The Touch of Innocents (3 page)

On cue a duty policeman saluted, the door swung open and without a backward glance the politician disappeared inside as Grubb’s voice echoed across the satellite link, at last intelligible if deeply inelegant.

The young broadcaster drew a deep breath, no mistake this time, the words mouthed with almost excessive precision.

‘We are likely to be hearing a lot more about Paul Devereux.’

The senses were stunned, literally. A blast of sheer white light had entered the eye, which had been unable to cope. The pupil struggled to exclude the glare but had found it an impossible task; the light beams felt as though they were tearing around the skull, harassing the brain like a pack of mongrels let loose in a school yard. The olfactory nerve, under assault from a powerful and nauseatingly pungent odour, jammed in revolt; the nostrils flared in disgust, but found it impossible to escape. A sharp pain shot up through the nerve tendrils of the left arm from somewhere near its extremity, travelling through the brain stem like an angry, malevolent wind, blowing away cerebral cobwebs, rattling closed doors and throwing open the windows of the mind as it passed. The sensation it created was intense and unpleasant, yet in response her body could manage nothing but a slight, almost contemptuous curling of the little finger.

Around the bed, the reaction to pain generated smiles. ‘You were right, Sister,’ the consultant neurologist, Arnold Weatherup, sighed. ‘Once again,’ he added with feigned reluctance. ‘I thought this one had passed us by, but it would seem the main problem was a leaky spleen all along. You have a sixth
sense about these things; not so long ago women like you would have been burned at the stake.’

‘And no’ so long ago, Mr Weatherup, doctors like you were robbing graves for anatomy specimens.’

The consultant laughed. There was always much laughter in this ward; it helped to ease the distress of frequent failure.

‘The medical profession has always required its sacrifices,’ the anaesthetist joined in, staring intently at Primrose.

‘I don’t think we need to prod or poke around any longer, Sister McBean,’ Weatherup concluded, examining the fresh scar on the upper left abdomen through which the leaky spleen had been removed. ‘I shall leave it to you to weave your charms and spells and hope that this recovery might continue.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – Scots, weren’t they?’

‘No, doctor. Only the corpses they sold. Nothing but the best for the medical profession.’

None of this banter registered within the damaged brain, which was still dazzled and largely blinded by the unaccustomed light. The tar pit, although drying out, still delayed and frustrated the reawakening army of neurological messengers. They leapt from stepping stone to stepping stone, trying to find a way through. Most still failed and some, like those bearing short-term memories, would perish entirely, but others were more persistent, reinvigorated by the blood’s fresh supplies of oxygen, trying first one route, then another, until slowly they came nearer their goal. The stepping stones were growing larger, more messengers were getting through, yet many still arrived out of sequence, jumbling their messages and confusing the brain.

Of the several hours before the accident and all
the many days since there would be no coherent memory, nothing but a dark void. Only through dreams, which have their own unscrambling process for memories, would she be able to revisit any fragment of the torment she had endured, and one fragment she would touch only in her nightmares. A meaningless, unconnected and untranslatable memory but one which was insistent.

The memory of a face.

Pale. Gaunt. A young woman with exhausted eyes and drained spirit. A face of parchment skin and the pallor of an aged, extinguished candle. Split across by chapped and shrunken lips. A haunted demeanour squeezed dry of humour, of hope. Trembling.

The face spoke only of despair, a despair that was to haunt every one of the nightmares which recurred both during the period of wakening and after Isadora Dean had woken from her coma.

For in every one of those nightmares, the girl was running off with Izzy’s baby.

Michelini couldn’t identify the precise moment he had made up his mind. Perhaps it was because the decision hadn’t been made by him at all; others had made it for him. Maybe it was that weekend in San Francisco spent humping the chief policy adviser to the Californian Congressman who occupied the chair of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee. No sooner had she seen him off at the airport with the promise of the Congressman’s ear – she seemed to control most parts of his anatomy – than he had caught the eye of a United stewardess as she kneeled down to retrieve the linen napkin he had dropped from his dinner tray. It was one of those looks practised by world-weary adults which leaves
nothing unspoken. When she returned with a fresh napkin, it had her telephone number on it.

He knew he had only a few years left before he fell firmly into the category of middle age, when stewardesses would regard his appetites as primarily gastronomic, when they would see only the sagging flesh beneath his eyes instead of the suggestiveness within them and start asking him if he took medication rather than home phone numbers. He couldn’t deny – didn’t want to – that he was fascinated by sex, new conquests; it had been inculcated upon him at his father’s knee and in those days the women simply turned a blind eye and got on with housework and motherhood. At least in first-generation Italian-American families.

Times changed, women changed. And he, too, had changed. He was no longer the
bandito
, the sexual athlete of his twenties, yet what he nowadays lacked in stamina he made up for in technique. He loved women. Not just one woman, many women. And he was on a roll, maybe the last one he’d get. Marriage, at least to a wife like his, had just been one of those rotten ideas.

At the start they had seemed so compatible. She was no innocent maiden but a professional woman in her thirties who knew what it was all about when he had invited her back to his apartment in the Watergate. He had learnt as much as he had taught. As she had mentioned later, it was not the view outside the window that had drawn her there, she’d seen that many times before.

They had seemed to share similar interests: a defence contractor and a television correspondent both headquartered in the American capital, both used to the frequent travelling and separations of business, both physically relishing their reunions.
Marriage had been the great mistake. It was a commitment she seemed incapable of honouring. She had promised to settle down, stop the globetrotting, the foreign adventures, assignment after successful assignment.

‘Just one more year,’ she would ask. ‘It’s going too well to walk away from it right now. Just one more year and I’ll get a Stateside editor’s job. Or maybe a slot anchoring my own programme.’

Then a year had turned to eighteen months, the promises had fallen like last year’s leaves and she had been posted to the European bureau in Paris as their top foreign correspondent, taking the kids with her, flying back every three weeks. Vowing this would be the last time.

And he realized he was burned up with it all. Not just the absences, although that was difficult enough to deal with. ‘How’s the wife?’ they would ask. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ he had begun to respond. Now she had been out of contact for more than two weeks.

It was more than the absences. More even than the frustration of reunion when she would arrive back exhausted, emotionally drained, too tired even to cook a proper meal let alone light fires in his bed. It had hit him at the cocktail party in Georgetown the other night. As her professional success had grown, increasingly he came to feel as no more than an appendage.

‘Oh, you’re married to Isadora Dean. How wonderful!’ yet another breathless matron had exclaimed. Not ‘Joe Michelini, how nice to meet you and tell me all about yourself’ but ‘Mr Izzy Dean’ all over again and twenty minutes discussing her career before he could break away and grab another Scotch.

She hadn’t even taken his name – ‘for professional
reasons’. Used to be there was a clear division of responsibilities within a family, the man as bread-winner and the woman as breadbaker, not these endless arguments about where and when they might be able to meet and who should do what and screw whom.

It was killing his self-esteem. Now it was on the point of killing his career.

‘Joe, we have a problem,’ Erskine Vandel, the president of Fox Avionics, pronounced in a manner which left not a shred of doubt that it was not he, but Michelini, who had the problem. They were in the presidential suite overlooking a wind-lashed Potomac, the early bite of winter adding exaggerated emphasis to the overcast atmosphere within the room. The president was seated in considerable pomp and splendour on one side of the desk, leaving the planning director stranded in space on the other, entombed in a chair that was deliberately four inches lower. It made Michelini feel uneasy, inferior, by design.

‘You know that the MP-Double-A means everything to this company,’ the president continued. ‘To you, Joe. To everyone else who works here. Without it we’re about as much use as a fart in a wind tunnel.’

Vandel had a strong anal orientation – ‘I’m a seat-of-the-pants guy,’ he would explain to new female acquaintances. ‘You get no bullshit from me. Nothing but the real thing.’ Yet behind the foul mouth there was an astute technologically based mind which had managed to build one of the most successful component supply businesses in the military aviation industry. It was scarcely his fault that the industry itself was less than half its size of Cold War days and was threatened with being permanently grounded. ‘Know how to run a successful small
business?’ he would offer to any Congressman within hearing. ‘Build a successful
big
business, like avionics. Then let the Government piss all over it.’

‘So we have this problem, you see, Joe.’

Joe didn’t, not yet.

‘Wilbur Burns, that half-ass who owns WCN, has got it into his mind he wants to run for President. Not one of us, Joe. He’s the sort of moralizing bastard who’ll step out of the shower just to take a piss. Intends to use his station to trail his conscience like a stuck pig trailing guts and, so’s he can establish his credentials, wants to offer up a sacrifice. Us. The MP-Double-A. You. Me. The whole show. And all the while pretending that the funds needed to develop it will pay for the dreams and votes of every mother between here and hell. Horse shit,’ the president snapped.

Like an affectionate father he began stroking a gold-plated model of the Duster which occupied pride of place on a desk top littered with executive toys and silver-framed portraits of his three daughters. ‘Joe, how long you been with this company?’

The voice was softer now and Michelini felt the prickle of sweat beginning to foregather on what used to be his hairline. He’d entered difficult territory and did not yet know which way to jump.

‘Nearly twelve years,’ he muttered.

‘Eleven years and eight months on Friday,’ his president stated. ‘And in all that time no one has ever had cause to question your loyalty. Done a damn fine job for Fox Avionics. That’s why I made you planning director. Gave you a great salary and an expense account twice as big as my own. Surprised you haven’t put on even more weight than you have.’

‘I work it off. On your business,’ Michelini responded defensively.

‘Never any doubt. You kiss ass over on the Hill like those Senators have got mistletoe dangling from their belts, and get laid so frequently I sometimes think you must be running for President yourself. Eh, Joe?’ He started a laugh which echoed around the large office, but in return Michelini could offer only a taut smile.

‘Never any doubt, Joe.’ Vandel was leaning forward across his desk, the humour gradually subsiding. ‘Until now. Trouble is, there’ll be split loyalties. You here at Fox, and your wife the flavour of the month at WCN. Likely to get her own show soon, I understand.’

‘Crap!’ Michelini responded. ‘Erskine, there’s no way I would …’

But already the president was waving down his protest.

‘Exactly what I said when some of the boys raised the matter with me. Capital K-R-A-P. Not old Joe, I said. But …’ He flapped his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘This is too big to take any chances. They said. WCN’s the opposition and we can’t afford the risk of having one of our top executives hanging out with them. Sleeping with the enemy. It’s not as if this is the sort of job you can leave behind in the office every night, it’s a twenty-five-hour-a-day commitment.’

Michelini bit into his lip, angered. ‘If you know what’s going on at the station you’ll also know that my wife is currently based on the other side of the world. This is ludicrous.’

‘And every three weeks she flies back here for … well, I guess, a marital update?’ Vandel countered, trying for once not to take the coarse line before
quickly abandoning the unfamiliar approach. ‘Shit, Joe, it’s not as if she’s just another one of your casual pick-ups you can fuck and forget. Chrissakes, she’s your wife.’

Michelini began to laugh through his nose. A hollow, scornful sound. Pillow talk! They were worried about pillow talk! Hell, what was he going to tell them? That he and his wife hadn’t made love – had scarcely even slept together – since the moment she knew the second kid had been conceived. That the baby had been a last and desperate attempt by her to glue back the pieces of a marriage which had been falling apart. That it turned out to be a lovely baby, and a pathetic mistake. The marriage would never be put back together, and now there was an extra child to complicate matters.