Pantheon

Chapter Nineteen

A moment or two later, a flushed George Lund returned. ‘I can’t go through with this, I’m sorry,’ he said and, before James had a chance to reply, he reached down for the briefcase — now returned to its place — turned and quickly walked towards the exit.

James got to his feet: ‘Stop!’

Lund did not turn around.

‘Don’t just storm out like that. Stop, will you!’ James called, much louder this time.

The mother at the next table was staring again. Digging into his pocket, James slapped down a couple of dollar bills and dashed out. He stumbled, knocking a glass over on his way to the door; he heard it smash to the ground. Once on the street, he looked left and right among the small knots of teenagers and geriatrics hanging around together in the warm evening, but he’d lost him.

It wasn’t the first time James had encountered one of Lund’s type, he thought as he headed back towards town. There were plenty like him in Oxford and, on two occasions, they had made their feelings known to James. Years later, he had told Florence about it and she had said it was his fault for being so damned handsome.

Even so, the photographs were pretty shocking. Shots of naked young men from the front, back and side on. At first glance each man looked as if he were standing before a medical examination board — facing the panel, then offering a profile, then showing them his back. James had wondered if that was how these pictures had been taken, by an official army photographer, or maybe by a hidden camera smuggled into the examination room.

But then he had spotted the strange spikes. At regular intervals along their spines, the men had sharp metal pins emerging from their backs. They were especially visible in the profile photograph, the spines silhouetted against the plain white background.

James liked to think he was a man of the world. In Spain a couple of the other volunteers had pornographic magazines which James had seen, featuring knickerless girls bent over chairs and tables, often prising apart their own buttocks in order to expose themselves more fully. He knew from his academic research that sexual desire was a complicated business and that some people were aroused by the unlikeliest of things — fetishes for women’s hair or feet, for example. But he had never contemplated anything like this, that a man could want to look at images of other men whose bodies had been elaborately pierced.

As James knocked back his second Scotch at the bar of the Owl Shop, he contemplated his rotten luck. He had hoped that Lund would prove to be his lucky break, the man who would prove that every now and again you could rely on the kindness of strangers. Instead he had run into a homosexual and pervert, who had somehow deluded himself into thinking this visiting Englishman would be interested in a quick, queer embrace.

No wonder Lund had wanted to meet far out of town, where no one would discover his shameful secret. James should have been suspicious from the off, starting with Lund’s suggestion that they meet in the evening and at a restaurant. And all that flustered placing of his moist hand on James’s wrist: the man was clearly nervous, uncertain of how James would respond to him. What was it he had said? You have no idea what you’ve walked into here, do you?

James ordered another whisky. And yet, he could not be sure. If Lund really were a homosexual out to make a conquest, why would he suggest meeting in public and early in the evening? If he had summoned James to his home at 11 o’clock tonight, promising some information on Florence and Harry, James would have gone there without hesitation. Meeting at Frank Pepe’s had only made it harder for the man.

Lund had said something else too. He’d been all but jabbering by then, so James had not taken it too seriously. But the message was clear enough: You’ve stumbled into something much bigger than you realize. Bigger and more dangerous.

That could be nothing, loose talk from a man determined to exaggerate his own importance, to increase the value of his information. Perhaps that was it: Lund was going to demand certain favours from him in return for the file on his wife and child. The very thought made James shudder.

In the morning he would make an appointment with the Dean himself. Reluctantly he would have to tell him what his subordinate had been up to, attempting to pressure a visiting fellow of Yale into… unseemly behaviour. James might then be able to propose a little exchange of his own: he would keep silent about the deviant interests of the Assistant Dean in return for the location of his wife and child.

He downed the last of his whisky, his fourth double. Or perhaps his fifth. He emerged from the Owl Shop, breathed the night air in deeply, then turned left and headed for his garret room in the Elizabethan Club, stumbling more than once on his way back.

He had woken so often to the fusillade of gunfire that he had almost learned to sleep through it. Somewhere in his unconscious, a voice told him that the pounding rat-tat-tat he could now hear close by was a creation of his own mind, part memory, part imagination. He could just stay here, under this thick, warm quilt of sleep — made thicker by the alcohol still in his bloodstream — and eventually the sound would disappear.

He started suddenly and was bolt upright: the noise had got louder. Now it was not a knocking sound, but a banging on the door and it was not coming from inside his head, but outside it — from the door of this small room. It was accompanied by voices too, which only now became distinct. It took another second for him to hear what they were saying: ‘Dr James Zennor, this is the Yale Police Department. Open up.’

‘What is this?’

‘Open up this minute, sir. Do not think about fleeing through that window, we have a man on the street outside.’

James’s heart was thudding in his chest; his head was cloudy with dreams and drink. His shoulder was sending volts of agony through him; in his stupor, he had slept on it, the alcohol anaesthetizing the usual pain that prevented him making such a calamitous mistake. He staggered towards the bedroom door, which he did not remember locking, and opened it.

The frame was filled by two uniformed police officers, one of whom spoke immediately. ‘Are you Dr James Zennor of Oxford, England?’

‘Yes.’

Instantly his partner snapped a pair of handcuffs on James’s wrists.

‘What the hell is this? What are you doing?’

‘You’re under arrest.’

‘Arrest? What for?’

‘For the murder of George Lund. He was found dead this morning. And you were the last person who saw him alive.’