Gabriel's Bureau E-Book

Mikka Haugaard

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Gabriel has worked for Soviet intelligence, but after the fall of the Soviet Union he has become a private investigator. However, he cannot cut himself off from the surreal world of international politics. Oleg, his former KGB boss, continues to haunt him. 'Would you like to buy,' he asked me once, 'a nuclear submarine? A friend of mine dismantles them up by the Arctic Circle. He will ship them to any part of the world.' As Gabriel struggles with personal problems, an acquaintance from the past asks him to help her when her lover is killed. Touched by her appeal, Gabriel makes promises he cannot keep. A psychological thriller set in London's seedy underworld.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Mikka Haugaard was born in Denmark in 1953. Her father is Danish and her mother American and she grew up bi-lingual. She studied classics at Cambridge University and did research in Roman history. She now teaches classics and psychology at a London school and lectures for the Open University. She is married with two children.

She is the author of two novels: Gabriel’s Bureau and The Dream Maker and has translated Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen for Dedalus.

For Charles

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 31 4

ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 78 5

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors,

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected] www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W 2080

email: [email protected]

Publishing History

First published by Dedalus in 2005

First ebook edition in 2013

Gabriel’s Bureau copyright © Mikka Haugaard 2004

The right of Mikka Haugaard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed in Finland by Bookwell Ltd.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Further Reading

CHAPTER 1

I was afraid but now I’m tired. Now tiredness is all, my all, and I can ride roughshod over night visions till I have to learn it all afresh. A fresh awakening to fear. It will be soon, but it isn’t now; now there is a drink that I must pour myself. Patience. The walk to it will dull the senses: floor, ceiling, window, a good arrangement. Into the glass it goes as so often before. Patience. Hands trembling and fingertips meeting round the rim. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. They touched your hand gently and that surprising piece of nonsense: a tickle under there. One was safe then, others weren’t of course. There was plenty of betrayal.

I never knew I was so afraid. Except the last time. I am stripped of everything and undone. Done. The pieces have fallen into place. The window ledge there to steady me. Confidence regained a little by the act. One has to continue. Or rather one does. I need to pee and I feel better for that. Strange how the body holds the mind and soul together. Coherence is all.

From the bedroom I hear her breathing, and I’m undone again and covered in sweat. I hear her breathing and all is lost except the knowledge that I can’t protect her. Not now. Not anymore. My left hand hovers emptily remembering its last piece of clumsy tenderness while I am finishing this glass. Another, please.

I am nothing now. For you, my beloved, I am nothing. Such fear I have for you, I would not have thought in me. Would not have thought that in me in those glad days of our meeting. May you never feel this fear, my Victoria, my beloved. This book is for you. A small consolation.

Below, a street; empty or apparently empty. And above? Bring in the sky – hang it low. Sweet chariot. Coming – yes, coming. There are people waiting for me, but not now. There is no one in that street with its feel of evening and day discarded.

And there is no need to look but I do it anyway.

The sound of the glass on the sill. Hard.

They will come but not tonight. Not tonight. Tomorrow perhaps.

Finally I sit down with that trash called memory trying to resurrect the bits that matter, the bits that are relevant to this story which began with a telephone call.

I remembered her as soon as I heard her voice on the phone but it wasn’t much of a memory. A pretty girl with long red hair. We had been at university together, but that was years ago.

“Gabriel,” she said, “it’s Anita. I found your number and I don’t know who to speak to so I’m talking to you, and you probably don’t remember me, but he’s dead. He’s lying here dead and I need someone.” She stopped, but she didn’t put the phone down immediately and I knew that she would be wondering why she had chosen me, why she had chosen anybody.

I didn’t know who she was talking about, but I recognised the tone of her voice. It was that tone that voices have, that flat tone, when people have lost whatever it is that enables one to stand up and make sense of things. I had heard it too often.

“I’m tired,” I said, “and I think I’m drunk.”

“Something terrible has happened,” she said not listening, “and I think I need somebody.”

If she had said, “I need you”, I might not have gone but I am somebody, a somebody, a last resort.

“I’ll be somebody,” I said pushing away my glass, telling myself I was sober. “I’ll be somebody.”

“Thank you,” she said leaving me with silence and the walk in front of me, down streets which an unusually clear sky made good. The stacked chairs in front of the second-hand furniture shop became a fine construction and the line of unimaginative terraced houses seemed to have received a nudge towards a higher sky. But the light was hurting my eyes.

“You look like a mole Gabriel,” shouted the seller of those too solid chairs, the king of sad inventories and an aggressive optimist, “want to buy a sofa? You can sit on it – and you won’t care to look at it anyway.”

I remember that walk and his shouting; he was a tall Asian, cynical in a way that had made him tolerant. The world was a bitch but he was going to channel what seemed endless energy into it giving him a chance. Uncomplaining he patrolled this kingdom and the nearby grocery shop in case anything was stolen or set alight. While he kindly creased his face into something intended as more than a greeting to those who knew him; a finer piece of recognition that he probably knew was likely to be wasted.

“Want a sofa?”

Not in this light, not even a mole wants your sofa in this light which allows no hiding places, no shadows.

“Come on Gabriel, if you don’t buy it, who will? I was a fool to accept it. Bright purple!”

There was laughter in the street of light, as if spring had finally returned, but my head was turned away.

“If you don’t buy it who will?”

Winged by memory I retrace my steps and hear his voice echoing down streets which recollection has turned grey, “who will, who will?”

She hadn’t moved from the telephone and she had left the main door ajar so that she would not be disturbed by my ringing the bell. I found her there sitting as still as a statue, her clothes sprayed with blood. A still life, and the image of grief, awesome and ugly. And I stood there crudely surveying it all, an apple in my hand, moving slowly, noticing where I put my feet so as to avoid the blood. I put the apple on a sideboard, a large hideous sixties thing of chipped mahogany veneer on which lay a few papers carelessly arranged marked with coffee rings, and a half-eaten sandwich.

I’m trying to remember it all as it was, exactly as it was: the unkind light and the few bits of shabby furniture, a green armchair and a red sofa covered by a large shawl in strong colours. A door opened onto a kitchen with just sufficient room for a table on which lay a few breakfast remains. Large windows, open doors, rooms full of light and I had just come from a place of curtains drawn and objects strewn everywhere. Bottle and paper litter on the floor, a sock curled round an empty glass, and here was so little that it might appear that they had moved in that morning.

He lay by the armchair, on his side, legs bent; a position of pain sustained and his jumper, camel brown, darkly stained. And as I saw those stains I noticed others too, on the walls, on the furniture, that I didn’t want to see. I felt sick.

“You called me,” I said, “I’m Gabriel.”

“You remember me?”

“I think so,” and then a sudden but inappropriate flash, “we went to the same philosophy lectures.”

Her finger sideways in her mouth, something for her teeth to bite on. She closed her eyes briefly as a sign intended for me, sparing me a moment from her grief. I seemed to remember her then, her shyness recalled and my own feelings for her, but that more dimly. She had been someone who had known how to listen.

She moved her finger from her mouth, but left it hovering in the air.

“I never knew,” she said, “that he could be so still. That a man so full of twitches could be so still.” She paused gesturing sadly at his awesome immobility. All potential gone.

I put my hand on her shoulder and now I could see him clearly. Brown eyes, high cheekbones in a lean face and the pallor of death or unhealthy living. He looked in his mid-thirties. Sympathetic features. I had never seen him before.

“It’s Michael,” she said, as if that was enough, repeating his name with all the affection of an intimacy I didn’t share, as if willing me to understand. She took his hand and began to rub it gently.

“You know Michael,” she pleaded without much conviction.

I told her that I didn’t, but she wasn’t listening or she didn’t care. She kept stroking his hand.

“Feel it,” she said, “it’s still warm.” She put his hand in mine and awkwardly I took that dead hand feeling for a warmth I knew I wouldn’t find. In my mouth the slimy substance of fear. Cold as an icicle, colder than that dead corpse. It didn’t help that I had been drinking. I had it summed up already: a sad domestic affair.

“It’s Michael,” she said noticing how I held that poor dead hand. “It’s just Michael.”

Just Michael. Someone’s lover. Her lover.

She looked at me for the first time and kneeling clumsily she let her hand travel the length of the corpse.

“How can a man so full of twitches be that still?”

Silently I stood by his feet not knowing what to do, wishing I wasn’t there.

“He is dead, isn’t he?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I called him just in case. Called the doctor just in case.”

“He is dead.” I said putting my arms round her, but she pushed me away angrily.

“Leave me with him. They’ll take him away soon enough.”

She kissed his hand and held it to her cheek.

“Did you know him?”

I didn’t.

“You must have seen him.” And for the first time she looked away from him and at me.

“I don’t think so.”

“You have never seen him?”

“No.”

“But we lived so close. Never?”

I shook my head. A total stranger.

Uncomprehending she began to list the many places we hadn’t met. Threshers, the Post Office, Safeways, the Pizza Express. The inventory of an ordinary life passed before me, shifting images of everyday, and all the while I kept looking at him – suddenly I couldn’t take my eyes off him – while she continued eerily. She spoke as if he might any moment get up and go somewhere.

“How did it happen?”

“What?” She looked at the dead man as if to remind herself of what had occurred. Her face almost unaffected – a bit strained, a bit drawn. And I stood at his feet, an intruder almost. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want the answer to my question. A middle-aged woman sitting with the body of her lover.

“How did it happen?” I repeated, because I felt I had to although I knew that I wouldn’t receive a worthwhile answer.

“I don’t know,” she said defensively, or was that my imagination?

“You don’t know?” A question mark but no surprise in my voice. I didn’t expect her to tell me.

She kept holding his hand and stroking it.

“When I came it was all over. All over. I don’t know anything.”

She saw that I was looking at her blouse with its fine spray of blood.

“I better put something else on and get rid of this,” she said.

I didn’t stop her; I didn’t want to intrude on this sad affair. With quick movements she changed opening drawers that were surprisingly neat in that flat. She even wanted to change her shoes, but I stopped her pointing at her foot prints.

“Oh, how he would have hated all this blood,” she said. She knelt by him and undid the top button of his shirt.

“He likes it open. It’s more comfortable.”

People are like that, they seem to slip between levels of understanding. A dream-world. Carefully she had changed her clothes and now he wasn’t dead. Coherence is all. There was no coherence. There never is.

“You mustn’t touch anything. Don’t touch him any more.”

“Why?” she asked looking me straight in the face as if she hadn’t just changed her clothes. Was she disingenuous or was it shock?

“Oh, the police,” she whispered unconcerned glancing at the knife, dismissing it. It didn’t matter anymore. It had done its thing.

“I’m sorry,” I said shabbily, “I am sorry I have to tell you this.”

“Feel his hand,” she repeated, “it is still warm and his eyes still looking.”

I wondered what life she’d found in those dead eyes.

“You mustn’t keep touching him.”

Ignoring me she took his hand and kissed it. Her movements were slow as if she no longer knew what she was doing. She looked at that hand as if it weren’t part of him, but something he had left behind, something with a meaning that had to be deciphered.

“How long has he –”

“I don’t know – I found him like this, but he is still warm.” Again she lifted the dead man’s hand to her face, kissing it and putting his fingers in her mouth, not wanting to let go.

“I don’t know what happened.”

I don’t think I believed her, but I didn’t care any more about the details of people’s lives, their private lives. I knew that she wasn’t telling me all she knew, and that people are capable of unexpected violence and complicated feelings. Perhaps he’d found them together, her and the intruder. There had been a struggle, and he had lost. I didn’t want to know, but she had asked for my help and I had come. I waited with her for the police and the doctor who I think came. And she did nothing but hold his hand, and I didn’t ask any questions and, even if I had, they would have been the wrong ones.

CHAPTER 2

This is a story about things as I saw them. My perception coloured it all, dyed this strange tangle and I’m trying to tell it now as I saw it happening. Hindsight doesn’t help me. Yes, I gain some clarity, but a rich texture is gone and my motives obscured.

I was in love, in love with an image: her holding that dead hand and then gently caressing the corpse with her fingertips. The image of her embracing the dead man haunted me and wouldn’t let me go. That’s the real beginning of this story, not a telephone call but an image, a picture that translated the past into something new and strange. The start of an obsession. This is the story of an obsession.

I wasn’t even sure how much I remembered about her. How well had I known her?

As I made love to my wife that night, I felt as if I were making love to her, and that we had done it many times before. A past, imagined or real, lay in my bed responding to my embrace with teasing familiarity. And after love, half asleep, I thought I saw some of her clothes discarded in the corner by my bed; and suddenly, in the wild way of dreams, I saw her kneeling by that corpse and her voice – coming strangely from another part of the room disembodied and colourless – insisting on the litany of places he’d been and we could have met, but now no logic applied. Had we met at Waterloo, Borodino or Stalingrad? No, I seriously replied, we had not. She brushed a fly from his face, all livid and long dead.

“He is still warm,” she said, “and I don’t want them to touch him. He doesn’t like being touched.” Grimly she looked at me. Suddenly she seemed old, her face too thin, and I thought that I could smell the corpse.

I didn’t contact her because I didn’t want to know anything about what had happened. I didn’t want to know more than I had seen: her holding that dead hand, caressing his body was enough. It told of love. The details might tell a different story. But then she came to see me. That was about a week after Michael had died.

“You must help me,” she announced sitting down firmly, “you must help me to find out everything.”

She kept her hands folded in her lap like a child. You wouldn’t have thought that she was speaking of her lover. She lifted her eyes briefly to look at me and my poor “office” she took in at a glance. I live in a modest flat and the front room is the Bureau: the premises of my business, my occupation, my folly. My Bureau of Investigation. A large desk, a computer, and, on the wall, the emblem of my office immodestly displayed. In the corner bottles; empty bottles which I hadn’t bothered to hide. Usually I put them in the kitchen. The debris of my life.

“How long have you known Michael?”

She had known him for a long time – years it appeared from the manner she spoke and I didn’t have the heart to ask for any precision. Expressionless, without looking at me, she began to talk about their relationship, their special love. She didn’t describe it in any way that made it become alive. A trite story of people who never disagreed and I remember not listening. But I saw something in her because of that image of her and that dead hand. Like a photographer I had captured that moment and I treasured it. That’s love. I had seen dead people before and that hopeless love of dead people, but not like that.

Gently, almost as if it were an irrelevance, I asked her if she had any inkling of who had killed him. She told me she did not know and it was obvious that she was playing her cards very close to her chest. But I’m used to that. People seldom tell everything at once, even if they are innocent. You have to be patient; but I wasn’t being patient. I didn’t want any answers. I wanted her to ramble on about their love and her ignorance while I saw her as I wanted to see her.

And she did just that, fixing me with an intensity that was unconvincing. Suddenly she said, “but you don’t want to hear about this, do you?”

Yes, I did. I wanted that string of nonsense which you were feeding me, my Anita. As I’m telling this my hands tremble. Another glass please. A special feeling of intimacy, a closeness sustained, such are the phrases I recall as I try see your face and the light. How did that fall?

She wanted to show me a list she had made of all the things that she had done on the day he was killed. A long drearily detailed list which served no purpose at all, except to prove that she was being serious and that she was of course innocent, entirely innocent. I listened. I noticed that she didn’t say a word about how she had found him, and I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to hear her telling that bit of the story. I knew it wouldn’t be convincing. I didn’t want to get involved right from the beginning, you see. But I had to say something and so I tried to unravel what had happened. It wasn’t going to be at all what I expected; but I wasn’t going to know that for a long time.

She had sensed that something was wrong. He did business deals which would not bear scrutiny, so he had tried to conceal them, but they had surfaced from time to time in the shape of letters and telephones calls. She had met someone who filled her with dread although not from anything he had said. He said nothing really in fact, merely sat in her kitchen with the words that if Michael was not in, then he would wait. She looked away as if inviting me to ask all those questions she didn’t want to answer.

“What was behind his visit?” I asked, annoyed. The mysterious stranger who always turns up when people are lying. That really got me.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. Of course, she was lying and I thought I knew why. She had fine images lodged, images of herself and Michael from an untainted past before the letters and unexpected visits and she wanted to preserve them. And I accepted it all because I had seen her, and I, too, had something to protect: the image of her rubbing that dead hand and holding that dead head. I didn’t want that to be deprived of meaning, to be lost in the details of a sordid story. An unprofessional attitude of course, but I wasn’t a professional any more. I wasn’t anything anymore. I had reached that point in a depression when you have lost all sense of self and cling to bits of wreckage and she was a large piece of flotsam, evidence that there is such a thing as love. But I didn’t want to look too carefully and I didn’t care if she lied.

It was a difficult interview and in the middle of it all Victoria entered. Victoria, my Victoria. My Victoria, the love of my life. She was wearing her dressing-gown inside out and seemed oddly surprised at finding herself in the Bureau as if she didn’t live in the house. Startled she stood in the doorway as if this had never happened before, although she frequently enters without warning to find me talking to someone. Her sudden appearance always has a purpose, and the flat is so small that one can hear if I’m not alone, yet she always seems overcome by a confused timidity as if caught by surprise. Looking at her feet (why doesn’t she wear shoes?) her lips part in that lost clown’s smile gathering strength to speak. I know my Victoria though I’m never sure what strange things she will dredge from those pools of consciousness. She spoke clearly and calmly as she always does.

“I’m going to celebrate the cat’s birthday.” She smiled and stood perfectly still, expectant. My Victoria is thirty five, but sometimes she will look at you as if she were only ten.

“What do you think? Is today the cat’s birthday?”

The cat’s birthday? Confused I looked at a calendar pinned to the wall. Anything is possible in this crazy world.

“The cat’s birthday,” she repeated patiently. “You ought to know.”

I’m so used to Victoria, my Victoria, that I find it impossible to imagine what people think who see her for the first time. On that day what struck me was her beauty: her blue eyes fixed on nothing and her fine elegant features. She is intelligent my Victoria, rare and intelligent. I became aware of the sympathy in Anita’s face. I could tell she had seen too much all of a sudden. She hadn’t expected a mad woman and she could see it all, all the sadness in a twinkling of a moment as one sometimes does. And Victoria smiled that smile that makes her look distant and she wouldn’t stop touching the buttons on her dressing-gown.

“When is it the cat’s birthday?”

“I don’t know, ” I said, adding more for Anita’s sake than hers (she wasn’t listening anyway), “I can never remember cats’ birthdays, but we could make it today.”

She laughed and I realised I had misunderstood; her bizarre question had been an attempt at humour. A joke. She often flits between despair and laughter when she is in one of her “moods” as I used to call them. Many years ago a doctor had said to me with what had been intended as a delicate circumlocution, an apology for a reference to a private grief on such public premises, “we need something, you know, to control her –,” and he paused ill at ease, “her moods you know.” It was not a happy expression and he smiled embarrassed. Since then we have tried various medication, and I have been up and down to the Maudsley and I’m no longer full of hope like the first time but I still use that phrase “her moods” as if out of loyalty to the person she was; a way of saying that all of this is not of her essence, her being, though sometimes I wonder.

That morning had been particularly bad: I had listened endlessly to a woman married to a man called “him”, the name of the spouse of all unhappy women. In return for cash which she took out of a large worn handbag I had promised to shadow “him”. It was a scruffy deal and she saw me as a scruffy appendage, a necessity imposed upon her by “him” and she took no trouble to hide her contempt.

“I wouldn’t have come to you but,” she had said, implying sadly that there was no option but my Bureau, Gabriel’s Bureau of Investigation. She pointed at me, Gabriel himself, the man behind the Bureau as if the irony of the situation would not escape me if I could only see myself. I felt my chin and I realised I hadn’t shaved, a bad sign. She had appeared early, nine o’clock. The Bureau opens at ten and in response to her insistence I had opened my door wearing a voluminous Chinese dressing-gown, and I knew that my body hid sadly amongst its folds, but I thought I had shaved. Then I remembered. Victoria, my Victoria had been in one of her “moods” and my response had been all wrong.

I had not been able to sleep till early morning. Then he had come to me. Michael not dead, not alive and curiously familiar as if we knew each other well. We shared a bowl of pasta. People are always eating in my dreams. I reminded him that he was dead, and he smiled as if in apology for the intrusion and his place was suddenly taken by the inspector who had found us sitting with the corpse and who had since called upon me “to help with the investigation”. I don’t think he had believed a word I said but officially I was eliminated. I record all my telephone calls, a precaution, and also a neighbour had seen me leave and been subject to my piano-playing. But I knew that was not the end of it, and the affairs of Gabriel’s Bureau are complicated and there are a few things of the night. It did not help that I had had too much to drink. So I had said to her with the cold clarity of those who are thank God sane, “you haven’t taken your medication.” With a tone full of “and that’s that”, I had rolled her life up into a ball making nothing of today’s sadness.

What had happened? Nothing. But she wouldn’t stop screaming. When she screams you see most clearly the line that separates people like me (an alcoholic, and mad in my own way) from people like her. Her screams seem to come straight from the subconscious and to translate instantly what she feels into a shock of noise. It took me some time to discover what had happened that morning. She had seen a mother scolding a child at a bus stop. No, it was worse than that: a mother hitting a child and it had struck her unprotected self like dark vapours rising suddenly from an abyss. All had been revealed to her in that scene and she cried hysterically, but I was too tired and I had no time for what I knew of the fine insight of her madness. So I said, “you haven’t taken your medication”. And I knew immediately that I had made everything worse. I felt sorry for myself and didn’t shave. I was still wearing my Chinese dressing-gown when Anita appeared at midday.

“I think I must know about the cat’s birthday or maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know his birthday,” and she pointed at me. Another joke or was there a deeper meaning?

“February twenty second,” I replied and she looked sad and confused.

“It’s next week,” I said, “and it’s going to be a dressing-gown party. Anita will join us. I remember you had a wonderful dressing-gown when you were a student. I saw you in it once. You had invited me for lunch.”

“Did I? I don’t anymore. Have a dressing-gown, I mean.”

Didn’t she? I imagined her naked in that flat. Her hair about her, as in the old days, but she was more birdlike now. Him I couldn’t imagine. Her Michael. I remembered that she had had a green velvet dressing-gown, and green eyes like a lot of people with red hair. The rich colours of a painting and around her neck an old-fashioned thick gold chain; a present from an aunt. In my mind she was forever associated with a green dressing-gown which she didn’t recall. I wondered what she remembered about me. Nothing, it seemed from the way she looked at me. She took what I had to offer at face value; a service of a kind for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t rely on the police. I was unshaven, possibly an alcoholic and I lived with a mad woman. She didn’t care and that made me angry. Perhaps I was jealous of him, jealous of that poor dead man. I felt a surge of unhappiness with myself sitting there among the debris, the litter of papers, unwashed glasses, yesterday’s plates with congealed egg, and Victoria herself, suddenly ugly in her unwashed dressing-gown. No one will ever touch me like that, not as he was touched. That poor corpse. Poor dead man. That dead head hitting the floor with a dead sound and her face stricken by it. The image of sorrow in the flash of that moment. He wouldn’t get up again and she knew it now. No one will feel that for me.

Angrily I said, “why did you come to me?”

She didn’t answer. I didn’t need an answer. She had had no one else to go to.

“You must tell me the name of this man, this man who threatened your Michael.”

She winced and looked away at the cruel your, embarrassed for my sake, aware of my jealousy and struck to the quick by it. A shabby world. Even in death one is part of it, part of its odious shabbiness. Her Michael.

“You must tell me,” I said gently sweeping my hair from my forehead and taking her hand, “you must tell who this man was so that I can contact him. It’s a start, that’s all. It’s a start.”

I could feel her relaxing, feel her thinking, “I’ve made a mistake. He is not like that.” And I felt sure that it had never happened. How could it have? One can’t be jealous of the dead. I had never been jealous of a dead man. Never. Firmly I leaned on my desk rubbing out the myriad seconds that make up experience. It had never been. That’s not me. Dear God that’s not me.

“Gregory, Gregory Mason,” she said, “that’s what he was called, the man who used to come to see Michael.”

“You are sure that’s his name?”