She had this way of pitching a sentence halfway between a question and a command. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Come, sit down,’ and she motioned him to the chair opposite. Her gesture reminded him of a papal benediction. He sat down.
She leaned over the table, clutching her cup in both hands. It might have been the only solid object in the room. ‘I saw a fire,’ she whispered, ‘and a dead man.’
‘No! Where?’
‘Ah yes, that’s so strange.’ Her eyes slid away from his. ‘You know the pink building? It happened there.’
Moses stared at her. ‘The pink building? You mean — ’
She shook herself out of her dreaming skin and hissed, ‘A dead man, I said. He died in front of my eyes.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know his name. But he was a policeman — ’
‘A policeman?’
‘I held his head so,’ and, lifting her shoulders, she tucked her elbows into her rib-cage and spread her palms, the tips of her little fingers touching, ‘and he died in my hands. In these same hands you see now. And for some moments I thought time, he was running away, and it was fifteen years before, and my Christos — ’ Her voice cracked like a dam and the dark valleys of her eyes flooded. Moses put out a hand, but she shook her head, staunched the flow with a soiled tissue. ‘I had troubles with the police,’ she went on. ‘So much troubles, you don’t know, and all because this man, he died in my hands — ’
‘You said something about a fire, Madame Zola. What about the fire?’
She seemed to rouse herself. ‘Yes, yes. The fire-engines, they came. Clang, clang, clang. Two fire-engines.’
‘And the building? Is it burned down?’
‘No, it’s not destroyed. It cannot be destroyed. Not yet. There are many colours it must be before it can rest. It was never orange, I think. No. I’m certain it was never orange — ’
She had lost him. He pushed his chair back. ‘Madame Zola, I’m sorry, but I really have to go.’
‘You know,’ she sighed, ‘sometimes you think you have all the time in the world,’ and with her gnarled hands she fashioned a globe out of the dingy air, ‘and then suddenly you have no time at all. Ah,’ and, shaking her head, she lifted her cup and wet her top lip.
*
Falling softly as feathers, the snow tickled the serious faces of businessmen. Bare-headed office-girls wore white flowers in their hair; winter could seem tropical. Moses ran towards Trafalgar Square. Thoughts raced through his head; they kept cornering too fast and spinning off. He jumped a bus at the lights outside South Africa House.
‘Come on,’ he whispered to himself, as it ground and floundered down Whitehall. ‘Come on.’
He wiped a hole in the condensation and peered out. He saw a woman stumbling along the pavement in a fur coat. Rich, she looked, but deranged. Eyes of glass. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, palms upwards. Resting on them, as on an altar, lay a pigeon, its neck slack, its head lolling — dead, presumably. There was a dignity, a mystical dignity, about the way she bore this dead pigeon along the street, past the Houses of Parliament, through a group of tourists gathered by the railings; he imagined a silence must have fallen as the red sea of anoraks parted to let her through. On other days he might have asked questions — What was the history of the woman and the pigeon? Where was she taking it now that it was dead? Could there be some kind of special pigeon cemetery in the area? — but as the bus lurched towards Lambeth Bridge, wheels slipping on the curve, gears clashing, he realised that no questions applied.
A woman with a dead pigeon.
That wasn’t a mystery.
That was an omen.
*
The black double-doors of The Bunker exploded outwards, snowflakes and waste-paper flying, and Ridley appeared, head flung back, fists bunched. His movements were so violent that they threw the air around him into a state of chaos. Moses thought he felt the shock-waves as he crossed the road.
When Ridley caught sight of Moses he glared and, for a moment, Moses was included in the bouncer’s terrible rage.
‘Where the fuck’ve you been?’
Moses swallowed. He began to explain, but Ridley cut him off with a horizontal slash of his hand. The question, it seemed, had been a rhetorical one.
‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ were Ridley’s next words. He looked up and down the street as if he expected the object of his anger to manifest itself. It would have to be a very foolish object, Moses thought, to do that.
He turned his attention to the club. A sorry sight. Smoked-glass windows shattered. Fire-blackened frames. Glimpses of a burnt-out interior. The fourth floor seemed to have escaped, though. His own side-door looked untouched.
‘What happened exactly?’ he asked.
Ridley swung round, jaw muscles rippling. His giant gold earring spat light. Snow melted on his face, ran down it like sweat. ‘How much do you know about this?’
‘I wasn’t here. I heard there was a fire. And somebody died.’
‘Yeah, it was a copper.’
Moses nodded. ‘I heard that too.’
‘You heard a lot. Did you hear what his name was?’
Moses shook his head.
‘Peach. His name was Peach.’ Ridley stepped back to judge the effect of his words. ‘Yeah, I thought that might interest you. And you know something else? They think he started it.’ He stared at Moses as if he expected some kind of explanation, but Moses could only stare back.
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Moses asked finally.
Ridley liked that. His laughter struck the walls of the houses opposite. Moses thought of thrown rocks.
‘He’s dead all right,’ the bouncer said. ‘Heart attack or something. I had to go down the station. Answer questions and that. They get a bit upset when a copper snuffs it.’
Then his anger returned, tightened the skin across his face. The bones seemed to shift beneath like continental plates. An immensely slow, immensely powerful grinding.
‘There’s something else,’ he said between his teeth. ‘Looks like Frazer’s done a runner.’ And, whirling round, he charged back indoors.
The avalanche of footsteps on the stairs told Moses that Ridley was heading for the office. He paused inside the door and looked round. He scarcely recognised the foyer. Scorched, gutted, flooded with water. A stench of damp ashes, charred wood, singed cloth. He squelched across the carpet, began to mount the stairs.
When he walked into the office, Ridley was brandishing a sheaf of brown envelopes. ‘I found these,’ he said.
They were letters from creditors and banks, unpaid bills, and summonses, some dating back to the summer. One letter from somebody called Mr Andrew Private and dated December 7th threatened Elliot with ‘legal action in the near future’, should he fail to repay his ‘substantial debt’ immediately. The tone of voice was tired, indignant — a reasonable man at the end of his tether; clearly not the first letter that Mr Private had written to Mr Frazer.
‘I never realised,’ Moses said, though, even as he spoke, he remembered the one-sided phone-calls, the talk of old ghosts from the past, and then the string of anonymous threats — the white arrows, the nursery rhymes, the blood and the shit. Yes, it all added up. ‘He’s gone for good, hasn’t he?’
‘He owed me too, the bastard,’ Ridley growled. ‘Four hundred quid. If I ever get hold of him — ’
He flexed his right fist, and his bones creaked in the abandoned room like the snap of dry twigs in a wood; the anaconda tattooed along the muscle of his forearm swelled grotesquely as if it had just swallowed a goat.
Elliot must’ve been desperate, Moses thought, to have risked incurring Ridley’s anger. Either desperate, or very, very foolish. Maybe even both. Ridley would crush Elliot like so much garlic and use him to season his next meal.