All That Follows

13

LEONARD PARKS AGAIN ON THE EDGES of the waste ground. There are a couple of half-erected marquees adding a dash of color — Oxford blue — but otherwise the makeshift village of trucks and buses has not changed much since Thursday, except that the earth is more churned up by vehicles and there is a collage of litter blown against the outer fence or kicked there by time-killing policemen. There is no longer any sense of urgency or excitement. Everyone is bored and regimented. Day four, it’s almost 5 p.m., and nothing much is happening.

This time Leonard has company. In fact, it has been Francine’s suggestion that they drive down to the hostage street. She’s curious to see it for herself, and she has promised Nadia that she will phone tomorrow evening with her report. As Leonard has suspected, the two women are prepared to like each other instantly. Within minutes, after Nadia says, “You’re the woman at my door,” they are holding hands across the cafeteria table while Leonard acts the waiter, bringing teas and pastries. Women are so skilled at reaching out, he thinks, at finding sisters, listening. He sits with them for a while, his chair drawn slightly back, indicating that he does not wish to intrude, as they take turns showing interest in each other’s daughters and their current whereabouts. He’s happy to stay silent and just look at them, a jealous spectator.

Here, unpredictably together and touching hands, are — so very few — the only two women in his life that he has ever cared for. Cared for sexually, that is. Observing them so openly, and comparing them, is curiously rewarding. His wife is thoroughly familiar, of course. After nine years of marriage, they have hardly any secret drawers. He’s intimate with everything she does. He knows the clothes she’s wearing, what she’s now wearing underneath, the dots and pigments of her skin, her range of smells; he recognizes what she says and how she says it, the characteristic language and expressions that she uses, the expressions on her face; that hanging thread; that single less-than-perfect fingernail; her slender upper body with its small breasts, the fuller hips and upper legs she regrets so much, the waist she’s learned to emphasize. Francine is the breathing, vivid detail of his life, a woman in hi-def, a wife till death do part, while Nadia is just a smudge. He’ll never know about her breasts and waist or recognize her underwear and fingernails, except in fantasy, this current fantasy, which causes him to close his eyes and exhale noisily: he’s loving both of them. He has to sit straight on his chair and breathe less heavily.

“Are you okay?” Nadia and Francine stare back at him.

“Yes, why?”

“You’re talking to yourself. You’re muttering.”

“No, I was only thinking … saying that I’m going to stretch my legs, leave you two pals in peace.”

For a moment, as he picks his way between the cafeteria tables and loaded shopping bags, Leonard feels a little like a man doubly rejected. He would have preferred it if they’d said, “No, stay. We want you sitting here with us.” But instinctively he sees that what he wants — what Lucy wants — will come about only behind his back and only if Francine mediates. He finds his way back through Maven’s into the concourse and wanders with his shoulders down and his hands in his pockets toward the exit doors and the open air, where he will — what? Sit among the flower beds with the smokers and feel his age advancing by the minute? It would be a surrender to beg a cigarette for himself; nevertheless, it is tempting. Lucy’s roll-ups have infiltrated him. Her nicotine has not cleared yet. The weather saves him, though. Yet again it’s damp outside, misty and autumnal rather than showery. So he comes back into the precinct and cuts across to the bookshop. If he can’t smoke, he’ll treat himself — why not? He’ll buy himself a birthday treat, something, anything. So far today, it occurs to him without self-pity, he hasn’t opened a single card or unwrapped a gift. He hasn’t even had a kiss.

He’s waylaid again before he reaches the bookshop, this time by a two-meter-wide concourse telescreen showing music videos, film trailers, advertisements, sports highlights, and every hour a home news and showbiz bulletin. What catches Leonard’s eye is Lucy’s face, that same schoolgirl photograph that the police showed him this morning: “Do either of you know, have either of you seen, this girl?” He stands and stares, tipping his head toward the screen, doing his best to pick up what is being said above the din of passersby. A “new communiqué” has been delivered, together with a long and heavy lock of Lucy’s hair. Nice touch, you clever girl, he thinks. A deadline has been set, it seems. Release the Alderbeech hostages by midnight (which midnight, when?). He steps closer to the screen, but almost at once he’s required to move aside by two women with prams. So he misses the final sentences of the commentary. By the time he has repositioned himself, the bulletin has finished and the first match results are on display. He has to stand among the jostling football fans and wait for the news strapline to track across the bottom of the screen. “Unknown Terror Group SOFA Holding Kidnap Girl.” Leonard smiles at that. No doubt the pundits will already be speculating what such an acronym might signify. Save Our Fat Arses, Leonard thinks. Pass the velvet cushions, please.

Leonard does not hold his smile for long, however. A moment later and he’s panicking again. The half-heard bulletin, with its totemic lock of hair and the always chilling word deadline, snaps him free from his earlier illusions. His all-too-recent and romantic entreaties for Nadia to allow her daughter this one chance to be the little heroine suddenly seem disastrously poor advice, given for the benefit of no one but himself. He has naively hoped that when this is over and everything is told, he will be reported as a genuine comrade by her mother to Lucy, a man who backed her up, not let her down, a man who’s still prepared to throw his pebble at the wall. But the revelation that Nadia served fourteen months and Lucy is a prison kid and he’s a bit — a lot — to blame has darkened everything. He knows he ought to go back into the cafeteria at once and tell the two women he has changed his mind, that caution — he’ll call it circumspection — is always sensible in situations such as this. He ought to do it straightaway, because at this very moment — if he has understood his wife’s intentions clearly — Francine will be charming Nadia, persuading her to go along with what Leonard has proposed, that she keep Lucy’s secret for a while. And Francine will agree with him. She always loves an escapade.

But if there is an escapade, costs and consequences are bound to follow it. Especially for Lucy. She’s piling up problems for herself — and for her mother now. Monday is two days away, and two extra days is a deep hole into which the police might pour a thousand men, as well as dogs, helicopters, news teams, public appeals, not to mention money. One million euros? Two million? He has heard of such cases before and has been shocked by how much such operations cost — and by how unamused and vengeful the police, the public, and the courts can be when it turns out that the missing person wasn’t kidnapped after all but playing games, “playing costly games with people’s lives.”

Leonard steadies himself. He thinks it through again from the bottom up, rehearsing the debates he has already had with himself and with Nadia and Francine for and against Lucy’s “genius.” It’s possible, of course, that the police will merely bof and shrug when they learn the truth, as they are bound to. Lucy cannot disappear for good. She isn’t Celandine. When she does show up, they might only tell her off, issue her a caution, then let her go. That’s possible. She is just a child, after all, a minor. But the more Leonard considers that outcome, the less likely it seems. The authorities will have to punish Lucy in some way. They’ll have to punish everyone involved. Public opinion will insist on it. The public do not like to be mischled.

Leonard can imagine the headlines already: “Tearful Mother Knew Lucy Was Not Kidnapped” and “Kidnap Mother Charged.” Francine will be implicated too. He has a sudden image of his wife, defiant in the courts. “I accept that you were a minor player in this deception, misled by your husband,” the judge is telling her, “but nevertheless this has been a thoughtless and costly hoax and one for which an exemplary custodial sentence is inevitable.” Now Leonard is almost running into Maven’s and up the single flight of stairs to the cafeteria. Just before he catches sight of Francine and Nadia, still sitting over their cups with their foreheads almost touching, he has another thought. His own genius idea. He doesn’t have to look a fool in front of them, by changing his mind so soon after arguing in favor of Lucy’s plan. He doesn’t have to tell them anything, in fact. It’s just the authorities who need to know. But not the cop on the roof. He’ll phone NADA, then keep that phone call to himself. What happens next is up to them. If they choose and if it serves their purposes, they can even decide to keep the matter quiet, sit back and see what comes about in Alderbeech. After all, it might be the best of strategies, even for the police, to encourage Maxie to believe that Lucy’s still in danger.

Leonard uses his own cell phone, standing on the landing of the store. It doesn’t matter if his calls are being bugged or logged. He isn’t hiding anymore. He texts in “National Defense Agency” and connects to the number that the directory provides. It’s Saturday, the switchboard is unattended, but Leonard leaves his information anyway. “This message cache is checked regularly at weekends and during public holidays,” a voice informs him. “Start recording now.” “This is urgent and it’s for …” What was that agent’s name? Yes, Rollins, not the saxophone colossus but Simon Rollins. “For NADA agent Simon Rollins. You visited me at home today, remember? This is Leonard Lessing. You asked if I could throw any light, any light at all, on the whereabouts of Lucy Katerina Emmerson. Or who it is that’s taken her. To tell the truth, since we spoke, the girl has been in touch …”

NOW HE AND FRANCINE WALK arm in arm from the waste ground to the hostage street. There are fewer gawpers at the barrier than on Thursday, fewer know-alls with opinions that they want to share and spread. And there are fewer men in uniform in the approaches to the house. Nobody at all is keeping armed watch behind steel shields in what has been designated an arc of fire. Keep It Tight has been replaced by Keep It Calm. The nation is a little bored with Maxim Lermontov, it would appear. He’s let them down. He hasn’t starved or handcuffed anyone. He hasn’t fired his gun enough. He hasn’t tossed a body out of an upper window, providing drama and pictures for the evening news. He hasn’t tried to master an escape or released a second video detailing future misch-apps. Instead, he and his two accomplices have simply run a tidy house for four days, ordering in food and toiletries like any family. It is even easy to imagine Maxie fascinating those nonvolunteers inside, the hostages for whom he will seem to presume a duty of care, the two sons especially. They will be glued to his great smile, no doubt, his sense of fun, his devastating and unstable charm, his artificial tenderness.

Tonally, today the house is like the sky, grayed out and smudged. The weather is contagious, showering the suburb in gloom. The street seems washed of energy, and muted. The afternoon is deepening as what little light there is sinks behind the rooftops. No bulbs are burning in the hostage house; all lights are doused, nor are there any in the evacuated neighboring and opposite houses. There are no moving window silhouettes or twitching curtains. Behind the barriers the television crews have been downgraded, and the remaining journalists are mostly juniors detailed just to keep an eye on things and then call for more experienced backup should anything kick off. Restricted by the police to one small area, they pass their time sitting under their fishermen’s umbrellas, texting, smoking, drinking coffee from their flasks, watching palm sets. Except for one wall-perched cat, wondering why nobody is passing to stop and rub its back, and pigeons on the roof, the hostage house is not worth looking at. The only sounds are the drones of distant traffic and, occasionally, a dog barking.

Leonard and Francine walk twice across the street, hoping perhaps to catch some sign of life inside the house, but see nothing to detain them any longer.

“It looks more interesting on the television,” Leonard says. He feels he needs to apologize, as if somehow the scene’s lack of energy is his responsibility. “What do you suppose is going on in there?”

“They’re watching television,” Francine says. “That’s how it works. That’s the deal. We watch them, and they watch themselves. It doesn’t happen on the street. It only happens on the screen.” Leonard nods but does not meet her eye. She’s said as much before to him, and meant it as a criticism. She thinks he watches television far too much, that the remote console is well named. He is consoled by it; he is unreachable.

“I’ll mend my ways,” he says, though that is what he always says. He rarely acts on it. He cannot pretend to share his wife’s gadget nausea or sympathize with her refusal to engage with any of the bloatware he has downloaded to their systems.

“But now let’s wend our ways.” She’s evidently in a punning, merry frame of mind. Her time with Nadia has cheered her up, illogically. Their hearts have been emptied and their troubles have been shared. They’ve promised that they’ll stay in touch. They have agreed, as Leonard thought they would — his wife’s persuasive when she wants to be; she will have swept Nadia’s qualms aside — that Lucy should be allowed, until Monday anyway, to enjoy her adventure, unbetrayed, and that Celandine is bound to show up safe and well in her own good time. Both women leave the cafeteria less burdened. Excited, even.

“Back home?” says Leonard.

“No, let’s break the mold for once. It’s your birthday, isn’t it? I haven’t even kissed you yet.” She pecks his chin. “Let’s find a pub or restaurant. Let’s have champagne.”

It is the second time that Leonard walks the streets between the hostage house and the suburb’s row of shops with its one restaurant (not open yet) and the same pub — the Woodsman — that he and Lucy visited two days ago. They do not go into the yard. No need for that. They are no longer smokers. Instead, they find a table in what is called the Parlor Bar & Bistro, where there is waitress service and a sundown menu of appetizers. They order poppy bread and olive dip, vegetable wedges, fried garlic and haloumi, and a whole bottle of champagne. They are the only customers. It’s intimate: table lamps and easy chairs, a corner, dusk. They drink and talk and reminisce self-consciously.

“You realize I didn’t mean half that stuff this morning,” Francine says.

“What stuff?”

“You know …” She beams at him. “‘You selfish bloody idiot.’ That stuff.”

“So what half did you mean?”

“None of it — well, hardly none of it. I only mean it at the time. It doesn’t last.”

It lasts for me, thinks Leonard, not quite managing a beam in return. “Decaf!” he says eventually. “That got to me. It sounds like impotent. In all its ways. And cowardly.”

“I didn’t mean you’re always cowardly … no, take that back.” She pegs her mouth playfully. “I’ll be careful. Timid is the better word.”

“Depends who’s saying it and who’s accused of it. Timid’s not a word I like that much, to tell the truth.”

“Squeamish, then.”

“Oh, this is so much fun when you’re being more careful! Squeamish, am I now? Hell, Frankie. Get out the thesaurus, why don’t you? How about inhibited … repressed—”

“You have a point. I’m teasing you.”

“You’re bullying me?”

“It’s good for you. You know it is. No, what I’m saying is … sometimes I think it’s just as well I’m here to bully you, because if I wasn’t breathing down your neck some of the time—”

“And prodding me.”

“And prodding you, then you’d just sit back and Google your life away. Admit it, you’re a screen slave, Leonard. I prefer it when …” She hesitates, wanting to strike a loving, hopeful note before it’s too late. She loves him, after all. And she is in a brighter mood than she has been in for months. For eighteen months. (Nadia has cheered her up. That daughter talk. That safe and well.) It’s time to end hostilities.

“You prefer it when what?” he asks.

“When we have fun.” Fun, as Leonard knows, is one of Francine’s favorite words, but one she hasn’t used much recently. It is her greatest compliment, to say that someone has been fun. “I’m going to hold my tongue from now on and be all sweetness and light, the perfect loving wife on hubby’s fiftieth. Because everything has started to turn out well today, hasn’t it?” she says, almost in her classroom voice. “I shouldn’t admit to this, I’m being bad, but it’s the truth. Dodging those awful goons back home. The drive down. Hunting Nadia in the shopping mall. Meeting one of your old flames—”

“Let’s not exaggerate.”

“Going to the hostage house. Drinking bubbly here. It’s been enormous fun. And you’ve been bouncy, haven’t you? We’re always better together, don’t you think, when you show a bit of swing?”

“Like on gigs, you mean?” Her glass is empty. He looks down at the bottle. Almost empty too.

“No, not only with the saxophone. That was mean of me. Let’s see …” Now, here’s an opportunity. “Remember that ECM Jazz Gala in Budapest about six years ago?”

“I do.” They had sex every night. “We made love every night.”

“Do you remember flying out?”

He does. He’s never been that scared since. The gales were so turbulent across the runway that the pilot was forced to abort his landing a meter from the ground and toil into the storm again. They had to circle, jettisoning fuel in cyclone winds, for forty more minutes before being cleared to try again. Leonard’s terror was so excessive that it rendered him powerless, motionless, expressionless, and mute, hardly able to breathe, let alone scream. He still remembers with unnerving clarity how the luggage lockers in the cabin all dropped open in one deafening clunk and how the coats and cases stowed above their heads dislodged and fell into the aisles. Outside, beyond the streaming window glass, the skyline of Budapest tossed and seesawed like a ship.

“I was absolutely sick with fear,” Francine says. “But you were totally calm. And comforting. Boy, you hardly raised a sweat. The only one on board. I thought you were so cool that day. And hot! That’s why we tumbled into bed so much.”

“Not quite the Mile High Club.”

“Now there’s a thought.” Francine wraps her hands around her champagne glass and stares into it, smiling self-consciously. “Truth or dare,” she says finally. “Did you make love to Nadia? With Nadia?”

“When?”

“Not in Maven’s, obviously.”

“In Texas?”

“Yes.”

“The answer’s no.”

“Before that, then?”

“Not exactly.”

“You go blotchy when you’re lying, Leonard.”

“I’m blushing because I’m telling the truth. Because the answer’s no again. Another failure. We exchanged slogans but no fluids.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you had. She must have been dramatic then. She still looks good. Don’t you think? Leonard, look at me. I’m asking you.”

It is the alcohol. They’re giggling, like people half their age, and Francine is reaching out to hold his hand across the table, not in the way she reached out for Nadia’s, stroking it to comfort her, but flirtingly, meshing her fingers between Leonard’s and lacing her legs round his below the tabletop.

“I always admired your hands,” she says, rubbing his palms and the backs of his fingers. “Long and strong. Sexy hands.”

“That’s from playing scales for more than thirty years.”

“I always liked your throat and cheeks and lips as well. From the first time I set eyes on you. You still look good. No sign of sag.”

“That’s blowing for a living. It gives you muscles in your face.”

“I’m sagging everywhere.”

“You’re not. In point of fact, you’re lovelier than you have ever been. I was watching you only today. In Maven’s cafeteria. With Nadia.”

“I saw you watching us. Bad boy.”

Leonard does not look at her. “Well, you were looking … fabulous.”

“Let’s not go home tonight. Let’s find a hotel,” she says.

“I’m okay to drive, I think. I haven’t downed as much as you.”

“No, Leonard. Let’s find a hotel now. I want to go to bed with you right now. A little birthday treat.” She twists around toward the bar hatch. “Let’s ask if they do rooms.” She laughs. That pealing, mezzo, Brighton laugh. “We don’t have to stay the night. An hour ought to do it, don’t you think?”

“Jesus, Francine, what are they going to think? We haven’t got any luggage, even.”

“Couldn’t give a damn what they think.” She’s standing up already and leaning over the bar, calling for attention—“Hello? Hello? Customers!”—while Leonard watches from the table, fearful and aroused.

The room is on the upper floor, an attic space with sloping ceilings and a tiny shoe-box sink. It isn’t clean and it isn’t comfortable. The mattress has been compacted by five years of heavy salesmen. The pillows smell of beer and other people’s scalps. Francine and Leonard do not notice any of this until they have tumbled onto the bed, pushed off their shoes, torn at each other’s lower clothes, and, in the words of a song from Leonard’s repertoire, Gotten so familiar with each other, So fervent and familiar / That what they feel is similar / To floating on cloud nine. They’ve not made love like this, so thoroughly and so spontaneously, for years. The champagne was a genius idea. It helped them find the reckless courage to make love in this unlovely place, and now it helps them try to rest, half naked in each other’s gluey arms.

Francine — once she has found a cleanish towel to put between the pillow and her face — is soon dozing, though fitfully and shallowly. She’s breathing heavily. Her day has been exhausting and exhilarating, packed with more drama than any term at school. It’s started with a police raid, and now it’s ending in a low-rent bed with sex. It has taken years off her. It is not long, though, before she begins, both in her episodes of consciousness and in her dreams, to regret the bottle of champagne and this grubby room. Now that she is sobering and submitting to sleep, all its imperfections shout at her. The furnishings are soiled and dirty. She has not been able to brush her teeth. She does not have deodorant or a change of underwear. If her car was a little longer, well, twice as long, or they had traveled in Leonard’s gig van, she might have suggested making love in some dark field, closer to home. Then she would’ve woken up tomorrow morning in her own clean bed, with Leonard bringing Sunday breakfast on a tray. Naked if he has to. That’s okay. Anything is more okay than this. Nevertheless, she stretches out. Any restlessness will not survive for long. She’s used to sleeping well on Saturdays. She stores her tiredness for the weekend and then she gluts on it.

All nights are the same for Leonard at the moment, now that he is nursing his bad shoulder and has no gigs to tire him out. His sleep is patchy at best. On this thin mattress, he’s wide awake at first, in fact uncomfortable, but not even trying to fall asleep. Hoping not to, actually. He wants to think about their lovemaking, and then he wants to run through his encounter with Nadia Emmerson and his clandestine phone call before considering what could occur to Lucy between today and Monday if Agent Rollins does not pick up his messages over the weekend. He sinks into a shallow doze, dreaming madly, bruising dreams, but waking often, stirring to the night sounds of the street or to adjust his body to the shoulder pain.

He’s almost glad to be rescued from the dreams by disturbances below the room, late or maybe early departures from the bars downstairs and taxis sounding their horns. He’s sleeping in his underpants and shirt and feels the cold. His cock is caked and sore. He turns his back against the room and hugs himself, looking at Francine’s sleeping profile just a few centimeters from his own face. She looks warm and peaceful in the strip of street light wedged across the bed. Still a handsome woman, even now that his sexual appetites are pacified. Leonard will not wrap himself round her, however. She should not be woken before she’s fully rested. She might push him away. So he slips out of bed to find the jumper he abandoned so hurriedly only a few hours earlier. As he pulls it on, he turns toward the old sash window of the room and its bottled nighttime silvering of glass and stares beyond the gables on the far side of the street to what are either the first signs of a fragile, dawning sky or the ambient light of the city center. In the other directions, the sky is still huge and salted with stars. He can’t decide the time of night. He’ll wait until he sees some evidence — an early bird, an early van, an early dog walker, some winking aircraft lights, perhaps — before he crawls back into bed. At least he’s warmer now, and while he is standing here he can let his shoulders drop to ease the ache.

Two vehicles drive idly past the pub, almost in convoy. The first is a dark gray personnel vehicle with blackened windows. So is the second. Leonard does not wait to see the third, or more, although they’re on their way. He guesses at once what’s going on. The siege is coming to an end. The troops are moving in.

“What are you doing?” Francine asks, an edge of weary irritation in her voice. “Come back to bed. You’re waking me.”

“I’m trying not to wake you. That’s why I’m up.”

“Well, you are waking me. I need to sleep. I don’t want to be awake in this dreadful room. Not for one minute. We should have driven home last night.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say that, because it’s true? I haven’t even got a toothbrush here.”

“I’ll go and get you one.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What time is it?”

“I’ve no idea.” Leonard holds his wristwatch up to the window but can make out only the circling phosphor of the second hand — and then the headlights of another dark gray vehicle. It’s clear he has to go back to the hostage house. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what the time is,” he says impulsively. “We have to get away from here. I agree. It’s horrible. You get some rest. I’ll get the car. I’ll make it quick. Drive home, okay?”