The Last Darkness (5 page)

Smiling like an idiot and nodding, he told the man he meant no harm, and finally forced the door shut. The man had made a strange baying noise, like a wolf maddened by moonlight, and then he'd gone downstairs, and within minutes loud bass-driven music had begun to play from below, sending reverberations up through the floors and walls to the rooms Marak occupied. He hadn't been able to escape the music.

He spent a few minutes taking clothes from his backpack – two pairs of black Levi's, a couple of black flannel shirts, socks, underwear – and folding them neatly inside a chest of drawers in the bedroom. The drawers were lined with yellowed newspapers, pages of the
News of the World
dating from the mid-1970s. He took his toilet items into the bathroom. Somebody's turds, in an advanced state of deterioration, floated in the bowl. He flushed the cistern and the water roared.

Before stacking his toiletries inside a rusted medicine cabinet, he cleaned the shelf with water and tissues. He aligned his things carefully: razor, shaving soap, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, and the small gold-handled scissors he used on his beard. The scissors were special. A gift from his father. His initials had been carved in tiny letters on the blades.

He walked through the rooms, expecting the phone to ring, thinking about Ramsay and his ‘lovely' flat. When a man tells one lie, usually he tells many. He felt a distinct uneasiness: how could Ramsay be trusted? Marak had come a long way. He'd received promises, and made promises in return. He'd sworn an oath.

Patience, have patience.

He paced the three dull rooms with their dirty curtains and shabby furniture. The kitchen was filled with mouldy food left behind by a previous occupant. He came across some edible bits and pieces in the refrigerator, bread and cheese and two imploded pears, not enough for sustenance.

Hungry, he left the place and walked through the poor morning light to a small grocery, where the staff was Pakistani. He bought milk, tea, cheese, pitta bread, oranges, houmus, a packet of dates. He paid, counted his change. He examined the coins and notes, trying to familiarize himself with them.

Back in the flat, the telephone rang. He dropped his groceries on the floor as he rushed to answer.

Ramsay asked, ‘What the fuck do you think you're doing, Abdullah, eh? Leaving the premises?'

‘You're having me watched. Why?'

‘I'm protecting our interests,' Ramsay said.

‘I don't like being observed.'

‘Get used to it.'

‘I had to go out for food.' He walked to the window, peered down into the street. A very light snow was falling. The morning sky was heavy, bruised. He saw no sign of observers. Unless there were spies among the workers, somebody on the scaffolding, or up on the roof. How could he tell? ‘Do you have information for me?'

‘Memorize this name, Abdullah. Joseph Lindsay. You got that?'

‘I'll remember.'

‘Now the address. No pen, no paper. Understand?'

‘My memory is good.'

Ramsay uttered the address slowly. ‘Got it?'

‘Yes, yes, of course. But where is this place?'

‘Take a taxi, you'll find it,' Ramsay said. ‘Oh, and one last wee thing. Look inside your fridge. Bottom shelf. Okay? Hey. Know this oldie, Abdullah?
It's gotta be rock ‘n' roll music, if you wanna dance with me
. Chuck Berry.'

‘I have not heard of this Chuck Berry.'

‘You know absolute shite about Western culture. Get with the programme, man.'

Ramsay laughed.
Hardyhar
. Then hung up.

Marak walked into the kitchen, found a brown envelope on the bottom shelf of the fridge. A photograph slid into his hand. He stepped to the window, examined the picture, a man's face snapped in grainy shadow, a little fleshy, late fifties, difficult to tell, heavy-lidded eyes like small hoods, a weak mouth, black-grey hair.

He turned the picture over. A name was pencilled on the back: Joseph Lindsay.

A name, a face. What you did with that information was up to you. How you performed the deed, that was left to your own discretion. No help from Ramsay. No weapon. Nothing. He wondered what Ramsay had contracted to do, if there were to be other kinds of assistance, something more than this depressing flat and the provision of names.

All right, if he had to go through this on his own, that was his destiny. Joseph Lindsay: he said the name to himself several times until it had begun to sound like a mantra. He stuck the picture back in the envelope, then it struck him that Ramsay or someone in his employ had a key to the flat and could come and go at any time.

An intruder. I have no privacy, Marak thought.

He left the flat. Outside, the air was unstintingly cold, shark's tooth sharp. He couldn't conceive of summer and sunshine in this place. He longed for home and the people he loved. His brothers, sisters. His mother –

Inevitably, he made the leap to the memory of his father. Inevitably, he saw him lying in that hot street and heard the echo of gunfire and he remembered shadowed faces in dark-blue doorways the sun couldn't reach, and a hawk sweeping the cloudless purity of the sky, and how he'd rushed to be with his father, how he'd held his father to him, and the man's eyelids had flickered and the pupils became whites and his lightweight summer suit was wet with blood, blood flowed and everything was red, the sun, the hawk in flight, everything deepest red, and an ambulance wailed in the distance and his father said
I do not want to leave you, but this hurts, how it hurts, hold me, do not let go …

These memories filled him with an unbearable sorrow.

Calm. An uncluttered mind was what he needed. Clarity. The address, think about the address. And Joseph Lindsay. How to meet Lindsay? How to know if he lived alone, or was married, where he worked, the hours he kept – so many elements.

Ramsay had been parsimonious with information.

Marak reached a main thoroughfare and scanned the passing traffic, double-decker buses and lorries and cars, looking for a taxi. It occurred to him that if anything happened to Ramsay, if Ramsay decided to disappear, say, or some accident befell him, what would he do then? Ramsay was the one who provided the names. Presumably for security reasons, they were going to be drip-fed to him one at a time, like this Joseph Lindsay. Fine. But without Ramsay there would be no names at all.

The whole undertaking seemed suddenly precarious to him, and he backtracked to the fat bearded Moroccan, Zerouali, the proprietor of a felafel restaurant called Tahini in the Arab Quarter of Haifa, who'd furtively given him a wad of money and blessed him for his courage,
you are doing a wonderful thing, young man, and may God be with you, and if you need a word of moral support at any time, telephone me here;
and the kibbutz boy in aviator glasses and a UCLA T-shirt who'd driven him by jeep to Port Said, then the funereal vodka-charged Greek skipper who'd ferried him to Athens, and the white-haired man in the glasses with bright-green plastic frames who'd handed him an envelope with the passport in the foyer of the Hotel Kirkeri in Athens – the connections, the links, how had they been forged? That wasn't any of his business. All he needed was the belief that the enterprise was sound from beginning to end.

Snow still fell. It felt strange against his lips and melted in his beard. When he saw a black taxi come towards him, he held out his hand and the cab stopped. He climbed into the back seat.

‘Where to?' the driver asked.

‘Bath Street.'

‘What number, john?'

John?
‘Anywhere will do.'

The driver shrugged. ‘Jump in. Glasgow's your oyster.'

The cab carried Marak across a short stretch of droning motorway into the heart of the city, where the streets were narrow and traffic was dense. Fumes hung in the serrated air.

‘Right you are,' the cabbie said. He braked.

Marak stepped out. ‘This is Bath Street?'

‘Unless they changed the signs since this morning,' the driver said. He was a plump man with a good-natured smile.

Marak thrust some money into his hand and said, ‘Keep the change.'

‘Actually, um, you've underpaid me, john.'

‘Underpaid? Sorry. I am not used to the money.' Marak held his open palm towards the driver, who picked out two chunky little coins.

‘Lucky for you I'm an honest man,' he said. ‘Mind how you go, squire.'

Marak watched the taxi pull away before he turned and walked. He looked at numbers. Ninety. Eighty-two. Restaurants, insurance offices, art galleries, banks, shops, a world of commerce. Some had Christmas decorations in their windows. Trees, bright lights, silver strands.

Snow, picked up by a gust of fresh wind, blew into his face like cold white lace. He walked until he came to the number he was looking for, and he checked the collection of brass plates screwed into the doorway, then moved on. He crossed the street, passed below the strange blue lighting of Bewley's Hotel. It had an hallucinatory effect. He thought he was strolling through a dream.

He stopped, looked directly across: the narrow building consisted of four floors. In an upstairs window which bore gilt letters he saw a good-looking blonde woman inclined over something, a computer perhaps, a typewriter. When he thought she was about to move the angle of her face and look out, he hurried away, huddled deep inside his coat.

On the next corner he went back across the street again and he walked past the front door of the premises, for a second time checking the brass plates.
Addendum Research Worldwide. Calico Interiors Ltd. Scottish Domestics Agency
.

At the bottom:
Joseph Lindsay, Solicitor
.

He glanced back up at the window where he'd seen the woman moments before. She was gone. The scroll on the pane read:
Joseph Lindsay, Solicitor
.

Marak reached the corner of Bath Street and West Campbell Street and he stopped, and just for a moment yielded to a certain dismay: how was he supposed to engineer a discreet meeting with Joseph Lindsay, one so private nobody must ever know it had taken place?

He walked until he came to Queen Street Station, a large clamorous structure echoing with the sound of timetable announcements and train cancellations. He found a public telephone. He called the operator, and was connected to Directory Inquiries, where he obtained Joseph Lindsay's office number, and punched it in.

A female voice answered, ‘Good afternoon, Joseph Lindsay and Company,' and Marak wondered if this might be the woman he'd seen in the window.

‘I wish to speak to Mr Lindsay,' he said.

‘I'm sorry. He isn't in today.'

‘Can you tell me when he is expected?'

‘Probably tomorrow. May I say who called?'

‘Can I phone him at home?'

‘I wouldn't be able to give you his private number, sir. If you tell me your name I'll have him contact you.'

Can this call be traced
? he wondered. It didn't matter. A public phone. So many people used it. He hung up. In the station bar he found a directory and flicked the pages. Plenty of J Lindsays. He took the photograph of Lindsay from his pocket and he tore it into small pieces and dropped them into a rubbish bin. He had the face memorized.

Probably tomorrow
, he thought. He went out of the station and even as he yearned for sun and resurrection, the unobtainable necessities of his life, he wondered what he'd do next. Whatever it was, he understood that death had to figure somewhere in the equation of his future.

8

Lou Perlman had his kaput Mondeo jump-started by the driver of a passing bread delivery-van who spoke at length about the need for regular battery maintenance in cold weather. Chastened, Perlman drove away scattering promises of future good behaviour. It was after ten a.m. when he reached the Cedars, a small private hospital in Mount Florida on the south side of the city. In summer, the building would have been invisible from the street because of the density of trees but now, in this stunted season, Perlman could see the structure beyond the branches. Once, the Cedars had been a motel, and you could still detect its origins in the low-slung utilitarian look of the place, although it had been tarted up with balconies and slatted blinds at the windows and a couple of antique statues placed here and there on the lawn.

He drove into the car park, got out, hurried towards the entranceway; a wind-devil of dead leaves chased him, swirling around his head. Breathless, he shut the door behind him and looked at the receptionist. ‘Bitter out there,' he said.

The receptionist wore a fashionable black suit. A glossy fringe of hair hid half her brow. She raised her face, gazed at Perlman as if he'd come here to collect for a charity of which she disapproved. ‘Do you have an appointment?'

‘With Dr Rifkind.'

‘Name?'

‘Perlman. Lou.'

‘Take a seat.' The woman picked up a phone and spoke into it quietly. Perlman sat in a sofa so soft and deep it engulfed him. He scanned the waiting room. It was all muted shades in the Cedars, rusts, tans, browns. The prints on the walls were spartan, bleached of bright colour. This sedate place was several universes removed from the hospitals of the National Health Service, which in Perlman's experience were desperate abattoirs filled with the smells of stale body fluids, and outmoded equipment, and waiting rooms stuffed with all the sad bastards who'd been maltreated or carelessly overlooked by an arse-backwards system. The Cedars, private and expensive, was where you came to be pampered in your infirmity, and to hell with cost.

The receptionist said, ‘Fine, Mr Perlman. Take the door to your left and go down the corridor.' She pointed with a yellow pencil. ‘The doctor will meet you.'

Perlman walked down a long corridor. He saw only one nurse, and she moved soundlessly on rubber-soled shoes; no shrill intercom announcements here, no emergency calls, just the kind of quiet you'd expect in a library. The air was slyly perfumed with a scent redolent of baby powder. Nobody left sweat in the atmosphere of the Cedars. Nobody's emissions remained for long in bedpans.