The hallucination lasted two heartbeats only, but long enough for him to glance down her body and up again to meet the same vile gaze.
“Carys?”
Then her eyelids fluttered, and the fan of her fingers closed across her face. For a lunatic instant he flinched, awaiting the revelation. Her hands dropping from her head; the face transformed: a fish’s head. But of course it was her: only her. Here she was now, smiling at him.
“Are you all right?” he ventured.
“What do you think?”
“I love you, babe.”
She murmured something as she slumped on him. They lay there for several minutes, his cock diminishing in a cooling bath of mingled fluids.
“Aren’t you getting a cramp?” he asked her after a while, but she didn’t reply. She was asleep.
Gently, he slid her sideways, slipping out of her with a wet sound. She lay on the bed beside him, her face impassive. He kissed her breasts, licked her fingers, and fell asleep beside her.
32
Mamoulian felt sick.
She wasn’t easy prey, this woman, despite his sentimental claim upon her psyche. But then her strength was to be expected. She was Whitehead’s stock: peasant breed, thief breed. Cunning and dirty. Though she couldn’t know precisely what she was doing, she’d fought him with the very sensuality he most despised.
But her weaknesses-and she had many-were exploitable. He’d used the heroin fugues at first, gaining access to her when she was pacified to the point of indifference. They warped her perception, which had made his invasion less noticeable, and through her eyes he’d seen the house, listened with her ears to the witless conversation of its occupants, shared with her, though it revolted him, the smell of their cologne and their flatulence. She was the perfect spy, living in the heart of the enemy’s camp. And as the weeks had gone by he’d found it easier to slip in and oil of her unnoticed. That had made him careless.
It was carelessness not to have looked before he leaped; to commit himself to her head without first checking what she was doing. He hadn’t even thought she might be with the bodyguard; and by the time he’d realized his error he was sharing her sensations-her ridiculous rapture-and it had left him trembling. He would not make such a mistake again.
He sat in the bare room in the bare house he had bought for himself and Breer, and tried to forget the turbulence he’d experienced, the look in Strauss’ eyes as he stared up at the girl. Had the thug glimpsed, perhaps, the face behind her face? The European guessed so.
No matter; none of them would survive. It wouldn’t just be the old man, the way he’d planned at first. All of them-his acolytes, his serfs, all-would go to the wall with their master.
The memories of Strauss’ assaults lingered in the European’s entrails; he longed to evacuate diem. The sensation shamed and disgusted him.
Downstairs, he heard Breer come in or go out; on his way to some atrocity or home from one. Mamoulian concentrated on the blank wall opposite him, but try as he might to exile the trauma, he still felt the intrusion: the spurting head, the heat of the act.
Forget, he said aloud. Forget the brown fire off them. It’s no risk to you. See only the emptiness: the promise of the void.
His innards shook. Beneath his gaze, the paint on the wall seemed to blister. Venereal eruptions disfigured its emptiness. Illusions; but horribly real to him nevertheless. Very well: if he couldn’t dislodge the obscenities, he would transform them. It wasn’t difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions. The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed. Picturing the lovers in death together, the nausea he’d felt receded.
In the face of that void what was their substance? Transitory. Their promises? Pretension.
He began to calm. The sores on the wall had started to heal, and he was left, after a few minutes, with an echo of the nothingness he had come to need so much. Life came and went. But absence, he knew, went on forever.