Beautiful Beast(60)

‘One last card.’

I close my eyes and let my trembling hand hover over the semicircle. With a prayer in my heart I fish one out. I hand the card to her without looking at it, but I already know. Something is wrong. Very wrong.

She frowns at the cards. It’s a hot day but I feel the chill spread over my skin, making my hair stand on end. She lays the three cards down on the table. Slowly she strokes the card in the middle with her forefinger. Her nail is thick and yellow.

‘An túr,’ she says. The tower. She doesn’t look up at me. Finally, she raises her martyr’s eyes, her expression portentous, and speaks.

‘Beware the woman who is wounded, beautiful and ruthless. She has soot and death in her mouth.’

My mouth opens with horror at her terrible words.

Her black eyes flash, her voice is a shade fainter. ‘You can still pray to the Madonna for a miracle. The abyss may not come to pass.’ She gathers the cards with a snap. ‘Perhaps.’





There is a sign on the door that can’t be missed.

It reads:

Enter but at your own risk.

—Whodini





EIGHTEEN


Lily

That morning Jake gets up early. There is something he must do at the office.

‘Unimportant, but necessary,’ he says when I ask him what.

It is too early for me to eat, but I sit and watch him wolf down three slices of toast thickly spread with butter and homemade marmalade that his mother bottles for him. I walk him to the front door, snake my arms around his neck and stand on tiptoe to kiss him and he lifts me up.

‘I’ll crumple your suit,’ I whisper in his ear.

‘Wrap your legs around me, woman,’ he growls.

I laugh and wrap my legs around his hips.

‘Have I told you today how beautiful you are?’

I tilt my head and pretend to think. ‘Let me see. Yes. Yes, you have.’

He looks into my eyes seriously. ‘You’re beautiful, Lily. Truly beautiful.’

‘Is everything OK?’ I ask him.

He smiles softly. ‘Yes, everything is just the way it should be.’

We kiss gently and then he leaves me.

I stand for a moment looking at the door. A small cold leaf of worry clings to my back. Is he doing something dangerous today? I go back to bed and lie down for a while, thinking. Why has he not told me where he is going?

By nine thirty a.m. I have showered, dressed and am closing the front door behind me. I walk to the bus stand down the road, and I sit on one of the red plastic seats and wait for the bus. It comes at nine fifty-two a.m.

I climb aboard, pay the bus driver, and take a seat upstairs. The bus takes me all the way to Leicester Square. I get off and walk up to Piccadilly Circus. It is full of tourists and I sit on the stone steps under the statue and look at them, with their maps and their cameras and their great enthusiasm.

Afterwards, I walk down Regent Street ambling in and out of shops. I try on a hat. When I look in the mirror I find my eyes huge and frightened. I turn away quickly. I flick through the hangers without real interest and my behavior earns me the attention of a security guard, who starts following me around. I leave that shop quickly.

I enter a shoe shop and after trying on about ten pairs I buy a pair. I am outside the shop when I realize I don’t even know what color the shoes are. By now it is one forty-five p.m. I go into a small café and order a salmon and cucumber sandwich, but I am unable to finish it. I pay my bill and set off toward the Embankment Bridge.

As I walk across the bridge I start to feel the first frisson of nervousness. It settles like lead in the pit of my stomach. I have blocked it out all this time, but the moment is here. It is time. I train my eyes not on the Tate Modern, but on St Paul’s Cathedral in the background. Eventually I come upon the giant black insect creature made of metal. Creepy and perfectly War of the Worlds.

I go through the front door of the Tate Modern and up the stairs. Down the corridor there is an exhibition by Marlene Dumas that I would like to see but I don’t go in there. Instead I pass into one of the smaller rooms where a man is sitting on a bench contemplating a collage called ‘Pandora’ by a new artist, Miranda Johnson.

The colors are bright and bold, but there is no difference between this painting and Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’. Both are violent and raw with suffering. To enter the painting is to enter pain. I let my eyes wander over it. There is an eye in the collage, a full pair of bright pink lips, and a flower. There are also words like bitch, suck, liar, arsehole, abuse, and on the very top, cursive writing that says, You are invited…

I walk toward the painting, my soul aching.

The man on the bench speaks. ‘She shouldn’t have opened the box.’

I don’t look at him. I simply sit next to him, but not close enough to touch. There are six inches between us. I feel frozen inside. I think of my brother lying on the floor with the needle sticking out of his arm. And I am suddenly caught by his pain, the pain of the painting, my pain. I can do this. Of course I can do this.

I look at the painting and all I can see is the word ‘Bitch’.

‘You called for a meeting,’ the man says without looking at me.

‘Yes.’

He turns his head briefly to look at me. I turn my head quickly to meet his gaze. I want to look into his eyes. I want to stand again on firm ground. His eyes are dark and expressionless. Exactly the way I remember them. I stare at him. He is first to look away.

‘Well?’

‘There is something big happening on the sixteenth,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know yet. But something is coming in through Dover.’

‘Good work, but we won’t act on this one. It will compromise you. We’ll let this one go. You have something far more important to do.’

I swallow hard.

He turns to stare at me. ‘Are you falling for him?’ His voice is hard and cold.

I think of Jake’s skin pressed against mine, his tongue tracing an erotic path to my ear, his lips whispering, ‘I love you, Lily. I never believed anybody could be as beautiful as you.’

‘No. Of course not. This is just a job,’ I say, my insides twisted in a hard knot.

He looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Good. Because you are a servant of the Crown and our best hope to bring Crystal Jake and his criminal enterprise down.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I stand to leave.

‘Keep your wits about you, Hart,’ he cautions.

I don’t turn back and I don’t allow myself to think of Jake. I walk away with the sound of my feet echoing on the hard floors and Luke’s beautiful, helpless face in my mind.

To be continued…





CRYSTAL JAKE: BOOK 2





O Mother, I have made a bird of prey my lover,

When I give him bits of bread he doesn’t eat,

So I feed him with the flesh of my heart.

—Shiv Kumar Batalvi





ONE


Lily ‘Hart’ Strom

If I should die before you, cremate my body and commit my ashes to the ocean.

—A note from Luke Strom to his sister

A month after my brother’s remains were brought home in an earthenware urn, my father and I—my mother was still too distraught—took the container out to sea.

I remember that day well.

The sky was cloudy, the light tinged with pink. Windless. At the pier the driver of the chartered boat held out his hand, weathered to leather, to help us in. My father and I sat side by side on plastic cushions. I jammed my hands into the pockets of my wind jacket and my father lovingly cradled the urn. Neither of us spoke. The motor began and we sliced cleanly through the water, the cold salty morning air buffeting us, flattening our clothes against our bodies, and tearing at our hair.

When we were three nautical miles out, the driver cut the engine, and the boat began to gently drift. For a few seconds the air held only the sounds of water lapping against the sides of the boat and the whispered creak of wood as my father and I moved toward the rail. The sea was a gray blank, quiet, waiting. Like a cemetery.

I stood beside him while he opened the mouth of the urn and undid the knot of the plastic bag inside. We each took a handful of the pale gray ash. One last touch.

‘Oh, Luke,’ I whispered brokenly, unable to reconcile that handful of dust with the living breathing being I had loved so dearly. When we were young we had been like Siamese twins, sharing one heart. Inseparable.

Without warning, it began to drizzle. I raised my eyes at the sky in surprise. Was it a sign? A final goodbye? Luke had always loved the rain. When he was young he used to cartwheel in it. Laughing, happy Luke. But the arms of my memories were cold. He was too young and sweet to die.

I began to cry.

Thousands of water droplets struck me and mingled with my silent tears as I stood perfectly still, fist stretched over the railing. I was aware of my father opening his hand, and the cloud of ashes pouring from it. As if that was not enough of a magic trick, he took the plastic bag out of the urn, and upended its contents into the sea. I watched Luke blossom in the water, temporarily disarmed by the gentle beauty of his new form. Finally I understood why they call incinerated bones white flowers in India.

My father turned to me.

I swallowed hard. I had no magic tricks up my sleeve. I had nothing.

Gently he nudged my arm. ‘Let him go, Lily,’ he urged, his voice lowered and solemn.

I looked up at him blankly. His blond eyelashes were wet with rain or tears or both, and in the milky light his eyes seemed paler than I had ever seen them. I noticed the deepening lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Poor Dad. Somehow life had defeated him, too. I felt the first flash of helpless anger then.