“I have to have a fix, Marty.”
“Now?”
“Pretty soon.”
He’d been waiting for this moment and dreading it. Not because he couldn’t find her a supply; he knew he could. But because he’d hoped somehow she’d be able to resist the need when she was with him.
“I feel really bad,” she said.
“You’re all right. You’re with me.”
“He’ll come, you know.”
“Not now, he won’t.”
“He’ll be angry, and he’ll come.”
Marty’s mind went back and back again to his experience in the upstairs room of Caliban Street. What he had seen there, or rather not seen there, had terrified him more profoundly than the dogs or Breer. Those were merely physical dangers. But what had gone on in the room was a danger of another order altogether. He had felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, that his soul-a notion he had hitherto rejected as Christian flim-flam-had been threatened. What he meant by the word he wasn’t certain; not, he suspected, what the pope meant. But some part of him more essential than limb or life had been almost eclipsed, and Mamoulian had been responsible. What more could the creature unleash, if pressed? His curiosity was more now than an idle desire to know what was behind the veil: it had become a necessity. How could they hope to arm themselves against this demagogue without some clue to his nature?
“I don’t want to know,” Carys said, reading his thoughts. “If he comes, he comes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Last night-” he began, about to remind her of how they had won the skirmish. She waved the thought away before it was finished. The strain on her face was unbearable; her need was flaying her.
“Marty . . .”
He looked across at her.
“. . . you promised,” she said accusingly.
“I haven’t forgotten.”
He’d done the mental arithmetic in his head: not the cost of the drug itself, but of lost pride. He would have to go to Flynn for the heroin; he knew no one else he could trust. They were both fugitives now, from Mamoulian and from the law.
“I’ll have to make a phone call,” he said.
“Make it,” she replied.
She seemed to have physically altered in the last half-hour. Her skin was waxy; her eyes had a desperate gleam in them; the shaking was worsening by the minute.
“Don’t make it easy for him,” she said.
He frowned: “Easy?”
“He can make me do things I don’t want to,” she said. Tears had started to run. There was no accompanying sob, just a free-fall from the eyes. “Maybe make me hurt you.”
“It’s all right. I’ll go now. There’s a guy lives with Charmaine, he’ll be able to get me stuff, don’t worry. You want to come?”
She hugged herself. “No,” she said. “I’ll slow you down. Just go.”
He pulled on his jacket, trying not to look at her; the mixture of frailty and appetite scared him. The sweat on her body was fresh; it gathered in the soft passage behind her clavicles; it streamed on her face.
“Don’t let anybody in, OK?”
She nodded, her eyes searing him.
When he’d gone she locked the door behind him and went back to sit on the bed. The tears started to come again, freely. Not grief tears, just salt water. Well, perhaps there was some grief in them: for this rediscovered fragility, and for the mats who had gone down the stairs.
He was responsible for her present discomfort, she thought. He’d been the one to seduce her into thinking she could stand on her own two feet. And where had it brought her; brought them both? To this hothouse cell in the middle of a July afternoon with so much malice ready to close in on them.
It wasn’t love she felt for him. That was too big a burden of feeling to carry. It was at best infatuation, mingled with that sense of impending loss she always tasted when close to somebody, as though every moment in his presence she was internally mourning the time when he would no longer be there.
Below, the door slammed as he stepped into the street. She lay back on the bed, thinking of the first time they’d made love together. Of how even that most private act had been overlooked by the European. The thought of Mamoulian, once begun, was like a snowball on a steep hill. It rolled, gathering speed and size as it went, until it was monstrous. An avalanche, a whiteout.