After the third job, it was accepted that she would stay in the house while he went to his office where he worked on the detailing of the town’s thirty-fifth tall office block, overflow work from a larger, more successful practice than his own.
The days were difficult for her. The quietness was depressing, the future uncertain. She read the foreign newspaper for information about Carlos, fearing a successful appeal by his lawyers. She dwelt continually on the night Carlos had given Jean the speedball, uncertain as to whether he had meant to kill him or if it had been a mistake. The panic in Jean’s eyes haunted her and made her heart palpitate and her scalp itchy. She knocked herself out with Valium and wine. She woke yellow-tongued and dry-mouthed and wandered around the huge adobe house that Claude had built for himself after his first marriage. It resembled nothing she had ever known, either her parents’ Tudor mansion or the shifting motel rooms of her gangster adventures. The walls needed painting and the air smelt damp. A fine clay dust settled on tables and chairs and spread across the slate floor like talcum powder so that each evening her footsteps stood as a diary of her restless day.
She had battle fatigue but couldn’t slow down. The days with Carlos had been full of fast movements, dangers she only half understood. She had been swept along in a swift current of meetings conducted in Spanish and Italian, electric cocaine concerts with the rock’n’roll band, border crossings with damp hands holding one of Carlos’s five passports, a heavy pistol in a motel drawer, and the continual wonder of living a B-grade movie when your father was a director of a multinational corporation famous for its detergents and insecticides.
To come from that, to this.
Days of wine and Valium and yellow rivulets running under willow trees to the wide muddy river at the bottom of Claude’s neglected garden which reminded her of some melancholy story she had been read as a child.
She had reached the safety she had ached for and now she was prey to the boredom that safety brought with it.
“Let’s go and dance somewhere,” she said, but there was nowhere to dance but the discotheque for thirteen-year-olds and the expensive restaurants for dirty old men.
On a Wednesday afternoon she wrote eleven letters to Evelyn, the back-up vocalist with the rock’n’roll band. She posted the eleven letters to five friends and six poste restantes, hoping that one of them would reach her. In the letters she promised safety, a refuge in this provincial city. She recognized the stupidity of the letters, the possibility of one of them reaching Carlos’s friends. She said nothing of Claude in the letters. There was no way she could explain Claude to Evelyn, or anyone else.
And she thought about the half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines safely stored in an underground passage in a small northern town. And she thought about them timidly, for now she had time to consider the matter, she admitted she had none of the business skills needed to dispose of them.
More seriously, she doubted that she had the courage to double-cross Carlos on anything so important.
All I am, she thought, is a fucking groupie.
She took ten milligrams of Valium and stood in the rain, pretending she was a cow.
4.
She waited for him each evening with an anxiety she denied even to herself. She resisted temptations to cook him meals, yet thought she should be doing something. She wondered who was exploiting who. She didn’t understand the rules of the relationship. She didn’t understand why he let her stay, but she only thought about that when he wasn’t there. And then she felt she had nothing to offer him, if to do something as simple as cook a meal might be interpreted as an attempt to lay a claim on him. So together they opened tins of tuna and beans. They rarely ate out. He seemed to have no social life, although he discussed friends and recent dinner parties. She wondered if he was socially ashamed of her.
She didn’t understand that she was a storybook for him, an encyclopedia of adventure, a Persian carpet of his imagination that he stared at with wonder, never hoping to understand all the mysteries of it.
He interrogated her gently, never sure of whether she was exaggerating or lying. He lay gentle traps for her, smiled to catch her out on inconsistencies, enjoying the slow unravelling of her story.
He was fascinated by the rock’n’roll band (samurais, magicians, keepers of Rosicrucian secrets), by Carlos, and by all the drugs he knew by name but not from experience.
Lying in bed he might ask her about Carlos, feeling the wonder of a child asking a parent about worlds he didn’t understand.
“He was really amazing,” she said. “Carlos was the most amazing person. He had a terrible temper. He wasn’t really bright. He killed a man, Claude, while I waited in the car.”
“Did you love him?”
“He was really amazing.”
And then there was the morning Carlos was taken away by two other gangsters.
“Were they mafiosi?”
“I think he double-crossed them.”
“But were they mafiosi?”
“He was in his dressing gown. It was the only time I saw him scared. He was scared shitless. They took him away.”
“What did they do to him?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t come back for two weeks.”
“What did you do?”
“I went and hid. I knew a lot of things he knew. Do you want a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines?”
“You said half a million before.”
“What the fuck does that matter. It’s a lot of money, baby.” And her face which had been clouded with frowns burst into a smile of pure sensual excitement as she waved straight-fingered hands and clicked her tongue.
“Where?”
“Come with me and I’ll tell you.”
“Where?”
“Carlos can’t go near it, even if he gets out of jail.”
He smiled at her, wondering. “Why not?”
“You don’t understand Carlos. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He’ll wait.”
He kissed her then, very gently. “I think you’re bullshitting.”
“You think I’m bullshitting because you’ve never known anyone like Carlos.”
“You keep changing your story.”
“Don’t be boring, honey. You’re a boring old man.” And then she would kiss him, as gently as he had kissed her, looking into his eyes to ask him puzzled questions she couldn’t begin to form. “Do you want me to go away?”
“No, not unless you want to go away.”
His skin was younger than his eyes. He lay there languidly, without apparent need.
“I found a photograph of your wife. She looks very beautiful,” she said, asking another question.
“What else did you find?”
“A mouldy sandwich under the bed.”
“Anything else?”
“Let’s go to a club.”
“There aren’t any clubs.”
“Well, let’s go to a bar.”
“I hate bars.”
“You’re a boring old man, Claude.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
And she began then to kiss him, first his neck, then his chest, and then his limp cock until it was stiff and hard inside her mouth. She moved her mouth and tongue slowly, sweetly, and listened with pleasure while he groaned softly.
Outside the frogs croaked beside the river.
They held hands tightly, fucking slowly, feeling curiously happy in their puzzlement with each other.
5.
And then, in the last week of winter, the letters began and each night, it seemed, she had some word of the odyssey of the rock’n’roll band who were now wanted for questioning due to information that Carlos had passed on to the police.
“He’s trying to do a deal,” she said.