“Grabianski.”
“No, your other name.”
“Jerzy.”
“What …?”
“Jerry.”
“But you said …”
“It’s what I was christened, baptized. Jerzy.”
“When did you change it?”
“When I stopped going to confession.”
“When was that?”
“When I couldn’t go on embarrassing the priest any longer.”
She looked across at him, waiting for his smile. She was propped against pillows, little makeup left on her face. She had not bothered to collect her other things from the foot of the bed, the carpet, the stairs; had slid, instead, inside a half-slip, creamy silk.
“Jerzy,” she said quietly.
“Okay,” he grinned, “now are you going to give me absolution?”
She moved so as to stroke the skin inside his upper arm, soft and surprisingly smooth. So much of him was like that, the smoothness of a younger man, never slack. She wriggled some more and rested her face against his shoulder, one of her breasts squeezed against his ribs. She said something else that he couldn’t hear. Grabianski knew that if they stayed in that position for long, he would begin to get cramp. Already he was wanting to pee.
“Maybe she’s not the brightest woman in the world,” Harold Roy was saying, “but on a good day she can tell black from white. Smoked salmon she might forget, come home with mineral water and some fancy new knickers instead, but that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?”
He offered Resnick an extra-strong mint, placed one in his own mouth and, almost at once, crunched it with his teeth. Always a disappointment, preferring them to last till they were wafer thin, a sacrament. Jewish father, Catholic mother, the nearest he got nowadays to religion and ritual was this: communion with a plainclothes officer while balancing fragments of peppermint on the back of his tongue.
“She would have been frightened, Mr. Roy.”
“Terrified. Out of her wits. Any woman would be.”
“In the circumstances, she might easily have panicked.”
“It’s an awful situation.”
“It could have been worse.”
“I suppose so.”
“For your wife, I mean.”
Harold Roy closed his eyes for several seconds. “I don’t like to think about it,” he said.
“Even so,” Resnick continued, “when she spoke to the constable, it’s possible she was still in a state of shock.”
“Confused, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
Resnick watched as Harold Roy popped another mint. The booze and all the other junk you use to pickle what once might have been a brain. He didn’t suppose that Mackenzie had been alluding to Trebor Extra-Strong.
Harold knew the time without looking at his watch; he was ahead and needed to stay that way, had to be back in the studio inside ten minutes, less.
“Inspector, if …”
“Sometimes, once people have made a statement, even the most innocent of people, they feel worried about changing it-as though, in some way, it might incriminate them.” Resnick waited until Harold’s eyes were focused upon him. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“If your wife wanted to change her statement, for whatever reason-if, with time to think more clearly, calmly, she had reconsidered-she would let us know?”
“Of course she would. I mean … of course.”
“Nothing she said, to you, nothing she’s said, suggests she might be having-what shall we call it? — second thoughts?”
“Nothing.”
Through a succession of glass-paneled walls he could see people working at keyboards, speaking into telephones, drinking coffee. Should any of them glance up they would see me, Harold thought, closeted here with a shabby police officer when I should be getting on with the job.
“Inspector …” Harold Roy began to rise.
“Of course,” said Resnick, “I understand.”
They stood for a while longer, facing each other across the small, anonymous room.
“Maybe you’d speak with your wife; if there is anything, encourage her to get in touch.”
Harold Roy nodded, opening the door. “Whoever it was broke into your house, the sooner we can put them out of business, better for all concerned. Especially while there’s still a chance of recovering your property, some of it, at least; whatever they might not have been able to dispose of right away.”
In some indeterminate way, Harold felt he was being almost accused of something, without understanding what. “Back past reception, Inspector … you can find your own way out?”
“No need to keep you, Mr. Roy. Thanks for giving up your time.”
Designer clothes, expensive haircut, Resnick watched him move through a maze of rooms, stride lengthening with each one until he had gone from sight. For the present. Though he didn’t know exactly why, Resnick felt certain that he would need to talk to Harold Roy again.
From the heaviness of her body, the change in her breathing, Grabianski knew that Maria had drifted into sleep. If he angled his head, he could read the time on the clock-radio beside the bed. No wonder his stomach was beginning, gently, to complain. He should have had something to eat in the tearooms, that waitress trying to come on, all airs and graces. Grabianski smiled: how he’d enjoyed sitting there the way they had, feeling her up under the table and those others knowing it, trying hard not to look, trying their damnedest to look without making it obvious.
Saliva spooled on to his chest from the corner of Maria’s mouth.
It had been good, Grabianski thought, better than good, better even than he’d imagined. It was possible to go for months, years, believing sex was overvalued; sometimes, in the soiled beds of strange towns, over-priced: a quick loss of joy. Then this.
Maria groaned and rolled her head away, a trail of spittle stretching from her mouth like translucent gum until it bubbled and broke.
“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”
“That’s okay.”
He took hold of an edge of sheet and dabbed carefully at the side of her mouth.
“What have you been doing?” she asked.
“While you were sleeping? There wasn’t an awful lot I could do.” He smiled at her and she thought, God, here is this man seeing me like this, no makeup, bleary-eyed and slobbering, and he can smile like that. “Watching you,” he said.
“Is that all?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
The smile broadened. His hand started its move back towards her breasts.
“Is that all?” Maria said again.
Grabianski quickly pushed back the covers and didn’t miss the sharp look of disappointment in her eyes, concern. “If I don’t pee,” he said, “I’ll burst.”
“Second on the left,” she called after his disappearing buttocks.
But then as she lay back down she remembered that he already knew the house quite well.
Resnick walked back along the narrow corridor by which he had entered the studio, remembering Diane Woolf and regretting he had come up with no good reason for seeking her out, other than to get caught staring.
Again.
“Drooling at the mouth, Inspector?” He could hear her voice inside his head, imagine the expression on her face as she said it.
Resnick walked through into the car park and was face to face with Alfie Levin.
“Mr. Resnick.”
“Alfie.”
Born again or simply biding his time, Alf Levin was unable to disguise the alarm he felt at Resnick’s sudden presence: the old enemy.
“Still looking for Harold Roy?”
“This time I found him.”
“Not the most popular round here.”
“So I’m beginning to realize.”
“You’re not the only one looking for him, neither.”
Resnick stepped aside to leave room for two men in overalls carrying a fifteen-foot ladder between them, smelling of cigarette smoke and paint. “Are you about to tell me something, Alfie?”
“Not in the way you mean, Mr. Resnick.”
“Which way’s that, Alfie?”
“Merely passing on a bit of information, the kind that crops up in conversation. Not informing. Not that.”