Mortal Love (29 page)

“Boundary issues?”

She said nothing, and again Daniel wondered at her choice of words.

How people have adapted to living their brief lives … people like you …

Not how do
we
live; not people like
us.

He sat for a minute, then asked, “You said someone was not watchful who should have been. Who was that?”

“Me.”

“I don't understand.”

“You don't need to.”

Daniel smiled. This was like an interview with an unwilling celebrity. “So what's her real name? ‘Larkin'—she told me she made that up. She said she does it all the time. Who is
she
when she's at home?”

“She has a lot of names.”

“Yeah? Such as?”

“We don't say them.”

Daniel laughed. “What is this, some kind of Jungian cult? I thought all you guys
did
was come up with names!”

Juda shook her head. Her gaze was cold, measuring. “You wouldn't understand it.”

“Try me.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?” This was the wrong tack; he knew that from hostile encounters with more performers than he could remember. But suddenly Daniel felt reckless and angry and even exhilarated, ready to wring a meaning out of the last two days, even if it meant getting himself thrown from this house back into Nick's orbit, even if it meant crawling back to the
Horizon
before his sabbatical was up. “Is this some kind of witness-protection program for the criminally insane? Is she that dangerous?”

He stared challengingly at Juda; she stared back. “Yes. She is that dangerous.”

“Then what's her name? Have I ever heard of her?”

Juda said something he couldn't understand, and he shook his head. “What?”

She said it again: Bleth or Beth. Then,

Daniel frowned. “What's that from?”

“One of the Homeric hymns.” In the subdued light, with her stark silk suit and calm pale eyes, she looked nothing like the scruffy gamine he'd met yesterday, and nothing at all like a boy. Then her mouth parted in a smile without warmth, and once again he was staring at a young man, sly-faced.

Daniel's neck prickled. “That's Graves again. Not a primary source.”

“
She
is a primary source—that's what I'm trying to tell you.” At his scowl Juda shrugged. “I gave you fair warning.”

She glanced at her watch. “I have someone coming at one. You can keep that shirt if you want.”

She stood, waiting for him to do the same. Daniel remained where he was. What if he were to refuse to leave? What if he were to demand that she find Larkin for him? Juda must know where she'd gone—maybe even somewhere in this house, or in her office, or—

Then he recalled Juda's kindness in seeing him in the first place. He had called
her
after all, a virtual stranger, and she had taken him in, fed him, clothed him. …

He had a flash of himself sitting at the kitchen table, coming uncontrollably on her flannel robe, and felt his face go scarlet.

“Thanks,” he said, and stood. She walked him to the door. When they reached it, she put a hand upon his shoulder.

“Daniel. Let this be the end of it. With Larkin.”

He shook his head. “I can't promise that,” he said. “I wish I could—or no, I
don't
wish I could. You're asking me to forget I ever saw her.”

“I didn't ask you to do that,” said Juda. “You couldn't if you tried. Not now.”

Her voice drifted off. She started to open the door, then stopped. “Your book—it's about the Arthurian cycle, is it?”

“Not really. Well, maybe a little, I guess. Mostly it's about Tristan and Iseult, romantic love. I wanted to take up where de Rougemont left off,” he said wryly.

Juda gave him her mocking smile. “Maybe you've gained new insights. Most roses have thorns, you know.”

She opened the door for him, and Daniel suddenly understood the name she had pronounced before. As he stepped back out into the yellow-glazed afternoon, he turned, placing a hand on the door to keep her from shutting it on him.

“Are there owls in London?” he asked.

She stared at him, silent, but he could see a darker sheen pass across her eyes and hear the quick intake of her breath. Daniel stared back at her and nodded.

“Because there is one now,” he said, and left.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Down to the Wire

W
hen we reached Dulles, four private
security guards were waiting in front of the hangar for me. I handed over copies of the contract and customs forms and my passport, they removed the crate and whisked it off to the waiting Gulfstream. I was subjected to X rays and the theremin whine of a metal-detection wand before being escorted to the plane.

By the time we finally took off, it was broad daylight. A steward dressed as expensively as the limo driver served me garlic-roasted chicken and haricots verts catered by the Four Seasons in Georgetown, crème brûlée finished off in the Gulfstream's galley. There was an audio-video library, a shelf of books by Joseph Mitchell and William Trevor and Jack Higgins. I could have watched anything I wanted on the wide-screen TV. Instead I knocked off a bottle of St.-Emilion, staring out the window and thinking.

I had last taken my medications the previous morning; I'd forgotten my evening dose. So: a little over twenty-four hours. Enough time to open a crack in my skull and let the light seep back in, but not enough time for me to start tripping off the line.

Was it?

Because I could feel something happening. The rush of wings behind my eyes, that sense of growing out of my body, of the world falling away around me as though I were a tree bursting explosively from the earth. Outside, the cloudless sky deepened to indigo as the day reeled forward. The wings became another heart beating inside mine; I felt an ache, a longing for something I couldn't place, and, for the first time in years, the stirrings of desire.

It was early
evening but still bright when we landed at Gatwick. We taxied toward another private hangar, where I went through the security dance again. I watched as a half-dozen guards unloaded the painting; then
Iseult
and I met with more security staff and customs officials, in a security-screening room that looked like the special effects department of a medium-size film company. The security chamber's door opened and a thin woman with blond hair and black rubber ankle boots appeared, flanked by two more guards armed with scary sunglasses and chest holsters. A Winsoame photo ID hung from a chain around her neck.

“Hello, Valentine,” the woman said briskly. She opened a leather portfolio, removed a sheaf of papers on a clipboard, and handed them to me. “Janet Keightley. I'm Mr. Learmont's acquisitions manager. Flight all right? Yes? Well, then. If you'll just sign off on this, I'll arrange for the limo to your hotel.”

I looked over the papers, a sheet signed by Learmont authorizing her to take the painting. I hesitated, then signed and handed them back to her.

“Thank you.” She looked up at me, and I saw her blush slightly. “I'll be happy to give you a ride, if you like. Mr. Learmont's made arrangements for you to stay at Brown's. It's a lovely hotel.”

“Will you be there?”

Her blush grew deeper. I toyed with the notion of making a play for her but decided I didn't want to get that close to Learmont.

“I'm not certain what Mr. Learmont has me scheduled for tonight.” She pulled out her cell phone. “Would you like to wait here while I have my car brought around?”

“No, that's all right—I have something I need to pick up myself.” I pulled out my wallet and fished around till I found the key to the storage locker. “And I don't need the hotel. I'm staying with friends in Camden Town.”

She put her call through, collating the signed pages into another, smaller portfolio that she gave to me. I looked through it—copies of the contract for
Iseult,
a sheaf of legal papers. There was also a separate packet that held any other information I might conceivably need while in London, along with a calling card, a little plastic wallet containing fifty quid in five-pound notes, and a prepaid chit for a car service.

“Gee, no toothbrush?” I smiled. “Well, thanks anyway.”

“Are you sure you don't want a ride?”

“Uh-huh. That's what I'm getting now—my bike. I used to live in London. Stored my motorcycle here for when I came back over.”

She glanced at my worn leather backpack. “Is that all the luggage you brought?”

“I travel light. Everything I need is here. Well, almost everything.” I held her gaze until I saw her flush again. “Sure
you
don't want a ride?”

“You're tempting me—but no, I'm sorry.” She turned and motioned to the security guards, signaling she was finished. “I just told Mr. Learmont we were on our way back. He's extremely excited about this particular painting.”

“More so than usual?”

“Well, yes, I believe he is.” She glanced at her clipboard again, gave me a curious look. “You're not by any chance the artist, are you?”

“No. That was my grandfather.”

“Ah.

I followed her outside. The Gulfstream had taxied off. A Rolls idled on the tarmac, its back open so that I could glimpse my grandfather's painting cradled in an elaborate leather-and-mesh sling. “Looks like it's traveling in style,” I said.

Janet Keightley stuck out her hand. I held it just a little too long, then tipped my head to her. “Sure you won't change your mind?”

She smiled regretfully. “Wish I could. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

I waved as the limo bore her and the painting off into the haze of South London.

I had a
cigarette, then caught a ride with one of the security guards who was going off duty. He gave me a lift to the storage facility, an anonymous, slightly sinister cluster of buildings on the outskirts of the airport.

“Motorbike, then?” he asked, tossing his uniform jacket into the back of his Citroën. “Triumph?”

“Vincent.”

“Really?” He whistled. “What, Black Lightning? Like the song?”

“Black Shadow.”

“Fucking hell.” He looked at me and shook his head, pulled in front of my rented storage bay, its sheet-metal door throwing waves of heat across the tarmac. “You need a place to keep that, give me a call then, right?” he shouted as he drove off. “I'll take care of 'er for you!”

I walked over to the shed, exultant. I jammed the key into the door, yanked it open, and there she was.

“Oh, baby,” I said, dropping my backpack. “Baby, baby. You ready for me?”

Sun poured molten into the shed. I stepped inside, blinking. When I touched the bike's handlebars they felt soft as tar. Gently I wheeled it out and into a lozenge of shade at the side of the building. I locked the bay and turned to my bike.

She was a 1955 Vincent-HRD Black Shadow, one of the last produced before the factory shut down. I'd bought her five years earlier, when I'd briefly gone off my meds after moving to London for a stint—I took the money that should have gone to pay my rent and got the bike, then ended up staying with Simon's friend Nick Hayward. At the time I couldn't explain to anyone why I had to have the bike; a typical manic episode, Simon thought.

But now I knew. Now I remembered: I'd bought her so I'd have her now.

“Miss me, darling?”

I lit another cigarette and went to work. I checked the gearbox, swiping dust and dead bugs from the stands and tire struts, ran a bandanna across the rear suspension with its original cadmium plate—I'd spent months looking for a bike that hadn't been restored with chromium or stainless steel. Last of all I went over the fuel tank, with its triumphant winged Mercury soaring over the words
BLACK SHADOW.

I made sure I had enough fuel to get to a gas station, tied the bandanna around my head, and got on, knapsack limp on my back and the Vincent beneath me live and warm as flesh. The engine choked once, then turned over, its roar lost in the thrum of traffic from the motorway. I circled the storage building, leaving a spume of white exhaust, cannoned out onto the road and headed north. The Vincent's oversized speedometer clocked up to 150 mph; I peaked at 90, weaving in and out of the black stream of cars and minicabs roiling around the city like smoke pouring from a crack.

It had been five years, but I still had my key to Nick's flat. I actually hadn't seen Nick himself in years. He was always on tour, or in the studio, or shacked up with a girl somewhere. I figured that this time I'd make a point of thanking him in person.

Traffic was heavy on Tottenham Court Road, so I detoured up to Tufnell Park and drove through Archway to Crouch End. It was a part of the city that always filled me with an almost unbearable nostalgia, mixed with a kind of despair: all those mock Tudors, each with its slip of lawn, pebble-dash walls, plastic flower boxes designed to resemble terra-cotta, plaster garden gnomes with chipped conical hats standing guard over beds of primroses and bluebells homesick for the woods.

It was utterly unlike American suburbia; eerier, the obsessive need for order more desperate, as though there were something dangerous and chaotic to be kept at bay. Like so much of London, it reminded me of something I could no longer recall clearly—a fragment of a dream, some shard of memory pried from me during my months at McLean, lost in the pharmaceutical clouds that had enveloped me since then. It made me ache—a real physical ache, hunger and thirst and desire all bizarrely focused on brick terraces and the sound of birdsong in flowering crabapple trees.

I let the Vincent idle at a stoplight, then turned onto Holloway Road. Traffic was heavy here. Waves of loss and an almost sexual longing made me unsteady on my bike. I decided to stop, parking in front of a pub. It was already packed with people celebrating the end of the week, so I ducked into a grocer's next door and bought an orange squash. I took up most of the shop, nearly knocking over a potted plastic fern as I fumbled for my change. The girl behind the counter stared at the Vincent, threads of exhaust rising from its engine box, then at me.

“You with the Steam Fair, then?”

I gulped down the squash and shook my head. “What's that?”

She pointed at a poster on the door. “Over at Priory Park. You look like them folk. Gypsies.” She grinned. “Guess not.”

I tossed the empty bottle, waved good-bye, and took off. Half an hour later, I was in Camden Town.

There was a gated alley off Inverness Street where Nick stored trash bins and leftover bits of amplifiers. A drunk had passed out in front of the locked door; I nudged him with my boot.

“Hey. You can't sleep here.”

His bleary eyes opened. He started to mouth off, then got a good look at me and quickly stumbled to his feet. “Sorry, squire—din' know there was gentry here,” he said, lurching backward into the street and making a clumsy bow. “N'arm done, right? Right?”

“Right.” I unlocked the gate, parked the Vincent inside, and locked up again, then started for Nick's flat. I went only a few steps before I stopped.

I had spent a lot of time in London over the years, much of it right here in Camden Town. Getting fucked up, getting laid, doing pickup gigs with bands that'd hire me for my looks, then come after me with knives when I took off with the lead singer's girlfriend. The city—especially this grimy, tourist-infested part of it—lost its charm for me about the same time I put the Vincent into storage outside Gatwick. I'd had a scare over an HIV test, got docked for more VAT than I should have, and lost a job working on a show that went on to Broadway. I'd burned out on London; that's what I thought anyway.

But now, as I stood on the corner of Inverness and the High Street, I felt that same intense, nearly sexual anticipation, a kind of excitement that made me feel like I was nineteen again, looking at a night when I knew I'd score, when I knew I'd end up tangled with some girl, hours and hours to go before the sun came up.

And when it did, I'd just be getting started; it would all be just the beginning of something.

Like now. It was a rush so powerful I could feel the blood stamping at my temples, felt myself grow hard as the hairs on my arms moved in the warm breeze. The smell of green apples wafted from a barrow packing up in Inverness. There was a cluster of girls in front of the Virgin megastore across the street; they stared at me, whispering behind their hands. In front of Nick's flat, a black-and-white dog jumped up on its hind legs and began barking, its pointed muzzle aimed at a sky green with dusk. The windows of old brick buildings blazed like they were on fire. I looked at it all and felt the way I did back when I was a kid, perched on my stool in Red's workshop, staring at the page in front of me with its labyrinth of trees and faces, thinking,
It's mine, it's mine. …

“Fucking hell,” I said, and laughed out loud. On the corner of the High Street, a short man with a red hat turned and stared at me. I stared back, grinning, then yelled at him.

“Mine!”

His eyes widened, not in fear but a kind of shocked recognition. He turned and clapped his hands. The black-and-white dog reared back up on its hind legs and began walking toward him, gave a sudden leap, and jumped into the little man's arms.

“Forty minutes!” the man cried. “Forty minutes!”

He turned and ran up the street toward Camden Market.

I stared after him, still laughing, then unlocked and shoved open the door to Nick's flat and strode inside.

Mine,
I thought as the metal door boomed shut.
It all belongs to me.

Not much had
changed in Nick's place since I'd last been there. It still smelled of coffee beans and the bitter residue of hashish, old books and the hemp-seed oil Nick used on his hands. One side of the living room was given over to bookshelves and vintage guitars, the other to an antique desk and new digital recording equipment, tiny computers like silvery eggs nested side by side on a long table beneath narrow windows overlooking the High Street. I dropped my knapsack in the kitchen, out of habit checked the back door that opened onto a rooftop patio, replete with bay trees and blue-glazed pots of tropical grass and flowers. Over the last ten years, the flat had been broken into twice, though never while I was staying; prowlers had hopped over from the neighboring rooftop, pried the door open, and made their way into the kitchen before someone called the police. After the second break-in, Nick had a barred iron security door installed. I made sure the key was still in place, hanging above the doorframe, and briefly considered going outside but decided I was too beat.