Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 31

19

HER BODY SLID up and down his as they danced, her thighs clamping his. “Let's go,” he said. “The other side.”

She glanced through the silk curtain. “Not here.” The music died and she went to the bar and plucked up a red and yellow apple, bit into it and washed it down with champagne. Her face was still flushed, her body radiated heat.

Neill nodded at the room beyond the silk screen. “Because of him?”

She put the apple down and held him, moving them back out among the dancers, her body so close there seemed no clothes between them.

Up on her toes she kissed him, soft and deep. “Instead we take a drive.”

So many to live with, he thought, so many to love. Her back strong and curvy, a slippery body hot for the rhythms of love. But why, he wondered, does she want me? He could feel her crotch hair against his thigh, through her clothes.

Up the narrow spiral stairs they went into a world of dark red shadows. She had a black lambskin coat and beret, black leather boots, and in the cold air her breath unfurled like a scarf. She got into a Lada, unlocked his door.

Inside it stank of pipe. She started the engine, let it idle while she kissed him, biting his lips, his tongue, teeth against teeth, her fingernails up and down his back. She shoved him away, backed fast down the alley and drove south to an empty wide boulevard curving away from the river. “The road to the Russian base,” she said.

She drove with thighs open, rocking her hips to the touch of his hand. “I could go forever,” she said, “like this.”

“You'll stop before I will.”

“I bet you give up first. Twenty-five dollars.” She swung off on a side road bordered by barbed wire.

“What's this?”

“The short cut to Vinohrady. At night nobody comes here.” She geared down, peering through the windshield, turned left on a gravel track, grass rustling under the car.

At the top of a hill the track widened into a parking lot, rubbish pinned by the wind to the barbed wire round it. She turned off the engine, hands up under his shirt. “I'm going to drive you wild.” She broke away, opened the door. “But first I show you Bratislava!”

“I don't care about Brati-bloody-slava.”

She got out, the dome light blinding him. He got out and shut the door. “You left on the parking lights.”

“Doesn't matter.” Her back to him, she stood looking for stars over the city lights. As he moved toward her she turned and extended her clasped hands at him and he saw the gun. “Back up to the car,” she said. “Turn around.”

He reached up his hands and she fired, the bullet sucking past his ear, the roar crushing his head. “Jesus!” he screamed, holding his head.

“Kneel! There, in front of the light!”

He knelt before one headlight. Against it an insect was splayed, long legs and body. “Please don't –”

“Who are you with?”

“I came alone, I told you!”

“Working with, idiot!”

“I'm a journalist, just going through, not working here.”

“Where to?”

“Damascus.”

“What for?”

“Cover the Middle East. Please don't –”

“Which side are you on?”

“Neither. None of them.”

“If I were Hezbollah I'd shoot you for that. Every dead infidel's one more step up the stairway to Heaven. Especially infidels who come pissing on Mohammed's cloak.” Her voice backed away. “Or the Czechoslovaks – how do they know you're not a spy? If you were hurting their country, what should I do?”

“Take me to the police. See what they say.”

“In Bratislava running to the police is a good way to get killed. You don't have much brains, do you? It wouldn't be a shame to kill you. Get away from the car.”

“Please don't!”

“Begging for your scrawny little life? Relax, I'm not going to shoot you, much as I should. But it's seventeen kilometers' walk back to the city, and that'll give you time to think about how stupid you were to let yourself be doubled to the most dangerous part of town, where you went on some weird stupid impulse, and where you leave in a car with a woman you've never met.”

“I've met you!” He started to rise. “I know your smell.”

“Now you do. But you didn't when you should. When I gave you half a hundred clues. You're thick as a door, mate.”

The Lada revved and he dashed for it but she spun round, spraying sand in his face, and roared back up the dirt track. He fell on his knees, hands clasped on the oily dirt. He jumped up, listening to the car, but it wasn't coming back. He ran to the edge of the hill but could not see its headlights. Beyond the dark hills Bratislava gleamed, evil and unforgiving.

THE SYRIAN GUNS in the Bekaa were firing at Israeli positions south of Sofar, lighting up the midnight sky. Mohammed led his three men out of the olive grove, seeking a silent path over the crunchy leaves. His heart was pounding – with fear or joy, he couldn't tell. The gun felt heavy and perfect in his hand, the night air clean and cold. God's finger truly points through the gun in your hand, he thought. Cleansing the world.

Beyond the olive grove barbed wire gleamed. He waved the men back, cut an opening in the double fence and squirmed through it. If there was a mine, would he have time to know? Paradise, that gleaming city of green grass and lovely women, was it worth death?”

Before him the land rose into barren plateaus and peaks, umber sharp outcrops and boulders lit by the white incandescence of the rocket launchers.

If God hadn't taught us to kill, what good would we be?

THE GIRL WAS PRETENDING to come, jerking her head back and forth, moaning. “Stop it!” André snarled, shoving harder, bunching her up and driving deeper. Maybe she wasn't faking it, this long coming slowly and her teeth in his shoulder and now this wild angry look through the sweaty hair and on her lips a taste of blood – whose? Not yet he wouldn't come, not yet; the girl stretched out beneath him like a ballerina, now hunching up, a ball of clenching flesh, her legs sliding down his, she writhed out straight again, squeezing herself tight, squeezing it out of him.

He pulled himself away, sat up, trying not to gasp. Sweat and semen glistened in the moonlight on his belly, down into the squat hairs.

She slipped into her clothes. Moonlight was like smoke spilled on the floor. In it he could see dust between cracked tiles. “You want me come back?” she said. “Some time?”

“I'm leaving.”

She shut the door softly as she went. Slowly, like a well-trained army, the moonlight moved across the floor, from under the window to the foot of the bed, toward the empty fireplace on the far wall. He went to the window, looking over the tile roofs of many houses and many dreams, to the yellow minaret of Hala Sultan mosque and the silvery sea beyond, and there seemed to descend over it all an almost holy blessing.

He pulled his bag from the cupboard and sat naked on the floor in the moonlight, dismantling and reassembling the Jericho, first eyes open, then closed, till by fingertip he knew instantly the touch of every part, the way each joined the others, until each bullet slipped by itself into the clip and the clip into the gun. Until it came together by itself.

Like this trip, which was disjointed and haphazard at the start and now was beginning to come together by itself. The closer it got, the stranger it was. That he should do this. Or that he should have waited so long. Wrong, what they said. Vengeance should be right away, not cold. Unless you make him live in fear. Unless he knows you're coming but doesn't know how or when.

But this guy doesn't know.

André had waited too long, got too cold, let his anger die. The hatred and pain. No, the pain was still there. But now it was a decision, not a response. A cold decision.

Here, now, was part of the process, talking himself into coming this far. Knowing that once he'd got this far he'd talk himself into going further. Until finally, the whole thing united before him, almost happened by itself.

On his hand were the smells of gun oil and the girl's vagina: out of this we come, he thought, and into it.

He put the gun away and stood at the window watching the moon's phosphorescence on the waves, the mosque with its minaret draped in green lights, the grim black fort, the play of cloud shadows on the gray-green sea, the mast lights of three ships lying at anchor outside the port. Beyond the bay were the refinery lights, then the city trailing into darkness eastward toward Famagusta, the famous Famagusta the Turks had taken in '74 and still held. Cyprus like Beirut was cut in half, east and west, people hungry to kill on both sides of the line.

“Yes,” the surf sighed, falling on the sand, “yes,” sliding back to rise and fall again. “Yes...”

The moon slid down the west, yellowed, reddened, and sank among the houses. Slowly, slowly its light faded up the wall, seeming to take him with it when it narrowed to nothing and slipped into the night.