The Unblemished (31 page)

'Come on,' he gentled. 'Come on.'

He threw open the first of the doors, indicating she should do the
same. There were four drawers in each refrigerator; all of them were
occupied. Something wasn't right, but her mind was so fogged with
fear she couldn't pin it down.

'Get in,' Bo urged. He was clambering into a drawer that
contained a child, a boy in his early teens who was so white he was
almost indistinguishable from the hard plastic that contained him.
More blows rained down on the security doors. She heard the door
groaning as it came away from its hinges. She slid into the drawer,
shutting her eyes to the figure that was already in there. She smelled
of germicidal soap. She could almost believe she was lying in the dark
with Claire, and that everything was all right. She closed her eyes and
dragged the drawer back into its sheath, scrabbling with the door,
pulling it behind her as the security entrance crashed free and the
world was filled with footsteps and screams. The threat of imminent
death was so great that she found it inside herself to reach out and
hold the inflexible creature lying beside her. Who then shifted in the
dark and said: 'Do not scream.'

Manser moved at night. He moved slowly. He avoided main
roads back into the heart of the city. It was difficult to find a
time when quiet dominated, but after 3 a.m., most of London seemed
to be tucked away indoors. He knew there were likely to be more
people about the closer he got to the river, but for now the
anonymity, the desertion helped. A few hours at a time was all he
could manage anyway. When the thickness of the night became
loosened, the sun still a good two hours away from putting in an
appearance, he melted from the street. He found an unalarmed
scaffold in Walm Lane; a loose corner of tarp covering a skip in
Sherriff Road; a child's tent in an Abbey Road garden. He slept
fitfully, if at all. Pain held his hand like a concerned parent
throughout, never letting him out of its sight.

He grew to appreciate the pain as it ate through what remained of
his face. He crunched on painkillers almost continuously, relishing
the bitter taste on his tongue, the slightest distraction from the
monumental suffering that threatened to take him out of himself to
the point where he might decide to climb a pylon or jump from a
tower block or hurl himself in front of a train. The pain he knew he
must best if he was ever to entertain the thought of loving his stumps
again in the future. How could he be tender to the dying if he thought
for a second that they were too engrossed with their own private
agonies to be able to enjoy his passion? He had to cling to that belief
that there was a future. It was all he had.

But that wasn't strictly true. There was Salavaria. He was a good
reason, a great reason to stay alive. Manser realised he, himself, might
be a bad man, in the classic, villainous sense of the word, but at least
he was honourable. He loved his friends. He was loyal. He couldn't
abide, couldn't understand, the betrayals that occurred so frequently
within the underworld he inhabited. If that was naive, then guilty as
charged. He believed in honour and trust. He was solid, dependable.
He was The Ton. Mister 100 per cent. And what had it brought him?

He gingerly touched his face, wincing at the crisp/sodden mess of
it. It worried him that he could not feel certain parts despite his
fingers sinking into a spongy mass that ought to have had his flesh
singing. Dead nerve endings. Dead. The thought that it was in him,
death, even in this limited way, traumatised him to the point where,
if his tear ducts weren't melted shut, he might have cried himself into
a coma. And yet it was other things too: emboldening, chastening. He
understood a little bit more about the enormous forces needed, both
physically and psychologically, to introduce death to a living thing.
The body was fragile: there were many ways you could kill, many
ways to die, but the body was also strong, ferociously strong. It did
not receive death easily, and once it was in the vicinity, the body
fought like fury to repel it.

Sunlight. He had been so enraptured by his fantasies of how he
might ruin Gyorsi Salavaria that he had forgotten the cramp in his
legs and the grief lacing his chest, neck and head. White fire lanced
his eyeballs, despite it being only the palest cream of pre-dawn. He
had to retire from the day, before it became blinding, before his body
rebelled and put him into a state from which he would not recover.
He'd have put on his beloved sunglasses if his ears hadn't been burned
away.

Patience was all. At the end of the road, Salavaria would be there.
The cunt would be taught some regal lessons. It didn't matter how far
the road was, or how long it took for him to travel it. It was
unimportant what state he was in when he got there. He would get
there.

'Jez, you dumb bastard,' he muttered to himself. 'You traitor. You
fair-weather friend. I thought you were loyal. I thought we were
mates. Jesus.'

Things were changing as he snaked towards St John's Wood. The
houses seemed to be hunched in towards each other, as if in a conspiratorial
huddle or quaking before some unimaginable fate. Every
window seemed to have been punched in or blown out; glass teeth
were bared at him as he trudged further south. He sought shelter in a
car showroom just before the main road turned into an ugly collision
of shops, fast-food joints and piddling side roads. He searched for
sleep in the back seat of a Mercedes, his face turned in to the soft
leather upholstery. He could hear nothing. London was a grave
waiting to be filled.

Sleep, or an approximation of it – a troubled, fevered greying of
consciousness – greeted him with fantasies of soil. He was grabbing
fists of earth and ramming them into Gyorsi Salavaria's mouth, which
was as wide open as it could be without splitting from the strain.
Staples were punched into that rigid O of his lips, attached to chains
snapped tight against the confines of his dream. Salavaria's teeth were
sharp and vulpine, stained plum from the decades of blood he had
supped upon. His eyes were wide with terror. It was almost too much
to take and he shied from the face, confused by his feelings. It didn't
seem right that a man such as Salavaria, a monster, a strong man in
every sense, could be reduced like this, brought down to the point
where he was a snivelling, abject wreck, even in the context of a
dream, a fantasy.

I fear him
, he thought, and the soil in the packed throat trickled
out as the lips somehow managed to curl into a smile. The staples bit
deeper and blood traversed the shining rim of his mouth. Salavaria
was the ultimate survivor. Would Manser, had he been in the same
situation, have been able to put his head down, banish himself from
society, hide in a hole for thirty years? Thirty
years.
His patience was
utter. His devotion to his beliefs unshakeable. How could he hope to
knock him off course? He didn't have a shred of that drive, that
hunger.

He woke sweating, shaking with cold. Salavaria was climbing out
the hole of his dream, the staples straining against his lips, tearing
through them, turning his mouth to a pulp of blood and mud.

'He works alone, Jez,' he said, shakily. 'You never stood a chance.'

Manser moaned and struggled upright, his legs squeaking against
the plush interior of the car, and the sound was enough to banish the
dream completely. He slid out of the back seat and walked shakily
across the road to a petrol station. The small shop annexed to it had
been raided, its windows shattered, produce looted. Most of the
shelves were bare, but he found a loaf of bread that was relatively free
of mould and a partially consumed pack of dried fruit. He sucked
gingerly at the bread, the apricots, wincing as his face came alive with
reminders of what had happened to it, until he had a paste he could
swallow. He sipped at a bottle of dandelion and burdock. The food
brought him back. He found his mind clearing, his confidence
returning. It prodded and played with Salavaria again, diminishing
him, breaking him down into what, essentially, he was: old.
Yesterday's man. Come on, Manser. You're The Ton, not him. He's
ready for his slippers. He's ready for his liquid meals and free bus pass.
You were his crutch, his meal ticket. He's rusty. He's been talking to
trees for a generation.

It was late afternoon. The sunlight was a dim, dusky red falling on
the south-facing rooftops and Manser imagined them as fading reflections
of the atrocities he would stumble upon within the next few
hours. That colour was all he could think of as he traipsed the final
few miles along past Lord's cricket ground, into Lisson Grove and the
heart of Marylebone. There were fewer people around than he had
expected, although he reasoned that he was now the kind of person
people went out of their way to avoid. He walked into an empty pub
on Harcourt Road and poured himself a lager from the tap, sipped it
through the cracked blisters of his lips while staring at the pale
Swedish church across the way. He drew a little peace, a little strength
from that simple building. He rested. Music played from a CD unit
behind the bar. Louis Armstrong on permanent loop.
What a
Wonderful World. Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. Baby, It's
Cold Outside. Mack the Knife.

When the shark bites, with his teeth, dear, scarlet billows start to
spread ...

He managed to eat some peanuts and climbed the stairs at the back
of the pub to the catering quarters. A dumb waiter was stuffed full of
corpses to the extent that he couldn't tell how many bodies were
inside, or whose limbs belonged to which abject expression.

A counter looked out on a tiny beer garden inhabited by blood drenched
picnic tables and parasols. Beyond that, a block of flats rose
four storeys, white-painted brickwork tigered here and there with deep
scarlet. A man was sitting on his balcony looking north towards
Regent's Park with a pair of binoculars, his long hair prancing about
in the stiff wind. Against his chair rested some kind of decorative
sword. A few balconies along, a woman was tying a rope ladder to the
railings. Shouts were coming from somewhere, alternately reasoning
and incomprehensible, furious. Manser filled his pockets with short,
sharp steak knives. He moved across the landing to the bathroom
where he found a small tub of painkillers. He popped two in his mouth
and crunched them and moved towards the front of the living
quarters. A TV was on, spilling white noise across a carpet rioting with
beige paisley. A woman was on her knees, collapsed into the sofa, her
back peeled open along the spine. A younger woman, perhaps her
daughter, lay with a pair of headphones on, staring up at the ceiling,
her face blue. There was no obvious damage to her body. He leaned
over her and was mildly shocked to see her eyes following him. He
reached out and tweaked the skin of her collarbone. No reaction.
Breath very shallow, hardly there at all. She had been left for dead.

He found more rushed murders as he walked down to Baker Street,
more bodies put through the agonies of death without actually meeting
it. A traffic warden was sitting back against the large window of a
charity shop, making slack, whale-like noises, his head jerking and
twisting as if on the end of an inebriated puppet-master's strings. He
had vomited down his luminescent yellow singlet. His face was bruised
and swollen where someone had beaten him; Manser was able to
discern cleat marks from the sole of a boot in the scuffed, torn skin of
his forehead. Some effort had been made to cut part of him away – the
heavy serge material on his arm had been scissored open, the exposed
flesh gouged – but it was a rushed job. It was as if whatever had
attacked him didn't have the time to finish it off. Manser felt his gorge
rise at the thought of being left brain-damaged, alone. He, at least, had
some idea of who he was and what he had to do. His mind had not
been switched off, although, at the height of the pain, he wished that
were an option.

He waded through bodies in the chemist's for a handful of energy
tablets and more hardcore analgesics. He suffered a bolt of pain as he
reached the junction of Baker Street and had to wrench himself back
out of sight; a swarm of people, perhaps as many as two dozen, were
striding up Paddington Street, their hands full of bats and hammers.
He was certain one of them had hold of a chef's blowtorch. He could
do without any more of that.

They would surely see him if he didn't get out of the way immediately;
he could hear their footfalls. They were so close he thought he
could hear the ticking of watches on their wrists. He flattened himself
against the doors of the cinema, the Screen on Baker Street. One of
them swung back; there was nobody in the booth. He hurried down
the stairs, the loose flesh on his face screaming at him as it struggled
to part itself at the red juncture with those hard, carbonised remains;
and looked back up to the street, where shadows were already
coalescing, shapes smearing up against the glass door, which had only
just settled back into position. He saw the top of the head of the last
man in the crowd turn his way, perhaps alerted by the tiny shiver of
the door as it came to rest.

Manser sank further. The bar at the bottom of the stairs was
deserted. Glasses were smashed and a popcorn machine had
overflowed; the stink of burning sugar came at him from all angles.
A fug of tan smoke riffled around the ceiling. Postcards were
scattered all across the floor. He received a brief, almost nostalgic
twang of excitement at the sight of a female cinema attendant whose
foot had been separated from her ankle. She had died in an awkward
position, half-kneeling, half-lying on a box of carpet cleaner in a staff
room she was presumably trying to get into to hide at the critical
moment. Whoever had taken her foot had discarded it almost
immediately.

A change in the air pressure. A corner of a newspaper on the
counter lifted and sank. Manser panthered across the bar to the swing
doors of the screen room. He eased them open, tensing himself
against the creak of oil-shy hinges, a noisy breath of stale, inner air,
but it never came. He moved inside and helped the doors close, his
eye on the landing as a shadow grew into the wall and a hand landed
on the banister's curve where it swept into the last section of stairwell.

Manser allowed the door to seal itself and turned to the
auditorium. Heavy velvet curtains obscured the screen. Every seat
was occupied, every head angled forwards to catch a performance
that would not be delivered. Manser shot a look at the projectionist's
booth; the window was smeared. He moved down the central aisle,
the hairs on his skin rising as he felt the empty gaze of dead people
drilling into his back.

He heard the jolt of a hand on the door and he jinked left,
dragging a young boy from his chair and ramming him into the foot
well, taking his place as a parallelogram of light raced across the walls
and two bobbing shadows moved into the theatre. Impossibly large,
they bled across the acoustic panelling and on to the velvet before the
door closed and ushered them into the gloom. Manser kept his eyes
riveted to the curtains and began to see patterns squirming there. Pain
was beginning to filter through the screen he had erected with those
painkillers; he wished he had necked a few more before this eminently
avoidable situation had transpired. All he had to do was play dead,
and he was halfway there anyway. He could feel baubles of sweat
begin to decorate his face.