Linger Awhile

  ‘Lester Chun isn’t at home very much,’ said Chauncey. ‘He travels a lot.’

  We sat there with our drinks not making much eye contact while I looked around the room.

  ‘You looking at me?’ said Elijah.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just the room.’ White walls and only one picture, a Chagall lithograph with an elongated female nude slanting to the right while being admired by a standing-on-air black cock with an inner man. Perhaps a full moon up above, perhaps an Eiffel tower down below, a man’s face at the base? Looking at the picture I began to hear klezmer music in my mind. I thought of Luise von Himmelbett whom I loved a long time ago. And was unfaithful to. And lost. Maybe loss is the main action of the universe and we’re here because the universe wants us to experience it. So why did I bring Justine Trimble out of my primordial soup? And why was I a little jealous of Chauncey Lim? I looked at the kelim under my feet and the pattern didn’t do anything, didn’t move forward and back like the optical-illusion bathroom tiles of my childhood.

  ‘Yo, Uncle Ish,’ said Justine as she came into the room. She looked great and gave me a hug and a kiss. Her breath stank and when she stepped back she looked a little wild, the way she did when she came home on the night she killed Rose Harland and had sex with two different men afterward. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ she said. ‘Chauncey won’t mind, will you, Chaunce?’

  ‘I don’t care a rat’s arse either way,’ said Chauncey.

  ‘Do it, Uncle Ish,’ said Elijah. ‘Do Justine.’

  ‘You don’t sound like yourself,’ I said to Chauncey. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘“The lotus springs from the mud.”’

  ‘What lotus are we talking about?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I find out,’ said Chauncey.

  ‘I’m a Texas lotus that sprung out of the soup,’ said Justine. ‘How about it, Ish? You up for a little action?’

  ‘Pas ce soir, Josephine,’ I said. ‘Have a drink.’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ she said. She got it down her neck pretty quickly. ‘Well, if nobody needs me here I might as well take a walk.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Chauncey, ‘a little exercise always puts roses in your cheeks.’

  ‘I’m off then,’ she said. ‘See you both later.’

  Chauncey and I drank more whisky. ‘What is it?’ I said after a while.

  ‘What is what?’ he said.

  ‘Come on, Chaunce,’ I said. ‘There’s something bothering you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘My falling in love with Justine was a delusion that came out of my wanting to take her away from you. That was how it started, then when we got into sharing her it seemed a really cool thing to do but now …’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I find Justine disgusting. The whole thing disgusts me. You got into it because Irving Goodman was obsessed with Justine from watching her old movies. You caught the obsession from him and you manufactured this creature that’s committed murder so that now we have to keep looking over our shoulders. How long will it go on?’

  ‘That’s a good question,’ I said. ‘I wish I knew the answer.’

  27

  Justine Two

  30 January 2004. When I stuck my tongue in that guy’s mouth it made him crazy but he liked it and his johnson stood up like a man. But he didn’t want to go all the way and he started fighting me when I went for his neck. I was strong enough to take charge but I was feeling funny, I was having flashes of dark and wet and I wanted a strong male gripping me from behind while my eggs spilled out oh yes. Hold on, I said to myself, this is no place to spawn, you’re a movie star. Walk, don’t hop, you’re as human as anybody else. Or almost.

  This was in a kind of alley full of little shops that sold books, maps, prints, posters, antiques and so on. People coming and going while I leaned against a wall for a little while till I got myself straight. That was Cecil Court. When I came out of there I was in a big bright street full of cars and people: St Martin’s Lane. There were cafés and coffee shops with people eating and drinking and I thought I might try that but I didn’t have any money. So I kept going until I passed a place where people were going in and lining up for tickets and then a store with opera music coming out of it. Kept going till I came to a corner and turned into a dark street where I saw a man coming toward me. I did my fainting thing and when he caught me I gave him a big wet kiss and it flew him to the moon. This time I kept my mind on my work and when I got to his neck I bit him good and started a nice flow. Oh boy there’s nothing like getting it the natural way, no tubes or technical stuff. I didn’t empty him, just had a nice top-up and he was feeling good about it the whole time so we had a little poontang party in a doorway. He wasn’t able to get out of a sitting position so I sat on his lap and that worked fine. His cap fell off and some people passing by dropped money in it. I also took a little from his wallet for expenses but I gave back the wallet and helped him zip up his pants, then I kissed him goodbye and left him sitting there smiling and shaking his head. When I was half-way back to the corner I heard him yell, ‘Oh my God!’ but I didn’t turn around. Maybe he was married and he felt guilty all of a sudden.

  Then I did feel hungry for regular food so I went back to a café I’d passed earlier, Gaby’s Deli in the Charing Cross Road near Leicester Square. I was picking up street names because when I didn’t see signs I asked people where I was. Gaby’s had a yellow awning that said HOT SALT BEEF, FALAFEL, SALADS. A sign by the door said LONDON’S BEST VEGETARIAN FALAFEL & SALAD IN PITTA. And above the awning the name in big silver three-dimensional letters with Est. 1965. The place looked busy and it smelled good when I opened the door so I went inside. I had a salt beef on rye and a bottle of beer. They didn’t have Coors or Corona so I had Maccabee because I thought it might be a Scotch beer but there was Jewish lettering on the label. The salt beef was nothing special but the beer was good. It was warm in there and the place was full of everybody’s smells. There were a lot of foreigners talking in their different languages. The lights were too bright and the voices were too loud. The man and woman at the table behind me, maybe they thought they weren’t talking loud. He was saying in his English accent, ‘There’s no reason to fake it if you can’t come, you don’t have to put on a performance for me.’ ‘I wasn’t faking it,’ she lied. Jesus, the things these people worry about. Where I come from the women don’t have time to fake it because the men are all done in ten seconds or less. But Gaby’s was OK – people talking and laughing and a couple of men giving me the eye. Well, I thought, it’s a long hop from El Paso but London isn’t so bad.

  There must have been a couple of pounds of salt beef in my sandwich and I was still working on it with my second Maccabee when this guy comes in and sits down facing me. Worn-out looking character in his sixties, white hair but he might have been a redhead once. ‘Justine!’ he says.

  ‘How come you know my name?’ I said.

  ‘What is this,’ he said, ‘amnesia? I brought you into the world, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘In a pig’s ass you did,’ I said.

  ‘Why aren’t you in Golders Green?’ he said. ‘You’re looking a little strange too. Are you on something?’

  ‘Look, Buster,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about or how you got my name but if you’re coming on to me I have to tell you that this salt beef and the beer are really weighing me down and I don’t feel much like spawning right now.’

  ‘Spawning!’ he said. ‘What are you, a salmon?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘You wanna see my warts?’

  ‘Some other time,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re on but you’re a little bit too weird for me tonight. I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Not if I see you first,’ I told him. When he left I was remembering his scrawny white neck. The salt beef and the beer were going round and round in me so I paid up and just made it outside in time to barf in the street wh
ich didn’t get me any applause from the passers-by. I went back to Cecil Court hoping to find somebody to take the bad taste out of my mouth and there was Mr Scrawny from Gaby’s looking in the window of a bookstore. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you’ when I tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t more friendly back there in Gaby’s Deli,’ I said. ‘Let me make it up to you.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take a rain check if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Well, friend,’ I said, ‘it ain’t, so I’ll just have a little taste of your neck if you don’t mind.’

  ‘But I do mind,’ he said, too late because I already had my teeth in him. ‘Well,’ he said just before he passed out, ‘this’ll teach me to let Irv Goodman give me a bottle of Scotch.’

  I was still trying to get a good flow going when I realised he was empty. I guess these old ones run dry pretty quick.

  28

  Grace Kowalski

  31 January 2004. Maybe three toads in the soup were one too many. When J Two snogged Artie he started hallucinating so badly that he almost had Irv and me convinced that a huge hopping thing was coming through the wall. She’s some piece of work, that girl. And strong. After putting the frighteners on the three of us she grabbed her wet clothes, got dressed, and headed for the door. Irv and I tried to stop her but she scattered us like tenpins and hopped it. Now I know how Frankenstein felt. And at least his creation had a bolt through the neck so that anybody could see that he wasn’t the usual thing. J Two was pretty, for God’s sake.

  Obviously the thing to do would have been to go after her and bring her back before she did any harm. Right, but Irv wasn’t up to that kind of thing, Artie was hiding under the bed, and I was no match for her. I couldn’t very well ring up the police and tell them to be on the lookout for a sexy woman in wet clothes with a hallucinogenic tongue. Would she be out for blood already? If not, she soon would be.

  What had I intended when I brought her out of the soup? I wanted to teach Istvan a lesson. How? What kind of lesson? I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. And, as Artie has said, once you see that a thing is possible you want to make it happen. I ought to have learnt by now that I tend to act without considering the consequences. Now the consequences were loose in Soho, out there in the dark. I wondered how soon we’d read about J Two in the papers.

  29

  Detective Inspector Hunter

  31 January 2004. Connecting the dots will usually give you some kind of picture but you can’t always be sure what’s a dot; maybe it’s a mouse turd. Last night a man came into the station looking around wildly and complaining of being followed by ‘some huge hopping thing’. He was Walter Dixon, thirty-two, a freelance writer. ‘What do you write?’ I asked him.

  ‘Science fiction,’ he said. Casually dressed but respectable, didn’t strike me as an addict of any kind but you never know with writers. I sat him down, got him a coffee, and said, ‘Please begin at the beginning.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but keep your eye on the walls because it could be hopping through at any moment.’ He kept turning his head like a blind man listening for something.

  ‘You’re pretty safe here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got armed officers for just such emergencies and if it hops through a wall we’ll book it. When did you first become aware of it?’

  ‘Around half-eight in Cecil Court.’

  ‘What were you doing in Cecil Court?’

  ‘I’d just had a salt beef sandwich and a couple of beers at Gaby’s Deli in Charing Cross Road and I was standing in front of Watkins Books looking at their window …’

  ‘Yes, go on.’

  ‘The Illusion of Reality by Sredni Bufo was the featured book. No, I’ve got the name wrong.’

  ‘Never mind. You were standing in front of Watkins and?’

  ‘Hang on – I don’t feel its presence any more, I think it’s gone. I don’t know what came over me. Look, I don’t want to be wasting your time so I really should be going.’

  ‘Don’t go just yet,’ I said. ‘It’s been my experience that these huge hopping things don’t usually turn up without a reason. Two beers wouldn’t do it. Was there anything before the hopping thing?’

  ‘Ah! The woman …’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘Standing next to me. Suddenly she crumpled and I caught her just before she hit the ground. I said, “Gotcha” and she held on to me. She gave me a great big wet slobbery kiss. My God, she tasted awful, then she was nuzzling my neck. Her mouth was very wet and she began to bite me but I fought her off.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then she wasn’t there but the hopping thing came after me – didn’t attack me, just kept hopping behind me with a squelching sound each time it hit the ground.’

  ‘Can you describe the woman?’

  ‘Quite pretty, blonde, about five foot six. Her clothes were damp and smelly.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘Some kind of western outfit. Cowboy boots.’

  ‘Do you mind if I take a swab from your mouth and your neck?’ I said.

  ‘What for?’ he said.

  ‘You never know,’ I said. Afterward I took his address and phone number and gave him my card. ‘Let me know if you remember anything else,’ I said. ‘Any time of the day or night.’ I sent the samples off to the lab and that was it for Monday evening. When I got home I took my shoes off, put my feet up, drank some whisky, and listened to Alison Krauss and the Cox family. I fell asleep in my chair and dreamt that Rose Harland was waiting for me on the far-side bank of Jordan. ‘I’ll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand,’ she sang, ‘and when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout. And come running through the shallow waters, reaching for your hand.’ I could still see her face as I woke up, then it faded and I went to bed. As I was drifting off to sleep I heard myself say, ‘Definitely not a mouse turd.’

  1 February 2004. Scotland Yard e-mailed me a photo sent by Ralph Darling of Witheridge in Devon. He’d written to say that his sister Rachael had gone to London last November in a depressed state of mind and he hadn’t heard from her since. He was worried about her and he wanted to know if there was any news of her. A living face in a photograph looks quite different to a dead one but when I had the Devon photo side by side with ours I was pretty sure it was a match. So that was her name, Rachael Darling. I rang up Ralph Darling and he came in to identify the body of his sister.

  He was a very large man in corduroy trousers and a reefer jacket. I’m six feet tall and he was half a head taller and broad. He had big hands, rough and red, and he smelled of cows. ‘It never goes away,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an organic dairy farm outside Witheridge.’

  Rachael was in the mortuary at St Hubert’s Hospital. I took her brother there and sat him down in the little waiting room while I went through to talk to Morton Taylor, the technician. Taylor consulted his clipboard and wheeled a trolley over to the banks of refrigerated body trays. He raised the trolley bed up to No. 12 and slid Rachael Darling’s tray on to it. Then he transferred her to another trolley with a blue floral-print skirt, put a pillow under her head and a blanket over her, and wheeled her into the chapel of rest where the lighting is subdued so the paleness of death won’t be too startling and the atmosphere seems hushed by virtue of a large wooden cross on a stand. I always expect a recording of non-denominational organ music, ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ or whatever and I’m always thankful for its absence.

  At this point I brought Ralph Darling in. He came over to the bier, looked down at her, sobbed and covered his face with his hands. After a few moments he took his hands away. ‘That’s her,’ he said, and clenched his fists. ‘She looks so pale, like a ghost. How’d she die?’

  ‘We can’t know for certain,’ I said.

  ‘I think you do know. Don’t play games with me.’

  ‘All right, but you won’t like it.’

  ‘Go on, Inspector.’

  ‘All the bl
ood was drained out of her body,’ I said.

  He was becoming very angry, I thought he was going to hit me and he was about two stone heavier than I was. ‘How?’ he said. ‘Who did it?’

  I pointed to the wound in her neck.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Is this some kind of horrible joke?

  Are you telling me there are vampires in London?’

  ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He stood there shaking his head for a while. ‘Could I have a look at her flat?’ he said.

  I took him round to Beak Street. On the way there I said, ‘Was she married?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Anyone in her life, a boyfriend?’

  ‘No, why are you asking?’

  ‘When a case is still unsolved like this I try to find out as much as I can,’ I said. When we got to the flat I removed the police tapes from the door, and we went inside. He stood there taking in the goneness of his sister. London silences always have the background of London traffic. ‘Could I be alone in here for a few minutes?’ he said.

  ‘Certainly, I’ll wait for you outside.’

  After about ten minutes he came out. ‘Do you think you’ll find whoever did this?’ he said.

  ‘We have a suspect that we want to talk to,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I can tell you just now.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ We shook hands and he walked away slowly.

  30

  Dr Wilbur Flood

  31 January 2004. I was coming through Cecil Court early in the morning on my way to the lab when I heard a woman singing with a down-home accent:

  Tweedle-O-Twill, puffin’ on corn silk,

  Tweedle-O-Twill, whittlin’ wood,

  Settin’ there wishin’ he could go fishin’

  Over the hill, Tweedle-O-Twill.

  That’s a Gene Autry song, and the last time I heard it was back in Tennessee about thirty years ago. My daddy used to sing it when he was working on his old Ford pickup.