For The Death Of Me

49

The rest of it didn’t even begin to come together until I made it back to New York, driving, dangerously, through the fog that seemed to have spread inside my head. Everything was instinctive. I don’t remember anything about the journey. The navigation system was switched off, but I made it on my personal auto-pilot, just heading north and taking signs as they came up.

I must have been burning rubber for it was just after midnight when I drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and on to Manhattan. I dumped the car in a Hertz drop-off location somewhere in the Forties, shoved the keys and papers at the receiving clerk without a word, took my bags and almost stumbled into the night. I was headed anywhere but towards the Algonquin: I wanted never to go back there, ever again. Still I don’t, and I won’t.

I walked across to Broadway, then headed south. It was early Monday morning and the city was as quiet as it ever gets, so quiet that some idiot tried to mug me. He was standing in a doorway just past Thirty-eighth; as I passed he pointed a gun at me and told me to give him my wallet. I looked at him, and considered his options. He didn’t look drug-crazy enough or scared enough to shoot me, so I snatched the pistol from him, pushed him back deeper into the doorway and beat him bloody, then shoved the barrel up his arse. I’m speaking literally here, folks. I told him, although I doubt if he was hearing anything, that if I turned and saw him crawling out on to the street I’d come back and pull the trigger, then I carried on in my aimless way.

Finally it dawned on me that I’d better get off the street before I killed somebody, so I checked myself into a hotel on West Thirty-second, just past the Empire. It wasn’t much better than a flophouse, and they gave me a room next to the lift-shaft. I don’t even remember now what it was called, but it had four walls and a roof, and that was all I wanted. As I lay there in the dark, the shock began to wear off. I began to come to terms (whatever the hell that actually means) with my grief, and I revisited it with a vengeance.

I cried for a while, for quite a while, for Primavera and for the times we had shared together, the good, the bad, the thrilling, the exciting, the downright scary. I cried for the love we had made, and for Tom. Soon I was going to have to tell him that he’d never see his mother again, other than in dreams. I’d try to find the positive side for him, though, when he was old enough, that he’d always see her young and beautiful, and that he wouldn’t have to watch her dynamism fade, and her body weaken and wither with age. I never saw that in my mother. I’d never see it with Jan, and I’d never see it with Prim.

It’s a terrible curse, being married to me: it’s as if you seal your fate when you sign the contract. I have been married three times and two of my wives have died prematurely, at the cold emotionless hand of Fate. Now I live my life in a constant state of fear for Susie, and with the dread that she might carry it too. I’ve found myself wondering whether I should leave her, for her own good, to try to protect her. But that didn’t do Primavera any good, did it?

I thought of all these things as I cried myself out, and then I began to think of what had brought them about, and I began to see more of the truth, beyond that first flash that I’d revealed to Susie.

First and foremost, I knew for sure that Sammy Goss hadn’t met us by accident: he’d been sent. Someone had noted my arrival in Sing, someone who knew all about Maddy January, and made the connection with me. Once Goss had latched on to me he hadn’t let go.

Only it had been more complicated than that. Something unexpected had happened. Someone entirely unlooked-for had turned up, and changed some people’s priorities.

I knew all these things: they followed a logical and inescapable pattern, yet it was all theory, all fucking Sherlock stuff, with no hard evidence, no reinforced concrete proof.

And yet there was, and I nearly threw it away.

I forced myself upright at eight fifteen next morning. The water pressure in the shower above my bath, its enamel worn almost through by countless thousands of feet, was so poor that it took me ten minutes to do the job according to my standards. I didn’t bother to shave: I wasn’t ready to look at myself in the mirror.

Back in the bedroom, I took a fresh shirt from my bag. When I had removed it from its wrapping, I picked up the one I had worn the day before, meaning to stuff it into the polythene and toss it all in the waste. But as I crumpled it in my hand, my fingers closed on the forgotten envelope in the pocket, Maddy January’s parting thank-you card.

I took it out and opened it. It was inscribed as she had said, but with it there was something else: another tiny square SD disk. ‘As a token of good faith,’ she had added, ‘and maybe a little insurance.’