The Assassin (6 page)

‘No,' Elizabeth said. ‘He never leaves the States. I came with a friend of his.'

‘Why didn't he travel with us?' Maybe because he was shy, like the passenger behind the smoked glass. Maybe he used a pretty girl as a screen, so nobody would see his face.

‘He had to go to Germany. He's a kind of publisher.'

Like hell he is; Keller lit another cigarette. Without thinking he took one out and handed it to Elizabeth. For a second their fingers touched. He refused to look up or take notice of her because of it. She was just a blind, a cover. When the journey was over he would never see her again. And he didn't want to see her. Suddenly he was tired of probing, or trying to find out who had employed him, and for what purpose. He knew the purpose. He knew it when he shot the target off the tree, and calculated it in terms of a man's head. He had been hired to kill, and the less he knew about the details, the safer it would be. All that mattered was the money. He rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and adjusted his seat back. He didn't look at the girl; he closed his eyes.

‘Excuse me,' he said. ‘I'm going to sleep.'

The room on the fourth floor back in the cheap hotel on 9th Avenue and West 39th St had been vacant for two months. When Pete Maggio booked it for two weeks, the superintendant took the rent and gave up the key without asking who or why or when. He knew Maggio by reputation; he had been born in the district and slipped down from petty hoodlum to running messages for the big boys. He had a collapsed lung after a three-year stretch in San Quentin, and he couldn't even beat up an old lady any more. He fixed things that needed fixing, and he made do with handouts here and there. He was a nothing, everybody knew that, but when he booked a place to sleep, or left something for collection, he was acting for the big boys. And always his money was good. The room was empty and it stayed empty until someone used the key Maggio had taken from the superintendent. Pete got his instructions by mail; he had syphoned off a few bucks from the rent money, and otherwise done as he was told. That morning in February he got up and dressed, put the hotel key in an envelope with the address inside, and took a crosstown bus to the eastern airlines terminal. It was a very cold morning; the stark New York buildings glittered like icicles in a frosty sky. The wind blew the Bejesus out of him as he walked against it. He had to catch another bus to Kennedy Airport; Pete shivered and wondered whether he could run to a cab out there. All he had to do was go to the airport and meet the passengers off the Pan Am flight from Beirut, ask for Miss Cameron, give the package to the guy she was with and put him in a cab for West 59th Street. He had been told to do this on the telephone the day before. He had also been promised a hundred dollars when he had done it.

He thought about the hundred dollars and forgot the cold. He played the horses a little; it was his hobby, like women or booze or both were what kept other guys happy. There was a horse running down in Florida which Pete had been following carefully through last year's season. Monkey's Paw. On form it looked good, and he liked the name. He used to be called Monkey when he was a kid; he had a screwed-up face with deepset brown eyes, and a flattened nose. For a year or two it had been all right. Everyone knew Monkey. Monkey was good for making collections, and very good at hustling anyone who didn't want to pay. But he got caught and jailed and that was the end of it. He had a lousy lung and all he was good for was odd jobs when he came out. If he put the whole hundred on Monkey's Paw at eight to one that was eight hundred bucks. With eight hundred he could … He never saw the delivery truck. His mind was so full of what eight hundred dollars would do that he half-shut his eyes to concentrate and just stepped off into the street. He never saw the truck and he died without finishing the thought. It was a four-wheeler and it weighed two and a half tons. When they got Pete's body from under it all that was left of his package for Keller was a blood-soaked pulp and a key.

When the plane landed Elizabeth was stiff with tiredness. Unlike the man beside her she hadn't been able to sleep properly; she had dozed uneasily for an hour or so, only to wake up with a sense of anxiety which she couldn't equate with the flight. And while Keller slept she studied him. He moved very little; she felt it must be her imagination but during the long hours she wondered whether he were really sleeping, or perhaps watching her under his eyelids, knowing that she was curious about him uncomfortable in case he shifted his heavy body against hers. They disembarked in silence; again he made no effort to help her with her coat or even lift down her small hand-case. He ignored her; even as they walked towards passport control he said nothing. ‘We're supposed to be travelling together,' she said. ‘That's the whole point.'

‘In that case I'd better take your bag,' Keller said. As they neared the immigration she felt his hand slide under her elbow with the same rough grip he had used to take her to the plane in Beirut Airport. She presented her passport first, and waited, her pulse bounding, for the brief moment before Keller was through and beside her.

‘Very good,' he said. ‘Now where do we go?'

‘Customs,' Elizabeth said; her voice sounded different. Her throat had constricted with the tension of those few minutes and she tried to clear it.

‘Relax,' Keller said. ‘It's over now. What happens after Customs?'

‘Somebody meets us and you go with them,' she said. ‘That's all I know.'

But nobody came forward when they were through into the main hall. There were crowds everywhere; hundreds of people in various stages of transit with the giant airlines whose tentacles reached out across the world. There were families with children, waiting for someone; business men and messengers and chauffeurs; airline officials; there was a constant stream of muffled announcements about arrivals and departures. At first they stood together in the eddying stream of people, waiting for someone to come forward. ‘Maybe there's a message,' Elizabeth said. ‘Wait here and I'll go and look on the board.' There was nothing for her; she didn't go back to Keller. She went to the Pan Am desk, refusing to be panicked, telling herself that King had arranged everything and she had no need to worry. But nobody at Pan Am knew anything. There was no message anywhere and nobody had come. She could see Keller standing alone at the edge of the crowds, his suitcase at his feet. She went back to him unwillingly.

‘They must be delayed. The traffic in New York is terrible. We'll just have to wait.'

They waited for an hour. Elizabeth went down to the front entrance and back to the message board, but there was nothing. Keller grew more silent; she saw the expression on his face grow colder, more withdrawn, and had a panic impulse to just walk out of the airport and leave him there.

‘I don't know what to do,' she said. ‘I was told you'd be met as soon as we arrived. Something's gone wrong. Nobody could be this late.'

‘I could have told you that half an hour ago' Keller said. He picked up his case, and for the third time he held her by the arm.

‘You're my only contact. We'll go to your place and I'll wait there.'

‘No,' Elizabeth tried to pull back. ‘No, you can't come home with me! I won't take you back to my apartment!'

‘You haven't any choice,' he said. ‘You brought me here; the contact hasn't come, but at least whoever it is knows I'm with you. That's how I'll be collected. If you pull away from me again I'll break your arm.'

They drove uptown the half-hour journey to East 53rd Street. She had a ridiculous impulse to burst into tears; it was like a nightmare. It couldn't be happening to her. This sort of thing was for the movies.

He paid the cab, but he kept her beside him; he moved through the hallway of the exclusive apartment block so close that they touched as they walked. He hadn't even looked out of the cab window while they drove from Kennedy; he hadn't shown the slightest interest in their surroundings or in the city which was one of the sights of the world. They went into the elevator and she pressed the button for the twelfth floor.

‘I never asked you,' he said suddenly. ‘You do live alone?'

‘If I didn't,' she said, ‘you wouldn't be able to force yourself on me like this.'

‘Don't be too sure,' Keller said. ‘American men don't frighten me. And stop looking at me as if you thought I was going to rape you. I don't want to stay any longer than you want to have me.'

The apartment was small, but elegantly furnished with a modern décor and some of the surrealist and abstract pictures her mother had collected. Keller dropped his case in the hall and stood for a moment, looking round him. He had never seen an apartment like this one. It was incredibly warm; the heat lapped over them like waves. He stared at the linen-covered walls, the Swedish furniture, the large and brilliant painting by the Belgian artist Magritte, which was the best in her collection.

‘What an ugly place,' Keller said slowly. ‘Why do you spend so much money to make such an ugly place to live? Jesus Christ …' he pointed to the Magritte—‘how could you put that on a wall?'

She didn't answer him; he was just ignorant; a peasant. Her back conveyed exactly that as she walked past him into the living room.

‘Where's the bedroom?' he asked her.

‘Through there. And don't tell me you find that hideous too, because it's the only place you have to sleep.'

The guest room had its own bathroom, and one of her decorator friends had done it out in natural-coloured hide. The bathroom was fitted up like a ship's cabin. Keller turned to her; his eyes were like stones.

‘This is a man's room. You told me you lived alone.'

‘It
was
a man's room,' she said. ‘But nobody uses it now.'

‘So you're in between lovers at the moment?'

The slap she gave him was instinctive; there was no thought behind it or she would not have dared to hit him. But her hand came out and struck him hard across the face. ‘Don't you dare talk to me like that!' And then because he moved towards her, ‘Don't you dare touch me. Don't you dare come near me …'

He would never have done it if she had not said that. He would have let her slap his face because she wouldn't have been the kind of woman she was if she had let him get away with that last insult. But it was the cry of fear, physical fear and revulsion that tore through his jagged nerves and sent his temper to explosion point. He had come seven thousand miles to kill a man he had never seen for the kind of money he had never even dreamed about. He had his head stuck out so far on the end of his neck that he could feel the cold, and everything had gone wrong. The carefully laid plan, the meticulous organising, had broken down. Nobody had come to meet him at the airport and he was left with this girl, hostile and defiant, forbidding him to put his hands on her as if he were some kind of dirty animal. Not to touch her. Not to dare touch her. All the way from Beirut, with her scent in his nostrils and her legs brushing against him, he had wanted to do just that.

He caught her arms and twisted them behind her back, pulling them upwards; he bent her against his braced body, and forced her head back. Her mouth was open with the pain of his hold; when he kissed her it closed against him, her head jerking in a hopeless effort to get free. He hurt her deliberately to begin with, to teach her that he was a man and she had better not struggle with him. She didn't surrender at once; she kicked and writhed and made little sounds under his mouth, but then she quietened, and he opened her lips. It was as if she were suspended, as if time had ceased to run. Nothing was real but the pressure of his body against hers; her arms were free and they hung down, numb and useless; his fingers were in her hair, holding her head in position for the assault on her unprotected mouth. The sensations of sight and sound deserted her; she hung in his arms, rising and sinking with the rhythm of his kisses, feeling her arms move upwards as if they were controlled by someone else, and slide round his neck. Lovers, she thought wildly, in between lovers. She had been to bed with one man, and tried to delude herself that this was what being in love meant. Peter Mathews for whom that bedroom had been decorated. There had never been a moment, not even at the climax of his possession, when Elizabeth had lost herself as she was lost now.

It was Keller who stopped. He put her away from him and held her. Already, without conscious intent, they had both moved near the bed. Another moment and he would have pulled her down on it. Her face was deathly, tears had seeped under her lids and smudged down her cheeks.

‘Now we know where we are,' Keller said slowly. ‘I can take you any time I want. And I do want, so be careful. Be very careful.' He moved her to the bed and made her sit down. ‘I didn't mean to hurt you,' he said slowly. ‘You made me mad. I'll get you a drink. Where do you keep it.'

‘Through there.' She didn't recognise her own shaking voice. ‘In the living room.' She watched him go through, heard him move round, open the door of the single unit standing against the long wall, with a Klee drawing above it, listened to the noise of glasses and his heavy tread as he came back. I should move from here, she tried to say it to herself. I should get away from the bedroom, get off the bed. If he touches me again …

‘Drink this,' Keller said. He put the glass of brandy into her hand, and finished a four fingers' drink in one swallow. ‘You'd better go to your own room,' he said.

She looked up at him, the brandy dulling her exhaustion into a kind of calm. ‘Why didn't you finish it? Why did you let me go?'

‘Because I'm in enough trouble without getting mixed up with you,' he said. ‘I wanted to show you what happens when anyone tries kicking me around. Now you know You needn't be afraid. I won't touch you again.'