't have to carry the guilt about the German into eternity with him, does he …

Streik has the need to touch something, to anchor himself, so grips the sleeve of Pagan's wet overcoat. ‘The way these guys think. Peace is bad for business. You don't do business when you got stability …'

Hold the coat, Jake. Keep holding. Don't let go
.

Pagan asks, ‘Where does Carlotta come in, Jake?'

Streik opens his mouth. Carlotta, he thinks. Carlotta rhymes with oughta. Carlotta oughta mean something, but it doesn't. Petrified by darkness, he stares into Pagan's face, shakes his head, he's slipping, he's going, his candle is being snuffed out, O God don't let it be like this, I don't want to go, please please don't take me, let me dally and linger and I promise to be gooooood from now on … But his hand slips from Pagan's sleeve, falls to his side, his head rolls on the pillow, he gasps, shudders, feels the quietly insistent pressure of oblivion.

‘I didn't mean to shoot the kid,' he says, and closes his eyes. His thick lips part with a soft fleshy sound.

Audrey Roczak, her eyes red-rimmed, drew the sheet across Streik's face. Pagan stepped back from the dead man, listened to rain on the window. He was conscious of Foxie at his side. Nobody spoke for a time. Then Audrey Roczak, lighting a Gitanes, said, ‘I knew he wasn't going to make it. At least I thought he could die here, where nobody could find him. I guess the old busybody
la Chanteuse
told you I might have come here. Old fraud. All those photographs. She signed them herself. She never knew any of those people. Even her dead husband's a fiction. She's a spinster from way back.' Audrey Roczak looked more sad than angry. ‘Jake had papers stuffed in the trunk of his car. You're welcome to them. He sure as hell doesn't need them.' She picked up a bag from behind an easel and, reaching inside, pulled out a wad of sheets, which she handed to Pagan as if they were distasteful to her touch. It was a bulky collection.

‘Maybe they'll be some help to you. Maybe they'll clarify things. I don't know.'

Pagan folded the papers, tucked them carefully in the inner pocket of his coat. He'd look at them later, when he was out of the dead man's presence.

‘Poor bastard,' she said. ‘All he ever really wanted was to belong to something. And half-assed espionage was the only club that would have him. Terrific, huh?'

Pagan gazed away from the body of the fat man. Death had compressed the room. He stared at the canvases stacked against one wall. They were as sombre as Deirdre Chapman had said, infinitely depressing in a way that had nothing to do with their artless quality.

Audrey Roczak sucked on her cigarette. ‘One thing's damn sure. You work for The Undertakers, you can't count on a fucking pension at the end of the day.'

Pagan could still feel the pressure of the dead man's fingers on his sleeve. He wanted to get out of this wretched room, out into the rainy air.

‘Well, Frank Pagan,' the woman said. ‘Have you learned anything? Or do you have questions for me?'