«Get out!» yelled the duty officer, pushing him out into the street. «Go on! Get lost! You can't come in here! Go away!»
«I'm Savely Savage who shot Coffin.»
«They'll kill you. Go away, they'll kill you!»
«Go where?»
«Just go and don't come back!»
He slammed the door.
«Where am I supposed to go? Where?» Savage tugged at the door but it was locked.
Squatting next to the girl, Savely put his head in his hands. A phone box screeched under the arc of a streetlight, its door flapping in the wind, like an injured bird. Photos of criminals and missing persons hung on the walls. The photos were all jumbled up, making it impossible to tell straight away who were the criminals and who were the victims. An old man, trudged by, dragging his leg and leaning on a lacquered cane so that, from a distance, he seemed to have three legs. He looked curiously at the sleeping girl and at Savage and terror stuck Savely's tongue to the roof of his mouth. The old man continued on his way.
The duty officer flung open the window.
«Take this! It'll do for a start!» He handed some crumpled notes out through the bars. «Go away! You were never here!»
Taking the money, Savely looked at the officer. The bars kept them apart and Savage couldn't tell which of them was inside and which was free.
Savage was an odd man out in any company. He propped up the wall at parties, he was alone in the crowd on municipal holidays and when his colleagues organized a party, he would sit bent over his plate all evening. At home he talked to himself. Now, he was creeping along the blocks of flats aware that the loneliness he carried within him like a child had finally let him go.
He checked his insides in astonishment and discovered that another Savage had taken up residence in the body of Savely Savage and realized in delight that he couldn't predict what the new resident would do next. «Maybe it's schizophrenia?» he chuckled, thinking that a madman among normal people was the same as a normal person among madmen and who knows, perhaps, it was only now that he had rid himself of the mental illness that had been his former life.
Previously Savage had felt that his future was over but the past had never happened. Interminable grey days were breathing down one another's necks, and the tail end of an unbearably long dull line of them was already in sight. Now, though, the line had been interrupted by days that had turned his life inside out and Savage felt that the past hung on him like a clingy girlfriend while the future was at his back.
A rusty stall leant drunkenly against a block of flats. Only the plump breasts of the saleswoman could be seen through the tiny window and Savage suddenly wanted to pinch them. The stall sold beer snacks and he stuffed his pockets with dried fish, nuts and crackers. He spent the rest of his money on a phone card.
He didn't recognize his wife's voice.
«It's me,» Savage croaked, surprised to find he wasn't stammering.
His wife let out a sob:
«Why on earth did I marry you? And now, now…»
A patrol call shot round the corner. Savage froze but the police went on by.
«I don't know what to do…»
«Die!» sobbed the receiver.
His wife promised to come out to the garages. Savage curled up on the ground behind a heap of scrap metal and watched the road through a hole in a rusty washtub. He had eaten the nuts and crackers which grated on his teeth like sand and now a leaden torpor came over him. He didn't think about anything, didn't try to remember or work anything out. At home, he slept under two blankets and wore pyjamas even during the summer yet now he didn't feel the cold of the metal he was lying on. His wet, dirty clothes were plastered to his skin and dry grass and chewing gum had stuck to his tangled hair.
A black spot on the horizon was getting closer and turned out to be a woman. Savage had told her to meet him a little way off so that he could check she hadn't been followed. His wife was wearing black as if she were trying out a set of widow's weeds. The pointed toes of her velvet boots wiggled predatorily as she looked around her, nervously straightening her skirt. Savage wanted his wife to take him by the hand like a child and to stroke his head. He began to cry, feeling alone and unneeded like a spent cartridge. Frightened that his wife would go away, he tried to call out to her but he couldn't move his swollen tongue. He might as well have been gagged. Everything swam before his eyes and Savage fainted. When he came round he saw his wife with Saam. As Coffin's right-hand-man, he had taken over as head of the gang. Savage imagined he was holding a gun that was pointing at Saam and he was trying to work out whether he'd killed the gangster or not.
Sound carried on the empty street as it does on water and Savage could hear every word. A gesticulating Saam was swearing at his wife, trying to convince her of something. She was having none of it, lips pursed, and Savely reckoned with a chuckle that no way would a thug like Saam get the better of her. «A stubborn woman's scarier than your gun,» Savage grinned, vengefully. Saam's sidekicks were searching the area, peering under cars, looking for him in every nook and cranny. As he tried to hide behind a piece of sheet metal, Savage knocked it over and the gang turned towards the sound.
«There he is!» Saam gestured, reaching for his holster.
Keeping close to the ground, Savage squeezed between the garages and fled into the forest. Tripping over rotting tree stumps slowed him down. Branches caught on his clothes and scratched his face. The only way to avoid being lynched was to go back into town but the way was blocked by his pursuers and the forest offered him no refuge. The gang were catching up and Savage weaved from side to side like a hare with hounds on its tail. He stumbled and rolled into a gully with a small lake at the bottom. He flopped, face first into the slime. Yells and the sounds of branches as they snapped under heavy boots came closer and closer. Savage sank into a stupor and resignedly awaited his fate. «It'll be all over soon. It'll be all over soon…» thudded in his head. Water got up his nose and in his ears and a grey shrew with a long tail like a rat clambered on to his shoulder and sank in its teeth. Savage brushed it off into the water. Then, he spotted a huge hole in the side of the gully where the roots of trees had been ripped out. It was a tight fit but he burrowed in and lay, face down, on the ground, covering his ears. To Savage, if he couldn't see the gang, they couldn't see him.
Saam was pulling Mrs Savage by the hand.
«You said he trusts you!»
«You're the ones who've frightened him off!»
She tripped and fell and, pulling off her boots in a fury, she ripped off a broken heel. His wife was so close Savage could have stretched out his hand and stroked her leg in its tight black nylon. It crossed his mind that he had spent twenty years with a woman he hardly knew. Married people are always unpredictable travelling companions but Savage and his wife hadn't even been on the same train.
«It's like the earth's swallowed him up!» spat Saam, sitting on a fallen tree.
«Maybe it wasn't him?» said one of the gang doubtfully, standing just a couple of steps away from Savage's hiding place.
Saam didn't answer. His eyes shone with malice.
«He won't last long in the forest,» whined Mrs Savage. «He'll be out there for a couple of days, and then he'll give himself up. Keep a look out for him at the police station. You're bound to get him. Where else is he going to go? He hasn't got any friends or relatives…»
They kept on looking for Savage until it grew dark, moving in circles and spreading out through the forest only to go back to where they had last seen him while Savely bit his fist till it bled to keep himself awake. He stifled a cough that felt like claws scratching his throat, struggling to breathe as he held it in with all his strength to avoid giving himself away.