‘We’ll work it out, you’ll see,’ Ray went on. ‘There are worse things in the world. Have you heard what’s been happening here in New York?’
‘No, you know I cut myself off completely when I’m on Saint Croix.’
‘The Mayor’s son was murdered. You know, the painter. And Chandelle Stuart, too.’
Alex Campbell started feeling palpitations in his chest, and he broke out in a cold sweat. The hand holding the cellphone grew clammy.
He asked a question to which he already knew the answer. ‘Chandelle Stuart the steel heiress?’
‘That’s the one. They’re not saying much about it, but it looks like it’s the same killer both times. Could be a good idea for a thriller.’
Alex Campbell’s mouth was so dry, he could barely speak.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes, I’m here. How did it happen?’
‘Nobody knows. Like I said, they’re not giving anything away. Only what I just told you. Understandable, given that it’s the son of Christopher Marsalis . . . What’s the matter, Alex, are you all right?’
‘Sorry, I’m just a little tired. Don’t worry, I’m fine.’
But he wasn’t fine at all.
The sour taste of fear had returned, and as so often in the past, his first impulse was to run away. He would have liked to tell the cab driver to turn around and go back to the airport. He wanted to be back in the peace and quiet of his island. Only the fact that there wouldn’t be any planes to take him there until the next day stopped him.
‘OK,’ Ray said. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow. We can decide what to do then.’
‘All right.’
He hung up as the cab turned from First Avenue onto 34th Street. From that moment on, the ride home was a series of out-of-focus images of neon signs and moving cars through the dirty windows.
His temples were throbbing. Even though it wasn’t the right time, he searched in his bag for the plastic box and swallowed a Ramipril, the pill he took to keep his blood pressure down.
Two names continued to echo in his head.
Gerald and Chandelle.
And one word.
Murdered.
He didn’t have time to indulge in memories. The cab stopped outside his building almost without his having noticed the distance they had travelled. He paid and got out. As he looked for his keys, he walked towards the low, welcoming building, with the three steps leading up to the walnut front door and the brass knocker.
Bedford Street was a short, narrow street close to the Hudson, and at that hour was quiet and dimly lit. The only light came from an old-fashioned tailor’s shop on the corner with Commerce Street, just opposite his building. The fact that the light was on was a sign that someone was still working there, but Alex Campbell was so lost in thought that he barely noticed. Nor did he notice a rundown old car parked 100 yards further back that set off as his taxi entered the street and drove up behind him with its headlamps off. He did not hear the car stop or see the man who got out, leaving his car door open, and came towards him. The man was wearing a tracksuit with the hood up and limping slightly with his right leg. Alex Campbell had just climbed the steps and was inserting the key in the lock when he saw an arm enter his field of vision. Immediately he felt a damp cloth pressed to his nose and mouth. He tried to struggle free, but his attacker was holding him in a suffocating vice, with his other arm around his neck.
He tried to breathe, but a sharp smell of chloroform filled his nostrils. He felt a slight burning sensation in his eyes, his sight grew blurred, and his legs gradually gave way. His slender body collapsed into the arms of his attacker, who held him up without any difficulty.
A few moments later, he was slumped in the back seat of a beat-up Dodge Nova. The hooded man sat down in the driving seat and, without switching on the headlamps, moved away from the kerb and unhurriedly joined the lights and chaos of the traffic.
CHAPTER 32
Alex Campbell was naked and terrified.
He lay there, freezing cold, ribs jolted by the poor suspension, in the dark, foul-smelling trunk of a fast-moving car.
After the attack outside his front door, he had not fainted completely but had remained sunk in a strange torpor that had left his body as heavy as if his bones had suddenly turned to lead. The first corners the driver had taken had sent him slipping little by little from the worn seat to the floor of the car. He had lain there as they had driven along a street that had seemed interminable, with the dusty smell of the carpet under his nose, seeing the lights of the city from a low angle. After a time, they had stopped in a deserted, dimly lit area, with a yellow light flashing intermittently in the distance: a lighthouse, maybe, or an air traffic control tower.
He had heard the click of the back door opening and cold air had rushed in. The air smelled of rust and seaweed, and for the first time in his dazed state he had had a lucid thought. He had realized that they must be somewhere near water.
A man had entered his field of vision, dressed in a cheap tracksuit, his face covered in a ski mask, with openings through which only the eyes and mouth could be glimpsed. He had grabbed Alex with black-gloved hands, pulled him up as easily as if he was a weightless bundle, and sat him up again on the back seat with his legs protruding out of the car, dangling in the air like a puppet at the mercy of a puppetmaster.
He had seen his abductor take a roll of adhesive tape and a large utility knife from his pocket. The blade had glittered menacingly in the semi-darkness as, with a few rapid, precise gestures, the man cut a strip of tape and placed it over Alex’s mouth and another which he placed around his wrists.
He had then taken him out and, supporting him effortlessly, had dragged him to the back of the car. There, he had propped him against the bodywork, keeping him in that position by putting one arm around his waist, while opening the lock of the trunk with his free hand.
The man had hoisted Alex roughly inside, lifting his legs to cram them in, and trained a torch at his face. Alex had seen the blade of the knife enter the beam of light just in front of his eyes. His heart pounding crazily, he had lost control of his body and had urinated and defecated at the same time.
He had emitted a desperate whimper, which the man had ignored completely, just as he had ignored the dark stain spreading over Alex’s pants. Calmly but skilfully, the man had started systematically cutting off his prisoner’s clothes. Alex had shuddered every time the blade had come into contact with his skin.
Tears continued streaming from his eyes. Bit by bit, he had been stripped bare, until he lay surrounded by torn shreds of clothing stinking of piss and shit and fear. The lid of the trunk had been closed, plunging him into darkness and leaving him alone with his terror and his stench.
In the silence, there were more sounds of doors closing, and then the engine started up, telling him that this had been only a halt and not their final destination.
Now he lay there in the trunk, thinking frantically.
Who was this man?
What did he want from him?
He remembered what Ray had told him not so long ago – an hour? a century?
– Gerald Marsalis and Chandelle Stuart were dead.
The two people he had once known as Linus and Lucy had been murdered. And now he was bound naked in the trunk of a car, perhaps travelling to the same fate.
He could feel his teeth chattering uncontrollably with fear beneath the tape that covered his mouth. And with the fear, as predictably as those signals from his cellphone telling him when to take his pills, came the remorse – guilt and sorrow for something that had happened a long, long time ago.
For years he had wanted to tell that story, but had never had the courage. In a way he had tried to tell it in his books, through the medium of words on paper, hiding his confession in metaphors, even though he knew these attempts would never bring absolution.
After a while –
an hour? a century?
– Alex felt the car stop with
a jolt, as if it had mounted the sidewalk.
While the engine purred, he heard a door opening. Immediately afterwards came a sharp metallic noise, and then another like an anchor chain being pulled and the squeal of a gate opening on badly oiled hinges.
Again the door closing and again the movement, as they drove slowly down a street that seemed to be full of holes. Then the car stopped for good and the engine was switched off.
Alex again heard the creak of the door opening and then the noise of footsteps on the gravel, and at every step his heart thudded. The lid of the trunk was opened and the light of the torch aimed downwards, allowing him to glimpse the outline of the man, who was clutching a long pair of wire-cutters in his right hand, holding it across his shoulder to balance the weight. He gave a brief glance at his passenger, lighting the interior of the trunk for a moment, and then, as if satisfied by what he had seen, closed the lid again, leaving a yellow blotch in Alex’s eyes as his only memory of the light.
All the noises from outside reached Alex through the filter of the throbbing he felt in his ears. After what seemed an endless series of palpitations, the thumping in his heart suddenly became a paroxysm of irregular beats, a phenomenon he had learned over time to recognize and dread. He was finding it harder and harder to breathe, as if the oxygen was not getting to his lungs.
In normal circumstances, he would have started breathing through his mouth, sucking greedily at the air he needed to survive, but right now, with the tape preventing him from doing that, he had only his nostrils to rely on. The dust and the stench of his own excrement were like a film gradually clogging the narrow passageways through which the air reached his ribcage.
His heartbeat was now a succession of short, desperate contractions.
pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc
Acid sweat was running down his forehead and into his eyes, burning them. He tried to raise his arms to wipe his face, but the position he was in and the tape on his wrists made that impossible.
From outside came a new noise, sharp and metallic, like that of a padlock being cut, then the screech of a sliding door, then footsteps approaching on a gravel surface.
pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc
The lock of the trunk snapped open. As a sliver of light came in, Alex heard a muffled cry and saw his attacker raise his left arm to support his right as if, as he had opened it, the lid of the trunk had somehow injured him.
By the light of the torch, which he had placed on the roof of the car to have his hands free, the man, with an instinctive gesture, rolled up the right sleeve of his tracksuit to check the injury. There was blood on his skin, all the way from his wrist to . . .
Alex’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
On his abductor’s right forearm was a big, colourful tattoo depicting a demon with the body of a man and thin butterfly wings.
Alex knew that tattoo, and knew who wore it. He knew when it had been done, where it had been done and who had one just like it.
And he also knew that the person who had one just like it was dead.
The effect of the chloroform had by now completely worn off. He started whimpering and tugging and kicking in a fit of hysteria while his heart
pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc
pounded uninterruptedly in his throat and chest.
As if surprised by his own gesture, the man hurriedly rolled down the sleeve of his tracksuit and partly closed the trunk, leaning his body on it. Through the crack, Alex saw him bend double, clutching his arm as if the pain was very strong. A bloodstain was spreading over his sleeve.
At that moment, from some vague point in the darkness, came a voice.
‘Hey, what’s going on? Who are you? How did you get in here?’
The weight on the trunk eased and the lid, freed from the man’s body, went up slightly. The suspension gave a jolt, and the torch fell from the roof of the car and went out.
Alex heard steps rapidly approaching, then the sound of other steps on gravel as his abductor moved away from the car.
‘Hey, you! Stop where you are!’
There was the sound of running feet coming past the car, and he surmised that his abductor had run away and the new-comer was running after him. The echo of the two men’s steps faded in the distance.
Silence.
Alex raised his head and pushed the half-closed lid up with his forehead until it opened completely and he was at last able to see where he was. It was a large, dimly lit open space. To his left, in the distance, perhaps on the other side of the river, were the familiar lights of New York. To his right, on the edge of his field of vision, were streetlamps and buildings and a road running alongside a metal fence.
Those lights and those buildings meant that there were cars, people, help.
Life.
Pressing his legs against the wall of the trunk, he managed with difficulty to turn and sit up. With equal difficulty, he raised his bound hands to his mouth and pulled off the tape. He sucked at the damp night air as if it was his mother’s breast. His heart was still pounding in his chest. He felt as if it might explode at any moment and transform his naked body into a shower of bloody fragments.
pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc
Trying not to hit his head on the lid that swayed over him, Alex awkwardly turned and got on his knees. Supporting himself with his hands on the edge of the trunk, he managed to climb out, leaving his soiled and torn clothes behind.
He took a few hesitant steps towards the distant lights, heedless that he was walking on the rough surface of an unpaved street. He did not even glance at the warehouse outside which the car had parked. All that mattered were the lights he could see ahead of him, which right now represented his only hope of survival.
In a flash, he remembered the bloody tattoo he had glimpsed in the torchlight. Alex knew who the man was, and he knew what he would be capable of doing to him if he came back, even though he didn’t know why.
This thought added terror to terror and gave his brain the nervous energy he needed to order his numbed legs to move.
In panic, he started running towards those lights, a dull pain still throbbing in his ears and chest
pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc pa-tuc
not even noticing that his bare feet were leaving bloody prints on the rough ground.
CHAPTER 33
The police car, a blue and white Ford Corona, slowly descended the ramp from the Williamsburg Bridge and turned right. This area was mainly inhabited by Orthodox Jews, with their hats, beards and long side-locks, but at this hour there was almost nobody about. The lights in the kosher butchers’ shops and supermarkets were off and the shutters down.
Manhattan with all its colours was far enough away to make this area seem like a different world entirely. There were only a few cars passing. Officer Serena Hitchin, a pretty twenty-nine-year-old black woman, was at the wheel and Lukas Furst, her partner, was sitting beside her, smiling and beating a somewhat unsteady rhythm with his hands on the plastic dashboard.
‘Is this how it’s supposed to go?’ he asked.
Serena had for some time been in a relationship with a member of the cast of Stomp, the musical that had been playing for a number of years at the Orpheum, a theatre on Second Avenue. Lukas knew how important the relationship was to her but never lost an opportunity to tease her good-naturedly about it.
Serena laughed. ‘You really don’t have any ear for music, Luke.’
Lukas leaned back in his seat, a smug expression on his face. ‘Is that so? You may like to know I was in the church choir when I was a kid.’
‘That must have been before God appeared during the service, pointed to you and said, “Either he goes or I do”.’
Lukas turned towards her with his index fingers crossed, as if Serena were a vampire. ‘Silence, blasphemer. If that had really happened, the Almighty would have pointed me out to everybody and said, “This is My masterpiece. One day this man will be
great”.’
Serena chuckled, showing white, regular teeth. ‘You’re really crazy, you know. Still think that, huh?’
‘Of course I think it. It’ll happen sooner or later, you’ll see. My name in lights on Broadway, and then I’ll show up at the precinct in a car that’ll turn you all green with envy. Look what happened to Captain Schimmer . . .’
Lukas Furst was a handsome young man, who looked especially good in uniform. He had indulged his passion for showbusiness – and a certain talent – by attending a whole series of acting classes, and every now and again played walk-on parts in movies or TV shows. At the precinct, everyone still remembered the pride with which he had announced that he was appearing in a Woody Allen film. He had dragged them all to the movie theatre, and when the scene had finally arrived they had seen him from the back for about two seconds. The teasing had continued for days.
Lukas opened a window to light a cigarette. By a tacit agreement with his partner, that was the only way he was allowed to smoke.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the captain made it. He got the break.’
The Captain Schimmer he was talking about had become a police consultant on movies and, when he had retired, still quite young, had delved further into that world and now often appeared on screen playing cop roles in movies and TV shows.
‘Your break was to join the police, Luke,’ Serena said. ‘I don’t think you’d ever leave this job. You like it too much.’
Lukas took a last puff and threw his cigarette out the window. Then he turned to Serena. ‘Of course -– I was born to be a police officer. But I also like the idea that I was born to win an Oscar one day. And when I do, I’ll thank my ex-partner Serena Hitchin, who with her faith in me and her support helped me to achieve my goal.’
It was a quiet night, they got along well, they were pleased with their lives and their work, and there was no valid reason not to joke between themselves.
But as always happens, the valid reason soon presented itself.