‘Tell me the truth.’
‘Vot for?’
‘I want to help you.’
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘It looks like you do.’
‘This is just temporary.’
‘Who did that to you?’
‘Club boss.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I borrow money, then I don’t come to work.’
‘When Paul was writing his book proposal?’
‘You are wasting your fifty euro, Frenchman. The truth is the least interesting thing about me.’
‘Why did you come back to the club?’
‘You have seen how we live.’
‘You had a job.’
‘I lost it.’
‘But this — dancing — you hate it. He told me.’
‘Is commercial transaction. Very soon I have enough to leave.’
‘Leave the club?’
She smiles; she knows I know that is not what she means. My heart plunges in a spiral. ‘Where will you go?’
‘Home.’
‘With Remington?’
‘Of course.’
I prop my elbows on my knees, scrub my head with my hands. ‘I wish you’d told me about this before. I can help you. I have money. It’s the one thing I do have.’
‘Oh, Claude …’ She stops short, brings her slender fingers to her heart. ‘Would you really do that for me? You are special man, very special man.’ She draws closer, till her breasts are hovering inches from my nose. ‘Maybe I can think of special way to repay you,’ she whispers. ‘A secret, just between us two?’
‘Stop,’ I mutter.
She reels away, with a leer of barren triumph. ‘The hero with his shining wallet,’ she says. ‘This club is full of men who want to help me, Frenchman.’
Exasperated, I rise from the chair; she flinches back theatrically, as if I had moved against her. I sit back again, say carefully, ‘I know you have made many sacrifices. And I know your husband has failed you many times. But I am asking you to give him just one more chance. I’m sure that this time, with a little help, he can finish this book —’
‘The book!’ She throws her hands in the air. ‘You are the same as him! I don’t care about the book! I don’t care if he writes another fucking word! I just want him to be here in the world with me! Be here with his son! Instead of walking around like the dead man!’
‘He loves you.’
She flicks her hand as at some insignificant noise.
‘He does!’ I insist. ‘He told me!’
‘He loves me, and he drinks our money!’ she exclaims. ‘He loves me, and eviction notice comes! He loves me, and I listen to my little boy’s tummy rumble all the night long!’ She draws back; the bruised flesh around her eye pulsates with loathing. ‘What do you know about it anyway? Little lonely Frenchman, with your sad dreams of true love, what do you know about love or truth? You sit in your palace of death buying and selling human souls, you don’t even look out window to see the world you make us live in.’
‘You are wrong. I do look out. I see what you have, and I envy it. The cliché is true, there are some things money can’t buy.’
‘Money can buy anything real,’ Clizia says.
‘You have not always believed that.’
She pulls up, looks at me aslant with an ironical smile. Even in silence the force of her rage hits me like a gale. ‘It is true. Perhaps in each of us there is a little Frenchman who sighs and knots his fingers and gaze at sunset. When I was young I have lots of dreams. I dream of escaping my shithole town. I dream of marrying an artist and never think about money. I follow my dreams and I end up on a stage showing my pussy to drunks.’ She pulls indifferently at a banknote that still protrudes from her G-string, looks up at me with false merriment. ‘That is how it goes, Frenchman. We dream our dreams, and we take our pay, and the world turns to shit.’
There is a click, and the lights come on. ‘Time’s up,’ she says.
I gawp at her, floundering, then fumble out my wallet. I have no cash left. She looks at me coolly, as she might at any other of her clients, priapic, in love with her, desperate to prolong the fraudulent moment. ‘Please,’ I entreat her, ‘you must promise me that before you do anything, you will let me talk to him.’
‘I have to go,’ Clizia says.
‘You can’t give up yet! Just wait a little bit longer!’
Standing in the doorway, shot through by shafts of light from the dance floor, she appears fissiparous, disintegrating. ‘Go home, Frenchman,’ she says. ‘This is not your story.’
She turns away and is swallowed instantly by the nebular darkness. I hurry out after her, but at the door I’m seized by Gary and Jocelyn and Dave Davison. ‘Have you heard, Claude?’
‘There’s a rescue package!’
‘We’re still alive!’
Their faces swing about me like carnival masks, repeating the same words — ‘government’, ‘last minute’, ‘Royal’. But I’m too addled to make sense of them. All I can think is that I must find Paul at once. To the sound of champagne corks popping, I climb the stairs and out on to the street.
Just as I flag down a cab, though, I remember that I gave the last of the cash in my wallet to Clizia. I search about my pockets frantically and at last dig something out — and freeze there on the side of the road.
‘Are you getting in or not?’ the driver wants to know.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ I wave numbly; he swears and pulls away again. I remain at the kerb, staring at the paper in my hand — not a banknote, but the fax from earlier today. It nests in my palm, a sheet of perfect black; and Clizia’s words resound in my ears. This very morning he tells me that tonight he does something big. A new plan that will change everything.
A terrible thought springs out of the darkness. What if this time he was telling the truth?
The road and footpath have almost disappeared, reduced by the downpour to islets of grit in a black lagoon of water. The rain is coming down heavier than ever — in its frenzy and force hardly like rain at all any more, but rather the bodying forth of something awful, until now hiding out in the abstract, gathering strength there, awaiting its moment to hurl itself into the actual. A sense of impending doom is unavoidable; I break into a run, splashing past nightclubs and pizza restaurants, then leaving the waterlogged street for the shadows of the square, where I instantly spot –
Nothing. In the decorous Georgian enclave, all is calm. The cherry trees cast their blossoms softly against the night; silence turns about the solemn axis of the oak tree like the moon through the houses of some rarefied, red-brick zodiac. My dash slows to a jog, then a plod; my heartbeat does likewise, and I see my fears for what they are: absurd, too absurd for words. Clearly the events of the day have taken their toll on me. Not even Paul would attempt a plan so outlandish — except for the plot of one of his unwritten books, maybe! I laugh out loud, there on the leaf-strewn street, am answered with a murmur of reproof from a covey of pigeons lodged in a dripping magnolia … and then the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.
Dread thuds back into my ears; at the same moment the grey boulders of the clouds roll away from the moon, and in the interval of light I see, amid the Benzes and Jaguars parked around the square, a large and anomalous white van. KGB EXTERMINATIONS, runs the legend on its side, with a picture of a terrorized mouse fleeing a man in a trench coat. I start to run again.
William O’Hara’s house is almost entirely dark, save for a dim glow from deep within. The garden is deserted, the front door undisturbed. It’s still possible I’ve got it wrong — but then a gate leading to a side passage opens, and a masked figure appears.
‘What the —?’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’