‘Very good, sir,’ he called back, then stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
A few seconds later the plane began its taxi. As it pulled away, the last thing I saw was Prim’s face, framed in a small round window. I could see mischief in her eyes; I could almost hear her chuckle.
47
I drove us back to the hotel and checked in again. If the desk clerk was surprised, he didn’t say so, even when I checked in under a different false name than the one I’d used before. I suppose that in Trenton, New Jersey, they see many things.
Marie began to undress as soon as I closed the door. I watched her as she slipped her shoulders out of the silk dress and let it fall to the floor. I watched her as she slipped off her thong with her thumbs.
And then it was my turn.
I made love to her slowly, very gently, taking my time, as I sensed she wanted. She winced a little when I entered her, and I realised she was a virgin, only the second I’d ever been with. I held nothing back; I gave her the best I could. Maybe here I should lie to you, and say that it was magicaclass="underline" yes, maybe I should, but it wasn’t. It was just all right, for me at least, although she wouldn’t have known if it had been cannon-fire, she’d nothing to set me against.
I told her it had been wonderful, though; well, you do, don’t you, if there’s anything of the gentleman about you? After a while, we did it again, and this time, Marie contributed more, although I could tell that she was making it up as she went along, trying to please me as best she could.
About ten minutes before ten, she got up. ‘I have to go downstairs,’ she said, as she headed for the bathroom. ‘I need things for morning. There’s a pharmacy across the street.’
‘I’ll go,’ I volunteered. ‘You stay here.’
She smiled at me. ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t shop for what woman needs.’
I watched her again, as she dressed this time. It didn’t take long. When she was ready she picked up her bag and stepped through the door, closing it behind her.
I lay there for a while, still naked, wondering what the hell I’d done, and where it was going, if anywhere. I think I began to feel ashamed, but as it turned out I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
To divert my thoughts, I picked up the television remote and switched it on. The hotel menu popped up on screen; I pushed a number at random and found myself watching more bloody baseball. I moved on to the next channel.
‘Blackstone.’ My name came out at me; I was watching the local CBS station and they were talking about me. ‘I repeat,’ said the announcer, ‘our breaking news story. English movie star Oz Blackstone is believed to have died tonight when a private jet crashed in a New Jersey swamp, en route for Newark Airport.
‘He was one of four passengers on the chartered Gulfstream when it came down. Emergency services report that so far five bodies have been recovered, those of the two pilots, the flight attendant, a woman as yet unnamed, and the promising New York mystery writer, Mr Benedict Luker. Police and fire-fighters are still searching for the remains of Mr Blackstone and of his former wife, Mrs Primavera Blackstone, the sister of Oscar-nominated Dawn Phillips, wife of Miles Grayson. More news and pictures on this story as it develops.’
48
I suppose I knew then that Marie wasn’t coming back. In fact, I guess I knew everything, although it was quite a while before I was able to lie down, quietly and with something approaching rationality, and put all of the pieces together.
At that moment, though, I was struck down, numb with grief. Primavera was dead. I could have stayed behind for another night in Trenton with her, rather than with Marie. I had been thinking about that in the State Capitol building, and so had she. If either of us had come out with it, said what we were thinking, given voice to our unquenchable lust for each other, then Marie would have been catching the plane back to her father, and Prim would be alive today.
And Maddy was dead: I’d gone to all that trouble to save her life, I’d thought I’d triumphed, but after all my efforts to save her from the gangsters she was still stone dead, crisped in a swamp in New Jersey that had been a Mafia dumping ground for decades. That’s a fine irony for you, Blackstone, is it not?
Dylan? Yes, he was dead too, but he’d been fucking dead for years.
The television was still droning on: they had moved on to the day’s death toll in Iraq, but I had my own casualty list to grieve over. I forced myself into action. I got up, showered and dressed. Then a horrible thought struck me. I snatched up my cell-phone and called Susie.
It was Conrad Kent who answered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before I’d had a chance to speak, ‘Mrs Blackstone is not taking calls.’
The media jackals were gnawing at my corpse already. ‘Shut up,’ I shouted at my assistant. ‘This is Oz. I wasn’t on that fucking plane. Now put me on to my wife.’
It took me a while to calm Susie down. It took me a minute or so to believe truly that it was me speaking to her. Christ, I was so fucked up in my head that I wasn’t even a hundred per cent sure myself.
‘What happened?’ she asked, when she could speak properly.
‘The plane must have been sabotaged, somehow. It was flying Maddy to safety but the Triads got to it.’
‘So they killed her, after all.’
‘Yes, but she wasn’t the target,’ I told her, even as the first significant part of the truth hit me, clear and ringing as a bell. ‘Mike was.’
49
The rest of it didn’t even begin to come together until I made it back to New York, driving, dangerously, through the fog that seemed to have spread inside my head. Everything was instinctive. I don’t remember anything about the journey. The navigation system was switched off, but I made it on my personal auto-pilot, just heading north and taking signs as they came up.
I must have been burning rubber for it was just after midnight when I drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and on to Manhattan. I dumped the car in a Hertz drop-off location somewhere in the Forties, shoved the keys and papers at the receiving clerk without a word, took my bags and almost stumbled into the night. I was headed anywhere but towards the Algonquin: I wanted never to go back there, ever again. Still I don’t, and I won’t.
I walked across to Broadway, then headed south. It was early Monday morning and the city was as quiet as it ever gets, so quiet that some idiot tried to mug me. He was standing in a doorway just past Thirty-eighth; as I passed he pointed a gun at me and told me to give him my wallet. I looked at him, and considered his options. He didn’t look drug-crazy enough or scared enough to shoot me, so I snatched the pistol from him, pushed him back deeper into the doorway and beat him bloody, then shoved the barrel up his arse. I’m speaking literally here, folks. I told him, although I doubt if he was hearing anything, that if I turned and saw him crawling out on to the street I’d come back and pull the trigger, then I carried on in my aimless way.
Finally it dawned on me that I’d better get off the street before I killed somebody, so I checked myself into a hotel on West Thirty-second, just past the Empire. It wasn’t much better than a flophouse, and they gave me a room next to the lift-shaft. I don’t even remember now what it was called, but it had four walls and a roof, and that was all I wanted. As I lay there in the dark, the shock began to wear off. I began to come to terms (whatever the hell that actually means) with my grief, and I revisited it with a vengeance.
I cried for a while, for quite a while, for Primavera and for the times we had shared together, the good, the bad, the thrilling, the exciting, the downright scary. I cried for the love we had made, and for Tom. Soon I was going to have to tell him that he’d never see his mother again, other than in dreams. I’d try to find the positive side for him, though, when he was old enough, that he’d always see her young and beautiful, and that he wouldn’t have to watch her dynamism fade, and her body weaken and wither with age. I never saw that in my mother. I’d never see it with Jan, and I’d never see it with Prim.