The October Killings (15 page)

By far the greatest part of Yudel's excitement at these attributes had been enjoyed resentfully, at a distance. During the many years he had been married to Rosa she had only once caught him in an act of unfaithfulness that had disturbed the harmony in the Gordon home. He had arranged to meet her at a music shop and, while he waited, had listened to a Toscanini recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Business was quiet and the shop assistant, a girl of eighteen or nineteen, had fetched a second set of earphones and joined him. When Rosa entered the shop they both had their eyes closed, in a state of transport, coupled together via the electronic circuitry of the amplifier and Beethoven's Ninth. It took her a month to forgive him.

The waitress's attraction, for Yudel, rested principally on two features. First, he noticed her downy upper lip. Immediately after that, his eyes came to rest on her concave temples. To Yudel, although he could not recall the association, this was a sign of uninhibited sexual energy. She also had a sun-washed skin color and lean, but nicely padded fingers and thumbs. More than any other attribute, her forearms fascinated him. They were light and well-shaped, puffed out tantalizingly just below the elbow. The sudden, neat swelling of muscle had drawn his attention as she handed Rosa the menu, her arm passing within a few centimeters of his face.

“The Sephardic congregation is getting a new Torah,” Rosa was saying. Lately, after an absence of many years, she had taken to attending shul again and was trying to interest Yudel. “Rachelle has invited us to the induction ceremony.” Yudel used a small part of his faculties of attention to listen to what his wife was saying. He wondered where it was leading and whether there was any possible way he could reply intelligently, or at all, without upsetting her. “It has been written on scrolled parchment. A special silver and gold case has been made for it. The Rael family sponsored its manufacture.”

“Do you know what the Torah is?” Yudel asked. He had given up the idea of replying intelligently.

“Don't be facetious, Yudel. Of course I know what the Torah is. It's the law. And it's high time you started taking an interest in such matters. I know at least as much about the scriptures as you do.”

“How many books of the prophets are there?”

“You're trying to annoy me. You can take that supercilious expression off your face. I won't be drawn into your silly games. You don't know how many books of the prophets there are either.”

It was true. Yudel did not know. He was saved from the need to reply by the return of the waitress. She had Rosa's 35 rand prawn cocktail and, probably out of pity, a few slices of Melba toast for him. Again that lovely, light forearm—lean, but swelling beautifully, passed just below his nose. He watched its progress as it came past, carefully positioning the toast in front of him, lingered unnecessarily for a moment, then withdrew. He looked up into her face and she smiled warmly at him in anticipation of the tip to come. Light reflected on a tiny, barely perceptible, golden line along the down of her upper lip.

Perhaps it was some memory awakened by the sight of the waitress's young hips rolling as she skipped between the tables on her way back to the kitchen, or perhaps it was only the warmth of an early summer evening or most probably the two glasses of wine she had already consumed, but Rosa's mood changed. “I'm glad the stove broke,” she said. “It's too long since we last did something like this.”

With the disappearance of the waitress Yudel's thoughts turned to the sort of things that usually occupied them. He thought about the conversation with van Jaarsveld, if you could call it that. There were things that van Jaarsveld had said that, of those present, only Abigail had understood. This was a problem to Yudel. He wanted to understand. In everything, all his life, he had wanted to understand. This was no different.

Rosa was still talking. He tried briefly to follow the direction of her conversation. “What a wonderful night. Look at the stars through the palm fronds. I have the feeling, the exhilarating feeling, that nothing bad can happen on a night like this. Just feel this air.”

Her remark directed his thinking to many nights, much like this one, each on October twenty-second when death had come suddenly via a wire garrotte. He wondered about the killer, and he had no doubt that the killer was just one person, a man, no longer young, and obviously skilled in his frightening art. He also wondered how it was that two people as different as van Jaarsveld and Abigail would know the killer's identity, and why Abigail would not tell him. His thoughts moved on and he wondered what thoughts, on this lovely night, were occupying the minds of van Jaarsveld and the murderer that Abigail was seeking.

“Yudel, say something. Don't just sit there. I try to make this marriage work. I've always tried, but you don't communicate with me. I never know what you're thinking.”

It was true. He did not communicate with her. It had always been his belief that she did not want to know what he was thinking. She thought she did, but on the rare occasions when he had tried her with a little sample, she had usually seemed distressed. Did she want to know about these killings? Or about the real reason for Abigail's visit? Or about the mind of Marinus van Jaarsveld?

“Can't you say anything about the night?” Rosa was almost pleading. “About the stars? Or about the palm trees?”

“Bush pigeons like to nest in them.”

“What?” Rosa asked.

“Bush pigeons like to nest in palms.”

“That's very interesting.” Her voice had acquired a sardonic edge. “I had no idea you were an expert on birds.”

“Just something I picked up.” Rosa was looking at him with the exasperation that comes with hopeless dejection when the waitress returned. Rosa had not quite finished her prawns, but the waitress already had her veal piccata and Yudel's just-peckish calamari. She placed the veal on the edge of the table for Rosa's future consumption and leaned forward to slip Yudel's calamari onto the place mat in front of him. Her arm, the same slender, gently swelling arm that had held his attention before, pale on the underside and brown on the outside, trimmed with fine golden hairs that you could see only when the light caught them, passed close by his face again as she positioned the plate of calamari. He tried not to follow it with his eyes, but she leaned forward a second time to do something to the plate. Whatever it was, Yudel's mind did not register the action. He saw only the softness of flesh, the subtle change of coloring where the pale underside met the brown outside, the light leanness and the compellingly elegant shape of the muscle. He leaned forward and bit it softly.

For much of his childhood Yudel had lived alone with his mother. Whatever self-confidence he possessed he owed to those years when he had been the center of her life. She had given him no scoldings, no hidings and only showed displeasure with one simple remark. “Yudel, you've done a naughty thing,” she would say.

In the moment, the small fraction of a second, in which his teeth held the waitress's arm, Yudel knew that he had done a naughty thing. He released it to look into the girl's blushing, not entirely displeased face and Rosa's round, horrified, utterly disbelieving eyes.

*   *   *

Yudel sat in his study, trying to think about Abigail's matter and what it all meant. This was not made easier by Rosa's rather noisy presence in the kitchen. Judging by the loud clanking of metallic objects, she could be destroying it.

Between the clanking of pots and cutlery, Rosa was doing something that could not accurately be described as crying. It was more a kind of hyperventilating. She seemed to be drawing in great lungfuls of air, as if she was struggling to take in enough oxygen, and in the process making loud mezzo-soprano wheezing noises. He had tried to comfort her, but had been driven off by a furious denunciation of his lascivious nature.

What a fuss about a little bite, he thought. She had fled the restaurant, leaving him to pay a puzzled management and to tip a still-blushing waitress. Instead of waiting at the car, she had set off for home on foot while he followed, driving slowly, like a curb crawler, trying with excessive persistence to make a pickup. After a kilometer's determined march she had weakened enough to accept a lift. Her weakening had extended no further than that. Yudel's stopping along the way to buy a newspaper did nothing to improve her disposition.

To hell with it, Yudel thought. He opened the unread newspaper on the desk before him and tried to absorb the lead item on the front page. If nothing else, it might allow him half an hour in which to avoid whatever confrontation with Rosa the night still held.

Reading the newspaper did not work. Yudel had read the headline four times without understanding it before he came to that conclusion. He would have to deal with the Rosa matter.

He found her washing a few dishes and pots that had stood over from earlier in the day. In her anguish she may have been a little heavy-handed, but she had not been destroying the kitchen. When she turned to face him her eyes looked darker than usual and her skin had taken on a pale, waxen appearance. “You're going out,” she told him between the wheezes. “Yudel, I'm only going to ask this once. Please give me a direct answer. Are you going to meet that waitress?”

“No,” Yudel said. “And I'm not going out either.” Despite the complete accuracy of his answer, he was aware that it sounded untrue, even to his own ears. “Rosa.” He tried to bring more conviction to his voice. “I don't even know the name of that girl or where to find her.”

“You seemed pretty intimate this evening.”

“It was a momentary aberration.” Yudel was seeking a way to strengthen his protestations. “She was so slow. I bit her arm in annoyance.” As soon as he had said it, he wished that he could have withdrawn the words. To lie successfully sometimes caused a few guilt problems, but to lie so transparently created problems of every imaginable variety.

“Oh, Yudel.” Rosa looked deeply distressed. “You're lying to me, you rotten man.”

“The truth is…” Yudel looked for a format within which to frame the truth. “The truth is that I'm a fool.”

Rosa did not need to think about this before nodding. “That is the truth,” she said.

*   *   *

The darkness in the apartment was softened by lights in the garden and in the street. Abigail did not know why she felt safer in the darkness. Perhaps, she thought, because this was her home turf. She knew the doors, the obstacles and hiding places, even in darkness. She could also not be seen, at least not readily.

Michael Whitehead had been just one of many recent surprises. The boy who had been trying to get closer to her at the time was a junior crime reporter. In his desperation to impress her, he had taken her to the place where Whitehead's body had been found.

It had lain spread-eagled on an allotment, one of the tiny patches of earth which some Londoners used to try to stay in touch with mother earth, getting their hands pleasurably dirty with the soil from which we are so alienated. The patch of allotments was surrounded by rows of narrow, terraced houses. Perhaps a hundred houses had windows looking down on the place.

The one where the body was found had belonged to the British fiancée of a military attaché at the South African Embassy. Scotland Yard had questioned the attaché at length before deciding that he was not their man. To the best of Abigail's knowledge, the case had never been solved.

Her young escort had brought her to this entirely blameless part of the city and presented it to her like a magician drawing a rabbit out of a hat. “What do you think?” he had said.

By that time the owner of the allotment had removed every trace of the incident. “Of what?”

“Of the place where this Whitehead's body was found.”

To Abigail, it had not looked like the sort of place where you would find the body of a murder victim. But what did such a place look like? Even to the community of exiled South Africans it had simply been a chance incident, a businessman who had the bad luck to run into the wrong man at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

She remembered one more thing her young crime reporter had said. “Had his throat slit, from ear to ear.”

She doubted that he had got that from Scotlard Yard. That had no doubt been his own analysis.

Abigail shivered. The place was so empty without Robert. This was the worst possible time for him to be away. She could not imagine a worse time. So suddenly and without warning. And with the twenty-second coming closer by the moment. The next day would be the nineteenth … just three days left.

She would go and see Leon in the morning. Until some sort of finality was brought to the matter, the only solution was for him to remain out of sight, and out of harm's way.

She stood for a while at the French windows, looking down into the neighboring garden. The white bull terrier she so hated had appeared out of the shadows and padded its way through the garden of the adjoining property. Almost immediately a man in ragged dungarees, riding a bicycle, by the look of him a manual laborer, had come down the road, stirring the dog into a frenzy. It charged the iron latticework of the gate, clawing it, trying without success to reach the cyclist.

The phone rang, taking Abigail away from the window. She paused before answering. God only knew who it could be. But then she realized that it was probably Robert.

“Hey, sweetheart,” her husband's voice said, “how are you this evening?” There was some anxiety in his voice. She could hear that he was really not sure how she would be.

“I'm okay. And you? What happened? What's it all about?”

“The briefing's tomorrow morning. I still know nothing. I'll be back tomorrow evening. My flight lands at ten past five. I'll get a cab home.”

No, she thought. I'm not waiting that long. I want you back now. “I'll pick you up at the airport,” she said.