Cory remembered the bloodied one-hundred peso note. He changed direction and passed into the crowd. The trinket sellers jostled him and he barked gruff idioms drawn from Lunfardo slang. The throngs multiplied, and he avoided the improvised clearings where dancers moved foot-against-foot, belly-to-belly. Abrazo, the embrace. Entrada, the entrance. Volcada, the capsizement: the dancer tilts his partner, then, at the last moment, catches her.
To judge by the light in the door’s frosted glass, Lisandro’s mother was awake. Cory did not knock. He pushed the bloodied one-hundred peso note under the door. Turning away, making zeros in the dirt, subtracting himself, he heard laughter behind the door, and it might have been Jennifer laughing at the sentimentality of a fool.
Chapter Sixteen
In her dream, Jem had accepted the invitation of a gentleman suitor to travel in his carriage through a twilit city. They passed roadside mourners: her mother, her dead father, Danny. She was cold in her nightgown and shawl. She smelled coal and chrysanthemums through the open window, and horse sweat. When the suspension ceased its rattle, the day had passed, and the gas lamps were like moons. Her suitor hooked his cane in his elbow and helped her from the carriage, and, with that, his winged collar became priestly and his dark eyes amused. As her bare foot touched the snowy road, the cobbles vanished. She wore Cossack boots again, and her nightgown had become a duffle coat. She turned to the horses but they had vanished, replaced by a stolen BMW. Its four corners winked. Groggily, Jem let Cory take her arm.
Through a tall gate and up a gravel path.
Watching a cat watch her as a keypad was tapped.
A hallway.
Darkly.
No sounds of clockwork.
(A poem.)
No smell of food.
(Because I could not stop for death.)
An unoccupied house.
Cory removed a glove and slapped her face.
Jem’s eyes opened fully and she coughed. There was a bitter taste on her tongue.
It was late in the evening of the day that Cory had murdered Lisandro when he stopped beneath a gas lamp to re-read Jennifer’s newspaper of the next day. He looked for clues about his immediate future. Finding them, he walked to the docks and located a tall, crumbling warehouse. He slipped into the shadowed alley on its eastern side. The alley formed a space narrow enough for him to launch off one wall and reach out for the lower rung of a fire escape. He swung for a moment. His heart surged. He climbed steadily towards the roof until his view became one of scintillating lights.
Cory slid his cane between the attic door and its upper hinge. The wood split and he moved inside. The attic was long and low. There was a zinc bath beneath a skylight. So too a bed, a couch, a changing screen, and a lamp. Cory stepped between the lamp and the bed. He pulled the cord and his shadow pounced across the prostitute.
Her wigless head was downy, not bursting with the mane so beloved of the Argentines, and her sad, thunderous face was hollow at the eyes and cheeks. She sat up and her blanket slipped to the tips of her breasts; she might have been a debutante in a curtsy. Her tinctures and condoms were arranged on the dressing table in a croupier’s semicircle: expert and honest, no cheating.
‘Get out,’ she said. There was a hunting knife in her slim hand.
He laid a German accent light as silk over his Spanish and said, ‘Where is Patrick Harkes?’
‘Turn around. Go.’
‘Harkes.’
Cory wound her bedsheet in his forearm and flung it away. She scooted into her pillows. Naked, she was gangly. All the play anger from her eyes. ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Do what you want, then get out.’
Cory knelt on the bed and took her knife. ‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’
She assumed a pout. ‘Something special, my dear? Here: Whisper in my ear.’
‘Harkes told you I would come for him, didn’t he? Otherwise, you would have cut me without asking.’ At this, she shrugged, one-shouldered. Cory let his thoughts progress. ‘You didn’t want to kill me, but you wanted to look prepared. So I wouldn’t be suspicious. You want to deal.’
She was smiling. ‘Deal?’
‘So innocent. You must be the oldest virgin in the house.’
‘Play fair, Mr Cory.’
Cory reached behind him and
a gun, to me
brought the snout of the weapon to her nose.
‘You know my name? It changes things.’ Straight Rioplatenese Spanish now, his German accent gone: ‘What’s yours?’
‘Paloma,’ she whispered. Her pupils were huge. ‘I liked the trick with the gun. How it flew to you! Are you a magician?’
‘Cory the Great. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She frowned at the formality, then, seeing something in his eyes, giggled. ‘Now, Paloma. Deal. Let’s say four hundred pesos for the information.’
‘Eight hundred,’ she mumbled.
‘A thousand.’
She dropped her head back and purred. Cory moved alongside her.
‘Harkes leaves for Santiago tomorrow,’ she said.
‘He told you that?’
Paloma looked at the skylight. ‘I found myself in his pockets. There was a ticket.’
‘Time? Flight number?’
‘I didn’t notice. But it will leave early. Nothing crosses the Andes at night.’
‘With whom will he fly?’
‘There was a logo with a star man.’ She stretched her legs. ‘He looked like you, Cory the Great. Will you show me another trick?’
‘Only if I believe you.’
‘Harkes told me that you know when people lie.’
Cory rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes as Paloma unbuttoned his shirt.
‘The star man had a strong jaw like yours. Ah, your teeth are beautiful.’
She drew her lips over his, and down, tracing the ridge of his Adam’s Apple.
Cory stared upwards. ‘Harkes would choose a small company. Harder for me to find.’
‘No small companies fly to Santiago. One needs a big plane. Wait, I just remembered the name.’
‘What?’
‘‘Star Dust’. Like the song.’
‘There’s a song?’
‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’
‘I don’t know it.’
She sang the song in lisping English.
When the sickness that followed Cory’s slap had faded, Jem found herself sitting in a winged armchair. The lounge was small and lit by three frosty lamps. Its brown scheme took her back to never-ending visits to elderly relatives in the late 1980s. She recognised a painting above the fireplace, but its name, like the falling snow, now dissolved in the warmth of her attention. Her lips were still numb from Cory’s bitter kiss. Was he venomous, like a blowfish?