Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

‘I’ve got pictures of Brechan and Gary,’ Caroline said to Halligan.

A silence lay on the room, a religious silence. Halligan clicked his nails on the table. Nails too long for a man, Caroline thought. Her father would have thought so, anyway.

‘Brechan and Gary?’

‘Yes. And Gary’s story.’

Marcia leant towards her. ‘What kind of pictures? Doing what exactly?’

Caroline looked pointedly at the woman’s bleached moustache, savoured the moment. She’d heard that Marcia had once had an affair with Halligan. ‘I’m talking to Geoff,’ she said. ‘When I want to talk to you, I’ll give you a sign. I’ll indicate.’

‘Doing what?’ said Halligan.

Caroline took the lid off her coffee cup, had a tentative sip. ‘Christ, the coffee’s terrible around here,’ she said. She wanted to make them wait. Since her first day on a free suburban rag in sodden Birmingham, all her life really, she had wanted a moment like this.

‘Well?’ said Halligan. His mouth was open and, with his pendulous jowls, he looked like a dog about to drool. ‘Well? Doing what?’

Caroline had another sip of coffee. ‘We should probably talk in private,’ she said. ‘Meeting adjourned for ten minutes,’ Halligan said. ‘Don’t stray too far.’

Everyone got up and filed out except Marcia, who was lighting a cigarette.

Caroline waited until the door closed behind the last person before she looked at Marcia. ‘You too,’ she said. ‘Out.’

Marcia was about to draw on the cigarette. She took her hand away, her mouth frozen and fish-like. ‘Who the fuck do you…’ Halligan raised both hands to her, palms outward. ‘This won’t take a moment, dear…’ ‘Don’t you fucking call me dear you spineless shit.’ She got up. At the door, she said, ‘This is going to be a defining moment in both your lives. I’ll make fucking sure of that.’

She slammed the door.

Halligan pulled at his nose with thumb and forefinger. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The pictures.’

‘Gary and Brechan fucking.’

‘Fucking,’ he said. ‘Each other? Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Taken by?’

‘I don’t know. It could be a remote thing.’

‘You’ve got the pictures in your hands?’

‘Yes. And Gary’s story on tape. The full story. I’ve promised him thirty thousand pounds.’

Halligan looked at the table, tapped his pink forehead with his knuckles. ‘Chickenfeed,’ he said. Wait till the boss hears. Unbelievable. This is terrific. Terrific. You are terrific.’

Caroline took the folded sheet of paper out of her inside pocket, gave it to him.

He read it, looked up at her. ‘Yes, you can leave the Frisson section immediately. Yes, you can be off-diary. Yes, you can have an office. But as for the rest of this, Caroline, it’s ridiculous…’ She stood up and started for the door. ‘Read the story in The Sun .’

‘Caroline my dear, sit down, let’s talk,’ he said.

…HAMBURG…

Light draining from the world, the coming winter on his skin, knee joints pleading, Anselm ran home, not stopping till he stood at his gate in the silent street, slumped in the shoulders, seeing his ragged breath in the air.

He was in the kitchen, about to drink bottled water, weak, unshowered, when the knocks sounded on the huge front door. He froze. There was a bell, it worked, someone chose to knock. Pause-again the hollow knocking.

He spoke to himself, calmed himself, and went down the cavernous passage into the hall, switched on the outside light. A shadow lay on the front door’s stained-glass window.

‘Who is it?’ he said

‘Alex Koenig.’

Anselm opened the door. She was formally dressed, a pinstriped suit, dark, a white shirt with a high collar, dark stockings. She looked severe and striking.

‘I came to apologise,’ she said. ‘I was wrong to come here uninvited and what I said was unforgivable.’

Anselm shook his head. ‘You don’t have to apologise. No one who deals with me ever has to apologise.’

‘You will accept my apology?’

‘Of course, but…’ ‘I won’t bother you again.’

She turned and went quickly down the path. He wanted to call after her, ask her to come back, come inside, show her that he was not the savage and unpleasant person he had presented to her.

But he did not. He was scared of her. Of what she knew about him.

Alex Koenig didn’t look back, the gate clicked behind her. A wait, then a car drove away, its sound lost in the murmuring city.

Anselm went back to the kitchen, down the flagstone passage so wide he could not touch the walls with outstretched arms. He put the bottle of water away, opened a beer and downed it in two long-throated drinks, the clean tawny smell filling his nasal cavities. He poured a glass of white wine, sat at the pine table. Just to sit there comforted him. The great, worn table in the kitchen always comforted him.

In Beirut, fighting against claustrophobia and pain and panic, his memories of the house on the canal, of the kitchen and the garden saved him. He had forced himself to think about the house and his childhood, his family: being woken by his brother in the middle of the night and seeing adults in the garden throwing snowballs; walking by the canal with his grandfather, autumn leaves underfoot; in the kitchen helping Fraulein Einspenner to shell peas, peel potatoes, knead dough. The kneading he had remembered most clearly: the feel of the dough, the life in it, the resistance building beneath his hands, the sensual, silky, breast-like resilience.

And he remembered the roses one summer-the ones the colour of burnt cream in the big pots on the terrace, the three or four shades of pink around the front gate, the dark satiny reds that smothered the boundary wall.

Later, after he had been beaten, after the panic when he began to discover the holes in his mind, the blank spaces, the lacunae, it began to gnaw at him that he didn’t know the names of so many things. For a long time, he could not distinguish between what he had never known and what he had forgotten. And when he thought he could, he was filled with an aching despair that he would die without knowing the names. In that hopeless space, always dark, the world was gone, the whole world of sky and earth and trees moving in a cold wind. Gone.

And with it the names.

Now, sitting at the table in the flagstoned room, he remembered clearly the ache to know the names, to be able to say them to himself.

The need to know names.

The names of so many things.

‘Do you know the names of any roses,’ he had asked.

‘What?’ Riccardi, a whisper.

‘Roses.’

‘Roses?’

‘Yes. Roses. Their names.’

And so it began. In that foetid hole, black, a shallow grave, two men lying so close together they could not be sure whose breath they smelled, whose body sounds they heard, whose heartbeat they felt- they began to name things. In three languages. Roses. Trees. Give me ten trees. Dogs, name twelve dogs. Fifteen saints. Twenty mountains. Flowers, stars, saints, rivers, seas, singers, capitals, wars, battles, writers, songs, generals, paintings, poets, poems, actors, kinds of pasta, ocean currents, deserts, books, trees, flowers, desserts, architectural periods, cars, American Presidents, parts of speech, characters in books, prime ministers, volcanoes, hurricanes, bands, waterfalls, sculptors, American states, meat dishes, actors, breads, wines, winds, women’s names from A to Z, men’s, towns, villages, statues, operas, kings, queens, the seven dwarves, engine parts, films, directors, diseases, biblical figures, boxers, names for the penis, for breasts, the vagina, for eating and shitting and pissing and kissing and fucking and pregnancy and telling lies.