Goodbye Again Page 14

  We were free of him at night when he locked us both in the cabin, but then Ben and I had to confront each other at even closer quarters. It was hot in the cabin, even late into the night. Impossible not to move around or shower or sleep almost naked, and though that hadn’t worried me with Ben before on the boat in Killiney, things had happened between us since that made it more difficult. In our enforced physical proximity we could only find privacy in our thoughts.

  Ben dipped fretfully in and out of Katie’s diary, sitting at the foot of the bed, trying to appear indifferent to what he was reading. I lay out on the bed reading some of the theatre books Geoff had left in the wheelhouse. Alec Guinness’s memoirs. Tennessee Williams’s plays. Sweet Bird of Youth, Small Craft Warnings, Suddenly Last Summer.

  One night Ben looked up from his reading. ‘Strange how Katie absolutely insists on remembering things in a particular way. She writes how “he contradicts me about obvious facts”, when I know what I said to her that time was absolutely true.’

  ‘Don’t you see? She had to be right. The sanity clause: seems she couldn’t face the truth with you, about whatever she was up to with her father, which was why she had to chuck you without giving you a reason. It was the same with Martha – I’ve no real notion of what took us apart.’

  ‘No idea?’

  ‘No. Except it was something she came to dislike in me. Something grated. Like your friend Katie she just left me swinging in the wind.’

  ‘Silence, admission of guilt?’

  ‘Yes, except I was somehow on trial, not her. She was the prosecutor, but wouldn’t say what my crime was. I think she came to believe our sort of love would tell against her with her very proper bosses in the New York legal firm, but since she couldn’t admit this nonsense, she had to find some other reason to leave me and go straight, and rise in the firm. Find some false evidence, phoney exhibits which would prove the case against me.’

  ‘She must have produced something concrete against you?’

  ‘Now and then, towards the end, yes, she let several mangy cats out of bags. She hinted she couldn’t love me, because I was using her, in love only with her youth. Well, she was hardly that young, and I was certainly not that old. Or that I was unfaithful: she once astonished me by asking if I had one-night stands with other women I’d met on my trips away.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course not, and I told her so. Then she said I was unreliable, a maverick, too demanding, that I was beyond the pale of reasonable emotion. She actually said we were incompatible.’

  ‘That’s always a good one. I got that one, too. Then they can chuck you without a qualm. Anyway, everyone is more or less incompatible, and isn’t that the attraction? We often love people because we’re so much not like them.’

  ‘The chalk-and-cheese clause. Except Martha couldn’t read beyond the incompatibility clause.’

  ‘The cook and the lawyer! Well, you were certainly very different. Maybe too different? Like Katie and me. I couldn’t ride a horse to save my life, nor she paint. And Martha probably saw you as a bit raffish, like Katie saw me.’

  ‘Yes. Frivolous. I’m sure she saw all my cooking and eating and writing about food as frivolous, and I had to be punished for that.’

  ‘How did she go cold? What did she do?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know … Well, yes, I was away on a job, a seafood article up in Maine. Just a few days. We’d arranged to have friends over for dinner that Sunday evening. She was doing the cooking. The flight back was delayed and I didn’t get home till after nine to find they’d not waited. That was okay, but Martha hadn’t kept any food or wine for me, except the remains of a meringue and apricot tart, just a few crackly mushy bits on a platter. A tart which I’d made myself, too.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So what’s your example with Katie?’

  ‘She said to me once, when I asked her why she’d only sleep with me, never do anything else – trips away and so on like we’d done so often before – “It’s easier this way now that I’ve lost respect for you.”’

  ‘She sounds a bitch. Unless maybe you really did something terrible to her. Did you?’

  ‘Of course not. I just put up with her saying terrible things to me. Maybe that was part of her charm.’

  ‘No. You’re plenty idiotic sometimes, but you’re not a masochist.’ I laughed again. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but one has to laugh. All the ridiculous shabby manoeuvrings one goes in for – “in love”! If we’d just been tougher and told them to bugger off, they might have come back with better sense.’

  ‘Martha might have done. But Katie wasn’t going to come back. If she had, she’d have to have written a whole new script, and she couldn’t face the truth of that.’

  We dropped these painful topics. Ben dozed off and slept, but I couldn’t. Why am I making such a meal of losing Martha? As if I was the first to lose like this. But you always feel you are. And you’re right – you are the only person who’s lost in this particular way with that particular person.

  It was my particular skin, after all, my body: it was your mouth, Martha, and mine – at that particular time, in that particular place – when we ate pastrami and rye one afternoon, sheltering from the rain, that particular Saturday afternoon, in that particular crummy Second Avenue bar, famished for each other. It was us, and no others, that Christmas when we watched the skaters on the ice at Rockefeller Plaza and you said, ‘I’d love to skate, but I don’t know how.’ And then you turned and kissed me, as if to say, ‘My not skating doesn’t matter a damn, because I have you.’

  Two mornings later we approached Bar-le-Duc, a little hillside town with medieval buildings already in view on our right. We were all in the wheelhouse, but as we came towards the open lock just before the town, Panama got up. ‘I’ll go below, just in case there’s anybody unpleasant to greet us here.’ He went below.

  ‘I hope Geoff’s drug-trafficking friend at Le Coq d’Or isn’t the unpleasant person to greet us,’ Ben said.

  ‘What’ll we do if he is?’

  ‘Ask him on board. Tell him his consignment is downstairs, under the kitchen sink. Then he and Panama can sort it out, while we disappear.’

  ‘Sort it out? How?’

  ‘Shoot each other. That’d be ideal.’

  The patron of Le Coq d’Or wasn’t looking out for us when we moored at the quay beyond the lock. Instead I saw the tarty woman walking towards us, in her headscarf and dark glasses and a flower-print dress. She stopped in front of the barge and stepped on board. The headscarf covered half her cheek but it didn’t quite hide the big bruise there. She had another scarf hiding something in her hands. Her gun.

  I thought she was going to shoot us. I took Ben’s arm, about to duck, run, retreat, anything. ‘It’s her,’ I whispered, urgently, ‘the woman I hit in the museum.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ the woman said. ‘It’s him I want to see, not you. Where is he?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ Ben said, ‘in the hold.’

  She pushed us into the wheelhouse, locking the door, and, gun openly in her hand, I thought she was going to shoot us. But she walked straight past and went below. We waited. Almost immediately there was a short muffled noise from the hold, the ‘phut’ of a puncture, a sudden escape of air.

  After a minute the top of the headscarf appeared on the wheelhouse stairs, then the dark glasses and finally the whole woman. She looked pleased, the gun with a silencer still in her hand. Now it was our turn, I thought, about to duck again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I need you two alive. You’re going to help me. It’s him I wanted dead. Abandoning me like that. I loved him, you see.’

  She turned and slapped me viciously on the face, once, twice, so that I stumbled and fell, putting my hand to my stinging cheeks. Ben moved forward in a threatening way, before she covered him with the gun.

  ‘No.’ The coarse voice was quite calm. ‘Nothing rash.’ She glanced down at me. ‘I just needed to be quits with her. N
ow I’ll tell you how you’re going to help me.’

  ‘Help you?’ Ben said, glaring at her, helping me up from the wheelhouse floor. ‘Can’t say I feel inclined.’

  ‘You will, you will.’

  ‘That’s just what your friend Panama used to say. Same English teacher?’

  ‘Panama?’

  ‘The hat. We came to call him that. He wouldn’t give us his real name, of course.’

  ‘His real name was Kurt.’

  ‘Oh? So he was telling the truth there.’

  ‘If he told you his real name he must have trusted you.’

  ‘He had to, stuck together on the boat, since he couldn’t work it alone.’

  ‘I won’t trust you so much – you can be sure of that.’

  She waved the gun at us, but then, beyond the bridge, the lock gates opened. We were second in line. Ben said, ‘I’d put that gun away if I were you – there’ll be a lot of people about when we move into the lock.’

  She sat down in the cane chair behind the wheel, which her late lover had occupied – at least I assumed he was late. She hid the gun, on her lap, underneath the second headscarf, the barrel pointing towards us. ‘Go ahead,’ she said to Ben. ‘Do whatever you have to do.’

  We went under a bridge, with the other boat ahead of us. Then into the lock. The gates closed behind us. The boat rose slowly. The gates ahead opened. I was outside, fending off. My cheek still stung. What a bitch. I came to think of Panama quite fondly. This woman was a very different kettle of fish. Poor old Panama – he’d have relished that expression.

  We were soon in open country again, but now there was just a narrow strip of scrubby pasture by the canal, and beyond, to either side, the land rose – hilly country, scattered trees, then forests rising up the slopes beyond. We could jump ship, but there was at least a hundred yards or so of open ground before the tree cover. And Headscarf was clearly handy with her gun.

  Ben was at the wheel. ‘So, what sort of help had you in mind?’

  ‘You’ll take me to Strasbourg – then onto the Rhine and into Germany – with the money you and Geoff double-crossed us on. And the rest of the heroin. Where is it?’

  ‘Downstairs, beneath the kitchen sink.’

  ‘And the money?’

  ‘In our rucksack – Panama took it. In his cabin on the right. Check it now if you want,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m not such a fool. I’ll check it all tonight, when you two are safely locked in your cabin.’

  ‘What about us? When we’ve got you into Germany?’

  ‘No more need of you. Do what you want. Where do we stop for the night?’

  Ben looked at the route map by the wheel, then at his watch. ‘Village of Trevernay, I think, three or four kilometres ahead. They have rubbish facilities there.’

  ‘You have rubbish to dispose of?’

  ‘No. You have. Your friend downstairs in the hold.’ Ben turned from the wheel a moment. ‘Or did you think to just leave him there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In this heat – in a few hours he’ll stink to high heaven.’

  ‘I see.’ She paused. The nasty processes of the flesh after death were clearly unknown to her. Or it may have been that she didn’t want to think of her ex-lover in that way. Who would?

  She said, ‘Dump him overboard then, at a suitable opportunity. Some backwater. You’ll see to that. Not something I’m going to be involved in.’

  Ben turned to her. ‘Dump him overboard? He must weigh a ton. And there are no backwaters here. This is a canal.’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’

  Ben returned to the wheel.

  I said, ‘Isn’t it rather extreme? Just knocking him off like that without talking to him? After all, maybe he wasn’t abandoning you and had some plan to meet you later.’

  She turned a glassy eye on me. ‘No. We did everything together. We were inseparable.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why he ran out on you?’ Ben remarked casually. ‘Got to feel the relationship was getting too constricted?’

  ‘You keep your fucking thoughts to yourself.’ She flourished the gun at him, moving restlessly about in the cane chair, as if there were ants foraging at her rump.

  I was nervous. ‘Of course not, Ben. Why it – it must have been a perfect relationship … else she wouldn’t have killed him when he left her, would she?’

  Headscarf turned to me, pleased with this apparent logic, almost a smile. ‘Exactly. It was perfect.’ She turned to Ben sourly. ‘A woman would understand that.’

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘And so all the worse when he sold you down the river.’

  ‘Down the canal,’ Ben murmured. ‘I keep telling you both – this is a canal.’

  ‘Listen carefully, you two jokers.’ She was restless again. ‘You’ll dump him overboard after we’ve stopped, late tonight.’

  ‘There’s a problem,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll just float on the water, all the gas in his stomach by then, and since there’s no current, he’ll stay there all night. Next morning he’ll still be there, a big balloon, belly up in the water, and some other boat behind us will see him, or someone on the towpath, and call the police. We have to dump him while we’re moving.’

  ‘Sink him with weights then,’ she said shortly.

  Later, towards seven, a mile or so before Trevernay, the canal widened. There was a single mooring space beneath a grove of willow trees arching over the water. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Pull in there. Just the spot for the night. And towards dawn you’ll dump him.’

  Ben pulled in. It was still hot. Flies and midges, disturbed from the willow leaves by our pushing in under the canopy of branches, started to devour us. We moored the boat, fore and aft, with iron stakes.

  It was supper time, but I wasn’t hungry. I was tired, and with what little energy I had left I was furious.

  When we were moored Headscarf said, ‘You better have an early night. Your cabin – get down to it.’ She waved the gun at us.

  We went down the steps into the corridor and stopped outside our cabin. She was a few paces behind us. ‘This yours?’ Ben nodded. She tried the door. It was locked. ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘Panama has it. He kept it on him.’

  ‘Go and get it off him then.’

  When Ben got back, holding the key, she stopped him at the doorway. ‘Just a moment, take everything out of your pockets.’ She stood back, pointing the gun at him. ‘Throw it all out on the floor.’ Ben emptied his pockets. Handkerchief, a wad of money, tobacco, cigarette papers, lighter – and a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘Handcuffs?’ she asked. ‘What were you going to do with these? Open the cabin and get inside.’ Ben unlocked the door and we entered the tiny space. She stood at the doorway, looking at the big divan, pointing at the headboard cupids. ‘So what’s this – cosy lovey-dovey in here, is it?’ She laughed briefly. ‘You two look a bit long in the tooth for that.’ I swear, if she hadn’t had the gun, I would have strangled her. ‘Where are your bags?’ she added. ‘The money?’

  ‘In Panama’s cabin.’

  ‘They better be.’

  ‘What did Panama expect to use the handcuffs for?’ Ben asked.

  ‘You two. I told you – he was slack about things.’ She slammed the door in Ben’s face and locked it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ben said, when we’d heard her move away down the corridor. ‘I’ve got another pack of tobacco and papers under the bed, and some lighters, too.’

  ‘That’s your only worry is it?’ God, I was angry. I could have strangled Ben as well.

  ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘The best way to keep control in a tricky situation is to think laterally, take a quite different approach. Get to grips with the real problem then.’

  ‘Okay, you’ve thought laterally. Now think vertically. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Well, hump that corpse overboard first.’

  ‘Just you and me?’

  ‘That’s what she said – f
iner feelings, you know. Doesn’t want to touch him. When you see him you’ll understand.’

  ‘Thanks. And when we’ve got rid of him?’

  ‘Well, we’re back where we started with Panama – take her to Strasbourg, then across the Rhine and into Germany.’

  ‘And?’

  He shrugged. ‘You go back to New York and eat cheesecake and I go on looking for the provenance of the Modi nude.’

  I turned away. The cheesecake seemed very remote now. I turned back. ‘You didn’t find Panama’s gun when you went to frisk him?’

  ‘No. Glad I didn’t in a way. I might have shot her, and that’s not really my metier.’

  I exploded. ‘Ben, none of this is our bloody metier! It’s all a nightmare.’

  ‘Worse – it’s real.’ He paused. Then he turned, brightly. ‘But look on the good side, Elsa. She doesn’t know about the Modi nude. When I went to get the keys off Panama, I went into his cabin and hid the picture under his bunk. So she knows nothing about what Panama found out – about us, the looted art, all that. See? She did us a real favour by bumping him off.’

  He knelt down, got his pack of tobacco out, sat on the bed, started to roll a cigarette. The two portholes were open. I went over to one and looked out. We were right up against the falling branches of a willow tree. I reached out and picked a green leaf, crunching it in my hand, smelling the juices. There was still a real world out there.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘bumping him off like that, no questions, tears, recriminations. Just shot him. One sure way to end an affair.’

  Ben drew on his cigarette. ‘She has guts that way. We hadn’t.’

  At four next morning, an hour before sunrise, Headscarf opened the cabin door. Gun in hand, she gestured towards the hold. Ben had stripped one of the big sheets from our bed. ‘The sheet,’ he said. ‘We’ll need it to carry him up.’