Lauriehad.His father knew the way out as far as East Hill.By then, aglassy calm had come over him.It was familiar.A far cry from thepotent, vital effect of Mama Luna’s darozha.This was justsedation, a chemical intensification of the false peace he hadsought for himself in his mother’s pill bottles.He wanted tosleep.The car was beautifully warm, its movements on its deepsuspension soothing.Sir William kept putting out a hand andshaking him.“Which way now?Which way now?”
AndLaurie told him.The streets gave way to open ground.It was soeasy.The heath opened up all around them.Laurie could just see,through the reflecting glass, the rags of a ruby gold sunset.Thelong, straight road it had taken him the entire night to walkdisappeared in ten minutes.Laurie saw the bus stop and the fenceand the gap in it that led to the lane and the camp.
“It’s here.Stop here.From here you have to walk.”
Hisfather pulled the car up smoothly by the side of the road.Put outa hand and caressed his son’s face, as if wondering where thebruises had come from.
“All right.Good boy.You stay here.”
He wasgone.Laurie shifted in the passenger seat so he could curl up andlean his pounding skull on the headrest.He drew up his knees tohis chest.He didn’t know what the fuck had been going on in hislife for the past few weeks, but it was over now.All over.Laurieclosed his eyes.
Heopened them.Why?Sleep was calling like a lover, like Sasha witharms outstretched and waiting for him.Blinking, he stared outthrough the windscreen, trying to see what had roused him.Therewere other cars pulled up near the Daimler now, in front andbehind.Not police cars.Nor, Laurie thought, the type of vehicleplainclothes men would choose.All of these were noticeable, justas the Daimler was.Ostentatious Chryslers and Bentleys, a vastfour-by-four Laurie knew from his father’s semiofficial,quasi-Masonic nights in with the old boys’ brigade of thecommissioners’ board.When Laurie thought of police, this was whathe pictured.Not kindly, open-minded young officers like Foster andKucharski.
Who werenowhere to be seen.Laurie sat up in the passenger seat.His mouthwas dry, his head fuzzy.What had woken him?Rubbing his eyes, hewiped steam off the windscreen’s cooling interior and squinted intothe dark.Yes, flashlights, probing the dark beyond the fence,lifting and vanishing as the bulky figures that bore them clamberedoff the roadside path and into the woods.Shuddering, Laurie pushedopen the door.These last ones were stragglers, he saw.He hadlain, curled up and still trusting something, while the majority ofthe men who had arrived in these vehicles had set off down the laneto the camp.
He fell out of the car.He remembered sitting tamely, rollingup his sleeve when his mother’s doctor—no, Sir William’s petdoctor, who never made a fuss about continuing to feed Lady Fitzroythe pills that would keepherquiet and tame in her turn—had shoved a needleinto his vein.The pavement was icy cold beneath his hands.Fragments of glass under his palms, a scatter of diamonds.Hepressed down till they cut, but could not feel them.
Laurie,who thought he had found out what betrayal was in his father’sstudy an hour before, staggered to his feet.He knew what it wasnow.
“My son would never choose to be with someone evil.We have tobe friends now.”A kiss to the top of hisskull.Everything Laurie had longed for in a father—faith,camaraderie, complicity; the tender, demonstrative aspect of lovehe had been taught to value by the absolute lack of it.Christ, hehad left those needs so far behind he had thought they were dead.Dry soil.Still full of life, apparently.Only dormant, onlywaiting for a few drops of rain, however bloody toxic, to bringthem bursting and flourishing through.Laurie, who had believed theold man almost a stranger to him now, was suddenlyimpressed.
Andterrified.He took the fence in an uncoordinated vault that landedhim painfully on his hands and knees on the far side.He thought—hehoped—his father would have stopped short of actually poisoninghim.
Already,hauling great breaths of the night air, he could feel some of themists clearing.It was enough.He didn’t need to be firing on allcylinders to run a straight line through the dark, did he?Thistime he had guiding lights ahead of him, receding torch beams.Andhe had learned from his last visit that an unhesitating track wasthe best to keep him out of the thorns.
He ran.The first few strides were a controlled fall, but after that hisblood began to beat, to shake out the drug in adrenaline.His legsgained strength beneath him.He was silent on the leaf litter, halfin flight before he reached the last stragglers of Sir William’slumbering brigade.One of them turned on him.God, in the swayinglight, Laurie knew him: a retired Metropolitan chief, commended ahundred times for harsh-but-fair methods of keeping the Londonstreets clean.At his side, companion and helper, was no more orless than a thug.Laurie had time to pick out the swastika tattoosbefore the pair of them moved to block his path.The recognitionwas mutual.“Laurence!”the chief snarled, getting a grip on hissleeve.“You get your arse back down that lane and into the car,boy, or—”
Laurietore out of his grip and ran again.There were the lights of thecamp.Laurie could not distinguish the probing torch beams from thefires and the yellow gleam from caravan windows and doors—all wereentangled, merging together, as if…
As ifhis father’s band of mates and heavies were in among the vans.Laurie felt terror close tight in his chest.He dashed over thelast twenty yards of open ground that lay between the track and thecamp, seeing Zaga’s broken chain but no sign of the dog.It was aSunday night, wasn’t it?The communal fire outside Mama Luna’s vanwas burning brightly, casting tawny shadows.She lit it on a Sundaynight, Laurie knew, not a Romani day of rest or worship but achance for a feast, some singing and dancing before the drab balameweek began.Sasha had told him that.
Beyondthe fire was a strange sight.At first Laurie’s mind would not takeit in.As if to think of Sasha was to conjure him, there he was, onhis knees in the flickering light.Laurie loved London’s artgalleries, had spent many hours over the years gazing at the scenesthey called the pietà, wondering at the pain in them and what hadcaused half a world to require a broken, dead boy to be lifted froma cross and draped across his desolate mother’s lap to save theirsouls.He dropped from his flat run to a ragged-breathed halt a fewyards away.
Christwas holding the mother this time.Sasha, eyes wide and blank, wasclutching the birdlike cluster of bright scarves and robes thatconcealed Mama Luna’s tiny frame.Mama Luna was stretched outacross his knees.Her face was contorted, limbs disposed awkwardly.Most incongruous of all, a wrongness that almost made Laurie startretching again—his father, standing off to the side, barely threefeet from Sasha in a world in which Laurie had sworn he would neverallow them to meet.Because it couldn’t contain them both.It wouldtear itself apart.
“Sasha,” he choked out, stumbling across the space that dividedthem.Laurie fell to his knees at his side.“Sash!”
SirWilliam was staring at the old woman on the ground.One of his bigfists was bunched against his hip, the other running through hishair in a gesture of bewilderment.A pair of his colleagues camerunning back from the vans and also halted by the group by thefire.“I didn’t touch her,” he said.“I didn’t lay a hand onher.”
Sasha,who had not moved or blinked in response to Laurie’s voice,suddenly seemed to hear him.He shifted a little to look at him.“Laurie,” he said, as if just woken up.As if he and Laurie hadnever been apart and were carrying on a conversation from before.“That’s what she meant.‘The father is death…’ Not yours.Herown.”
“No.She’s not…” Laurie stretched out his fingers.The oldwoman was still warm, her skin soft and dry as a seasoned apple’s.But there was no flicker of a pulse, in her wrist or at her throat.Laurie whispered, “Oh, no…”
“She had a weak heart.When they all came running in, she wasfrightened.She tried to jump up, and…” Sasha lowered his head.“She just fell.Laurie, what are they doing here?”
Laurie,shell-shocked, had nothing left in him but truth.“My sister’s gonemissing.He…” He jerked a hand in his father’s direction, notlooking up at him.He thought he would never look again.“Hethought it was something to do with you.The police told me aboutyour father.”
Sasha shook his head.“What?Dear God, no.”He swallowed andflinched as if a stone had struck him.“And Clara… She’smissing?”
“Yes.Three days.”
“It can’t be.Oh, Laurie.This is why I tried to stay away fromyou.But I couldn’t.I couldn’t be without you.I…” He fell silentfor a moment.Laurie saw him losing his way among the pits andholes opening up in the world all around him, as Laurie had losthis own.“Look,” Sasha said suddenly, tenderly shifting the oldwoman’s body in his arms and reaching into his coat’s insidepocket.“I bought theStagefor you yesterday, in case you forgot.For nextweek.And there was this in it.Have you seen?”
He withdrew a newspaper sheet, carefully folded, and handed itto Laurie.Laurie took it from him in numb fingers.Opened it outand knelt staring at his own image.Or his own borrowed skin.Hecould not remember the moment fromHamletin which the shot had beentaken, could not recall his murderous advance on Laertes, sword inhand.It was a good photo.Dazedly scanning the page in thefirelight, he saw that the article was better.New talent.Huge potential.East Hill’s hiddenstar.In another world, he would have beendelighted.“I want that back,” Sasha rasped, eyes filling withdesperate tears.“I don’t have a picture of you.”
A picture.A mug shot, height markings on a wall.Alexandru Petrica.Lauriehanded the article back to Sasha, a sudden tremor making the papervibrate.Laurie did not care who Sasha was.The only thing he knewnow with any certainly was that he should never, not for oneinstant, have had the slightest doubt of him.Horror rose up inhim, metaphysical in its intensity.The night filled with black,beating wings.He glanced up at his father, at the six or seven menemerging from the caravans where they had finished doing whatevertheir worst might be.“Sasha,” he said very softly, not taking hiseyes off the old man.“You have to go.”
“What?”
