The Last Darkness (13 page)

‘It's fine,' he said. ‘Sharpish. Tangy.'

‘Hot when it gets down,' she said.

‘Aye, I'm feeling it now.'

‘Cheers,' she said. ‘You know the last time you came to our place for dinner?'

‘Last year, I think.'

‘More like three years ago, Lou. You avoid us.'

Yes, true, he avoided the whole domestic situation, Colin and Miriam, Miriam and Colin, the little touches between them, the common references they were so used to sharing they failed to realize they excluded other people from their world. The perfect couple in the perfect reality. Nothing could be
that
perfect, he thought. Why didn't he ever catch some hint of stress in their marriage? Some sense that they ever disagreed about things? Their world was like smooth glass.

‘I'm busy more than I want to be,' he said. ‘Don't forget bachelors get the short straw when it comes to working the worst shifts, Miriam.'

‘I suspect you just don't like seeing married people because it reminds you that you live all alone in a damp old house.'

‘I'm
that
transparent?'

‘Is there never going to be a woman, Lou?'

‘I got out of the swami business. The future's impenetrable.'

‘You have a lot to offer,' she said.

‘So my aunts keep telling me,' he said, thinking of those Southside crones, Aunties Hilda and Marlene and Susan and all the others who got together and concocted marital schemes. ‘They sit over a cauldron in Giffnock and brew up love-potions.'

‘Because they care about you,' she said. ‘You ever hear anything from Nina?'

‘Nina? A blast from the past. Not a word in … must be ten years. Probably more.'

‘Ever think you'd
like
to hear from her?'

‘We don't have anything to say to one another. So no, I don't want to hear from her. Everybody should have at least one failed marriage just for the experience. Mine was mercifully short.'

‘Somebody told me she was in New Zealand.'

‘That's pleasantly far away,' he said. He picked up his drink, tasted it. Funny how you could be married to somebody, how you could achieve a certain depth of intimacy, and then it disappeared as if it had never taken place. He could hardly remember Nina's face, her body. Their lovemaking was a blank. She left no scent. He had no photographs of her, no reminders. He was thirty when he'd fancied he could find love with her, and so they'd married, and the union had lasted one year before she bolted in pursuit of her own distant star.
I have it in me to be a great writer, Lou. But you cramp me. Glasgow cramps me, I'm suffocating here
.

A writer, he thought. All of a sudden I'm married to Virginia fucking Woolf. She took to sitting up nights composing stories in a big yellow-paged ledger. She never asked him to read what she'd written. And then one day – bye-bye, baby – she was gone. London, he heard. Then Paris. After that nothing. Down the Chute of Creativity, he guessed. He hadn't pursued her. What was the point? He'd known he hadn't loved her, the marriage was a hollow undertaking, an act of self-delusion. It was history now, and withered, a shrub in winter.

Miriam had fallen silent. She set down her glass and played with her beret on the bar. Her expression darkened. She shut her eyes and inclined her face forward. He risked touching her, laying the palm of his hand over the back of her wrist. Her skin was cold. In this one connection of flesh, Lou Perlman felt more of a charge than he'd felt in a whole year's marriage to Nina.

‘What can I do to help?' he asked.

‘I don't think you can, Lou.'

‘You wanted to see me. You have something to say.'

‘Right. It's … Rifkind tells me …' She turned, faced him. ‘Rifkind says Colin has to have this bloody bypass surgery as soon as possible,' and she made her lovely hands into tight white fists. ‘And I wish that wasn't the case, because I keep thinking of them cutting Colin open, and people doing things to his heart. And I'm afraid. What if he dies on the table? What if he dies?'

‘He's not going to die, Miriam.'

‘Heart surgery is risky, Lou.'

‘Rifkind's good. Anyway, people have these operations every day, they're commonplace.'

‘But still risky, Lou.'

‘They've got sophisticated new techniques. I understand they don't work by gaslight any more.'

‘Seriously. I read these stories about people who don't come round from the anaesthetic. What if that happens …'

‘Colin will come through it. He's strong.' He thought of his brother, chest cut, skin clamped back, beating heart exposed, merciless lights shining down into the cavity of his body.

‘He's not as strong as we all thought,' she said.

‘Strong up here,' and he tapped his head. ‘Where it counts.'

‘The op's scheduled for tomorrow at noon.'

She finished her drink. She studied the dregs in her glass a little wistfully – the expression, Perlman thought, of a young girl clutching a bittersweet farewell letter from her lover – then glanced at her watch. ‘I have an evening class to teach,' she said. ‘It helps take my mind off things.'

‘Call me any time,' he said.

‘You're a sweetheart, Lou.'

Yeah, I'm a saint, he thought. A St Bernard more like. You need me, Miriam, I'll come running, small barrel of brandy attached to my neck. ‘You want me to walk back with you?'

She reached for her beret. ‘I'll be fine. Thanks for coming to meet me.'

He kissed her quickly on the cheek, a sparrow's peck, and she began to move away.

‘Oh, Miriam, wait – one last thing. Do you know if Colin's acquainted with somebody called Joseph Lindsay?'

‘Lindsay? A lawyer?'

‘That's the one.'

‘He came to the house a couple of times for dinner a while ago.'

‘What did you make of him?'

‘Oh, a quiet wee man. Pleasant in his own way. Why do you ask?'

‘Curious.'

‘You're working on something, aren't you?'

‘I can't tell where work stops and life begins, lassie,' he said, and watched her go outside. His eyes followed her as she passed the window, her face sad and her hair tugged by the wind and flopping against her shoulders. When she'd gone he felt lonely. He wished he could do something, perform an act of magic, that would make her worries vanish.

He lit the cigarette he'd been gasping for, dragged smoke into his lungs with a satisfying feeling. He studied the comforting red glowing tip.

Connections then. Wexler knew Lindsay. Colin knew Wexler. And Joseph Lindsay had come to dinner. There was really no great surprise in this, was there? Glasgow social circles were small; and Jewish ones incestuously so.

Had Miriam served lamb chops with caramelized onions? Or her beef and paprika ensemble? She did both those dishes well. The wine, he knew, would be good; it was always good at Colin and Miriam's table. They favoured a certain Nuits St George Colin imported by the case. The conversation: how had that gone? What had they discussed? Miriam would be up and down between dining table and kitchen, playing hostess, leaving the small-time solicitor and the hotshot financial adviser to carry the talk on their own much of the time. It was probably business, Perlman thought. Simple dull business.

Money and the law, those twisted partners.
Yack yack yack
. He left the bar and shivered on Sauchiehall Street. He flicked his cigarette away and looked in the direction Miriam had taken, but there was no sign of her now. He imagined her climbing up into Garnethill, and he thought of her slim form passing under streetlamps.

Beautiful Miriam, a flash of loveliness in a city where the charred bones of an unknown man had been found stuffed inside an old sewage-pipe, and an alcoholic kid had been battered to death in Sighthill, and Joseph Lindsay, solicitor, had perished in a cocaine explosion.

20

BJ Quick and Willie Furfee arrived at Govan underground station on the south side of the city at five minutes to eight. Leo Kilroy met them there. He was short and enormously fat and wobbled like a flesh-coloured blancmange when he moved. He wore a long camel coat and a red silk cravat. He also wore a homburg hat as outmoded as the cravat, and a brocade waistcoat. He had clusters of rings on his plump fingers. He carried a walnut cane with a brass handle. He was a man of wild ostentation and as out of place in the dreich surroundings of Govan as a peacock at a ploughing contest.

‘You think this varlet will show up?' he asked. He had a strange honk in his voice. His vowels might have been porcine in origin. Some people referred to him as Fat Pig, but not to his face: he allegedly controlled a number of local rackets and could count on some heavy muscle, and so it was imprudent, perhaps downright lethal, to offend him.

‘Aye he'll show,' BJ said.

‘And if he doesn't?'

‘We go to his house,' BJ answered.

He gazed into the sleet. Govan depressed him. Black tenements. Dead shipyards. Social security. Shuttered shops. No glamour here. Just a daily grind. This was the Third World. He wanted big lights and neon in his life. ‘I'm thinking next time I'll call the club some other name.'

‘Smart lad,' Kilroy said. ‘Dissociate yourself from your failures.'

‘I'm thinking Club Farraday.'

‘Club who?'

‘Where Jerry Lee was born. Farraday, Louisiana.'

‘Oh, laddie, no. It lacks a certain
oomph
factor. Pizzazz, BJ. Electricity. Something that will blaze in the sky at night. Think of Glasgow clubs that have any kind of longevity. What names come to mind?'

BJ Quick said, ‘King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut, but –'

‘My very point,' Kilroy said, and prodded Quick in the chest with his cane. ‘King Tut's been in business for
years
. Great name. But Club Memphis? I ask you. And Club Farraday? I don't care if Farraday was the birthplace of Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry and Jesus
Christ Almighty
all on the same damn
day
, it's not going to go down with the average punter, laddie. Think again.'

‘Right,' BJ Quick said. ‘I will.' He thought: It's my club and I'll call it anything I like, you fat wank.

Kilroy looked at his gold wristwatch. ‘It's five past the hour. Where is this scruff we await?'

‘Late,' Furfee said.

‘Punctuality is everything in business,' Kilroy said.

Quick said, ‘He'll be here, Leo, I swear it.'

‘With my five thou?'

‘Absolutely,' BJ said.

‘How are you acquiring this capital? And how did you raise the first ten?'

‘Old debts,' BJ said.

‘But not drug-related, I hope?'

‘No fucking way.'

‘You know how I feel about narcotics, BJ. They're evil. If you're connected in any way with drugs, you won't find me so easy to deal with, rest assured. So is this five grandees another old debt or what?'

‘Cash I loaned in a moment of weakness,' Quick said. Why was Pig putting him through a third-degree here? What difference did it make where the cash came from? A measly 5K and Pig wants its history. Sometimes Quick had a vague feeling that Piggy Kilroy was playing a game with him.

Kilroy asked, ‘Name of debtor?'

‘You wouldn't know him, Leo.'

‘Tell me anyway.'

Quick sighed. ‘A fellow called Vindaloo Bill.'

‘Small-time?'

‘Very,' Quick said.

‘Just need to know what you're up to, BJ.' Kilroy looked across the street and shuddered. ‘By God, Govan's like a portal to hell. I usually love a wee bit of slumming, but this …'

‘Another few minutes,' BJ said.

He tried to keep any note of desperation out of his voice. Be cool. He didn't want Kilroy to slip away. He needed to press a wad of dough into Pig's hand, so Kilroy could hoof off cheerful in the knowledge that he already had 10K of BJ's money, and in a few minutes he'd drive away in his 1956 Bentley with another five: total fifteen. And still BJ had to find the final instalment, another ten. 25K total, it was a miserable pittance, the kind of money he'd piss and party away in a couple of days, young hookers and drugs and champagne. By God, he wanted those good times to roll again.

He heard an underground train
shooosh
to a halt way below.

If that fuck Vindaloo lets me down
, he thought.

A woman of about forty approached. She wore a plastic rainhat and a red raincoat and red galoshes, and she had the expression of one whose life has been a sequence of bruises and disappointments: now, she regarded the world with neither expectation nor fear.

She asked BJ, ‘You're Quick? He told me to look for a guy with a right stupid hairdo. I've brought you this,' and dug into her purse and drew out a package wrapped in a copy of the
Daily Record
. Quick ignored the insult to his hairstyle, and ripped the newspaper. He counted the banknotes quickly and removed two hundred for himself.

Kilroy said, ‘Tchhh-tut-tut.'

‘I need running expenses, Leo,' BJ said. ‘Petty cash.'

‘I'm keeping records. Deductions will be made.'

The woman regarded this transaction with a hostile frown. Her forehead resembled a furious map of intersecting motorways.

BJ asked the woman, ‘You the missus?'

‘He can't come himself,' she said. ‘He's so badly cut. He had to go to the bloody hospital. You bastard. You paira bastards.'

‘Whoa,' Furfee said.

‘I'd like to kick you in the balls,' she said.

‘Be the last thing you did,' Furfee said. He stepped between Quick and the woman and forced her away.

‘I find this unsightly,' Kilroy said, and he reached out and picked the package from BJ's hand. ‘Call me when you know the ETA of the last payment. Which, I might point out, should be soon.'