“I think he is predictable. I’ve met him for myself. We’ve talked—”
“For twenty minutes at the most. Three birthday cards and a photograph, you said.”
“No, more than that. Not only on the doorstep when he came in August, just suddenly. But since.” She lowers her voice and leans in toward Leonard, as if to trust him with an intimate disclosure. “He’s phoned. We’ve met. We’ve been on walks. We’ve been in pubs. Don’t say. My mum’d have a stroke if she found out.”
“Well, mum’s the word. Trust me.” Her eyes are wet, he sees.
“But it’s for me, not Mum. I had to talk with him. Why wouldn’t I? Aren’t I entitled to? And now I know he sort of loves me. In a way. I asked him and he said he did. Or would. Give him the chance, at least.” She sits up suddenly, a fresh bright girl engaging with the world, a practiced catchphrase from FBH, the television show, on her lips: “It’s Flesh and Blood and History … and common sense. They’re on our side.”
“That’s quite a lineup, Lucy.”
“Yes, it is. It means he’ll never let me come to any harm. Admit it now, this is how it works.” In her scenario, her father dares not tie his victims up for fear of ropes around his own girl’s wrists. He dares not use his fists or fire his gun at anyone, the family or a policeman, anyone, or let his comrades do it either, for if he does, then Lucy will be beaten up or shot as well. A wound to match a wound. A death to match a death. A love to be rewarded with a love.
“Equivalence,” says Leonard.
“And if he wants a ransom,” Lucy adds, “or makes demands, you know, a helicopter or a wad of notes, all you do is ask the same for me. It’s only words. And if he tries to kill himself, he can do it knowing you’ll kill me as well. Don’t laugh. I see you couldn’t hurt a fly. But only we know that. How sweet is my idea? He’ll have no choice. He’ll have to … what’s the word? Resign?”
“Surrender, do you mean? Admit defeat? Capitulate?” Leonard smiles; the thought is satisfying. “You know what, then? Just think it through. If he backs down, if he caves in”—sweet phrase—“is that the end of it?” He shakes his head. She does the same and waits, biting her lower lip. “No? Exactly. Your newfound father will be dragged away in front of all the cameras and then locked up for one very long time. Don’t kid yourself. How will you live with that?”
“I’ll visit him in prison every week. I’m doing him a favor. There’s no defeat. I’m saving him.” This is where her argument is won.
She loves her father, Leonard thinks. Or at least she loves the idea of her father. Well, no surprise. Unquestionably, Maxie is a man who’s easy to be beguiled and inveigled by, on first encounters. Lucy will not have had the chance to feel his rage or spot the thug in him, as Leonard has. She will have found him handsome, charismatic, and mythically romantic. Overpowering, in fact. Of course she doesn’t want to lose a man like that for seventeen more years — forever, probably. She needs to know exactly where he is, even if that is in a cell. She wants him within reach. And more than that, she’s offering him the chance, his first and only chance, to prove he loves her. Yes, that’s her genius. What she proposes is a test of love. Leonard lifts his chin and offers Lucy Emmerson a loving smile of his own. She’s overpowering as well. He is the one who has capitulated. He has become Lucy Emmerson’s slavish comrade. Her only help. There’s no one else. He daren’t say no. At least, he daren’t say no to her face.
Lucy, like an excitable adolescent, wants to baptize the plot and their confederacy by pricking their fingertips with a brooch and shaking bloody hands, but Leonard will not stab himself. He says he is too old for punctures and perforations. But he agrees “in principle” to her grand plan. Overnight, he’ll square the idea with his wife (“No problem there,” he boasts) while Lucy collects her few “unsuspicious” things from home. “Nothing that looks too planned,” she promises. “I mean, I’ll leave my toothbrush in its usual place, and my BaxPax, stuff like that. It has to seem like I’ve just been grabbed. Right off the street. Like a genuine kidnapping. No witnesses.” She kisses Leonard’s cheek. “You’re really nice,” she says, delighted with the caper she has planned and now can share. Rather than return her kiss, as she seems to expect, Leonard raises his good hand for her, the painless one, and clenches it again.
“No pastarán,” she says. “We’re going to get on fine. I’m going to be the perfect guest. Three days maximum. Radiant! Tomorrow, then. High noon.” They arrange to rendezvous in the car park of the Zone superstores near the airport’s Charles III terminus. “Just sit and wait. I’ll find you,” she says. “There’s no mistaking that creepy van of yours.” Now she tilts her face again and smiles. “Let’s see that Texas photograph.” She leans across, her hair in his face. His hand is on her arm. Good mates, no more than that. They talk and smoke until the lights come on, this naught percenter and this child that might have been his own. They seem unlikely comrades, sitting damply with their drinks, more drinks than he can manage, their two hats on their laps providing the beer yard with its only vividness: red beret, yellow cap.
4
LEONARD IS NOT SORRY to get back to the van and be himself again. Those hours spent behind the Woodsman, so thrilling and so promising at first, have left him cornered rather than resolved. He is relieved, though, to find that his van has been neither clamped nor towed. Throughout his meeting with Lucy Emmerson he has never quite forgotten the single yellow restricted parking line running under its nearside tires and has worried what ingenious excuses he might have to offer Francine to explain why he is so unexpectedly late home. He cannot tell her he has ended up, expensively, at a City Highways car pound after an afternoon of drinking and smoking with a pretty teenage girl. A more likely delay, given his white lies of that morning, would be having the vehicle locked in by careless rangers at some unattended forest clearing. But, thankfully, the van is untouched. He can save his inventions for some other occasion. For a moment only, his spirits lift. This trip has not proved to be an entire disaster. Not yet, at least. Not if he can go back on his promise. He knows he will, he knows he must. Leonard flushes hot and cold at the prospect. What folly has he promised Lucy Emmerson? Pressed up close together on that wooden bench, conspirators, he has abandoned his good sense. On the journey back, he can concoct the most convincing reasons for his change of heart, something that will satisfy both the girl and himself, though nothing he does now — including speeding or taking risks, as he has just done, pulling out too carelessly into lively traffic — will get him home before his wife as he has promised.
Leonard knows the law. He should not be driving at all: 25 centiliters of wine is the limit and he has drunk three times that volume. And on an empty stomach. He’s risking a suspension. But it is only early evening, not quite dark yet. Random checks are not usually deployed until much later. He will avoid the motorways, however, where there are robot eyes to monitor the vehicles, and return the way he came, on rural routes. First, though, he turns the van round, drives back toward the hostage house, and parks again on the fringes of the mobile village with its circle of incident and rescue vehicles. Something pulls him there, something that he hopes is more than prurience. He is only idling, in both senses. He does not even turn the engine off or get out of the van. Instead, he reaches for his thermos under the passenger seat, where it has rolled and been forgotten during the jazz-fueled journey down. The lime-and-honey-flavored green tea is tepid and cloudy. It is reviving, though, and, he imagines, sobering. If he is stopped and questioned by the police (or Francine, come to that) because his driving or behavior is erratic, his grape-and-tobacco breath will have been partly cleansed and sweetened and might not betray him. Everything he does from now on until the lights go out tonight must help erase the day.