Communion Town (13 page)

7. The Heart is a Crime Scene

Eleven-seventy-four Lorenz Drive was out in the hills beyond the city limits, one of the winding high-banked avenues that ran for miles with now and then a big villa set far back above the road. The final scrap of dawn-time cool was cooking out of the air as I steered my coughing, bucking jalopy round the curves. Most of the gates were chained and padlocked. In spite of the splendid seclusion, the folks who lived out here found it too close to the sickness stewing down in the city. Same as always they’d cleared out to their country retreats until the heat was off.

The last of the dawn evaporated, the sun flicked itself clear of the hills and got straight into burning, and the curves went rolling past, the gatepost numbers rising at a crawl. The aspect began to change. Soon the gates were rusted and broken in, and the paths beyond them choked with dark greenery. Then nothing for a stretch. I drove on.

When I found it, the place turned out to be only half there. Some time back they’d begun construction of the last in the necklace of hillside villas, but work had stopped at the bare structure, leaving an abstraction of a house in concrete and brick, which had since been crumbling. The doors and windows were bare rectangular gaps.

I zigzagged up the steep driveway and braked to a stop in the dish of dust out front of the house. What did you want to bring me here for? I clumped the jalopy’s door shut, settled my hat on my head and shot my cuffs. I didn’t like it. It was seven-oh-two a.m. precisely. Why had I agreed to come? There was no sign of you. There were no other vehicles. I squatted and eyed the dust fruitlessly.

Inside, the house was an undivided space, still wide open at the back. A stack of breeze blocks had partly fallen over in the uncompleted aperture. An approximation of a staircase led nowhere. All at once I was on the point of calling your name out loud.

Then I heard an engine snarl and tyres in grit.

Anyone could tell it was time to disappear out the back and wait to see how things unfolded. But I paused an unforgivable moment, there in the open of the half-made house. Doesn’t that tell you everything, kid? Doesn’t that tell you how much trouble I was in? More than anything else, what I wanted was to see a certain shape outlined in that doorless doorway, so I bought into the sudden lift of excitement in my chest, and I paused.

And the light was blocked out. Don Cherub shouldered into the room, followed by his brother.

‘Hal. Seems you ain’t given up.’

‘Where is she?’ My head felt as hard, angular and hollow as the heaped blocks. ‘Where is she?’

‘That,’ said Don, ‘is what you ain’t going to find out.’

‘Tell me where she is.’

‘You should have listened in the first place, Hal, and turned down the case. But you ain’t a man to take friendly advice. So here we are again.’

Don was holding something close to his leg, something blunt and leaden. Brass glinted at Dave’s fist. I lifted my chin. No one quite seemed to know what to say next.

‘Come on, then,’ I offered at last, and, shyly, the brothers moved towards me.

… mid-morning sunlight angled through the holes and tracked across unfinished floor. Dust moved in small whorls, the motes buddying up and falling out again. I stirred. I was spread on the ground all ready for outlining in white tape. I moved a hand to find out what shape my head was, then sat up, full of regrets. From the precipice of the staircase you’d have seen me feeling my skull, surrounded by scattered gold bits. They had burst from my pockets and the Cherubs had left them where they fell. Those boys and their professional ethics.

You hadn’t been here. I gave it to myself straight: she wasn’t here, it was them instead. I was in no state not to despair. There were no leads, there was no way forward. I knew nothing about you except what wouldn’t help.

With my thoughts cramped tight as my jaw I gathered up the thin coins, restoring every last one to my pockets. I knew their weight, now, to the penny. I thought I’d head back into the city then inter myself at the back of Meaney’s and see how many whiskies I could swap them for. Then I noticed something else in the dust. I picked it up. A business card: a name, unknown to me, was printed on the front, and the name of a trade, and an address. But when I flipped it over, the pale-pencilled handwriting there nearly floored me again. The characters were already fixed in my mind. Four words.
Take care of yourself
.

8. Tough Guys Bruise Easy

I pounded the streets. I’d have driven but the Cherubs had cut my tyres, so the jalopy was beached up on Lorenz Drive and I’d slogged it back into the city on foot, parched, earning blisters. The cheap business card was in my pocket, its edges already rubbed soft by my fidgeting thumb. My thinking was, you’d slipped it into my pocket back in the office. I didn’t like that but it was something to go on. It took me all afternoon to find the address. It wasn’t a district I knew, and I kept having to turn back, making detours with my handkerchief clutched to my nose and mouth, because the red sigils clustered ever thicker and just out of sight the bells were ringing. Plenty of streets were too far gone for containment. The doors hung open and bodies lay half in and half out, kinked across doorsteps and kerbstones, able to crawl so far and no further, or perhaps in some confused attempt to cool down. In these murky trenches the air lay like piping hot asparagus soup. They moaned to each other, lifting mottled limbs, the ones that could. Here and there daring entrepreneurs, their bodies robed and their heads swaddled in herb-stuffed bandages, slung the still and the still-twitching alike on their carts before hauling them off to collect a few pence a head at the burial pits. I hurried past, monitored by the rats that laced themselves in and out of the mounds blocking the alleys to the first-floor windowsills.

The address on the card turned out to be a sullen door a couple of steps below pavement level. I had to shove to reach it because the street was obstructed by a crowd of young boys and old women clustered around a pair of dogs fighting over some raggedly round, bloodied object. The spectators slashed at the frantic animals with sticks and shoes, and called out bets to each other.

I consulted the card again –

DOCTOR S. DOGG

MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE

97 DAPPER STREET, GLORY PART

– and was none the wiser. So I tightened my greasy half-windsor, rasped a palm across my jaw, and battered the wood with the heel of my fist. At once, locks tumbled and bolts shot on the other side. I was all ready to go in hard and force some answers out of there. But when the door opened I was struck stony.

She folded her arms tight under her bust. It didn’t look so friendly as sometimes. She spiked me with that challenging look she had, kohl-ringed for emphasis. The tough guy act is all very well for scaring up information from the unsuspecting, but what are you meant to do faced with a flimsy who’s looking at you like she’s seen all your tricks before? Worse, she had, and I knew it. The angle of her chin was saying she’d been more impressed by her puppy the last time it left a damp patch on the floor. I spluttered and found my tongue.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Believe it or not, Hal, you don’t know everything about me. A better question is what are
you
doing here?’

‘I’m on a case,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’ll bet you are. Listen –’ she glanced back into the dark house ‘– this ain’t a good place for you. Turn around and go home, all right?’

‘I’m on a case.’

She leant closer, and I caught the bready flavour of her breath. She spoke in a hurried undertone.

‘Dammit, Hal, I’m getting sick of looking out for you all the time.’ Her brown hair brushed my stubble, and her eyes softened, but only for a moment. ‘Do you even notice? You shouldn’t have come here. Go away!’

As she flared, she shoved me in the chest. I caught her wrist and we tussled on the threshold. I saw the gap in her strong teeth and tested the sturdy softness of her arms. But then a voice flowed out of the house’s interior, and a presence slid forward to encompass us. He was hard to see. He came over as a tidy group of impressions, a frictionless smile and hair parted with a ruler, a gust of cologne, a linen jacket crisply immune to the heat, a pair of pointed patent tiptoes that seemed to slip along on hidden rails, an arm that curled across Dolly’s shoulders and mine all at once to guide us together into the house. Above all he was a voice, a pleasant, continuous hum of a voice. The man was hard to see straight because the voice never stopped describing itself so smoothly.

‘Well,’ it said, ‘well well well, and who have you found for us today, Royal Doll, incomparable lady, can it be that you have brought us the well-known Mr Hal Moody? Ah, yes yes, very striking, most characterful, and so very much exactly as one would have expected, ha ha – we are honoured indeed though we flatter ourselves it was inevitable you should find your way here in due course – oh, allow me, yes, this way please, might I relieve you of your hat, ah, no, I perceive you prefer to retain that cephalic accoutrement, by all means, but may I introduce myself, I am known to one and all as the Captain, and may I express, Mr Moody, if I might, my admiration for, how shall I phrase it, your
straightforwardness
in coming here, no no, a particular species of courage without a doubt and I am quite confident we shall be more than able, and, needless to add, willing to ease you in actualising your desires given certain reciprocal considerations into which it would diminish us both to go further at this juncture. Yes, I can assure you it is merely a matter of procedures which though startling to the layman are for the initiated routine, and on that point I beg leave to introduce to you our learned colleague and I would go so far as to say the genius of our little republic – see how he appears from his potently befugged laboratory in the back – this is Dr Dogg himself, blinking behind the pebbly lenses of his erudition. Permit me to apologise in advance for the lapses in manners that are certain to ensue in the course of his conduct but we must take into account that he is a man of brilliance such as must not be yoked by the guidelines of quotidian social concord if we are to reap the bounty of his virtue – here, doctor, you see, our valued client himself, yes!’

This guy didn’t draw breath. He only smiled, smooth as Vaseline. He’d ushered us into a room in the heart of the house. In here there were no windows in the stained brick, and the only light was from a bulb dangling bare from the ceiling. The cement floor was tracked with oily marks. Even so, the Captain hovered in the middle of the den like it was the set of a game show.

The short, undernourished figure stumping from the back room, with his multicoloured fingers and the scorchmarks down the front of his smock, was more in keeping. He peered up at me and pursed his lips so that against his yellow pallor his sparse moustaches wriggled in their own grease. Blackheads stuck out of his nose like peppercorns. He began to quiver silently.

The room was furnished like a bankruptcy in a rag-and-bone shop. There was a sofa that looked to have spent some considerable time on a landfill; there was an incongruous full-length mirror, a selection of packing crates, and a three-panelled screen whose printed cotton had been ripped out, leaving only the wooden skeleton. Against one wall stood a glass tank, murky with waterweed, in which I saw a grey-green shape moving with flicks of a flattened leaf tail.

‘I observe that you share our esteemed doctor’s passion for natural history,’ said the Captain. ‘Here we find yet another one of creation’s young creatures which he has, with all the compassion and rigour of his vocation, nursed from sickness into health and now nurtures towards the fullness of its potential. It is, as you will of course immediately have recognised, an immature salamander, in the larval stage. Once it has undergone its metamorphosis and entered into its adult form, the doctor, evincing the hatred of all forms of bondage that is native to his constitution, is determined to set it free to live in the wider world with its many risks and fulfilments. Think of that, Mr Moody, and consider then whether Dr Dogg is not one into whose hands you are confident to entrust your hopes. If he would do so much for a dumb beast, then how much for you?’

The Captain’s gaze tick-tocked between me and the thing in the tank. It was a bug-eyed blighter with a fringe of fleshy lobes around its neck, frantically pulsing its gills and waving its clubbed legs in the water. Dogg seemed to be suppressing a coughing fit.

While he creased himself up, Dolly Common hung back, hard-lipped, and the Captain bobbed around, his large, flawless hands flicking and stroking the air as if conducting our interactions. It was time to show these clowns what was what.

‘What you’re selling, buddy, I ain’t buying,’ I told him, acting like the diminutive sniggerer wasn’t even there. ‘I’m asking the questions here and you’re going to spill, see?’

Dolly rolled her eyes and Dogg was still locked into his soundless convulsions, but the Captain dipped and swayed. ‘But
natürlich
, but anything we can do, we are at your service entire –’

I cut across him with your name, clipped and curt. ‘What do you know about her?’

‘Ah, ha ha, yes, but of course, we know her of whom you speak, we share even if I may say so a certain intimacy, and who could know her without holding her in a deep regard? Not yourself, certainly, no, not you. He is a seeker, is he not, poor darling Doll? A pilgrim, we might say, don’t you think, my dear doctor?’