Death and Other Lovers Page 9

  The lazy smile that curled Obregon’s lip confirmed that that was the desired effect. “That would be a mistake,” he said.

  Angry at himself for again allowing Obregon to manipulate him, Flynn jerked his face away from the wall. The flock of the expensive wallpaper had left its imprint on his cheek. He growled, “I didn’t come here for the privilege of being thumped by your minders and then running away again.” He wished his head would stop spinning.

  “I wondered about that,” admitted Obregon. “I asked myself if I cared why you had come. I decided I did not.”

  Flynn squinted at him. “Are you teling me you don’t know why I’m here?”

  Obregon’s manner was deprecating. “Mr. Flynn, I’m not telling you anything. I’m waiting to hear what you have to tell me. I’m waiting to see if it’s worth anywhere near as much to me as the pleasure of destroying you.”

  Flynn could not work out if the man was toying with him, for his own amusement or some even less fathomable purpose, or if Obregon was genuinely unaware that he had been implicated in the fate of Flight 98. “You do know Maxine Faber?”

  “Of course I know her, of her, anyway. She works for me. At a company of mine in Fort Lauderdale. So?”

  “She travels a lot. She carries drugs for you.”

  Obregon barked a silent laugh at the ceiling. “You’re a persistent son-of-a-bitch, Flynn! Twelve months ago I had to leave my home because of your damned insinuations. I swore then that when I got my hands on you I’d rip your lying tongue out.”

  Flynn’s pointed chin came up, his lip curled and brimstone smouldered in his eyes. “Don’t waste it on me, Obregon. There’s only the two of us here, and I know where your money comes from. I know what kind of work Maxine Faber does for you—and so does the British cop who was there when she told me.”

  “Told you?” He had succeeded in surprising Obregon. Faber was an experienced courier—not too good to be caught, no-one was that good, but too clever to admit anything and certainly too wise to bring his name into it. “Mr. Flynn, tell me what you came here for.”

  “I came to ask you a question. I’d have asked it in the garden and then gone away, except that the house fell on me.”

  “Ask it now.”

  “Were you responsible for the bomb on Flight 98?”

  “I told you already. No.”

  “You could have been. Your courier was on board. You could have given her a bomb to carry instead of crack. You might have reckoned it was worth losing her to see me scattered across half southern England.”

  “How could I know you were on the plane?”

  “You could have had me followed. From my apartment, after you had the place torched. The two Arabs—Fahad and the other man: God knows how you found them, but they had their own reasons for helping you. But they got it wrong. You wanted me dead and you didn’t care who died with me. Faber was in London, and Fahad made the bomb. She thought it was crack, of course. If she hadn’t panicked when the police came for me, she’d have died with everyone else.”

  “I employed two Arabs to burn your apartment? My, didn’t I have a busy day! Why Arabs?”

  “Because one of them wanted me dead as much as you did.”

  “That’s your answer, then. He blew up the plane. Fahad? He bombed Flight 98.”

  “And it’s coincidence your courier was on the plane?”

  “Yes. No-one followed you. Miss Faber would be travelling on a ticket bought weeks in advance: she always does, it looks better that way.”

  If it was true, it was impossible for Maxine Faber to have carried the bomb on board for the purpose of killing him. “Can you prove that?”

  “Miss Faber can undoubtedly prove it to your British policeman. I could probably prove it to you, if I cared to.” Obregon’s tone dropped a note: something in it reminded Flynn of a cat sharpening its claws on upholstery. “But Mr. Flynn, I have a much more interesting proposition.

  “It’s like this. If I did what you suggest, it was because I want you dead. I think you will have no difficulty believing that. On the other hand, if I didn’t do it, it’s in my interests to help discover who did—because others will come to the same conclusion as you, and a businessman who is prepared to blow up his associates soon runs out of people willing to associate with him. So if I did it I’m going to kill you; and if I didn’t I’m going to let you leave in the hope that you will discover the real culprit and thus clear my name. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  Flynn did not know what to say. Obregon’s voice trickled like slow honey. His manner was infinitely threatening and something like madness glittered in his eyes. Yet there was a land of inescapable logic to what he said. Finally, fractionally, Flynn nodded.

  “Get up, Mr. Flynn.”

  It took Flynn longer than it should have, and he could not have said how much of the delay was due to his concussion and how much to the fact that he was staring death in the face. He glanced fitfully left and right. But the only door was behind Obregon and certainly guarded from the other side. He got to his feet and stood swaying slightly, the palm of one hand flat against the wall to steady him. He watched Obregon with hollow eyes and hoped that, whatever he intended to do, he would do it before Flynn’s shaky knees let him down.

  “Turn round. Face the wall.”

  Flynn did. He put both hands flat against the flock wallpaper and closed his eyes.

  The word “Now!” hissed in Obregon’s throat, a savage primitive sound, and again the heavy cue in his hands leapt into life, surging in a vicious arc propelled by all the strength and all the bitterness in the small man’s wiry frame. It was still accelerating when the loaded butt smashed splinteringly, sickeningly, into bone.

  Chapter Two

  Leah Shimoni caught Todd as he was leaving. Another day she would have let him go, saying she would see him again. But she had spent time and nervous energy working up to this. She had spent most of the day and all the drive into town working out what she wanted to say, and how to avoid saying more than she wanted to say once her blood was up, and she thought that if she did not have this out with him now she would burst. His career as well as hers was at issue: it was worth making him late for whatever mercy-mission he was engaged on now.

  So when he came to the door with his coat already on and his carkeys in his hand, she faced him out until her small body made his bulky one give way and let her come in. She closed the door firmly behind her.

  Todd said, “I hope this isn’t going to take long, Leah—”

  And she said, “It’s going to take as long as it takes, Gil, and it’s far and away the most important thing you could be doing tonight so don’t start checking your watch.”

  Todd blinked, surprised at her manner, at the strength of her tone. Involuntarily, as a reflex action, he checked his watch. “All right. But—I don’t suppose we could do this in the car? I am rather—”

  “No,” said Shimoni. Everything about her was shouting except for the pitch of her voice which was ominously low. “We could not do this in the car.”

  “All right,” he said again, defeated. He put his keys on the hall table and took his coat off. “What is it, Leah? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s bloody happened,” she said forcibly. “For the last four days. I have taken hundreds of photographs of that crash. I have printed dozens of them. I have done all I can do until you write a report on the thing. It’s four days, Gil! The sodding Sunday supplements will have sorted their coverage out by now! Have you written anything?”

  He had not. She knew he had not. He shrugged uncomfortably. “I’ve been busy …”

  “So have I,” she snapped, “printing photographs that are already past their sell-by date. It’s not good enough, Gil. I worked hard on that. I got good pictures—maybe better than any I’ve seen printed so far. But it’s yesterday’s news already. Even the people who buy our stuff, who want something better than news-flashes and are prepared to wait a couple of days for the full sto
ry, don’t want to be printing this week what everybody else printed last week. You’ve let them down, Gil. You’ve let me down.”

  In the last three years Todd had got used to taking criticism from this pint-sized Israeli girl that he would never have brooked from Flynn. Partly it was her sex. Partly it was because he held nothing over her: he had not dragged her out of the gutter, dried her out and given her something better to do than digging a hole in the Hudson River. The wide age difference notwithstanding, theirs was essentially a professional partnership between free equals. What Todd had had with Mickey Flynn had been both more and less than that. He had let Flynn down more than once. Not in his wildest dreams could he imagine Flynn storming round here to tax him with it.

  He shrugged awkwardly. “I’m sorry, Leah. This is different—personal. Mickey needs my help.”

  “I need you to do your job!”

  He bridled against her anger. “Leah, you know what the situation is. Somebody’s trying to kill him, for God’s sake! On top of that, he’s carrying round a load of guilt nobody should have to bear alone. You want me to stand back and watch it flatten him? I’m not going to do that. Not even for you. Not even for the job.”

  “Gil, if I thought it would do any good, I wouldn’t let you get on with it, I’d help you. I know how you feel about Flynn. Well, that’s all right, you were together a long time. But you have a responsibility to me now, and if you can’t or won’t meet it the least I have the right to expect is that you’ll tell me that so I can act accordingly.”

  He passed a weary hand in front of his eyes. “I’m sorry, I should have called you.”

  “You’re damn right you should have called! Four days ago you should have called! I haven’t heard from you since you used my house to talk over old times and fed all my biscuits to the dog. I’ve called you three and four times a day. You’re never in. I can’t get you on the carphone. I leave messages on your answering machine but you never call back. What the hell is going on, Gil? Do we still have a partnership, or did that crash in flames too?”

  “Damn it, Leah,” he snapped then, “you’re not being fair. Yes, I’ve messed you around, I’ve wasted your time, and I’m sorry. But what else did you expect? The kid’s like a son to me, you know that, and for all I know he may be dead now and I just haven’t heard yet. No, I’m not going to be much use to you until this is over. I hope you’ll bear with me so we can pick up the threads then. But Leah, please—please don’t make me choose between my partnership with you and my friendship for Mickey.”

  “Is it so certain that I’d lose?” she asked bitterly.

  “We’d all lose.”

  She went on staring at him, angry-eyed, for half a minute longer. Then by degrees the anger seeped away. He could not help how he felt. It was unreasonable to expect him to shrug off Flynn’s plight: when this was over he would need to feel he had done everything in his power to help him. It was the common duty of friendship. It was no threat to her. Neither, she was coming to realise, was Flynn. A shade ruefully she said, “I suppose I should be flattered you consider it a choice.”

  They ended up talking in the car after all: hers, as she drove him to his overdue appointment. Even driving through a foreign capital on the wrong side of the road, she was safer behind the wheel than Todd was. And quicker. Todd did not make right-hand turns if he could avoid it.

  The small storm seemed to have cleared the air between them. Todd realised he had never explained to Shimoni, not in so many words, about him and Flynn, and he tried to do so now. The darkness in the car, and the street-lamps throwing surreal patterns through the windscreen as they drove, and the fact that Shimoni’s eyes were on the traffic and not free to slide his way and embarrass him, made it easier. But still not easy.

  When he was writing Todd could reduce the most complex ideas to a form which anyone with a desire to do so could understand. Emotions, however, gave him more trouble, and his own emotions most of all. He had had friends and lovers. He had been married once, briefly, it had ended amicably enough and not a moment too soon for either of them. He had made many enduring professional relationships that gave him respect and something palpably close to affection, and he treasured these—among them the one he had with Shimoni—because to a man with no gift for personal commitment they offered a safe, comfortable compromise between domestic turmoil and loneliness.

  Flynn was different. Flynn was the closest thing he had to family.

  He had told Shimoni that Flynn was like a son to him, and substantially that was true. He had created Flynn—Flynn the world knew, Flynn the award-winning photographer, Flynn the by-line—not from his seed in the body of a woman but out of a jumble of spare parts dumped in the last stage of dissolution on a bar-stool a stone’s throw from the New York waterfront. He was not the first drunk Todd had been accosted by. He was not even the first young drunk, heading for a body-bag as a twenty-fifth birthday present. He had never felt tempted to take one home before. Mostly he asked the barman to find him a seat away from the garbage.

  This long after, he had no idea why he had put up with Flynn draped over the bars breathing alcoholic fumes at him, arguing and bumming drinks. It was true that he needed a photographer, but Flynn was not one and nothing about him suggested that he could become one. He was a lanky, undernourished street-wise hustler with a drink problem and a crazy grin, and sometime this week or the next he would curl up with a bottle of cheap whisky and go under for the third time. But he was not Todd’s problem or any of Todd’s business.

  “Then as I was leaving,” said Todd, “he tried to mug me. Can you imagine? It was like being attacked in an alley by a length of well-chewed string. I didn’t even have to knock him down—I stood back and he fell down of his own accord.”

  That had left him with three choices. There seemed no point in calling the police: Flynn posed no threat to anyone. He could have left him in the gutter. Somehow that seemed too easy. Flynn needed a lesson and Todd was in the mood to deliver one, and since he was not in the habit of kicking drunken kids he did the next most vicious thing, which was take him back to the hotel where he was staying and dry him out.

  He did not tell Shimoni what that had been like, how Flynn had hurt and cried and begged and how halfway through Todd had hoped he would do them both a favour and die. But afterwards, motivated as much by shame as by charity, he had begun to put the pieces of Mickey Flynn back together, hoping to create a more useful model than the one he had picked apart. That was when the notion of making a press photographer of him had occurred to Todd. He needed a tame photographer almost as much as he needed some way of getting Flynn off his conscience.

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Shimoni said quietly. It was the first interruption she had made. “You don’t have to make excuses for saving a man’s life.”

  Todd nodded slowly. “Yes, he would have ended up on a slab, and therefore I did save his life. I doubt if that entitled me to use him the way I did, then or later. It was a kind of pride. God made man, but Todd made Flynn.”

  “But not in his own image,” murmured Shimoni, and Todd chuckled in the darkness. Seen together they looked like a Government Health Warning on the respective dangers of obesity and anorexia nervosa.

  Todd went on, “You know how it finished. After four years of pretending he needed me as much as I needed him, all at once he’d had enough of dancing to the tune of an old fool who talked a lot about Great Journalism but actually couldn’t sell his stories without the help of some pretty outstanding photography. I never gave Mickey his due, and after four years he gave me my cards. I was lucky—I found another pretty outstanding photographer, who listens patiently when I talk about Great Journalism and has far too firm a grip on her own life to let me interfere in it. And if Mickey came back tomorrow with his cap in his hand, I’d have to tell him that I’m content with and committed to the partnership I now have.

  “But Leah, I still—miss him, I suppose. Even after three years. There’s a kind of hol
e in my soul where he used to live, and I’d got used to thinking it was there for good and now suddenly here he is again, hurting and needing my help again. What can I do? It’s like when a marriage is over—mine, anyway; you don’t want it back, but you still care enough about the other person to try and keep them safe.” He rolled his eyes and his head tipped back against the restraint. “Oh God, I’m not explaining this very well.”

  Shimoni’s voice was low, slightly husky with the accent, with a warmth to it Todd had not expected so that he thought, She does know what I’m on about! She said, “You don’t owe me any explanations, Gil. You owe me what I’m due under the terms of our partnership, which is the right to know, at a suitable time, what we are and are not working on. You should have called me. I was angry. I’m sorry I shouted.”

  They came to some traffic lights. Shimoni stopped her car and looked at Todd for the first time since leaving his flat. “Gil—thanks for telling me. About you and Mickey. Some of it I knew, but—anyway. I appreciate your confidence.”

  He wriggled embarrassed shoulders inside his coat. “You mustn’t feel—second choice, second best. Mickey’s a bloody good photographer but so are you: I have never for one moment regretted our partnership. This thing with Mickey is—different. Somehow he’s etched his initials on my conscience and I think they’ll be there until I die.” He chuckled. “Even when I don’t see him for years; even when I do see him and he immediately starts driving me up the wall. I care what happens to him. Like someone I used to love, or a child grown up and grown away. Family. There,” he said then smiling. “Who’d have thought the old man had so much sentiment in him?”

  She smiled back, and the lights changed and she returned her eyes to the road. Todd thought he heard her say, “Me,” but it might have been a windscreen wiper squeaking.

  As they turned the corner she said, “I’ve two things more to say and then I’ll shut up. The first is, don’t ever apologise for being nice. It’s humanity’s greatest sin that we find it easier to talk about our vices than our goodness. And the other is, whatever this address is that you’ve had me hunting for, we’re there.”