Black Butterfly (5 page)

T
ravel, though it broadens the mind, narrows life expectancy. The positive benefits of each lovely foreign vista, every restful
felucca
sail down the blue Nile, are offset by the hateful tyranny of actually getting there. The cramped train, the soulless airport, the dreadful people and, perhaps worst of all,
carrying one’s own luggage
. Whatever became of bearers?

Athens Airport wore the familiar, bleary look of a late night arrival, stale with sweat and tobacco. A handful of uniformed officials shuffled about the shoddy buildings, staring sullenly at us newcomers. A shoe-shine man in a too-heavy topcoat waited expectantly by the exit, grinning like a simpleton. I was keeping the Negroid youth in sight. He was some way behind me, head buried in a well-thumbed paperback. I angled my hat low over my eyes, hoping to blend in. He’d leaped into a cab at Piccadilly, which I’d followed all the way to London Airport. Abandoning the moped, I’d quickly ascertained that the boy was taking a plane to Athens and promptly booked myself
onto the same flight. I’d been lucky and had studiously managed to avoid him as we boarded, and then, much later, disembarked.

All at once, I was being ushered to the passport booth, its glass façade smudged with fingermarks. I handed over the comfortingly solid navy book, the Britannia emblem shining like iron pyrite in the ghastly neon glare.

A scowling official looked me up and down, scratching at his scarcely shaven chin. ‘How long you here?’

‘Fortnight,’ I lied.

‘Business or pleasure?’

‘Oh, pleasure. Always pleasure. And, for the record, I think you should have your marbles back.’

He grunted, licked the rubber stamp and thumped it heavily onto a virgin page of the passport. Waving me through, he turned his attention to a skinny Welsh couple shivering in shorts and wind-cheaters. The boy was some way behind them and still hadn’t looked my way.

I quickly exited. Outside, the air was sharp, the darkening sky cobalt as a ceramic tile and crammed with stars. I lit a cigarette, hailed a cab and then sat in the back, ignoring the jabbering driver as I waited for the mysterious youth to emerge.

At last he did so, shouldering his bag and getting into a cab of his own. We followed him through cramped, dingy streets overhung with sagging cables, like stitches on burst wounds, until he reached the dimly lit railway station. A big, elderly-looking train was already at the platform, huffing as though impatient. I checked the departures board. The train was heading for Istanbul. In five minutes.

The slender youth swung open a door, took a swift look around, and then disappeared inside the train. I paid off my driver and then raced to the telegraph office. I just had time to rattle off a wire. I knew of someone in Istanbul who might prove very useful…

With moments to spare, I pulled myself up onto the train, feeling a little thrill of anticipation as I settled down into a private cabin. The engine lurched, the giant wheels squealed and the journey east began.

The cabin was small but well ordered, the woodwork a pleasant amber-brown. When the conductor came, I paid for my ticket in sterling and ordered up a bottle of schnapps before stripping off my wilted linen suit. I’d have to buy myself a whole new wardrobe once we reached Turkey. What a happy thought!

The booze was harsh but acceptable. I got into bed–the cotton sheets wonderfully cool–and let the thoughts that were buzzing inside my head settle into some kind of order.

As I’d remarked to Delilah, the crazed behaviour of Sir Vyvyan Hooplah was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Bells had rung. Distant ones, but they’d rung all the same. Recently, I’d noticed other incidents bearing marked similarities.

Just twelve months ago, Sir Douglas Gobetween, another former Cabinet Minister, had broken his neck after falling out of an apple tree. When questioned about his behaviour, his grieving wife could only say that he’d woken up that morning determined to ‘go scrumping’. Then there’d been Baroness Watchbell, the elderly pharmacist who, not long after Gobetween’s demise, had strapped herself to the wing
of a Cessna Bobcat and collided with a mountain. Then there was Père Meddler, the French cleric, whose work on the immune system had brought him the Nobel Prize. Happily celibate for years, he had suddenly, at the age of eighty, taken himself off to Marrakech and died in a fit of sexual excess involving thirty-eight boys and a Barbary macaque. The question was, had these silly old buffers just got it into their heads to have one last hurrah before the graveyard–or their deaths connected? And was Christopher so-called suicide part of the same, bizarre pattern?

And then there were Hooplah’s dying words. ‘
Le papillon noir
’. The Black Butterfly.

I knew this was the French term for depression. Had Hooplah gone off his rocker because he’d been clinically depressed? At any rate, a curious picture was forming, made all the more strange by the presence, both at Hooplah’s table and the scene of the accident, of the coloured youth. It wasn’t much of a lead, but it was all I had.

The next day dawned hot and sunny. The great black engine, steam smothering its face like foam on the bridle of a mad horse, dragged us on. Station signs flashed past, unknown and dreadful in their loneliness.

I struggled back into the previous day’s linen (such a horrid feeling, don’t you think?–unless the reason for it is a saucy one) and then breakfasted in the dining car. A bored-looking waiter ministered to my needs, and then left me alone in the com
partment. I turned an eye towards the dusty window, peering out at the excitingly impenetrable shadows of the dark forest blurring past. Sagging terracotta-tiled houses and crumbling churches flickered by like snapshots between the lush green of the pines, their faded oranges and cornflower-blues gay-seeming next to the brooding dark of the trees. I was reaching for my second coffee, when suddenly I became aware of another presence in the otherwise empty carriage.

He was standing by the door, willowy tall in a cut-throat-creased suit, black roll-neck sweater and sunglasses. The dead straight hair hung over his sunglasses.

‘This seat taken?’ he fluted. The accent was curious, faintly American.

I shook my head.

Without a word, my quarry slipped into the empty place and I felt his warm leg brush my knee. He didn’t remove his sunglasses. In the blazing orange of the late-morning light, they glowed like moth’s eyes. Then he smiled, showing perfect white teeth.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello,’ I said quietly.

‘Cigarette?’ he asked.

‘Thank you, no,’ I said, patting my side. ‘I have my own.’

He shook his head, ever so slightly, and the dead straight hair shifted over his smooth forehead. ‘No, baby. I meant do you
have
a cigarette. For
me
?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ Reaching into my jacket, I produced my battered old silver case. He took out a Turkish mixture and held it gently between his long, slim fingers.

‘Light?’

I felt in my pocket for a gas-lighter and managed to get a spark out of it. The flame leaped up and the youth closed both hands around mine as he leaned close to light his fag. He glanced up at me and there was a curious look in his hooded eyes. Pleasure? Mockery?

He blinked slowly again. ‘Thanks.’ As he withdrew his hands, his sleeve caught the polished coffee-pot, spilling it over the white cloth.

‘Oh, man, I’m so sorry!’ he said. ‘Here, let me—’

‘It’s nothing. Don’t bother.’

He shook his head, righted the pot and refilled my little cup. Then he sat back, smiling.

I lit a cigarette for myself and fixed the youth with a hard stare. ‘Well, this is a pleasant surprise, Mr…?’

He chuckled and the sound was curiously pretty, like the song of a bird. ‘Names are very powerful things, baby. If you knew who I was, you might go telling tales out of school.’

‘Now why ever would I want to do a thing like that?’

The boy shrugged, rumpling the shiny fabric of his beautifully cut suit. ‘You might have taken exception to me.’

‘The very idea. However, I have no qualms about introducing myself. My name’s—’

‘Oh, I know who
you
are,’ he murmured.

‘You do?’

‘Uh-huh.’

He propped his elbows onto the table before us and rested his head on his hand. The long shadows threw his cheeks and
jaw into relief, smooth as chocolate ice cream. Smoke from his cigarette drifted like a veil over his face. ‘See, people have no respect these days,’ he mused. ‘Young people ’specially. They always wanna knock down everything that’s gone before. I-con-o-clasm, they call it.’

‘I am aware of the term,’ I said.

The youth took a long drag. ‘Even the good things, they wanna smash ’em up. I ain’t like that. I appreciate history. Or heritage, you might say.’

‘Rare in one so young,’ I commented, tipping ash onto the saucer of my coffee cup.

He slid the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, eyes glittering like Whitby jet beneath the sculpted hoods of their lids. ‘Like I said, I know all about you,
Mr Lucifer Box
. You were good.’

‘
Was
I?’

‘You might even have been the very best. But there comes a time when you should retire from the field with some grace, baby. It just wouldn’t be right for you to end it all…out here. Time’s up. Tick-tock, baby. Tick-tock.’

He let his words hang in the air and turned back to the window, eyes flickering as he watched the landscape stream past.

I folded my arms. ‘How kind of you to be concerned for my welfare. And for elucidating matters.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, I wasn’t sure whether I was on a wild-goose chase. Now I know I’m not.’

He threw back his head and giggled, slapping a long
brown hand against his chest. ‘Good point.
Oops
.’

I felt a sudden warmth on my leg and realised with an electric thrill that he had slipped off his shoe and lain his bare foot against the flesh of my ankle. ‘But listen, baby,’ he cooed. ‘Seriously–why don’t you get off the train at the next station? Beautiful country around here. You could see the sights. Take it easy…’

His foot was moving slowly, lazily, up my calf, over my knee. ‘Easy,’ he breathed. ‘Nice and easy…’

I felt his foot slide into my lap. Its heaviness and warmth were strangely wonderful. The boy gazed at me. ‘But then you take the Orient Express or somesuch back home where you belong.’ The pretty face suddenly hardened. ‘This isn’t work for old men.’

In an instant, my hand dived under the table and grabbed his ankle. With the other hand, I took hold of his big toe and bent it back savagely. He gasped in shock and pain and dropped his cigarette.

‘And what exactly is this work of yours?’ I cried.

‘That’d be telling…wouldn’t it?’ he hissed between clenched teeth. ‘Let go of me, you bastard!’

‘Who
are
you?’ I demanded.

He twisted in his seat and I jerked his toe back still further. He yelled, then scowled in fury. ‘It’ll take more than that to—’

‘Name?’ I insisted, jabbing my thumbnail into the soft flesh of the toe. ‘NAME?’

‘Kingdom!’ he gasped at last. ‘Kingdom Kum!’

I let his foot go at once and he pulled it back, like a whip.

‘Damn you!’ he cried. At once, he assumed a cross-legged position on the dusty seat and began rubbing at his naked foot. ‘No call for
that
!’

I picked up my coffee and swirled it around the cup. It was thick as molasses. ‘So, Kingdom–I may call you Kingdom, mayn’t I?–it seems you know all about me but I know next to nothing about you. That strikes me as a very unfair arrangement.’

‘Life’s unfair, baby,’ he snarled, massaging his bruised toe.

I fixed him with a level stare, blue eyes to brown. ‘Really? How’s yours been?’

He giggled, as though the whole incident was forgotten, and cocked his head to one side. ‘Up and down.’

‘And how does Sir Vyvyan Hooplah fit into it? You two were having a very animated chat last night in the
Blood Orange
.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Might I enquire what it was about?’

Kingdom Kum picked up his cigarette. It had burned a big brown hole in the tablecloth. ‘Let me tell you a little story instead,’ he whispered. ‘Story about my daddy’s boss. Mr Hyogo.’

I stubbed out my cigarette and made to get up. ‘I don’t have time for reminiscing—’

In a flash, there was a long, thin, deadly blade at my throat, bright against the white of his palm.

‘On the other hand,’ I gulped, ‘you sound like a fascinating young fellow. Do go on.’

Kingdom Kum let the knife move slowly over my skin.
‘Well, baby, Mr Hyogo, he used to slip into my sister’s room some nights. My parents couldn’t do anything about it for fear Daddy’d lose his job. But I did something about it. Eventually.’

‘Oh yes?’ I could feel the blade skimming my ill-shaved cheek.

‘One night Mr Hyogo got between my sister’s sheets but
she
wasn’t there.
I
was. With this.’ He inclined his wrist just a fraction and I could feel the pressure of the steel against the bone of my tensed jaw. ‘Mr Hyogo didn’t come again. In any sense of the word,’ the youth told me. ‘If you get my drift.’

I nodded.

‘I could slit you open like a blowfish,’ Kingdom Kum went on with deadly gravity. ‘No one touches me,’ he said. ‘Not without my say-so.’

I swallowed and grinned foolishly. ‘I have terrible manners. I always forget to ask nicely when I’m torturing people.’

The boy’s face suddenly relaxed and he giggled again. The knife vanished up the expensively-cut sleeve as suddenly as it had appeared. ‘Well, let’s call this a warning, then,’ he said lightly. ‘A nice, friendly warning, Mr Lucifer Box.’

He rose like a wisp of smoke, and gave a graceful bow as he headed for the door. ‘It’s been an honour, sir. I mean that. But I do hope we shan’t meet again. Next time, I might not be so friendly.’ He waggled his hand and the light caught the watch on his slender wrist. ‘Tick-tock, baby. Tick-tock.’

He pulled open the door, the noise of the rattling carriage increased for a second–and then he was gone.