Chapter Eleven
Paul
Jacobs sat on the desk of the Empire’s tiny office. It was ten
o’clock on Monday morning, and he had only come in to tidy up the
props and hand some costumes to the dry cleaner. To his surprise,
East Hill’s hidden star had been sitting on the steps outside,
oblivious to the rain, apparently waiting for him. He had taken
Laurie in, given him a plastic cup of tea from Mrs. J’s office
supplies, and waited in his turn for him to begin to talk. The
office door was open, the cleaner cheerfully whistling as he plied
an industrial mop across the foyer’s tiles.
Not much of the star about Laurie this morning. The review
from the Stage was
proudly tacked to the board behind him, and Jacobs looked from the
photo—all that flash and glamour, a haughty Renaissance prince with
poor Laertes, who looked genuinely scared, at sword point—to the
young man sitting opposite him. The bruises he had arrived with
last week were fading, but he looked more life worn than before.
Older too. Oddly calm, as if something inside that had been keeping
him off balance had burned out.
Laurie
took out his wallet. It was a very nice one, Jacobs idly noticed,
far better than the usual accessories of those walking shadows who
came to strut and fret their hour upon his stage. He was well
dressed too, which was something of a relief to Jacobs, who had
feared last week he was going to have to ask him to do something
about that solitary T-shirt. Jacobs watched him count out a hundred
pounds in notes. “What’s this for?” he asked.
Laurie
looked up. “What you gave me on Friday,” he said. “That was another
advance, wasn’t it? Because you paid me in advance for last
week.”
Jacobs
shrugged. “I suppose so. Apart from the take on the house. I
wouldn’t worry. You earned it ten times over.” He glanced at the
newspaper cutting and smiled. “Or you will, at any
rate.”
“That’s just it. I can’t be here this coming week to
rehearse The White
Devil. So I need to give you this back.”
When Jacobs did not immediately reach out for the proffered cash,
Laurie laid it on the desk. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let you
down. You should cast Laertes for Flamineo. He’s pretty
good.”
Jacobs
pulled a wry face. He looked from Laurie to the money on the desk.
“I suppose,” he began thoughtfully, “that…technically speaking, and
based on experience, rehearsal may not be strictly
necessary.”
He
watched. It was a silent challenge. Laurie picked it up in silence.
For a moment, Jacobs wondered if whatever had happened to him
between Friday night and now might have knocked his mercury, his
transfiguring magic out of him.
As
usual, Jacobs failed to see the shift. As usual, Laurie did
nothing—nothing more than fold his hands into his lap and raise his
face to look at him. “What is ’t you doubt?” he asked him
conversationally. “Her coyness? That’s but the superficies of lust
most women have.” He shook his head, as in friendly wonder at the
vagaries of the sex. Then he shifted a little in his seat,
expression darkening. “Why should ladies blush to hear that named,
which they do not fear to handle? Oh, they are politic; they know
our desire is increased by the difficulty of enjoying, whereas
satiety is a blunt, weary, and drowsy passion. If the buttery-hatch
at court stood continually open, there would be nothing so
passionate crowding, or hot suit after the beverage.”
“Laurie, stop.” Jacobs stretched out a hand to his shoulder. He
saw Laurie take long seconds to come back to himself, and in the
interval watched the departure of a scheming, lust-sickened
nobleman from the court of the Medicis. He had never heard anyone,
let alone a boy in his teens, throw the right degree of sexual
revulsion into the metaphor of that vile buttery-hatch. And yet he
knew that, regardless of his experiences in the outside world,
Laurie’s nature remained sweet as day. “I was thinking of you for
Bracciano, but…clearly you can do villains too. Laurie, tell me
something. Are you one of the Mayfair Fitzroys, whose little girl
was snatched last week?”
“Yes, sir. She’s my sister.”
“I did wonder. You didn’t know, did you?”
“Not until yesterday. I don’t have a TV.”
“No. I don’t suppose Flamineo would.” Jacobs folded his arms
across his chest. “I’m very sorry. That’s why you can’t come. Have
you moved back home?”
Never spend another night under that roof as long as I
live. Laurie, medieval fires dying out from
his brain, understood with relief that it was true. “No. I need to
be there during the day to help search and be with my mother, but
I’m living in East Hill. At the address I gave you.”
“All right. I see you picked yourself up a change of clothes.
That’s good. Are they funding you otherwise?”
“No, sir.” Another truth. Another great pang of relief, finding
its way through the dull cloud of fear in which Laurie had been
living since the day before. Not another
night. Not another penny. “I just grabbed
some of my things.”
“Then for God’s sake, take the money. Do you think you can make
it over here at all?”
“I…I’ll try.”
“Good lad. I’ll have Laertes understudy for you, be your
placeholder for the others. Just turn up on the night.”
* *
*
Laurie
sat in his mother’s room, in a patch of pale winter sunlight. It
was Tuesday afternoon on the fifth day after Clara’s disappearance.
John Kucharski had told Laurie that in missing children cases, this
was the critical time. Kids who’d wandered off by accident normally
turned up after three or so days, alive or dead. Kidnappers tended
to issue ransom demands before the fourth—long enough, Kucharski
had said, for the parents to build up a good head of terror. To be
only too willing to pay.
No one
had called in their price for his sister. Kucharski and the others
were becoming puzzled and alarmed. Children not found or ransomed
in five days tended never to be found at all. Kucharski had said
all this gently to Laurie, at the end of a conversation in which
Laurie, too, had set out his store of certainties.
Laurie
would walk the streets to find Clara. He would post leaflets,
canvas half of London, set up a Web site to get to the other half
and the rest of the world. He would tell Interpol absolutely
everything he knew about his whole family and acquaintance. But he
would not answer any further questions regarding Alexandru Petrica,
because Alexandru—his Sasha—had nothing to do with this. Never had,
never would, and if Kucharski wanted to pursue his inquiries about
drugs, weapons, and human trafficking, he would have to do it on
his own time and quit using Laurie as some kind of human crowbar to
get into his case.
Kucharski had not appeared offended by this declaration. He
had looked at Laurie quite serenely and continued packing up his
computers and files. There was nothing further he could do at the
house, he had said, and he gave Laurie his contact numbers and the
details of the room in Scotland Yard from which the investigation
would now proceed.
In
another conversation, concluded the night before, Laurie had told
his father that his game of cat’s-paw was all over too. Laurie
understood now. Sir William loved his children, but the fallout
from that love was lethal. Indifference would have been better—or
outright hate. His outraged love for Clara had given him the reason
he craved to smash at the foreigners he so despised, to try and
crush the boy with whom Laurie had violated his sacred English
walls. To crush Laurie while he was at it—or those elements of his
son’s nature he could not bear.
Laurie
had told him all of this, and Sir William’s reaction had not been
as calm as Kucharski’s. Bruised and humiliated from his encounter
with Gunari as he was—deflated, too, by PC Foster’s assurance that
even the board of commissioners could not obstruct justice or deal
out their own as they pleased, that he would in fact face charges
for the death of Mama Luna—the old man still had strength to growl
and rage.
“You’re nothing without me, boy. I changed my will when I
found out you were buggering your little rent boy. I don’t change
it back, you’re a pauper.” And Laurie, who
once had feared poverty, had experienced nothing but a kind of
soaring, transcendent relief. “You might
as well leave it. You don’t have a son anymore.”
His
mother stirred in the bed. Laurie, who was sitting on the end of
it, turned to look at her. She was of a piece with her delicate
white bedclothes, barely disturbing their outline in her little
chiffon gown. He braced himself to talk to her. He had been doing
so, between long hours on the streets, over the last three days.
Normally it did not cost him too much. She seemed less grieved than
detached, on the run inside herself.
He could
easily become the calm and supportive young man who was not
inwardly dying himself of terror and grief. Who was not subject to
flashing images of all the fates that could have befallen the
little girl who had been more his than Sir William’s since the day
she came home and he had fiercely assumed to himself the duties of
brotherhood, knowing how much she would need them, loving on sight
the little creature mewling in her fancy, uncomfortable
cradle.
Yes,
Laurie could do it. It was just that, at present, he could not
decide if his feet or his heart were hurting him worse. He was
exhausted. He thought that every pillar, caryatid, and lamppost in
Mayfair now bore Clara’s image. And, when not assailed by visions
of her discarded body, all he could think about was Birchwood camp
and firelit dark and everything he had ever wanted disappearing
like a ghost into the night. Sasha, whom he’d betrayed and would
never see again.
Did not
deserve to see again, because even now, when the house became
quiet, his treacherous logical mind would insist on trying to click
two and two together: to place Sasha, innocent though passion’s