Primo was sitting astride a chair facing me. Without getting up, he shook his head in warning. His hands rested on the chair back. The flesh across his fingers was pulpy and liver-coloured. It looked bad, as if one or more fingers might be broken.
I closed the door on him.
‘You still have some of your drink left,’ Brond said.
Slowly I went back and sat down. Since there was nothing better to do, I drank the whisky. It was a taste in my mouth, nothing more.
Brond brought the bottle and put it between us. We had a still life – the whisky, a muddle of wrapping paper, a length of marked towel, a gun.
‘I don’t want any more to drink.’
‘Nonsense.’ He poured into both glasses. ‘You’re what – six feet? With a sound pair of kidneys, excited as you are, you could finish the bottle and keep your wits.’
It was easier to drink than to argue.
‘We’ll have a longer chat another time. You’re an interesting young man. When I’m less pressed for time, you’ll tell me all about yourself.’
The absurd idea came into my head it was like a job interview; only instead of a knife to see if you balanced peas on it as a test there was malt whisky and a Czech gun.
‘I’m a student,’ I said. ‘I was given a parcel to keep. I wish I’d never seen it.’
Into the silence a clock behind me spaced sweet chimes.
‘What an uncomplicated young man you make yourself sound.’
He stood up and I followed him to the far door. With Brond leading the way, we passed through another room, a passage, another room. They were places we crossed – Brond in front, Primo behind me. No one knew I was here. Perhaps Margaret . . . No. She only knew I had gone away in a car.
We came into a small entrance hall. It looked very much like the one I had come in by, but smaller. When he opened the door, I saw across the landing the other door with its raw gouged panels.
I stepped over the threshold on to the dirty grey stone landing like a prisoner released.
‘Wait!’ Brond said. ‘This won’t do!’
Stopping me then was like a cruel joke. He touched my shoulder.
‘Your stick,’ he said. ‘You’ve left it behind. It must be by the chair in the study.’
Primo turned back into the flat. I concentrated on keeping upright; I wanted my face to be without expression. Don’t whine, had been Primo’s advice; don’t whine. On the door there was a piece of cardboard with a name printed on it: Anders.
‘Not an alias,’ Brond said following my glance. ‘A simple forename. Anders Brond.’
‘Anders,’ I said. The name Anderson and its history came to my mind. ‘That’s a Swedish name.’
‘Or you’ll find it in Finland. The Swedes are the aristocrats of Finland.’
A door closed inside and Primo appeared again. I took the stick from him and felt the difference at once.
‘It’s not mine,’ I said, and cursed my stupidity. Yes, it’s mine. Let me take it and go. Any stick does to lean upon. To walk away.
‘Never mind,’ Brond said. ‘I’ll make you a present of it.’
For some reason, perhaps because I was exhausted, perhaps because I had been sitting for so long, walking was harder than it had been since my accident. I needed the stick. All my weight fell on it. With great labour, I crossed to the stairs.
‘Wait!’ Brond said for the second time.
I stopped. It seemed as if the cruel play was to be ended. As I waited, I saw a body, as if it had never been mine, lying by the side of a road with rain falling on it.
Brond came close.
‘It’s only fair to the Finns to add,’ he said, ‘that a time came when those proud Swedes lost their university posts and their comfortable places in the civil service.’
At what he had chosen to say or at the look on my face, he burst into laughter and tapped me on the chest. Even when the door closed behind him, the laughter hung with the echo of what he said last, ‘Things change.’ I was alone on the landing of an old tenement that smelled of a hundred and fifty years of betrayal.
As I stood, a child whimpered. The sound shocked out of the darkness below me. The bulb above my head lit the two doors and the boarded window at the turn of the stair. From somewhere beyond that, a child whimpered out of the dark.
At the second flight I stumbled, afraid of a fall. There was a rustling whisper in the dark. I slid one foot until I found a step then gripped the bannister edging my way down. In a field last summer a pheasant had sprung up from under my feet. It was like that: an uprising turbulence and I could see nothing and threw out my hands. There was a cry of pain and a child’s voice, ‘I’m sorry.’
Under my hand a thin shoulder. Without letting it go, I passed my other hand up to her face.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
I whispered the questions as if it were a trap. The child’s voice wheedled at me out of the darkness.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said.
‘What do you want?’
‘I live here.’
‘For Christ’s sake then, knock and go in.’
‘My daddy put me out.’
Why did I have to meet her?
‘I’ll knock,’ I said. ‘You can’t sit here alone in the dark.’
I had dropped my stick and now, holding her, I felt around my feet for it. I wanted it in my right hand when a father like hers opened the door to my knocking. The wood brushed my hand and I pulled it to me.
‘What are you doing?’ the child whispered.
‘My stick. I wanted my stick.’
She moaned and took my hand from her shoulder and carried it in both of hers down between her legs. I felt the bone under the heel of my hand, and my fingers curled into her.
‘Don’t hit me,’ she said.
And I pushed her away. I heard the thud of her hitting the wall but she made no sound. Flailing, crippled, stumbling in the dark, I fell from flight to flight until I reached the outer world.
I left that street and the next before I stopped. It was moonlight and I put a hand across my eyes and was weeping.
EIGHT
The last time I had been in a taxi had been at my Aunt Netta’s funeral. Don’t upset your Aunt, they’d told me when I was little, she won’t have a breath to draw. I sat watching the dark streets go past, on my way to the Kennedys’ house where I lived, remembering my Aunt’s fat white arms and the noises that knocked in her chest when she got excited.
I had taken a taxi because one came past empty when I was tired. I began to look through my pockets for money. I reached into my breast pocket with two fingers and felt a fold of paper which I drew out between them. It seemed to be a note of some kind and I remembered Brond touching me there. At first I could not read it but when I angled it at the window, brief light caught Margaret Briody’s name. Under it an address had been pencilled.
There was a sliding glass between the driver and passengers. I tapped on it and he pulled it back. I leaned forward until I was almost through it.
‘Do you know this address?’
‘What?’
‘On this paper. If you know it.’
He reached with one hand and like me held it slanted to the street to catch the light.
‘So?’
‘Would you take me there?’
‘You mean after or instead of?’
‘I want to go there now.’
‘You’re paying.’
I wanted to know where Kilpatrick had gone, and why she had given me the parcel, and if she had known what it was. I wanted someone to talk to me. I wanted to see Margaret.
You’re paying, he’d said. A gun had been pointed at me that night, the trigger pulled, and now I was sweating because I might not have the money to pay for a taxi ride. Very cautiously, I started to feel again through each pocket. It was hard to count. I got different totals and then I dropped a coin on the floor and it rolled and got lost though I scrabbled after it.