Goodbye Again (14 page)

Panama put the paper down. ‘“Fifteen to twenty million dollars”! That puts my business in the shade. “One of Modigliani’s finest nudes.” I got it all wrong! Nothing so vulgar as drug-running. You’re in the major-league art heist business. And strangulation …’ He fingered his neck gingerly. ‘My goodness, I better be careful.’ Ben was speechless.

‘And yet you see,’ leaning forward, Panama helped him out enthusiastically, ‘somehow I don’t quite believe it all.’

‘Why not? You don’t look or behave like a drug-runner.’

‘Ah, but unlike you artists, in my business I have to look as conventional as any bank manager or dentist.’

‘I see.’

‘Good, but I don’t. Because if you’d stolen that picture the last thing you’d do would have been to go to the Louvre with it, giving the archivist your name and address. And then you didn’t return to your own boat, this
Sorrento
. Instead you escaped on Geoff’s barge, when my friend and I took another boat, following you to Vitry. So all right, you’re not drug-running for Geoff, but clearly you must be guilty of something?’

‘Our deal was just to take you into Germany.’

‘Never mind. Meanwhile, since clearly we’re both on the run we could help each other out. I could put my gun, and yours, away.’

‘I’m surprised. If you go by the facts in the paper, guns aren’t our style. One of us might strangle you.’

‘Yes, and I should fear that. Except I don’t. I know the strangler type. Neither of you remotely fills that bill. So I’ll tell you what’s much more likely. Somebody else strangled this Martin-Beaumont, before you got there.’ He smiled. Ben said nothing. ‘And they strangled him because they wanted information from him. They applied the pressure, literally. Some very important
information, which only he possessed, but didn’t give them. Now do you see where this is leading?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘No, perhaps not, because, like the others, you failed to get this vital information out of him. But what information? “Martin-Beaumont: well-known art historian who, in his youth, knew Modigliani”. Yes, Ben, now it all fits. The information Martin-Beaumont had can only have been about establishing the background of the nude, for his killers and for you.’

‘Yes, all right, that’s it.’ Ben could no longer keep silent. ‘We were trying to establish the provenance of the painting with Martin-Beaumont.’

‘Now we are getting somewhere, but we face another problem. If you didn’t steal the painting then it must be yours. It’s not a crime to try and identify the origins of one’s own property, yet you are behaving very much as if it was. In a most guilty manner, if I may say so. So there are some vital pieces missing in the puzzle.’

‘Why not cut the cackle? What do you want?’

‘“Cut the cackle”! – I like that. I told you, we could help each other.’

‘You mean you want the painting. And fifteen or twenty million dollars, or whatever you can get for it from some crooked buyer.’

‘Yes, exactly, but I’d cut you in on it. And when we get to Germany I’d see you both safe out of Europe. Plenty of money, new names, passports. I have friends in high places. Think about it.’ He stood up, still covering us with his gun. ‘And while you’re thinking about it, I think the painting would be safer under my cabin bed, rather than yours. Would you bring it up for me please, Elsa?’

I went down and brought it up to him. He gazed at it. ‘Sensuous, erotic, but all so understated. Who is she?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what we were trying to find out.’

‘Well, it hardly matters. She won’t be going on public view.’

‘Wait a moment, I haven’t agreed about giving you the painting, or your selling it on. I’ve only agreed to take you into Germany.’

He looked at Ben, a kindly gaze. ‘You are hardly in a position to refuse any of my requests.’ He looked down at his gun, surprised, as if only then was he aware that he had it in his hand. That seemed about it. We were stuck with the genial bastard, right through to Germany.

In the hot days that followed, dawns rising to pink and pale-blue skies, and then the burning orange of midday, to midge-filled twilights and late deep dark, we fell into a routine where it was difficult to avoid feeling that the three of us were colleagues, at least, on holiday, cruising the lovely canal, through little towns and poppy fields with the other tourist boats.

A routine of opening and closing locks, moored by the bank in the midday heat, a snack lunch, mugs of tea and biscuits at teatime in the wheelhouse, wine in the evening with whatever decent meals I could manage. Panama was always polite. He praised my cooking and Ben’s navigation.

Stuck with him? No, we were his prisoners. He kept an eye and his gun on us all the time. Except when he let me off the boat at some canal-side town or village to buy provisions. ‘Remember, I have your “partner” here,’ he would say before I left. ‘So don’t do anything rash. Like contacting the police, for example. I’ll shoot your friend if you do.’

We were free of him at night when he locked us both in the cabin, but then Ben and I had to confront each other at even closer quarters. It was hot in the cabin, even late into the night. Impossible not to move around or shower or sleep almost naked, and though that hadn’t worried me with Ben before on the boat in Killiney, things had happened between us since that made it more difficult. In our enforced physical proximity we could only find privacy in our thoughts.

Ben dipped fretfully in and out of Katie’s diary, sitting at the foot of the bed, trying to appear indifferent to what he was reading. I lay out on the bed reading some of the theatre books Geoff had left in the wheelhouse. Alec Guinness’s memoirs. Tennessee Williams’s plays.
Sweet Bird of Youth, Small Craft Warnings, Suddenly Last Summer.

One night Ben looked up from his reading. ‘Strange how Katie absolutely insists on remembering things in a particular way. She writes how “he contradicts me about obvious facts”, when I know what I said to her that time was absolutely true.’

‘Don’t you see? She had to be right. The sanity clause: seems she couldn’t face the truth with you, about whatever she was up to with her father, which was why she had to chuck you without giving you a reason. It was the same with Martha – I’ve no real notion of what took us apart.’

‘No idea?’

‘No. Except it was something she came to dislike in me. Something grated. Like your friend Katie she just left me swinging in the wind.’

‘Silence, admission of guilt?’

‘Yes, except I was somehow on trial, not her. She was the prosecutor, but wouldn’t say what my crime was. I think she came to believe our sort of love would tell against her with her very proper bosses in the New York legal firm, but since she couldn’t admit this nonsense, she had to find some other reason to leave me and go straight, and rise in the firm. Find some false evidence, phoney exhibits which would prove the case against me.’

‘She must have produced something concrete against you?’

‘Now and then, towards the end, yes, she let several mangy cats out of bags. She hinted she couldn’t love me, because I was using her, in love only with her youth. Well, she was hardly that young, and I was certainly not that old. Or that I was unfaithful:
she once astonished me by asking if I had one-night stands with other women I’d met on my trips away.’

‘Did you?’

‘Of course not, and I told her so. Then she said I was unreliable, a maverick, too demanding, that I was beyond the pale of reasonable emotion. She actually said we were incompatible.’

‘That’s always a good one. I got that one, too. Then they can chuck you without a qualm. Anyway, everyone is more or less incompatible, and isn’t that the attraction? We often love people because we’re so much not like them.’

‘The chalk-and-cheese clause. Except Martha couldn’t read beyond the incompatibility clause.’

‘The cook and the lawyer! Well, you were certainly very different. Maybe too different? Like Katie and me. I couldn’t ride a horse to save my life, nor she paint. And Martha probably saw you as a bit raffish, like Katie saw me.’

‘Yes. Frivolous. I’m sure she saw all my cooking and eating and writing about food as frivolous, and I had to be punished for that.’

‘How did she go cold? What did she do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know … Well, yes, I was away on a job, a seafood article up in Maine. Just a few days. We’d arranged to have friends over for dinner that Sunday evening. She was doing the cooking. The flight back was delayed and I didn’t get home till after nine to find they’d not waited. That was okay, but Martha hadn’t kept any food or wine for me, except the remains of a meringue and apricot tart, just a few crackly mushy bits on a platter. A tart which I’d made myself, too.’

He laughed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So what’s your example with Katie?’

‘She said to me once, when I asked her why she’d only sleep with me, never do anything else – trips away and so on like we’d done so often before – “It’s easier this way now that I’ve lost respect for you.”’

‘She sounds a bitch. Unless maybe you really did something terrible to her. Did you?’

‘Of course not. I just put up with her saying terrible things to me. Maybe that was part of her charm.’

‘No. You’re plenty idiotic sometimes, but you’re not a masochist.’ I laughed again. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but one has to laugh. All the ridiculous shabby manoeuvrings one goes in for – “in love”! If we’d just been tougher and told them to bugger off, they might have come back with better sense.’

‘Martha might have done. But Katie wasn’t going to come back. If she had, she’d have to have written a whole new script, and she couldn’t face the truth of that.’

We dropped these painful topics. Ben dozed off and slept, but I couldn’t. Why am I making such a meal of losing Martha? As if I was the first to lose like this. But you always feel you are. And you’re right – you are the only person who’s lost in this particular way with that particular person.

It was my particular skin, after all, my body: it was your mouth, Martha, and mine – at that particular time, in that particular place – when we ate pastrami and rye one afternoon, sheltering from the rain, that particular Saturday afternoon, in that particular crummy Second Avenue bar, famished for each other. It was us, and no others, that Christmas when we watched the skaters on the ice at Rockefeller Plaza and you said, ‘I’d love to skate, but I don’t know how.’ And then you turned and kissed me, as if to say, ‘My not skating doesn’t matter a damn, because I have you.’

Two mornings later we approached Bar-le-Duc, a little hillside town with medieval buildings already in view on our right. We were all in the wheelhouse, but as we came towards the open lock just before the town, Panama got up. ‘I’ll go below, just in case there’s anybody unpleasant to greet us here.’ He went below.

‘I hope Geoff’s drug-trafficking friend at Le Coq d’Or isn’t the unpleasant person to greet us,’ Ben said.

‘What’ll we do if he is?’

‘Ask him on board. Tell him his consignment is downstairs, under the kitchen sink. Then he and Panama can sort it out, while we disappear.’

‘Sort it out? How?’

‘Shoot each other. That’d be ideal.’

The patron of Le Coq d’Or wasn’t looking out for us when we moored at the quay beyond the lock. Instead I saw the tarty woman walking towards us, in her headscarf and dark glasses and a flower-print dress. She stopped in front of the barge and stepped on board. The headscarf covered half her cheek but it didn’t quite hide the big bruise there. She had another scarf hiding something in her hands. Her gun.

I thought she was going to shoot us. I took Ben’s arm, about to duck, run, retreat, anything. ‘It’s her,’ I whispered, urgently, ‘the woman I hit in the museum.’

‘That’s all right,’ the woman said. ‘It’s him I want to see, not you. Where is he?’

‘Downstairs,’ Ben said, ‘in the hold.’

She pushed us into the wheelhouse, locking the door, and, gun openly in her hand, I thought she was going to shoot us. But she walked straight past and went below. We waited. Almost immediately there was a short muffled noise from the hold, the ‘phut’ of a puncture, a sudden escape of air.

After a minute the top of the headscarf appeared on the wheelhouse stairs, then the dark glasses and finally the whole woman. She looked pleased, the gun with a silencer still in her hand. Now it was our turn, I thought, about to duck again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I need you two alive. You’re going to help me. It’s him I wanted dead. Abandoning me like that. I loved him, you see.’

She turned and slapped me viciously on the face, once, twice, so that I stumbled and fell, putting my hand to my stinging cheeks. Ben moved forward in a threatening way, before she covered him with the gun.

‘No.’ The coarse voice was quite calm. ‘Nothing rash.’ She glanced down at me. ‘I just needed to be quits with her. Now I’ll tell you how you’re going to help me.’ 

ELEVEN

‘Help you?’ Ben said, glaring at her, helping me up from the wheelhouse floor. ‘Can’t say I feel inclined.’

‘You will, you will.’

‘That’s just what your friend Panama used to say. Same English teacher?’

‘Panama?’

‘The hat. We came to call him that. He wouldn’t give us his real name, of course.’

‘His real name was Kurt.’

‘Oh? So he was telling the truth there.’

‘If he told you his real name he must have trusted you.’

‘He had to, stuck together on the boat, since he couldn’t work it alone.’

‘I won’t trust you so much – you can be sure of that.’

She waved the gun at us, but then, beyond the bridge, the lock gates opened. We were second in line. Ben said, ‘I’d put that gun away if I were you – there’ll be a lot of people about when we move into the lock.’

She sat down in the cane chair behind the wheel, which her late lover had occupied – at least I assumed he was late. She hid the gun, on her lap, underneath the second headscarf, the barrel pointing towards us. ‘Go ahead,’ she said to Ben. ‘Do whatever you have to do.’

We went under a bridge, with the other boat ahead of us. Then into the lock. The gates closed behind us. The boat rose slowly. The gates ahead opened. I was outside, fending off. My cheek still stung. What a bitch. I came to think of Panama quite fondly. This woman was a very different kettle of fish. Poor old Panama – he’d have relished that expression.

We were soon in open country again, but now there was just a narrow strip of scrubby pasture by the canal, and beyond, to either side, the land rose – hilly country, scattered trees, then forests rising up the slopes beyond. We could jump ship, but there was at least a hundred yards or so of open ground before the tree cover. And Headscarf was clearly handy with her gun.

Ben was at the wheel. ‘So, what sort of help had you in mind?’

‘You’ll take me to Strasbourg – then onto the Rhine and into Germany – with the money you and Geoff double-crossed us on. And the rest of the heroin. Where is it?’

‘Downstairs, beneath the kitchen sink.’

‘And the money?’

‘In our rucksack – Panama took it. In his cabin on the right. Check it now if you want,’ Ben said.

‘I’m not such a fool. I’ll check it all tonight, when you two are safely locked in your cabin.’

‘What about us? When we’ve got you into Germany?’

‘No more need of you. Do what you want. Where do we stop for the night?’

Ben looked at the route map by the wheel, then at his watch. ‘Village of Trevernay, I think, three or four kilometres ahead. They have rubbish facilities there.’

‘You have rubbish to dispose of?’

‘No. You have. Your friend downstairs in the hold.’ Ben turned from the wheel a moment. ‘Or did you think to just leave him there?’

‘Yes.’

‘In this heat – in a few hours he’ll stink to high heaven.’

‘I see.’ She paused. The nasty processes of the flesh after death were clearly unknown to her. Or it may have been that she didn’t want to think of her ex-lover in that way. Who would?

She said, ‘Dump him overboard then, at a suitable opportunity. Some backwater. You’ll see to that. Not something I’m going to be involved in.’

Ben turned to her. ‘Dump him overboard? He must weigh a ton. And there are no backwaters here. This is a canal.’

‘You’ll think of something.’

Ben returned to the wheel.

I said, ‘Isn’t it rather extreme? Just knocking him off like that without talking to him? After all, maybe he wasn’t abandoning you and had some plan to meet you later.’

She turned a glassy eye on me. ‘No. We did everything together. We were inseparable.’

‘Perhaps that’s why he ran out on you?’ Ben remarked casually. ‘Got to feel the relationship was getting too constricted?’

‘You keep your fucking thoughts to yourself.’ She flourished the gun at him, moving restlessly about in the cane chair, as if there were ants foraging at her rump.

I was nervous. ‘Of course not, Ben. Why it – it must have been a perfect relationship … else she wouldn’t have killed him when he left her, would she?’

Headscarf turned to me, pleased with this apparent logic, almost a smile. ‘Exactly. It was perfect.’ She turned to Ben sourly. ‘A woman would understand that.’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘And so all the worse when he sold you down the river.’

‘Down the canal,’ Ben murmured. ‘I keep telling you both – this is a canal.’

‘Listen carefully, you two jokers.’ She was restless again. ‘You’ll dump him overboard after we’ve stopped, late tonight.’

‘There’s a problem,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll just float on the water, all the gas in his stomach by then, and since there’s no current, he’ll stay there all night. Next morning he’ll still be there, a big balloon, belly up in the water, and some other boat behind us will see him, or someone on the towpath, and call the police. We have to dump him while we’re moving.’

‘Sink him with weights then,’ she said shortly.

Later, towards seven, a mile or so before Trevernay, the canal widened. There was a single mooring space beneath a grove of willow trees arching over the water. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Pull in there. Just the spot for the night. And towards dawn you’ll dump him.’

Ben pulled in. It was still hot. Flies and midges, disturbed from the willow leaves by our pushing in under the canopy of branches, started to devour us. We moored the boat, fore and aft, with iron stakes.

It was supper time, but I wasn’t hungry. I was tired, and with what little energy I had left I was furious.

When we were moored Headscarf said, ‘You better have an early night. Your cabin – get down to it.’ She waved the gun at us.

We went down the steps into the corridor and stopped outside our cabin. She was a few paces behind us. ‘This yours?’ Ben nodded. She tried the door. It was locked. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘Panama has it. He kept it on him.’

‘Go and get it off him then.’

When Ben got back, holding the key, she stopped him at the doorway. ‘Just a moment, take everything out of your pockets.’ She
stood back, pointing the gun at him. ‘Throw it all out on the floor.’ Ben emptied his pockets. Handkerchief, a wad of money, tobacco, cigarette papers, lighter – and a pair of handcuffs.

‘Handcuffs?’ she asked. ‘What were you going to do with these? Open the cabin and get inside.’ Ben unlocked the door and we entered the tiny space. She stood at the doorway, looking at the big divan, pointing at the headboard cupids. ‘So what’s this – cosy lovey-dovey in here, is it?’ She laughed briefly. ‘You two look a bit long in the tooth for that.’ I swear, if she hadn’t had the gun, I would have strangled her. ‘Where are your bags?’ she added. ‘The money?’

‘In Panama’s cabin.’

‘They better be.’

‘What did Panama expect to use the handcuffs for?’ Ben asked.

‘You two. I told you – he was slack about things.’ She slammed the door in Ben’s face and locked it.

‘It’s all right,’ Ben said, when we’d heard her move away down the corridor. ‘I’ve got another pack of tobacco and papers under the bed, and some lighters, too.’

‘That’s your only worry is it?’ God, I was angry. I could have strangled Ben as well.

‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘The best way to keep control in a tricky situation is to think laterally, take a quite different approach. Get to grips with the real problem then.’

‘Okay, you’ve thought laterally. Now think vertically. What are we going to do?’

‘Well, hump that corpse overboard first.’

‘Just you and me?’

‘That’s what she said – finer feelings, you know. Doesn’t want to touch him. When you see him you’ll understand.’

‘Thanks. And when we’ve got rid of him?’

‘Well, we’re back where we started with Panama – take her to Strasbourg, then across the Rhine and into Germany.’

‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘You go back to New York and eat cheesecake and I go on looking for the provenance of the Modi nude.’

I turned away. The cheesecake seemed very remote now. I turned back. ‘You didn’t find Panama’s gun when you went to frisk him?’

‘No. Glad I didn’t in a way. I might have shot her, and that’s not really my metier.’

I exploded. ‘Ben, none of this is our bloody metier! It’s all a nightmare.’

‘Worse – it’s real.’ He paused. Then he turned, brightly. ‘But look on the good side, Elsa. She doesn’t know about the Modi nude. When I went to get the keys off Panama, I went into his cabin and hid the picture under his bunk. So she knows nothing about what Panama found out – about us, the looted art, all that. See? She did us a real favour by bumping him off.’

He knelt down, got his pack of tobacco out, sat on the bed, started to roll a cigarette. The two portholes were open. I went over to one and looked out. We were right up against the falling branches of a willow tree. I reached out and picked a green leaf, crunching it in my hand, smelling the juices. There was still a real world out there.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘bumping him off like that, no questions, tears, recriminations. Just shot him. One sure way to end an affair.’

Ben drew on his cigarette. ‘She has guts that way. We hadn’t.’

At four next morning, an hour before sunrise, Headscarf opened the cabin door. Gun in hand, she gestured towards the hold. Ben had stripped one of the big sheets from our bed. ‘The sheet,’ he said. ‘We’ll need it to carry him up.’

‘Do it how you want. You’re the undertakers.’ She turned and went up to the wheelhouse.

Panama was lying just beyond the galley, at the end of the corridor. Stretched out, his coat open, shirt stained red, torn,
distended white stomach showing, belly up, like the filthy pike Ben had caught. The battery lights weren’t very bright, and I was glad of that. I couldn’t see much of him to begin with, as Ben laid the sheet out and started to turn his great body over on to it. But then, bending down to help him, I saw the pool of blood and a dark shitty mess seeping out on the floor, and the same on the sheet, as Ben turned him and covered him with it. And the stink. I held my breath, then gulped air in through my mouth.

We pulled him, slithering along the corridor, towards the steep steps that led up to the wheelhouse. Now the difficult part. Ben had tied the sheet firmly round the body, head and foot. Now on the first step, he started to lug it up. He didn’t get very far. Panama was really heavy. Ben stopped, panting for breath. Wrapped in the bloodied winding sheet, Panama now had his great rump on the third step, his back against the next three, his legs propped up crookedly on the floor.

On the top step above the body, Ben took the twisted end of the sheet and started to pull. This time he managed to get it right up, leaning against the sharply angled stairway. Then, stepping up into the wheelhouse, he started to pull again. But it was no use.

‘We’ll have to rope him, and both of us pull from the top.’ Ben left Panama balanced against the stairway and went up into the wheelhouse. I stood there, looking up at the grisly, bloodied mummy-fold.

And then the whole fat white cigar was falling forward, the body bursting out of the sheet, the heavy torso coming straight at me. I screamed. It almost fell on me, swollen and purple, brushing past my face and landing with a great squelchy thump, doing a belly flop on the floor beside me.

We got it up in the end, both pulling on a rope, into the wheelhouse. Ben tied on some big ballast bricks he found under the floorboards in the hold. The sun was nearly up. We dragged the
body through the wheelhouse door, back to the stern, and then, with a last great effort, pulled it over the stern board, and let go. It fell into the placid water like a stink bomb, a cloud of gassy bubbles rising to the surface.

I stood back, and turned. The sun was just up over the horizon to our left beyond the willow trees. There’d been no sign of Headscarf throughout all this, but now she emerged from the foredeck with her gun. Ben was already going back to the wheelhouse.

‘Well done,’ she said. The first comment she’d made in anything like a friendly tone. Then she added, a concerned voice now, ‘You see – I was worried about him.’

Ben said nothing for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Right, let’s get out of here.’ He went into the wheelhouse, started the engine, and I went ashore, casting off, then leapt on board, as the boat moved off. I went downstairs to the cabin, into the tiny shower cubicle to wash. I saw my hands clearly then in the rising sunlight. Smeared with blood and shit. I saw my face in the mirror over the basin. The same. I started to retch. I turned just in time, spewing everything out into the Sanilav.

Later that morning, in the wheelhouse, Headscarf gave out the rules for our voyage to Strasbourg. ‘You’ll stay on the boat all the time, except when one of you needs to attend to the locks. You asked what the handcuffs were for. They’re for both of you, and that’s why Kurt had them, and should have used them. But he was daft. So I’ll be buying the food, and you’ll both be locked together in your cabin when I’m out.’

‘Wait a moment,’ Ben turned on her. ‘There’s no need, we’re not going to escape.’

‘No?’ She bared her teeth in a crooked smile. ‘Pull the other leg. You know I can’t drive this boat alone, so precautions are in order, for your own good. Because if you try to run I’ll shoot you.’