Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘The book!’ She throws her hands in the air. ‘You are the same as him! I don’t care about the book! I don’t care if he writes another fucking word! I just want him to be here in the world with me! Be here with his son! Instead of walking around like the dead man!’

‘He loves you.’

She flicks her hand as at some insignificant noise.

‘He does!’ I insist. ‘He told me!’

‘He loves me, and he drinks our money!’ she exclaims. ‘He loves me, and eviction notice comes! He loves me, and I listen to my little boy’s tummy rumble all the night long!’ She draws back; the bruised flesh around her eye pulsates with loathing. ‘What do you know about it anyway? Little lonely Frenchman, with your sad dreams of true love, what do you know about love or truth? You sit in your palace of death buying and selling human souls, you don’t even look out window to see the world you make us live in.’

‘You are wrong. I do look out. I see what you have, and I envy it. The cliché is true, there are some things money can’t buy.’

‘Money can buy anything real,’ Clizia says.

‘You have not always believed that.’

She pulls up, looks at me aslant with an ironical smile. Even in silence the force of her rage hits me like a gale. ‘It is true. Perhaps in each of us there is a little Frenchman who sighs and knots his fingers and gaze at sunset. When I was young I have lots of dreams. I dream of escaping my shithole town. I dream of marrying an artist and never think about money. I follow my dreams and I end up on a stage showing my pussy to drunks.’ She pulls indifferently at a banknote that still protrudes from her G-string, looks up at me with false merriment. ‘That is how it goes, Frenchman. We dream our dreams, and we take our pay, and the world turns to shit.’

There is a click, and the lights come on. ‘Time’s up,’ she says.

I gawp at her, floundering, then fumble out my wallet. I have no cash left. She looks at me coolly, as she might at any other of her clients, priapic, in love with her, desperate to prolong the fraudulent moment. ‘Please,’ I entreat her, ‘you must promise me that before you do anything, you will let me talk to him.’

‘I have to go,’ Clizia says.

‘You can’t give up yet! Just wait a little bit longer!’

Standing in the doorway, shot through by shafts of light from the dance floor, she appears fissiparous, disintegrating. ‘Go home, Frenchman,’ she says. ‘This is not your story.’

She turns away and is swallowed instantly by the nebular darkness. I hurry out after her, but at the door I’m seized by Gary and Jocelyn and Dave Davison. ‘Have you heard, Claude?’

‘There’s a rescue package!’

‘We’re still alive!’

Their faces swing about me like carnival masks, repeating the same words — ‘government’, ‘last minute’, ‘Royal’. But I’m too addled to make sense of them. All I can think is that I must find Paul at once. To the sound of champagne corks popping, I climb the stairs and out on to the street.

Just as I flag down a cab, though, I remember that I gave the last of the cash in my wallet to Clizia. I search about my pockets frantically and at last dig something out — and freeze there on the side of the road.

‘Are you getting in or not?’ the driver wants to know.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ I wave numbly; he swears and pulls away again. I remain at the kerb, staring at the paper in my hand — not a banknote, but the fax from earlier today. It nests in my palm, a sheet of perfect black; and Clizia’s words resound in my ears. This very morning he tells me that tonight he does something big. A new plan that will change everything .

A terrible thought springs out of the darkness. What if this time he was telling the truth?

The road and footpath have almost disappeared, reduced by the downpour to islets of grit in a black lagoon of water. The rain is coming down heavier than ever — in its frenzy and force hardly like rain at all any more, but rather the bodying forth of something awful, until now hiding out in the abstract, gathering strength there, awaiting its moment to hurl itself into the actual. A sense of impending doom is unavoidable; I break into a run, splashing past nightclubs and pizza restaurants, then leaving the waterlogged street for the shadows of the square, where I instantly spot –

Nothing. In the decorous Georgian enclave, all is calm. The cherry trees cast their blossoms softly against the night; silence turns about the solemn axis of the oak tree like the moon through the houses of some rarefied, red-brick zodiac. My dash slows to a jog, then a plod; my heartbeat does likewise, and I see my fears for what they are: absurd, too absurd for words. Clearly the events of the day have taken their toll on me. Not even Paul would attempt a plan so outlandish — except for the plot of one of his unwritten books, maybe! I laugh out loud, there on the leaf-strewn street, am answered with a murmur of reproof from a covey of pigeons lodged in a dripping magnolia … and then the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.

Dread thuds back into my ears; at the same moment the grey boulders of the clouds roll away from the moon, and in the interval of light I see, amid the Benzes and Jaguars parked around the square, a large and anomalous white van. KGB EXTERMINATIONS, runs the legend on its side, with a picture of a terrorized mouse fleeing a man in a trench coat. I start to run again.

William O’Hara’s house is almost entirely dark, save for a dim glow from deep within. The garden is deserted, the front door undisturbed. It’s still possible I’ve got it wrong — but then a gate leading to a side passage opens, and a masked figure appears.

‘What the —?’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What are you doing here?’ I return, with a sense of déjà vu.

‘Dad?’

‘ Mon dieu — what is he doing here?’

‘Look, Claude, I don’t mean to be rude, but we’re sort of in the middle of something here —’

‘What is about, this racket-making out here?’ A third figure comes shambling out of the shadows — dressed, like Paul, in black, with a stocking over his head. ‘What is this fucking Frenchman doing here?’ he demands when he sees me. ‘It is not enough you bring your son? Who else is coming? Your wife? Your mother-in-law?’

‘I didn’t bring him,’ Paul hisses back. ‘I don’t know why he’s here! What the hell are you doing with that window? You could hear it a mile away!’

‘How I can concentrate with you people jabbering like babushkas out here?’

‘You said you knew what you were doing!’ Paul jabs his finger at his accomplice.

‘That was before I found out that as well as art heist I must be babysitting!’ Igor shouts. I grab Paul’s arm and point: a light has gone on in an upper floor of the house next door. Reluctantly, he stifles his retort; Igor, with an air of vindication, turns on his heel and disappears back into the black shadow of the house, from which a moment later further shattering noises ensue.

‘Oh, that’s great, Igor. Why don’t we send up a few flares while we’re at it? Or put it on Facebook? Current status: breaking into William O’Hara’s house .’

‘Dad?’ The boy pulls at his hand until Paul hunkers down.

‘Again?’ he says incredulously. ‘Didn’t you use the toilet in Igor’s?’

‘Igor’s toilet is scary,’ Remington says sorrowfully.

‘Well, you’ll just have to hold it in until — aha, here we go!’ Above us the front door swings open, a panel of deeper black in the tenebrous façade of the house, as if the night were a series of nesting darknesses into which we were tunnelling. Paul’s son has already scampered up the steps, and his father after him.