Notorious (35 page)

I try to move away from him, but he gives me a little shake. The black tide is rising again.

‘The files,’ he says.

There is nothing I can do to stop it. I wonder how bad it will be. It is unknowable, how deep his pain is.

We look at each other. We both remember how he channelled his pain before. At the thought of it, a shiver runs up my body, under his hands. I force myself to stay still.

‘You think you have no control when you lose control,’ I say. ‘Don’t you see losing control controls everything?’

Deliberately, carefully, he rests his head against my heart. I feel his lips against my skin and I can’t help myself, I throw my head back. He opens his mouth, presses his teeth into my skin. I grip his head, run my fingers through his hair. I feel every strand, longer than my own. He pulls me down to him, so I am lying across him, looking up at him as he kisses me. I feel his tongue at the base of my throat. I am swimming in molten water. I cry out, a low humiliating sound. ‘Yes,’ I say. Then, ‘Yes.’

He kisses me again, his hand running slowly down my back. He says, his fingers digging into my shoulders, ‘How much did you know about me?’

I know I can’t lie. He would feel it. I am being dragged back into the cold. I resign myself. ‘Everything,’ I say.

His face is as rigid as when he put the electronic bracelet on me.

There is nothing to stop it. ‘Before Borneo.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘No, no.’

He shoves me away.

I say, ‘Why is me knowing about you worse than you knowing about me?’

‘Because I didn’t know you knew.’ He pushes me off his legs and stands, wrapping the blanket around his waist, staring into the fire.

I am cold without him. I am sitting in a pool of darkness; dark water in my bones. The light trembles across the outline of his lower ribs, the hollow of his spine. He is cold too but not as cold as me. Anger always keeps him warm somehow.

An ember falls onto the stone and he kneels to flick it back in. The firelight makes his body a frightening place of jagged cliffs and shadows. I pull the blanket around me and say, ‘I thought the one across your shoulders meant
Forgive me
.’

He stiffens. ‘You got that out of me.’

‘That’s right, Dev. To blackmail you. Or talk you out of arresting me. Except that – gee, I forgot to do any of those things.’

‘If you knew from the start, then – ’ He can’t see the whole picture. It is beyond him. All he can do is fall back on what he knows, on what Mitch and his goons believe. I feel like saying to him, How much do you know about your own people?

He’s shaking his head. ‘All this,’ he says slowly, ‘must be some kind of elaborate revenge.’

The warmth he has given me is extinguished. But I refuse to pursue him. I sit back, against the wall. I give up, I think. Maybe this is how it is meant to end. It was always meant to be a punishment.

‘From the first moment,’ he says, ‘you knew it was me.’

‘The first moment I saw you,’ I say as evenly as I can through my shaking jaw, ‘I thought you had the blackest eyes of any blue-eyed man I had ever met.’

I close my eyes. I see the garden, the light from the palazzo’s ballroom spilling onto the tiled terrace, the images of the great works of art projected on the high stone wall, the moonlight caught in falling stars in the fountain, the boats rocking in the black water at the jetty. The bells tolling in San Marco square, the vaporettos growling in the lagoon.

Tremors run up my spine. I say, ‘I remember you sitting on the bench across from me. In the darkness past the fountain. You weren’t drinking. You were watching me.’

‘You knew why I was watching you,’ he says, his voice coming from a long way off.

I shake my head, stiffly. ‘Not at first. The lawyers only gave me one photo of the man on the case. It wasn’t very clear.’

I am sliding down into chilled water.

‘I thought you had lost too much weight for your build,’ I say drowsily. ‘Like my brother – eaten away by shadows. I thought you were ill under your tan. So a time spent in illness maybe. You should have been heavier. Cuddlier.’

‘I was never cuddly.’

‘Everyone’s cuddly, Dev.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

I slide into ice. I try to remember his hands on me but the ache and throb of it are a long way away now. It isn’t going to happen again, I accept that.

There is a long silence. I want to see whether he is looking at me but it is too much effort to raise my head. I feel like a clock running down.

The water is in my chest now. In my heart. How odd, I think, I never had any thought of giving up in the lake.

I force my lips apart. ‘Everyone’s lovable, Dev. No matter what you think.’

The waters close over my head. I see the moon moving away from me through the dark water. I want it back – I want something. What did I want?

‘Ash,’ I say. ‘Ash.’

I am back in the garden under the swollen yellow moon. It is late. The jetty is nearly deserted – just a few security guards minding the motorboats; all the other guests are inside. Voices escape in scraps through the tall windows of the marbled ballroom. Occasionally the spray from the five-tiered fountain floats on the breeze, falling across me like a cold veil. I raise my glass and imagine the two hundred guests seated at their tables, the tall red candles in silver holders, the waiters changing the crystal glasses between each of the nine courses. The smokers would be lingering on the upper balcony, admiring the view across the lagoon, pointing at the moonlight touching the wings of the golden lions lining San Marco square.

Everyone is inside except for me and the man who sits across from me.

I close the book in my lap and look at him. Did I know then? I think so. I recognised something. A way out of misery, perhaps that was all it was.

He gets up and comes towards me. He is more sinewy up close. Gaunter, older.

‘Your guests are a rude lot,’ he says. ‘Eating while the party-giver goes without.’

‘I thought maybe you were welded to that chair.’

‘I heard your accent earlier.’

‘Really.’ I pick up the champagne bottle next to me. ‘Drink?’

He smiles tightly and sits. ‘I’m at a stage where it doesn’t agree with me.’

‘I’m not hanging out with you then.’

His mouth twists in what is supposed to be a smile but is more of a grimace. He raises his arm. ‘Waiter!’

‘Go on.’ I hold out the glass. He looks at it, with a look I had seen on my brother’s face. I am ashamed. I put the glass down.

‘I can get you a mineral water,’ I say. ‘Or orange juice. There’s caviar too. Russian purple. And smoked salmon thingies.’

‘Don’t try to be a hostess,’ he says. ‘It’s obvious your heart’s not in it.’

‘And I thought I was putting up a good pretence.’

‘I’m an expert,’ he says apologetically.

‘At hostesses?’

‘At pretences.’ He half turns away, as though the crack has been surprised out of him, as though he has surprised himself.

I look up at the blue mist threaded across the yellow moon.

‘Maybe this should have been a masked ball,’ I say. ‘You can tell a lot about someone by the masks they wear.’

He turns towards me on the bench, his face serious. ‘What mask would you wear?’

‘What mask would you?’

‘You first.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘All right – together. Three, two, one – ’

‘A happy face,’ I say just as he says, ‘Something happy.’

‘Well,’ he says. His fists are clenched on his knees. I am a little disconcerted myself.

‘It’s the goal of adult life,’ I say. ‘Pretending to be whole. Learning to get through life with the cracks. That’s what everyone does.’

‘That’s insane.’

‘I know.’ And we look at each other and laugh.

Above us, Edward Steichen’s painting
The Pond-Moonlight
is projected on the high wall. A picture of darkness and light, the trees doubled by their reflection in the quiet water, the light breaking through radiantly in the centre, like the flare of a new day, like the flare of birth. Doubling the hope.

I refill my glass, lift the champagne bottle at him. He turns his head.

‘Right, I forgot,’ I say. I run my fingers through my hair. A long dark clump comes away in my hand. ‘Stupid extensions,’ I say, throwing it away. It lies like a black snake in the flowerbed behind us. ‘That’ll give the gardeners a thrill,’ I say.

‘Another front page story.’

The champagne sourly slicks my throat. ‘So you’ve come to have a look at the infamous Miss K?’

He shifts back into the darkness. ‘I’m an Embassy drone,’ he says, trying to sound meek but not succeeding. ‘You sent us an invitation. I was dispatched to – ’

‘Spy?’

‘Find out why you invited us.’

‘What’s your verdict?’

‘I thought at first it was vanity,’ he says. ‘Now . . . ’

I take another sip.

‘Perversity,’ he says.

‘I’d call it a malicious sense of humour,’ I say.

‘Aren’t they the same?’

‘Only to someone who has no sense of humour.’

‘That’s pretty much everyone at the Embassy then.’

‘Hard for you,’ I say.

‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I don’t have much of a sense of humour either.’

I take another drink and face him, gathering the hem of my silk dress so I can curl up on the bench. I have the feeling he wants to move further away but he stays still. Holds his ground.

‘I suppose surveillance guys don’t need humour,’ I say.

‘I’m not spying on you,’ he says, sharply.

‘But you are a man on a mission?’

He hesitates.

I raise the glass to the moonlight. The liquid, coiled and gold and oily, rolls back and forth. The bubbles are gone already.

‘You want to know about the stories,’ I say.

He shrugs. ‘That’s not what the Embassy is interested in.’

I laugh. ‘Really?’ I hold the glass out, under his nose. ‘Just one little drink,’ I say. ‘You’ll feel better.’

He looks at me. The moonlight catches the edge of his eye, the sliver of deep blue, like the sea where it meets the horizon on an overcast day. But then he moves his head back and all I see is black.

‘Which stories?’ he says, mildly. ‘The drug stories? The loony bin stories? The men stories?’

I drain the glass, reach for the bottle. ‘All you file-collecting Embassy types want to know the men stories.’

‘But if we’re efficient Embassy types, we already know the men stories.’

‘Never as interesting second-hand.’ I raise the bottle. ‘One teensy drink?’

‘You can’t taunt me into drinking.’ He closes his mouth, hard.

‘Is that what I’m doing – taunting you?’

‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘That is too . . . personal.’

‘What’s wrong with personal?’

‘Well . . . ’ He says slowly, as though he is feeling his way through the words. Cutting away dangerous jungle. ‘I don’t expect you to tell me anything . . . intimate. I’m a stranger. I might use it against you.’

‘What if I want you to use it against me?’

He stares at me. I half fill the glass. The bottle is empty. I throw it onto the gravelled path where it breaks in two with a loud crack which makes the security guards at the jetty rush forward. I drain the glass and raise it. A guard waves and speaks into his walkie-talkie.

I throw the glass onto the path and turn to the man on the bench. ‘Here’s the thing, John Devlin,’ I say. He draws a breath. ‘I just got back from Poland where I was arrested for trespassing and deported, as if you didn’t know. Nothing my lawyers couldn’t handle, of course, because even though my father is a convicted looter who was busted smuggling art from Baghdad to Casablanca, and who had his assets frozen in three countries, everyone still thinks I have billions – ’ I hiccup and put my hand over my mouth. ‘Excuse me.’ I wait to see if I am going to hiccup again. I’m not. I take my hand away. ‘Where was I?’

‘Everyone thinks you have billions.’

I stand, unsteadily. There is a crunching on the gravel: a waiter carrying a silver tray with a bottle of champagne, two glasses and a large pot of caviar.

‘Thanks, Italo,’ I say. ‘Just give it to Mr Devlin here.’

Devlin is still. He takes the tray.

‘You’d better bring another bottle,’ I say to Italo as he retreats.

Devlin puts his hand on the cork.

‘Can you open that?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says.

A breeze smelling of salt cools my cheek. I raise my hands against the sky, to enclose the moon and the stars. ‘Look,’ I say. ‘My hands are full of stars.

‘I have to be by the water,’ I say, walking towards the jetty, still conducting to the stars. ‘My idea of hell would be a dry place. A hot place. Not to smell the sea. There are no boundaries when you swim. No expectations. No dark cities. It is a democratic country. You forget the shipwrecks inside yourself.’

I reach the stone wall above the jetty. Across the canal the palazzi sit eyeless and darkened, water lapping against the old stone. Over the doors, gargoyles’ heads glower, turned black-green by their mossy growths. Some of the lower levels are boarded up, uninhabitable as the water rises.

‘One benefit of being rich,’ he says, behind me. ‘You can choose where you live.’

‘Only for those with no memory.’ I wonder how close he is.

‘That’s a little self-indulgent isn’t it?’ he says.

I prop myself on the wall. The guards are at the far end of the jetty, their backs discreetly turned. The sparks from their cigarettes float into the darkness like tiny lanterns, up into the slipstream. ‘Goodbye, lucky voyagers,’ I whisper as I always do.

I hear liquid falling and imagine stars in a waterfall. I look over my shoulder. He is pouring champagne into a glass. ‘What exactly are you celebrating?’ he says.

I turn back. ‘Death.’

There is silence behind me. I look to the mouth of the canal, where the lights from the lamps in the piazza trail like tresses on the water, the pale oranges and silvers breaking up in uncertain lines.

‘To water,’ I say. ‘Everything is absorbed by water.’ There is the clink of glass on stone. I stretch out a hand. ‘Whole cities. Silence.’

The trailing lights are sinking, the harbour is blackening. ‘Even darkness itself,’ I say. The guards have turned, curious. I stretch out to grasp the light falling through the black water. ‘Water is the material of despair.’