Sisters Three

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘Do you not want to take my hand, Tony?’

  ‘Not when you’re waving that gun about.’

  ‘I am not waving it about. Take my hand.’

  He felt like a fool, a cheat, but took her hand none the less.

  She wore mittens, clumsy hand-knitted things that covered her palms and wrists but left her fingers bare. She took his hand firmly and when she had it in her grasp, crooked her forefinger and tickled his palm, scratched the ball at the base of his thumb with her fingernail. She leaned against him, rubbed against him like a cat, like Frobisher when Giffard put out the food bowl.

  ‘What is wrong? Why are you so tense, darling?’

  ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you not enjoy me?’ Penny asked, still rubbing.

  He didn’t have the gall to answer her honestly. He was afraid of her or, rather, he was afraid of the effect that she had on him. He wanted to explore that sleek, elongated body, to make her writhe and beg him to stop, to prove who was master. But he could never be Penny Weston’s master, not when he was in love with Polly Manone. He knew now that the urgent lovemaking to which he had subjected Polly was only an apology for love and that Polly had touched him in a way that this girl, any girl, no matter how sleek and beautiful and willing, could not.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ Tony said. ‘Last night was a mistake.’

  He tried to pull away but she held on tightly.

  ‘I am a mistake? What happened was a mistake?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She pouted for an instant, then laughed.

  ‘Are you saying to me that it will not happen again?’

  ‘Yeah, I am.’

  ‘Is it because you are not in love with me you think what we did was wrong?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was wrong, just…’

  ‘The mask, you liked it with the mask, did you not?’

  He tugged his hand from hers. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’ve a job to do here, both of us. I can’t cope with distractions.’

  ‘Hoh! Am I a distraction now? I’ve never been called a distraction before.’

  Four strands of wire separated the pasture from a strip of ploughed ground. The acreage, turned in the autumn, had been left to weather and the furrows, marled by rain and frost, swooped down into a plantation of young firs that gave protection from the biting east winds. Above the tree line the sky was waxing, the cornflower-blue patch expanding.

  ‘You do not love me.’ Penny pouted again.

  ‘Of course I don’t bloody love you.’

  ‘I will put on my mask for gas and then you will love me?’

  ‘No,’ Tony said.

  She adjusted the rifle, arched her back a little, offered her cheek. ‘Not even one small kiss for me, here, where no one can see us?’

  ‘I told you. It was a mistake.’

  ‘I will catch you out.’ She pivoted on the rubber heels and leaned all her weight against the sagging fence, careful with the gun, though, always careful with the gun. ‘If I come to you tonight, when you are dreaming of someone else, will I not catch you out?’

  ‘Be careful, Penny,’ Tony said.

  ‘There is someone else, am I not right?’

  ‘None of your damned business. Just because we…’

  ‘What? What do you call it? What name do you have for what we did together?’

  ‘You’ve got more names for it than I have, I reckon,’ Tony said.

  He was tense: Penny was right about that. Being with her in open country with nothing but the rooftops of the farm building showing, he felt more vulnerable than ever. As a rule he was relaxed with women – except in the bedroom. He had never been casual about his performance in the bedroom, had never left a woman wanting more, never left them in tears. He might be more man than gentleman but he had never deliberately hurt a woman in his life.

  Now he was hurting, hurting bad. He wanted Polly, to see her smile, hear her laugh, feel her slender arms about him, her small hard breasts pressing against him; not to use her, not to prove himself, not to count out her climaxes like loose change, but just to hold and protect her, assure her that he’d be there when she wakened in the darkness and needed him to keep her safe.

  ‘I know all sorts of names for it,’ Penny said. ‘Love is not one of them.’

  ‘I didn’t figure it would be,’ Tony said.

  ‘I doesn’t matter,’ the girl said. ‘I do not mind if you do not love me.’

  ‘No, but I do.’

  She smiled, a sly, secretive sort of smile.

  ‘You are in love with someone else,’ she said. ‘I think you are in love with Dominic’s wife.’

  ‘You’ve got some imagination, kid,’ Tony told her.

  She bounced a little on wire, making the strands whirr and sing between the rotting posts. ‘Does Dominic know?’

  ‘It would never cross his mind,’ Tony said, ‘because there’s nothing to it.’

  ‘I am guessing,’ the girl said. ‘I guess that he would kill you if he found out that you were in love with his wife? He is Italian and you are Italian so he would feel entitled to kill you for betraying him. It is just like the opera, is it not, with all that loving and killing?’

  ‘You’re nuts, Penny, do you know that?’

  ‘So I can ask him, can I? Ask Dominic about his wife? What will he tell me? That she is faithful, that she adores him, that she is the mother of his three lovely children and would never betray him with another man?’

  ‘Two,’ Tony said, ‘just two children. And I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.’

  ‘I would like some of that,’ the girl said.

  ‘What? Children?’

  ‘To be loved – just a little bit, to be loved,’ Penny said. ‘Perhaps I will ask Dominic to tell you to love me the way you love his wife. You will do as he tells you to do, will you not, darling? It will make me happy just to pretend.’

  ‘Won’t going back home with forty or fifty thousand dollars in your luggage make you happy?’

  ‘Oh, I will have that too,’ Penny said. She moved closer, sliding along the wire until she was almost beneath him. ‘Maybe I will not have to ask Dominic for the other thing. Maybe you will give it to me without asking.’

  ‘And maybe I won’t,’ said Tony.

  She pushed herself upright, adjusting the angle of the rifle once more.

  Even in the scruffy outfit and ugly rubber boots, she had a unique, dangerous quality that in the filament of sunlight appeared almost wicked; then Tony realised that she was no longer looking at him. She was looking past him. Swinging round, he saw the hare limping across the crown of the pasture, just as the girl raised the rifle and fired. He heard the shot ring out, ring away into the distance, its echoes muffled by the trees.

  The hare rose on its hind legs, sleek and slender ears cocked, fore paws bunched daintily at its breast; close enough for Tony to read its startled expression, one sad eye rolling as it caught the scent of its own impending death.

  He heard her fire again.

  She was rock steady, disciplined, light and smiling.

  The hare swivelled in the air, flopped and lay struggling on its back, its long body bowed, its paws kicking ineffectually.

  Penny ran towards it, reloading.

  Tony followed as a dog might, lumberingly obedient. He imagined he knew what he would find but it was not what he expected, not bloody, not heavy, not a dead thing at all but a thing still alive. Its neck hairs glistened in the rays of the sun, neck twisted and head raised and in the little soft black curve of the mouth were two perfect prominent teeth, so pathetic, so beseeching that he felt as if the bullet had entered his belly and the sticky star of blood on the fur was his blood too.

  The girl planted the heel of her boot on the hare’s hind legs and, leaning back to find an angle, fired a final shot into the head.

  She shouldered the rifle and knelt, lifted the corpse by the ears.

  ‘One for the pot,’ she said. ‘Big fellow too, a
fine big buck by the look of it.’

  Tony didn’t answer. He was already walking rapidly towards the farmhouse, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, his back turned towards the sunset and the cornflower-blue gap in the cloud.

  Chapter Eleven

  In a more fanciful world there would have been a hidden entrance to John James Flint’s headquarters above the Stadium Cinema. The cinema belonged to a company in which ‘Flinty’ Flint was a major shareholder and the construction of a sliding panel in the lavatory or a secret staircase sneaking up from the stalls would have been easy to arrange.

  Johnny Flint didn’t run that kind of organisation, however, and admission to the top-floor offices was via a grand wishbone-shaped staircase that cascaded down into a wide open yard behind the picture house. The stairs were topped by a beautiful wrought-iron railing against which John James Flint would lean while he sipped his mid-morning coffee or afternoon tea and surveyed the wall of a coal-merchants’ dump and the towering edifice of the Paisley & District Flour Mill, as if the atmosphere of black dust and white was both aesthetically pleasing and a suitable symbol for the sporting empire over which he presided.

  Flint had Dominic Manone to thank for his exalted position in the great grey netherworld of almost bloodless crime. It was on Manone’s instruction that Flinty’s boss, Charley – Chick – McGuire had met a sticky end some eight or nine years ago, a fact of which only four or five men had sure knowledge, and the police no knowledge at all. John Flint had not been one to waste a golden opportunity, however, and as soon as Chick had turned up dead in an alleyway on the other side of the river he had assumed control of the illegal book and the handful of other rackets by which Chick had turned a dishonest buck, and in the years that followed had spread his interests into the entertainment business, melding legal and illegal activities in a manner that bamboozled even the most diligent investigators.

  He had purchased the Ferryhead Rowing Club from Dominic and had turned it into a billiard hall. He had paid fair money for the remnants of Manone’s protection racket and the right to infiltrate the rich, feudal lands of Govan and Ibrox as far to the east as Gorbals. He was, and always would be, a street crook, however, for he had none of Dominic’s panache when it came to socialising with stockbrokers and big-city businessmen. John Flint’s contacts were limited to crooked councilmen, a handful of on-the-payroll policemen and an accountant who could make numbers dance like angels on the head of a pin.

  He was sharp, natty, affable and unflappable. He had a shock of steely grey hair that was coifed by a professional barber three or four times a month, and the sort of vulpine good looks that maturity had only improved. Women thought he was wonderful. Even his new young wife, Natalie, was so hypnotised by his awful charm that she turned a blind eye to his outrageous philandering and never asked him to explain himself or demanded to be told what he was up to or where he had spent the night; she was, in fact, just grateful that he deigned to come home at all.

  Flint was standing on the balcony sipping coffee when Dominic drove the Wolseley into the parking lot behind the cinema. There were few car owners in the vicinity of Paisley Road West and the quarter acre of asphalted ground behind the Stadium provided no cover for nosy coppers. For the most part it lay empty, save for Johnny’s private transport and a couple of small delivery vans.

  ‘Dom,’ he called out. ‘By God, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Come up, for God’s sake, man, come on up and let me take a look at you.’

  They hugged at the top of the staircase and moved out of the damp January air through the big double-door that gave access to the offices.

  Although it was still early afternoon the cinema had commenced its matinee performance and a mutter of gun-fire and thundering hooves and the ebb and flow of panic-stricken music filtered up into the office’s carpeted corridor. In dockets and alcoves clerkesses were busy at typewriters and smart, Brylcreemed young men were hammering away on comptometers. In a shuttered office just outside Flint’s private suite two well-groomed young women were managing a teleprinter, and the overall impression was one of clean-cut commercial endeavour, though who or what shady connections lurked at the end of the telephone wires was anyone’s guess.

  Still carrying his coffee cup, Flint ushered Dominic into the suite.

  A far cry from Dominic’s office in Central Warehouse, it was decorated more like a lounge bar or nightclub than a place of work. A massive walnut wood cocktail cabinet occupied half a wall, glasses and bottles glinting. Framed, signed photographs of football players, jockeys, and less-than-leading lights from theatre and film crammed every available inch of space. Pride of place was accorded to an enormous painting in the Landseer tradition of a greyhound – Half Way Home – posed on a rock at the top of a misty mountain, though what the animal might be seeking at that altitude Dominic could not imagine.

  Flint’s desk, a great flying wing fashioned from exotic hardwoods, seemed to come at you out of the light from the window, a glazed and tinted masterpiece that must have cost Flint more than a Clydeside riveter could earn in a lifetime. Standing behind the desk, as if he, not Flint, owned the place, was Edgar Harker, looking implacably American in a black alpaca overcoat and a suit with stripes so broad that you could have driven a tramcar along them.

  There was, Dominic realised, a disturbing similarity between Harker and Flint, not so much in appearance as demeanour; a cocky, arrogant, superior manner that Johnny managed to make work for him but that Eddie Harker could not. He felt himself bristle at the sight of the little man who, like a pantomime villain, was stroking his moustache, and grinning.

  ‘Surprise!’ Edgar Harker said. ‘Surprise, eh what?’

  ‘You know Eddie, of course?’ John Flint said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dominic. ‘I thought this was to be a private meeting, John?’

  ‘No secrets from Eddie,’ Flint said. ‘Right, m’boy?’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Harker. ‘I’ve just arrived myself, in fact.’

  Dominic tossed his hat on to a padded banquette that filled a corner under the big painting. He took out and lit a small cigar, blew smoke, while Flint made the long trip around the desk and seated himself in an armchair.

  Harker remained positioned at Flint’s right hand.

  ‘Where have you just arrived from?’ Dominic said. ‘Hull, by any chance?’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody sniffy, Dom,’ said Harker. ‘You got all I promised you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Guido?’

  ‘Didn’t know about Guido.’

  ‘What’s happened to my aunt?’

  ‘Teresa?’ Harker said. ‘She’s gone to stay with Benedetta.’

  ‘Who the hell is Benedetta?’

  ‘Her younger sister. Surprised you didn’t know that. She’ll be safe as houses with Benedetta,’ Harker said. ‘Benny’s boys are both army officers.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Roma.’

  ‘I didn’t even know Teresa had a sister in Rome.’

  ‘Lots of things you don’t know, son,’ Harker said. ‘Lots of thing you really should try t’ catch up on. Pronto, pronto.’

  ‘I hate to interrupt this family reunion’ Flint said, ‘but time’s money an’ it’s money we’ve come here to discuss. Dom, did you bring me a sample?’

  ‘A sample of what?’

  ‘The counterfeit notes you want me to put through the system.’

  Dominic studied the end of his cigar and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, not awkwardly but in the manner of a boxer who might be called upon to weave and duck defensively.

  At length he said, ‘Just how much has friend Harker told you?’

  ‘Pretty well everything,’ Johnny Flint answered.

  ‘Pretty well everything,’ Dominic said. ‘Then that’s pretty well more than he’s told me. How come you got involved before I did, Johnny? It was presented to me as an open and shut job – and my show.’

  ‘Nope, it was never your j
ob to handle distribution, Dominic,’ Harker said. ‘You print the goddamn things and we channel them through the system. That was the deal your old man laid out for you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ Dominic said. ‘And what “system” are we talking about?’

  ‘That don’t concern you,’ Edgar Harker said.

  ‘Hang on,’ Dominic said. ‘The agreement was that I would manage the production of the notes for twenty-five per cent of market value. My old man told me I’d be expected to finance the management and distribution and…’

  ‘Not distribution,’ Harker said. ‘That’s always gonna be our pigeon.’

  ‘So how do I get paid, on what reckoning?’ Dominic said. ‘Face value?’

  ‘Hell no!’ Harker said. ‘That’d be far too much. You’ll get what you were promised, son, which is twenty-five per cent of sale value of each run.’

  ‘And you’ll tell me what each run has fetched?’ said Dominic.

  ‘Prices are gonna vary,’ Harker said. ‘I mean, that’s obvious. We sell down through a friend like Johnny here an’ the price will be lower than if we trade through the foreign exchanges.’

  ‘Trade in what currency?’ Dominic said. ‘Lira, dollars, Deutschmarks?’

  ‘Who the hell cares?’ Harker said. ‘Rubles or kronen or even bloody pesetas if the rate is advantageous enough. The plates you were given were top-notch. A lot of sweat an’ blood went into gettin’ you the right paper an’ the right inks. Your old man told me you had the best contact in creation for managin’ the printing. Was he wrong? Ain’t you an’ your guy up to it?’

  ‘Oh, we’re up to it,’ Dominic said. ‘I just want to know where the materials came from, where they originated?’

  ‘Does that really matter, Dom?’ John Flint put in.

  ‘Of course it matters,’ Dominic said. ‘We’ll be running off a hundred thousand face value a month by Easter and the way it was explained to me we’re expected to keep the run going at that rate of production for six or eight months.’

  ‘Longer,’ Harker said. ‘Much longer.’