I Was Dora Suarez (19 page)

‘Inform us, Scalo,’ I said. ‘You’re looking twenty years in the face.’

Scalo said: ‘Look, I know nothing about it, OK?’

Stevenson said: ‘Look, we’re not monsters like you. We just want to meet the farmhand, that’s all. Like friendly, make an acquaintance.’

‘Scalo,’ I said, ‘who was the short man in the grey sports gear running out of the back door of the club? Now look, we really mean it.’

Scalo said: ‘I really couldn’t be helping you there.’

I said: ‘British jails are filthy dirty, Scalo. We don’t have the public funds to get you colour telly, and your Bolivian passport
will just be a memory for a very sick old man by the time you get out.’

Scalo said: ‘You like to break a man. There ought to be a law.’

‘We’re all the street,’ I said.

Scalo said: ‘So I don’t make my plane for Milan two o’clock.’

‘No,’ said Stevenson, ‘but there’s a police bus to Brixton at half past ten, and believe me you’ll be on it.’

‘Talk some more, Scalo, guilty man,’ I said, ‘talk some more.’

Stevenson said: ‘These rats were hard fucks for sick condemned men, weren’t they? Weren’t they? Weren’t they?

‘And even more fun if girlie took the rabbit up hers first while your punter jacked off and then maybe followed it,’ he said.

‘And another thing, the girls were easy, weren’t they?’ I said, ‘because once they were infected, they were caught, just like the punters.’

‘I’m not telling you a thing,’ said Scalo.

‘Not going to show us your rats, then?’ I said.

‘I’m saying nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘Still, you’re beginning to understand what serious police work really means, now, aren’t you, Scalo?’ said Stevenson. ‘Because you might have been in danger of forgetting. It’s dead simple. We find the punter and grill him.’

I said to Scalo: ‘By the time our people round at the Factory have finished with you nine-handed, anything you know about these three deaths, we’ll know it; you know how we work.’

‘Next time you put money into London clubs,’ Stevenson said, ‘invest a little more wisely, try and be appreciated, come on less heavy next time when you’ve done your bird.’

‘Meantime, nothing you can tell us about the Suarez/Carstairs/Roatta killer at all?’ I said. ‘Your sportsman with an axe handy, reckons himself in a mirror, fast with a Quickhammer?’

‘It’s your last chance,’ said Stevenson.

Scalo said: ‘I couldn’t help you.’

Stevenson reached a glass off the bar, got his cock out and pissed in it. He handed the glass to Scalo.

‘Drink,’ he said. ‘They say rats get thirsty.’

Session two. We were still all three of us sitting at the bar. I said to Scalo: ‘Now we’re going over the whole lot of this again, and then we’re going to go on and on and on going over it. Your time is our time, and our time over at the Factory is our own time, and that, darling, is your hideous fucking bad luck.’

‘The law says you can hold me for forty-eight hours,’ said Scalo, ‘no more.’

‘You’re going back, way back to the days when you still were someone and had a passport,’ I said. ‘I pity you.’

‘And besides, why take a steam hammer to crack a nut?’ Stevenson said. ‘Five or six hours is all we need, Scalo, and you’ll already never be the same again.’

‘I feel like a beer,’ I said.

‘That’ll be on the club, I suppose,’ Scalo sneered.

‘Who wants to drink your fucking rubbish?’ I said. I went out and got the cans I kept in the boot of the Ford.

When I brought in the Kronenbourgs, Stevenson snapped one open and said to Scalo: ‘Cheers.’

Scalo said: ‘Don’t I score for one?’

I said: ‘You do not, scum.’

Scalo said: ‘What are you doing right now to Robacci, that doorman, Margoulis?’

Stevenson looked at his watch. ‘What, right now?’ he said. ‘Right now the two of them are being broken up separately over at the Factory by Rupt, Drucker and Snaile.’ He added: ‘And it won’t take long either. Margoulis will have grassed by now, he’s a peeper. Peepers always grass.’

‘You people are fucking inhuman,’ Scalo said.

‘All right,’ I said, setting my empty can down. ‘Let’s get at it again then, shall we?’

‘I know what I think, Scalo,’ said Stevenson. ‘I think you must either have got your shares in this club here very cheap, or else you must want to protect them very badly – but in either case you look
as if they were starting to weigh heavy round your neck, Scalo, my life and fucking mazel tov; I mean, just look at the trade the place suddenly isn’t doing.’

Scalo said: ‘Normally the police come in tactful.’

Stevenson said: ‘Well, now you see how the police comes on when it’s working on three murders, and like when it’s not being tactful.’

‘Suarez,’ I said. ‘You might as well spill, Scalo, we’ve got all our time. The sporty little man in the running gear.’

‘Look if I knew anything,’ said Scalo, ‘I’d have made a deal with you hours back, but the fact is I’m mostly abroad, and I tell you, I know nothing about these deaths. Felix Roatta was a cunt who come on too hard and greedy and lost his chops down to it, but these women’s deaths, I tell you, I know fuck all about.’ He added: ‘Anyway I don’t understand. There’s a tariff with you people upstairs; it was set up long ago.’

I said: ‘Yes, well, this time your tariff’s gone off the edge of the plate.’

‘Come on now,’ said Scalo, ‘let’s be reasonable, can’t we, there must be a price on this. OK if it’s steep.’ He looked at his watch and said: ‘Christ, I have to be in Milan tomorrow afternoon like I said, the plane won’t wait, so how about it?’ He said: ‘OK, so, one, I drop the Parallel Club, there’s been trouble, nasty, right, OK, it got its knackers caught in its knickers, so we get out at a cash sum and I throw you the folk in with it, do I care, I do not – easy with the noughts at the end of the banker’s draft is all. So. Cash,’ said Scalo. ‘Right, well, let’s dream of a figure – I say just dream of one for openers, is all.’

I said: ‘You pay in dollars?’

‘Always, always in dollars,’ said Scalo with a pacifying smile. ‘Yes.’

I said: ‘A case of advanced AIDS. An axe death. An old lady of eighty-six thrown into the front of her clock. What does that run out at in dollars?’

‘Now don’t fun me up,’ said Scalo. ‘Now please.’

I said to Stevenson: ‘I think we’ll just run him as far up the mast
as he’ll go and see what happens to him when he gets to the top.’

Stevenson said to Scalo: ‘So that we’re to understand that you’re by way of offering a bribe to two police officers.’

Scalo said: ‘When you’ve got your knees a little browner, you’ll understand. You’re both quite new on this, I would think.’

Stevenson said to me: ‘Hasn’t hell suddenly got so fucking crude these days – it makes you feel like putting on clean clothes.’ He added: ‘How long shall we try and get them with the DPP?’

‘Twenty years each wouldn’t be long compared to eternity,’ I said, ‘which is all Carstairs and Suarez have in front of them now.’

Session three, still in the Parallel bar. I was saying to Scalo: ‘Perhaps you were more on the management side only, but for me you still knew all about the gerbils and what they were there for.’

‘And we haven’t all our time,’ said Stevenson, ‘so which version are you choosing? You either own shares in the Parallel Club and no vermin, or else you own both the vermin and the shares.’

‘I still badly want a word with the sporty man in he photograph, Scalo,’ I said. ‘In fact, more I think about him, more he turns me on.’

Scalo said: ‘Names? I know no names, folks. What are names?’

‘The wrong ones carry a lot of porridge,’ Stevenson said.

I said: ‘So you know nothing about Roatta, you know nothing about the gerbils, nothing about our disappearing man in the club photograph – so what are you, some kind of immaculate fucking birth or what? It would be a right marvel to hear something you did know about, because if you go on not knowing about anything like this any more, you’re going to turn into a fairy tale, my old darling, and I don’t know a crown court in the land who believes in them.’

‘Anyway,’ Stevenson said to Scalo, ‘there’s no point spreading butter on a heart attack is there? We’ve got Margoulis, we’ve got Robacci, and now we’ve got you – so until we get answers here that really really interest us, we’re just going to go on and on like
this, eating you up one after the other until in the end some fucker suddenly farts and decides he does know something, OK? And until that moment comes, you, Margoulis, Robacci and every other saint in the calendar is going indoors to take shade at the Factory, and don’t think Mr fucking McGuffin the lawyer is going to get you out of there because we’ll fire three murders and the Parallel Club at him straight in the mush, and the press will have a lot of fun with it. We’ll see to that end of it, don’t worry your heart out.’

Scalo said: ‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’

‘Well, it is,’ I said. ‘It’s very, very serious, even our folk upstairs at the Factory are sneezing hard. The press is starting to poke about in it now, too, and as for us, a policeman being an expensive thing, the public wants a run for its money, so there we are. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?’

‘So you see, Scalo, don’t you,’ said Stevenson, ‘that these three murders here are a really rotten rotten case, and that we at the Factory so far have every reason to think that Dora Suarez was deliberately infected with AIDS for financial reasons – that the Parallel Club offered a service of infected call girls for rich, seropositive young cunts, who, knowing that they no longer had a chance of coupling with the pure young daughter of a duke, had no option other than sexual relations with women as infected as themselves for the rest of their lives, which is to say on average three years with AIDS, and when I see villains making money out of that, we don’t like it. Strange folk, aren’t we?’

‘You’ll never prove that,’ Scalo said.

‘You’re quite wrong there, Scalo,’ I said. ‘I’ve proved much harder things.’

‘Well, it’s true it would have been more difficult if you hadn’t been going to help us,’ said Stevenson. ‘Only the fact of the matter is, darling, that you are. You’ll be falling over yourself to help us over this once you’ve understood what twenty years in Maidstone with not one hour’s recommendation really means, let alone the reaction of your co-detainees once they know what you’re in for
–some of them have high moral, even priestly aspirations as they purge their crimes in there, didn’t you know?’

‘I’m tired of standing around in here,’ I said suddenly. ‘Let’s go back to Room 205 and start this all over again. Let’s see if we can’t get the glimmerings of a statement into shape.’ Turning to Scalo, I said: ‘You don’t look as if you knew the Factory very well yet, but you’ll soon see that it’s a place where time no longer exists for people in your position. You’re in for a stupefying ride, but there you are. Sorry, I’m afraid that can’t be helped.’

Scalo said: ‘I’m a Bolivian citizen, and you two are going to suffer because of that.’

Stevenson said: ‘For a little lad on the away ground you come on strong, don’t you?’ He yawned. He said to Scalo: ‘You got your passport on you then? Let’s see it, just to see.’ He put his hand out.

Scalo showed the passport and Stevenson took it from him. He stowed it away in an inside pocket and said to Scalo: ‘Now who are you? Suddenly you’re no one, are you?’

Scalo shouted: ‘Give that back.’

‘Round about 2009 you might draw lucky,’ Stevenson said. ‘When you get out, you have to go and ask the court.’ Turning to me, he said: ‘Let’s get the car.’

Waiting for the car with Scalo, I felt old and depressed; then all at once I looked across a space inside my head and saw Dora with perfect clarity; I suddenly had an absolutely clear view of her through pine trees massed on a towering slope. ‘So you were there after all,’ I said, as though she had kept a vital appointment. She was pretty far off. She was walking quietly among the trees, her head bent thoughtfully, half-turned away from me, bowed over a white dress that she was wearing now. She seemed self-absorbed and moved very slowly. If she were still wounded, that was too far off for me to see, but what is sure is that for an instant, in that forest clearing, as she moved away to its other side I saw her entire shape half-turned from me and it was most certainly the sweetest shape I have ever known; she made me feel clumsy and stupid. I was not disappointed that it did not happen but thought it might well have
been that for all the distance between us, she was about to turn, look up, reach out and touch me; and in that instant all the love that I ever had in me rose up and overwhelmed me in a wave of unimaginable joy; everything was worthwhile after all. If only she had been enabled to turn them to me, I knew that her eyes would no longer have been the hard, blinded fruit, the tough glossy almonds pitted with dust that had stared upwards past me when I found her at Empire Gate, but would have been, if only I had been allowed to see them, peaceful, reflective and alive with a meaning that on earth I could only guess at: and it was hard for me to reconcile her quiet arms as they were now, her white hands calmly joined, with that other dislocated arm, stiff, thrown upright as a challenge, a menace, a demand – a sword in the freezing room where I had found her, flung forward.

When we got up to the second floor, I said to Scalo: ‘You wait out here, all right, just heat your arse in that chair there.’

‘Look,’ said Scalo, ‘be polite. Where’ve all the manners gone?’

‘This is the Factory,’ I said. ‘There never were any.’

‘Yes, to you it’ll seem like a different world for a little while,’ Stevenson said to him. But he added comfortingly: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll adjust – they all do.’

We left him there and went into 205. We had hardly done that when Charlie Bowman stuck his snout in the door. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘either of you know about a Greek around here somewhere name of Margoulis?’

‘I wouldn’t trouble him just now if I were you,’ said Stevenson. ‘He’s had a rough time with Rupt and Drucker; he’s trying to sleep it off in Cell 3.’

‘What do you mean “sleeping it off”?’ said Bowman. ‘He’s thrown off his first-stage rockets in my office not half an hour ago.’