Burial (22 page)

I didn't know whether Karen felt genuine affection for me, or whether she was clinging to the only other person on the planet who knew for certain what had happened to Michael and Naomi Greenberg. Maybe it was a little of one and a little of another, with a dash of tiredness and shock thrown in for good measure. I don't usually think about
love, not in the context of
my
day-to-day relationships. Love was something that got bored with sitting on the end of my bed, and which one day just got up and walked out, without even bothering to close the door behind it.

After I had finished my coffee I went into the spare bedroom for a couple of hours' sleep. I didn't want to go back to my consulting-rooms on East 53rd because I knew that there would be more reporters lying in wait for me; and I wanted to forget about the Greenbergs for a while. I could still see Martin's fist clutching Naomi's bloody, hairy flesh; and I thought that I would probably go on seeing it for ever.

The spare bedroom was small but pretty, wallpapered with faded gilt flowers. I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror. The left side of my face was hugely swollen, like a cartoon character, and my eye was almost closed. I hadn't realized I looked so bad. I slowly undressed and climbed into bed, and eased my cheek onto the cool, slightly musty-smelling pillow. Next to me, on the wall, there was a gold-framed engraving. It depicted a fierce nineteenth-century lady traveller in a large ostrich-plumed hat staring through opera-glasses at a Red Indian in a magnificent war-bonnet. The caption read
Our Feathered Friends
.

I couldn't help smiling at its naïveté. The Indians had never been our friends and never would be; and we would never be theirs.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost at once.

After about a half-hour, I began to dream. I dreamed that I was running upstairs in the Greenbergs' apartment-building. Their front door was ajar, and a cold blueish light was shining out of it, like a television flickering in a strange motel-room. I could hear people talking in muffled voices, and somebody saying, ‘
Neeim … neeim … Nepauz-had
…' again and again.

Then I realized that somebody was standing close behind me — so close that I could feel their chill, even breathing on
the back of my neck. I tried to turn around but I couldn't. A hand had gripped my hair and was tearing it out by the roots. I felt panic more than pain, but I knew that my assailant was hurting me badly. He might even be disfiguring me for life.

The next thing I knew, my head had been pulled back, and somebody was trying to cram their fingers into my mouth. I gagged, struggled, and tried to wrench my head away. I shouted, ‘Get off me! Get off me! I can't breathe! You're choking me!'

At least I
thought
I was shouting ‘Get off me!' I was probably screaming ‘Gruggle-uggle-grogghh!' instead. Suddenly I opened my eyes and said, ‘
Ah
!' because I found Karen lying right next to me, smoothing my forehead. She whispered, warmly, ‘Ssh! You've been having a nightmare. You've been screaming and groaning at the top of your voice.'

I let my head drop back onto the pillow. I looked up at her. It didn't take much waking-up for me to realize that she was naked. All she was wearing, as far as I could make out, was a thin gold chain around her neck, with a gold S-shaped pendant dangling from it. Singing Rock had sent her that pendant, after he had helped to save her life. It was the prehistoric Alqonquin hieroglyph for ‘secret sign'; and according to Singing Rock it was supposed to have the same deterrent effect on evil Indian spirits as crucifixes had on vampires.

Karen kissed my forehead and ran her hand through my hair.

‘I'm not sure that I'm ready for this,' I told her.

‘Why not?' she smiled. ‘I've always liked you, right from the moment I first met you.'

‘Karen, you don't owe me anything. You know that. Besides … you and me, they didn't exacdy find us under the same bramble-bush, now did they? I'm a Bronx boy,
always will be. Sniffy suburban Bronx, with the fancy lace curtains, but Bronx all the same. And what are you? New England and upper East Side. Private education, designer duds.'

She reached across to the nightstand and produced a square foil envelope. ‘I took the liberty,' she said. ‘Do you want me to put it on for you?'

‘Karen …' I protested, as she drew back the sheet, ‘think of the age difference. If I'd married your mother when I was fifteen, I could have been your father.'

‘My mother doesn't like younger men,' she said, biting open the condom packet.

‘I'm not talking about your mother, I'm talking about you. I don't even know if I feel this way about you.'

Karen grasped my cock in her hand and gave it three arousing rubs. ‘It
looks
as if you do.'

‘Karen —'

‘Ssh, this is the difficult bit.'

She stretched the rubber over my swollen glans, and then carefully unrolled it down the shaft I was disconcerted to see when she'd finished that my cock had turned bright emerald.

‘They come in colours,' she said. ‘Green was all I had left.'

She climbed over me and kissed me again. Her small breasts brushed against my bare chest, and her nipples crinkled. They were pointed and pale-pink, with just a hint of brown, like dying rose-petals.

We kissed deep and long. I brushed back her hair, and looked into her eyes. She was so close that I could see every crinkle of her irises; every stray fleck of colour.

‘I never thought of you this way,' I told her.

She smiled. ‘I never thought of you any other way. Besides — what choice do we have?'

‘I don't understand you.'

‘After what happened, how could any of us possibly form any kind of relationship with anybody else? We're the only ones who know, the only ones who really saw. When I was standing at the altar with Jim I was promising to love him in the name of God, but all the time I was wearing this pendant around my neck to protect me from the spirits that I
really
believed in.'

‘Karen —'

She kissed my eyelids, kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Harry, I'm not Karen Tandy any more. I'm not that innocent young girl who first came to you for help. I've grown up, I've married, I've learned what's what I'm Karen van Hooven who fancies your body; if only for once.'

With that, she lifted herself over me, took hold of my cock in her right hand, and positioned it up between her legs. She excited me. I can't say that she didn't She was very slim and very small, and whatever she said she was still a child-woman. I reached up and touched her breast, and gently rolled her nipple between finger and thumb, and kissed her chin and her neck and anywhere else I could reach.

When she sat down on me, she felt very tight and very slippery and very warm. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and rode up and down as if she were crossing the prairies on a slow and faithful horse. I kept thinking to myself,
you shouldn't be doing this … this girl believes in you, this girl has faith in you, you‘re supposed to take care of her, not screw her. What would her aunt think
?

But I looked down and saw her lean hips rising and falling over mine; and the neatly-clipped triangular bush of her pubic hair; and my shiny emerald-green cock sliding in and out of her swollen pink lips. And I was turned on, I admit it Green cock, pink flesh, it turned me on.

I reared up and turned her over onto her back. I kissed her and snuzzled her neck. I squeezed her breasts and tugged her nipples between my fingers. Then I pushed
myself deep inside her, and deeper, until she lifted both her legs in the air and gasped and cried out, and made other noises like suddenly-disturbed doves.

She cupped my balls in her hand and I could feel how scrunched-up they were: all ready to shoot. I wished to God that condoms hadn't been invented, or better still, that communicable diseases hadn't made them necessary. But that was the last complicated thought that I had before I filled the condom in three bulging bursts, and Karen dug her nails into my back and held me tight.

At last I dropped back onto my side of the bed. I kissed her. I was sweating so much that my hair stuck to my forehead like Julius Caesar. All I needed was a laurel wreath. ‘I'm sorry,' I said.

She kissed me back, licked my sweat. ‘What are you sorry for?'

‘Well, I could have lasted longer. It's been a while, that's all. Gives a man an itchy trigger.'

‘What are you talking about? I came.'

‘You did?'

‘Just because I didn't scream and throw myself around.'

‘You actually had a climax?'

‘Of course I did. I wouldn't lie about it.'

I stared at her. I couldn't believe it. All of the ladies with whom I usually consorted made such a song-and-dance about climaxing that you would have thought that their sexual responses were choreographed by Leo Karibian — you know, the guy who did
West Side Story
. Maybe they were trying to give me value for money. Maybe they were faking it.

But Karen simply smiled and kissed me again and said, ‘I came, okay? I really did. As soon as you got on top of me.'

‘Oh,' I said, feeling pleased.

‘It was gorgeous,' she said, and snuggled under my armpit.

We lay like that for almost an hour. We both dozed. I had more intermittent dreams about the Greenbergs' apartment, and I was sure that I could see a snake gliding transparently beneath the bed, with just the faintest hint of a rattle. I opened my eyes and the sun was still shining through the drapes, and the telephone was warbling.

‘You want me to answer it?' asked Karen, in a blurry voice. But I said, ‘No, I'll answer it. You stay where you are.'

It was Sergeant Friendly, from the 13th Precinct He sounded tired. ‘You asked me to call when your friend had seen his lawyer.'

‘Oh, sure, thanks. I owe you.'

Karen was sitting up in bed, bare-breasted. I didn't know whether I had known her long enough to be permitted an eyeful or not. Sometimes even long-term ladies get upset if you stare too open-mouthed at their gazongas. Not that Karen's were gazongas, more like modest-sized meringues with cherries on top.

‘What is it?' she said.

I tugged on my pants. ‘The police. I can talk to Martin.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Ten after eleven.'

‘Do you want me to come with you?'

I thought about it; but then I shook my head. ‘I don't think so. I don't want you to get mixed up in this for a second time.'

She looked at me with eyes like dark smudges. ‘You're still so sure that it's him?'

I nodded. ‘It all fits. I didn't want it to fit. I tried to think of a hundred possible ways in which it wouldn't. But it does; and I don't even know what I'm supposed to do next. That's why I want to talk to Martin.'

‘Okay,' she said, with determination, and her little breasts jiggled.

Martin was waiting for me in a stuffy interview room with windows that were covered in dented steel mesh. Outside I could see rooftops and warehouses and water-towers, and a thin stratum of idle clouds. There was a hot, glazed look to the lower east side that for some reason reminded me of that poem ‘By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.' You'd never believe it, but I first came across that poem in an old Pogo strip, and it wasn't until fifteen years later that I realized that it wasn't Walt Kelly who had written it, but Rudyard Kipling. Goes to show, doesn't it. I've got all the style, but none of the education.

A bored Hispanic police officer with Elvis Presley side-burns (Las Vegas era) leaned against the flaking green wall and tried to beat the world chewing-gum noise record. Martin sat at the cheap sun-faded table looking diminished and grey. They had given him a clean denim shirt and jeans, and allowed him to shave, but he still looked haunted and strange, as if his face was a half-assembled jigsaw.

The chair made a scraping noise as I pulled it out. Martin looked up. ‘Harry,' he said.

‘Are you okay?' I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected. My lawyer's already started to make lateral noises about pleading insanity. He was my father's attorney, yet there he was screaming at me. ‘You pulled her muff out of her mouth, and you want to plead
what
?'

I drummed the table with my fingertips. By the old Moulmein Pagoda. ‘How are you going to plead?'

‘You know how. You know what happened. I was
possessed
. I was taken over completely.'

There was no point in being ridiculous about it. I said, ‘Yes, I know you were. If I had any way of proving it, they'd let you out of here in three minutes flat.'

‘It's never happened to me before. Usually, I can control any spirit from any age … the older the better. They're
usually so gentle, so sympathetic. But this one — my God, you have no idea. This one hit me like a locomotive. It was big, it was dark, it was powerful — and it was so
vengeful
, I've never felt anything like it. It wanted to tear my heart out, and everybody else's heart out, too.'

‘How did you reach it?' I asked him. ‘Through Singing Rock?'

‘Unh-hunh. He shook his head. ‘I felt Singing Rock … Singing Rock passed me by, like a wind. Singing Rock didn't want me to go any further. But of course I knew better. Don't the living always know better than the dead?'

‘So what did you do?'

Martin wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His eyes shifted quickly and furtively from side to side, as if he were afraid of being overheard. ‘I didn't have to do anything at all — which is very unusual. I was approached. A man in a blue cavalry uniform came up to me. His head was all bone and scabs, like he'd been scalped. I've never been approached by a spirit like that before. He was angry; calm but angry. He had a moustache and his moustache was all stringy with blood. He couldn't look at me directly. It was very unusual. He said that I should have stayed away; but since I hadn't, he'd show me the cause of all the trouble.'