Chapter Ten #4
lifting and vanishing as the bulky figures that bore them clambered
off the roadside path and into the woods. Shuddering, Laurie pushed
open the door. These last ones were stragglers, he saw. He had
lain, curled up and still trusting something, while the majority of
the men who had arrived in these vehicles had set off down the lane
to the camp.
He fell out of the car. He remembered sitting tamely, rolling
up his sleeve when his mother’s doctor—no, Sir William’s pet
doctor, who never made a fuss about continuing to feed Lady Fitzroy
the pills that would keep her
quiet and tame in her turn—had shoved a needle
into his vein. The pavement was icy cold beneath his hands.
Fragments of glass under his palms, a scatter of diamonds. He
pressed down till they cut, but could not feel them.
Laurie,
who thought he had found out what betrayal was in his father’s
study an hour before, staggered to his feet. He knew what it was
now.
“My son would never choose to be with someone evil. We have to
be friends now.” A kiss to the top of his
skull. Everything Laurie had longed for in a father—faith,
camaraderie, complicity; the tender, demonstrative aspect of love
he had been taught to value by the absolute lack of it. Christ, he
had left those needs so far behind he had thought they were dead.
Dry soil. Still full of life, apparently. Only dormant, only
waiting for a few drops of rain, however bloody toxic, to bring
them bursting and flourishing through. Laurie, who had believed the
old man almost a stranger to him now, was suddenly
impressed.
And
terrified. He took the fence in an uncoordinated vault that landed
him painfully on his hands and knees on the far side. He thought—he
hoped—his father would have stopped short of actually poisoning
him.
Already,
hauling great breaths of the night air, he could feel some of the
mists clearing. It was enough. He didn’t need to be firing on all
cylinders to run a straight line through the dark, did he? This
time he had guiding lights ahead of him, receding torch beams. And
he had learned from his last visit that an unhesitating track was
the best to keep him out of the thorns.
He ran.
The first few strides were a controlled fall, but after that his
blood began to beat, to shake out the drug in adrenaline. His legs
gained strength beneath him. He was silent on the leaf litter, half
in flight before he reached the last stragglers of Sir William’s
lumbering brigade. One of them turned on him. God, in the swaying
light, Laurie knew him: a retired Metropolitan chief, commended a
hundred times for harsh-but-fair methods of keeping the London
streets clean. At his side, companion and helper, was no more or
less than a thug. Laurie had time to pick out the swastika tattoos
before the pair of them moved to block his path. The recognition
was mutual. “Laurence!” the chief snarled, getting a grip on his
sleeve. “You get your arse back down that lane and into the car,
boy, or—”
Laurie
tore out of his grip and ran again. There were the lights of the
camp. Laurie could not distinguish the probing torch beams from the
fires and the yellow gleam from caravan windows and doors—all were
entangled, merging together, as if…
As if
his father’s band of mates and heavies were in among the vans.
Laurie felt terror close tight in his chest. He dashed over the
last twenty yards of open ground that lay between the track and the
camp, seeing Zaga’s broken chain but no sign of the dog. It was a
Sunday night, wasn’t it? The communal fire outside Mama Luna’s van
was burning brightly, casting tawny shadows. She lit it on a Sunday
night, Laurie knew, not a Romani day of rest or worship but a
chance for a feast, some singing and dancing before the drab balame
week began. Sasha had told him that.
Beyond
the fire was a strange sight. At first Laurie’s mind would not take
it in. As if to think of Sasha was to conjure him, there he was, on
his knees in the flickering light. Laurie loved London’s art
galleries, had spent many hours over the years gazing at the scenes
they called the pietà, wondering at the pain in them and what had
caused half a world to require a broken, dead boy to be lifted from
a cross and draped across his desolate mother’s lap to save their
souls. He dropped from his flat run to a ragged-breathed halt a few
yards away.
Christ
was holding the mother this time. Sasha, eyes wide and blank, was
clutching the birdlike cluster of bright scarves and robes that
concealed Mama Luna’s tiny frame. Mama Luna was stretched out
across his knees. Her face was contorted, limbs disposed awkwardly.
Most incongruous of all, a wrongness that almost made Laurie start
retching again—his father, standing off to the side, barely three
feet from Sasha in a world in which Laurie had sworn he would never
allow them to meet. Because it couldn’t contain them both. It would
tear itself apart.
“Sasha,” he choked out, stumbling across the space that divided
them. Laurie fell to his knees at his side. “Sash!”
Sir
William was staring at the old woman on the ground. One of his big
fists was bunched against his hip, the other running through his
hair in a gesture of bewilderment. A pair of his colleagues came
running back from the vans and also halted by the group by the
fire. “I didn’t touch her,” he said. “I didn’t lay a hand on
her.”
Sasha,
who had not moved or blinked in response to Laurie’s voice,
suddenly seemed to hear him. He shifted a little to look at him.
“Laurie,” he said, as if just woken up. As if he and Laurie had
never been apart and were carrying on a conversation from before.
“That’s what she meant. ‘The father is death…’ Not yours. Her
own.”
“No. She’s not…” Laurie stretched out his fingers. The old
woman was still warm, her skin soft and dry as a seasoned apple’s.
But there was no flicker of a pulse, in her wrist or at her throat.
Laurie whispered, “Oh, no…”
“She had a weak heart. When they all came running in, she was
frightened. She tried to jump up, and…” Sasha lowered his head.
“She just fell. Laurie, what are they doing here?”
Laurie,
shell-shocked, had nothing left in him but truth. “My sister’s gone
missing. He…” He jerked a hand in his father’s direction, not
looking up at him. He thought he would never look again. “He
thought it was something to do with you. The police told me about
your father.”
Sasha shook his head. “What? Dear God, no.” He swallowed and
flinched as if a stone had struck him. “And Clara… She’s
missing?”
“Yes. Three days.”
“It can’t be. Oh, Laurie. This is why I tried to stay away from
you. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t be without you. I…” He fell silent
for a moment. Laurie saw him losing his way among the pits and
holes opening up in the world all around him, as Laurie had lost
his own. “Look,” Sasha said suddenly, tenderly shifting the old
woman’s body in his arms and reaching into his coat’s inside
pocket. “I bought the Stage
for you yesterday, in case you forgot. For next
week. And there was this in it. Have you seen?”
He withdrew a newspaper sheet, carefully folded, and handed it
to Laurie. Laurie took it from him in numb fingers. Opened it out
and knelt staring at his own image. Or his own borrowed skin. He
could not remember the moment from Hamlet in which the shot had been
taken, could not recall his murderous advance on Laertes, sword in
hand. It was a good photo. Dazedly scanning the page in the
firelight, he saw that the article was better. New talent. Huge potential. East Hill’s hidden
star. In another world, he would have been
delighted. “I want that back,” Sasha rasped, eyes filling with
desperate tears. “I don’t have a picture of you.”
A picture. A mug shot, height markings on a wall.
Alexandru Petrica. Laurie
handed the article back to Sasha, a sudden tremor making the paper
vibrate. Laurie did not care who Sasha was. The only thing he knew
now with any certainly was that he should never, not for one
instant, have had the slightest doubt of him. Horror rose up in
him, metaphysical in its intensity. The night filled with black,
beating wings. He glanced up at his father, at the six or seven men
emerging from the caravans where they had finished doing whatever
their worst might be. “Sasha,” he said very softly, not taking his
eyes off the old man. “You have to go.”
“What?”
“The police. They found out everything about you. They were
meant to come here, not…not these bastards. Go.”
“No. I haven’t done… I’m not leaving her. But—” Laurie jumped
as Sasha’s grip suddenly closed on his arm. He turned, a pain like
hot stone weighing in his chest. No point in looking away. Nowhere
in the world for him to avoid this admission, this consequence.
“Laurie, how did they find us?”
“I told them. I gave you up. Oh, Sasha. Run!”
Laurie
didn’t think he would obey. Sasha was on his feet, Mama Luna
falling from his arms into the fireside dust. His gaze on Laurie
should have turned him into stone. The brown eyes were lightless.
He held still for one second, then another. Then he fell back by
one step, and William Fitzroy stirred and snapped
upright.
“Oh, no, you little fucker. We want to talk to you.”
“Run!” The cry tore from Laurie’s
throat, so hard he tasted blood. He saw Sasha turn and, as if in
slow motion, begin to retreat. He saw his father make a signal to
one of his men. Saw both of them—his father and the burly crew-cut
thug—begin the pursuit. All Laurie had was his position and his
weight. Jolting halfway upright, he tangled with the crew cut, went
down with him in a flail of arms and legs that knocked the wind
from him but did not stop him scrambling back up to see his father
setting off on Sasha’s heels. He saw Gunari appear between two of
the vans, his baseball bat swinging. “Gunari!” he yelled. “Stop
him!”
The authority in his own voice was a mystery to him. He had
lost everything. He was nothing. Some cold blue-blooded ghost rose
up and spoke for him, and Gunari obeyed. Laurie had the dubious
satisfaction of watching Gunari run, pounce, and tackle Sir William
to the ground, an earthshaking effort, the two big bodies crashing
down into the frost-shimmered grass. The
bigger they come, the harder they fall.
But he
was falling so hard himself, watching Sasha become a fleet-footed
shape among the trees, then a shimmer, and then nothing. Watching
Sasha run from him and flicker out to nothing in the
dark.