Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

The phone was on László’s side of the bed. When it rang he was so startled he knocked over the glass of water on the bedside table as he snatched at the receiver.

‘Monsieur Lázár?’

‘Yes?’

‘I am sorry to call you so late. I tried to call you earlier but without success.’

A voice with an accent. A voice faintly familiar.

‘Who is this?’

‘We have met before, monsieur. At the university. We discussed the situation in the Balkans. Perhaps you remember?’

‘Wait,’ said László, ‘I’ll take the call in my study.’ Kurt was awake. László smiled at him. ‘Its nothing,’ he said. ‘Sleep. Dream of fish.’

In the study, he crossed the unlit room, switched on the desk lamp and picked up the extension. He knew who it was now: Emil Bexheti, leader of an Albanian students’ group at the Sorbonne. A young man born for conspiracies.

‘I’m here,’ said László.

‘I am disturbing you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I will be brief, monsieur. I wish for an opportunity to talk with you again. Somewhere in private. Not, I think, at your apartment. Or mine, of course.’

‘And this must be arranged at two o’clock in the morning?’

‘You received the new faxes, monsieur?’

‘No. Yes, perhaps. I haven’t looked at them. You want to talk about the Balkans again?’

‘I would be honoured if you would agree to meet with me.’

‘May I ask why me? Why in particular?’

‘We think you are a friend of justice.’

‘“We”?’

‘You know what it is to have an oppressor in your land. To be ruled by force. By fear. You know what it is to see…’

‘Enough of this!’

‘We respect you, monsieur.’

‘Not enough to stop you calling me in the middle of the night. Are there no Balkan professors you can wake up? What about Dr Kelmandi?’

In the background, László could hear another voice, a man, older, speaking with hushed, rapid authority. Not French. Presumably Albanian.

‘I apologize, monsieur. But if you look at the documents I have sent you will understand our urgency.’

‘Who are you speaking for? The students? Or someone else?’

‘May I believe that you will meet with me?’

‘You know where my rooms are at the university. I have no objection to seeing you there.’

‘Thank you, monsieur, but not at the university. You will be contacted again in a few days with the name of a safe place. Goodnight, monsieur. I am sorry. Goodnight, monsieur.’

The line went dead. László replaced the receiver and stood in the green light thinking of the room somewhere in the city where Emil Bexheti and the others were gathered to make their plans, their late night calls on behalf of the ‘We’. He decided to have absolutely nothing to do with them. They were quite capable of making trouble, precisely the kind of trouble the Garbargs probably already suspected him of. He yawned, stretched and was about to turn off the lamp when something on the floor between the two desks caught his eye, and he reached down to pick it up. It was the napkin in which he had carried the gun from the dining room. He looked about for a few moments but there was no sign of the weapon and he knew it had gone. For a night at the end of May, the study seemed unseasonably cold.

Cutting coke on Jo-babe’s belly, Ranch used a credit card rather than a razor. She lay very still on the bed, her T-shirt bunched up under her little breasts, the lines organized around her belly button like long white scars. On the other side of room Rosinne was putting a new CD into the jaw of the music machine.

‘No more Bjork,’ called Ranch. ‘She’ll make us crazy as she is.’

‘I like crazy,’ said Rosinne, but it wasn’t Bjork, it was the King in full sail singing America’s Favorite Yuletide Melodies.

‘Inspired choice,’ said Larry, who stood by the window working with his tongue to loosen a piece of meatloaf trapped between his front teeth. Lunch had been an hour in the sunlit dining room of the main house, where there were more pictures of Harold and John, the lost boys, and several piles of shiny unlabelled videocassettes. Betty, her charm bracelets jangling, had brought in the meatloaf, the peas and potatoes, and after that some odd approximation of an English steamed pudding with scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, mocha flavour. As a courtesy to her the men had not talked business at the table, but when she cleared away the bowls and put the coffee on – the swing-door to the kitchen bringing gusts of another soap opera – ‘… I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you kids …’ – TB had produced a folded single-sheet photocopied contract from the breast pocket of his shirt, and slid it over the table to Larry.

‘The grisly formalities,’ he said, winking.

Larry scanned the contract. ‘Who are “Southern Enterprises”?’

‘I,’ said T. Bone, ‘am Southern Enterprises.’

‘I thought it mighta be the Mafia.’

‘You wag,’ said T. Bone.

‘And I get the first five on signature?’

‘In a lovely fat envelope that only we will ever know about.’

‘What about Cindy X and Selina D’Amour and the others. Do I meet them before we shoot? It would be nice, you know, to talk to them. First.’

‘My dear Larry,’ said T. Bone, helping himself to another triangle of foil-wrapped cheese that seemed, like much of the meal, to have come from some museum of food, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. The important thing is to keep yourself in tip-top condition. We want you looking sleek as a young seal. Our productions should exude a sense of optimism. No bags under the eyes, please. Ranch knows all the tricks.’

So Larry had signed, and after coffee he and Ranch had been excused like children to go back and play in the annexe. The ‘fat’ envelope was produced, and Larry made his goodbyes, kissing Betty’s hand and treating her to the doctor’s penetrating pre-diagnosis stare. She blushed, deeply.

‘Oh, Larry,’ she sighed.

‘Adieu, Betty.’

He knew that one of them was mad.

Close to, Jo-babe’s seventeen-year-old belly was a thing of wonder, the taut surface finely atremble with the jelly and clockwork of her guts. Larry leaned down and sniffed a line through one of his new hundred-dollar bills; then, with the very tip of his tongue, he licked the stray grains of powder from her skin and nuzzled the head of a tattoo lizard that peeped from the waistband of her jeans. He wondered whether he would have sex with her, whether indeed he was supposed to, so that Ranch, presently watching a hand-held TV with a screen the size of a playing card, could examine his technique, offer advice on angle, thrust control, that special grunty kind of porn fucking.

The King was doing a South Seas steel-guitar version of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’. Larry got up to dance with Rosinne, who looked sulky and puffy-eyed, aware perhaps that this wasn’t the life Santa had promised her as a little girl. She leaned her head against his chest and they shuffled round together, his hands pressed against her back, her breath moistening a patch of blue cotton above his heart.

‘Snoo-ow o-on snooooww…’ sang the King, accompanied now by a choir of children and a Detroit brass section, his voice rolling like a big sea, wave after wave of tremulous emotion, an irresistible, heartbreaking, nonsensical bawling. They danced with Rosinne’s bare feet on Larry’s shoes. She was so light he didn’t think she could weigh much more than Ella. She had her arms around his neck. He held her very close, sliding one of his hands up her back where her skin was slick with heat as though she were running a fever. Once upon a time he had danced like this with Kirsty, the two of them leaning into each other like a pair of exhausted brawlers, those days of courtship at her father’s place in Lemon Cove when he could not look at her without wanting to touch her, could not touch her without needing to lie down with her, and like some slouch-mouthed movie star had called her ‘baby’ and ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’. On occasion – he had not dreamed this – the mere sound of his voice had made her flinch with pleasure as though he had stroked the denim between her thighs. So how on earth had he got from there to here ? What was this tangle between them, this knot of ravelled emotion? It was pathetically distressing to him that he did not make love to his wife any more when he could recall so clearly the nights he used to plunder her, that look of insane concentration on her face, her arms flexed against the head-bars of their iron-framed bed, pushing against him with all her might as though she could never have him deeply enough inside of her. How had he got from that to this ? From his wife to teenage coke fiends. From Kirsty to Scarletta Scar?