Ikon (3 page)

He gingerly picked up the head by its sticky, blood-soaked scalp, and tumbled it into the green plastic bag. His stomach turned over, but he managed to keep the rest of his lunch down. He took one last look around the bedroom, deliberate and slow, making absolutely sure that he had left nothing behind which could identify him. In the living-room, he carefully collected up all the family portraits, and systematically went through every drawer and cupboard, searching for photographs and letters. It took him over an hour.

It was almost dark when he closed the door of Margot Schneider’s house behind him, and crossed the driveway to his car. He unlocked the trunk, and stowed the head carefully on top of the spare wheel, so that it wouldn’t roll around when he turned corners. He spread a plaid blanket over it, just in case. Then he climbed quickly into the car, started it up, and drove back down Oasis Drive without lights. In a few moments, he was speeding along Lincoln Drive, back towards 24th Street, where he would turn left for Sky Harbor airport.

The getaway contingency was simple. It had been devised years ago, when Henry had first started looking further afield than California. Henry would park the Oldsmobile at Sky Harbor’s long-term parking-lot, unscrew the licence-plates and peel off any special decals. Then, from the terminal, he would telephone his people in Los Angeles and tell them what had happened. While he boarded his flight at Phoenix, an exactly similar vehicle would be rented from the Avis desk at LAX, and by the time Henry arrived in Los Angeles, this new vehicle would be waiting for him, minus its licence-plates, in the LAX parking-lot. Henry would attach to it the plates from the car he had rented in Phoenix, and check it in to the Avis desk, making a point of telling the girls there how arduous the drive had been from Arizona. ‘And those dust storms, phew…!’

The accomplice who had rented the car from Los Angeles would fly to Phoenix with his licence-plates, screw them on to Henry’s old car, and then drive immediately to Las Vegas, and check it in there, pretending he had driven up from Los Angeles.

The switch would remain undiscovered until one or other of the cars was serviced; and even then the mechanics probably wouldn’t bother to check the vehicle numbers.

Henry turned on the radio as he drove south on 24th Street towards the airport. The yuccas on either side of the road were silhouetted against the evening sky like black-paper cutouts on a Carmen Miranda stage set. KTAR radio was playing Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave… .’ He lit a cigarette and his hands were trembling. Twenty years between killings was far too long. Twenty years between anything was far too long. He felt like a medieval mariner, hoary, bearded, hopeless, who had suddenly reached the brink of the world.

Two

Daniel was woken up by a loud, insistent purring, like a cat eating its breakfast. He opened his eyes and blinked at the sunlit adobe ceiling above him, and wondered for nearly a minute where he was, and what century he was in. He thought: Buck Rogers must have felt like this, when he woke up from that gas-filled mine in Pittsburgh and discovered that he was in the twenty-fifth century. Where am I, and who is this woman lying next to me, and why is she snoring so loudly?

She was a coppery redhead, although her hair was all that Daniel could see of her. He seemed to remember that her name was Cara. At least, that was what she had said it was. Hitch-hikers rarely told the truth, and it was a kind of unwritten law of the highway that they didn’t need to. It was enough that they were entertaining, or sexy, or both. Cara from South Dakota, making her way to the Coast. Daniel had been to South Dakota himself, playing the Treble Clef Club in Rapid City, and he didn’t find her story at all incredible. All that South Dakota was good for, as far as he could tell, was escaping from.

‘Hey,’ he said, gently shaking her shoulder.

‘Hmmph?’ she said, stretching herself out.

‘You’re snoring.’

She wrestled the sheet around herself. I am not, either,’ she told him, without opening her eyes. ‘Ladies never snore.’

‘Oh no? Well, what’s that purring noise you’re making?’

‘Emphatic breathing,’ she said. ‘Now, let me get some sleep, will you? It isn’t even dawn, for God’s sake.’

Daniel leaned over and looked at her in close-up. ‘It’s six-fifteen,’ he announced. T have to be open at seven.’ He decided that he still had pretty good taste in women after all, as long as she didn’t have herpes. She was sharp-faced, white-skinned, and big-breasted, with those wide flaring hips that always reminded him of milkmaids.

It was amazing the women you could encounter on the highway between Superior and Phoenix on a hot Thursday evening, or any evening, come to that. Vassar graduates, lady truck drivers, hookers, viola players, feminist activists, gambling shills; and now Cara.

She kept on snoring, deep and low, but Daniel couldn’t really complain about it. Last night, after the last of his customers had gone home, she had helped him to stack the dishes and clean up; and then, sweet and high on good red wine and Bruce Springsteen records, she had tumbled among the sheets with him with such fun and energy and unembarrassed lust that it had taken all his self-control not to let out his famous window-vibrating rebel yell, just for the sheer joy of it. This morning, his back and thighs were scratched like Brer Rabbit in the brambles, and his lips felt as if they had been caught up in a catering-sized garlic press.

He climbed stiffly out of bed, and the springs squeaked. His jeans and his T-shirt were crumpled up on the bare-boarded floor in the most peculiar heap, as if he had leaped out of them last night without even undoing them. The large Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the bureau said 6:20. He yawned so hard that he almost dislocated his jaw, and sniffed.

Susie was standing just outside the door, in her long pink Mary Poppins nightdress. She watched him silently as he took out a clean shirt and dressed, and then followed him along the corridor as he went to pee and to throw cold water in his face. It was only when he had risen from the depths of his towel to stare at himself in the cracked bathroom mirror that she said anything.

‘Who’s that?’ she asked. She was seven, with blonde braids, and a pretty little perky face, and china-blue eyes. Just like her mother. Mega-cute.

‘That’s, er, Cara. Cara from South Dakota.’

Is she staying for breakfast?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Do you like her?’

Daniel stared down at Susie for a long time. In the end,

he said, ‘I don’t know yet. We haven’t really done a whole lot of talking.’

‘But she’s staying for breakfast?’

‘Sure. We didn’t argue or anything.’

‘And you don’t hate yourself? And she doesn’t hate herself?’

‘I don’t know. She’s still asleep. If s kind of hard to assess how much you like or dislike yourself when you’re still asleep.’

I can sing when I’m asleep.’

Daniel shuffled down the narrow wooden stairs to the old-fashioned Mexican-style kitchen. Susie followed him, with all the intentness of a concerned wife. Daniel opened up the huge Amana icebox and began to take out bacon strips and eggs and hamburger patties and sausage links in preparation for the morning stampede. In addition, there would be two gallons of coffee to perk, three dozen oranges to press, twenty-five buns to be sliced and nine tables to be laid. He drank a large gulp of grapefruit juice straight from the carton, and helped himself to a handful of stale Cheetos.

Susie said, ‘It’s time you settled down, you know.’

‘Settled down?’ Daniel demanded. T am settled down. What could be more settled down than living here with you, doing what I’m doing?’

‘I mean you could marry.’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I tried it. You know that. I’m not the right type for marriage. I don’t have the right amino-acid chains for marriage. Besides, I’m allergic to fidelity. It brings me out in hives.’

‘You’ve been faithful to me.’

‘You’re my daughter. Being faithful to your children is different.’

Susie toyed with the magnetic clips stuck to the front of the icebox. ‘Don’t you ever think about mommy, ever?’

‘You know I do. Your mommy was the prettiest lady who ever lived. And to prove it, you’re the prettiest daughter who ever lived. But she wanted something else,

somebody else. Not here, and not me. I couldn’t do anything about it.’

Susie said, ‘Would you take her back, if she came?’

Daniel had an armful of fresh eggs. But he stopped where he was, and looked at Susie seriously, and then set the eggs down one by one on the counter so that he could take her into his arms and hold her very, very close. She had that warm-bready smell of a young child who has just been sleeping, a hostage freshly released by the sandman.

‘Susie,’ he said, in a hoarse, affectionate whisper, ‘I have all I need in you.’

‘You won’t take her back then?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’

She looked closely at him, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Who wouldn’t it be fair to?’ she asked.

‘It wouldn’t be fair to your mommy, nor to me, nor to you. We’d argue all the time, you know that. We’d shout. We’d wind up hating each other when we should always love each other.’

Susie pressed her forehead against his, and then said, in the smallest voice, ‘I miss her.’

‘I know, said Daniel. ‘So do I.’

A cat-curious voice interrupted, ‘I hope I’m not breaking up anything meaningful here.’ Daniel looked up. It was Cara, sleepy-eyed but awake, with her red hair brushed into chrysanthemum curls. She was wearing one of Daniel’s blue denim workshirts, unbuttoned, so that she was revealing her deep alabaster-white cleavage, her flat white stomach, and the rusty tangle of red pubic hair between her long white thighs. She was unashamed, provocative, and highway-stylish - possessed of that same vagrant elegance that had attracted him to Candii, his first-ever wife and Susie’s mother. Susie recognized the breed, and kissed her father on the nose with childish promptness and left.

‘Did I drive her away?’ asked Cara, not altogether without satisfaction.

Daniel stood up, and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘She’s

used to it. She’s only trying to make me feel guilty. She misses her mommy.’

‘Understandable,’ said Cara. She came up close and kissed his cheek, then his mouth. ‘Do you want me to fix us some coffee?’

‘Don’t worry. I have to fix enough for the whole of Apache Junction in any case. Would you pass me that skillet?’

Cara stood beside him as he melted lard in the skillet for the hash browns. She touched his shoulder sensitively, as if she couldn’t quite believe that he was real. The sun crept in between the slats of the Venetian blind and suddenly illuminated the white china bowl of Spanish onions, so that they took on the charmed radiance of a detail by Vermeer. And as he stood over the hot kitchen range in his jeans and his white short-sleeved shirt, slightly-built, dark-haired, a little used-looking but still attractive, Daniel appeared to Cara to become irradiated with some of the same domestic magic. Portrait of the chef as a tired but friendly angel.

‘You were strange last night,’ she told him. ‘Strange and wonderful. Too gentle for a short-order cook.’

‘Restaurant proprietor, he corrected her. He scraped frozen onion slices into the skillet and they began to sizzle.

‘Restaurant proprietor, whatever, she smiled.

‘You think I’m strange?’ he asked.

She nodded happily. He frowned at her for a moment and then shrugged. As a matter of fact, he had often thought himself that he must have been born into some kind of backward-facing looking-glass land. His life and his career always seemed to turn out the polar opposite of what he really wanted, and of what he was really capable of achieving. The only points he ever managed to score in the 36 years he had been alive were into his own goal. Even his face, when he saw it in photographs, looked as if it were the wrong way around; as if the man he glimpsed in mirrors and store windows was the way he actually should have been, and the face with which he

walked around all day was his awkward other-self, his klutzy doppelganger.

He should have been a famous TV entertainer, a kind of alternative Johnny Carson, a poor man’s Dan Rather. Instead, he ran Daniel’s Downhome Diner, in Apache Junction, Arizona, beside the heat-wavering horizon of the Superstition Mountains, near the famous Lost Dutchman Mine. Daniel’s Downhome Diner was popular enough, if popularity meant anything at all in a town of 2,391 and falling. There was an intermittent passing-through trade, truckers and tourists and windpump salesmen, as well as hitch-hikers and assorted mysteriosos. Sometimes the customers were friendly; sometimes offensive. Sometimes they cried into their coffee, or threw chairs through the window. There were nine gingham-covered tables, red gingham, with plastic tomatoes full of ketchup, and a 1967 jukebox with Happy Together by the Turtles and Penny Lane by the Beatles, not because Daniel held any special memories of 1967, but simply because the lock was broken and nobody could get into the juke-i box to change the records. On the wall there was a smeary blackboard menu, Franks & Beans, Minute Steaks & Beans, Tamales, Empanadas, Cheeseburgers. All good downhome stuff, although Daniel was actually capable of ! tossing together oysters Bienville, or pompano en papillate, or ( even pigeonneaux royaux au sauce paradis, with equal equanimity. His father had been a chef at Alciatore’s in San ‘< Francisco in the 1950s, and had taught him to cook with j all the care and patience and calculated disgust of a real professional. Daniel rarely prepared such exotica these days, mainly because he was more than seriously tired of cooking by the end of the day, and because nobody else in Apache Junction would have wanted to eat anything like that anyway. Apache Junctioneers ate a lot of steak and a lot of beans and that was just about it. He could just imagine the reaction he would get from Indian Bill Hargraves if he served him up tender fragments of crab and mushrooms and fish in a paper poke. ‘What the hell’s this, a Western Airlines sickbag?’