The Evil Inside (11 page)

‘Try me.'

‘Well he said that that same group of pigeons had flocked together up in the sky …' She stared intently at the orange tip of her cigarette for a few more seconds ‘… and that it looked just like the face of Satan laughing.' She shuddered.

‘Jesus!' I suddenly felt like a cigarette – and maybe a drink – myself. ‘Did your dad ever hear any local Dallas rumours about who might have been responsible for the crime?'

‘Lots of them. But the one he liked the most was that Frank Sinatra had ordered the hit.'

I gave her an incredulous look.

‘Well, the theory goes that Kennedy had snubbed Sinatra earlier that year by staying at Bing Crosby's house instead of Sinatra's house out in Palm Springs. So to pay him back, Sinatra had the president whacked.'

‘What, so was it Ol' Blue Eyes himself up on the sixth floor?'

‘Close. It was Jack Ruby! Sinatra allegedly knew Ruby through his own casino at Lake Tahoe in the fifties – the Cal-something. So he asked Ruby to do it and Ruby said yes because he had big gambling debts at the time and had some Mafia heavies chasing him for them.'

‘So was Oswald in on it or not?'

‘According to the Sinatra theory, Oswald both was … and he wasn't.'

Just then, Terry the Terrible walked past Lucy's open doorway and glared at me. He'd been wanting to brief me on a new corporate brochure for a big satellite communications client that our UK office usually handled. I knew it would be a long, dull job, so I'd been putting him off. ‘Well, it's been fun, Luce, but I guess I better go and assassinate Terry before he gets me first. You're better than the History Channel!'

And a hell of a lot sexier.

She smiled. ‘If you're really interested, I'll ask Daddy to email me what he remembers.'

I paused in the doorway. I wished I could stay in there all day shooting the breeze and studying her legs. ‘See you this afternoon for our exciting new yo.com meeting.'

‘Yo, Bro,' she smiled.

‘By the way, is it true you were seeing JFK Junior last year?' The thought of the two of them together had me very excited.

‘Is that the rumour?' Lucy scoffed. ‘We were trying to get JJ on the board at Highcams. I met him at a company cocktail party and took him up to see a camera we'd just installed on top of Trump Tower. He was nice – and very flirty of course – but a little too … Hyannis Port for me.'

She looked me straight in the eyes. ‘I prefer my men to be a little more “real”.'

I went back to my desk, trying to hide my hard-on underneath it.

As I skimmed the client brief, I wondered whether one of their many satellites could have picked out the killer in the Depository's sixth-floor window back in November '63.

I seemed to remember that Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he'd been in the first-floor lunchroom of the building at the exact time of the assassination. And when a cop accosted him on the second floor getting a Coke out of the machine no more than ninety seconds after the shots rang out, he'd acted completely normal.

Not at all out of breath.

As cool as a cucumber.

I wondered whether the sockets in that lunchroom had been screaming.

Yo.com was a nifty new back-end personalization provider for other online businesses. So when one of the big online retailers told you which books you were likely to enjoy reading next, it was Yo who had already done the algorithmic homework for them.

Anthony was away at a new media conference in San Jose, to which he'd invited the coolcams kids and a couple of our other west coast clients – or our ‘faultline confrères' as he called them.

So it was just Lucy and me today.

But our scheduled mid-afternoon meeting downtown turned out to be more of a ‘no' than a ‘yo'. Their blue-haired teenage receptionist, who had more metal in her than an aircraft carrier, told us that the marketing director we were meant to be meeting was still up in the air somewhere on a foggy flight out of Chicago.

‘Sorry, guys,' she explained through her gum. ‘I woulda called ya but Ben didn't leave me no numbers.'

‘If only there was a Yo for your personal life that could tell you what you were going to do next.' I was holding my folder over my head as we trotted out of their lobby into the rain.

‘Not very personalized of them to not even show up!' Lucy complained from under her red Levis jacket. A taxi splashed past, soaking the cuffs of my Diesels and completely drowning Lucy's Blahniks. ‘Shit!' she cried. ‘These shoes cost me a month's salary. And that taxi's just gone and pissed all over them!'

The rain intensified into artillery fire: small, stinging ball bearings battering us into an early retreat. The wind also brought out its icy whips. So we holed up in the cosy entrance to a Jewish cake shop called Levin's, a fragrant foxhole against the marauding elements. With the heat venting out from the deli inside, it was a small, warm, moist place to take shelter.

We stared through the steamy window at the bar mitzvah blintzes and freshly minted matzah balls. But as the rain intensified and we remained trapped under the awning, eventually we had nowhere else to look apart from at each other.

She really was good enough to eat.

‘Olcott Races, Callum's Day, doo dah, doo dah … Olcott Races, Callum's Day, oh–the-doo-dah-day …'

It was funny, but apart from the occasional maid pushing a vacuum cleaner, we hardly ever seemed to see anyone else on our floor.

Home from work, I raced Callum down the long, deserted hallway. But he was slower than usual and not really into it.

‘I wanna see Mummy,' he said.

‘OK. It's time for dinner now anyway.'

I sat down with a Red Stripe. ‘So how did it go?'

Mia had had an interview at a gallery in Soho.

‘So so.'

She sipped her Chardonnay. I could tell there was more in her than in the bottle. She hadn't drunk like this since after she'd had the abortions all those years ago.

‘They said they'd call me if anything came up. And they gave me the numbers of some other galleries downtown and out in Brooklyn.'

‘So it was a worthwhile meeting?'

‘Who knows?' she slurred a little and the wine sloshed dangerously around her glass.

‘How was Callum today?'

‘Fine. Esmeralda took him to a Peter Pan puppet show up in Harlem. Now he wants to learn how to fly.' But it wasn't Callum or flying boys she really wanted to talk about. ‘You've been getting home even later the past few weeks? Eleven last night?'

‘Yeah – well we've been busy.'

‘Funny. I spoke to Susanna today and she said you'd actually been pretty quiet. That's why Anthony's out in California trying to drum up more business.'

She kept staring at me: I was a rabbit in a headlight. A couple of nights the week before, I had genuinely been working with Bill on new business pitches that Anthony had briefed us on remotely. But last night, Lucy, Bill and I had gone round the corner for a drink and then Bill had left round nine.

And Lucy and I had stayed on a bit longer.

But I really didn't feel like going into the details right now. ‘Busy, not busy – it's all relative. With respect, Susanna doesn't know a lot about the day-to-day business. Just how to spend the profits.' I started to clear the dishes.

‘Daddy read me a story!' Callum demanded, thrusting his Paul Hamlyn fairy tale book into my belly. ‘Come on, Dad!'

‘Read your son a fairy tale,' Mia said drily. ‘After all, you've been telling me a few lately.'

Oh yeah?
I felt like saying.
And with the amount you're putting away these days, you could give my father a run for his fucking money and that's saying something.

But I said nothing: there was no point. Especially when she was like this.

I closed the book, tucked Callum in and switched on his Noddy lamp.

I noticed a blob of blue clay on the side table next to him.

‘What's that?'

‘Play-Doh, silly! Don't you even know?'

I picked it up. ‘Yes, I know it's Play-Doh. But what have you made out of it?'

‘Don't tell Mummy,' he lowered his voice to an excited whisper. ‘But I made Bubby!'

I turned the little blue sculpture over in my hand.

My heart froze.

Complete with froggy feet and hollow eyes, although slightly smaller than life-size, it was a pretty good facsimile of a baby in utero mid-term.

Because I intentionally hadn't been home early these past few weeks, I'd managed to avoid any awful Callum/Bubby mind-fucks. In fact, I'd almost managed to convince myself that the shocking events at Arcadia had been mere figments of my fevered imagination. But now it seemed as though the whole sequence was starting all over again.

‘Talking 'bout Bubby makes Mummy sad,' Callum explained solemnly. ‘So I just showing her to you, Daddy.'

I was still turning the thing over in my hands.

‘You know what, Son? I do think it's a good idea not to mention Bubby to Mummy. It does upset her. But this little Bubby you've made' – it felt very cold in my hand – ‘is
so
good, I'd like to take it to work with me. Can I do that?'

Callum lapped up the praise. ‘Oh yes, Daddy! You can keep her on your work desk, next to your 'puter. I can easy make another Bubby for home!'

‘We-ll, you've made a good Bubby already,' I demurred. ‘So maybe next time, make something different, eh?'

Callum pondered this new challenge for a moment. ‘Maybe a Balto instead – or a Buzz or a Woody!'

‘Great idea, Son!'

I slipped the sinister little effigy into my pocket.

‘Good night, darling.' I kissed his forehead and switched off the bedroom light.

For the next ten minutes, I sipped on another Red Stripe and kneaded the Play-Doh in my pocket until my fingers were raw.

Then, once Mia had also safely gone to bed, I walked down the passage to our front door, opened the heavy stairwell door to my left and hurled the nasty little blue ball down into the abyss.

‘Guy, Esmeralda's in hospital!'

‘Esmeralda?'

‘Yes. They've taken her to Mount Sinai!'

Mia was yelping loudly at the other end of the phone. As if she couldn't draw breath.

‘W-what happened?' Bill heard the catch in my voice and looked up from his layout.

‘I-I don't know. I had a coffee with Susanna at Isabella's. Then I went to Fairway to do the shopping …'

‘Yes?'

‘And then when I got back to the Olcott, Michael came rushing up to me and …' She gulped.

‘Keep going. Take your time.'

‘Told me that she'd fallen and hit her head.'

‘Fallen where? Off what?'

‘The couch. You know how she's always fiddling with the curtain cord because she says the room's so dark during the day?'

I remembered I had seen her do it that one time. And I hadn't liked her doing it. ‘Yes?'

‘She was always fiddling with the bloody cord and sometimes it got stuck and she used to stand on the arm of the couch—'

Mia began to wail. I'd never heard her sound like this before. Even after she'd lost babies, her crying had been quieter, private, human. Now she sounded like an animal caught in a trap.

‘Where's Callum? Is he all right?'

‘He's here with me. He's fine but a bit shocked. One of the Irish maids found him wandering up and down the corridor. He was the one who found Esmeralda lying there, poor little thing. He'd been having a nap and then he wandered out to the lounge and saw her lying there on the floor with blood coming out of the back of her head. One of the ambulance guys also noticed some blood on the window sill, so maybe she cracked her head on that on the way down.'

‘Jesus. What do the doctors say?'

There was a long, terrible pause.

‘Guy, it doesn't look good. She's still unconscious – that's all they'll tell us at this stage.'

*

We'd told Callum that Esmeralda had been taken to hospital with ‘a really bad headache' but that she'd probably be OK and back home before he knew it. That was two days ago and he still needed some serious cheering up.

‘Come on, son. I'm taking you down to Texas, boy!' I put on a lame John Wayne drawl.

‘Wh-at?' Mia slurred from the couch. It was dinnertime, but that event didn't seem to have crossed her addled mind yet.

‘It's all right, Mia. I'm taking Callum downstairs to Dallas BBQ. Do you want me to bring you back anything? Some nachos with guacamole? Or some tacos maybe?'

‘No thanks.' My wife didn't eat much these days. The only nutrients she was getting were from fermented grapes. Maybe the anti-depressants were killing her appetite.

Despite what we'd told Callum, we really had no idea when Esmeralda would be rejoining us. The day after the accident – as soon as she'd been allowed – Mia had visited her at Mount Sinai. Apparently Estella was there, too, maintaining as much of a vigil as her duties at the Johnsons' would allow her.

‘What did they say?' I had asked as soon as I'd got home from work.

Mia was trying to make
pozole
in Esmeralda's honour. She was dropping occasional tears into the frying pan along with the olive oil.

‘They've put her in a medically induced coma. The doctor I spoke to said they had no idea about how long she'll be like that. Oh, it was horrible, Guy. She's just lying there like a corpse.'

Or
copse
as Esmeralda would have said.

‘So no prognosis, then?'

‘They're running “tests” – they always say that, don't they? But they can't offer anything conclusive.'

Mia was leaning against the kitchen bench, wiping her eyes with a tea towel. ‘I'm not sure I can go back there till she's better. Mount Sinai is such a sad place for me.'

I held her, but again there was that stiffness.

‘Estella said she'd call us as soon as there was any news.'

I let her go.

‘This place is a bit like where Esmeralda comes from,' I explained as Callum and I entered the Dallas BBQ and slid into a red booth behind a noisy bunch of teenagers. ‘Sort of like Mexico.' Actually I was pretty sure it was nothing like Mexico – I was just trying to make conversation with my sad and distant son.

Callum seemed neither impressed nor interested. He looked up at the sombrero hanging on the wall. One of the teenage boys said ‘shit'. I glared at him and his friends all laughed nervously.

It must have been Michael's hour off. He was sitting over at the bar with his boyfriend, Enriquo – the moustachioed bartender who'd served me my first beer in New York. Callum liked Michael, not only because he wore ties that featured cartoon characters but because he also expertly mimicked their voices for Callum whenever we stopped by the front desk.

‘
Here's your mail, Cawwum
,' Elmer Fudd might say, ‘
It's vewy vewy interesting.
'

But today I doubted that even a note-perfect ‘
sufferin' succotash
' could make Callum smile.

I tried to enthuse him: ‘You can have some of the yummy food that Esmeralda makes for you. Like tacos!'

He just looked sad.

‘You miss Esmeralda, don't you?' Of course he did. His favourite new person in New York, perhaps the only stable constant in his life, and now she'd been taken away from him in an abrupt and violent fashion. Plus he wasn't enjoying the local playgroup nearly as much as that first time with the Play-Doh: he'd told Mia one of the Puerto Rican boys had started picking on him.

He avoided the question but asked, ‘Daddy, can I have a drink of water, please?'

‘Of course you can. And I'll get a Bud for Daddy.'

Michael was drinking a Fluffy Duck at the bar and laughing with Enriquo. Someone put ‘Blue Bayou' on the jukebox and I suddenly missed our nanny, too.