For The Death Of Me (34 page)

50

As I stared at it, I felt as if someone had switched me back on. I had purpose again; I had things to do.

The first of those involved breakfast. Somehow I'd managed to skip lunch the day before, and I was starving. I checked out of the dosshouse and took a cab to Seventh and Fifty-fifth. They were between rush-hours in the Carnegie Deli, so I was afforded the luxury of a table on my own. I demolished a Woody Allen (lotsa corned beef, plus lotsa pastrami) and a side order of cinnamon toast, and I was on my second coffee refill when I was aware of a guy peering at me. He wore a white apron; it was too pristine for him to have been a cook, so I guessed that he had to be the owner. ‘Hey,' he asked hoarsely, ‘ain't you Oz Blackstone?'

I ran my hand over my heavy stubble. ‘So the beard didn't fool you.'

‘Buddy, you're supposed to be dead. It says so in the Daily News.'

‘Shit, and I felt fine when I woke up this morning.'

He chuckled. ‘Yeah, maybe I should be careful what I believe. They ran another story about a guy found semi-conscious on Broadway with a Smith and Wesson up his ass. I didn't swallow that one, though. No, you maybe don't look so great, Oz, but I reckon you're alive. Tell you what, buddy, how about proving it by sending me a picture for the wall?' (I forgot to mention that the Carnegie is decorated with the autographed photographs of thousands of celebrities who've eaten there over the years.)

‘I'll do that,' I promised.

‘Great. When you do, be sure to put today's date on it.'

When I'd mopped up the last of the maple syrup with the last of the cinnamon toast, and paid at the counter on the way out, I caught another cab. I'd done some telephone-directory research at the hotel so I was able to ask the driver to take me straight to the British Consulate General, on Third Avenue at East Fifty-first.

I walked in off the street, and asked to see the Consul General and the Press Officer, in that order. The counter clerk looked at me sceptically until I handed over my passport: that got her attention, big-time. I was shown straight in to see the boss.

I kept my story simple.

 
The last part really sealed it; obviously, the cops in New Jersey wanted to talk to me, but the Consul General insisted that they do so on what was legally British soil. An assistant Chief of something and another senior officer came to Third Avenue at half past midday and took a formal statement. They were clued up enough to ask me about Marie; I was ready for that, and told them that I was considering her for a role in the movie of Blue Star Falling (true) and that the meeting had been arranged to suit my schedule (lie, more or less).

Once they were done, they asked me if I would identify the bodies of Dylan and Maddy . . . they still hadn't found Prim. I was able to do so from photographs they had brought with them: they'd been banged about, obviously, but not too badly burned because of the swamp, so they'd been made recognisable. I nodded, mute, as I was shown each one.

They asked me who would be handling the funeral arrangements. I told them that Ms January's mother lived in England but that she had a sister in Princeton, who could be contacted in India through the university. I added that, as far as I knew, Benedict Luker had no next of kin and that I would take care of his needs.

As soon as they had left, the Consul General authorised the Press Officer to issue a statement announcing my miraculous escape, and recounting most of the story I'd told him and the cops. He offered me lunch, too, but I was still full of Woody Allen and cinnamon toast, so I passed on that. But I did ask him for his secretary's help in getting me out of the country; within half an hour she had me booked on the six thirty out of JFK, connecting to Nice and getting me home well in time for lunch the next day.

51

They gave me the full diplomatic treatment on both sides of the Atlantic. I never saw Customs or Immigration at JFK or 'Eefrow and, better still, I never saw any journalists.

The evil hour was only postponed, though: there was no protection in Nice, and I have never been happier to be met by a minder. Conrad, ever efficient, had hired extra security; just as well, because the airport staff couldn't have come close to coping. This was the Cannes Film Festival and Grand Prix week rolled into one and trebled. And all for poor, poor, pitiful me.

It was easier in Monaco: the Prince had ordered the police to guard my privacy while I recovered from the terrible shock I'd had.

I had another thing to recover from too. I had to tell Susie exactly why I'd missed the plane. I may be pretty good at manipulating the truth, but not when she's around. She didn't take it well. For a while I thought that the curse of being married to Oz had struck again, but eventually she told me that she'd rather have me, in her words, ‘with a stain on your record and by my side than sat spotless up on a cloud playing a fucking harp'.

She went on to add that there can be very few people in history who could claim that their dick saved their life. Even so, I don't think that she's quite forgiven me; maybe she never will.

The kids didn't understand any of what had happened, thank JC, and won't for a while. Tom knows his mother won't be coming back, and he's making of that what a four-year-old can. Being brutal about it, he hadn't seen much of her for a year, so it would have been worse for him if it had been Susie or me who'd been put out to the pasture in the sky.

A week later, I was back in New York, with Susie. Benedict Luker's cremation was private; there were only five of us there, the two of us, his publisher, his editor and her secretary. The lovely editor was heartbroken. I reckon old Benny had been right: he might well have been on there.

The memorial service we held for Prim in Auchterarder, ten days after that, was an altogether different matter. David and Dawn Phillips were the chief mourners, of course, but Tom Blackstone was there too, with his dad, and Bruce Grayson, Prim's nephew, with his. They tell me that there were four hundred people outside the jam-packed church, listening as the service was relayed on speakers.

David asked me to do a eulogy for his daughter. I was touched, and agreed, of course. When I considered what I would say, I found myself remembering the last time Prim and I had really talked to each other, in the Algonquin, our favourite hotel in New York. And this is how it turned out.

‘If you're the sort of person who looks at life through rose-coloured spectacles, you'd have seen Primavera Phillips as a conventional angel, clad in white. But if you were to take them off, then paradoxically, you'd have seen her still angelic, but maybe clad in a different colour, for Prim had some of the fallen one in her too, or at least she tried to make it appear so.

‘She's touched my life in more ways than I can explain. I know this: from the moment I met her, I became a different person, a deeper person, a stronger person. A better person? Others can decide that. But without Primavera, I wouldn't have become what I am, whatever that might be, however you people see me as I stand here, unable to read my carefully drafted script for the tears in my eyes.

‘She's touched your lives too, with the sheer excitement of being around her, with her mischief, with her devilment, but never with her badness, for despite all the things she saw and did . . . and there have been a few which I could not possibly recount to you, not here in this place, nor in any other . . . there was none of that in her. In spite of herself, in reality she was a wholly good person, and if she'd have liked to have been bad, well, she never quite made it, however hard she tried.

‘We're not having a funeral today, because we have no body to commit, although we retain the hope that one day we might be able to do her that final honour. Still, where Prim rests right now, she shares that place with the likes of the fictional Luca Brasi, and maybe the real Jimmy Hoffa, and a few more similar characters. I find comfort in the knowledge that, in her wholeheartedly perverse way, she might like that idea.

‘Yes, she played the game of life with all her great heart, and usually she won. She and I may not have played it too well together, not all the time, but when we were good we were great and when we were less than good, what the hell? We still managed to make Tom. He'll go down as her crowning achievement, and I promise you and her, I'll make damn sure that her spirit burns on in him.

‘It was Kitty Wells who sang that it wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels. I reckon that in at least one case old Kitty was wrong. So long, Primavera, from me, from our boy and from all of us who love you and who will never forget you.'

I heard them applaud in the church, and outside, but by that time I couldn't see a single fucking thing.

52

Before all that came to pass, though, I did something else.

As soon as I'd tired the kids out playing with them, and that took a long time, I went off to my study, alone, and locked the door. My digital camera was in a drawer of my desk, where it usually resides because I always forget to take the bloody thing when I go on a trip. I took it out, connected it to my computer with a USB lead, then replaced the memory card with the one Maddy January had slipped to me.

I opened the software, and retrieved the images it held. There were only two. There was Harvey . . . or Hard-on, as I would call him ever afterwards when we were alone . . . in his father's red robe and wig with a cigarette in one hand, a can of the inevitable Irn Bru in the other, and an erection as big as his smile.

And then there was the other. Shot through a window and amplified, it was a back view of someone whom I knew had to be Tony Lee, his head slightly bowed as if in supplication. Facing him solemnly across a table was a man whose face I'd come to know well during our very brief acquaintance: Jimmy Tan.

In the background, beyond him, there was someone else: her face wasn't quite recognisable, but I knew her body and who she was too.

It had all clicked into place before that: the photo was just confirmation of what I'd known since Marie had left me in Trenton. Jimmy, the head of island security, had been aware of Maddy January's background, and he'd known of her connection to me. When he saw my name show up on what was probably his routine list of VIP arrivals, he put two and two together and came up with the correct number, or one that was near enough to the mark. Until Dylan told him the truth in the Next Page, he may have thought that she had sent for me to help her, but that didn't matter. Jimmy had put us together and that was enough.

He'd sent his tame Scots hitman to intercept me. I guessed that he'd staked out the hotel and had simply followed our taxi to the Crazy Elephant. Casually, during that first Saturday evening, Sammy had given me the tip to go to the Esplanade, and there Marie had been waiting to point me to Tony Lee.

He'd been a marked man himself, of course. He had to die with his wife, yet they knew he'd never betray her, and with him dead, how would they find her? Answer: by recruiting an unwitting mug like me to lead them to her.

But then, as I told you earlier, the simple game had changed, and had become much more complex.

First, Lee had been smarter than they had anticipated, sending Maddy out of Singapore and turning up to meet me himself. (He'd been right: if she'd gone to the Next Page, she'd have died there.)

Then Tan had been called in, not to bail me out of a nasty situation but directly by his old acquaintance Martin Dyer, the insider agent who'd gone down in flames in a shoot-out in Bangkok, of which Tan, the Triad chieftain, had known in advance, but had been unable, or maybe even unwilling, so devious was he, to prevent.

From that point, his prime objective had been to kill Dylan, the Interpol plant who had wrecked a Triad drug empire, and cost the lives of many men, but to do so in a way that nobody would ever uncover, by making him appear to be collateral damage in the death of Maddy January.

And in my death.

I had no doubt then and still have none, that Marie's mission had been to see me on to that plane with the rest. But she had failed her father: she'd been unable to watch me go on board to die so she'd offered herself to make me stay with her in Trenton. Yet she almost failed. I would have died, I would have gone with them, had it not been for that voice in my head.

Jan's message made me stay with her; I truly believe that Jan saved my life, from wherever she is now. You think I'm crazy? Tough shit.

How had Jimmy Tan reacted when he found out about his daughter's weakness, I wondered? With indifference, I guessed. In his great secret life, who was I, and what could I prove?

He was right, every step of the way, and I'd shown him to be so when I'd fed the cops a fable in New York. As always, Jimmy Tan had won. He was still the most important man in Singapore, and maybe in the whole of South East Asia, and nobody knew, outside the highest strata of his Triad clan.

Jimmy Tan was a wise and cunning man, and he understood this. All knowledge is power, and that is demonstrably true. But there is one form that bestows supreme power on those who hold it, and that is knowledge of which no other living person is aware that its bearer is possessed.