Walkers (8 page)

‘Do you know something?, he said.
‘I’ve been thinking about this on the way out here: she was
exactly
my type. Can you believe that?
The more I think about her, the more it hits me. She was my dream girl, my
fantasy girl, come true. I loved her face and I loved her body and I loved the
way she dressed. I loved the way she talked and I loved the way she laughed.
Jesus – if I met a girl like that and she really liked me, I’d marry her
tomorrow. I’d marry her this evening.’

Santos listened to this carefully.
Then he reached into his pocket and took out a key.

He unlocked his closet, and from one
of the shelves near the top, he brought down a tin box, with a plaid pattern
printed on it. Originally, it had contained Genuine Scottish Petticoat Tails.
Santos opened it up and inspected its contents. About a half-ounce of
marijuana, a packet of cigarette-papers, and some shag tobacco.

‘We should smoke,’ he said. ‘Then
maybe we can find out what’s going on here.’

‘I’m not sure I want to.’

‘I can’t help you if you don’t,’
Santos told him, matter-of-factly.

Gil glanced up at the crucifix, and
then said, ‘Okay. But I’m not getting totally stoned.

I want to get back and meet this
girl this evening.’

‘You’ll get back,’ Santos assured
him.

Gil watched silently as Santos rolled
a joint. Then he closed the tin box and reached into his shirt pocket for
matches. He lit up unhurriedly, and blew smoke across the room. ‘This is good
stuff. I got it from Benes. You remember Benes, who used to come down to the
college sometimes?’

‘Sure,’ said Gil. He waited while
Santos drew in a deep, sharp breath of marijuana.

Then he said, ‘You must miss college
pretty bad.’

Santos shrugged, his mouth leaking
smoke. ‘What’s to miss? Look what I got here. A tractor that won’t go, a mother
who never stops complaining, grapevines, heat, dust, and fucking chickens.’

He passed over the joint. Gil
hesitated, and then inhaled, dragging the aromatic smoke deep down into his
lungs. He closed his eyes and waited, then he slowly allowed the smoke to roll
out of him. He took another drag, and then passed the joint back to Santos.

Gradually, as they smoked, the room
seemed to Gil to open out, to expand. Before he knew it, the tiny adobe cell
was like a vast cathedral, echoing and empty. He could see Santos, but Santos
appeared to be very far away, and shrunken, as if he were nothing more than a
half-developed embryo with a checkered shirt and a pompadour.

Santos said, slowly and loudly, ‘You
have to tell me what she said... exactly what she said.’

Gil tried to think of Paulette. For
a moment, he couldn’t assemble any kind of picture of her in his mind, but then
he forced himself to remember the very first moment he had seen her, standing
against the sunlight that irradiated the street outside the Mini-Market door.
In a blurry voice, he told Santos, ‘She said... Gil Miller. She spoke my name.’

‘Then what did she say?’

‘She said... I’m sorry to surprise
you... she said, I’ve had a cup of coffee and I’ve bought a book... She told me
the name of the book. She seemed to think that I would know what it meant, like
it was a secret message or something.’

‘What was the name of the book?’
asked Santos. He sounded distant and metallic.

‘It was foreign, I didn’t understand
it. I can’t remember it now.
Day
something.’

‘Remember,’ Santos urged him. ‘It
could be important.’

Gil closed his eyes and tried to
recall the name of the book.
Day
something.
Day
something.
Day After Day
.
Day For Night
.
Day of the
Triffids
.

He heard a voice, different from
Santos’s voice, and he opened his eyes again. He was startled to see that the
floor of the room was bright blue, and swirled with streaks of white that
looked like horsetail clouds. One second he was sitting still, the next he was
travelling over the floor at what seemed like sixty or seventy miles an hour,
the clouds flashing past underneath him. The voice said,
‘Remember nothing.

Remember nothing.’
And then he was hurtling even faster, even though he was still sitting
with his legs crossed.

There was a flash of ultimate speed.
Then the opposite wall of Santos’s room came rocketing towards him, and hit him
straight in the face. He was conscious of falling, tilting sideways. Then he
looked around him and he was lying on the tiles, and there was blood splashed
everywhere. Santos was kneeling beside him, staring at him in fright.

‘Hey, you’re not dead?’ Santos asked
him, anxiously. His high seemed to have vaporised.

Gil touched his nose, and then his
forehead. His fingers came away bloody, and his head pounded.

‘What happened?’ he croaked.

‘What happened? I wish I knew. One
minute we were sitting there talking, the next minute you jumped up like a
fucking space shuttle and banged your face straight into the wall.’

‘Did you hear anything?’ Gil asked
him, gripping hold of the edge of the bed, and sitting up.

‘Hear anything? Like what?’

‘Like a voice, another voice. Not
yours, and not mine.’

‘I didn’t hear anything like that,
but what I did hear was quite enough.’

Gil tugged out his handkerchief, and
dabbed at his nose. He hoped his face wasn’t going to be bruised for this
evening’s date.

‘What did you hear? You mean you
heard something from me?’

‘Sure, you said the name of the
book.’

‘Well. Day something was all I could
remember,’ Gil told him.

‘No, no, you said the name. And,
believe me, that’s all I needed to hear.
De
Sortilegio.’

‘Hey, that was it!’ Gil responded.
‘De Sortilegio.
That was the book she
bought.’

Santos shook his head. ‘No way did
she
buy De Sortilegio
at any
second-hand bookstore in Solana Beach. You were right, she was giving you a
message. Pity you were too dumb to understand it.’

‘Well, what is it, then, this
De Sortilegio?
Sounds like some kind of
Italian cookbook.’

Santos said,
‘De Sortilegio
was written by some guy called Paul Grilland in
fifteen – something. It’s a famous book, if you’re into mysticism and magic and
all that kind of stuff. You don’t find it in any second-hand bookstore, though.
No way, Jose. It’s rare, and what’s more it’s all in Latin, because it’s so
dirty.’

‘What are you trying to say? This
Paulette was trying to talk dirty to me in Latin?’

‘Are you kidding?
De Sortilegio
is only dirty because it
explains how the Devil, who happens to be a spirit, can have physical sex with
mortal women. I mean it tells you how he uses living ectoplasm to provide
himself with a viable dick.’

Battered and sore as he was, Gil was
still a little bit high. He kept a straight face as long as he could, but then
he burst out laughing, and rolled on to the bed, laughing so much that he could
scarcely breathe.

‘Oh, God, Santos, you had me fooled
with that one! Oh, God, I can’t stand it! A viable dick! Oh, God, that’s the
funniest thing I ever heard!’

But as Gil laughed, and pounded his
fists on the bed, Santos remained unsmiling.

He waited for Gil to finish, and
kept his eyes fastened on the crucifix that hung on the wall of his room.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and
prayed, and then he crossed himself twice.

Gil abruptly stopped laughing, and
stared at him, his forehead marked with a glaring crimson bruise, his upper lip
caked with dried blood from his nose.’ What are you doing?’ he asked, in a
hollow-sounding voice.

‘I am praying for my own
protection,’ he said.

Gil turned toward the crucifix, and
then back toward Santos. ‘Protection from what?’ he demanded. ‘Come on, tell
me, protection from
what?’

H
enry was asleep on the couch when
Lieutenant Ortega called around. At first, he thought that the persistent
buzzing of the doorbell was a large mosquito, and he flapped at the air several
times to get rid of it. Then he opened his eyes and saw the sunlight and the
ceiling and the half-empty bottle of vodka on the table, next to Andrea’s book
on eels, and he was jolted back to reality like a man arriving at the lobby of
a cheap hotel in a badly serviced elevator.

He opened the door. Lieutenant
Ortega was standing on the concrete doorstep, neat and smart in his
cinnamon-coloured suit and his cinnamon-coloured necktie, his hands clasped
behind his back, inspecting Henry’s thermometer.

‘Eighty-two already,’ be smiled.
‘Looks like we’re in for a hot afternoon.’

Henry smeared his hand all over his
face, trying to reassemble his features. The older he got, and the drunker he
got, the larger his face seemed to spread, and the less disciplined its component
parts seemed to become. His forehead felt like a ploughed field that it would
take hours to walk across. His jowls seemed to hang like theatre curtains. The
bags under his eyes were hammocks, in which fat and indolent matelots swung.

‘You’d, uh,’ he said, gesturing
behind him, ‘better come in.’

Lieutenant Ortega walked past him
into the living-room. His suit may have looked cheap but his after-shave was
Giorgio of Beverley Hills. He stood in the centre of the carpet, carefully
tugging his cuffs and looking around him. Henry closed the door. He was pretty
sure that Lieutenant Ortega had immediately taken note of the vodka bottle and
the book on eels.

‘What happened this morning on the
beach, that was very distressing,’ said Lieutenant Ortega. His Latin accent was
soft but distinctive.

‘It was not only distressing, it was
unnatural,’
said Henry. He walked
across the room, tucking in his shirt-tails, and collected up the bottle of
vodka. He tightened the screw-cap, and put the bottle back in the cupboard.

‘I will be talking later to the two
young people who were with you,’ said the lieutenant.

‘But I thought first of all that I
would like to discuss the matter with you. You are, after all, a man of
learning, are you not?’

Henry shrugged, and sniffed. ‘Learning,
yes. Wisdom, only possibly.’

Lieutenant Ortega leaned over the
book of eels. Henry had been reading about their dietary habits. Henry watched
him for a moment, and then volunteered, ‘There doesn’t seem to be any record of
eels attacking a human being
en masse,
the
way those eels did.’

‘Well, it’s something of a mystery,’
Lieutenant Ortega admitted. ‘We still have the beach cordoned off, and we have
asked the people from Scripps to come along and dig out the remaining eels for
us. Then perhaps we can find out how to deal with them.’

‘It could be a serious problem,
couldn’t it, killer eels, just before the vacation season?’

Lieutenant Ortega smiled distantly.
‘I don’t think we have a
Jaws
situation
on our hands, Professor Watkins. This is probably an isolated tragedy. Some
deep-sea eels which were brought close to shore by the current. We’ve been
having some unusual tides here lately; you know for yourself how
uncharacteristic the weather has been.’

‘What does your medical examiner
think?’ asked Henry. ‘He seemed like a pretty opinionated kind of guy.’

‘Oh, him. John Belli. Don’t take too
much notice of him. He would run the whole investigation single handed, if we
allowed him. He watches too much
Quincy
on
television.

He’s good, yes, I have to confess,
but he sometimes fails to see the whole picture.

How and when somebody died is
usually not half as important as
why.’

Henry said, ‘What do you think I can
do for you? Would you like some coffee?’

Lieutenant Ortega nodded. ‘Yes, some
coffee would be appreciated. Black, please.’

Henry went through to the kitchen,
which was an untidy jumble of washed-up dishes that hadn’t yet been put away,
cups, glasses, boxes of cereal, and sprawled-out newspaper sections. He rinsed
out the coffee jug, filled it, and unfolded a fresh filter-paper.

‘Mocha. You like mocha, lieutenant?’

‘Perhaps you should call me
Salvador. I’m not much of a stickler for formality.’

‘Salvador, okay. My name’s Henry.
Well, you know that.’

They shook hands. Henry looked
around the kitchen and said, ‘Excuse the – well, I was working all night. The
place doesn’t usually stay too tidy when I’m working.’

‘You were thinking about the eels
this morning, then?’ asked Salvador.

‘Yes, I was thinking about the
eels.’

‘And what line of thinking were you
pursuing? Is it possible for you to tell me that?’