The Devil's Breath (24 page)

‘But?’

‘But …?’ She stopped again. ‘It means you’re totally exhausted.’ She looked up. ‘It means you’ve reached the end.’

*

Emery sat by the bed, his coat carefully folded in his lap. The whole house smelled like a hospital, surfaces scrubbed and bleached, windows curtained against the hot Californian sun. A young Filipino care attendant ghosted from room to room, kind eyes and a permanent smile above the carefully pressed white jacket. Fischer, standing by the window, accepted a third cup of coffee. So far he’d said very little, content to introduce Emery with a deferential wave, the man from Washington, the guy in charge.

Emery looked down at the face on the pillow. They’d been at the house an hour now, going over the woman’s story. She’d been married to Lennox Gold for twelve years. She’d known very little about his work. First he’d been in regular employment, salaried jobs. Then he’d gone out on his own. She thought he’d done well. Money had never been a problem. Not, at any rate, until the accident.

Emery hesitated, his finger circling a button on his coat. ‘You were drunk,’ he repeated, ‘when the truck hit you.’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember anything about it?’

The woman, Lola, gazed up at him. She had a pale, oval face and thick, auburn hair. Her eyes, deep-set, flicked incessantly from Emery to Fischer. She frowned. ‘I think I saw something on the freeway. Just before it happened. An animal or something. I dunno.’

‘Is that why you stopped? So suddenly?’

‘I dunno. Might have been …’ She grimaced, a small bitter curl of her lower lip. ‘Like I said, I was out of it.’

Emery nodded. Fischer had shown him the file of cuttings before they’d left the car. The woman had tested positive at the hospital. The truck had hit her car, a dozen other vehicles had piled up behind the truck, and two people had been killed, one of them a child of three. The subsequent trial had made headlines across the State. Lola had pleaded guilty to causing death by drunken driving, a charge that normally resulted in a lengthy driving ban, a heavy fine, and occasionally a year or so in the State penitentiary. In this case, though, the judge had taken a different view. Her neck broken, Lola Gold would be paralysed for life. Furthermore, with her insurance negated by the police evidence, she’d have to look somewhere else for the hundreds of thousands of dollars the rest of her days would require. That, said the judge, was punishment enough for any human being. And so Lola Gold had been wheeled from the courthouse, free to get on with the rest of her life, trapped in a body that wouldn’t work any more.

The Filipino appeared at the door again. He carried a cordless telephone and murmured a name that Emery didn’t catch. The woman shook her head, dismissing the call.

Emery bent forward. ‘So we’re talking how much?’ he said. ‘Since the accident? Half a million? More?’

‘Less.’

‘How much less?’

‘Not much less.’ She hesitated, her eyes on the move again, tallying the costs of this new life of hers. ‘Hospital bills, physiotherapy, care attendants, the van out front, alterations to the house, this little bed of mine …’ Her eyes came to rest on the hi-tech bed in which she lay, with its hoists, and pulleys,
and motorized frame. Then she looked up again at Emery, and for a second or two he glimpsed how complicated and helpless her days had become, her every waking need permanently in the gift of other people. Regardless of the circumstances, it was impossible not to feel sorry for the woman.

‘This money,’ he began, ‘it came from your husband?’

‘All of it. He paid for all of it. Every last cent.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But he was broke …’ Emery paused. ‘Wasn’t he? That last year? Since the accident?’

The woman’s eyes flicked towards the window. ‘So your friend tells me.’

‘You’re saying he’s wrong?’

‘I’m saying Lennox paid for everything. Dollar bills. Hundreds of thousands. He knew what was needed and he found it. You ask me how, I don’t know. I just know he did it. He was a good man, a good husband. He looked after me here, after I came out of the hospital, and when things were OK for me, he went off and got the money. Where from, I don’t know. How, I don’t know that either.’ She paused for breath, her voice faint with the effort. ‘He was a good man,’ she said again. ‘And I miss him.’

Emery nodded. ‘You know how he died?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Friend of his. Over in New England.’

Emery nodded again, saying nothing for a moment, aware of Fischer watching him from the window. He’d asked the same question, out there in the car, genuine curiosity. Emery looked at the woman. ‘So how did he die?’ he said softly.

‘Heart attack.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, for sure. The man never knew when to stop. Never had, never would. He used to go to New York a lot on business. I’d warn him about it but he’d never listen. The man had a real appetite.’

‘For what?’

‘Work.’ She paused. ‘And sex.’ The eyes were back on Emery again. ‘Twelve years we were married. Those twelve years we couldn’t get enough of it, of each other. I knew the man, believe me. You think all that comes to an end? Because of this? Because of me?’ She shook her head, answering her own question. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The man needed it.’

‘You knew about it?’

‘I knew the man he was. I knew we had a pact. Nothing local. No shitting in the tent.’ She looked away. ‘So that pretty much left New York. We called it business. It was easier that way.’

‘But that’s why he went. On business.’

‘Sure.’ She smiled. ‘Work hard, play hard.’

Emery nodded, accepting the point. ‘And this friend of his. He told you about …’ He hesitated. ‘What happened?’

‘He said Lennox died of a coronary. In bed. In some hotel room. He didn’t go into details. He didn’t need to. Lennox wouldn’t have been reading a book.’

Emery nodded again. Some of the smoke that Telemann had blown around the events in Room 937 had to do with a heart attack. It was down under ‘Cause of Death’ on the certificate, yet another over-worked executive, struck down at the coalface of American capitalism.

‘You know why he went to New York so many times?’

‘Business. He had clients there.’

‘Is that what he said?’

‘Sure.’

‘You believed him?’

The woman didn’t answer for a moment. She looked hurt. Then she nodded. ‘Sure,’ she said again. ‘That and the hookers.’ She paused. ‘He’d buy it. I know he would. He liked to keep things neat and tidy. Emotion bored him. That’s why he was such a good businessman. He never went beyond the figures. Never. That’s what he used to say. He used to say, “Lola, if it ain’t there in the figures, it ain’t there. What don’t add up, ain’t real. The rest is schlock.”’

‘And you?’

‘I was his wife.’ She smiled gently. ‘The one permitted fantasy. I’d do anything for him. And he knew it.’

There was a long silence. Emery produced a small notebook and opened it. ‘This friend of his,’ he began, ‘the friend in New England …’

He glanced down at the bed. The woman had closed her eyes. She was breathing a little more heavily, the sheets rising and falling. When she opened her eyes again, they were filled with tears. She tried to cough, a faint rasp in her throat. She nodded left, towards a stainless-steel trolley on the other side of the bed. ‘There’s tissues in the box,’ she said. ‘You get to play mother.’

Emery reached across for a tissue, mumbling an apology, dabbing gently as the tears rolled down her face and on to the pillow. After a while, he started on the question again, the friend back east, but the woman spared him the trouble. ‘His name’s David,’ she said. ‘David Weill. He works in Massachusetts someplace. I’ve got the address. The rest of the time he’s back home.’

‘Where’s home?’

The woman said nothing for a moment, staring up at him, her mind drifting off again, the eyes filling with tears.

‘Weill,’ Emery said again. ‘Where does he come from?’

The woman blinked, making an effort, offering a small, apologetic smile.

‘Israel,’ she said at last, sniffing.

*

The old man, Abu Yussuf, sat in the tiny apartment kitchen, waiting for the boy to return. He’d cooked himself a meal earlier but he’d barely touched it. It was still on the table, a congealing mound of boiled rice, caked with minced beef and tomato ketchup. Beside it, half-wrapped in a strip of cotton waste, was a heavy adjustable wrench. The wrench he’d fetched from the garage. With the wrench, he’d beat the truth from the boy.

The old man heard a cab rattle to a halt in the street outside. He got to his feet, moving across to the window, peering out, taking care not to show himself. From three storeys up, he watched the cab door open. Two black men got out. The cab
drove away, and the old man stepped back into the shadows again as the two blacks sauntered across the street and into a tenement building opposite. The old man checked his watch. He’d been waiting for nearly an hour.

He sat down again, taking another mouthful of warm Coke from the can beside the chair. For two days, he’d brooded on the meaning of the conversation he’d had with Amer Tahoul, his wife’s brother, the voice in the darkness, the neat young bureaucrat he’d phoned from the office on 18th Street. The conversation had lasted longer than he’d planned. It had seemed an age, the old man immobile by the huge desk, scarcely daring to move, whispering his story to Amer Tahoul, checking over his shoulder, peering through the open door, listening for the footsteps that never came.

He’d told the Palestinian about the letters he’d written to his wife, the letters she’d written back, and then the long period of nothing, the days lengthening into weeks, no letters, no postcards, no phone calls, nothing. He knew in his heart that something had happened, something terrible, and he needed, now, to know what it was. Amer Tahoul had listened to his story, interrupting from time to time, sympathetic, wanting to clarify this point or that, and at the end of it there had been a long silence, so long that the old man’s nerve had nearly cracked, his hand an inch above the receiver, ready to terminate the call, to bend to the vacuum-cleaner and return to his chores, to the aching void that was now his life.

Then Amer had come back. ‘Hala was arrested,’ he said. ‘Yesterday.’

The old man nodded, already numb. ‘Arrested,’ he repeated. ‘Yesterday.’

‘But before that she had been writing to you.’

‘You know that?’

‘Yes. Some of the letters she gave to me. She has no money for the air-mail stamps. I post them through the Municipality.’

‘They went? They definitely went?’

‘All of them.’

‘How many? Tell me how many this month?’

There was a brief silence. Then Amer came back. He’d never been less than precise. At home. At school. At work. ‘Since the end of August,’ he said, ‘four.’

‘To here? To Newark?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. I have to keep a record. Hala insisted. She said you’d repay the postage when you got back.’

The old man shook his head. Four letters, he thought. And maybe more, maybe some that didn’t come through Amer at all but through some other source. He pictured his wife for a moment, back home, sitting at the table, bent over the pad of lined blue paper she always used.

‘Where is she? Where have they taken her?’

‘We don’t know. We’re still trying to find out.’

‘Why? Why have they taken her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve been seeing her? Before yesterday?’

‘Of course.’

‘How was she?’

There was another silence, much longer, and the old man knew that he was close to the heart of it, this terrible mystery, the disappearance of his wife.

‘Tell me,’ he said, his voice suddenly gruff, ‘tell me how she was.’

‘She was frightened.’

‘Why?’

‘Because …’ Amer paused. ‘It’s difficult. A woman had been to see her. An Israeli woman. She was confused. Frightened. She didn’t know what to do. She asked me to …’

Amer stopped again. In the background, the old man could hear voices, men talking, the sound of a door being slammed. Then Amer was back again, asking the old man for a number, some way they could continue the conversation, and the old man panicked, his hand fumbling with the telephone in the darkness, cutting off the call, rearranging the desk, stooping for the hoover, his mind suddenly quite blank.

Now, waiting for the boy, he knew what he must do. He’d
met the mailman in the street. He’d asked him about the missing letters. The mailman, a friendly Greek his own age, had told him that the letters had come. He’d given them to the boy. The boy had always been waiting, eight in the morning, the old man still over in Manhattan. The boy had taken them for the old man. He’d give them to him when he got back. That had been the arrangement.

At the table, the old man heard the door to the street again. The boy had a distinctive way of announcing his arrival. The old man had watched him sometimes. He gave a little half-turn to the key, then kicked the door hard, always the same place, so the door crashed back, pitting the plaster on the wall inside. The old man heard it now, the door crashing back against the wall, and then the boy’s footsteps along the hall and up the stairs, stamp–stamp, the rhythm echoing upwards.

There were six flights of steps to the third floor. The old man picked up the wrench, the cotton waste wrapped tightly round the handle. It fitted nicely into the palm of his hand. Standing behind the door, in the narrow hall, he just had room for the one swing that would count, the first blow, the edge of the wrench, hard against the boy’s skull.

The footsteps got louder, accompanied by the high piping whistle the boy knew the old man hated so much. The old man closed his eyes for a moment, a simple prayer, the thought of his wife in some damp cell or other, paraded for hour after hour, question after question. At home, they called it
t
’
azeeb kufif
, light torture. Light torture meant they beat you in the places that never bruised. His sons had shown him how it was done. He knew what it felt like, how much it hurt. The Israelis did it all the time. It meant you were lucky. It meant they’d spared you the real thing,
t
’
azeeb t
’
eel
, heavy torture.