To all of which Pendel listened studiously, sensing the presence of a message in everything, even if its meaning was not clear to him. And gradually the police faded away, the crowd also. The old woman sat down beside her husband and put her arm round his neck and Pendel walked up the steps of the only house in the street with its lights out, saying to himself: I’m dead already, I’m as dead as you are, Mickie, so don’t think your death can frighten me.
He knocked and no one came, but his knocking caused heads to turn in the street because who on earth knocks on anyone’s door at festival time? So he stopped knocking and kept his face in the shadow of the porch. The door was closed but not locked. He turned the handle and stepped inside and his first thought was that he was back in the orphanage and Christmas was coming up and he was a Wise Man in the Nativity play again, holding a lantern and a stick and wearing an old brown trilby that someone had given to the poor – except that the actors inside the house he was now entering were in the wrong places and somebody had snatched the Holy Infant.
There was a bare tiled room for a stable. There was an aura of flickering light from the fireworks in the square. And there was a woman in a shawl watching over a crib and praying with her hands to her chin, who was Ana apparently feeling a need to cover her head in the pres-ence of death. But the crib was not a crib. It was Mickie, upside down as she had promised, Mickie with his face flat on the kitchen floor and his arse in the air and a map of Panama one side of his head where one ear and one cheek should have been, and the gun he had done it with lying beside him pointing accusingly at the intruder, telling the world quite needlessly what the world already knew: that Harry Pendel, tailor, purveyor of dreams, inventor of people and places of escape, had murdered his own creation.
Gradually as Pendel’s eyes became used to the fickle light of fireworks, flares and streetlights from the square he began to make out the rest of the mess that Mickie had left behind when he blew one side of his head off: the traces of him on the tiled floor and walls and in surprising places like a chest of drawers crudely daubed with rollicking pirates and their molls. And it was these that prompted his first words to Ana, which were of a practical rather than consoling kind.
‘We ought to put something over the windows,’ he said.
But she didn’t answer, didn’t stir, didn’t turn her head, which suggested to him that in her way she was as dead as he was, Mickie had killed her too, she was contingent damage. She had tried to make Mickie happy, she had mopped him down and shared his bed, and now he had shot her: take this for all your trouble. So for a moment Pendel was angry with Mickie, accusing him of an act of great brutality, not just against his own body, but against his wife and mistress and children, and his friend Harry Pendel as well.
Then of course he remembered his own responsibility in the matter and his depiction of Mickie as a great resister and spy; and he tried to imagine how Mickie must have felt when the police dropped by to tell him he was going to do more prison; and the truth of his own guilt at once swept away any convenient reflections upon Mickie’s irrelevant shortcomings as a suicide.
He touched Ana’s shoulder and when she still didn’t budge some residual sense of the responsibility of the entertainer sparked in him: this woman needs a bit of cheering up. So he put his hands under her armpits and hauled her to her feet and held her against him and she was as stiff and cold as he imagined Mickie was. Clearly she had been stuck for so long in one position keeping watch over him that his stillness and placidity had got into her bones somehow. She was a flighty, funny, skittish girl by nature, judging from the couple of occasions when Pendel had met her, and probably she had never in her life watched anything so motionless for so long. First she had screamed and ranted and complained – Pendel reckoned, remembering their telephone conver-sation – and when she had got all that out of her system, she’d gone into a kind of watching decline. And as she had cooled, she had set, which was why she was so stiff to hold and why her teeth were chattering and why she couldn’t answer his question about the windows.