The Last Darkness (11 page)

She pressed the call button and Marak noticed she wore pink fingernail varnish. The lift hissed in the shaft and the door opened and the woman stepped inside. Marak entered behind her. The door slid shut. The lift began to climb.

Marak said, ‘I don't intend to hurt you.'

The woman looked at him. ‘Hurt me? What the hell are you talking about?'

‘Tell me what I want to know, and I will leave you alone. You'll never see me again.'

‘And what could I
possibly
know that you'd like to hear, you creep?'

‘Where to find Joseph Lindsay.'

‘Wait a minute. You phoned today, didn't you? I remember your accent.'

‘Just tell me where he is.'

‘Why don't you piss off,' she said. ‘You don't scare me. I don't have to tell you a bloody thing.' She stretched out a hand and held the tip of her index finger over a red button marked
ALARM
.

He said, ‘No, don't do that.'

‘Then back off. And if you want to know anything about Joseph Lindsay, I suggest you call the police. Talk to a detective called Perlman. Or Inspector Scullion. I'm sure they'd be delighted to answer your questions. I hate this – a woman can't go anywhere in this bloody city without some fucking perve annoying her. Bugger off.'

‘Please,' he said.

‘This is where I get out.'

The lift slowed, halted. The door opened. The woman moved to exit, Marak stepped in front of her. He pressed a button and the door closed again.

‘I don't want to talk to the police,' he said. ‘Tell me where I can find Joseph Lindsay. This is all I am asking.'

‘Open that fucking door,' she said.

He struck her. He hit her once with the flat of his hand and her nose bled. The blood ran down her overcoat. Marak was devoured by shame. He'd never hit a woman before. He'd always respected women, always. He took off his scarf and reached towards her face to stem the blood and she misinterpreted his movement – perhaps she saw herself strangled – and she backhanded him, a sharp ring on her right hand piercing the skin of his upper lip. The pain stung him. His range of vision was filled a moment with all kinds of disturbances. The lift door opened, the woman shoved him and moved past, and he stepped after her, catching her as she hurried towards a rank of parked cars. He swung her round to face him. He was furious with himself. Shame and anger and pain. In his mind he'd seen this all differently. He'd ask the question. The woman would answer. A civilized exchange. He'd go away. That was it. Distilled and simple. Not like this.

‘I am sorry, the blow, I didn't intend …' he said. ‘Just tell me what I want to know, please.'

‘I wouldn't tell you the time of day if you were on your hands and knees and begging. Go on, hit me again, I dare you,' and she turned her face up to him, offering him the target, taunting him. She knows how to fight, he thought. She'd fought before. This was nothing new to her.

‘Go on, smack me again, big man, what's stopping you?'

He took a step back. It had all gone wrong. He tasted blood in his mouth.

‘Well, you bastard? Can't work up the balls, eh? Well,
fuck you
,' and she turned and walked in the direction of the cars and Marak was about to chase after her again when he was aware of a man in a navy-blue uniform emerging from a doorway to his right. Security.

He turned and ran towards a stairway that led to the street, and he clattered down the steps, slipping where pedestrians had left slicks of melted snow, and clutching the handrail to break his tumble. He heard the guard shout
Hey you
and the voice echoed in the stairwell. Marak made it outside, but it wasn't the place where he'd first entered the building. He found himself in a narrow alley, and he ran until he reached the main street again where the illuminated letter P hung in the dark sky. He used his scarf to wipe blood from his mouth: the wrong approach, but how could you know she'd act like that? You have no powers of prediction. You thought she'd be scared enough to tell you what you wanted to know. And that would be the end of the matter. You'd be polite, firm, but not violent. He thought about the Moroccan in the Haifa restaurant, and remembered what he'd said:
you have courage, and you have been patient, and now you are doing a wonderful thing
–

A wonderful thing, yes. Hitting a woman. And running away like a jackrabbit. He raged against himself. His dead father rose in his head, furious as a thunderstorm.
This is not the way. Violence is never the way forward
. He tossed the scarf over his mouth and walked, thinking, no, I can't yield to panic, cannot, people are depending on me.

He spotted the little man in the baseball cap slip deftly into the doorway of a darkened shopfront a few yards along the pavement. He thought, this is who I want, exactly, this man who watches me hour after hour, this damned dwarf in black leather jacket, does he think I don't know he's been trailing behind me all day?

Marak walked until he came to the doorway and he reached quickly into the dark space and his hands came in contact with the man's neck and –
forgive me, God forgive me, this is madness
– he squeezed hard, thumbs digging into windpipe while the little man stammered N-n-n, but Marak, trapped in the impetus of violence, kept pressing hard, then harder, his fingertips throttling the throat, squeezing shut the passage of air,
N-n-n-n
, the little man's breath smelled of spoiled things, cheese left in the sun, old meat hanging in a marketplace too many days. Appalled by himself, he let the man go, and his hands slithered down the smooth front of the leather jacket. The man slid slowly against Marak's coat to the ground and lay there like a bundle of refuse dropped by somebody who didn't give a damn about litter, or a package nobody wanted to sign for – a limp heap in a black doorway in a bitter-cold city where Marak felt displaced and abandoned.

17

Outside Force HQ Scullion asked, ‘Who's Wexler?'

‘Somebody I knew once,' Perlman said. ‘I saw him this morning at the hospital. First time in years.'

‘Small world.'

‘If you're a Jew in Glasgow it's even smaller than that.'

‘What does Wexler do?'

‘Last I heard he had a finance company. Borrow ten grand and pay off all your debts in one swoop, you know the kind of racket – but the small print says you repay Artie Wexler's company twenty grand over three years, or whatever the going rate is. Fucking Shylock. He's probably retired, living off the fat he accumulated in a lifetime of moneylending.'

‘I gather from your tone of voice you're not a big fan of the man.'

Perlman stood still, as if reluctant to enter the building. The lights from windows illuminated slow-falling snowflakes. Three uniformed cops went past in their long coats. One of them said, ‘Okay here's what
really
happened,' and the other pair laughed in anticipation. When you only hear the start of a story it makes no sense, Lou thought. When you're at the beginning of an investigation, likewise, nothing is clear. He was trying to draw a line on an imaginary graph, joining Colin's heart attack and Joseph Lindsay's murder, and extending this series of dots in the direction of Artie Wexler. But it didn't take him anywhere, nor did he expect it to. It was head doodling, a brain game, playing with names and associations.

He looked at Sandy and said, ‘I was remembering when I didn't belong. I had my nose pressed to the window, looking in. Always looking in.'

‘Are you confiding something in me?'

‘Ach, just thinking aloud, Sandy. I was the wee brother who was sent to fetch bottles of lemonade and sweeties for Col. Now I remember having to run to the shop and pick up a bag of soor plooms or sherbet for Artie Wexler as well. It wasn't just Colin who bossed me around, I was Artie's runner too.'

‘What are you telling me?'

‘Just old stuff I'd totally forgotten. I resented being the errand boy. I kept hoping somebody would pass a Wee Brothers' Emancipation Act and set me free. Then one day Colin and Artie grew up, Colin went to London, Artie to St Andrews University … and my little world was empty for a while. Then I joined the Force when I was twenty-two and suddenly I had a whole new purpose.'

Scullion smacked his gloved hands together and frowned. Sometimes Lou could go off into a thicket of apparent digressions, and there was no point following him. ‘You coming inside, Lou? It's freezing.'

‘I'd like to get a hold of Artie Wexler. Talk to him about Lindsay.'

Scullion had resigned himself long ago to the fact that Perlman kept to a schedule of his own. If you let him run loose, he sometimes got results, sometimes not. You took a chance on him because he'd never knowingly let you down. ‘Okay. But remember to keep me posted. Here, take my phone again. I'll pick up Bernigan and Bailey and we'll run out to Lindsay's house.'

Bernigan and Bailey, two young Detective-Sergeants detailed to Scullion, were known around Force HQ as Rodgers and Hart because each had some musical ability: Bernigan sang bass in an
a cappella
vocal group, and Bailey played cello in a string quartet. Or was that the other way round? Perlman couldn't keep the pair apart. There was even some physical resemblance. Both men were slender, both had a kind of dark Pictish intensity. They were devoted to the serious ministry of law and order. They also thought the sun shone out of Sandy's arse.

‘I'll be in touch, Sandy.'

‘Tonight.'

‘Absolutely. I promise.'

Perlman walked to the end of the street, thinking what a weird contraption memory was, how it released images like a flawed steampipe issuing vapours. He'd somehow obliterated Artie Wexler's part in the formative years of his life.
Fetch me this, bring me that, chop chop wee Louie, shake a leg
. And then memory kicks in and three boys from the demolished slums of the Gorbals assume new forms. One an investments adviser with a serious heart condition, the other a retired loan shark – don't even
look
for a euphemism, Lou – and the third a cop.

And then he remembered something else, how Colin and Artie had secret words they used, coded words, like the private language of a club Lou could never enter. He'd accepted this fact without rancour. They were Big Boys, after all. They smoked cigarettes behind tenements. When they couldn't buy cigs, they tried to smoke cinnamon sticks. They flirted with girls. They talked about condoms. Sleeping bags for mice, they called them. They talked about ‘getting their hole'.

A melancholy buzzed Perlman. Patterns of the past resonate in the present. A man acquainted with the dead Joseph Lindsay, perhaps even his closest friend, was a ghost from Lou's boyhood. Did that mean anything? If so, what? He tried to imagine Lindsay's dying. He tried to imagine that feeling, the condom leaking in the acids of the stomach, the cocaine rocketing into the bloodstream, the heart exploding. A ride on an express train to infinity.

Lost in his thoughts, he collided with a young policeman who was hurrying along the pavement. It was Murdoch, the cop who'd cut Joseph Lindsay down from the bridge.

They did a little shuffle together, one trying to make room for the other. ‘Sorry, son,' Lou said. ‘Get to my age and your head wanders all over the shop.'

‘No, it was my fault, Sergeant, I wasn't looking where I was going.'

‘Where's the fire?'

‘A woman was attacked in a parking garage just south of Bath Street.'

‘Badly hurt?'

‘From what I hear she's fine.'

‘You take a statement yet?'

‘I'm on my way, Sarge. Just got a call from security at the garage.'

‘Don't let me keep you.' Perlman stepped aside and young Murdoch kept moving. The energy of youth, the elasticity of muscle and sinew. How quickly all that betrayed you. Perlman considered the dread of retirement and wondered what he'd do with his life when he didn't have this job any more. The lack of a daily function, an identity. The city would seem strange to him then, like a place he'd seen once on a postcard.

Retirement, ballocks. He didn't want it. Not ever. Die on the job. He was still working all the shifts that came his way. He crossed Sauchiehall Street. Christmas decorations strung between buildings were garish. Sleighs and electronic reindeer, no sign of a Jesus anywhere. Christmas was all Hollywood these days.

He reached the junction of Dalhousie Street, then walked until he came to Renfrew Street. Here, on the edge of Garnethill, the neighbourhood that rose above the shopping centres and pubs of Sauchiehall Street like a fortress of tenements, he paused and took the phone out of his pocket. He punched in Directory Inquiries and asked for Artie Wexler's number. He got it, tapped it in, a woman answered.

‘Is Artie at home?'

‘No, he's not. Can I take a message?'

‘You can tell him Lou Perlman called. I'd like him to get back to me –'

‘
Lou Perlman
? Don't you remember me?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Ruth. Ruthie Cowan. Well, Ruthie Wexler nowadays. We met at your brother's wedding.'

Perlman brought the memory up like a struggling fish reeled in from the deep: Ruthie Cowan, a slender young woman with lips that were a little sluttish, the kind of mouth that held out guarantees of a damn good time, dirty talk included gratis. He wondered how much of that appeal remained. He couldn't remember Artie Wexler getting married. He was out of touch. He didn't read the
Jewish Telegraph
to find out who'd wedded whom, who'd been born and who'd died. Hatches, matches, dispatches. He wasn't keeping up with tribal information.

‘That was more than – oh, I hate talking about the years,' Ruth Wexler said. ‘You in good health, Lou?'

‘The clockwork runs. Just about. You?'

‘I keep fit,' she said.