Rook & Tooth and Claw (3 page)

“Not just yet,” she said. “Let’s wait till some of this dust has settled.”

“Sure, Ellie. I didn’t mean now.”

“No,” she said, as if none of the men she met ever meant now.

He went home first, to his second-storey apartment in a pink-painted concrete block just off Electric Avenue, in Venice. There was a small blue pool in the courtyard, around which the residents relaxed in the evening on rusty half-collapsed sun-loungers, drinking warm wine and reading thick blockbuster novels. This evening it was so warm that even Mrs Vaizey was outside, seventy-six years old, in a huge pair of black silk shorts and a shrivelled tube top, and one of those SpaceFace lobster visors that were thought to be such a scream about 15 years ago.

“You’re looking grim, Jim,” said Mrs Vaizey, shielding her eyes against the sun. “Bad day at Black Rock?”

Jim nodded. “One of our students was killed today. It’s been pretty heavy all round.”

“Killed? That’s awful! How did that happen?”

“We’re not entirely sure. But so far it seems like another student stabbed him.”

“The world isn’t what it was, Jim. In my day you went to school to get yourself educated, not to kill other students, or to get yourself killed.”

“Well, that’s right, Mrs Vaizey. But I’m not so sure that this killing is quite so simple as it looks.”

The pale pink lobster on top of her head gave him a beady-eyed look and dangled its plastic claws. “You think different, do you? That’s because you
are
different.”

“Don’t start giving me that mystical stuff, Mrs Vaizey. I respect your gifts, and I respect what you believe in, but one of my favourite students died today, and this isn’t the time.”

“Nonsense,” she said. The skin on the back of her hand was like crumpled tissue-paper. “This is exactly the time. You tell me
why
you think different.”

Jim glanced over at Myrlin Buffield, from Apartment no. 201, who was pretending to read
Primary Colors
but who was listening to their conversation intently. Myrlin was ninety pounds overweight, with black slashed-back hair, and bosoms, and a gold earring in the shape of a dagger; and skin as white and luminous as a freshly-caught pollock. Nobody knew what Myrlin did for a living. Nobody liked to guess.

“Why don’t you come up for a drink, Mrs Vaizey?” asked Jim. “Then we can talk in private.”

“Beer?” asked Mrs Vaizey, suspiciously.

“What do you think I am? Bourbon.”

“In that case, Jim, I’d be happy to join you.”

He picked up her newspaper and her glasses and her sewing-bag and helped her up the steps to his apartment. He didn’t speak to her very often; mainly because she was always trying to persuade him to have his palms read; or his Tarot cards interpreted; or his tea-leaves scrutinised. He believed in a whole lot of odd things, but he didn’t believe in fortune-telling, or Ouija boards, or ghosts. He believed that the future was unpredictable, and that when you died, you died.
Click.
The light was switched off, and that was it.

Jim unlocked the door of his apartment and ushered Mrs Vaizey inside. The calico blinds were drawn down, and it was dim and warm. It wasn’t untidy, but there were several tell-tale signs that a single man lived here, and that nobody had cleaned up during the day. The cushions on the couch were still crumpled. There were dead sweet peas in the vase on the windowsill. Yesterday’s paper still lay where Jim had dropped it, as well a single slipper.

Mrs Vaizey cautiously sniffed. She could smell it, too. Nothing unpleasant – just stuffy, motionless air that nobody had breathed all day.

“Where’s your cat?” she wanted to know.

“The feline formerly known as Tibbles? He’ll be back, once he knows that I’m here. I never let him in during the day. I’m allergic to the smell of litter-trays.”

Mrs Vaizey sat down on the couch and Jim went through to the kitchen to find his bottle of Jim Beam. He sploshed out two generous glasses for both of them, and knocked his glass against hers, in salute, and to frighten away the devil. “Here’s to Elvin, who died today. And here’s to justice, and sense, and respect.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Mrs Vaizey. “Whatever the hell you’re talking about.”

Jim said, “I’m talking about young people who die too young, Mrs Vaizey. Elvin, you know – he didn’t have much of a chance to begin with. He was so damned slow he couldn’t catch a cold. His father was an invalid and his mother could never cope. But he was always so cheerful. He always made the best of what he had.”

“So who killed him?”

“One of his classmates. A boy called Tee Jay. That’s what the police think, anyway.”

“But you think elsewise?”

“I’m not sure. Tee Jay and Elvin were having a fight, earlier on; and when the fight was over I saw a man walking down the corridor. Tall, with a black suit and a wide black hat. He disappeared before I could find out who he was. But I saw him again, coming out of the school boiler-room; and that’s where Elvin was stabbed to death. I saw him, as clear as I can see you; but the trouble was that nobody else saw him. Nobody.”

Mrs Vaizey knocked back her bourbon and wiped her
mouth with the back of her hand. “I think I should look at the palm of your hand, Jim.”

“Mrs Vaizey, with all due respect, that’s not going to answer anything.”

“Jim … there’s something different about you. I always knew there was. You got the aura.”

“The aura? What’s that?”

Mrs Vaizey made a circular motion with her hands. “It’s a kind of a
glow
that some people have around them. Sometimes a happy person can shine like a light. But most people have more like a
mottled
effect, different colours for different parts of their psyche, if you get my meaning.”

“So what colour is mine?” asked Jim. He poured her another drink.

“Yours is different. Yours scarcely glows at all. Yours is more like a shadow than a shine.”

“What does that mean? That I’m depressed?”

Mrs Vaizey shook her head. “Nothing like that. It means that you’re in touch with the world beyond. There’s a part of you that can see
through
this everyday world right into the next, same as looking through a store window on a sunny day. You have to cup your hands around your eyes, and press your face close, but you can always see
something
.”

Jim gave an amused grunt, but Mrs Vaizey took hold of his hand between her claw-like fingers with all her knobbly silver rings and clutched it tight. “What do you think you saw today, Jim? You saw a man that nobody else could see. Now, was that man alive, do you suppose, or could that man have been something else?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘something else’. What are you talking about, a ghost?”

“Maybe a ghost. Who knows? It isn’t just the spirits of
dead people who wander through the world. Sometimes the living can do it, too.”

“What, like an out-of-body experience?”

“That’s one of the ways,” said Mrs Vaizey, looking down at the palm of his hand. Her sharp orange-lacquered nail probed his heartline, his headline and his lifeline.

“You’re very bright,” she told him. “The trouble is, you’re stubborn, too. You don’t like taking advice from other people. You always think that you have a better way of doing things. On the other hand, you have moments of great self-doubt, when you feel that you might have taken the wrong fork in the forest. At times like these you feel that the trees are closing in on you, and that you can hear strange growlings in the undergrowth.”

She looked up, and knocked back her second glass of bourbon. “Metaphor-orically speaking, of course.”

Jim watched her, the way her silver hoop earrings dangled in the sunlight. He should have been sceptical but somehow he wasn’t. After today’s murder, he was prepared to consider almost any explanation for what had happened. If God could allow a young man like Elvin to die; then obviously they were living in a universe in which nothing was logical, and nothing was fair.

“You’re very emotional, and capable of very great love,” Mrs Vaizey continued. “You had a love once who let you down, and it took you a long time to get over it. But another love will appear when you’re least expecting it – quite soon, by the looks of it – and this relationship will endure, on and off, for the rest of your life.”

“On and off? I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Everybody has quarrels, Jim, especially people who really love each other.”

“Well, I guess.”

Mrs Vaizey probed his lifeline. He wished she wouldn’t
dig her nail in quite so deeply. But then she looked up at him again and there was the most extraordinary expression on her face. She was staring at him as if she couldn’t believe that he was real. She probed it some more, peering at it intently; and then she said, “I don’t understand this at all.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“It’s very strange. Normally, if somebody’s lifeline is broken, you can predict when they’re going to die. You know, almost to the
year
.”

“And, what? Is my lifeline broken?”

Mrs Vaizey nodded. “You see here … way down at the bottom. It breaks up and goes every which way.”

“So what does that mean? You’re not telling me that I’m not going to die young, are you? My dad and my mom are both still alive.”

“Jim, this break happens very, very early in your life. It means that, by rights, you should be dead already.”

“What?”

“There’s no mistaking it. It’s very clear. It means that you died when you were eleven or twelve.”

Jim laughed. “I died when I was eleven or twelve? That doesn’t say much for palmistry, does it? I mean, how dead do I look?”

“There’s no mistake,” said Mrs Vaizey, and her voice was completely serious.

“So I’m supposed to believe that I’m dead, is that it?”

“You’re not dead now; but you were once. Just for a moment, perhaps. But dead.”

Jim took his hand away, and held it against his chest, as if it were injured. “Listen,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know, Jim,” said Mrs Vaizey. “Maybe it could.
Were you ever sick, when you were a child? I mean seriously sick?”

“I went down with pneumonia once, when I was ten or eleven.”

“Can you remember what happened?”

“Not very clearly … I was always pretty skinny and weedy when I was a kid. I went down with the grippe and the grippe turned into pneumonia. My dad and mom took me to hospital and there were all these people in white, looking after me. They were great. They took me for walks and they talked to me, and in the end they brought me back to my bed and I was cured.”

“What do they look like, these people in white?”

“I don’t know. I guess they were doctors and nurses. But there were dozens of them … all talking to me, all trying to make me feel better. And in the end, yes. I felt better.”

Mrs Vaizey held out her glass and Jim filled it again. The sun had fallen, and there were wide stripes of light across the only picture which Jim had hung on the wall: a large reproduction of
The Surrender of Breda
by Veláquez, Dutch soldiers handing over the keys of the city to Spanish lancers. Jim had always taken a particular kind of strength from it, because it showed sworn enemies behaving toward each other with courtesy and understanding – two qualities which he had always tried to instil in the students of Special Class II.

Mrs Vaizey said, “Has it ever occurred to you that those people in white might
not
have been doctors and nurses?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You were very young, and close to death. Clinically, perhaps, you
did
die. But, believe me, there are many kind spirits on the other side who do their best to turn back young souls before it’s too late.”

Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs Vaizey. I don’t believe in life after death.”

“Even though you probably saw some spirits for yourself?”

“I was very young. I was probably dreaming.”

Mrs Vaizey took hold of his hand again, and ran her fingernail up and down his lifeline, again and again. “The point I’m trying to make to you, Jim, is that if you’ve seen spirits once, you can see them again. Coming close to death, that gives you
a facility,
if you understand what I mean. An extra sense that you never lose.”

Jim said nothing, but watched and winced as Mrs Vaizey pored over his palm. After a few moments, she frowned, and peered even more closely at his lifeline.

“Something wrong?” he asked her.

“I don’t know … I can’t understand what this means. You have a double break and then a loop, almost, like an oxbow. You’re going to have a strange meeting, unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. Then something very frightening is going to happen. But that’s all that I can decipher.” She drew her fingernail along his lifeline yet again, and as she did so, Jim felt a searing pain. Her fingernail scratched against his skin like a safety-match, and flames sprang up behind it, right out of the palm of his hand.

“Jesus!” he shouted, and instantly clamped his hand shut. But flames burst out from between his fingers and engulfed his whole fist.

He tried to jump up, but Mrs Vaizey shouted, “No!” She snatched a cushion from the couch and pressed it over Jim’s hand. She held it down for a long, long moment, and then she cautiously lifted it up again to make sure that the flames had been extinguished. Slowly, Jim opened
his fingers. The fire had vanished, leaving nothing but a pattern of faint red marks.

“Does it hurt?” Mrs Vaizey asked him.

Jim raised his hand and turned it this way and that. “Not really. There’s a dull kind of a burning sensation … but I guess that’s all. What the hell happened?”

“It’s a warning,” said Mrs Vaizey. She was so shaken that her hands were trembling. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never seen it, not for real, not right in front of my eyes.”

“A warning? A warning about what?”

“I can’t tell you. There are some things that people shouldn’t know.”

“Come on, Mrs Vaizey. My goddamned hand just caught light. You have to tell me.”

She pressed her hand over her mouth for a while, thinking. Then she said, “All right … I suppose you have the right. Sometimes, when the danger of death is very close, people show signs of it on their bodies. The more sensitive a person is, the clearer the signs. I knew a woman in Santa Barbara whose lips went blue; and three weeks later she was dead of cyanide poisoning. Then there was a movie producer in Westwood who kept getting these red bite marks on his arms. Before the year was out, he was attacked by two Dobermanns when he was visiting one of his friends. They practically tore off his face.”