Quentin got to his feet. He kissed Diana deftly on the lips. "Good night, Diana. Thank you for your help." He conferred silently with Marvell and Celia. "I think, however, that we'll stay up and see this through."
"Okay." Diana hesitated as she turned to leave. "Wait. isn't there something else? Isn't there — haven't we forgotten something?"
Quentin spread his arms. "I fail to see what."
The effort of recall flickered once more in Diana's eyes.
"The weekend — it's over then?"
"I don't know," said Quentin, "what else it could be."
68: white room
The Chevrolet came to a grilled halt broadside an ambulance in the Blishner Institute Psychiatric Casualty forecourts. As the five spilled from the car a tall young intern with long black hair noosed in a headband promptly wheeled a stretcher from between the sliding doors. "This him?" he asked, levering Giles onto the white sheeting. "Yeah." They had started back to the building when Andy abruptly snapped his fingers. "Fuck," he remarked to Lucy. "We forgot little Keith again."
He ran back to the car, exhumed Keith from its trunk, and trotted back with the body slung over his shoulder.
"What's with this one?" asked the intern, staring at Keith's blood-bubbled face.
"Uh. " said Andy. "Uh, he just took this great load of aspirins."
"Like hell he did," said the intern. "You boys had better stick around,"
He led them between the automatic doors, through the dim vestibule, along a corridor and into a small white room.
"Stay here," he told them.
: Andy watched him go. "That guy wants a fight," he said, letting Keith's body drop from his shoulder to the floor.
"I'm not staying here," said Skip. "That guy means business and I'm loaded."
"Relax," said Andy. "I tellya, he's—"
"Hey!" said Roxeanne, opening a cupboard door to reveal four shelves of bottles and vials. "Get this!"
"Christ," said Andy. "Look. Mandies! Andrenalin! Amyl-nitrate!" He spun around to Skip. "Get inna car, turn it round. We'll be right out." He began loading his pockets, Roxeanne hers. Skip kicked Keith out of the way and hopped into the corridor.
And there was Keith, looking as if he had been dead for a week. And there was Giles, drowning, dying and dying in the white room. Lucy crept nearer the stretcher. She held his limp hand in both of hers. Her face burned with incredulous disgust. "Andy," she whispered.
Andy turned, wide-eyed, a jar of pills held up in either hand. "Yeah?"
"Andy. What are you doing?" Lucy's voice trembled. "Get out of here and leave us alone. Get out."
His hands dropped to his sides. "Ah, what the hell, Lucy? I mean, really — what the hell any more?"
69: wrong yesterdays
In the smaller of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, Quentin reclined on a pink chaise-longue with Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau dandled on his thighs. But he wasn't reading. His forefingers placed in either nasal cleft, Quentin's head was tilted backward in a meditative posture.
In the larger of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, unaware of Quentin's presence behind the half-closed partition doors, Celia and Marvell were together on the sofa.
"Yeah, that," Marvell was saying, "that'd be the time I was over here before. When I stayed at a, at Quentin's people's home?"
"Oh. So you visited Tallbury."
"Nah, not 'Tallbury.' What was it… fuckin' great country place. It was. ”
2OO
"Tallbury," said Celia. "So you met them before they got killed?"
"They did? All of them?"
"In an aeroplane crash," said Celia neutrally.
"What, some sorta charter flight?"
"Probably. They are more dangerous. The brother survived."
"The brother? Oh, right — the 'brother,' yeah. Ah, that's too bad. I liked them really a lot. Quentin never said."
Next door, the book slid from Quentin's thighs. He made no attempt to retrieve it.
"You liked them?" said Celia. "They and Quentin never got on."
"Nah, well — but they liked him, huh, Cele?"
"He only put up with them because of the trust money."
"Yeah," said Marvell. "That was the gimmick."
"Hardly a gimmick. The money is rightfully his."
"Guess you could put it that way."
Next door, Quentin's eyes closed. A bleached light played on the corners of his eyes.
"When was this?" asked Celia.
"Uh, early last year."
"Last year? But Quentin's parents died four years ago."
"Parents? Parents? No, no, Celia. This was a 'people's home'? It was a gimmick Quent had an interest in then. You know, one of the de-luxe old-fag joints? Quent financed it. Get the queers along, screw their cash, and maybe they leave you something when they pop off?"
"Quentin's 'people'?"
"Yeah. Inna home. He never had any parents far as I knew. It was a good gimmick. It was a very good gimmick. We were, I was pulling down four hundred, maybe five hundred—"
"Quentin?"
Quentin's eyes opened. He sighed, and a great weight seemed to slide upward from his body. Then it hit him, like newly fallen snow, all the blank wrong yesterdays.
"Quentin?" Celia called. "Quentin."
"Yes?" said Johnny.
part three. sunday
lxx: johnny
did all kinds of jobs — Mondays he was bucket boy at Greek Charlie's downriver abortion factory, sold OK piss samples Tuesdays for the semilegal immigrants to smuggle into the Health Board Centre, evicted widows and cripples from South London tenements Wednesdays, Thursdays it was petnapping for the paravivisectionists, removed antisyndicate fingernails Fridays, the weekends his own—so then it was drugs, four acid plants run by him, as many trips to Tangier a month, dealt direct with Chinese heroin agents, cornered the coke concessions in three continents — into the sex market full time, so incredibly good looking that when he hit the street courting couples snarled with lust and reached out to steady each other, lorries and girl-driven minis alike mounted the pavement and cannonaded shop windows, people of all ages dropped to their knees in his wake, championed the fuck farms and pioneered the boyhire networks, two hundred a trick by the time he was through — until all these dreams began to slow down on him, all these pornographic, hallucinatory, and mercantile dreams — and suddenly it is not he who sits in a darkened room but flashing this way and that far to go through the night looking for a name, and so—
"Quentin?"
"Yes," said Johnny.
Celia came through the door and with a hideous, inhuman leap Johnny was on her back, a lithe-limbed insect accelerating her fall to the ground. Holding his wife by the hair Johnny smashed her face into the stone floor, smashed until it went all runny and sweet in his hands. Without looking round he jumped and swiveled his right arm backward and upward and shattered the approaching Marvell's jaw with the side of his fist. Johnny kicked. He kicked, and stopped when the twitching stopped.
Diana had felt the disturbance from below and was already in her dressing gown when she heard the gentle footfalls on the stairs and the soft knock.
"Who is it?" she said.
"It's Quentin," said Johnny.
Diana opened the door: "You," she said as he closed it behind him.
"Oh no. Johnny, don't kill me," said Diana. "Please don't kill me, Johnny."