Mapping the Edge (22 page)

Sitting in the drab décor of the hotel office Anna flashed on her own house: ten years of Habitat and Ikea mixed with some items of superior junk and a bit of Conran when she had the money. If he was looking for golden eggs he had most certainly picked the wrong goose. On the other side of the world, Sophie Wagner was waiting. “Have you told anyone else about all this? I mean, did you go to the police?”

“Oh, please . . . You guys watch too many TV shows. New York cops don't catch criminals, they just verify insurance forms. You think anybody's going to be interested in some flake Englishman who fucks his way through alarm systems? Anyway, what name would I give them? Marcus Irving or—who did you say he was?”

“Taylor. Samuel Taylor. He's got a passport.”

“Sorry. So did Marcus Irving. I saw it.”

“God. I don't know what to say. I can't tell you how grateful I am—”

She laughed. “No, you're not. You wish you hadn't heard any of it. So would I in your shoes. If it's any consolation, I've been around this racetrack a while and I've seen a lot of the horses in action. But I never came across anything quite like this guy. The best you can do is take comfort from the fact you're getting worked over by a class act, then pick his wallet from the bedside table tomorrow night and get the hell out of there. If you did that you could write my name along with yours in lipstick on the mirror. Just make sure you get all the credit cards, too,” she said, dabbling her fingers for a while in the healing waters of fantasy. “Good luck.”

And the line went dead.

Anna put down the receiver and sat for a moment with her face in her hands trying to take it all in.

When she looked up, the hotel owner was hovering in the doorway watching her. She wondered how much cash she had upstairs. Maybe she would find herself having to pick his wallet anyway.

“All right, Signora Taylor?”

She got up from the desk. “Just wonderful, thank you. How much do I owe you?”

He had a pad in one hand. He looked at it almost mournfully. “I'm afraid it's one hundred and nine thousand lire,” he said with a crooked smile.

Forty quid, she thought. God. At least it would make a good story. She reached for her bag. “Could you give me a receipt for that?”

Home—Saturday
P.M.

I
CRAWLED INTO
the bed and curled myself around her body. She was warm and calm, but it did nothing to soothe me. I lay and listened to the night, or the little of it that was left. Somewhere in the plane tree across the road an overeager bird was already up and celebrating the dawn. I closed my eyes, but I was too stoned to sleep. Too stoned to think straight, either. The dope had me spinning on a pinhead. All I could do was to replay Lily's remark on the stairs. “When she said good-bye to me, she sounded sort of . . . sad, like she didn't want to go. . . .”

What would happen if Anna didn't come home? I gave in to paranoia and let my mind run with it. We would have to think about it sometime. Better to have been prepared. Without Anna, what the hell would we do?

In the will that had been drafted soon after her birth, Paul and I were named as joint guardians. Of course we had never talked about what that would mean. The very act of signing our names seemed to protect against the possibility of anything like that ever happening.

But what if it did? What if it already had? A child can't live in two places at once. Paul loved Lily, and he was a good parent to her every Friday and Saturday. No one would deny that. But for the rest of the time he had his own life and his own business and now his own lover. Did a part-time father really want to be a full-time one? Would he even be given the chance? With no parents and no brothers or sisters it would be left for the court to decide. Would they give her to him or to me? There was no doubt that in some ways it should be him. She saw him more often, knew him more intimately. Even at my most mean-spirited I would accept that. But a gay man running a full-time business and involved in what might be deemed a casual relationship with a lighting designer thirteen years younger than himself? It would be the stuff of tabloid meltdown. If Paul had given it any thought over this last twenty-four hours (and surely he had) then he must have realized that.

Yet, when it came down to it, would my CV read much better? Single professional female married to her work and living in foreign city. I saw my apartment in Amsterdam with its open interiors full of desirable arty objects and its floor-length canal windows opening onto sky and water. For years, whenever Lily came to stay I had kept the windows locked, terrified by a horror story of a rock star's son who had danced his way across their skyscraper New York apartment and out to his death. If Lily came to live with me, would she, at seven years old, be old enough to cope, or would I have to put up bars? Or move? If Lily came to live with me . . .

The list of questions was long and loud. Home? School? Holidays? Friends? Care? Without a job I couldn't support her, yet with one, my life was so eaten away by work that it would need a full-time wife to include a child within it. Hey, René. Ever thought of turning a commitment to the casual into a ready-made family? Hardly. Our very success was based on absence, and after two days away I could barely remember who he was anymore. You can't make a family just to house a child. Anyway, how could you ever take her away from the house where she grew up? Even my father had known it was better to live through that pain than try to cut it out. So would I have to come here? Could I do it? Leave the flat cool spaces of my head and my house to become a surrogate single mother in a city I had long since disowned?

No. The truth was that we all loved Lily, but as Anna's child. Anna was the pivot of this fabulous piece of emotional geometry we had all created. Without her, it would disintegrate and fall apart, leaving the rest of us to pick up the debris.

I saw my father's face as he stood by the kitchen table that morning trying to find the right words. Welcome to the void.

Away—Sunday
A.M.

I
F SHE COULD
have hit him then she might really have done some damage, but the angle was wrong and in the darkness she could barely see him, let alone tell a skull from a shoulder blade. And because there would be only one chance she couldn't risk mucking it up.

Still, there was no doubt that she caught him off his guard, looming like a specter into his path at the bottom of the stairs.

“Hello, Andreas,” she said, the brightness in her tone surprising even herself. “Were you looking for me?”

After so much of her own fear it was a pleasure to watch him jump. As he whirled around she thought he might go for her, but instead he stopped abruptly, as if someone had frozen him in his tracks, plunging his hands deep into his pockets as if to avoid the temptation of violence.

“I scared you. Sorry.” She laughed nervously in his face. “My door was open. You must have unlocked it after I went to bed, yes? I woke and found it like that, I couldn't sleep so I came downstairs. Had a cup of coffee. Hope that was all right?” She was gabbling, the words running away with her, deliberately careless, deliberately gullible, like the woman who talked herself into believing his goodwill in the living room mirror just now.

“What were you doing under there?” he said at last, his voice almost a whisper.

She shrugged. “I was looking for you, and then I found this door at the back. I thought it might be your darkroom.” When are the truth and the lie the same thing? “But it was locked. Is that where you work?”

She drew in a breath.

She still couldn't see his face, just feel his tension. It was different from before. She kept on talking. So what if she sounded nervous—it would make her appear less of a threat. She repositioned her fingers around the horse's neck. “I found some books. In the living room. I suppose they belonged to Paola. I took one, in case I couldn't sleep. I hope that's all right?” she said, moving her right arm slightly as if to explain its place behind her back. “Where did you go? I thought I heard a car drive away. You must have come back in very quietly. I didn't hear the door open,” she added. “I think we must have scared each other.”

God, Anna, why don't you just hit him now? she thought as the words tumbled out. Just take a swing at the side of his head and get it over with. Why do women always have to try and earth things, make them better with words rather than letting them explode? Here and now is the best chance you're going to get. But her hand stayed behind her back. Either she couldn't or she wouldn't do it. She realized that she didn't know which one it was. She would find out soon enough. I'm not going back into that room, she thought. And you're not going to put me on your walls.

He was standing in the middle of the staircase, hands still lost in his pockets. She took another fast breath, as if there still was much more to say, and she just needed to get ready to say it, but this time nothing came out. It was as if the connection between her brain and her voice had been suddenly severed and there was nothing she could do about it. The breath skittered away in a noisy sigh.

The silence grew around them, then snaked its way up the stairs and along the corridor. What was happening here? He had barely listened to what she had said. It was as though he had blanked off from her, as if the conversation between them had been too much effort and now he had let it go. Maybe that was why she had kept on chatting, to get him to join in the game again, to inject the normality of his abnormal politeness into this fucked-up relationship.

But something had changed. What? She thought frantically. She hadn't even tried that hard to escape. Instead, she had given him exactly what he wanted, standing in front of his camera and letting him snap his mirror images of her, offering him smiles, intimacy, even tears. Everything he desired. Just like Paola. He had them both now eye to eye in his lens. What more could he possibly want?

What more?

What else could there be apart from sex? she thought, staring at him across the gulf of silence. And that's not what this is about. I know you already. She thought back to the meeting in the gift shop, then the conversation in the station and the car, in her room, over the bottle of wine. In all that time he had never come near her, never even so much as lifted a finger in her direction. In fact, the only moment he had touched her at all must have been when she was unconscious.

But if he didn't move soon, then
she
was going to have to touch
him.
He was standing right in her way and it was clear he had no intention of moving.

So be it. “I have to go back to my room now,” she said softly, the manic energy faded. “I'm tired and I want to sleep.”

She waited for him to move aside and let her pass. When he didn't budge she took a step closer. She felt his body go rigid and watched a muscle twitching in the side of his face. Fear or fury?

One more step. She was within striking range now. Whatever happened next there would be no more presents or promises of freedom or intimate meals in front of the fire. No more talk of lost love. Despite her confession into the mirror, despite all the games and the reassurance, he wasn't going to let her go. She knew that absolutely now. And so did he. She could smell him again, the leftover chemicals mixing with sweat, sour upon sour, like something rotting inside him. Somewhere on his body there was a key to the room downstairs and somewhere in that room were her passport and ticket and the way out. Get it over with, she thought. One way or the other, get it over with.

“Listen,” she said, lifting her face into a smile as if she were staring at him in a mirror. “I know how much you miss her, Andreas. And I'm truly sorry for you. But . . .” Her words hung there, deliberately soft, almost coaxing. And as they did so, her right arm roared out of the darkness, with Lily's horse heavy on the end of it.

She deserved better than she got. Stella was right. Anna was a good liar, and she had played it as well as it could be played: the mirror talk, the chatter, the calm, even the caress of her voice. It wasn't even that she was queasy about the violence anymore. No. Once she had decided, she struck him as hard as she could. Or at least she would have done. If he hadn't hit her first.

You wouldn't expect such a constipated man to have such elegant action in him. It was almost as if he had known what she was going to do before she did it. His hand rose out of his pocket like a bird in sudden flight. The one blow was all it took, fast, efficient, perfectly aimed, his fist connecting to her head on the right side just above the eye.

Away—Sunday
A.M.

T
HE CENTRAL PIAZZA
resembled something out of a sci-fi movie: ghostly, emptied of life and cars. Under the glow of badly placed halogen lamps, the cobblestones undulated like pebbles beneath shallow water, the whole square apparently tilting to one side as if somehow defying gravity. Bibbiena after the aliens had landed. Not even any bodies left to snatch.

Except for hers. She was sitting on a bench under an old and stately chestnut tree, staring out over the scene. She was trying to think, but she wasn't getting very far. The illusion of water on the cobbles was distracting, reminding her of the ice-rink floor in the Fiesole apartment that first night. It seemed so long ago. Everywhere in this story there were hidden depths, surfaces that couldn't be trusted. It became hard to hold on to what you knew. She would have liked to be asleep now, but the phone call had wired her brain into an adrenaline feed, and although her eyes hurt from being open she knew that if she closed them sleep wouldn't come, particularly not if she was lying next to him.

At first the fresh air had helped, the night so clean, the temperature so balmy and perfect. It was always a delicious shock for English skin; to be warm in the darkness, to feel the sun in the night air. Expansive climates make for expansive temperaments. That's what makes Americans so flamboyant, she thought. They spend their lives expanding and contracting to the extremes of mercury. Would a Spanish or a Norwegian woman have had a different reaction to the seductive arts of a con man? If that was indeed what he was?

She strode through the streets pulling at the tangled ball of facts, looking for the end of the thread so that she could start to unravel it the right way. Where to start? With a man who set out to rob women? To woo and entrap them, then fuck them—in all senses of the word—and walk away with what? An enlarged ego, a tired cock, and whatever he could raise from the sale of their valuables?

It didn't make sense. Too much effort for too little reward. So Sophie Wagner's grandmother had left her some antique rugs and pricey jewelry? Hardly enough bait to spend the best part of a month wooing her in New York and then five days of nooky in St. Petersburg hotels. Maybe the burglary had nothing to do with it. It could be just the talk of an aggrieved woman desperately looking for an explanation for the emotional disemboweling that had been inflicted upon her. But then without it, the whole thing made even less sense. Even the most sadistic gigolo culture has to feed on something more than vanity and humiliation. It has to be about money, too.

There were other things that she hadn't got right. His job, for instance. Marcus Samuel Irving Taylor was almost certainly an art dealer. Or at the very least he worked in one of those Swiss galleries that Sophie had called. She needed to get hold of that number. He would know it himself, of course. And if he dialed it enough he might use the directory to save himself the use of his fingers. Technology makes us lazy. Thank God.

She had reached the main square now. She sat on the bench and dug out the crumpled paper from her jacket pocket. The first two numbers had European prefixes, but she didn't know which one applied to Switzerland, and anyway, there was not enough light to make out the writing properly.

She went back to Sophie Wagner and the love affair from hell. Whatever it was, the scam had been complete there, which must mean that from his point of view it had been a successful business operation. So how? She played through it again, slower this time.

First act: He had found her through the want ads, which meant that although she could be traced he could not. Second act: He had wooed her and won her, been taken to her place, but not returned the favor, nor offered a phone number or even his real name. Third act: He had taken her to St. Petersburg, where he had—what had been her words?—“been the perfect lover,” unfolding the city like a carpet beneath her feet and sending her home warmed by promises of eternal love.

Stop there. Why St. Petersburg? It would have been cheaper and warmer in Florida. It would have been sexier in the Caribbean. But no. He had wooed her with a deliberately romantic vision of ice and culture. “Snow on pre-Revolutionary boulevards, Hermitage art, pepper vodka like frozen spice.” Clever, really. As she had said, the right in-flight movie for the right woman, the kind who would advertise in
The New York Review of Books.

St. Petersburg and
The New York Review of Books.
The
Guardian
and a weekend in Tuscany. As dating games went they were both clichés. What was the garden of delights that he had laid out before her that morning in the Fiesole restaurant, when she had been so caught between staying and leaving? The monastery of St. Francis and a great collection of Della Robbias . . . Hermitage art and pepper vodka . . .

Of course. That was the connection between the two. The art. But then it would be, wouldn't it? After all, art was his work. Buying and selling. So was this about some kind of art scam? Using a tourist–love affair trip as a front for dodgy dealing. But what and how? There'd been no time for him to do any business. They hadn't seen any art worth talking about (the churches hardly counted; the most exciting thing had been the altarpiece and that had been an “almost” rather than the real thing), and by the time they got back to Florence to catch an early Monday morning plane the weekend would be over. Unless he stayed on and did it then. In which case, why did he need her with him in the first place?

No, there was something she wasn't getting here. Her head hurt from trying to work it out.

Two . . . three . . . The bell in the clock tower echoed into the silence. From across the other side of the square she could make out a low buzzing noise, like a chainsaw starting up in the night. From a small side street opposite a scooter zipped into sight, moving more like a kid's remote-control toy than the real thing. The driver was a young guy with long hair, his pillion passenger, arms clinging around his waist, a girl in a very short skirt, her thighs bare to the night air. They drove fast right across the middle of the cobbled square, the engine buzzing angrily along the uneven surface, zooming past her and down the street to her left. The noise died slowly behind them. An Italian pair on their way home after a late night. One could only hope that the household wasn't up waiting for their return.

She thought of them saying good night on her doorstep, a quick snog before the lights snapped on in a room above. The image brought back her own date, sprawled across a bed in the best hotel room in town. She painted him more clearly in her mind's eye.

He liked to sleep on his stomach, that much she already knew: head turned to one side, face half-squashed into the pillow, his breathing heavy. In repose his shoulders and upper torso were chunky with muscle and what was—if you looked hard enough—the beginning of flab. But it still looked good, still offered an invitation to touch. She could feel the texture of his skin under her fingers, strong and supple at the same time, conjuring images of sweat, like beads of water, clinging to it. She ran her eye and her hands farther down his back toward the small of his buttocks, her voyeurism making her gaze cool, almost cruel in its assessment. There were traces of love handles above the hips, the leftovers of all those expensive meals. And she'd seen better asses. In her time. She imagined someone (herself?) slapping him on the buttock. “Come on, boy, wake up here. Start doing your job. There's a lady here who needs servicing.” As he turned over, groping his way out of sleep, she noticed how his jawline had grown almost slack, and his eyes dull.

She froze the image and studied it, gorging herself on its grossness as if in some kind of
Clockwork Orange
aversion therapy. I don't like your body, she thought. It's too ripe with its own success. I don't know why I didn't notice it before. I don't ache for your hands on me anymore. I'm not even sure I could make love to you again.

She opened her eyes and the square exploded back into view, calm and silent, confident of the beauty in its age. She felt an almost palpable sense of relief. What is it with you and men, Anna? she thought to herself. Why is it you have such lousy taste?

She thought herself back to her kitchen table: saw Paul and Michael sitting on one side of it, a half-drunk bottle of wine between them and a game of Clue laid out in front. Opposite them sat Lily, kneeling up on her chair, clasping the dice in her fat little fingers, ready to throw, concentration in capital letters on her face. On the board Miss Scarlett was chasing Reverend Green around the house with a spanner, and the gay boys were having fun watching. There was laughter in the air, and a quiet kind of love. No, it wasn't true. She didn't have lousy taste in men. She just picked different ones for the fucking and the fathering.

Maybe in some bizarre way it suits me better, she thought: feeling both loved and left alone at the same time. In retrospect, she realized that she had been telling the truth about herself that first meeting in the Oxo tower. Not only did she not want a husband, she only sometimes wanted a lover. The worst sin she had committed here was waiting too long to get one, not recognizing the depth of hunger in herself, so that when she did eat she took in too much too fast, then felt sick afterward. It was a common enough female disorder, not knowing how to control your appetite. But given the chance, she could learn. Everyone can get what they want if they want it enough. If they want it enough . . .

So what was it he wanted? If it wasn't sex and it wasn't adoration, what was it about? She didn't know. But she would find out. As the clock chimed the half-hour she got up from the bench and walked slowly back to the hotel.