She said: “Kill him, Bella.”
Ed found himself looking across the top of her head into the muzzle of Bella Cray’s big Chambers pistol. He shrugged.
“Kill me, Bella,” he said.
Tig Vesicle observed this standoff for a moment, backing away quietly. He still had hold of Neena’s hand. “Goodbye, Ed,” he said. He turned away and ran off down the street. At first he had to pull Neena along, but soon she seemed to wake up, and began to run in earnest. They were like some kind of tall, awkward bird. The snow whirled round them, half-obscuring their poorly articulated limbs and curious running style. Ed Chianese felt a kind of relief, because he owed them both so much. He hoped they would work it out between themselves, and come back for their kids, and be happy.
“Hey,” he said absentmindedly. “Go deep, you guys.”
“Dipshit,” said Evie Cray.
There was a loud bang as the gun in her purse went off. The purse exploded and a Chambers bolt hummed off down the street. Ed jumped in surprise and shot Evie in the side of the face. She went rigid and backed into her sister’s hand, so that Bella shot her too, in the back of the head. Ed let Evie fall, stepped away and got the Hi-Lite under Bella’s chin.
“I hope it was a cultivar, Bella,” he said. Then he warned her: “Drop the pistol unless you’re running one too.”
Bella looked down at her sister’s body, then at Ed.
“You fucking cunt,” she said. She let the pistol fall. “You won’t be safe anywhere now. You won’t be safe anywhere ever again.”
“Not a cultivar, then,” said Ed. He shrugged. “Sorry.”
He waited until he was sure that Tig and Neena Vesicle had escaped. Then he collected up all the weapons and ran off down Straint in the opposite direction to the one they had taken. He had no idea where he was going, and the snow was already turning to rain. Behind him he could hear Bella Cray screaming for the gunpunks. When he looked back she was trying to get her sister to sit up. The remains of Evie’s head flopped backwards like a bit of wet rag in the streetlight. Point-blank, he thought. Shot right in the eyes.
16
The Venture Capital
The day he got back to London, Michael Kearney closed the Chiswick house and moved into Anna’s flat.
There wasn’t much to move, which was lucky because Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts. The place was a warren to start with: linear in plan, but each room sized differently or acting as a passage between two others. You never knew where you were. There wasn’t much natural light. She had reduced it further by doing the walls a kind of Tuscan yellow then rag-rolling on top of that in pale terracotta. The kitchen and lavatory were tiny, and the latter had been painted with blue-gold fishes. There were masks everywhere, streamers, Chinese lampshades, bits of dusty curtain, chipped glass candelabra, and large dried fruits from countries to which she had never been. Her books spilled off their bowed softwood shelves to drift across the molasses-coloured floor.
Kearney had planned to use the futon in the back room, but as soon as he lay on it his heart raced and he was racked with inexplicable anxieties. After a night or two he began sleeping in Anna’s bed. This was perhaps a mistake.
“It’s as if we’re married again,” Anna said, waking up one morning and giving him a painfully bright smile.
When Kearney got out of the bathroom, she had made poached eggs and stale toast, also stale croissants. It was 9 a.m. and the table was carefully set with place mats and lighted candles. Generally, though, she seemed better. She signed up for yoga classes at Waterman’s Arts Centre. She stopped writing notes to herself, though she left the old ones pinned up on the back of the bedroom door where they confronted Kearney with forgotten emotional responsibilities. Someone loves you. He spent much of each night staring at the wash of streetlight on the ceiling of the room, listening to the traffic murmur to and fro across Chiswick Bridge. As soon as he felt settled, he went to Fitzrovia to see Tate.
It was a raw Monday afternoon. Rain had emptied the streets east of Tottenham Court Road.
The research suite—an annexe of Imperial College orphaned recently into the care of free market economics—was entered through a bleak, clean basement area with a satin-finish nameplate and newly blacked iron railings. A few streets further east it would have housed a literary agency. The ventilators were open and noisy, and through the frosted glass windows Kearney could see someone moving about. The faint sound of a radio filtered out. Kearney went down the steps and punched his access code into the keypad by the door. When it didn’t work, he pressed the intercom button and waited for Tate to buzz him in. The intercom crackled, but no one spoke at the other end, and no one buzzed.
After a moment he called, “Brian?”
He pressed the buzzer again, then held it down with his thumb. No answer. He went back to street level and peered through the railings. This time he couldn’t see anyone moving, and all he could hear was the sound of the ventilators.
“Brian?”
After a moment, he assumed he had been mistaken. The lab was empty. Kearney turned up the collar of his leather jacket and walked off in the direction of Centre Point. He hadn’t got to the end of the street when he thought of phoning Tate at home. Tate’s wife picked up. “Absolutely not here,” she said. “I’m glad to say. He was out before we woke up.” She thought for a moment, then added dryly: “If he came home at all last night. When you see him tell him I’m taking the kids back to Baltimore. I mean that.” Kearney stared at the phone, trying to remember what she was called or what she looked like. “Well,” she said, “in fact I don’t mean it. But I will soon.” When he didn’t answer she said sharply, “Michael?”
Kearney thought her name was Elizabeth, but people called her Beth. “Sorry,” he said. “Beth.”
“You see?” said Tate’s wife. “You’re all the same. Why don’t you just bang on the fucking door until he wakes up?” Then she said: “Do you think he’s got a woman in there? I’d be relieved. It would be such human behaviour.”
Kearney said, “Look, hang on, I—”
He had turned round just in time to see Tate come up the steps from the suite, pause for a moment to look both ways, then cross the street and walk off at a rapid pace towards Gower Street. “Brian!” called Kearney. The phone picked up the tone of his voice and began squawking urgently at him. He broke the connection and ran after Tate, shouting, “Brian! It’s me!” and, “Brian, what the fuck’s going on?”
Tate showed no sign of hearing. He stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. By now it was raining heavily. “Tate!” shouted Kearney. Tate looked over his shoulder, startled, then began to run. By the time they reached Bloomsbury Square, which was where Kearney caught up with him, they were both breathing heavily. Kearney grasped Tate by the shoulders of his grey snowboarder jacket and swung him round. Tate made a kind of sobbing gasp.
“Leave me alone,” he said, and stood there suddenly defeated with water pouring down his face.
Kearney let him go.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
Tate panted for a bit, then managed to say: “I’m sick of you.”
“What?”
“I’m sick of you. We were supposed to be in this together. But you’re never here, you never answer your phone, and now bloody Gordon wants to sell forty-nine percent of us to a merchant bank. I can’t deal with the financial side. I’m not supposed to have to. Where have you been for the last two weeks?”
Kearney gripped him by the forearms.
“Look at me,” he said. “It’s all right.” He made himself laugh. “Jesus, Brian,” he said. “You can be hard work.” Tate watched him angrily for a moment, then he laughed too.