Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Francine rests her face against her husband’s shoulder. “Is that the poorly one?” she asks. Her voice is husky and a little strained, as it often is by Friday evening, at the end of a week of speaking loudly and firmly to a nursery class. “Let me rub your poorly shoulder. Let me rub it better.” She’s talking to a four-year-old.

Leonard has not recognized what she intends for him, not yet. He thinks, She’s acting tired, she looks and sounds exhausted. Perhaps she won’t be pleased that he has presumed to book a table at Wilbury’s and would rather take it easy at home, read, have an early night. Perhaps he ought to phone and cancel, then she can rest and he can waste another evening chasing bulletins, up till late, alone with the telescreen and his anxieties, enslaved, while Francine sleeps upstairs with hers.

Today’s events have panicked him. He’s trembling. But Francine thinks his trembling is caused by her. She nuzzles him. She turns her mouth to his. Soon their different troubles have been largely set aside for a short while, while she unbuckles him and he unfastens her and, fused at the chin and nose, they negotiate a stumbling way into the darkened living room and fall onto the futon, where finally – it’s been too many weeks – they satisfy a less-than-childish fantasy that does not require a passion for the Spanish Civil War. They imagine making love while they are doing it. They cast themselves as lovers in a film, a hero and a heroine. And no, she’s not too tired when it is over to shower quickly, blow-dry her hair, and apply – while Leonard, who has fixed their tonic aperitifs, watches from the bedroom chair – more lively makeup than that morning’s and a splash of scent. She selects an outfit that she knows pleases him, a boxy emerald jacket and a straight black skirt. At once she looks less businesslike and less child-resistant than she did on her return from work. She finds a flattering silk scarf and tries out jewelry, turning to her husband and then the mirror for approval.

“Well?” she asks, giving a twirl, like a teenager.

“You always look beautiful,” he says.

“Oh, yes? That’s the tonic talking.”

“I’ve only had a sip.”

“It only takes a sip at our age. Come on, then, you – let’s stagger down to dinner. I’m starving. I could eat a plate of wood.”

“Would that be medium or bleu, madam?”

They walk the kilometer to Wilbury’s arm in arm. A decent autumn night, with stars. They’ll do their best when they are seated at their corner table in the restaurant, intimate and slightly drunk, waiting for their vegetarian options to be plated and brought out, to put a brave face on their worlds, their private, inner, hidden worlds, not to express or share how anxious they are still, or why. So this Friday finishes, and Leonard’s decade finishes, at peace, an anxious, loving, troubled, transitory peace.

8

LEONARD LESSING IS FIFTY YEARS OLD AT LAST. As usual on a Saturday, he is the first to wake, but even he has slept much later than usual. It is a minute or two before nine. His stomach at once feels bloated with worry, but that is not unusual lately; this waking anxiety from dreams he cannot quite recall can last all day. He’s used to it. The first heavy thought that burdens him consciously is that he has not yet discovered any details of Lucy’s “kidnapping.” The second, troubling in its own way, is that today is his birthday and that he will be obliged to socialize. There will be plans for him. Plans and traps. A dinner party, probably. He’ll be too unsettled to entertain or be entertaining unless he tidies up his life a bit. If he’s quick he can be downstairs in time to watch the news headlines and also check his mailbox for any reply from the girl he dare not think of as anyone but Swallow. He will need to be careful not to disturb Francine. If he is heavy on the mattress or tugs the duvet too carelessly, she will wake, and then she will want him to stay where he is so that she, for once, can prepare breakfast for him in bed. She can be the waitress. He can be the guest. And then she’ll want to sit with him while he drinks his tea and opens the presents and cards she will have wrapped for him. Possibly they will make love again. High days and holidays, and anniversaries.

Leonard rolls over, transferring his weight as gently as he can, and slips quietly out of bed. The floor and air are wintry. Beyond the curtains, the sky is still dull, but the patio and garden show lustrous and satiny. The first frost of the year. But Leonard does not rummage for a sweater or a dressing gown. He steals out of the room, bare-chested and wearing only his snooza shorts, wraps a towel around his shoulders, and descends into the hall, where there are already several birthday cards waiting on the mat, together with circulars, and leaflets for a takeaway. Just at the moment when he stoops to gather them, a shadow falls across the door window. Someone rings the bell and, just for good measure, raps the knocker too. He expects it is a birthday delivery of some kind. But when he straightens with a handful of letters and leaflets and reaches for the lock handle, he sees at once through the brittled glass that there are several people standing on his porch. Large men. Instead of opening and answering, he goes into the little dressing room where he and Francine keep their bikes and coats, kneels on the floor, and pulls back one slat of the blind a centimeter or so.

Three men at least. Not anyone he knows by sight. There might be others farther along the path, hidden by the shrubbery. Certainly there’s movement. Shapes and shadows. Probably they are salesmen of some kind, cold-callers or political canvassers, or, given the numbers, some evangelical church group, and he will be required to stand on his front mat, half clothed and shivering, and account for his energy and Internet preferences, or his party and voting affiliations, or his expectations of paradise. If he stays still and out of sight for a minute or so, then surely they will take the hint and go away.

Leonard sits with his back to the wall, his head below the sill. He can’t be seen, he’s sure of it. This is a tried and tested hiding place that over the years has saved him from encounters with tiresome neighbors, charity volunteers, and unexpected friends. He’s becoming homophobic, Francine says: “Homo sapiens, that is.” He flexes his shoulders and neck. He studies his naked toes. He runs a finger down the front forks of his street bike and promises himself that he will ride it more often, just as soon as his shoulder repairs. The doorbell rings again, more heavily, and someone is rapping with keys or a metal pen on the dressing room window. Evidently Leonard’s flipping of the blind was noticed. The callers know his name as well. One of the men has his forehead pressed against the pane and is repeating, “Mr. Lessing, sir, please come to the door.”

Reluctantly, Leonard starts to stand. He knows that practiced tone of voice. But Francine is in the hall before him, barefoot, in her crumpled linen nightie, and is already pulling at the lock before she spots her husband rising to his feet. “What on earth—?” she says, though Leonard is not clear if that is aimed at him – his cowering, his seminakedness – or at their visitors, who, once the lock is sprung, are pushing back the door and, unlike the most determined salesmen, canvassers, or evangelists, entering the hall uninvited. And without wiping their feet. The first of them, a casually dressed man in his early thirties with a two-day growth of reddish beard, holds up his ID fob. “NADA,” he says, the misleadingly feminine and cozy – unless you’re Spanish – acronym for the National Defense Agency, not quite the police, not quite the SAS. The second and the third are older men, plump and neat and, it is clear at once, more polite, though both are evidently carrying handguns under their jackets. They could be brothers, except that one has a local accent and the other is a Scotsman. They show their own IDs – regular police officers – and hold up a printed document with the house address written out in heavy ink at the top. It’s a search and entry warrant, they explain.

“Why’s that?” asks Francine.

“Mrs. Lessing?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

They’ve come for Francine, Leonard thinks. It’s all to do with her. His body blushes with relief, a little guiltily. What has she done? Or what has happened at her school? A kid’s been hurt, perhaps. Didn’t she mention some incident the other day? A broken arm? Then, suspecting worse, his body blushes cold again. Three officers – and now he sees another one in uniform standing at the outer gate – is quite a force. Something personal and certainly more tragic than a broken arm must have happened for so weighty a response. It’s Celandine, he thinks. There’s no one else. And as he thinks it, Francine thinks the same. She almost sinks onto the ground; her face is instantly as white and crumpled as her nightie. “Is it Celandine?” she says, talking to the older men. “Has something happened to our girl?”

“Who’s Celandine?” the NADA agent asks.

“My daughter. Celandine Sickert.”

“How old’s she?”

“She’s only twenty.”

“Is she at home?”

“She went away … last year.”

“Where is she now?” His tone is browbeating.

“Do youknow where she is?”

He does not even shake his head, but turns to his two colleagues and says, “So let’s get on with it.”

“Get on with what?” Leonard feels he ought to speak, and firmly. These are Franco’s men. “This is not acceptable,” he says, with as much dignity as a shivering man in his underclothes can display. “This is a family home. My wife has not done anything, I’m sure. Make a proper appointment if you must. You could at least have wiped your feet. In fact, you ought to take your shoes off at the door like any other visitors.” He wags a finger at the costly floor timbers – British cherrywood – and shakes his head, though there’s not a mark on them.

“This is not a social call,” the young one says.

“It certainly is not.”

“Can we suggest you pop into your living room, the pair of you, and give us twenty minutes?” the Scotsman says, attempting a smile but already spreading his arms and herding them toward the door of the teleroom. “Sit there.” He points toward the futon. “We’ll not be long. If all is well.”

“Can we at least dress ourselves?”

“No, sir. Stay exactly where you are.”

“I’m cold.” Leonard regrets admitting it at once. It has made him sound too timorous and frail. Foolish fragile feeble flimsy frail, he thinks.

The Scotsman puts a reassuring, warning hand on Leonard’s upper arm. Bare skin. “We’ll not be long,” he promises.

“I also have a shoulder condition.” Leonard winces at the policeman’s touch, more from embarrassment and cold than any honest pain.

They are not long. But they are noisy. Francine and Leonard listen to the thump of feet on the floorboards above, the unlocking of cupboards and the slamming of doors, the rolling open of drawers. They hear the scrabble of a dog, and finally see it, a rangy, heavy-hipped Alsatian, with its handler, first on the patio, picking up the scent of cats, and then tugging on its lead toward the little outbuilding and the garbage trolleys. The Scotsman has not left the room. He’s minding them, but he has the good manners not to stare directly at them as they sit, with four bare knees, four bare arms, and their nightclothes. He does, though, study Francine, watching her reflection in the window glass. He can smell, as Leonard can, the sleep on her, the loose ends of the perfume she used the night before. He has every reason to admire her legs and hair. He does not turn when she and her husband start whispering. “I’ll ask you not to talk. Just yet. If you don’t mind,” he says, and then adds – requiring no reply and not inferring any approval either—“Interesting place you’ve got.” By interesting, he means eccentric and suspicious.

Within thirty minutes they are done. The policeman with the local accent puts his head round the living room door and tells his colleague, “Not a sign. We’re clean,” and Francine and Leonard are thanked for their patience and asked to go upstairs – without a minder – and to dress. “What’s going on?” they ask each other, as soon as they are out of earshot and pulling on the first clothes they can find in their disordered bedroom.

“It’s something to do with you, I think,” Leonard says. “With school?”

“You think it’s Celandine?”

“It isn’t Celandine. They haven’t even heard of Celandine. That isn’t it.”

“What, then? What do you think they’re looking for?”

He shrugs. “Search me. Whatever it is, we haven’t got it, have we? Or they haven’t found it.” Some kind of error, they decide. Some farcical blunder.

“The wrong address entirely?” Francine suggests.

“They have your name. They called you Mrs. Lessing, didn’t they? They do know who you are.”

Their house has almost emptied. Only the NADA agent remains. When Leonard and Francine return downstairs, ready to demand explanations, he is standing in the living room, studying the row of historic framed jazz posters on the wall – old concert programs signed and personalized for Leonard by Carla Bley, Dave Douglas, and Natty “the Gnat” Nicolson, an older generation of jammers.

“Play an instrument?” he asks, addressing neither of them in particular and not waiting for an answer. He stabs his finger at the folder he is holding. “Everything is here,” he says. “The tenor saxophone, yes?” and he looks up, smiling, much amused, it seems. “Happy birthday, Mr. Lessing. It’s today. Correct?”

“Some birthday,” Leonard says.

“Apologies if we have spoiled the festivities. Some questions, though. Then I’ll hope to leave the two of you in peace.” He flashes his photo fob and agent ID for a second time but holds them steady, requiring Leonard and Francine to verify the details. His name, Leonard is unnerved to read, is Rollins, though Simon rather than Sonny. He pulls his folder open and holds up a photograph. “Do either of you know, have either of you seen, this girl?”

“No idea,” says Francine, spreading her hands and fingers as if to say, Enough of this.

Leonard takes a half step forward. Puts a hand out. “Let me see,” he says. He knows the face at once. It’s clearly Lucy Emmerson, aged about fourteen and not yet sexy and theatrical but puppy-plump and bored. The hair, though, is unmistakable, already thick and piled. He holds her portrait with both hands, because he’s shaking slightly. Not Francine, then. He’s the one they’ve come for. It’s about the “kidnapping.” Why had he ever doubted it? He makes his mind up straightaway. This photo’s three or four years old, an imperfect likeness. He can lie about it if he wants. It’s best not to volunteer any information but to stay his hand. There’s nothing on his conscience, nothing illegal anyway. Whatever they have found to link him to this girl’s disappearance cannot be against the law, unless buying alcohol for a minor or driving with wine in his bloodstream is a serious enough crime to warrant the attentions of so many men. This is just routine, he suspects. Heavy-handed and routine. Someone, maybe Nadia, has mentioned his long-past connection with Maxie. The police are simply checking, as they should, given that they must believe this kidnapping is genuine. He will not betray his new young friend. He owes her that.

“It isn’t Celandine, that’s for sure,” he says.

“You’ve never spoken to this girl? Lucy Katerina Emmerson. Either of you?” He lets them shake their heads before turning to another printout sheet. “Then please explain the phone log that I have for calls made and received within the past forty-eight hours by phones registered to you. Thursday night, ten-seventeen p.m.: a male using your cell, Mr. Lessing, calls Lucy Emmerson’s grandfather, seeking her home number. Ten twenty-eight p.m.: a male using your cell, Mr. Lessing, speaks to Lucy’s mother, claiming to have located her stolen bike—”

“What is this, Leonard? Is this you?” Francine has whitened again.

“The same male also talks with Lucy herself, according to her mother. More about the bike, she thinks. Friday, nine-oh-two a.m., that’s only yesterday: Lucy Emmerson calls this same number, Mr. Lessing, from her own handset. That conversation lasts, let’s see, for thirteen minutes. There’s more.” He smiles again. Rollins is warming to his task. “Five thirty-six p.m., last evening. Somebody, could be anyone who has access to your handset, Mr. Lessing, reaches this young woman’s answer service but, in spite of being invited to ‘do what you have to do,’ chooses not to leave a message. Two minutes later, five thirty-eight p.m., a man using your cell again, Mr. Lessing, speaks to Miss Emmerson’s grandfather at the family home. And that conversation lasts for just four seconds. Though long enough for us to make a note of it—”

“Bravo,” says Leonard.

“Now, let me show another face to you.” He does not even hold it up for Francine but hands it immediately to Leonard. It’s Maxim Lermontov, a recent formal photograph with a police detention tag attached to it and a committal number. “Ring any bells with you?”

“It’s the guy who’s taken hostages.”

“Know him personally?”

“Used to. Once. Long time ago.”

“Seen him recently?”

“Haven’t seen him since, oh, 2006.”

“Been in touch in any other ways?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Final warning. What do those words mean to you?”

“They mean what they mean in plain English.”

“But otherwise?”

“A protest group. A violent protest group.”

“How would you know that, Mr. Lessing?”

“From the television. On the news. Yesterday. I watch the news. I keep myself informed.”

The NADA agent shakes his head. “This makes no sense to me,” he says, and chins a smile at Francine as if to ask if thismakes any sense to her. He shows he’s happy when she shakes her head. “Your wife is mystified.”

“Explain,” she says. Either one of you, she means.

“What do we have?” Rollins continues, turning now to Francine as he might to a baffled colleague for help. “We have a girl your husband says he’s never met or spoken to, and yet some male has used his phone to contact her or someone in her family – what?” He turns to his folder, quickly counts the log. “Five times at least. Five times that we know of. We have a hostage situation thanks to a guy armed to the teeth, a guy who’s been a friend of your husband, a guy we’ve been informed by Lucy’s mother was someone Mr. Lessing here was involved with”—he checks his paper once again—“in Austin, Texas. Snipers Without Bullets.” He turns to Leonard again. “Is that you?”

“It was. For about two days. Eighteen years ago. This is very tenuous.”

“Possibly.”

“Then wouldn’t you be better off arresting burglars?”

The young man nods and closes his folder. He’s looking less amused. “Better watch the old blood pressure, Mr. Lessing. Deep breaths are called for, don’t you think? Might well be sensible. Let’s leave it there for the moment, shall we? Unless there is something helpful you can contribute.”

Leonard takes a calculated risk. “I haven’t wanted to mention it to anyone, but it’s true, Lucy Emmerson and I have been in touch. Once in a while. Over the years,” he says. “I’m like her kind of unofficial godfather. So obviously I tried to talk to her by phone when all this stuff blew up with Maxie. That’s all there is to it.”

“Mr. Lessing, let’s be straight with each other before I go and before it’s too late. You understand the penalties, I’m sure, for withholding information in security matters, for wasting police time.”

“You’re wasting our time, that’s the truth of it.”

“Mr. Lessing, people’s lives are in danger here, not just the girl’s. This is serious. This is perilous. This is what we need to know. Your final chance. Can you throw any light, any light at all, on the whereabouts of Lucy Katerina Emmerson? Or who it is that’s taken her?”

It’s true, it’s mostly true, what Leonard says. “I haven’t got the foggiest.”

THE HOUSE WILL HAVE TO WAIT, Francine says, when her “fathomless” husband starts slamming drawers and fretting about the disarray – open cupboards, piles of clothes and bedding – that the officers, like teenagers, have left in their home. “Leave it, leave it, leave it,” she insists, making him sit on the futon in front of a muted telescreen – pushing him, even – while she remains standing, her arms crossed, being heavily patient as if she is dealing with a bulky infant. Leave it, she means, until her anger has subsided. Leave it until she knows how big this problem is. “Now talk. No bullshit either, Birthday Boy.”

He tells her almost everything: his failure on Wednesday evening to pass on information to the authorities, his surreptitious Thursday visit to the hostage house, the talk, the drink, the cigarettes with Lucy Emmerson, her genius idea, his loss of nerve, his Friday decoy visit to the woods, the log of phone calls that of course have been so simple for the police to trace. “Such amateurs,” Francine says, still standing. She doesn’t mean the police. “You know what maddens me the most, Leonard?” He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to know. “It’s not the lies. It’s not your secrecy. God knows I’m used to that. You think I care anymore? It’s that you never even offered me the chance.”

“I was protecting you,” he says, not really knowing what he means by it.

“Protecting me from what? Another one of your backdowns? Protecting me from offering an opinion, from saying, ‘Yes, let’s have her here, your little hush-hush goddaughter. Let’s help this poor girl reach her father in some way, let’s all do what we can to put an end to this monstrous nonsense with the hostages in Cedarbeech—’”

“Alderbeech.”

“Protecting me from making you do something ill-advised for once, not rational, not sensible? You weren’t protecting me. You were protecting you!”

“You wouldn’t have wanted me to go ahead with it. Would you?”

“I would have wanted you either to call the police and tell them what you knew or to … to … arghh.”Here she tightens her fists, knuckles up, and shakes them at Leonard. “I would have loved you for it, actually.”

“If I’d brought Lucy here?”

“Of course, of course, of course. What do you take me for?” She brings a fist down on her open palm. It always quiets the class. “Right now I’d really like to beat you up.”

The worst is over. No one’s hurt. Francine and Leonard are sitting side by side on the futon – not touching, though, and for the moment preferring to listen to the television newscaster rather than face each other anymore. The news blackout has been relaxed, it seems. Whereas yesterday live coverage from Alderbeech was rationed and controlled, today the wraps are off. The UK station that they settle on provides a menu for the hostage scene: Background, Security Briefing, Mother’s Plea, Latest Developments. They open the last of these. It is “the standoff’s fourth tense day” already. A routine has been established. Here are St. John Ambulance Brigade officers, stripped of shoes and coats, delivering yet more pizzas for the hostages and the uncooked food and unopened tins and bottles that the hostage-takers have required. Here are helicopters “standing by” for reasons that are not specified. Here again are photographs of the three suspects, not just Maxie now. An international brigade.

The female that Leonard once suspected could be an undiminished Nadia Emmerson has been identified as a mixed-race Filipina called Dorothy Paredes, known as Donut. In one photograph, she is still a pretty student with faculty colleagues at a Chinese restaurant. Christmas 2013. She’s smiling, just a little tipsy, with her arms around the shoulders of two pixelated men, one of whom is tugging at her ponytail of sleek black hair. A later photograph, released this morning by Interpol, shows a thinner woman with cuts and bruising to her lips and cheeks. Her jaw is swollen and her hair is cropped. The second man, an older, grizzled-looking Nicaraguan thought to be Donut’s lover, is Tony Ramirez, also known as Rafaelo Matamoros and, less convincingly, Pancho Mancha. Both are “wanted on four continents” and both are “unpredictable.”

There is also a picture of the hostages: another Christmas shot with a laden table, bottles, candles, and a turkey; four seated and delighted carnivores twisting to face the camera in the dining room of the hostage house ten months ago; and the slightly out-of-focus image of a half-crouching man who has evidently just arrived in the shot after setting up the camera on automatic delay. His mouth is hanging open breathlessly, not quite ready for the grin. The others are holding up their knives and forks in front of cheesy smiles: two boys of seven and nine years of age, their faces partly concealed; a middle-aged woman with heavy earrings – that day’s gift, perhaps – and thin sandy hair, scraped back beneath a paper hat; an older, white-haired woman whose wedding ring on her thin hand catches and reflects the camera flash.

Leonard punches his way between the various reports, hardly daring to speak other than to make a muttered comment at the screen, until he finds the information that they need, the latest word on Lucy Emmerson. The girl has simply disappeared, they say. Her disappearance was not planned: she has not packed a bag, taken any clothes or toiletries, or withdrawn her savings from the bank. Her tobacco pouch, her purse, and her cell phone have been discovered in her room. The police are in possession of a ransom note “with detailed threats” that links her kidnapping to events at the hostage house and to the suspect now unequivocally identified as Maxim Lermontov. The police do not specify what threats, but they are concerned for her safety. They do not say that she is Maxie’s daughter. They do say that raids are being carried out today on “suspect premises.”

“That’s us,” says Francine, almost pleased.

Finally, under the menu selection titled Mother’s Plea, Francine and Leonard find themselves observing a room crowded with journalists and film crews. Two senior policemen, a female community liaison officer, and Nadia Emmerson make their way across the screen to take their places behind a trestle table.

“It’s the mother,” Leonard says, though she is not the woman that he knew. How could she be? It’s eighteen years. What had he seen in her? he wonders. “My God, she’s changed. I’d walk right past her in the street.” But Francine shushes him and edges forward on the futon.

Nadia Emmerson looks dazed. Her face is stained and shiny, stressed and tight with tears and sleeplessness. The liaison officer nods and puts her hand on Nadia’s arm to a salvo of flashes from the cameras. Nadia’s shoulders drop to field a sob. Another salvo catches her. But still she finds enough courage and willpower to start reading her statement and her plea, not looking at the cameras but at the tabletop. “If you are watching this,” she says to Lucy’s kidnappers, “then please don’t think I do not understand why …” But then her throat clogs up with queuing sobs, and try as she might, for awkward moments she cannot summon the breath to continue. The words, written out in capitals on the paper in front of her, are beyond speech. In fact, she does not have the strength to stay a moment more. She stumbles out of the room, to a final, heartless fusillade of flash. The liaison officer has to carry on for her and read the paragraphs in her flat, measured voice, picking up exactly where Lucy’s mother left off: “Mrs. Emmerson says, ‘I do not understand why you have carried out this act. You hope it will stop violence in some way. But you have threatened violence yourself. Against my little girl. She’s only seventeen. I beg you, let my little girl come home.’”

“Well, Birthday Boy, my undeserving Birthday Boy,” Francine says, rising to switch off the screen, then standing at the window to glare at the retreating frost, “what are you going to do?”

“For my birthday?” Leonard sees too late that her eyes are glistening.

“No, you idiot. You selfish bloody idiot. What are you going to do about that?” She throws a cushion at the darkened screen. “What are you going to do for that woman, that mother? Did you hear her at all? Did you look at her? Who gives a damn about your birthday now?”

“What am I supposed to do? You tell me.”

“You might at least pretend to care. That’d be a start.”

“I care. Of course I care.”

“Well, care enough for once to get up off your arse and act on it. What’s happening?” Leonard spreads his hands and shrugs. “My God, to think I found you brave and dangerous when I first saw you in Brighton, at that concert.”

“Please, Frankie, cut it out.”

“What, it’s too painful to hear the truth? You were playing like a madman on that night, like a demon, even. Live. I might not have wanted the recording, but I sure wanted the man. That’s the truth. What I couldn’t guess back then was that the jazz was the only thing about you that wasn’t”—she hesitates—“decaf.”

“Well, that was then,” he says feebly. Her truth has wounded him.

“What’s weird is that you don’t seem to give a damn what people think when you’re playing, at a gig. But when you’re not onstage, that’s all you care about, all that English blush and stutter that you do. Don’t cause a fuss, don’t give offense, don’t make a noise, don’t show it when you’re angry or upset—”

“I’m getting upset now.”

“Well, good.”

“I have to be a demon onstage, no choice,” he says finally, doing his best to miss her point. Decaf? It is a dreadful word. “That’s what a jazzman has to do, to survive the gig.” Jazz is a refuge from a hazardous world, he wants to say. It’s not a hazard in itself. He is not courageous when he’s playing, not mad and not demonic, just lessfrightened. He’s Lennie Less Frightened, mapping out a landscape of his own making where it is not truly risky to take risks. “It isn’t me. It’s just an act. The music makes me brave.”

“Let’s have some music, then, Captain Braveheart.”

THEY’LL TAKE THE BUZZ 900, Francine’s hybrid runabout. They dare not use the roomier and faster van. They have, she says, quick to enjoy the subterfuge, to keep below the radar. It’s probable that Leonard is still being monitored – his phone, his Internet use and e-mail account, his vehicle, at the very least. Perhaps that’s why he’s not been taken in for questioning despite the flimsy and unsatisfactory explanations he offered for his phone calls to Lucy. The police and NADA might hope he’ll lead them to the girl, the place where she is being kept. It’s possible their house is bugged. It’s possible the van is tagged. But the Buzz is a community pool car, not registered in either of their names. “Let’s go,” she says, “before you duck out of it.” He finishes dressing, though he hasn’t showered yet, or shaved, or even found time to locate his spectacles in the clutter of their bedroom.