wife, and without the faith to believe in seeing her again; incapable of tears. And 
another thought came fast upon the first: that Somervale's stone heart, which had been 
broken at one terrible stroke, was not so dissimilar from his own. Both hard men, both 
keeping the world at bay while they waged private wars in their guts. Both ending up with 
the very weapons they'd forged to defeat their enemies turned on themselves. It was a 
vile realization, and had Marty not been buoyant with the news of his release he might 
not have dared think it. But there it was. He and Somervale, like two lizards lying in 
the same stinking mud, suddenly seemed very like twins.
    "What are you thinking, Strauss?" Somervale asked.
    Marty shrugged.
    "Nothing," he said.
    "Liar," said the other. Picking up the file, he walked out of the Interview Room, 
leaving the door open behind him.
    Marty telephoned Charmaine the following day, and told her what had happened. She 
seemed pleased, which was gratifying. When he came off the phone he was shaking, but he 
felt good.
    He lived the last few days at Wandsworth with stolen eyes, or that's how it seemed. 
Everything about prison life that he had become so used to-the casual cruelty, the 
endless jeering, the power games, the sex games-all seemed new to him again, as they had 
been six years before.
    They were wasted years, of course. Nothing could bring them back, nothing could fill 
them up with useful experience. The thought depressed him. He had so little to go out 
into the world with. Two tattoos, a body that had seen better days, memories of anger and 
despair. In the journey ahead he was going to be traveling light.
    
    8
    The night before he left Wandsworth he had a dream. His nightlife had not been much 
to shout about during the years of his sentence. Wet dreams about Charmaine had soon 
stopped, as had his more exotic flights of fancy, as though his subconscious, sympathetic 
to confinement, wanted to avoid taunting him with dreams of freedom. Once in a while he'd 
wake in the middle of the night with his head swimming in glories, but most of his dreams 
were as pointless and as repetitive as his waking life. But this was a different 
experience altogether.
    He dreamed a cathedral of sorts, an unfinished, perhaps unfinishable, masterpiece of 
towers and spires and soaring buttresses, too vast to exist in the physical world-gravity 
denied it-but here, in his head, an awesome reality. It was night as he walked toward it, 
the gravel crunching underfoot, the air smelling of honeysuckle, and from inside he could 
hear singing. Ecstatic voices, a boys" choir he thought, rising and falling wordlessly. 
There were no people visible in the silken darkness around him: no fellow tourists to 
gape at this wonder. Just him, and the voices.
    And then, miraculously, he flew.
    He was weightless, and the wind had him, and he was ascending the steep side of the 
cathedral with breath-snatching velocity. He flew, it seemed, not like a bird, but, 
paradoxically, like some airborne fish. Like a dolphin-yes, that's what he was-his arms 
close by his side sometimes, sometimes plowing the blue air as he rose, a smooth, naked 
thing that skimmed the slates and looped the spires, fingertips grazing the dew on the 
stonework, flicking raindrops off the gutter pipes. If he'd ever dreamed anything so 
sweet, he couldn't remember it. The intensity of his joy was almost too much, and it 
startled him awake.
    He was back, wide-eyed, in the forced heat of the cell, with Feaver on the bunk 
below, masturbating. The bunk rocked rhythmically, speed increasing, and Feaver climaxed 
with a stifled grunt. Marty tried to block reality, and concentrate on recapturing his 
dream. He closed his eyes again, willing the image back to him, saying come on, come on 
to the dark. For one shattering moment, the dream returned: only this time it wasn't 
triumph, it was terror, and he was pitching out of the sky from a hundred miles high, and 
the cathedral was rushing toward him, its spires sharpening themselves on the wind in 
preparation for his arrival He shook himself awake, canceling the plunge before it could 
be finished, and lay the rest of the night staring at the ceiling until a wretched gloom, 
the first light of dawn, spilled through the window to announce the day.
    
    9
    No profligate sky greeted his release. Just a commonplace Friday afternoon, with 
business as usual on Trinity Road.
    Toy had been waiting for him in the reception wing when Marty was brought down from 
his landing. He had longer yet to wait, while the officers went through a dozen 
bureaucratic rituals; belongings to be checked and returned, release papers to be signed 
and countersigned. It took almost an hour of such formalities before they unlocked the 
doors and let them both out into the open air.
    With little more than a handshake of welcome Toy led him across the forecourt of the 
prison to where a dark red Daimler was parked, the driver's seat occupied.
    "Come on, Marty," he said, opening the door, "too cold to linger." It was cold: the 
wind was vicious. But the chill couldn't freeze his joy. He was a free man, for God's 
sake; free within carefully prescribed limits perhaps, but it was a beginning. He was at 
least putting behind him all the paraphernalia of prison: the bucket in the corner of the 
cell, the keys, the numbers. Now he had to be the equal of the choices and opportunities 
that would lead from here.
    Toy had already taken refuge in the back of the car.
    "Marty," he summoned again, his suede-gloved hand beckoning. "We should hurry, or 
we'll get snarled up getting out of the city." "Yes. I'm here-" Marty got in. The 
interior of the car smelled of polish, stale cigar smoke and leather; luxuriant scents.
    "Should I put the case in the boot?" Marty said.
    The driver turned from the wheel.
    "You got room back there," he said. A West Indian, dressed not in chauffeur's livery 
but in a battered leather flying jacket, looked Marty up and down. He offered no 
welcoming smile.
    "Luther," said Toy, "this is Marty." "Put the case over the front seat," the driver 
replied; he leaned across and opened the front passenger door. Marty got out and slid his 
case and plastic bag of belongings onto the front seat beside a litter of newspapers and 
a thumbed copy of Playboy, then got into the back with Toy and slammed the door.
    "No need to slam," said Luther, but Marty scarcely heard the remark. Not many cons 
get picked up from the gates of Wandsworth in a Daimler, he was thinking: maybe this time 
I've fallen on my feet.
    The car purred away from the gates and made a left onto Trinity Road. "Luther's been 
with the estate for two years," Toy said.
    "Three," the other man corrected him.
    "Is it?" Toy replied. "Three then. He drives me around; takes Mr. Whitehead when he 
goes down to London." "Don't do that no more." Marty caught the driver's eye in the 
mirror.
    "You been in that shit-house long?" the man asked, pouncing without a flicker of 
hesitation.