The Last Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘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 spe
ak 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.

  Martin Rifkind appeared at the end of the corridor. He was a lean muscular man in a white coat. He had a large skull, a dome. It was the first feature of the man anyone noticed. Across this duomo lay a frail latticework of white hair. Years of bedside visits had given him a friendly manner. I’m more than your doctor, I’m your chum. Nothing happened in this small hospital without his imprimatur: he was cardinal, chief physician, God. Lou Perlman had met him a couple of times in the past. He was one of Colin’s people. Lou had always felt distanced from the coterie in which Colin moved – they were all too bright, too classy, or just too obviously ambitious. They favoured sleek places and smart cocktails and holidays at expensive bijou hotels on the lesser-known islands of the Caribbean.

  Rifkind held out a hand and Perlman shook it.

  Rifkind said, ‘It must be, what, a dozen years?’

  ‘Who counts time any more? It’s too depressing.’

  ‘I remember, it was the anniversary …’ Rifkind paused in mid-faux pas. ‘Ooops.’

  Perlman listened to the word ‘anniversary’ reverberate in his skull and he remembered that night, oh Christ did he remember that night. The twentieth wedding anniversary of Colin and his wife, a hundred guests, tuxedos and glittering dresses and fancy jewels. The room was gleaming, brilliant, wonderful. But the humiliation … He’d begun drinking before his arrival because he was nervous, he didn’t want to attend, and when it came to alcohol he was an utter lightweight who rarely drank. It roared immediately to his brain and distorted all his notions of time and propriety.

  He remembered sitting at the head table, one of the anointed. He remembered rising at some point, unbidden, to make a toast to the happy couple. Spilling things. Coffee pot, milk jug, ashtray. Getting his feet tangled together and listing forward and clutching table linen and thinking he was on the Titanic and here’s the iceberg coming. He remembered the anniversary couple turning to look at him. Aghast: that was the word for their expressions.

  Pished out of his skull, Lou raised his glass in the air and tried to make a joke, while the room swivelled and the punchline deteriorated in mid-structure, and when he jerked his arm upwards to emphasize the sincerity of his toast the glass shot out of his hand and zoomed like a missile across the table and struck Colin in the forehead and rebounded, spilling globes of liquid into Rifkind’s lap, and then Lou had staggered out into the garden, bending double, boking vigorously into a bed of violets and pansies for all the guests to hear. And then Colin was bending over him and saying, You’re humiliating, a fucking total embarrassment to me, this was an important night for us, arsehole, I’m sticking you in a taxi and you’re out of here and no goodbyes …

  Perlman looked at Rifkind. ‘That was quite an evening, Martin, eh?’ And he tried to laugh it off, a drunken misadventure, a silly wee thing, tut-tut pooh-pooh.

  ‘Ah, we all act daft sometimes,’ Rifkind said. ‘Even doctors like me have been known to consume a cocktail too many. Hard to believe, right?’

  Too too kind, Perlman thought. I behaved disgracefully. ‘Never drink on an empty stomach. So they say.’

  ‘Plays havoc with the system all right,’ Rifkind remarked.

  Perlman looked at his watch. He wanted to see his brother and get out of here. Things to do. ‘Can I visit him, Martin?’

  ‘For a minute.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’ll get over it in time, Lou. But his heart won’t take another hammering. Go in room nine. Two doors down. Just keep it short.’

  Lou Perlman entered the room. He realized he rarely saw his brother. Once a year, maybe twice, if that. A shame. Colin Perlman, handsome but pale and weary-eyed, head held up by a bank of pillows, offered a tiny smile.

  ‘Well well, wee brother, le gendarme,’ he said.

  Lou Perlman approached the bed. Colin was attached to an IV drip. A machine monitored his heartbeat. ‘So, Colin. How do you explain this state of affairs?’ Lou gestured with his hand.

  ‘Explain it?’ Colin Perlman had Etta’s blue eyes. He had a few fair strands in his thick grey hair. His face was square-jawed the way Etta’s had been, his nose straight exactly like hers. ‘I was jogging along minding my business, when out of an orange-coloured sky –’

  ‘I know the song,’ Lou said. ‘Flash. Bam. Alakazam.’ Etta had played it constantly on her old record-player, he remembered. But who the devil had been singing it?

  Nat King Cole: got it.

  ‘It was like a bloody stake going deep into my heart, Lou. The
pain was … utterly fucking appalling. I was suffocating. Blacked out. Rifkind says if I hadn’t been treated so quickly you’d all be putting me in a box. Me, the fit one. Addicted to gymnasiums. I don’t smoke, I get a serious heart attack. You smoke like an old blacksmith’s forge, you get off scot-free.’

  ‘So far,’ Lou said.

  ‘I had chest pains a couple of weeks ago. I thought heartburn. Wrong? I hate feeling this weak. That quack Rifky tells me I’ll still have a quality life. Mind my diet. No fats, no butters, no cream. Alcohol? One tiny glass of vino on special occasions, thank you very much, doc. Oh, and don’t overdo things. I’m supposed to walk with a bloody stick and pat the heads of all the nice geraniums I’ve grown and thank my lucky stars for the quality of my life? Well, fuck, I doff my hat to the constellations.’

  Lou said, ‘Bad shite happens to everybody.’

  ‘Not to me it doesn’t. This is a bitch.’

  Lou gazed at his brother. Everything Colin touched, abracadabra, pure gold. He could take donkey droppings and turn them into doubloons. He invested money, it multiplied tenfold, twenty. He was a respected member of the Jewish community, not just in Glasgow, but in London, New York, Los Angeles. He went to the finest tailors. He flew first-class. He probably didn’t even realize there was a rear cabin where all the shlukhs sat. He’d been kissed by a benign God.

  One heart attack later, he knew he was mortal after all, and he didn’t enjoy the discovery that, despite his good fortune and intelligence, he was exactly like everyone else: doomed. Those well-honed muscles in arms and legs, what good were they to him if his heart was a joker?

  Lou touched the back of his brother’s hand, and he felt a certain sadness that had its source in the understanding that they’d come from the same womb and seed, they’d grown up together, they’d seen their parents die; they were past middle age, and when it came to the blood of family they were the end of a specific line. There were no young Perlmans to carry on what Etta and Ephraim, fugitives, had begun. There were aunts and uncles, and a clamour of cousins, but that wasn’t the same thing.