For The Death Of Me

48

I suppose I knew then that Marie wasn’t coming back. In fact, I guess I knew everything, although it was quite a while before I was able to lie down, quietly and with something approaching rationality, and put all of the pieces together.

At that moment, though, I was struck down, numb with grief. Primavera was dead. I could have stayed behind for another night in Trenton with her, rather than with Marie. I had been thinking about that in the State Capitol building, and so had she. If either of us had come out with it, said what we were thinking, given voice to our unquenchable lust for each other, then Marie would have been catching the plane back to her father, and Prim would be alive today.

And Maddy was dead: I’d gone to all that trouble to save her life, I’d thought I’d triumphed, but after all my efforts to save her from the gangsters she was still stone dead, crisped in a swamp in New Jersey that had been a Mafia dumping ground for decades. That’s a fine irony for you, Blackstone, is it not?

Dylan? Yes, he was dead too, but he’d been fucking dead for years.

The television was still droning on: they had moved on to the day’s death toll in Iraq, but I had my own casualty list to grieve over. I forced myself into action. I got up, showered and dressed. Then a horrible thought struck me. I snatched up my cell-phone and called Susie.

It was Conrad Kent who answered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before I’d had a chance to speak, ‘Mrs Blackstone is not taking calls.’

The media jackals were gnawing at my corpse already. ‘Shut up,’ I shouted at my assistant. ‘This is Oz. I wasn’t on that fucking plane. Now put me on to my wife.’

It took me a while to calm Susie down. It took me a minute or so to believe truly that it was me speaking to her. Christ, I was so fucked up in my head that I wasn’t even a hundred per cent sure myself.

‘What happened?’ she asked, when she could speak properly.

‘The plane must have been sabotaged, somehow. It was flying Maddy to safety but the Triads got to it.’

‘So they killed her, after all.’

‘Yes, but she wasn’t the target,’ I told her, even as the first significant part of the truth hit me, clear and ringing as a bell. ‘Mike was.’