Death and Other Lovers Read online

  Wylie was a mercenary. War was his trade. He had learned it as an American soldier in the closing phase of the Vietnam adventure, had refined it in covert operations in South American jungles, had finally faced the choice of serving in the make-believe world of a peace-time army or getting out and finding some real battles to fight. Once he had thought of it in those terms it was no contest. Now he ran his own army.

  Of the four men who might seek his death, Wylie was the only one Flynn reckoned to know in any degree personally. It might have been the shared nationality, or the three months he spent with Wylie’s group in Africa which gave him the chance to talk to this tough, hard, infinitely professional man as he had not with the others. But there was another element too, and Flynn suspected that it was something as much in him as in Wylie. They had things in common, not so much experiences as attitudes. The way they worked, the way they lived, were not that dissimilar.

  A casual observer would not have seen it. There were thirteen years, a generation, between them, the compact, intense violenthearted man and the long-limbed footloose photographer with his kind eyes and his wicked grin. Wylie dealt in death, Flynn strictly in dollars. Flynn swore constantly and foully and it meant nothing. Wylie almost never raised his voice, but his displeasure was so abrasive it flayed the skin and drew blood.

  But Flynn sensed what, having no particular skill with words, he could not describe: that he and Wylie were fellow-travellers on the same current of time and events, exiles mostly by choice with no allegiances and no master under a god neither of them believed in. Both sold their services where need, inclination and an ability to pay were conjoined. Neither paid even lip-service to the conventional morality that condemned them, yet neither was without a morality of his own. Flynn would not sell his camera, and found that Wylie would not sell his guns, where only the money was attractive. Wylie was a man who made almost a religion of being unlikeable; but Flynn liked him and found much to admire in him, and came finally to respect him, which was harder.

  At the end of his time with Wylie, Flynn returned to London. They had arranged that he would publish nothing until the opening shots had been fired in the small war which Wylie was preparing for. It was always Flynn’s intention to abide by that. But when news came through of a fire-fight on the border between government forces and alleged ivory poachers, Flynn assumed it was the signal he was waiting for and called the magazine he had sold the pictures to and told them to print.

  Before the first copies reached London he knew he had made a mistake, that the alleged poachers were poachers indeed and Wylie was still manoeuvring his forces into position. The next he heard Wylie had been taken prisoner.

  For ten days Flynn dwelt in an agony of guilt and horrid imaginings. He had spent long enough with the mercenaries to have learned something about this particular cashew republic, and what he had learned left him with no illusions as to its policy on human rights. That was one reason there were enough disaffected citizens to pay for professional help to overthrow their government.

  Then word came out of fighting in the streets of the capital. The revolt had begun, the partisan forces organised and led by the mercenary army under the command of Wylie’s lieutenant. The government must have thought itself safe for as long as they had the rebels’leader, and were wrong-footed by the attack, coming long enough after Wylie’s capture for them to have relaxed and not long enough for them to have realised that a professional army which puts its own interests before those of the paying customers quickly runs out of paying customers.

  By the time the government troops were mobilized the rebels had seized the power-station, the radio-station, the airport and the main armoury. Fighting continued all that day and throughout the night, but it was increasingly a rearguard action by government forces attempting to safeguard a negotiating position for their political masters. But the partisans had scented victory and were not interested in negotiating. Government House fell at dawn on the second day, and all remaining government installations were ceded to them by noon. Including the prison.

  When Flynn learned that Wylie had been taken from the prison alive he tried desperately to obtain more information. But he could not get into the country—all flights had been cancelled and land borders closed—and when he tried to contact the new regime all he got was a message from Wylie’s lieutenant saying, “Haven’t you done enough?”

  Flynn never succeeded in speaking to Wylie. He wrote explaining what had happened but had no way of knowing if the letter reached him; certainly Wylie never wrote back. But five months later Wylie was commanding his small army in a promising little war in Central America, and Flynn inferred that he must have recovered from whatever abuse he had received during his ten days of captivity.

  But Flynn remained deeply uneasy about how his actions must have seemed to Wylie and his men. Some sins he was quite happy to have attributed to him, but betrayal was not one of them. He had respected Wylie, and would have liked his respect in return. After all that had happened, it seemed an optimistic ambition. Even more, he would have chosen to avoid Wylie’s enmity. He suspected that Wylie’s enemies slept as lightly and woke as nervously as turkeys in the first three weeks of December.

  Then there was Fahad.

  Very little of what happened to Fahad’s organisation was Flynn’s fault, but he doubted if Fahad saw it that way. The Israel Defence Forces had used Flynn, without his knowledge—he was about the last man involved in the operation, on either side, to find out—to infiltrate the Palestinian base Fahad had established in the desert by the Dead Sea.

  When the IDF cleared it out, everyone there was either captured or killed. Except Fahad. His bomb expert was serving a life sentence. His chief of staff was dead. An entire intake of PFLP recruits, young Palestinian men and women come to him for training, together with those there to train them, had been lost to the intifada. Jamil Fahad’s escape left him a general without an army.

  Flynn knew that Fahad had intended to kill him at one time. It would come as no surprise to learn that he still did. The timing was a little odd. It was three years since the episode at Bab el Jihad: if Fahad had wanted vengeance for it, why had he waited so long? Of course, the first year Flynn would have been harder to get at. He was a prosecution witness at trials not only in Israel but also in Holland, and the assorted police involved were keeping a more than just friendly eye on him.

  And after that he had moved around a lot. Perhaps Fahad would have tried for him then if he could have found him. New York, Nebraska, Mexico, Peru; the Obregon episode up and down the eastern states; at other times he was in Australia, in the Mediterranean where he caught up with Loriston, and in Africa for three months with Wylie’s mercenaries.

  He had only been back in England four months. Perhaps this was the first time he had stayed put long enough for Fahad to do something about him. After three years he had thought he was safe enough slowing down. It looked as if he had been wrong.

  Inspector Ford gave a long low whistle. He looked impressed but not in the least envious. “You fairly get around, don’t you?”

  “It seemed like a good idea. Maybe I should have kept it up longer.”

  “And any of these four could hate you enough to want to—”

  “To incinerate my girlfriend. Yes. But I don’t know that any of them did.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Flynn considered, shook his head helplessly. “Maybe. Maybe someone who took something I did more seriously than I thought. But I don’t know who.”

  “OK,” said Ford. “Well, we’ll get to work on it, see what we can find out.” He fingered the intercom. “How’s the PhotoFit coming?”

  “We’ve got one decent likeness,” said a man’s voice. “Shall I bring it in?”

  It was more than a decent likeness, it was a picture of a man Flynn knew. He let his eyes close and his head rocked back. Then he drew a deep breath. “Fahad,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  By the time the poli
ce had finished with Flynn and Laura, the Fire Brigade had finished with the apartment so they went back there. Laura was more than uneasy, practically needed dragging up the stairs. Flynn could have left her in the car but he felt in his bones that, even if she never set foot in the place again, she needed to go back once. So he half cajoled, half bullied her into going up with him.

  The smell of wet soot was everywhere, so pervasive that even the winos had moved out for the moment. The stone steps were greasy with it. They went carefully to avoid falling. Laura was resigned now to returning, but still her hand clutched Flynn’s tightly like an anxious child and on every corner her steps lagged so that he had to tug her gently along in his wake.

  The forensic people had locked the steel door when they left. Flynn opened it, hardly knowing what to expect, from some nasty scorching to total devastation.

  It was bad enough but it could have been worse. All the furniture was burnt beyond repair, all the windows blown out, the carpets charred in black drifts and soggy all over, some of the floorboards beneath in need of replacement. But structurally the building seemed to have escaped serious damage. The fire-engines had arrived in time to save the roof, and those stout Victorian walls would take more than a little fire to bring them tumbling down. When the insurance came through, the place could be made habitable again.

  But not by tonight, or the weekend, or the end of the month; and even if he could have got the work done that quickly Flynn doubted it would have been a good idea. Until the police found Fahad, or at least knew he had left the country, it was only asking for an encore to move back here with Laura.

  In fact, he did not think he could go anywhere with Laura now. Not until this thing was resolved. He could not expose her to that kind of danger, that kind of fear. In the wet sooty ruins of his home, with nothing to sit on, he tried to explain.

  “The man who came here, the older one. He’s been waiting three years for the chance to—hurt me. It isn’t coincidence that you’d just moved in here. He must have been watching since I got back, looking for some way of getting at me. It wasn’t enough to kill me, he could have done that before now—he wanted to kill someone I care about. If we stay together, wherever we go, however careful we are, he’ll try again. We have to split up. Go away; and don’t even tell me where you’re going.”

  Laura Wade was a beautiful woman. She was very tall and straight, with long strong expressive hands. She had broad shoulders and narrow hips, and a long slender column of throat that ended under her pointed chin. Her eyes were the shape of almonds, her nose rather long and straight, her lips full, sculpted and mobile. Her skin was the colour and texture of the darkest parts of a seal-point Siamese. Her hair, when it was down, was an electric cloud blue-black around her head, and when she fastened it up it became a tight cap drawn into a braid at the back and underscored the attenuated lines of her skull much as shaving it would have done.

  At thirty-three she was a couple of years older than Flynn: the calm, unhurried confidence that came with that maturity, amounting at times almost to a serenity, was one of the things that attracted him to her when they first met ten days ago. Today that confidence had taken a beating, but already the strength of maturity and independence was reasserting itself.

  She said, “Are you sure you want to let him win?”

  Flynn’s eyes flared at her. His eyes were the most attractive thing about him: just brown, plain brown like the hair he could not be bothered to keep trimmed to a sensible length, neither hypnotically large nor wonderfully lustrous; not at all the sort of eyes that get written about in romantic novels. But his eyes were a direct line to his soul, and his soul was a lot nicer than anything else about him suggested.

  He was thirty-one now, had been a lot of places and done a lot of things, had known extremes both of failure and success. He had been close to death a few times, and to suicide twice—not even honest, straightforward, head-first-off-a-high-building suicide but the cowardly sort, drink the first time and deliberately courting danger the second. He had suffered pain, and fear, and humiliation; and once he had been considered the best photo-journalist in the world.

  So his thirty-one years had left him in no sense a virgin. He had used and been used, and people who knew him a little thought they could see it in his lazy shambling walk, in the cynical twist of his wide mouth even before it broke into its evil grin, in the careless lop-sided shrug of his shoulders.

  But they were people who had not known him well enough to look into his eyes, because his eyes gave the lie to that. Somehow the tide of events that had surged past and not infrequently over him had never found its corrosive way into his soul. The notorious self-mocking obscenity of his language did not reflect, as it might have done, some inner cess-pit of despair and disappointment. Somehow his soul had managed to retain a strange innocence, a kind of simplicity, and it was the unexpected glimpse of that which made his eyes so attractive.

  But if it came to a straight fight between Flynn’s innocence in disguise and Laura’s sophistication, it was no contest. He had no defences she could not penetrate. So when his eyes flared she saw the fear behind them, which was for himself as well as for her, and the memory of hurt, and the impotent rage of being hounded from his house and his woman.

  “Of course I don’t,” he snarled. “But what choice do I have? I won’t be responsible for Fahad taking out on you what he’s got against me.”

  “Suppose I take that responsibility?”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “You don’t know what he’s like. He wouldn’t have started this unless he was prepared to finish it.”

  “Then we’ll run away together.”

  “I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

  “And I don’t want you dying alone!” She broke off and blinked, and waited for her voice to come down a tone or two. Her speaking voice was deep and mellow, the voice of mature sophistication, but she shouted like a fish-wife. “Mickey, I care about you. That’s why I moved in here—not to save on hotel bills, or to give me something to do in the evenings when there’s nothing on the telly.” That drew a quick grin from him and she smiled in return. “I want to be with you. I want us to be together.”

  He had his hands shoved deep in his trouser pockets. Already he was missing his combat jacket, but even Flynn drew the line at wearing clothes with actual holes in them. “You think I don’t?” He was struggling to find words. His emotional vocabulary was less comprehensive and less well exercised than his litany of abuse. He could curse fluently in several languages but found it difficult to express love in his own. “I’d give—anything—I want you, with me, by me. I’d fight him for that, if I could find him. I’d risk what he might do to me. But I won’t risk him doing any more to you. Damn it, woman, I think I love you!”

  “Well, you’ve a funny way of showing it,” Laura said gruffly, turning away. It was unfair—probably in all the circumstances it was the only way he could have shown it—but it still stung. He wanted to reach out and hold her, and let his stinging palm go hang, but held at bay by her resentment he only shoved his hands further into his pockets than before.

  What he did not do was let her sway him. It might not be the ideal solution, but for the moment it was the best he could do. With his back against the wall he was capable of almost infinite obstinacy. “We’ll get together again sometime. After he’s gone, or if the police catch him maybe.” He did not have high hopes of that. “I’ll give you an address, of a friend of mine. When you’re settled, let him know where. Then when it’s safe I’ll know where to find you.”

  She shrugged, with a coolness he did not believe she felt. “Sure, Mickey. Unless I’ve had a better offer by then.”

  Before they left the apartment Flynn went into the darkroom. This room of all of them was gutted: broken glass and melted plastic and a thick sludge of wet ash heaped together on the floor. Nothing had survived. Laura could not imagine what he was doing. Her brow creased in puzzlement, she watched from the door as he
picked his way through the debris to one corner where he folded his long body down like a roosting heron. His fingers brushed at the floor. Then he peeled back the remains of the vinyl and lifted a hinged section of the floorboards to reveal a safe beneath. He opened it with a key from his ring.

  “Whatever do you keep in there, the family jewels?”

  Flynn grinned. He had no family, and no valuables beside his equipment. “Negatives. The kind of negatives I want to keep, and that people might try to steal. The models who sit for me don’t always do so voluntarily.”

  “Will they have survived the heat?”

  The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “I’ll tell you in a minute.” He pulled folders out of the hole, opened them, held the contents up to the light coming through the open door. “Miracles will never cease.”

  Curiosity moved her closer. “What have you got that someone might want to steal?”

  Honesty was not a virtue to which he let himself be held ransom, but somehow he could not lie to her. “Well, nothing much at present. Mostly they’re pictures I might be able to sell again, and things I want to keep for old times’sake. I’ve got the Obregon set in here, and—oh, most of the important stuff from the last couple of years.”

  Laura was leafing through them with him. “Who’s that?”

  Flynn looked at the negative, automatically seeing it as it would appear when printed. “That’s Hehn. You know, the chemist.” Her face remained blank. “The one who won the Sondheim Prize. If I keep it till he wins something else I can sell it again.”

  “What will you do with these now?”

  “Take them with me. I can’t leave them here. Besides, there’s enough stuff here to pay the bills until I can get working again.”