Scarcely a quarter hour had passed since he'd visited the Pools without Ezra Garvey thinking of the girl he'd glimpsed in the corridor. Her face had come back to him during dinner with his wife and sex with his mistress. So untrammelled, that face, so bright with possibilities.
Garvey thought of himself as a woman's man. Unlike most of his fellow potentates, whose consorts were a convenience best paid to be absent when not required for some specific function, Garvey enjoyed the company of the opposite sex. Their voices, their perfume, their laughter. His greed for their proximity knew few bounds; they were precious creatures whose company he was willing to spend small fortunes to secure. His jacket was therefore weighed down with money and expensive trinkets when he returned, that morning, to Leopold Road.
The pedestrians on the street were too concerned to keep their heads dry (a cold and steady drizzle had fallen since dawn) to notice the man on the step standing under a black umbrella while another bent to the business of undoing the padlock. Chandaman was an expert with locks. The shackle snapped open within seconds. Garvey lowered his umbrella and slipped into the vestibule.
'Wait here,' he instructed Chandaman. 'And close the door.'
'Yes, sir.'
'If I need you, I'll shout. You got the torch?'
Chandaman produced the torch from his jacket. Garvey took it, switched it on, and disappeared down the corridor. Either it was substantially colder outside than it had been the day before yesterday, or else the interior was hot. He unbuttoned his jacket, and loosened his tightly-knotted tie. He welcomed the heat, reminding him as it did of the sheen on the dream-girl's skin, of the heat-languored look in her dark eyes. He advanced down the corridor, the torch-light splashing off the tiles. His sense of direction had always been good; it took him a short time only to find his way to the spot outside the large pool where he had encountered the girl. There he stood still, and listened.
Garvey was a man used to looking over his shoulder. All his professional life, whether in or out of prison, he had needed to watch for the assassin at his back. Such ceaseless vigilance had made him sensitive to the least sign of human presence. Sounds another man might have ignored played a warning tattoo upon his eardrum. But here?; nothing. Silence in the corridors; silence in the sweating ante-rooms and the Turkish baths; silence in every tiled enclave from one end of the building to the other. And yet he knew he was not alone. When five senses failed him a sixth - belonging, perhaps, more to the beast in him than the sophisticate his expensive suit spoke of- sensed presences. This faculty had saved his hide more than once. Now, he hoped, it would guide him into the arms of beauty.
Trusting to instinct, he extinguished the torch and headed off down the corridor from which the girl had first emerged, feeling his way along the walls. His quarry's presence tantalized him. He suspected she was a mere wall away, keeping pace with him along some secret passage he had no access to. The thought of this stalking pleased him. She and he, alone in this sweating maze, playing a game that both knew must end in capture. He moved stealthily, his pulse ticking off the seconds of the chase at neck and wrist and groin. His crucifix was glued to his breast-bone with perspiration.
At last, the corridor divided. He halted. There was precious little light: what there was etched the tunnels deceptively. Impossible to judge distance. But trusting to his instinct, he turned left and followed his nose. Almost immediately, a door. It was open, and he walked through into a larger space; or so he guessed from the muted sound of his footsteps. Again, he stood still. This time, his straining ears were rewarded with a sound. Across the room from him, the soft pad of naked feet on the tiles. Was it his imagination, or did he even glimpse the girl, her body carved from the gloom, paler than the surrounding darkness, and smoother? Yes!; it was she. He almost called out after her, and then thought better of it. Instead he went in silent pursuit, content to play her game for as long as it pleased her. Crossing the room, he stepped through another door which let on to a further tunnel. The air here was much warmer than anywhere else in the building, clammy and ingratiating as it pressed itself upon him. A moment's anxiety caught his throat: that he was neglecting every article of an autocrat's faith, putting his head so willingly into this warm noose. It could so easily be a set-up: the girl, the chase. Around the next corner the breasts and the beauty might have gone, and there would be a knife at his heart. And yet he knew this wasn't so; knew that the footfall ahead was a woman's, light and lithe; that the swelter that brought new tides of sweat from him could nurture only softness and passivity here. No knife could prosper in such heat: its edge would soften, its ambition go neglected. He was safe.
Ahead, the footsteps had halted. He halted too. There was light from somewhere, though its source was not apparent. He licked his lips, tasting salt, then advanced. Beneath his fingers the tiles were glossed with water; under his heels, they were slick. Anticipation mounted in him with every step.
Now the light was brightening. It was not day. Sunlight had no route into this sanctum; this was more like moonlight - soft-edged, evasive - though that too must be exiled here, he thought. Whatever its origins, by it he finally set eyes on the girl; or rather, on a girl, for it was not the same he had seen two days previous. Naked she was, young she was; but in all other respects different. He caught a glance from her before she fled from him down the corridor, and turned a corner. Puzzlement now lent piquancy to the chase: not one but two girls, occupying this secret place; why?
He looked behind him, to be certain his escape route lay open should he wish to retreat, but his memory, befuddled by the scented air, refused a clear picture of the way he'd come. A twinge of concern checked his exhilaration, but he refused to succumb to it, and pressed on, following the girl to the end of the corridor and turning left after her. The passageway ran for a short way before making another left; the girl even now disappearing around that corner. Dimly aware that these gyrations were becoming tighter as he turned upon himself and upon himself again, he went where she led, panting now with the breath-quenching air and the insistence of the chase.
Suddenly, as he turned one final corner, the heat became smotheringly close, and the passageway delivered him out into a small, dimly-lit chamber. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt; the veins on the back of his hands stood out like cord; he was aware of how his heart and lungs were labouring. But, he was relieved to see, the chase finished here. The object of his pursuit was standing with her back to him across the chamber, and at the sight of her smooth back and exquisite buttocks his claustrophobia evaporated.
'Girl...,' he panted. 'You led me quite a chase.'
She seemed not to hear him, or, more likely, was extending the game to its limits out of waywardness.
He started across the slippery tiles towards her.
'I'm talking to you.'
As he came within half a dozen feet of her, she turned. It was not the girl he had just pursued through the corridor, nor indeed the one he had seen two days previous. This creature was another altogether. His gaze rested on her unfamiliar face a few seconds only, however, before sliding giddily down to meet the child she held in her arms. It was suckling like any new-born babe, pulling at her young breast with no little hunger. But in his four and a half decades of life Garvey's eyes bad never seen a creature its like. Nausea rose in him. To see the girl giving suck was surprise enough, but to such a thing, such an outcast of any tribe, human or animal, was almost more than his stomach could stand. Hell itself had offspring more embraceable.