Taking Lives (4 page)

Raoul says: ‘Then don’t change the details. Switch the picture, just the picture, don’t let him know, and the next time he tries to leave the country, he’s Bugs Bunny and he’s under arrest.’

That afternoon, Arkenhout walks through the meat market down to the Hudson River. He sees old warehouses hollowed out with neglect, windows long gone, nettles growing in deep basements. Nobody cares about them. Nobody checks them.

John Gaul is shifting about his apartment. For a few minutes after lunch, he even agonizes. He doesn’t want to lose this chance of a connection to David Silver. He is suspicious, and he hates to leave suspicions unresolved. All these are all clear reasons to call Arkenhout. But he doesn’t trust Arkenhout. His life gets invaded so rarely that he reckons he can at least choose the invaders.

Still, he calls.

Arkenhout calls back at seven, and he’s willing to go to dinner. He goes to a hardware store on Sixth Avenue. He needs a box cutter, he says, but they won’t sell him one because there is a school around the corner. This does not seem logical to a sensible Dutch boy. He has the dorm room to himself. He takes paper from the printer and practises his own signature, his signature as Seth Goodman. He wants to see how much variation people take for granted.

He gets to the designated bar under a violet backpack, which irritates Gaul; it makes the boy look like a student, not a man who knows David Silver. Both men have a beer.

Gaul says he’s sure the house in the Bahamas will be a zero. He’ll be back in a week. Arkenhout says he might like it, might stay there. Gaul says: ‘I could, I suppose. I could always stay anywhere.’ Arkenhout ignores the self-pity in the voice; he notes down absence of planning, limitless possibilities.

‘I just want to know about it,’ Gaul says. Daringly, he adds: ‘Silver has a place in the Caribbean, doesn’t he? I read about it once.’

‘I never went to the Caribbean place,’ Arkenhout says. ‘I was just the housesitter.’

Gaul thinks it’s too early for dinner, but he wants to be on the move. Arkenhout follows. Gaul takes more beers, then gin, then a glass of red wine. Arkenhout doesn’t. Evidently Gaul has given up on impressing Arkenhout and is juicing himself for some more direct attack.

They take a cab into SoHo and get tucked into the corner of a grey restaurant that claims to be Provencal. Gaul is so precise he’s like a tin toy at table;

Arkenhout simply eats. At the end of the meal, Gaul has coffee and more coffee. Then, when he stands, he is punctiliously drunk, a man who has just remembered the programme for standing, walking, turning.

Arkenhout hails a cab.

‘I don’t want a cab,’ Gaul says.

Arkenhout pushes him in the small of the back and he tips into the cab seat. Gaul sits there, not quite sure enough to complain.

Arkenhout thinks he can kill, probably. The boundaries weakened when he took a rock to Seth Goodman’s head.

Besides, it will be Seth Goodman’s crime, and he will not be Seth Goodman any more.

The cab driver squeals between lanes as though he wants to jolt Gaul sober.

The problem, Arkenhout is thinking, while Gaul is thinking someone is being kind to him, is the body. It would be too much luck if the cops muddled up the bodies as they did in Florida, and besides, Gaul is that much older than Seth, with more time to have broken teeth or bones in ways that get recorded. So the body has to be lost for a long while.

The doorman doesn’t rise from his desk when Gaul sweeps in, so Gaul wants his name, his apologies. The man can smell the drink so he understands.

The doorman hardly notices Arkenhout.

In the apartment, Gaul throws off his jacket and sits down suddenly on his striped, shiny sofa, and lists a little to the left.

Arkenhout doesn’t even have to sympathize with the man. There is no man to attract sympathy, just a few random functioning elements with no core of purpose or life.

Gaul is snoring now, still startlingly rigid, with the dark East River behind his fatuous head.

All Arkenhout needs now is information. He opens his backpack and puts on rubber gloves.

He takes Gaul’s jacket into the hall, in case Gaul should suddenly surface, and checks the credit cards, the ATM cards. The signatures are simple enough and, besides, everyone varies their signature subtly. Hardly anyone checks with the eye of a graphologist.

Fine. He can access the money, but is the supply constant? Gaul seems to think he can travel anywhere; that’s good. He seems to travel on whim. But perhaps that’s just the appearance he wants to give. With all that movement, he can’t simply wait for his credit card bills at a fixed address; there must be someone who settles them for him.

There is a roll-top desk in a side room, closed but not locked. Arkenhout opens it, hears the mechanism jar, then listens hard to Gaul who is snoring and gasping down the hall. He pulls papers out, letters with long trails of names on the envelopes, a passport; next to the passport is an air ticket, Delta, roundtrip to Nassau going out in two days and the return open. So Gaul is going, and doesn’t know when he’ll be back.

There’s a lawyer’s letter attached to the ticket with a rubber band. Gaul is to ‘introduce’ himself to the agent, some woman on Bay Street. If he has to ‘introduce’ himself, then he’s not known. The lawyers have arranged credit in Nassau, they say. He might want to stay for a few months.

John Gaul wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have the patience to stay out of people’s way. But Martin Arkenhout might.

He’s a boy in a foreign country still. He’s not sure he has read everything right. But he has the ticket, the money, the cards, the possibilities; and he needs a new life. Why should it matter how long this life can last?

He closes the desk carefully, but he keeps the ticket and the lawyer’s letter.

He walks back to the room where Gaul is sleeping. Now it comes down to this: how to kill someone, how to make the body disappear.

It isn’t time yet.

He makes himself coffee, and sits in the hallway. There is a stack of heavy art books, catalogues and monographs, but that doesn’t seem distracting enough; instead, he looks around for magazines. He has to settle for a thumbed paperback of some English whodunit that’s been read over and again.

One o’clock. He goes to the desk to see if there’s a letter opener. He finds one that is surprisingly sharp. There are paper towels and large, black garbage bags under the sink; he helps himself and stuffs them into his backpack.

One-thirty. Gaul has toppled to his right, torso and thigh and calf a zigzag of black.

Arkenhout remembers the doorman saying it was good to have Gaul back and how long was he staying? After the date on that Nassau ticket, nobody here expects to see John Gaul. Nobody will particularly care, except to avoid the possibility that he might complain.

Two o’clock. Arkenhout takes off the rubber gloves, pulls Gaul up, slaps a cold washcloth across his face, waits for his eyes to creep open, then focus, then see.

‘I’ve got to get the car,’ he says.

Gaul doesn’t want to think because it would upset the delicate balance in his head. He looks around for his jacket, pulls out the keys.

‘Come on,’ Arkenhout says.

‘Where are we going?’ Gaul says.

‘We’re going to see David Silver. It’s a -‘ he can’t quite bring out the word without giggling, so he tries again - ‘a surprise.’

Gaul works at being sober, works furiously.

‘I should change,’ he says.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ But Gaul insists on cleaning his teeth.

‘There isn’t much time,’ Arkenhout says, shepherding him through the door. There are two other apartments on this floor, owned by old-money relicts, so Gaul says, who won’t go wandering this early, and would never dare hear sudden movements through their fog of sleeping pills.

When the elevator comes, the operator is trying to stop yawning.

‘I’ll get the car,’ Arkenhout says. ‘Wait for me out front.’

Gaul needs every ounce of his concentration to prepare for the moment this kid is offering him like a Christmas parcel: to meet a man impossible to meet. He nods to the elevator man.

The elevator doors snap shut at the garage level. Arkenhout pulls out the keys. He looks around the acreage of shiny, white cruisers, sleek town cars, even a Jaguar that belongs to some old-guard traditionalist.

So what the hell does Gaul drive?

He ought to know, he ought to have found out. It was such a simple thing to ask. But they’d always been in cabs, and besides, he had other things to consider that made up a future and not just the next hour.

Only you can’t get to the future except through the next hour, he tells himself, thinking he sounds like his father at his most sententious.

He checks the keys. There are two sets, with no colour code to distinguish them, no licence plate number cut in the metal.

‘Sir?’

He expects security, some official kind of challenge. He spins round. But he sees only a man in a mechanic’s overalls, the night garage man.

Arkenhout says, ‘John Gaul’s car,’ with all the authority he can summon. When the car arrives, he doesn’t know if he should give the mechanic money.

He collects Gaul at the front of the building. The man is perfumed like a bar, breath the caricature fresh of peppermint, with skin like egg white over paper: not in good shape.

‘We’re meeting in the meat market,’ Arkenhout says.

For a moment, Gaul doesn’t understand. He thinks of social meat markets, sexual ones.

‘The one,’ Arkenhout says, ‘where they sell meat.’

He takes Tenth Avenue downtown, a wide channel of dark and moving red taillights, and cuts across towards the river. There are people around, of course; he expected that. There’s more light than he remembered, the meat trade starting up, the night trade drifting off in high heels and Lurex.

He parks a block away from any lights. He waits a moment. There may be someone stirring behind a Dumpster, a door shutter about to rise up rattling and reveal a store set with carcasses. He wants to be sure.

The street won’t do. He puts the car into reverse, and pulls round the corner to the side of one of the hollowed-out buildings. Headlights sweep the end of the street.

Gaul wants to ask what’s happening, but he always knew this meeting could never be ordinary.

Arkenhout pulls the backpack from between the seats.

He sometimes read thrillers as a child. He collected ways to kill: odd expertise about when blood flies, where to cut and when, how poisons work, information that clearly belonged to the adult world and leaked through Agatha Christie to a nation of ten-year-olds. None of it helps now.

He is terribly aware of Gaul breathing. He hits him once with force on the windpipe. Gaul’s head breaks forward.

Arkenhout pulls a thick, black garbage bag out of his backpack, puts it over Gaul’s head and pulls it down. He moulds the head in the bag until he can find the artery at the neck. He takes the sharp letter opener, and he drives the metal deep into the meat of Gaul’s neck. He pushes Gaul forward, pinches the hole the letter opener has made.

He’s thinking: Gaul wouldn’t take his car to the Bahamas. The car will just rest in the garage until Gaul comes back, as secure and unquestioned as any leaseholder.

Besides, Gaul’s blood in Gaul’s car is easy to explain.

But the blood is flooding. He tries to dam it with paper towel from his backpack. He shifts the body across so it leans on the door. He backs away from the blood.

It isn’t raining tonight, the convenient Florida rain that washed away the questions he should have answered.

Good, he tells himself. Now he’ll have to solve his problems. Now he’ll have to learn a way.

But he has a horror of the body in the leathery intimacy of the car. It is unpredictable. He starts to wonder if the whole eight pints of blood will spurt out through that simple puncture in the neck, if Gaul couldn’t simply stifle under the black plastic that forms a cast of his high forehead and his thin nose.

Gaul’s legs kick out.

Arkenhout gets out of the car, opens the passenger door. He expects the body to fall on to the sidewalk. He half-expects eyes to open in that plastic face and Gaul to kick his way along the dark street. There is a smell of lard and blood from behind the closed steel doors.

He drags the legs out of the car and cocoons them in black plastic. He tugs Gaul bodily out of the car by the waist, constantly reaching up to make sure the body is as much covered as possible. At least this is a street where blood is ordinary.

He props the body on a wall beneath a wide industrial window that has no glass.

He can’t go back now, so he finds the strength to tug Gaul up to the window sill and let him fall on the other side, down to an open basement with struts and weeds and iron spans all lying around. As it happens, nobody sees him, or likes to ask questions, or believes what they’re seeing.

He moves the car by the river on West Street and walks back to the building. If anyone sees, John Gaul is out about some sexual business he doesn’t want known.

Inside the empty building, there’s moonlight and the light of street lamps making bars across the floors, camouflaging the bags. Arkenhout climbs down the inside wall, stone by stone. Once he gets down on the rough floor, he’s a kid with a backpack.

He has a box cutter in the backpack. He puts on rubber gloves, then holds a garbage bag in front of him as he slashes across John Gaul’s face. The blood oozes. He cuts the cheeks away, and the eyes. For a moment, he wonders if one eye was open, like Seth Goodman’s eye on the roadway.

He lets the head fall again. He picks up a rusted pipe and hammers teeth out of place. The flesh softens sound. He pushes the body under an iron beam and he covers it deeply with old wood and metal.

He can hear the rats running. In a story, he’d call them to help him.

He puts paper towel, black and soaked now, into the garbage bags and he leaves the garbage bags in a Dumpster. It would be foolish to throw them in the river, to do anything that might make people inspect them; better to take this chance. The bags will go anonymously to the landfill, the body will be lost, and it could be years before anyone knows that a life was taken at all.