“Oh, Christ!” whispered the production secretary. “All this fucking foreplay.”
“Remind Laurence of what I told him,” Harold told the floor manager.
“Will do, Harold. All right, everyone, silence on the floor, if you please. I can still hear somebody talking. Quiet, please! Okay. Forty-seven, take five. Action.”
Laurence pushed his way through the door and into the set of his horrendously decorated living room, just as a cry and a loud splashing sound came from beyond the partly opened French windows. The actress playing his wife, hair and body freshly sprayed by makeup, ran into the room, a towel clutched to her micro-bikini.
“Oh my God!” she screamed.
Another splash and her toy-boy lover was right behind her, looking concerned, looking beautiful in an obvious kind of way, looking hungrily for the camera.
“So this is what I splashed out all that money for, is it?” emoted Laurence. “So that you could turn our home into some suburban Sodom and Gomorrah!”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” pleaded his wife. He had, she thought, desperately struggling to improvise a reply. There was nothing about Sodom and Gomorrah in the sodding script!
Upstairs, Harold Roy let out a constricted cry of anguish.
Robert Deleval pounded both hands against the glass.
“Now I can see at last what a petty bourgeoise little Whore of Babylon you’ve always been!” roared Laurence, declaiming in a style that would have taken the RSC back at least a decade.
“Oh, Christ,” moaned Harold, “he’s giving us his Othello.”
“Strumpet!” howled Laurence, flinging out an arm and tearing away the top half of the bewildered actress’s bikini.
“Cut!”
“Shit!”
“Bastard!”
“Bitch!”
Harold’s head slammed forward hard against the end of his microphone; not once, but twice. Diane Woolf closed her eyes; the production secretary held her breath.
Suddenly Mackenzie was there in the control room, face shining. “Fine, Harold. Terrific job. You really did the business this time.”
Harold swiveled his chair, propelled himself to his feet and punched Mackenzie smack in the mouth.
“You know,” said Maria. “Harold and I never do this.”
“Never?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Never now or not ever?”
“Once, maybe. A long time ago. Even then it was a mistake.”
“How come?”
“He was out of his head and lost his footing. Fell in.”
Grabianski laughed. He had, Maria thought and not for the first time, a wonderful laugh. Loud and open, like a man who isn’t afraid to let go. So different to Harold in this as in all other things. Whatever her Harold was about, it wasn’t letting go. A shelf or more in the medicine cabinet stacked with laxatives, and still he was as constipated as a church mouse.
“Poor fool doesn’t know what he’s missing,” said Grabianski, scooping almond-scented lather into his hands and sliding them between Maria’s arms and over her breasts.
“I know.” Maria leaned back against him, twisting her neck until she could kiss him. Grabianski’s legs were wrapped around her, knees above her knees, calves resting inside her own. Oh God, tongue in his mouth, she could feel him stiffening again against her buttocks. His age, how did he do it?
“Maria,” he said gently.
“I know.”
“Harold-is he going to say what we want him to say?”
She pulled her head clear until they were both facing the taps. “What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“What then?”
“Sometimes, when they’re pushed into a corner, men’ll do strange things.”
“Harold?” Maria scoffed, laughing.
Grabianski loved the way her hair clung dark to the nape of her neck; he loved having his arms, his legs, full of this woman.
“When’s he meeting this dealer?”
“I told you, I don’t know. For sure. Tonight, some time. After the studio. It must be.” She leaned forward just far enough to allow her hand to slip back between them. “Don’t worry. You’re not worried about it, are you?”
“No,” Grabianski shook his head. Honestly, there was no reason for him to worry, little enough.
“You think the water’s starting to get cold?” Maria asked.
“A little.”
“Maybe we should move back to the bed?”
“In a few minutes,” said Grabianski. “In a while. Relax.”
Mackenzie had still been stemming the blood from his split lip when Harold Roy drove his Citroën out of the car park at a speed that made the wheels spin. The production secretary was gently applying a plaster to the cut as Harold overtook a brewery lorry and then swung in front of it and almost immediately skidded left into his own road. “Listen,” Mackenzie said into the telephone, “that solicitor we use, give me his name and number.” The Citroën came to a halt half on the gravel, half on the grass.
“What was that?” asked Grabianski.
Maria, facing him now, straddled above him, head thrown back, failed to reply.
It was only with the slam of the front door that Grabianski was certain.
“Maria! Up!”
“Yes!” yelled Maria. “Oh, yes!”
A voice rose like a muffled echo from below and then there were footsteps hurrying up the stairs.
“Maria?”
Grabianski seized hold of her arms and held her as he levered himself backwards, leaving her to splash through the lukewarm water as he pushed himself to his feet and swung one leg over her astonished head, jumping from the bath as fast as he was able.
“Who …?” gasped Harold, clinging to the handle of the bathroom door. “Who the fuck are you?”
He was staring at a naked man, a few sad bubbles of foam hanging desolately from his erection. Behind him his wife was trying to submerge herself below the level of the water.
Harold wasn’t tempted to have any truck with Sodom or Gomorrah, never mind Babylon. “Go to it, you bitch!” he encouraged. “Drown your fucking self!”
“Harold Roy,” said Grabianski, extending a soapy hand. “Jerry Grabianski. Let’s go outside,” he said, grabbing at a towel. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Twenty
Resnick pushed pieces of paper around his desk: Grabianski’s visits to the King’s Court, burglaries following the same MO-there was no denying the overlap. A call to Milton Keynes had established that while the industrial estate Grabianski had given as a business address existed, there was no textile factory on the site, nobody had heard of any Grabianski.
Resnick laughed. Even now he couldn’t be certain what it was that had alerted him. A man steps into a fight when he could easily turn away; not a tearaway, some youngster looking for a buzz. This was a man close to Resnick’s age, choosing to go up against a violent gang and an ax and why? Because he liked the way the waitress had taken his order, brought his tea? Did Resnick believe that? Ah, I’ve always been too much of a romantic. And did it mean that any time a citizen did what the police encouraged citizens to do, their duty, they immediately came under suspicion? Friends say it’ll be my downfall. No, it had been something about Grabianski’s plausibility that had started a nerve somewhere beneath Resnick’s skull tapping. A man so used to dancing on thin ice, he’d long since ceased to look down and see how black and cold the water was beneath, how close.
“Naylor!”
The young DC was sitting at the computer keyboard, worrying away at the inside of his lip with his teeth. He knew there was a way of getting from one file to another so as to transfer information between them, but he was damned if he could remember the command. Last night he’d taken home the manual intending to work his way through it, but last night had been no better than the rest.
“Naylor, are you wedded to that thing, or what?”
“Sorry, sir.” He executed the command for save and hurried towards the inspector’s office.
“How’s it going?” Resnick was back behind his desk, one leg crossed over the other.