Turquoiselle (25 page)

Carver found he himself had looked away.

He stared into the deep red pool of the wine in his beaker.

No, he did not want to drink any more of it. Or get up and go
anywhere else.

He sat, letting his eyes fill with redness.

And heard Avondale say, quietly and affectionately, to a nice
mother with a rather difficult child, “Maybe, keep your eye on our friend, eh,
Silvia... Can we leave that with you? No hurry. There’s time. Take your time.”

“Is
it Avondale then?” Carver asked, ten minutes or thirty minutes later. By then the
other men had left the room.

“Avondale ...?”

Her voice had remained Silvia Dusa’s.

“You’re the Second Scar. I’m the Third. Is Avondale the First?”

She chuckled, quiet, no edge to it. “No. But he’s pretty high up
in Mantik. Higher than they usually let on. He checked you out that night you
two had dinner in London. Checked the
effect
you had. Yes, he was
protected, but he’s one like Preece, or Sunderland – he has certain – developed
sensitivities. He could tell better than a machine. His report on you was the
final deciding vote. Then Mantik got you properly lined up, and everything
went into action.”

“Including you,”

“Including me.”

“Dead on a slab.”

She did not reply. He did not look at her.

(The wine seemed miles deep now, how far did it descend into that
other dimension it seemed to occupy? A bottomless henna lake. )

“Who’s the First Scar, then?” Carver asked. He had no knowledge
why he did. He did not care.

“I don’t know him. I mean I’ve never met him. I was told a little
about him.” She paused. When Carver said nothing, she continued slowly,
thoughtfully. Maybe she was improvising, making it up as she went along. “He
was born in Europe, somewhere between the Middle East and Russia. Three
quarters English, one quarter something I can’t remember, some eastern European
nationality, from his father’s side. The father was half and half, with a
fully English mother. Apparently there was something wrong with the boy –
defective genes, learning difficulties. Physically he was, well, odd. But she
loved him, the woman, and the father came to love him. He was a very loveable
infant for them, it seems. Phenomenally so. And his mother called him this
unreasonable name – I was told it was something extremely religious, something like
– was it
Paradise
? No,
it wasn’t. But
that
extravagant and
unsuitable. A curse of a
name for a kid. For anybody. And then there was bad trouble out there, where
the father was posted – he worked for the British government – and both parents
were killed. But the boy survived. And it became obvious he had something
special, exclusively astonishing. So Mantik took him on. He grew up in Britain,
somewhere. He’s far younger, by the way, than Avondale. Of the three of us,
apparently, I’m the oldest, if not by much. He’s about your age. Car. Thirty-one-two-three
– whatever. I can’t recall his name.”

“Paradise.”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t that.
Kingdom of God
–? Was
it that? No. You see, I can grow my hair at will or turn it blonde–”

“Or be a corpse.”

“–
Or be a corpse, yes. But I can’t remember the name of the
first member of our trio. Perhaps you should ask Latham.”

“Ask Latham.” Carver smiled. His facial muscles simply did this.
He did not know why, or why he spoke to her at all, this reasonable and couth
young woman.

“There’s no restriction on him telling you, Car. Not now. Or
I’ll
ask, if you like.”

Like...

The pool of henna reached down and down. You could effortlessly drown
in it. That was why they drank it, after all. To drown. It in you, you in it.
Either/or.

A movement. Her chair shifting back.

“Let’s go outside, shall we?” she asked.

Why? Why not? Go outside.

Carver rose. He picked up the beaker and poured the last of the
wine out on the cleansed floor. Only a trickle now, about deep enough to drown
a fly.

The
room opened on another lift. They descended two floors. The lift door drew wide
on a sunny courtyard, shut in by the building on one side, and by walls nine
or ten feet high on the other three sides. Tree tops visible, sky. Hint of sea-scent
and faint putrid linger of smoke, with – here – the mildest tinge of human
death in it.

The yard was paved, plain concrete squares. Tubs around, the
plants undamaged, some with flowers. Two sets of garden tables, four chairs
apiece. No one there.

Another door, metal, with a button to push, confronted them in the
third wall. Presumably it led out to the grounds.

But Silvia had sat down on one of the two tables. She shook back
her malleable hair and raised her face to the sky, eyes part-closed.

No noises anywhere. But neither did the birds call. Still no gulls
flying over.

On either side, blank windowless angles of the building restricted
further view.

In a corner, beside one of the tubs, a smashed bottle (overlooked?)
sparkled happily.

The woman spoke.

“Try to relax, Car. We’ll be leaving fairly soon. Around two in
the afternoon at the latest.”

Avondale:
You’ll see the lights of London long before the the dark moves in
.

London. What was London?

Carver pulled out a chair from the second table and sat on it.
He would not, he supposed, be able to get rid of the girl. She
was his (un)official minder. And she was strong enough probably to manage him,
was she? He would not want to try, would not want to harm her. Even if, in the
shed –

Too late, Croft. I should have said
Yes
. Yours was the only way
out.

Beyond the wall with the door there was a sound. Nothing to it, in
fact. An
ordinary
sound. A couple of voices were talking without urgency or raised volume. And
then, instead, a girl’s crying, but not that loud either. And then a male
voice, but so very low, no meaning could be made of it except a sort of – kindness.
The crying faltered and stopped. “Thanks, mate,” said another male voice,
audibly.

Following which the silence returned. They, whoever they had been,
had gone away.

And yet –

Something had
not
gone away.

Something stayed there outside the shut metal door.
Something
.

Not meaning to, not knowing what it meant, Carver had got up
again. Silvia also had swung herself about on the table, her back to Carver,
staring it seemed towards the shut door. Which sighed. And slid open.

Twenty-Five

Mainly sunshine filled the space, a starburst of white-gold.
But against and out of the sun –

A silhouette evolved. Forming up and filling in, until
substantial. Though advancing, it was at once reminiscent of a man seated
against a blank lit window. An old trick. Filmic. Effective. A big shape, a big
man, tall and excessively broad-bodied, thickly built of flesh.
Croft
? It
was Peter Croft, animate and alive, and without the rear of his skull blown
off.

He came rambling forward unhurriedly out of the light. Not only
big, then,
this
Croft had ballooned into fat. And the suit was a tent, yet tailored and not
graceless. The fashion in which he moved, too, had an almost absurd –
elegance
.
The body did not seem either to mind or to be hampered by its potential
obesity. Its lack of coordination was
coordinated
. Another species,
and automated in its own unique way. Valid in its own unique right.

Shaggy hair, not grey, well-cut yet tufted, framed the profound
countenance of a huge toad. The enormous eyes, river-brown rather than dark,
were definitely not Croft’s, but bulbous. They glowed, having consumed some ray
of the sun.

“Loandy,” the toad-being said. “You’ve all grawn up.” And stopped,
positioned on the paving. Where instantly it was a fixture, cast from iron and
set there to last forever.

As Carver’s vision adjusted, he saw over one of the bulbous
shoulders. Two paramedics were leading a woman away along a line of trees. She
appeared tranquil, going along brightly, without regret. She was not crying
anymore.

Silvia spoke.

“I remember,” she murmured, “the name.”

“Yes,” said Carver. He too had realised what it must be, the name
that implied Paradise, and had been altered by morons to fit apparent earthly
circumstance. “Heaven. That’s his name.”

On
the wide-screen of Carver’s mind the truth unrolled, some extravaganza of
fiction that was fact. Suddenly he had it all. There could be and were no
doubts. As, however reluctantly, one recognised oneself in a mirror.

Born in that other country far east of the Med, the trouble in
the city or the town, the bomb-blast that negated the diplomatic building,
Croft’s living quarters with it. Croft must have been elsewhere. He had not
seen. His wife, the English woman, detonated into fragments like broken glass,
and the child
– t
he unwieldy impaired child Croft had begun by
loathing and fearing, until those states altered into amazed love – shattered
so small, as only a child’s body could be, not anything could be found.
Not enough left of him to bury
.
Except they had
lied
.
The British employers of Peter, or Petre Croft,
Mantik Corp
.
The child had survived the blast. No one could figure out how. They had been
together in that room, the mother and her son she had called Heaven out of the
passionate belief she had in him. But where she and the room and all else had
perished, the child, two, three years of age, he was untouched. Just as, those
other years later, he would be untouched by the racing traffic on that suburban
road, and with him the black puppy he had snatched, and known by then how to
shield by his ungainly miraculous curled-up body.

And Carver could see – the three-year-old child wandering through
the bombed rubble, and how he floundered to the hurt and howling, the
screaming, the dying, and floppily touched them with his small ugly ungainly
disgusting beautiful hands. And they grew serene and lay waiting, for death or
rescue. And maybe some of them slept, or even laughed. Not minding, unafraid.

So Mantik, when they entered the scene, took the child with the
obscenely perfect name. They carried him off as evil wizards do in some TV
series for the fantasy-minded under-twelves. And they told Petre Croft that
both his wife,
and
his
son, had been killed. But Croft, though he believed it, on some other level, in
some obscure way, sensed –
smelled
– the stench of treachery.
And that was why he had, eventually, turned to other work, anything that might
bring Mantik crashing down.

Carver knew, almost in words, always in pictures, how Heaven, by
then known as Heavy, was allowed to grow up, supervised and guarded – yet left
experimentally to the non-mercies of the mundane world. And while he was,
Mantik, like all the cruellest and most cold-blooded guardian gods, noted every
nuance of his development, and his –
skills
. His
powers
.

Subsidiary to which, they had seen him connect himself, unwanted,
then welcomed, to another boy, this one the dark and sullen and uneducated
little thief, Andreas Cava. And by that straightforward means, they learned bit
by bit, that Carver too was worth taking up and manipulating, for future and
relentless use. Heavy, Silvia, Carver. One, Two, Three. Scar, Scar,
Scar
.

He’s
informed me of this, shown me, Heavy. That’s how I can see it, and know for
certain
.

Carver stared into Heavy’s eyes. Does
he
know? Does he know
what
Mantik are –
does
he understand
? – The men were standing rather as they had, when boys, in the
park, the very last occasion of their meeting. Not far off, nor close. May all
the good be happy. And all the bad be good. Oh Christ, Christ.

“Your father’s dead. He’s wrapped up in a grade A body bag,”
Carver jaggedly said to Heavy. “Did they bother to tell you?”

“Yes,” Heavy answered. “‘S all right. He’s fined now. And I’ll be
able to be talking with him, like I do with moth–ah.”

Carver could feel the unexcitable warmth from Heavy. It was like
the sunlight. And he could feel Silvia’s presence, now at his back, hot and
cold like heating or freezing, fire and Arctic waters.

“She can change shape,” he said to Heavy. “And you can change –
anything. But I – ruin and drive insane. And we are all Mantik’s slaves. Their
whores
.”

Heavy put out one of his awful, fat and misshapen hands, and
touched Carver on the shoulder. Only an instant. There was no feeling at all from
this, less than a leaf falling –

“Leafs do fall,” Heavy said, in a low unheard murmur.

– And
after the fall – something...

Something
.

What?

“I must go now,” said Heavy. “Lots man need helpful up there. It
will be fined, Andy. Will be fined. Belief it. We are not too many. See you
next soon.”

Above, so high, so far, a shape, and a shadow falling like a leaf,
and then another, and another. And then the wild amused screeching of a gull.

Heavy raised his heavy head. He grinned into the sky with joy. “Gully
birds,” approved Heavy. “They pull the sun.”

Up
from the flat roof the second lesser helicopter lifted. The fair-skinned sky
was open wide, and any gulls, sensibly, had veered to the west. The shrill-singing
racket of the aircraft
filled
Carver’s ears like glue. Under and about him the rear seat
vibrated and jarred. He was on the left, Silvia to the middle. Avondale
occupied the right-hand place. He seemed, mollified by his drink and the
general success, to be nodding off. No conversation started. There were no
questions. Heavy was gone. In front, by the pilot, Latham sat. He was close
enough you could pull his hair. It was the school bus.

Swiftly sky-borne, astoundingly high. The colossal blueness and the
transparent gleam. And below, the building, some original wieldy house bought
up and soullessly extended, erratically decorated, recently very blackened,
here, there, by arson.

Carver could see now, the multiple extension of carefully planted
and nurtured ‘grounds’, woods, rises, valleys. And then, a reduced yet shaking
swing of the chopper revealed hillsides northerly, and behind, huge barren
chunky crags collapsing statically downward to moorlands, grey-green and
purple, miles beneath.

Where
was
this place? Scotland – some outpost of Avondale’s
folly –
No. Unless he had passed it over to the LLE – the true Life Long Enemies, to
Croft’s organisation, some deliberate ploy – but it made no sense. What did?

As if it knew it had suggested too much, the chopper manoeuvred
again, and the forward and side-view were solely of the south margin of the
cliff. One last glimpse of the building and the lawns, the south terrace (so
tiny now, toyland.) Then all the earth dropped away into an incredible abyss.
At the bottom of which was not red wine, or eternal darkness, but the sea.
Emerald near the narrow shoreline, curving over into outer ocean. And there the
waves were a single thing, a glistening sheet of turquoise.

But it was not turquoise, of course. Not much is what it seems.
Some things are not even – what they are.