Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 49 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

“Your arm.” It was hurting him; I could see the tears glittering in his eyes.

Boris made a face. “Nyah. This is zero. This is nothing. Aah,” he said, lifting his elbow up so I could wrap the phone charger cable around his arm—I’d yanked it out, wrapped it twice above the wound, tied it tight as I could—“smart you. Good precaution. Thanks! Although, no need really. Just a graze—more bruised than anything, I think. Good this coat is so thick! Clean it out—some antibyotic and something for pain—I’ll be fine. I—” deep shuddering breath—“I need to find Gyuri and Cherry. I hope they went straight to Blake’s. Dima—Dima needs a heads-up too, about the mess in there. He will not be happy—there will be cops, big headache—but it will look random. There is nothing to tie him to this.”

Headlights sweeping past. Blood pounding in my ears. There weren’t many cars on the road but every one that passed made me flinch.

Boris moaned and dragged his palm across his face. He was saying something, very speedy and agitated. “What?”

“I said—this is a mess. I am still figuring it out.” Voice staccato and cracked. “Because this is what I am wondering now—maybe I am wrong, maybe I am paranoid—but maybe Horst knew all along? That Sascha took the picture? Only Sascha brought the picture out of Germany and tries to borrow money on it behind Horst’s back. And then when things go wrong—Sascha panics—who else could he call? of course, I am just thinking out loud, maybe Horst didn’t know Sascha took it, maybe he would never have known if Sascha hadn’t been so careless and dumb as to—Goddamn this fucking ring road,” said Boris suddenly. We had gotten off the Overtoom and were circling around. “Which is the direction I want? Turn on the Nav.”

“I—” fumbling around, incomprehensible words, menu I couldn’t read, Geheugen, Plaats, turning the dial, different menu, Gevarieerd, Achtergrond.

“Oh, hell. We will try this one. God, that was close,” said Boris, taking the turn a little too fast and sloppy. “You have some minerals, Potter. Frits—Frits was out of it, nodding practically, but Martin, my God. Then you—? Coming around so brave? Hurrah! I did not even think of you there. But there you were! Say you never handled a firearm before?”

“No.” Wet black streets.

“Well, let me tell you something that will maybe sound funny? But—is a compliment. You shoot like a girl. You know why is a compliment? Because,” said Boris, with a giddy, feverish slur in his voice, “in situation of threat, male who never fired weapon before and female who never fired weapon before? The female—so Bobo used to say—is much more likely to drop her mark. Most men? want to look tough, have seen too much movies, get too impatient and pop their shot off too fast—Shit,” said Boris suddenly, slamming on the brakes.

“What?”

“We don’t want this.”

“Don’t want what?”

“This street is closed.” Throwing the car in reverse. Backing down the street.

Construction. Fences with bulldozers behind them, empty buildings with blue plastic tarps in the windows. Stacks of piping, cement blocks, graffiti in Dutch.

“What are we going to do?” I said, in the paralyzed silence that followed, after we’d turned down a different street that seemed to have no streetlights at all.

“Well—no bridge here that we can cross. And that’s a dead end, so…”

“No, I mean what are we going to do.”

“About what?”

“I—” My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely get the words out. “Boris, we’re fucked.”

“No! We are not. Grozdan’s gun—” awkwardly he patted his coat pocket—“I’ll drop it in the canal. They can’t trace it back to me, if they can’t trace it back to him? And—nothing else to tie us. Because my gun? Clean. No serial. Even the car tires are new! I’ll get the car to Gyuri and he’ll change them tonight. Look here,” said Boris, when I didn’t answer, “don’t worry! We are safe! Shall I say it again? S-A-F-E” (spelling it out clumsily on four fingers).

Hitting a pothole, I flinched, unconsciously, a startle reaction, hands flying up to my face.

“And why, more than anything? Because we are old friends—because we trust each other. And because—oh God, there’s a cop, let me slow down.”

Staring at my shoes. Shoes shoes shoes. All I could think, when I’d put them on a few hours before I hadn’t killed anybody.

“Because—Potter, Potter, think about this. Listen for one moment please. What if I was a stranger—someone you did not know or trust? If you were driving from garage now with stranger? Then your life would be chained with a stranger’s forever. You would need to be very very careful with this person, long as you live.”

Cold hands, cold feet. Snackbar, Supermarkt, spotlit pyramids of fruit and candy, Verkoop Gestart!

“Your life—your freedom—resting on a stranger’s loyalty? In that case? Yes. Worry. Absolutely. You would be in very big trouble. But—no one knows of this thing but us. Not even Gyuri!”

Unable to speak, I shook my head vigorously at this, trying to catch my breath.

“Who? China Boy?” Boris made a disgusted noise. “Who’s he going to tell? He is underage and not here legally. He does not speak any proper language.”

“Boris”—leaning forward slightly; I felt like I was going to pass out—“he’s got the painting.”

“Ah.” Boris grimaced with pain. “That is gone, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“For good, maybe. I am sick over that—sick in my heart. Because, I hate to say it—Woo, Goo, what’s his name? After what he saw—? All he will think about is himself. Scared to death! People dead! Deportation! He does not want to be involved. Forget about the picture. He has no idea of its true value. And if he finds himself in any kind of fix with the cops? Rather than spend one day in jail even? All he will want is to get rid of it. So—” he shrugged woozily—“let’s hope he does get away, the little shit. Otherwise very good chance the ptitsa will end up thrown in canal—burned.”

Streetlights glinting off the hoods of parked cars. I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn’t imagine. We were back in the old city, cobblestone rattle, nocturne monochrome straight out of Aert van der Neer with the seventeenth century pressing close on either side and silver coins dancing on black canal water.

“Ach, this is closed,” groaned Boris, jerking to a stop again, backing up the car, “we must find another way.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yes—of course,” said Boris, with a sort of scary disconnected cheerfulness. “That’s your canal over there. The Herengracht.”

“Which canal?”

“Amsterdam is an easy city to get around,” Boris said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “In the old city all you have to do is follow the canals until—Oh, God, they closed this off too.”

Tonal gradations. Weirdly enlivened darks. The small ghostly moon above the bell gables was so tiny it looked like the moon of a different planet, hazed and occult, spooky clouds lit with just the barest tinge of blue and brown.

“Don’t worry, this happens all the time. They are always building something here. Big construction messes. All this—I think is for a new subway line or something. Everyone is annoyed by it. Many accusations of fraud, yah yah. Same in every city, no?” His voice was so blurry he sounded drunk. “Roadwork everywhere, politicians getting rich? That is why everyone rides a bike, it is quicker, only, I am sorry, I am not riding a bicycle anywhere one week before Christmas. Oh no—” narrow bridge, dead halt behind a line of cars—“are we moving?”

“I—” We were stopped on a pedestrian footbridge. Visible pink drops on the rain-splashed windows. People walking back and forth not a foot away.

“Get out of the car and look. Oh, hang on,” he said impatiently before I could pull myself together; throwing the car into Park, getting out himself. I saw his floodlit back in the headlights, formal and staged-looking amidst billows of exhaust.

“Van,” he said, throwing himself back in the car. Slamming the door. Taking a deep breath, bracing his arms out straight against the steering wheel.

“What is he doing?” Glancing side to side, panicked, half expecting some random pedestrian to notice the bloodstains, rush at the car, bang at the windows, throw open the door.

“How should I know? There are too many cars in this fucking city. Look,” said Boris—sweating and pale in the lurid tail lights of the car in front of us; more cars had pulled up behind, we were trapped—“who knows how long we will be here. We are only few blocks from your hotel. Better you should get out and walk.”

“I—” Was it the lights of the car in front of us that made the water drops on the windshield look quite so red?

He made an impatient flicking movement of the hand. “Potter, just go,” he said. “I don’t know what is going on with this van up here. I’m afraid the traffic police will show up. Better for us both if we are not together just now. Herengracht—you cannot miss it. The canals here run in circles, you know that, don’t you? Just go that way—” he pointed—“you will find it.”

“What about your arm?”

“It’s nothing! I’d take off my coat to show you except is too much trouble. Now go. I have to talk to Cherry.” Pulling his cell phone from his pocket. “I may have to leave town for a little while—”

“What?”

“—but if we don’t speak for a bit, don’t worry, I know where you are. Best if you don’t try to call me or get in touch. I’ll be back soon as I can. Everything will be okay. Go—clean up—scarf around the neck, up high—we will speak soon. Don’t look so pale and ill! Do you have anything on you? Do you need something?”

“What?”

Scrabbling in his pocket. “Here, take this.” Glassine envelope with a smeared stamp. “Not too much, it is very very pure. Size of a match head. No more. And when you wake up, it will not be quite so bad. Now, remember—” dialing his phone; I was very conscious of his heavy breathing—“keep your scarf high up at your neck and walk on the dark side of the street as much as you can. Go!” he shouted when still I sat there, so loudly that I saw a man on the pedestrian walk of the bridge turn to look. “Hurry up! Cherry,” he said, slumping back in his seat in visible relief and beginning to babble hoarsely in Ukrainian as I exited the car—feeling lurid and exposed in the ghastly wash of headlights from the stalled vehicles—and walked back over the bridge, the way we’d come. My last sight of him, he was talking on the phone with the window rolled down and leaning out, in extravagant clouds of auto fume, to see what was going on with the stalled van ahead.

xiv.

THE SUBSEQUENT HOUR, OR hours, of wandering the canal rings hunting for my hotel were as miserable as any in my life, which is saying something. The temperature had plunged, my hair was wet, my clothes were soaked, my teeth were chattering with cold; the streets were just dark enough that they all looked alike and yet not nearly dark enough to be roaming around in clothes bloodied from a man I’d just killed. Down the black streets I walked, fast, with oddly confident-sounding heel taps, feeling as uneasy and conspicuous as a dreamer wandering naked in a nightmare, staying out of the streetlights and trying hard to reassure myself, with dwindling success, that my inside-out coat looked perfectly normal, nothing unusual about it at all. There were pedestrians on the street, but not many. Afraid of being recognized, I’d removed my glasses since I knew from experience that my glasses were my most distinctive feature—what people noticed first, what people remembered—and though this was unhelpful in terms of finding my way it also gave me an irrational sense of safety and concealment: illegible street signs and fogged streetlamp coronas floating up isolated out of the dark, blurred car lights and holiday tracers, a feeling of being viewed by pursuers with an out-of-focus lens.

What had happened was: I’d overshot my hotel by a couple of blocks. Moreover: I was not used to European hotels where you had to ring to get in after a certain hour, and when at last I splashed up sneezing and bonechilled to find the glass door locked, I stood for some indefinite time rattling the handle like a zombie, back and forth, back and forth, with a rhythmic, locked-in, metronome dumbness, too stupefied with cold to understand why I couldn’t get in. Dismally, through the glass, I gazed through the lobby at the sleek, black desk: empty.

Then—hurrying from the back, startled eyebrows—neat dark-haired man in dark suit. There was an awful flash where his eyes met mine and I realized how I must look, and then he was looking away, fumbling with the key.

“Sorry, sir, we lock the door after eleven,” he said. Still averting his eyes. “It’s for the safety of the customers.”

“I got caught in the rain.”

“Of course, sir.” He was—I realized—staring at the cuff of my shirt, splatted with a browned blood drop the size of a quarter. “We have umbrellas at the desk should you require them.”

“Thanks.” Then, nonsensically: “I spilled chocolate sauce on myself.”

“Sorry to hear that, sir. We’ll be happy to try to get it out in the laundry if you like.”

“That’d be great.” Couldn’t he smell it on me, the blood? In the heated lobby I reeked of it, rust and salt. “My favorite shirt too. Profiteroles.” Shut up, shut up. “Delicious though.”

“Happy to hear it sir. We’ll be happy to book you a table at a restaurant tomorrow night if you like.”

“Thanks.” Blood in my mouth, the smell and taste of it everywhere, I could only hope he couldn’t smell it quite so strongly as me. “That’d be great.”

“Sir?” he said as I was starting off to the elevator.

“Sorry?”

“I believe you need your key?” Moving behind the desk, selecting a key from a pigeonhole. “Twenty-seven, is it?”

“Right,” I said, at once thankful he’d told me my room number and alarmed that he’d known it so readily, off the top of his head.

“Good night sir. Enjoy your stay.”

Two different elevators. Endless hallway, carpeted in red. Coming in, I threw on all the lights—desk lamp, bed lamp, chandelier blazing; shrugged my coat on the floor, and headed straight for the shower, unbuttoning my bloodied shirt as I went, stumbling like Frankenstein’s monster before pitchforks. I wadded the sticky mess of cloth and threw it into the bottom of the bathtub and turned on the water as hard and hot as it would go, rivulets of pink streaming beneath my feet, scrubbing myself with the lily scented bath gel until I smelled like a funeral wreath and my skin was on fire.

The shirt was a loss: brown stains scalloped and splotched at the throat long after the water ran clean. Leaving it to soak in the tub, I turned to the scarf and then the jacket—smeared with blood, though too dark to show it—and then, turning it right side out, as gingerly as I could (why had I worn the camel’s-hair to the party? why not the navy?) the coat. One lapel was not so bad and the other very bad. The wine-dark splash carried a blatting animation that threw me back into the energy of the shot all over again: the kick, the burst, trajectory of droplets. I stuffed it under the tap in the sink and poured shampoo on it and scrubbed and scrubbed with a shoebrush from the closet; and after the shampoo was gone, and the bath gel too, I rubbed bar soap on the spot and scrubbed some more, like some hopeless servant in a fairy tale doomed to complete an impossible task before dawn, or die. At last, hands trembling from fatigue, I turned to my toothbrush and toothpaste straight from the tube—which, oddly enough, worked better than anything I’d tried, but still didn’t do the job.

Finally I gave it up for useless, and hung the coat to drip in the bathtub: sodden ghost of Mr. Pavlikovsky. I’d taken care to keep blood off the towels; with toilet paper, which I compulsively wadded and flushed every few moments, I mopped up, laboriously, the rusty smears and drips on the tile. Taking my toothbrush to the grout. Clinical whiteness. Mirrored walls glittering. Multiple reflecting solitudes. Long after the last tinge of pink was gone, I kept going—rinsing and re-washing the hand towels I’d sullied, which still had a suspicious flush—and then, so tired I was reeling, got in the shower with water so hot I could barely stand it and scrubbed myself down all over again, head to toe, grinding the bar of soap in my hair and weeping at the suds that ran into my eyes.

xv.

I WAS AWAKENED, AT some indeterminate hour, by a bell buzzing loudly at my door which made me leap up as if I’d been scalded. The sheets were tangled and drenched with sweat and the blackout shades were down so I had no idea what time it was or even if it was day or night. I was still half asleep. Throwing on my robe, cracking the door on the chain I said: “Boris?”

Moist-faced, uniformed woman. “Laundry, sir.”

“Sorry?”

“Front desk, sir. They said you asked for laundry pickup this morning.”

“Er—” I glanced down at the doorknob. How, after everything, could I have neglected to put out the Do Not Disturb sign? “Hang on.”

From my case I retrieved the shirt I’d worn to Anne’s party—the one Boris said wasn’t good enough for Grozdan’s. “Here,” I said, passing it to her through the door and then: “Wait.”

Suit jacket. Scarf. Both black. Did I dare? They were wrecked-looking and wet to the touch but when I switched on the desk lamp and examined them minutely—specs on, with my Hobie-trained eye, nose inches from the cloth—no blood to be seen. With a piece of white tissue, I dabbed in several places to see if it came away pink. It did—but only the faintest bit.

She was still waiting and in a way it was a relief, having to hurry: quick decision, no hesitating. From the pockets I retrieved my wallet, the damp-but-amazingly-intact Oxycontin which I’d slipped into my pocket before the de Larmessin party (Did I ever think I’d be grateful for that hard time-release matrix? No) and Boris’s fat glassine envelope before handing suit and scarf over as well.

Closing the door, I was suffused with relief. But not thirty seconds later a murmur of worry crept in, worry which rose to a shrieking crescendo in moments. Snap judgment. Insane. What had I been thinking?

I lay down. I got up. I lay back down and tried to go to sleep. Then I sat up in bed and in a dreamlike rush, unable to help myself, found myself dialing the front desk.

“Yes Mr. Decker, how can I help you?”

“Er—” squeezing my eyes shut tight; why had I paid for the room with a credit card? “I was just wondering—I just sent a suit out to be dry cleaned, and I wonder if it’s still on premises?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you send the laundry out to be done? Or is it done on site?”

“We send it out, sir. The company we use is very reliable.”

“Is there any way you could see if it’s gone out yet? I just realized that I need it for an event tonight.”

“I’ll just check sir. Hang on.”

Hopelessly, I waited, staring at the bag of heroin on the nightstand, which was stamped with a rainbow skull and the word AFTERPARTY. In a moment the desk clerk came back on. “What time will you be needing the suit, sir?”

“Early.”

“I’m afraid it’s already gone out. The truck just left. But our dry cleaning is same-day service. You’ll have it this afternoon by five, guaranteed. Will there be anything more, sir?” he asked, in the silence that followed.

xvi.

BORIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT his dope, how pure it was—pure white, a normal sized bump knocked me cockeyed, so that for an indeterminate interlude I drifted in and out pleasantly on the verge of death. Cities, centuries. In and out I glided of slow moments, delightful, shades drawn, empty cloud dreams and evolving shadows, a stillness like Jan Weenix’s gorgeous trophy pieces, dead birds with bloodstained feathers hanging from a foot, and in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

When the doorbell shrilled into my dreams, hours later, it might have been hundreds of years, I didn’t even flinch. Amiably I got up—swaying happily on air, supporting myself on bits of furniture as I walked—and smiled at the girl in the door: blonde, shy-seeming, offering me my clothes wrapped in plastic.

“Your laundry, Mr. Decker.” As all the Dutch did, or seemed to do, she pronounced my surname “Decca,” as in Decca Mitford, once-upon-a-time acquaintance of Mrs. DeFrees. “Our apologies.”

“What?”

“I hope there’s been no inconvenience.” Adorable! Those blue eyes! Her accent was charming.

“Excuse me?”

“We promised them to you at five p.m. The desk said not to put it on your bill.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” I said, wondering if I should tip her, realizing that money, and counting, was much too much to think about, and then—closing the door, dropping the clothes on the foot of the bed and making my unsteady way to the night table—checked Gyuri’s watch: six-twenty, which made me smile. To contemplate the face-clawing worry the dope had saved me—an hour and twenty minutes of anguish! Frantic, phoning the front desk! envisioning cops downstairs! flooded me with Vedic serenity. Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

Absolutely. Which was why I didn’t fret about the snippy pre-printed note Housekeeping had slid under my door (Dear Guest, we made an attempt to service your room but were unfortunately unable to gain access to…), why I was more than happy to venture into the hall in my bathrobe and waylay the chambermaid with a sinister armload of waterlogged towels—every towel in the room was soaked, I’d rolled my coat in them to help press the water out, pinkish marks on some of them that I hadn’t really noticed before I—fresh towels? Certainly! oh, you forgot your key sir? you’re locked out? Oh, one moment, shall I let you back in? and why, even after that, I didn’t think twice about ordering up from room service, indulgently permitting the bellboy to enter the room and wheel the table right to the foot of the bed (tomato soup, salad, club sandwich, chips, most of which I managed to throw right back up again half an hour later, the pleasantest vomit in the world, so much fun it made me laugh: whoopsy! Best dope ever!) I was sick, I knew it, hours of wet clothes in zero-fahrenheit weather had given me a high fever and chills, and yet I was much too grandly removed from it to care. This was the body: fallible, subject to malady. Illness, pain. Why did people get so worked up about it? I put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase (two shirts, sweater, extra trousers, two pairs of socks) and sat sipping coca-cola from the minibar and—still high and coming down—fell in and out of vivid waking dreams: uncut diamonds, glittering black insects, one particularly vivid dream of Andy, sopping wet, tennis shoes squelching, trailing water into the room behind him something not quite right about him something weird looking little bit off what’s up Theo?

not much, you?

not much hey I heard you and Kits were getting married Daddy told me

cool

yeah cool, we can’t come though, Daddy’s got an event at the yacht club

hey that’s too bad

and then we were going somewhere together Andy and me with heavy suitcases we were going by boat, on the canal, only Andy was like no way am I getting in that boat and I was like sure I understand, so I took apart the sailboat screw by screw, and put the pieces in my suitcase, we were carrying it overland, sails and all, this was the plan, all you had to do was follow the canals and they’d take you right where you wanted to go or maybe just right back where you started but it was a bigger job than I’d thought, disassembling a sailboat, it was different than taking apart a table or chair and the pieces were too big to fit in the luggage and there was a huge propeller I was trying to jam in with my clothes and Andy was bored and off to the side playing chess with someone I didn’t like the looks of and he said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along

xvii.

I WOKE WITH A snap of the head, nauseated and itching all over like ants were crawling under my skin. With the drug leaving my system the panic had roared back twice as strong since clearly I was sick, fever and sweats, no denying it any more. After staggering to the bathroom and throwing up again (this, not a fun junkie throw-up, but the usual misery), I came back in my room and contemplated my suit and scarf in plastic at the foot of the bed and thought, with a shiver, how lucky I was. It had all turned out okay (or had it?) but it mightn’t have.

Awkwardly, I removed suit and scarf from the plastic—the floor underneath me had a drowsy, nautical roll that made me grab for the wall to steady myself—and reached for my glasses and sat on the bed to examine them under the light. The cloth looked worn but otherwise okay. Then again, I couldn’t tell. The cloth was too black. I saw spots, and then I didn’t. My eyes still weren’t working quite right. Maybe it was a trick—maybe if I went down to the lobby I’d find cops waiting for me—but no—beating this thought back—ridiculous. They’d keep the clothes if they’d found anything suspicious on them, wouldn’t they? Certainly they wouldn’t return them pressed and cleaned.

I was still out of the world halfway: not myself. Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss. Ship’s carpentry; deck swaying, and lapping outside, the black canal water. Delirium: unmoored and drifting. Outside, the fog was thick, not a breath of wind, streetlights burning through with a diffuse, haggard, ashen stillness, softened and blurred to haze.

Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish—mental and physical—when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin’s forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and—even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely—the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.