cold and unused. The hydroshear and the centrifuge were silent. It all looked normal, or the same as before. The dusty machines. The emptied desks. The place deserted. The doors open. A gonk left on a table by some departed scientist. A grinning gonk.
Where was Fazackerly? Maybe it had all been nothing? Maybe he had misinterpreted that terrible second message?
This panic returned when he heard the buzzing. It was the same buzzing as on the phone. Like a wood-saw heard through endless leafless trees in a snowbound forest. Someone cutting logs away over there, in the black and white distance.
There. It was emanating from the corner of the lab. It was one of the machines Fazackerly had shown Simon on his perfunctory tour of the lab. The industrial-sized microwave, used for sterilization and antigen retrieval and histology and –
He rushed over. The enormous wardrobe-sized machine was whirring away. It was cooking, busily cooking, like a happy and humming housewife. There was something inside the oven.
Simon knew, of course, and of course he didn’t want to know. He averted his face, then he turned around again, fighting the desire to run into the street, to flee in disgust and dreadful panic.
Pressed against the tinted glass pane of the vast microwave oven was a face. A cooked and sweated old face, drooling liquid from the white and crinkled nostrils. Fazackerly was inside the oven. Broiled but unbrowned. His skin was bleached and pink, one poached eye was hanging from the socket.
The buzzing stopped. The microwave pinged.
21
The wound in his hand was healing, but the pain was still there. And the anxiety was relentless.
David was standing in the sunlit garden of the Cagot house, winding bandages around his blooded hand. The garden was overgrown, with fallen trees and ivied paths and flowers growing from the tumbledown walls. But the garden was also big, and hidden from everywhere, and it got the air and light, unlike the damp and sinister hallways of the ancient Cagot house. A good place to talk. A good place to think about your beloved grandpa’s Nazi connection.
As he tied the last bandage, David felt a grief, inside him, not far from the surface, from the conversation with Madame Bentayou. He had been mulling over their remarkable dialogue, and every time he reached the same inevitable conclusion. It did make horrible sense. They must all have been prisoners, at Gurs – José, Granddad, Eloise’s grandmother.
The facts certainly pointed to incarceration at the Nazi camp; moreover, the hidden wealth of his grandfather, the guilt and the furtiveness, seemed to imply some kind of profiteering. Or something. Even collaboration.
It was a ghastly idea, yet unavoidable. Was Granddad complicit with the Nazis? If not, how did he get the money? And why was he so evasive at the end? Why the mystery?
David sat down on a stone bench, then stood up. The dampness of the moss was soaking into his jeans. Everywhere in this rotten and syphilitic place was so fucking damp. The walls were sodden with medieval humidity. The garden rioted with unlovely life: David had seen a fat torpid slow-worm the first day, sliding brazenly into the kitchen.
It was detestable. The filthy Cagot house. It made David detest them: the Cagots. He wanted to flush away the grime from the countless Cagots who had hid here, slept here, fucked in here, cooked their stupid Cagot meals…
David calmed himself. The Cagots were being killed. They deserved pity.
How easy it was to hate.
A kestrel swung through the sky, which was fast clouding over. David heard a noise, and turned: Amy was at the door. She frowned his way; he smiled back. She and he had been forced to sleep, these last few nights, in the same dark musty bedroom – forced by the nastier, damper, more rotted state of all the other available rooms. They had bedded down beside each other, in adjoining bunks. Nothing physical had happened between them, yet…something had happened between them.
They had talked long into the nights, alone, by the flickering candlelight. Faces inches from each other: like kids hiding under the sheets.
And here she was: open, ready, prepared. His very close friend. Something good had come out of this terror and darkness: his deepening friendship with Amy Myerson. But then he realized: she was frowning.
‘What’s wrong? Is it José?’
‘No. He still won’t say a word. No –’ The frown was urgent and serious. ‘It’s Eloise.’
‘What?’
‘She’s disappeared. At least I think she has. Can’t find her anywhere.’