Chapter Twenty Five
A
perfect summer evening on the heath. Sasha had only seen it bare,
stripped to turf and tree-branch bones, glittering monochrome under
a coating of frost. Now the track was lined with brambles in full
flower, a froth of pink and white. The season was early: in a few
sunny places, the delicate petals had fallen and a handful of
berries come to sudden readiness. On instinct Sasha picked them,
aware of their ruby-black beauty, ignoring the burning brush of
nettles on his hands. He was very hungry. He was of Romani blood,
however, and where there were plants there was food.
Where there were trees there was rest. Lowering sunlight was
slanting through the ferns. Beeches tall and smooth as church
pillars soared up through the undergrowth, only a few leaves
amongst all their green glory beginning to turn with the year. One
gold coin, two, three, like the galbi disks on Mama Luna’s
scarves...
Sasha
wiped his eyes to separate the blurring colours around him back
into sensible shapes. He had business to attend to. The purpose of
his journey was as real and vivid as the weight of the Makarov
pistol in his pocket. He ate the blackberries, seeking the tiny
sugar hit that would keep his senses active and tart juice to
quench his thirst. The feathery pale flowers growing nearby looked
like little cow parsleys but were pignuts. Gunari had taught him
how to dig them up and find their savoury root, delicious roasted
with chestnuts. If the stream he could hear in the distance was
clean enough for watercress to grow, that was his vitamin C sorted
out, provided he could boil out any liverfluke. Yes, he could
survive. One of the church-column beeches had divided early in its
growth. The fork was low enough for him to reach if he could jump
for it. The left arm was beautiful, a curve like a huge waiting
embrace.
He
needed to rest. That was the reason he gave himself for scrambling
into the tree. Twenty feet up, he could see the heath around him,
the full length of the track, from the road to the place where the
encampment had been. He stretched out on his belly along the
curving branch. His palms were green with moss. When he glanced
down at his clothes, it was as if his battered parka and camouflage
trousers had found their destiny at last: in the shifting shade, he
was nothing more than abstracts, a random patchwork only faith
could reconstruct into a man. And Sasha was all out of faith.
Dissolution suited him fine. If he didn’t exist, there was no duty
upon him to carry out his objective here. He was so damn
tired...
Maybe he
was sleeping already, launched into a time-travel dream. There was
Gunari himself, an incongruous giant among the brambles,
bleach-blond crewcut glinting in the sun. Sasha pushed up, resting
on his elbows. What had Laurie said—that he ran a restaurant now?
Sasha’s brain ran unlikely possibilities. Authentic Roma food taken
to a far extreme, ingredients hand-gathered by the chef on a lonely
heath...
No.
Gunari wasn’t here to dig up pignuts. He was pacing the track in
the direction of the camp, head down, coat collar turned up. His
movements were nervy and anxious. Every few paces he glanced back.
Sasha watched him until he took the fork that led off the lane and
into the deep woods. The summer verdure closed behind him, and like
a dream he was gone.
That track lane led to a group of half-ruined buildings in the
heart of the Birchwood wilderness. Sasha had found out about them
on the night of the raid. Gunari had caught up with him as he fled
through the flame-lit trees. Come with me,
Sandru! There’s a safe place here, a place Stefan Petrica uses.
He’s not here now. Come! And Sasha had run
with him, until the encroaching branches, the ugly brick sheds
hunched in the torchlight, the terror invoked in him by his
father’s name, all had squeezed down with a suffocating weight on
his heart and he’d broken away, tearing off alone into the night.
Straight into the arms of John Kucharski, as it turned out,
although that captivity had turned into a freedom and peace he
should have known could never last.
Sasha hadn’t come up here to rest. He was much too tough to
fall apart after a transatlantic flight and a couple of missed
meals. He had been waiting. Along with this realisation came a rush
of amusement and pain at his own absurdity. He’d been allowing time
to pass by—time for distance to close, for two shattered halves to
draw back together again. He was a child, laying invisible
breadcrumbs of time on the trail behind him, not so that he could
retrace his steps but for someone else to find, the only man who’d
ever shown him magic in a concrete-jungle world. Laughter like
sobbing passed through him. I once met a
fairytale prince...
In a
bright-red Mercedes. Sasha froze to stillness on the branch. The
road out from East Hill was a quiet one, a bus route between
far-flung suburbs. The rush hour was over. How many convertible SLs
would come tearing down here, paintwork flashing blood-red lights
back at the sun?
Still it
was impossible. Sasha didn’t move, not until the car was veering to
a halt, leaving two neat bands of acrid rubber on the road. No-one
would stop here unless they had visited previously on foot, unless
they knew the little stile that led over the fence onto the heath.
Dear God, who else drove a Merc with gypsy-fixed scratch down her
passenger side? “No,” Sasha whispered, pushing up off the branch.
“Laurie, no. No.” He lost his footing, turned his fall into a drop
and landed hard among the brambles. Frantically he disentangled
from their thorns. He began to run. He had lost coordination, his
instincts for silence and stealth. The noise he was making would
attract anyone who hadn’t already noticed the flame-red convertible
arriving here at eighty miles an hour, but he couldn’t stop
himself. The whispers crawling up his throat changed into raw
yells. He got clear of the undergrowth and hit the track flat out,
flying up towards the fence. “Laurie, for God’s sake!
No!”
And
there he was. Always Sasha’s blue-eyed god, not the less so now
because he looked as if he’d flown in straight from hell. His hair
was rumpled, five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw. He slammed the
car door and stood in the road. He was wearing a jacket still
stained with Glastonbury mud. It didn’t hide the shivers running
through him. “Sash,” he called out, and began to stumble towards
him round the car’s front end.
“No. Get back in.” Sasha was close enough now to be heard
without shouting. He stopped by the fence, grabbing its top bar for
support. “What the hell are you doing? Get out of here.
Go.”
“I can’t believe I found you. I can’t leave you. I
won’t.”
“Then...” Sasha glanced around urgently, shading his eyes
against the sun. “Then get back in and take her on another thirty
yards or so, just past that streetlight. There’s no fence there,
just low branches. Drive her into there and hide her.
Now!”
“Will you promise not to run?”
“Just do it, will you?”
Sasha
turned away. He didn’t care if Laurie obeyed him or not, although
the roar of the engine and subsequent crackling of undergrowth told
him he could still direct the Fitzroy force of nature to that
extent. As for himself, he could have given the promise. He didn’t
have the strength or heart to run anywhere now, not to save his
life. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his parka, which hung
heavy on his shoulders with the weight of the gun.
He began
to walk. The track was so familiar. Every detail had been burned
into his mind, not from his back-and-forth trek to his job at the
car wash but from the first time he’d come here with Laurie. A
diamond-sharp winter’s day, his companion alight with curiosity at
his side, struggling not to show his excitement at the adventure,
to stay cool and not look like a rich kid gawping at the Roma...
Tears nettled up behind Sasha’s eyes, a sting and then a scald he
couldn’t ignore. Blinded, he came to a stop.
He had
always known that one day he would return here. That they both
would—not just to the heath but to this one patch of bare open
ground beside the woods. The sun was beginning to set, beech trees
throwing long blue shadows out across the earth. In noonday light
the remains of Mama Luna’s fire would be invisible, merged by two
years of rain back into the patchy turf. Now, if you knew it had
been there, you could just see a trace of a circle.
Sasha
sat down. After a long minute, ragged breathing broke across the
dusk-breeze silence. Footsteps scraped. Sasha tried to wipe his
eyes on his parka’s sleeve, but the fabric was coarse and
non-absorbent. Something brushed against his hand. Blindly he took
it, and found himself holding an American Airlines paper napkin.
He’d have laughed if he’d had breath for it. If Laurie touched him
now he was lost—broken, undone. He blew his nose. When he could, he
raised his head and looked.
Laurie
was kneeling opposite him on the far side of the long-dead fire.
His beautiful hands were clenched so tight that Sasha could see
every bone and tendon. “Ves’tacha,” Laurie said hoarsely. “Have you
been waiting?”
“Yes. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to tell you something. What I’ve been trying to
do with you—keep you, protect you—that’s a thing you do with a
child, isn’t it? Or a treasure of some kind. And you didn’t want
that.”
“Never mind what I wanted. I—”
“I have to mind it, Laurie. What you wanted swept us halfway
round the bloody world. I know why you did it now, but it was what
you wanted to do, and your needs, desires, cravings—they’re strong,
and they’re gonna get stronger as you get older, not
less.”
Laurie
lowered his head. “Oh, Sasha.”
“They’re what make you what you are. You wanted to be a
brilliant actor, and you are. You wanted your car and you got that.