Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [105]
The investigation created its own fears as it progressed, as it dawned on me that something very peculiar was going on. A small number of cops did turn out to be directly on the Vinaldi payroll, but nowhere near enough to account for his exorbitant success. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that his fan club must start near the very top of the NRPD, which I couldn’t understand. Things had gone on in the same old way in New Richmond for many, many years; I couldn’t work out what would make senior brass decide that it was worth throwing their lot in with one hood in particular.
Mai and I kept on digging, and kept getting closer to the truth, until that final week five years ago. By then, through pure intuition, I could tell the investigation was going to break. Normally my intuitions aren’t worth the paper I wipe them on, but this time I knew it was different. I could feel it like a continual vibration under my fingers, and I spent virtually the whole of that week in the office or on the street, barely seeing Henna and Angela.
On the last morning I left very early, but not too early for Angela, who came sprinting out of her bedroom as I was on my way to the door. She threw herself up at me and I caught her awkwardly, only then realizing how long it had been. Partly it was because I was away so much of the time, but it was also, I realized, because she was growing up and didn’t do it so often anymore. For a moment I was truly afraid. If I wasn’t careful I was going to miss the last of her childhood, and then what would I have left?
I put her down with a kiss on the head, and called good bye to Henna as I walked out the door. Perhaps she came into the living room to give me a kiss, to wish me luck with my day. I’ll never know, because I never saw her alive again.
Someone had discovered what I was doing, how close I’d come to the truth. They gave the order and that someone came to my apartment that day and dismantled the two women I loved. He did it in a way which said they knew all about me, about the kind of things I had seen in The Gap, about what fears still lived at the heart of my life. For the last five years I’d assumed it was someone hired by Vinaldi, but now I believed that it wasn’t.
But somebody did it. They did it, and they helped destroy me, but perhaps it was me who added the most damning touch.
At the time when Henna and Angela were being killed I wasn’t at work. I wasn’t even working. I could have been at home, but I wasn’t because I was with another woman, and I was fucking her. Her name was Phieta, and she was the one who eventually came and found me in the warehouse, where I’d run after finding my family’s bodies. At the moment Henna was killed I was kissing Phieta’s breasts; by the time Angela died I was perhaps down to her navel. I can’t be exactly sure about the timing, but it’s probably about right. I don’t suppose it really matters.
How long do you wait for something which may never come? Do you keep on looking for Oz? In the end does it even exist, or is it just MaxWork, a way of passing the time?
Five years on the Farm brought me no closer to understanding anything. Perhaps I’m not built for answers; perhaps I am just the product of wrong experiences and bad advice. I can remember one time, when I was fourteen, a rare expansive moment of my father’s. He was sitting in our tiny kitchen, slobbing his way through the dinner my mother had prepared. She was at the sink, washing up. I don’t recall which house this was in, because they all blur into one, but I remember my father watching my mother for a long while as she cleaned and scrubbed, running his eyes over her tired, slumped shoulders. He turned to me eventually and said these words:
“Remember this, Jack. Masturbation is no substitute for all of the other women in the world.”
And though I loved my mother, and hated my father more than anyone before or since, I fear it was his world view which I absorbed. It’s not necessarily the right things, the good things, which