Chapter Ten #3
is alive, Laurence. He’s the lynchpin of a massive drugs and
firearms cartel that runs out of the Roma ghettos in Sofia.
Interpol wants Alexandru in connection with its operations in the
west. Drugs, guns, and…human trafficking. Do you know what that
is?”
Laurie did. The no
that had fallen from his lips was unconnected with
the question. He pushed up onto his feet, oblivious to the chair
that clattered over behind him. Kucharski still had hold of his
wrist. “No,” he said again, trying to take a step back, tethered by
the grip, by the officer’s steady gray eyes.
“I’m not saying Alexandru is responsible for the loss of your
sister. But he has dangerous, ruthless connections. We’ve been
watching him, and we know he’s been back and forth to this house.
Your father’s told us, and our surveillance bears this out, that…he
came and went as he chose, to share lessons with you, and you
weren’t always there to let him in. You have to tell us, Laurence.
Did you give him a key?”
Laurie
choked. He jerked at Kucharski’s grasp, which only tightened. He
thought a wind must have risen. It was all he could hear, drowning
the hiss of the radios, beating like wings against his eardrums. He
couldn’t get a breath into his lungs. PC Foster’s voice made it to
him through the storm, fragmented and broken. “You’d better let him
go, John.”
She was
holding the study door open. Laurie went through it slowly, having
to grab at its frame to keep upright. The windstorm continued. He
heard her say, “Is there a bathroom downstairs?” and his father
replying, “Yes. I’ll take him.”
“No, sir. Better let me.”
“For God’s sake. He’s my son.”
“The son you assaulted, sir. You can see he’s afraid of
you.”
Laurie
walked off from the argument. He got a few yards down the hallway
and doubled up retching, spattering water over the black-and-white
tiles. It was all he had. Thank God I didn’t have breakfast, he
thought detachedly. His sinuses burned, and his knees tried to melt
out from under him again. Shame hit him. Coughing, he struggled
upright and made a desperate run for the bathroom. Tried to slam
the door behind him, but it bounced back at him, and he couldn’t
even make it to the toilet, instead collapsed across the edge of
the claw-footed bathtub, banging his bruised ribs, knocking the
last breath of air from his lungs.
“Laurence. Laurie, my boy.”
Sounds
of struggle in the doorway. Laurie couldn’t get his head up, but he
could picture the scene—his father, bulldozing through whatever
resistance Foster or Gray was trying to put up. Laurie could have
told them that it was no use. He heard, without surprise, “All
right. But you be bloody careful with him, okay? We’ll be right
outside.”
When was the last time his father had tended him—touched him
at all, for that matter, other than with a blow?
Never. Laurie began to
fight, driving an elbow back. He did not want that hand on his
shoulder. Didn’t want his head held. “Fuck off!” he rasped between
anguished dry heaves. All he wanted was Sasha.
Sasha, who was gone. “I’ll come back
to you, I promise. Can you trust me?”
Can you trust?
“Listen, son.”
He did
not want his father kneeling heavily on the bathroom floor beside
him, reaching for a washcloth and awkwardly wiping his face. He
tried to bat him away, but despite his half-starved emptiness, his
stomach was trying to wring itself inside out, and he was too
disabled by the spasms to escape.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you. And I know what you think
about…me and Clara, but I swear to you, I never harmed her. Do you
understand?”
Oh, God. The memory of those great
bear paws, the same ones manipulating him now, on that little body.
That did it for Laurie. He choked and threw up the remains of a
long-forgotten supper, shuddering and clutching at the side of the
bath. “Fuck you,” he repeated when he could. The old man was
washing out the cloth under the tap, wiping his mouth for him. “Did
you tell them? Did you tell the cops out there,
about…you and Clara?”
“No. Because nothing happened. She hasn’t run away, Laurie.
She’s been taken. Snatched.”
“Christ!”
Laurie found he was sobbing. He knelt on the bathroom floor,
brow pressed to the rim of the bathtub. He could feel his own hands
reaching, starfishing on vacant air. His father’s hands closed
under his armpits, lifted him as if he weighed nothing. Deposited
him on the toilet seat. And Laurie remembered. It wasn’t the first
time, no. The old man had
taken care of him, when he was very small. Swung
him around in the air for a game, hoisted him into and out of his
playpen. Then something had changed. His father had never harmed
Clara. Never harmed him, either. And nothing had
happened.
Was that
how he had stopped himself? By ceasing to touch Laurie at
all?
Big hand
on his head now, gently stroking back his hair. “Laurie. We’ve been
enemies, haven’t we?”
“I… Yes.” Laurie tried to shake him off, but he was dizzy,
nausea still roiling through him. “Stop it. Let me go.”
“We have to be friends now. For Clara.” The stroking continued.
Laurie, suddenly unbearably tired, felt some last resistance give.
He tried to get up—get out of here, anywhere away from this horror
that could caress the child in him into thinking that it was a
good—but his effort miscarried, and he crumpled forward into his
father’s arms. “Listen,” the old man said. “My son would never
choose to be with someone evil. I know that. But somebody this
Alexandru—Sasha—knows…”
Laurie
could hardly breathe. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. “What do
you want?”
“The police out there need to talk to his associates. Just
talk. Maybe one of them knows something.” The old man rocked him
slightly, pressed a rough, tender kiss to the crown of his head.
“Come on, son. You’re my good boy. Just tell us where they
are.”
* *
*
To make
the journey this way was so easy. Brow resting on the glass, Laurie
watched slip by the miles of streets and suburbs he had traversed
so laboriously on foot or on the bus, which stopped every few
hundred yards and started again with a bone-shaking roar. The
Daimler was silent. Its progress through the night was smooth as a
shark’s. His father was not so good a driver as Charlie, but still
they covered the ground in great effortless swathes. They would
soon be there.
In the
end, he had not told the old man. He had told John Kucharski, who
had appeared in the bathroom door and asked Sir William to leave
them. The doctor who had been attending his mother upstairs had
come in and looked him over, and Laurie had scarcely noticed his
attentions, not even the sting of a needle to his inner arm. While
the doctor worked, Kucharski had sat on the edge of the bath, had
given Laurie his nice smile and told him how much danger Alexandru
Petrica was in. How Interpol could help and shelter him from
dangerous men Laurie had no reason to help shield.
He had
stumbled out of the bathroom. His father had hung up the phone at
the hallway’s far end and come to intercept him. Kucharski had
hesitated, as if reluctant to hand him over, but PC Foster had
called for him from the study, and he had hurried off. Sir William
had put a warm arm around his shoulders and led him away, down
through the kitchens and into the alley, where the Daimler waited
in its garage. Laurie had wondered where Kucharski and the others
were, but his father had said they would follow on if Laurie gave
the lead.
Laurie
had. His father knew the way out as far as East Hill. By then, a
glassy calm had come over him. It was familiar. A far cry from the
potent, vital effect of Mama Luna’s darozha. This was just
sedation, a chemical intensification of the false peace he had
sought for himself in his mother’s pill bottles. He wanted to
sleep. The car was beautifully warm, its movements on its deep
suspension soothing. Sir William kept putting out a hand and
shaking him. “Which way now? Which way now?”
And
Laurie told him. The streets gave way to open ground. It was so
easy. The heath opened up all around them. Laurie could just see,
through the reflecting glass, the rags of a ruby gold sunset. The
long, straight road it had taken him the entire night to walk
disappeared in ten minutes. Laurie saw the bus stop and the fence
and the gap in it that led to the lane and the camp.
“It’s here. Stop here. From here you have to walk.”
His
father pulled the car up smoothly by the side of the road. Put out
a hand and caressed his son’s face, as if wondering where the
bruises had come from.
“All right. Good boy. You stay here.”
He was
gone. Laurie shifted in the passenger seat so he could curl up and
lean his pounding skull on the headrest. He drew up his knees to
his chest. He didn’t know what the fuck had been going on in his
life for the past few weeks, but it was over now. All over. Laurie
closed his eyes.
He
opened them. Why? Sleep was calling like a lover, like Sasha with
arms outstretched and waiting for him. Blinking, he stared out
through the windscreen, trying to see what had roused him. There
were other cars pulled up near the Daimler now, in front and
behind. Not police cars. Nor, Laurie thought, the type of vehicle
plainclothes men would choose. All of these were noticeable, just
as the Daimler was. Ostentatious Chryslers and Bentleys, a vast
four-by-four Laurie knew from his father’s semiofficial,
quasi-Masonic nights in with the old boys’ brigade of the
commissioners’ board. When Laurie thought of police, this was what
he pictured. Not kindly, open-minded young officers like Foster and
Kucharski.
Who were
nowhere to be seen. Laurie sat up in the passenger seat. His mouth
was dry, his head fuzzy. What had woken him? Rubbing his eyes, he
wiped steam off the windscreen’s cooling interior and squinted into
the dark. Yes, flashlights, probing the dark beyond the fence,