[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
way. The old man's voice seemed tiny in the wake of the shot, but his words
acted like a spark set to a line of gunpowder. His command sputtered through
the nearby pedestrians, then caught as each person turned and passed the
phrase on, and on it ran up the street, fizzing and furious as it burned
through the residents, coming even with the honking maroon bonnet, passing it,
converting itself into motion: A heavy-laden greengrocer's cart began moving,
slowly at first but inexorably into the path of Greenfield's stolen motor. The
horn cut off as the Chrysler squealed one way then overcompensated to the
other before smashing into the cart and a parked poultry lorry at the same
moment. Cabbages and caged chickens rained down in all directions as the
Page 233
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
stunned pair tried to keep moving. Greenfield got so far as to raise his
pistol, but the crowd had already closed over them, and the gun went off
pointing at the upper window of the telephone exchange, causing a number of
trunk calls to come to grief as their connexions were yanked free by startled
operators.
We remained where we were while the community brought Dr Ming his two
prisoners. The old man had settled down onto the emerald bonnet of our own
stolen motor, his hands tucked together into invisible sleeves, and was in
placid conversation with Holmes; Hammett gazed at the two of them in frank
disbelief; I let myself out of the motor slowly, watching the procession come
near.
Greenfield struggled against his bonds of grocer's twine, shouting furiously.
His sister had her hands tied as well, and I looked at her carefully,
wondering if I had seen her on board the Marguerite. She was a tall woman,
nearly as tall as I, and although her suspiciously uniform brown hair was
slightly mussed by the chase, otherwise she appeared so self-contained, she
might have been pausing to answer the queries of a passer-by rather than
waiting for the police. Studying her closely, I thought I might have seen her
on the ship, perhaps on the night of the fancy-dress ball, but I would not
have sworn to it. She came quietly in the hands of her captors, her expression
more watchful than daunted; I thought the police needed to be warned that she
should be carefully searched.
I wanted to talk to her, wanted in fact to grab her hard and demand what had
set her on our heels so resolutely, but then I saw her glance at him, and in
that one glance, it all became clear.
Even after all these years, and despite the self-control that was keeping her
spine straight and her face untroubled, her weakness was the man beside her.
For a brief instant, she looked afraid not for herself, but for him.
She was not his sister. She might have been his willing slave.
My eyes went to him, as if mere appearance could explain such a lifetime of
devotion: Robert Greenfield, my father's comrade-in-youth, who had inspired
mistrust in my mother and open animosity in his ex-wife. An ordinary enough
figure, other than the scarring on his face, and even that was hardly
fearsome.
Standing at the front of the motor, Greenfield's curses only increased in
volume, until one of the men nearby drew a length of filthy rag from about his
person and held it up enquiringly in front of Dr Ming.
Dr Ming deferred to Holmes, who turned to look at me, asking with his eyebrows
if I cared to speak with the man before the police arrived.
Greenfield followed the sequence of glances until it ended up with me, at
which point his curses strangled in his throat. "Jesus Charlie?" he choked
out, then looked at me more comprehensively. If anything, his face went
whiter, and the internal murmur of something, there was something behind
the grew loud and louder in my ears.
"You... You must be the daughter. Mary. Christ, that hair, those glasses... I
thought " He caught himself up short, and tried hard to summon a crooked grin.
"Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like your old man?"
"Before you killed him, you mean?"
The grin slipped for an instant before he retrieved it to buoy his protests,
Page 234
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
but I was not listening to his words. Instead, I was taken up with his face
and the voice itself.
The burn that affected about half his facial skin had erased one eyebrow and
part of the other, but had not gone deep enough to reach the muscles and
tendons. Below the shiny scar tissue the movement was normal enough, albeit
somewhat stiff on the left side.
And the voice I knew that voice, slightly hoarse and with the flat Boston
accent that my father had possessed in a much softer degree. The voice reached
in and pulled out the hidden something, the room
in my memory house that I had known was there, the key I had obediently set
aside so thoroughly that I did not even see it.
"You said, 'Don't be afraid, little girl, '" I told him. I had not meant to
speak aloud, but the man blinked, so clearly I had.
"What?" he said.
"In the tent. When you came looking for my father and woke me up, you had no
face, it was whiter than your face is now and even shinier, and I was
frightened. You told me not to be afraid. But I should have been, shouldn't
I?"
Greenfield looked at the men holding his arms and again tried to grin. "I was
out doing rescue work and got burned, so I went to find your father and see
how he was. He'd been a good friend of mine, before
he married, and "
"You were not doing rescue work; you were out robbing abandoned houses and
stripping dead bodies. "
That silenced him.
"But that wasn't the only time, " I continued, speaking as much to myself, or
to Holmes, as to Greenfield. "You were there when Father stopped for the
tyre-change, weren't you? In Serra Beach. That's the thing I've been trying to
remember the last few days, that I caught a glimpse of you behind the garage,
slipping behind that big gum tree at the side. You'd been talking with my
father, and when I finished lunch and went to find him and tell him we were
ready to go, I saw the two of you, arguing. When my father turned and saw me,
his face was red and his fists were clenched I'd never seen him look like
that. You ran off. And I asked him then who you were and he told me you were
nobody, that it would upset Mother if I told her I'd seen you, that I should
try to forget all about you.
"And so I did. God, did I ever. But you were there that day, and you cut the
brake rod and you killed them all. Just like you killed Leah Ginzberg and Mah
and Micah Long, four months later. "
At this last pair of names a murmur sprang up, as several of the older
residents recognised the Anglicised versions of the murdered couple's names. I
walked around the motor until I was standing directly in front of Greenfield,
and I wanted to murder him. Then and there, I wanted to gut him and leave him
bleeding his life out on the street, for what he had done to six good and
loving people. I might even have done so I was on the very brink of snatching
the gun from my pocket or bending for the knife in my boot-top when something
touched my arm. It was the gentlest touch imaginable, the mere brush of a
bird's wings in weight, but the faint weight of it settled onto the taut
muscles of my forearm and stopped them from moving. I looked down at the
Page 235
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]