Romeo's Tune (1990) (18 page)

We finished the last of the charlie with two big snorts each by the phone and Algy made some calls and told me we’d have to hang around until his dealer made a house call. I was easy. I had all the time in the world and nowhere to go.

After a while a greasy little individual with a crash helmet in his hand came pussyfooting in. He dragged Algy to another table and I saw some cash change hands. The greaser slid out again without as much as a glance at me. Algy came back and joined me.

‘Primo,’ he said.

‘Nice friends you’ve got,’ I remarked.

He showed me some paper wraps in his hand. ‘If you want to mess around with this shit,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t object too much to the smell.’

I shrugged and we ordered another round.

Then some whore in a corner wanted to know what the guy with the bandaged hand was on, and we dragged her over and bought her some gin. I changed to gin too and it still tasted like water.

I took a wrap of coke and the whore into the gents which stank of stale piss and worse. I locked us into the stall and cleaned off the top of the cistern with my sleeve. I laid out a line and gave the whore a rolled-up fiver to snort it with. Whilst she was leaning over to get a hit I started to touch her. I felt her suspenders and panties through the thin material of her dress, and she pushed back against me and wriggled like she was enjoying it. I thought of Little Jo as I explored the crack of her arse with my fingers and I felt so sickened with my own behaviour that I squeezed her buttock until she cried in pain.

We went back into the bar and had another round. I felt even worse.

‘I’ve got to get to a phone,’ I said.

‘Use the one in the car,’ said Algy. ‘It’s private. Here’s the keys. You know where it’s parked.’

‘I’m phoning the States,’ I said foolishly.

‘Who cares, it’s not my bill. As if McBain would give a shit where you’re phoning.’

I took the keys and made for the door. Half-way there I stopped and went back for a joint. I went out into the raw afternoon. The car was where we’d left it. I climbed wearily into the rear seat and lay back on the chilly leather. The inside of the car was cold and I felt as close to giving up on everything as I’d done for years. The telephone was mounted below the glass partition that separated the driver’s compartment from the back. I took my notebook from my pocket and peeled the pages apart. I picked up the instrument and began to dial. I tapped out the fifteen digits on the push button phone and heard the circuits connecting in my ear. I could faintly hear all the other calls on the satellite lines, intruding on the connection. All the wrong numbers and the good news and the bad news and the lovers and the liars, a burst of static and a snatch of music, like a million-pointed star attached to the plastic receiver I held in my hand. Then came the final click and an American ringing tone. The telephone was answered on the fourth ring.

‘The Cassini residence,’ a male voice said. He sounded old and there was an English intonation in his accent. I hesitated. ‘The Cassini residence,’ said the voice again. Was I imagining it, or was there misery behind the words?

‘I need to speak to Mister Cassini,’ I said.

‘To which Mister Cassini are you referring?’ asked the voice politely.

‘Josephine Cassini’s father,’ I said.

There was a sob in his voice as he answered. ‘Mister Salvatore is indisposed at present.’ So they knew. ‘Can another member of the family help?’

‘Probably, I don’t know. I’m calling from London. I’m afraid I’m not acquainted with any of the family.’

‘Mister Antony is here. Shall I connect you?’

‘Is that Josephine’s brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please connect us.’

‘Can I say who is calling?’

‘My name is Sharman.’

He cut me off without another word. The line clicked and went dead. I lit the joint and sucked in the smoke. The line clicked again and an American voice spoke.

‘Antony Cassini.’

‘My name is Sharman,’ I repeated, ‘Nicholas Sharman. I’m calling from London, England.’

‘I’ve been expecting a call from you, Mister Sharman,’ said the voice. It was ice-cold, as cold as the air in the back of the car where I was sitting.

‘You know,’ I said.

‘We heard early this morning from our embassy in London, and your police have also called. Why haven’t you phoned before?’

I felt like telling him that I hadn’t had the guts, so I did.

‘I didn’t have the guts,’ I said. ‘The bomb was meant for me. It was my fault that she died.’

The tears ran down my face like twin channels of ice and dripped on to the front of my new shirt.

‘I’m coming to England to collect the body. Where can I reach you?’ asked Antony Cassini.

I told him my office and home addresses and the two telephone numbers.

‘Be at your office at ten tomorrow morning,’ he ordered.

‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ I said.

“This whole episode is a bit of a mess, Mister Sharman. Just be there.’

Then he hung up.

I hooked the telephone back on its stand and finished the joint. Then I went back to the club.

The whore was still there, all over Algy like a bug on a sticky bun. She’d also found a mate, a black brass who didn’t remind me in the least of Tess. She was tall and thin and called herself Desirée. She sucked up Southern Comfort and lemonade like mother’s milk. Her silky red dress was short and low-cut, but with long sleeves. I thought they probably hid the track marks on her arms. A real sweetheart.

When the pubs opened we hit the trail. The rest of the night we went from pub to pub and club to club where I kept getting refused service and Algy kept handing over fivers to get us in.

Finally we ended up in a club in Charing Cross Road where the fiver didn’t work, nor did a tenner. Eventually Algy hit the doorman so hard that blood sprayed six feet along the reception wall. We walked in and the management called the police. We knew what was going down and we didn’t care. We sat at the bar and waited. Algy took the remains of the coke and the last joint and put them inside the black whore’s knickers. She whined that she wanted to go to the ladies and Algy told her to shut up and stay put. She said something about her pimp and Algy told her that if her pimp tried to get between him and his drugs he’d kill him. She said that her pimp was a hard man and Algy sat there like a rock and sneered at her. The other whore, who’s name was Debbie, I think, said that she wished she had charlie in her pants because she got wet just thinking about it and I told them all to shut up because the filth was in, and Desirée pulled her sleeves down tight.

Then the Bill came up with the manager and started performing, and I told them who I was, and one went off and called in on the radio and came back and whispered to his mate and they both stood there looking at me with a mixture of sympathy and disgust at the state I was in and the company I was with. Then Algy paid a load of dough to the bouncer and the manager and we had another round and bought the two coppers a drink each and I went off with Desirée and we snorted a huge line each in the ladies much to the disgust of a couple of Japanese tourists and I had another hit while Desirée took a pee, and on the way back we stopped and she stuck her tongue in my mouth and her hands into my pants. Then we went and found Algy and Debbie, and the Bill were telling a funny story about a wild man who’d chucked a wheel clamp through a van window earlier in the day, and things started getting unreal and the music was too loud and Algy took me home and the two brasses came with us.

And that’s how I woke up four or five hours later, naked except for the remains of my bandage between two women less than two days after Little Jo was murdered, and I felt like the most disgusting, deranged bastard that ever lived.

31

I
crawled out from between the two women almost puking on the stink of their stale, cheap perfume. Algy was asleep fully dressed in the armchair with his mouth wide open. I kicked him awake on my way to the bathroom.

‘Get those fucking bitches out of here will you?’ I said with a voice like broken glass.

‘Enjoy yourself?’ he asked.

‘Fuck off, will you,’ I said and crashed through the door to the bathroom. I looked like hell and felt worse. The booze had knocked me out for a while, but I was up and wired again now that it had worn off. I cleaned my teeth but even after scrubbing at them for what seemed like five minutes I could still feel a film on them.

I was in pain all over. My hand kept up a perpetual stabbing which made me shiver as if in a fever, and even through the filthy bandage I imagined I could feel the heat from the burns. I combed my hair with my fingers and threw cold water in my face, one-handed. The thought of shaving made me shudder. I had a blinding headache and the skin on my temples felt stretched as tight as a drumskin. The other pain I felt was of the spirit and was infinitely worse. My stomach was knotted up tight and my eyes were raw and dry.

I went back to the other room. Algy was where I’d left him and so were the two women. It was already nine-thirty. I dragged on a shirt and jeans and threw a leather jacket over the lot.

I felt like shit.

‘You look fucking awful,’ said Algy.

‘You say the loveliest things.’

‘I know just what you need.’ He took the last wrap of coke out of his shirt pocket.

‘Do fuck off,’ I said.

He crushed and cut out a line on the coffee table and offered me a rolled-up tenner. I looked at him, then the charlie, then the tenner, took it and pulled up the line into my nose. I nearly threw up in reaction. The fine powder caught in the back of my throat with a taste like aluminium. I coughed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. But he was right: the drug did make me feel better. An illusion I knew, but so what?

‘I’ve got a meet, I think,’ I said to Algy. ‘Now wake those cunts up and get them out of here and lock up after yourself. I don’t know what’s going down or where I’ll be, but call me later and we’ll get together. All right?’

I hit the street and was in the remains of my office by nine forty-five. Sitting, trembling with speed in the wreck of the room, staring out into the street.

The weather matched my mood. Grey and gloomy with a brittle, sharp wind that picked at your clothes and skin like sharp teeth at a chicken bone.

I didn’t see the two men looking in at me at first. I just stared right through them. It was only when the identically dressed pair moved in unison towards my door that I focused on them. I watched them as they crossed the street towards the office.

The taller of the two was also the elder. He was heavily built under his overcoat, and a black felt trilby covered his grey hair. The other man must have been in his mid-twenties, with thick black hair rumpled by the breeze. They both looked rich and foreign, tired and very, very sad.

The younger of the two pushed the wreck of the door open and allowed the other to enter first. Youth deferring to age, but looking at me with hatred in his dark, brooding eyes. The older man spoke. He had an American accent, sharp and clipped, similar to Jo’s but with none of the softness that she had in her voice.

‘Nicholas Sharman?’ he asked. I looked up at him. I knew I was in danger, but didn’t give a damn.

‘That’s me,’ I replied.

‘My name is Ferrara, Benjamin Ferrara. This is my associate, Frederick Newberry. We work for Mister Cassini. His son Antony has sent us to fetch you.’

I sat back in my chair and placed my hands, palms down, on the desk before me. ‘You were very quick,’ I said.

‘We have our own plane. We came over the moment you spoke to Mister Antony on the telephone. We are here for his sister’s body.’

‘And for mine?’ I enquired.

‘We shall see. Our orders are to take you to Mister Antony. He wishes to speak with you.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Not far away. He flew in with us.’

‘And if I don’t want to come?’

The older man dismissed the possibility with a gesture of his hand. ‘Mister Sharman,’ he said. ‘I know men like you. Men who must always prove that they are indeed men. Macho, you know? I have killed such fools and afterwards wondered why, when words would have sufficed. Your wishes are of no concern to me.’ He leant towards me and placed his hands on the desktop to keep his balance. ‘I loved Josephina as a father would. I am in mourning. It gives me no pleasure to visit this miserable island of yours on a task such as this. I read Josephina’s letters about you. She said you were a good, if troubled, man. Why would there be any reason for you not to visit her brother? If however you persist in playing the hard man, the two of us’ – he encompassed Frederick in his remark – ‘would take great satisfaction in having you beg us to take you to see Mister Antony.’ He looked down at my hands. ‘Did you try to save her?’

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘I loved her.’

‘Then come with us. We mean you no harm. There is a great sadness today in the family.’

‘Are you the Mafia?’ I asked, realizing how stupid the question was even as I asked it.

‘There is no such thing, Mister Sharman,’ replied the older man. ‘You have been watching too many American films.’

I could hardly control the thoughts racing through my head. ‘Jo said she was scared of the way she lived. That she had to get away. So that was why. She was. . .’

‘A Mafia doll.’ The younger man finished my sentence for me, his voice harsh and ugly in the small room. ‘Is that what you were going to say?’

I looked at him. ‘I don’t care if she was a Mafia hit-man, Frederick. I loved her. L.O.V. E. D. Don’t you understand?’

‘And you got her killed,’ the younger man spat. ‘Big lover.’

‘Fuck off.’ I said.

‘I’ll take you out for that, Sharman,’ the younger man threatened.

I laughed a laugh that sounded like a death rattle in my own ears. ‘Take me out, ice me, you still don’t get it do you? Without her I don’t care what happens to me. But don’t forget Freddy, she came here to get away from you too. She told me. If she hadn’t come, she wouldn’t have died. So look at yourself before you hand out blame.’

For a moment I thought he was going to leap over the desk and attack me. He went red in the face and his whole body gave a massive twitch, like a seizure. The older man clamped a hand on Frederick’s arm, just above the elbow, and he spoke in Italian, words I didn’t understand. They seemed to calm the younger man and slowly the blood left his face.

The older man spoke again. ‘Josephina was a gentle girl. It grieves me that she died as she did, almost as much as it grieves me that she lived a life she hated. But it does no one any good to blame the ones who loved her.’

‘I saw her burn,’ I said. ‘I saw her burn and I tried to help.’ I held up my hands in front of me. ‘But I was helpless. Could I have done more?’ I asked the older man.

‘You could never have met her,’ replied Frederick savagely.

‘What’s done is done,’ cut in Ferrara. ‘Now silence, Frederico. Mister Sharman was not to blame. It was fate, kismet. Come, Mister Sharman.’

I allowed myself to be led out of the office to a chauffeur-driven maroon Volvo parked on the corner. I left the office as it was. If anyone wanted to wreck the place again, they could just walk in.

The Volvo took a short, angry route towards the West End. I sat in the back next to Ferrara. Frederick sat in the front, sideways on, so that he could with little difficulty stare his hateful stare at me. Once it would have made me nervous or angry. But by then it only irritated me slightly, like a tooth that may or may not be ready to ache. I sat in my pain on the leather seat with my hands on my knees. The interior of the car smelt expensive. Quality cologne and old cigar smoke in equal quantities. The driver stabbed the car through the grey South London streets like an assassin.

‘Does he get paid by the victim?’ I asked mildly as he narrowly missed yet another pedestrian.

‘Be quiet,’ said Frederick.

‘Bollocks,’ I replied. ‘I don’t take orders from you.’

‘Mister Sharman,’ said Ferrara. ‘Are you determined to antagonize Frederick into killing you?’

‘I can’t handle this shit,’ I said. ‘Where the fuck do you two get off? I feel like I’ve got a grenade stuffed up my jacksie with the pin hanging out, waiting for one of you to pull it. I don’t need this crap, if you’re going to top me, get on with it, otherwise let me out.’

‘No chance, Sharman,’ said Frederick.

‘Want to bet?’ I said as I saw a traffic light turn red two cars in front of us, and prepared for a quick bail-out.

Ferrara touched my arm. He must have felt me stiffen in readiness for my escape. ‘Please Mister Sharman,’ he said.

‘Blimey,’ I replied. ‘You know the word please, I’m amazed.’

He went on. ‘As I explained, there is a lot of sadness in the family. Perhaps we are over-reacting.’

‘I’ll say you are.’ I felt tears prickle at my eyelids. ‘You knew her,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her.’

The younger man made a sound of disgust and turned to face the windscreen.

‘She was like my own,’ Ferrara said, now looking every day of his age. ‘I have no children. It is my sorrow.’ He touched his heart. ‘My wife is not able. A tragedy, but a tragedy we live with. When Josephina was born I was made her godfather.’ He noticed my look. ‘Not that kind, not like the stupid film. But in the church at her christening I was put in charge of her spiritual life. I upheld my responsibilities to the full. In doing so I fell under her spell, as all who met her did.’ He gestured with his head at Frederick sitting in the front seat. ‘As he did. As you did, Mister Sharman.’ I nodded. ‘She was a jewel,’ he went on. ‘But as she told you, she hated the business of her family. She wanted only peace. Not that she was always peaceful. She could be a hurricane. Her tempers.’ He smacked the side of his brow. ‘Did you see her tempers?’

‘Yes.’ I laughed for one of the few times since she died. ‘She stamped around me once or twice.’ I changed the subject. ‘What did she write? You said you read her letters. Was she happy here?’

I saw the young man stiffen.

‘She was happy with you, if that is what you mean,’ Ferrara said. ‘Contented – but do you need me to tell you?’

‘No, I saw her every day. She was happy,’ I replied.

Whilst we’d been talking the car had crossed the river and circumnavigated the Victoria one-way system. Now we were heading towards the park. The chauffeur expertly cut through the traffic into Park Lane, and then doubled back to stop in front of the Intercontinental Hotel. The three of us disembarked and the driver burnt rubber to park the Volvo.

We entered the lobby of the hotel and the two men led me over to the lifts. We expressed to the penthouse. The suite door was opened by a besuited bruiser. He didn’t speak, but vanished through a connecting door and left us in the sitting-room.

Ferrara invited me to sit. I did so. He asked me if I wanted a drink. I accepted a bourbon over ice from the trolley. Frederick stood, still in his coat in the over-heated air, and glared at me. Ferrara shucked out of his coat and sat down close by me. I sipped the liquor. The connecting door opened and another man entered. I guessed it was Antony, Jo’s brother. He had similar features. Ferrara jumped to his feet. I stayed where I was. Ferrara introduced us politely. It was indeed Antony Cassini. He was tall, taller than I’d expected. The more I saw of him the more his face reminded me of Jo’s, although his face was masculine and hard and full of sorrow. He was dressed in an expensive dark blue flannel suit that gleamed slightly in the indirect light of the suite. A black armband was pulled over his right sleeve. His eyes were shielded by wraparound black-lensed glasses. Looking at him was like staring at the carapace of a beetle. During the introduction Antony didn’t move to shake my hand. Whether it was in deference to my bandages, or that he couldn’t bring himself to touch me, I’ll never know.

He sat in the armchair opposite me. There was a coffee table between us. It might just as well have been a brick wall. He snapped his fingers and Ferrara dipped his hand under his suit coat and came up holding a snub-nosed automatic with an Italian look to it, just like everything else in the room. Antony took the pistol from Ferrara, worked the action to slide a bullet into the breech and placed it on his side of the table with the barrel pointing towards me.

‘Thank you for coming, Mister Sharman,’ he said.

‘I had little choice,’ I replied.

‘That is true.’

I nodded at the pistol. ‘I’m not impressed,’ I said.

‘I’m not really surprised,’ replied Antony. ‘I’ve been doing a little preliminary checking up on you. You are apparently a dangerous man.’

Frederick snorted. I looked over at him then back to Antony and said, ‘I’ve been lucky.’

‘And modest.’

‘You were lucky that Josephina took your car,’ interrupted Frederick.

Antony silenced him with a look, then continued. ‘Mister Sharman,’ he said.

I couldn’t get over how polite these mobsters were. I wondered if they asked permission to nail your feet to the floor. I switched my attention back to Antony as he went on. It was hard to pay attention, the last of the coke was wearing off and I felt tired and drained of all life. I dragged myself back to what Antony was saying.

‘I want to know exactly what happened. I’ve read the newspaper accounts of my sister’s death. You were there. Please tell me the whole story.’

So, in the air-conditioned hush of the thousand-pound-a-night penthouse suite, in one of the most expensive hotels in London, fortified by booze at forty notes a bottle, I told a Mafia chieftain’s son the story of how his sister, running from a lifestyle that disgusted her, was chewed apart by a car bomb planted by men of similar ilk to her own family.

When I’d finished my story, Antony sat for a while in silence. There was a discreet knock at the door. Frederick answered it. A waiter wheeled in a large cloth-covered trolley.