Hades (10 page)

The pregame coverage began. One of the owls turned up the sound. People took their places on Eden’s long sofa. Empty bottles were starting to accumulate on the countertops and in the corners, and the voices of the guests were rising.

Eden appeared between the balcony doors. She was staring at the horizon as she spoke on the phone. I watched her slide inconspicuously between the guests, around the sofa towards the front door. She disappeared and the room seemed colder without her, as though a window had been left open.

I broke the stalemate and went to the balcony. Eden was talking on the street corner, just beyond the orange light of a lamp.

Eric’s voice behind me made me jolt.

“Maybe I was wrong about you being a misogynist, Frank,” he said. “You seem pretty attached to Eden.”

I said nothing. Eden looked frail in the light, wiry like a spider as she paced by a stone ledge.

“Just remember, the last guy who tried to keep her as a pet got his head blown off.”

“Doyle was overprotective?” I asked. “I find that surprising. You’re overprotective enough for the entire department.”

“Doyle was nosy. Possessive. She’s your partner. Out of hours, she stops being your partner.”

“I was hoping she would be my friend.” I tried to keep a lid on the hatred in my voice but it seeped in like ink. “But you wouldn’t know much about that, would you, Eric? You’re surrounded by people who are afraid of you.”

“You make her your friend and it’s a conflict of interest. The job’s about being impartial. If someone threatened her, you’d have to be able to watch her suffer for the protection of others.”

“Maybe we should be partners.” I smiled brightly. “I’d love to watch you suffer.”

He sneered. I took a deep breath. I’d let myself be sucked in again, into the pettiness of a meaningless rivalry.

Eric glanced over at Eden.

“Come on, idiot.” He cocked his head inside. “You’re missing the game.”

I ignored him and leaned on the balcony rail. Eden was stationary now, covering the phone mike with her hand as though even the distance between the party and the street, the distance between where she stood and the apartment, was not enough to reassure her that she would not be overheard. She ended the call and stared at the phone in her hand for a few seconds, her face passive and detached as it had been in the Sampson house, and then her eyes lifted and she looked at me, surprised and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a little angry. Even from where I stood I could see the muscles in her shoulders flex with momentary defensiveness. I turned around and walked through the balcony doors and almost ran right into Eric. He had the same look on his face.

J
ason arrived fifteen minutes early. He tried to do this everywhere he went. When you came early you caught people off guard, got to wait in their living rooms while they dressed, got to look at the things they had forgotten to put away, read their mail, talk to their kids, play with their dog. He was disappointed to find Sandra Turbot waiting for him just inside the clouded glass of the front door. She had heard his car. She was a small woman, mid-forties, and bent as though she had been scurrying, antlike, under a great weight for many years. Her eyes peered from behind thick-rimmed black glasses that she probably thought were in keeping with fashion but reminded him of 1980s politicians in brown suits. She didn’t smile when he stepped up onto the porch. They never smiled for him.

A man appeared. Jason felt electric terror surge through him, the impulse followed closely by rage that almost blinded him.

“Who the fuck is this?” he asked as Sandra opened the door.

“My husband, Reg. He knows. He’s known the entire time.” She shrugged a little, afraid. “It’s his money.”

Jason sighed and pushed past her into the hall. The husband was another bent and big-eyed creature, a bald top shaved close, leathery neck crisscrossed with wrinkles. Jason had known about the husband but hoped somehow to catch the woman alone. He enjoyed the quiet tension of a woman on her own, the sparkle of threat in the air, the knowledge shared between them of what he could do, what he was capable of. Had he wanted to hurt the Turbot woman he could easily have done so, but the husband made things messier. Jason resigned himself to communicating his disappointment through sighs and sternness rather than violence.

He went to the dining-room table and dumped his things. Sandra and Reg watched him. He began unpacking, clumping things into piles.

“We want to know more about the donor,” Reg said.

Jason let out another sigh, long and loud like a hiss, closed his eyes and let his head hang. When he looked at Reg, the man winced slightly.

“Fuck you,” Jason said. “Fuck. You. Reg. I don’t know who told you you had any say in this, but it sure as hell wasn’t me. Your wife and I have made an agreement. There’s no turning back now. Shut your fat head and tell your bitch to sit over here.”

Sandra seemed to waver between loyalties. Eventually she crept to the chair at Reg’s nod and sat down.

“The donor,” Jason sneered. “Jesus H. Christ. Who the fuck is the donor to you? What if the donor was your neighbor, Reg? The local priest? The mayor’s wife? What the fuck are you going to do about it? You need this heart or Sandra is going to die.”

“We were under the impression that the donor would be someone of... of suitably low, uh . . . worthiness of life.”

Jason shook his head and took a stethoscope from the table. He fitted the earpieces.

“Take off your shirt.”

Sandra looked up at him.

“Take it off.”

She glanced at her husband, cringed, moved as though in pain as she slipped slowly out of the garment. Jason stood over her, sniggered at her plump brown breasts inching their way up into fat rolls at her armpits.

“You wanted a junkie.” He nodded, glancing over his shoulder at Reg. “A prostitute or a violent sex offender, something like that. Sure, maybe I could have gone down that road, and you might have thought to yourself that you were complicit in the death of someone who deserved it or who was probably going to kill themselves anyway out of selfishness, stupidity, greed. What you don’t understand, Reg my friend, is that it doesn’t matter.”

Jason made some notes on a clipboard on the table. He listened to Sandra’s back, counted the irregular, half-certain heartbeats against his watch.

“Of course it matters,” Reg bristled. “We’re . . . we’re not . . .
animals.
”

“That’s exactly what you are,” Jason sighed, pulling a syringe from a box and unwrapping it from its plastic sheath. “You’re animals. You think putting on a tie and slipping on Italian leather shoes and waddling your fat arse to your Lexus every morning doesn’t make you an animal? You think that because you listen to fucking Chopin you’re not an animal?” He laughed. The Turbots listened, each as hard as a rock, watching the doctor’s face. In the yard a dog was barking, pawing at the screen door. No one moved to placate it.

“Let me illustrate this for you,” Jason said, waving the syringe to accentuate his words. “Couple of years back, on my way into work, I was on a train that hit a man. Terrible thing, you know, I mean here we are, fifty or more people in the carriage, all standing chest to chest and crotch to crotch and trying our best to ignore each other, and someone—some
junkie
probably, some person unworthy of life—decides to run out and leap in front of the train. We knew what had happened, even back in carriage eight. You just
know
, you know? There was a distinct locking of brakes, a pause and then a poetically wet
foomp!
”

Sandra and Reg both screwed up their faces. Jason nodded as he prepared to draw Sandra’s blood.

“So when the announcement comes, as it inevitably must, everyone is mortified. There’s sorrow in the carriage so tangible you could have bottled it and sold it to Hollywood. People are covering their mouths and saying, “Oh God,” and crying—this one woman, she even prayed. Ha! The train sits there while emergency calls are made. No one can get off, of course, because bits of this guy are strewn everywhere and there are pictures to be taken and reports to be written. An hour passes. People start to talk to each other, you know, as strangers do. People begin to look at their watches, sigh, wriggle around. There’s no air-conditioning. When another hour’s passed, people start to get restless. They beat on the windows and try to talk to the cops, ask how long it’s going to be. They swear and they make phone calls. They start bickering with each other, get stuck into their packed lunches, sweat, pick their teeth, talk about what’s wrong with society. A fight breaks out. Women cry and babies scream.”

Jason capped the blood and plasma vials and labelled them, slotting them into foam cartons. He wrote some dietary instructions for Sandra on a piece of paper and weighed it down with the fruit bowl in the center of the table.

“People care for as long as it’s socially appropriate to care,” he said finally. “They love and they hate and they share and they feel guilt as long as they need to, and not a second longer. You can switch that off whenever you want to. You can make it so that you don’t feel anything at all. You’re an animal.
Homo sapien
, that’s you. Most evolved primate of the family
Hominidae
. Guilt is not in your nature, Reg. It’s not in your DNA. Never was, never will be.”

The doctor packed his things away and hefted the bag onto his shoulder. He glanced at his watch and noted the date.

“I’ll see you in two days,” he said, looking Sandra in the eye and ignoring her husband. “I’ll expect you to be alone.”