‘But she didn’t leave right away. She looked down at the barman again, moaning and whimpering at her feet. She seemed to like that. She gave him a measured kick in the balls, pivoting from the hip so that she was more sort of stamping on him with her heel. I suppose she wouldn’t have got much force otherwise, with open-toed shoes.
‘Then she led the way, and I followed.’
‘Was that the night that Abbie was conceived?’ I asked, breaking another reflective silence.
Peace shook his head, pulling himself out of the vivid past into the painful present with difficulty. ‘No. We did spend that night together, but Abbie – that came later. That all came later.
‘Mel was staying at the Independence, and she took me back there even though the doorman looked like he was sucking a mouthful of lemons when he saw how I was dressed.
‘She was incredible in bed: a little bit scary, even. Not just uninhibited but totally off the fucking leash. She was into bondage – degradation, submission, slave-and-master shit – and she had some games I’d never come up with in my wildest dreams. She was into drugs, too, and we were as high as Kiliman-sodding-jaro as we fucked. I’m not likely to forget that night in a hurry. I wish I could, in a lot of ways.
‘I stayed with her for a couple of weeks. Fifteen days, actually, and some odd hours. And I found out a fair bit more about the weird shit she was into. It didn’t stop with sex games. In fact, I think the weird sex was a side effect of the other stuff.’
‘The other stuff?’ I thought I knew what he meant: I just wanted to check, because it sounded like we might be getting to the point at last.
‘Black magic. She was a necromancer. And when she found out I could do the binding and loosing stuff, she couldn’t get enough of me. She used to make me raise up ghosts and bring them to watch while we were . . . you know. While we were in bed, or wherever else she chose to do it. She was a natural sensitive, so she could always see them. It used to send her right over the top – infallibly. The kind of orgasms that go into legend.’
Peace closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed them hard with the balls of his hands. His head had fallen back onto the makeshift pillow again, and he looked even paler and more exhausted than before.
‘It all got a bit intense,’ he sighed, with what sounded to me like exquisite understatement. ‘I mean, it was fun. Most of the time. But she was a bit rich for my blood, all things considered, and I didn’t like some of the people she hung out with. There was this one guy especially who used to give me the creeps. Big blond bruiser with these weird violet eyes. His name was Anton, Anton Fanke . . .’
He stopped, seeing my reaction to the name. For a moment, a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. ‘You know him?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard of him. Recently. A friend of mine was looking for information on you, and his name came up.’
‘Yeah,’ Peace agreed, grimly. ‘I’m not surprised. Fanke was something really big and special in the circles Mel moved in. Carried himself like he knew it, too. Fucking arrogant son of a bitch. Charming enough, but you know that sort of charm where it’s just another way of fucking you up the arse? Like what matters is being on top the whole time, and if he can’t do it one way he’ll do it another. You don’t want to be there when the charm offensive stops, because you know it’s going to be bloody.
‘But there was no way past it. Being around Mel meant being around Fanke as well. I thought she was screwing him too, at first, but I don’t think his vices were that close to normaclass="underline" he was her priest, not her boyfriend, and that was a lot harder to deal with. After two weeks I’d had just about enough.’
Peace looked up again and met my gaze, again inviting or defying me to judge him. ‘So bearing in mind what I’ve already told you about my M.O.,’ he said, with a sarcastic smile, ‘what do you think I did next?’
I shrugged and took a gulp of my coffee while I gave that one what little thought it deserved. The stuff was half-cold now, but the liquor still had a little bit of a kick to it. ‘You woke up before she did,’ I said, ‘and you cleaned her out. Took that necklace you mentioned, and whatever money you could get your hands on, and did a runner.’
Peace nodded. ‘Got it in one,’ he acknowledged, his tone a little bleak. ‘She had almost two thousand dollars, and the jewellery was worth that much again even to one of the fences down on Banfora Street. I took her stash, too. Swiped the lot and scarpered, thinking what a nasty, clever little bastard I am. I get the girl and I get the money, just like James Bond.
‘I went back to the scummy little flophouse where I was staying, and turned in for a bit more sleep. I’d never got much of that in Mel’s bed. The next thing I know, the police are smashing the door in and I’m under arrest for drug trafficking.
‘I never did figure out the ins and outs of that one. Most likely it was coincidence – or the gents I’d been working for getting their own back in a slightly subtler way than I’d have given them credit for. Maybe they’d been watching for me to go back home again, and this was a trap they would have sprung earlier if I hadn’t been otherwise engaged. But at the time, it made me wonder. It was so pat: like, I burned her, and I got burned back, twice as bad.
‘The cops took all the cash I had on me, so I had nothing left to bribe the judge with. They sent me down for two years. Could have been worse: if I’d been a local lad, I’d probably have been swinging on the end of a rope.
‘Didn’t matter much in the end, in any case. Mel came down and bought me out before I’d done a week of that time. Probably just as well, because I was already in trouble. The only white boy on the yard, and too stupid to stay out of fights. I’d taken at least one beating every day I was there, and by the time she came to get me I could barely walk.’
‘Everyone needs a guardian angel,’ I observed, downing the last of the tepid coffee.
Peace laughed. ‘Yeah. Everyone does. God forbid you should ever end up with mine.’
‘You need another drink?’ I asked him, because he’d gone quiet again, his face reflecting a parade of mostly unpleasant memories.
‘No more booze?’
‘No.’
‘Then don’t bother. Where was I?’
‘You’d just played your get-out-of-jail-free card.’
‘Not free, Castor. Nothing like free. I’d already hit the eject button on Mel once, and she wasn’t going to let me do it again. Or maybe it was Fanke who set it up, I don’t know. Anyway, the way it worked, it wasn’t exactly like I got a pardon or anything: it was more like they had me on lease, and Mel made it clear that they could send me back if I didn’t mind my manners and say my prayers at bedtime.
‘I said she was into slave games. She’d been the slave the first time around. Now it was my turn, and she really went to town. If ever a man was made to eat shit, that man was me.’
I opened my mouth to interject a question, then shut it again: better just to assume that that was a metaphor. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I’d called Pen: I reckoned another twenty – at least– before Dylan got here.
‘Tell me about Abbie,’ I suggested to Peace. I was getting a little sick of hearing about his sex life. But I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t drawing this out because of any misplaced sense of drama: there was a place in his past that he really didn’t want to revisit, and we were almost there.
‘I thought Mel was just a sort of weird life-form that lived on sex and pain,’ he murmured. ‘I never thought she had any agenda beyond what was happening right there, right then. But I underestimated her. I really did.’