Chapter Seven
Laurie
decided to walk part of the way home. The London skies had cleared
while he'd been off creating Sir Ralf's Renaissance Italy, and a
beautiful evening was unfolding over Kew and the distant western
reaches of the Thames. The streets around the Barbican were less
lovely—unbridled modern development filling the gaps left by World
War II bomb damage—but the rose-bronze light touched old facades
and new with equal tenderness. Laurie wondered if his visions of
Stefan, of Little Grey Stalking Hood, had simply been ghosts of the
rain. No-one was following him tonight.
He made
his way down Beech Street to Charterhouse, unhurriedly threading
the crowd. He turned back his shirt sleeves and slung his jacket
over his shoulder. Part of him yearned to run and jump, expend the
bottled-up rush inside him, but he and Sasha would find a way of
doing that later. He wanted to be ordinary, just one of the crowd,
and behaving like an escaped lunatic wouldn't help him much with
that.
He was Romeo. No, he corrected himself instantly. He'd been given the part of
Romeo. There was a difference, and the sooner he learned to exploit
and live with it, the better. He'd gone back on stage to find
Clipboard Bill—or Neil, was it?—whispering to Sir Ralf, and he'd
met their eyes calmly. He hadn't waited for direction. Enough of
the Capulet mob had been assembled: he'd nodded to Second Servant,
and simply begun the scene.
He
hadn't transformed. But, as Sasha had pointed out, he didn't need
full moon and the mark of the beast in order to do a good job, and
Sir Ralf was entirely satisfied. The old man had shaken his hand at
the end of rehearsal, informed him that he was a gentleman and an
acquisition. That his father would have been proud of
him.
Laurie almost walked into a lamp post. His reflexes saved him,
and he laughed at the kid who was laughing at his near miss and set
off at an easy lope down High Holborn. He was all right. He
breathed deeply, allowing the glimpses of his reflection in the
Sainsbury shop windows to reassure him. Sir Ralf had said a couple
of things, and that had caused Laurie to remember a couple, but
they were insignificant. Show me Romeo,
not the famous Fitzroy temper. Laurie had
let that one pass by. Whatever he might have become famous for so
far, it certainly wasn't his temper: backstage staff fought over
him for the privilege of his easygoing ways. He had a fit maybe
once in every six months, and even then it was usually just another
transformation, a stance. So the temper concerned wasn't Laurie's.
It was Sir William's, and Sir Ralf knew about that because he and
the old beast had been friends. Not that Sir William had hobnobbed
with ragged theatrical folk, but Ralf was a peer of the realm, a
club which excluded the mere baronet and therefore fascinated him.
And running a huge theatre company was different to acting in it.
The two had shared board rooms from time to time. Sir Ralf had been
a fit person for the monster of Mayfair to know. Laurie remembered
now. It would have slipped past him if not for Sir Ralf's parting
blessing.
Proud... Laurie bit back laughter.
His father wouldn't have known whether to shoot Laurie first or
himself, had he lived to see this stage of his offspring's career.
Laurie caught sight of himself once again in the glass. It didn't
matter. The old man was dead, and like an ugly dream had passed
without leaving a trace of his being, not one visible DNA coil to
commemorate his time in the world. Put Laurie, Clara and Marielle
together in the same room, and you'd think that Marielle had simply
budded off two children without any aid at all from her husband—a
thought Laurie infinitely preferred to the reality. The old man was
gone.
Still,
Laurie wished he could break into that lunatic run, less for joy
now than a primitive desire to get away. From what, he wasn't sure.
He took a side street from Holborn into the classier neighbourhood
of Goldsworthy Square, with its pavement cafés and
designer-furniture stores. There were also some car showrooms, not
forecourt places but the type with their wares behind glass,
precious and unattainable.
All except one sunset-red Mercedes SL R-107, sitting alone on
a ramp by the roadside. The delivery truck was just pulling away. A
salesman was emerging from the showroom's glossy interior,
manoeuvring a sign that declared she was the Bell's classic deal of
the week. Laurie, without even seeing the price tag, couldn't help
but agree. He stopped short. She might as well have had a vanity
plate that read Christine.
The
salesman gave him an expert, not unkindly onceover. He balanced the
sign on its end, as if aware it wasn't destined to get much
further. “Bit of a dream girl, then, sir?”
Laurie
considered the question. He'd always admired the Roadsters, with
their squared-off fenders and long, racy nose, but a dream? Hardly.
He could have had ten for the asking while under his father's roof,
and as Sasha had said, neither he nor King Lear really needed a car
at all, as long as they were living in Bloomsbury and not on the
blasted heath. “I'm not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “She is
nice.”
“And sweet as a nut, too. Full service history and a year's
MOT.” The salesman gave Laurie another assessing glance. “Well. We
pride ourselves on no-pressure business here at Bell's. I'll leave
you think about it, and I'm glad to say we offer extremely
favourable terms to clients who want to spread costs.”
Laurie
frowned. He recoiled a little, then drew himself up. “That won't be
necessary,” he said, his vowels clipping reverb off the glass. “Can
you expedite the paperwork? I'm in rather a rush.”
The
salesman said nothing, but spread his hands in a manner that
suggested the paperwork could be managed at any speed Laurie
desired.
“Good. Get her down off the ramp. I’ll take her right
now.”
***
In a
forest outside Cluj-Napoca, Sasha waited. He knew the scene well by
now. It was always cold, always raining. The same veils of mist
always hung among the pines. Five or six battered jeeps were parked
on the far side of the clearing, well out of view of the road.
They'd brought a dozen men out to this lonely place—enough for a
jury, though no real justice would be meted out here. The number
was a formality. It concealed the purpose of the kangaroo courts
that sprang up in the forest whenever an errant member of the
ghetto mafia needed to be dealt with. The Roma policed themselves,
as their leaders would point out whenever government or state tried
to move them on, take from them even their miserable city
encampment in the mahala. Their rules were strict. Those who broke
them met the forest jury.
A
hanging party, no more and no less. Sasha leaned against the tree.
He didn't try to run, having learned by now that his bones would
turn to lead weights before he could get anywhere. He had his role,
his function, and he had to stay.
The
jurors pulled a thirteenth man out of the back of one jeep. He was
tall and thin, his ragged clothes marked with blood from the
beating he'd sustained. His face and head were covered by a thick
black hood, but that couldn't save Sasha from knowing who he was.
Sasha watched while the jurors marched him to the centre of the
circle, then dragged the hood off to reveal the rope already looped
around his neck.
Brown
eyes, hollow with suffering, met Sasha's. “Alexandru,” he said
brokenly. “My boy.” And Sasha, helpless, in the grip of nightmare's
cold coercion, began to recite the evidence against him.
“Sasha. Sasha!”
Sasha
sucked a breath. He held on to a pine branch at shoulder level and
looked around for the source of that voice. Things were bad enough
without Laurie on the scene. Laurie would put on a one-man show to
try and distract the jury, transform the trees to the Forest of
Arden and chase himself round it as Orlando and Rosalind in turn.
Failing that, he wouldn't think twice about jumping in the way of a
bullet. “Laurie, get out of here! Go!”
“Not a chance. Come on, Sash. Just a little bit further. Wake
up.”
Oh, God,
they would kill him. Once they'd finished with Stefan, taken his
poetry and freedom-fighter spirit and lynched the whole lot, they
would find Laurie and do the same to him. Sasha clutched the branch
in panic, wondering why it gave beneath his fingers, why it was
warm and had a strong pulse beating hard down the core of it.
“Laurie, run!”
“Even if I wanted to, love...” The voice was very close now.
Right up against Sasha's ear, and for some reason rough with
discomfort and amusement. “Even if I wanted to, you've kind of got
me.”
Sasha
woke up. He snatched his hand off Laurie's upper arm and watched in
horror while the fingerprints he'd left turned white, then scarlet,
then began to darken with bruising. “Oh, fuck.”
“It's all right. You can always hang on to me.”
Falling
back against the pillows, Sasha lay gasping. His heart was
pounding, his stomach knotted tight. His armpits, belly and spine
were soaked with sweat, and underneath it all was a draining,
absolute exhaustion. “Our programme of waking me up from my dreams
is... really working well, isn't it?”
Laurie
leaned over him. He squeezed out a flannel in a bowl of iced and
pressed it to Sasha's brow. “It's okay. We'll get
there.”
“This is the third night in a row.”
“That doesn't matter.”
“And this is... the fourth time tonight. Isn't it?”
“As often as it takes. And now you talk to me.” Laurie folded
back the duvet. He took the flannel gently down Sasha's midriff,
then undid his pyjama cord and plied the cloth over his stomach.
“That was the deal, handsome. I wake you up from the screaming
heebie-jeebies five times a night, and as a reward, I get to hear
what they're about.”
“Oh, Laurie. Some reward. I feel like I'm cursing you with this
crap.”
“Not at all. It's all out of your life, not mine. I can handle