The Barbershop Seven (166 page)

James Randolph had not, after all, been informed of the change of plans.

***

'W
ell, that's a lot of money,' said Romeo McGhee, smiling. He looked round at Chardonnay Deluth who was smiling back, her eyes wide with greed. One million pounds. For a piece of bony meat. Easiest money either of them would ever make. McGhee, however, was about to get a lot greedier. 'You guys must be pretty desperate to get a hold of Jonah's hand.'

He flicked his eyebrows at Jacobs, smiled some more.

'You as desperate as you look?' he asked cheekily.

Jacobs had a sudden vision of leaping across the coffee table and pounding McGhee's face. He closed his eyes, composed himself, closed the case and straightened his shoulders.

Ephesian was at home battling his demons. Jacobs had not had to persuade Ephesian to allow him to undertake this particular task on his own. Ephesian's humour and confidence were fragile enough for him to retreat at the first sign of trouble. More regrouping. What he required was for something to go right, yet the closer they got to the culmination of decades of work, the more problems there seemed to be.

Despite his excitement at what lay ahead, Ephesian had begun to think that perhaps they would have to postpone. It didn't have to be this evening and perhaps they had rushed into it following Lawton's discovery. And it would be a wonderful way of pissing off Ping Phat, the fat Chinese bastard having dragged himself onto a plane for the first time in decades.

Jacobs favoured pressing ahead. Did not believe that any of their problems were insurmountable, regardless of the missing Grail. Assumed, wrongly, that whoever had attacked Lawton would appear McGhee-esque from the woodwork to levy some trivial blackmail demand.

'You've seen the money,' said Jacobs indifferently. 'Let me see the hand.'

'Not so fast, bucko,' said McGhee stupidly.

Jacobs' face remained expressionless. This was not unexpected. Even the lowest form of life always thinks it can get more than its due. Chardonnay Deluth, on the other hand, slung him a look of horror. She was about to get her hands on one million pounds.

'Rome!' she ejaculated. 'What's with you?'

'It's cool, babe,' he said, eyes never leaving Jacobs. 'We're still going to get our million. Aren't we, Mr Jacobs? Or should I call you Cream Cracker?'

He laughed at his own joke. Jacobs, who hadn't heard the joke since he was seven or eight, stared deeply into McGhee's core and imagined injecting him with a vial of some flesh-eating virus and watching his body rot and die over the ensuing few weeks.

'What do you want?' Voice hard as marble, dull as dust.

'Rome!' repeated Deluth.

'Well,' said Romeo McGhee, 'I've been thinking.'

'Romeo, don't be a fucking idiot,' she said, leaning towards him, her voice lowered, as if Jacobs wasn't going to hear her.

'What do you want?' asked Jacobs again, ignoring the woman.

'Well,' said McGhee, 'as far as the talk goes around here, you cowboys have a right little brotherhood between you all, with your tasty little clandestine meetings on a Tuesday evening. Donut Jonah was a member of your wee cabal and presumably the frozen hand is all tied up with the same business.'

He paused, asking the question of 'hot or cold' with his eyebrows raised. Jacobs remained impenetrable. McGhee was slightly disarmed by Jacobs inscrutability but managed to keep up his confidence, or at least, the appearance of it.

'So, what I'm thinking is that you'll need someone to take Donut Jonah's place, am I right?'

Jacobs said nothing.

'For fuck's sake, Romeo, don't be an arsehole!' said Deluth.

He waved her down with a calm hand.

'You've turned up here with a million quid, exactly as I asked for. No attempt to negotiate me down, no attempt to strong-arm, you just want the hand so that you can get on with whatever you're doing. So I'm thinking, chief-o, that you must be doing something pretty soon. Now I want to be a part of it.'

'Do you?' said Jacobs coldly, speaking at last.

'Aye,' said McGhee, 'I do.'

They held each others' gaze across the coffee table, Deluth simmering on the sidelines.

Jacobs breathed deeply. The urge to leap across the table and tear him to pieces was strong. He glanced at Deluth but she was playing her part in the Mexican stand-off by staring at McGhee.

If he killed McGhee with his bare hands right now, Jacobs thought, would it terrorise Deluth into telling him where the hand was hidden?

Jacobs abruptly stood up, clutching onto the bag.

'I'll need to speak to Mr Ephesian,' he said, then turned and started to walk away.

It would mean returning empty-handed once more to see his boss but he could sense the anger within him about to come bursting brutally to the surface, and it is rare in life for such an explosion of rage to ever achieve anything positive. At least allowing McGhee into their forum would guarantee the hand being there and it wasn't as if they had a queue of decent applicants lined up. And, now that Lawton was in hospital and not showing any signs of waking up, they were looking for two new members of the brotherhood, rather than one.

'You can leave the money,' said McGhee, his voice oozing slime even without trying.

Jacobs stopped but did not turn. Counting to ten.

'No I can't,' he said eventually without turning, then he opened the door into the hall and was gone.

They listened to the front door closing, and then McGhee and Deluth looked at each other. McGhee smiled, suddenly having disappeared several miles up himself.

'Cool, eh?' he said. 'We are so kicking their butts.'

'You,' said Chardonnay Deluth, 'are a complete fucking twat.'

And she walked brusquely to the bathroom to install herself and seethe.

––––––––

'I
'm not sure, really. What do you think?'

Barney looked at the back of the customer's head. The man was in his late eighties, weak-jawed, sallow-skinned and irresolutely-eyed; the customer who had been waiting behind Randolph. Had a good head of grey hair on him, however, demanding a straightforward short back and sides.

'I think a short back and sides would do you fine, sir.'

'Do you think?' said Thomas Petersen, studying his hair in the mirror, as if coming across it for the first time.

'Aye,' said Barney.

Igor looked suspiciously up from his sweeping.

'I had been thinking more of a
Keanu Reeves
type of affair. You don't think I'd suit that at all?'

The door opened and another old fella, his face hangdog all the way down to his knees, minced in, huddled against the cold as if it was minus fifty outside. He closed the door and regarded the occupants of the shop.

'Aye, it's all right for you lot sitting in here, with your heating and your fancy double glazing,' he muttered.

Igor rolled his eyes.

'If you'd just like to take a seat, I'll be done here in about ten minutes,' said Barney.

'Is that all?' said Thomas Petersen. 'Are you sure?'

'All right, all right, I'll sit down,' said the newcomer, 'but God knows what havoc that old bench is going to play on my haemorrhoids. I'd be better standing, but then if I do that my varicose veins'll pop and my hip replacement'll seize up. Can't sit, can't stand and Christ knows what it would do to me if I tried to kneel. Christ knows.'

'Igor,' said Barney, 'get the fella another cushion, please.'

Igor nodded a resentful acceptance and disappeared into the back room. The old fella tutted and looked out of the window.

'They say it's going to be this cold until the autumn and then it's going to snow for six months,' he said to no one in particular.

'So,' said Barney, deciding to ignore the ray of sunshine in the corner, 'a short back and sides all right for you, sir?'

Thomas Petersen looked doubtfully in the mirror.

'Well, if you're sure,' he said.

Barney lifted the electric razor, flicked the switch and swung the razor down onto the back of the customer's neck. Igor emerged and handed the new boy the cushion.

'I suppose technically that's a cushion,' he mumbled, as Igor trudged back to his sweeping, 'but it'll probably cause complete mayhem with the trapped nerves at the base of my spine.'

And then he sat down with a great deal of puffing and muttering, as Igor lifted the broom and imagined himself a Ninja.

And so, everybody in their place, the shop settled down. First customer getting his hair cut, second customer waiting on the bench, barber at his position, razor buzzing away in his fingers, barber's deaf, mute, hunchbacked assistant sweeping at invisible particles on the floor. The natural order of things.

Ruth Harrison had been dispatched for a walk along the front to get some fresh air. She was sitting on a green bench beside the crazy golf course, fingers crossed in her lap, jumping every time she heard footsteps on the pavement behind her. Trying to lose herself in an intimate world of seagulls and waves and rocks and sky, to wrap herself into a cocoon of all she had ever known. Return to some childhood place where the world could be blocked out and she could play and be in her own imaginary world for hours on end.

She was aware of the cars passing behind her every now and again but many of them slipped by unnoticed. So it was that, when the cavalry from
wraithwreckers.com
arrived in their twenty-four year-old red Peugeot, she did not see them. The car pulled up outside the barbershop, not too far from where she was sitting, as Barney had directed.

Merlot Tolstoy stepped out of the vehicle, put on her £1.99 Woolworth's shades, looked up and down Shore Street checking for possessed spirits and demons and any other agents of malfeasance, turned and looked out on what she saw as a godless, cruel sea, and then walked into the barbershop.

The four male occupants of the shop turned. The maroon shirt with white dog collar attachment was a bit of a giveaway, so that Barney and Igor immediately knew who had come into their presence. Thomas Petersen and old miserable-as-shite Jack Monroe regarded the newcomer with some concern.

'We're here,' said Tolstoy, authoritatively.

'Thanks for coming,' said Barney, not stopping the cut.

'No problem. Got here as fast as we could. Boat was running ten minutes behind schedule.'

'Ten minutes?' chimed Monroe. 'You're lucky it wasn't ten hours. And you call that a boat? It's a bath with an engine.'

Tolstoy hesitated then turned back to Barney.

'Are you ready to show us the infected property?'

'Give me another couple of minutes to finish this off, then I'll need to do the other gentleman, which won't take long...'

'Are you saying I don't have much hair?'

'...then we'll go. Ruth is waiting just along the front.'

Tolstoy glanced out the window and made a positive identification of the forlorn and scared woman on the bench.

'We saw her on the way by. Have we got a complement of six?'

'Well,' said Barney, 'there's you and me. There's Ruth, whose husband is the problem. There's Igor here behind the brush.'

'Igor,' said Tolstoy with a nod.

'Arf.'

'Then I thought we could ask these two gentlemen if they might help,' said Barney, giving them both a quick glance.

'Ask us what?' asked Thomas Petersen, sounding concerned.

'Typical,' said the old fella from the bench, 'that's what today's society's all about. Always asking, never giving. No doubt I'll end up doing it, whatever it is you want, but I won't like it, I'm telling you that now. Not one bit.'

'What is it?' asked Petersen, 'I mean, you're not saying much, but already I don't like the sound of it.'

'Exorcism,' said Tolstoy. 'We need a gathering of six.'

'Exorcism!' said Petersen, and fortunately Barney felt the explosion of worry and restlessness coming and knew enough to back away from the cut for five seconds, as Petersen's head swivelled round. Although, not all the way round.

'Standard procedure,' said Tolstoy. 'We do it all the time.'

And she gave Barney a bit of a
don't blow my cover, we need these people
look. Barney kept schtum.

'Who is 'we' exactly?' asked Jack Monroe from the bench.

'But exorcism,' worried Petersen, whose head had at least calmed down enough for Barney to restart the cut, 'how do you mean that? Are we talking demonic possession? Green vomit and bile and really bad language? I don't like bad language.'

'If there are more of you,' continued Monroe, 'why do you need us two to make up the six? Sounds like there's some sort of ecumenical insurance scam going on. You church people are only ever interested in money. Did you know the Catholic Church owns 51% of
ExxonMobil
? What is the matter with these people? Used to be the church was about values and decency. Not now.'

'Do we need overalls?' asked Petersen, interrupting.

'Arf!' barked Igor from behind his brush.

'Aye,' said Barney. 'Enough talk. I'll finish these cuts, then the five of us are picking up Ruth and heading over to her house to see what's what. We cool?'

'We're cool,' said Tolstoy.

'Arf,' said Igor.

'I think so,' said Petersen with no conviction whatsoever.

'So Ruth's getting haunted by old Jonah, eh?' said Monroe. 'Serves her right for all those lovers of hers. I always said no good would come of it. Always said it.'

And he shook his head disapprovingly.

'Arf.'

––––––––

'P
sst! Psst!'

Tony Angellotti stopped and looked around. He had walked up Cardiff Street, had kept going up the hill past the farm and was approaching the top of the town with the graveyard and golf course beyond.

He thought he'd heard something but decided he probably hadn't, and started to walk on again.

'Psst! Tony!' Louder this time. Tony turned, as ostentatiously as Luigi had hoped he wouldn't.

'Luigi?' he said, looking into woods, up and down the road. 'Luigi?'

'Not so stinkin' loud, you idiot,' said Luigi. 'Try and look inconspicuous.'