Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (20 page)

CHAPTER 33

UNION TRANSFER

U
nion Transfer is a rock club on Spring Garden that I knew of but till then had successfully avoided. Crowded all-night venues for obscure rock bands, where I could skulk in the back and feel out of place as hipsters hopped and twirled before the stage and shouted out the lyrics to songs I had never heard before, were no longer my kind of place. They were fine in the late nights of my early adulthood, but my life took on a different cast once I embarked on the downward trajectory of my failed career. Now I preferred quieter places with cleaner undertones of desperation that better matched my mood.

Yet here I was, making my way through the crowd loitering at the door, fresh young folk with cigarettes and beers, far cooler than I had ever been, who looked to have just rolled off their couches and into the night. It might not have been my type of place, but it surely was Duddleman’s, and I liked that she had asked to meet me there. It meant she was getting back to herself.

The crowd made way as if for a leper as I walked up to the ticket window.

“One,” I said.

The woman inside, all tattoos and piercings, with bright, pretty lips, didn’t bat an eye at my suit and tie and trilby. “Fifteen dollars.”

“Who’s playing?”

“Why?”

“I just want to know.”

She looked at me as if she had heard it before, heard it all stinking night. I gave her the money and examined the ticket. I guess with The Who and The Guess Who already taken, WHY? was the only band name left.

Just inside the door was an anteroom where T-shirts and ice cream and CDs were being sold, and then beyond that was the main space, large and open and steampunk in design, with lights darting here and there, the room dark, bouncing, mobbed, loud, chaotic.

The band of the night was onstage, the lead singer mixing rap and song over the heavy bass line. The young and the earnest were pressed to the front as the singer exhorted and the crowd shouted back and the lead guitarist tore it up. I walked into the least crowded area in the room, just in front of the soundboard. Behind me was a rise leading to a bar area with scattered tables. Above me a metal balcony ringed the room, every inch of rail leaned on by patrons looking coolly down at the stage. In the rear, behind the balcony, was a set of bleachers upon which a gang of carousers stood and shouted. I spun around as I searched. I didn’t spot Duddleman, but she was there, somewhere.

Within the pressing, hypnotic four-four beat, I made my way to a stairwell on the far side of the room. I had to maneuver past stoned dancers, around couples making out, through a horde that barely shifted to let me through, as the singer shouted out his mystifying lyrics, and the music throbbed, and the ceiling lights spun.

Just as I reached the stairs, I saw someone watching me, his eyes uneasily trained on mine.

He was thin, with a sparse beard, wearing a loose flannel shirt, just another weaselly face in the weaselly crowd, but this face stared at me as if I was somehow familiar to him.

And then he backed away before turning and disappearing into the waves of sound and the writhing mob.

It didn’t come to me just then, or as I climbed the stairs, but when I reached the second level, I took a moment to grab a spot on the balcony rail and look down, hoping to catch sight of the man again. And I did. I caught the check of his shirt as he pushed his way hurriedly toward a doorway by the stage. He stopped for a moment and looked behind, as if he were being chased, as if he were being chased by me. And suddenly I placed him.

The skinny wretch I had caught rifling my apartment, standing among the wreckage, holding onto my bag as I came out of my bedroom, before some other wretch knocked me into next week. One of the bastards who had placed my prints on the bloody hammer and then buried the hammer in my drawer.

I leaned forward and looked close and saw him grab at another man whose back was turned. He said something to the man and then they both turned and looked up at the second floor, not at me, and not at the bleachers, but at someplace behind the bleachers, as if something back there was of more concern to them than the likes of Victor Carl. They rushed off, escaping out of the room, but not before I recognized the second man, too, the son of a bitch. I recognized him right off, and as soon as I did, I grew scared, very scared, and not just for myself.

I tore away from the rail and fought my way through a bobbing throng to the back of the second level, behind the bleachers. It was an empty space dimly lit and filled only with the shrieking guitar, and the solid wall of bass, and the singer shouting words like nonsense all in time to the beat, the steady, steady beat.

Each second that passed drove the desperation until it nearly clogged my throat. I shouted for her, but my shouts were lost in the darkness, lost in the music, and with every beat I became ever more certain as to what had happened, and what I would find, hoping all the while I was wrong, so wrong.

And then I saw the shape of a leg, just peeking out behind a table in a far corner of the space, one long thin leg, stockinged in black, with no shoe.

CHAPTER 34

REDHEAD

W
hen I returned to my apartment in the early morning hours, everything was different, everything was cleaner.

My hate, for instance, was no longer diffuse and general, but hard and glowing, sharp as a scythe. And my purpose was now as directed as a missile; suddenly I had answers to Timothy’s three questions, answers as cold and hard as my hate. And my profile, too, was cleaner, for I no longer wore the hat, that ludicrous gray trilby that made me look like a lothario pol from the fifties. I had tossed it into a garbage can outside the rock club, letting it nestle amidst the empty bottles, half-chewed sandwiches, and vomit, where it belonged.

Well, not everything was cleaner. My apartment itself was utterly trashed. I had straightened it from its earlier ransacking, put the crap back in the proper crap drawers, stitched up what daggered couch cushions could be saved, turning bad side down so that the scars were hidden, and replaced those that couldn’t be sewed. It had almost seemed good as new, but not anymore. All the drawers again were pulled open and emptied, all the cushions again were slashed, the floor again was strewn with my crap.

And in the middle of this unholy mess, curled on a chair and wearing nothing but one of my starched white shirts, the shirt open just enough to uncover the ruby point of a single breast, was Ossana, her lips ripe and swollen, her hair a red swarm, her long legs bare and pale and pulled up beneath her, her green eyes so heavily ringed with mascara they appeared bruised.

I looked around at the ruin of my apartment, so precise a representation of the ruin of my political dreams, and kept my expression matter-of-fact, as if finding my apartment in such a state were no more remarkable than finding a fat man at McDonald’s. Everything was now on the table. Good.

“Looking for something?” I said.

“A cigarette. I was desperate. I remembered too late that you don’t smoke. What took you so long?”

“An unexpected tragedy. There’s been a murder.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said without an ounce of sorrow. “Anyone I know?”

“Just a reporter.”

“In that case.”

I walked over to the easy chair where she sat, leaned over, reached down and cupped her breast with my hand, put my jaw on the top of her head, smelled her scent, warm and rich with still an undertone of sex. “Have you been in touch with your friend Colin Frost? How’s his rehab going?”

“Quite well, from what I hear,” she said. “He should be out soon.”

“Won’t that be a party.”

“Why are you bringing up Colin? Are you worried he’ll take your job once he’s out?”

“Which job is that, working for your brother or working on you?”

She shrugged my chin from her head and pulled my hand away. “Don’t be crude.”

“I thought that’s the way you liked it.” I took a handful of her hair and brought my mouth close to hers. “Hard and crude and impersonal.”

Her lips twitched into a cruel smile. “I do like it better when I can’t see your face.”

I leaned forward, brushed my lips across her eye, and then put my mouth at her ear. “Who are you imagining when you can’t see my face? Colin?”

“Are you obsessed with Colin Frost, Victor? My God, you sound jealous.”

I kissed her neck. “It’s just that I thought I saw him tonight.”

“Impossible. The facility he’s in is very secure. It doesn’t allow its patients to just up and leave as they will.”

“Prudent policy.”

She bent her head back, exposing her long pale neck. “I’ve been waiting.”

I had the bright vampiric urge to take a bite, a large one, a real mouthful. Instead, I let go of her hair, looked at my hand, pulled a strand of red from between my fingers. She turned her head to face me as I put the strand into my shirt pocket and I stared into those eyes, so wide, so green, green as jade, so accomplished at hiding what was behind them.

“I’m sorry you waited for nothing,” I said, “but I’m no longer in the mood. A bloody murder tends to do that to me. Not to mention the hours I was held for questioning by the police, and then the hostile interrogation by Detective McDeiss. But at least my absence gave you the opportunity to look around my apartment. For cigarettes, I mean.”

“Sometimes I just have such an urge. Did you take the lock of my hair as a keepsake?”

“Something to moon over on full moons. It’s not here, you know. It was when they first came up here looking for it. But they missed it. That’s the problem with hiring drug addicts to do your dirty work. I think you would have been clever enough to find it—I’m sure of it, actually—except it’s not here anymore.”

“What are you talking about, Victor?”

“Let’s not be coy when just a few hours before we were screwing like unhinged rodents. I’m talking about the proof Jessica Barnes gave to me. You asked for it, your brother asked for it, Melanie Brooks asked for it, even Detective McDeiss pressed me for it. Everybody so desperately wants it, but I don’t have it anymore.”

“That’s too bad. It would have been useful to have.”

“How far does it go, you shilling for your brother? Is screwing me part of the job?”

“We all have unpleasant duties.”

“Don’t we,” I said, and then I leaned forward again and kissed her. And she kissed me back, with a bit of urgency in her tongue now, the kind of urgency that would have boiled my blood just a few hours before. I made it seem like it was hard to pull away, I made it seem like I wasn’t ready to vomit into her mouth.

“The reporter who was murdered was young and bright and idealistic,” I said, “and remarkably pretty. She was getting her life together. Her future would undoubtedly have been brilliant.”

“You sound like you were a little in love with her.”

“I liked her, very much, actually.” I backed away to get a gander at the whole of her. “But it was your brother who was in love with her.”

“My brother has his unfortunate infatuations,” she said a little too quickly. She pulled her legs further beneath her. There was an expression of distaste, as if she had eaten a rotten clam, but there was no shock or puzzlement, no wondering what was what.

Maybe there had been a bulletin on the radio. Maybe she had been texted the news by her brother. Or maybe she had peeked at my phone while I was in the shower and gave the order herself. Maybe she was a pawn in someone else’s game. Or maybe she was a murderous bitch who needed to be put down. Maybe she was a damsel in distress. Yeah, that was it, and I was Richard the Lionheart back from the Crusades.

“The reporter was looking into the Shoeless Joan murder,” I said. “And wouldn’t you know it, she ended up shoeless herself. It’s become a dangerous business, this whole thing, and I have to tell you, Ossana, I have the strange feeling that I might be the next one to lose my footwear.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Victor. It doesn’t become you.”

“Neither does death. That’s why you didn’t find what you were looking for. It was too hot for me, too damn dangerous. I gave it away.”

A twitch and an impatient tightening of her lips. “That was imprudent of you. To whom?”

“To someone with very explicit instructions on what to do with it if anything happens to me.”

“That’s the best you could do?”

“I’m not clever enough to have devised something richer.”

“What ever am I going to do with you?”

“Keep me alive,” I said. “Keep me employed.”

And those words, like an incantation, magically eased her concern. I was still on a line, her line, her brother’s line, on the line of this whole political world of easy money and easier virtue. She stood up, lifted her arms in the air and stretched like a cat. She took a step forward, placing her arms atop her head so that I could see the flock of birds fluttering on her wrist.

“You still want to work for my brother?”

“I still want to be paid by him.”

“At least you’re true to form, I’ll give you that. I love men without surprises.”

“I know where I’ve been, I’m not going back.”

“But there is something different about you, Victor, a new taste I can’t quite put my tongue on.”

“I’m seeing everything more clearly.”

“Even me?”

“Especially you.”

She took another step forward, and another. She lowered her arms onto my shoulders and tilted her head so that her green eyes stared up into my own. “And what do you see, Victor?”

“That you were right about your darkness being darker than mine.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” She pulled my head close and kissed me, tried to slip her tongue through my unmoving lips, was checked by my teeth. “Oh my, I see why you like it like that. It’s like kissing a dead man, what could be richer? Are you going to fuck me now?”

“No.”

“I’ll be anything you want. Cheerleader. Corpse. A cheerleader’s corpse.”

“No.”

“Frightened?”

“Terrified.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open, I promise.”

“That would only make it worse.”

“And if I told you I had nothing to do with the reporter’s murder?”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“I had nothing to do with her murder.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But you do believe me.”

“No.”

She pushed herself away and turned, but not before I caught the beginnings of the smile she was trying to hide. “Oh, how cruel you are, to think me capable of such a thing.”

“But not as cruel as you.”

“No, Victor, that’s right,” she said, sloughing the shirt from her shoulders, baring the line of her back, the double question mark of her ass. As she began to walk away, she turned her head and flashed that smile like a punch to the jaw. “You could never be as cruel as me.”

“My God,” I said, in admiration of her body, her balls, the anarchy that glowed like a bonfire in those bright-green eyes. “This political line is rougher than I ever imagined.”