Perlman couldn’t bear to hear this yarn again. A pre-emptive strike was needed. ‘You could get out of this dump. Social services, go see them.’
‘Social services. You think it’s easy, ask for a handout? How would you know?’ Tartakower swatted the air with a skinny hand. ‘Your job, a pension, my heart doesn’t ache for you. What do you want anyway? I don’t see you in years, and you turn up and tell me you have a question.’ He slurped his tea then stared into his cup. ‘You put me in jail, Perlman. A fellow Jew, you put me in jail, I do my time, I walk out a free man and my debt to society is paid and look around you, call this freedom? This is living? I’d be better dead.’
Perlman held up a hand to stop Tartakower’s flow. ‘They moved you to the open prison at Noranside after eighteen months in Barlinnie, in case you’d forgotten. With you it’s always selective memory. Let me ask what I came to ask, so I can get out of here.’
Tartakower had the face you saw on one of life’s victims, the expression that suggests there might be a deep pleasure in the ache of sorrow; the supplicant angle of head that invites all the blows of misfortune. He was a man waiting for a bus to hit him.
‘When you were operating your unlicensed surgery—’
‘Don’t overlook I did some good work there, Perlman. People on waiting lists for a bed in some germ-infested NHS hospital, I helped them, you wouldn’t believe how many—’
‘Including the woman you killed.’
‘An accident. Tell me they don’t happen.’
‘They happen more often when you’re strung out on amyl nitrate or ether.’
‘This tragedy you need to remind me? I was weak-willed, too much pressure, I had a habit. So? Now I’m clean.’
Perlman said, ‘Back to the question I came to ask. Did you ever run any talented young student surgeons through the place?’
‘I had eager students looking for hands-on experience they couldn’t get quick enough in universities. Why are you asking, why are you digging up old graves? Some of these kids went on to eminence.’
‘Did any of them – how do I put this? – did any of them strike you as wrong? They were in medicine for the wrong reasons?’ No, this wasn’t it, not quite. Perlman tried to rephrase it, but Tartakower spoke first.
‘What are you fishing? Do you mean criminal types?’
‘Mibbe. More like a guy who wasn’t glued together the right way. Somebody whose laces were loose.’
‘Is it a psycho you’re looking for?’
‘Could be.’
Tartakower scratched his beard. Flakes of dried food drifted out of the massive tangle. ‘This I need to ponder, Perlman.’
‘How much ponder and how much money?’
Tartakower pulled out his empty pockets. ‘Remind me what money is.’
‘The man I’m looking for is skilled. I’m not talking any old bonechopper, Ben, you understand? I’m looking for somebody gifted.’
‘And meshugane. With thoughts you don’t want to hear and questions you don’t want to answer. I need time to think.’
‘You don’t have time.’
‘Oh, I should be in a hurry to do Perlman a favour, the man who incarcerated me? What is this individual alleged to have done?’
‘He cut off somebody’s hand. A clean cut.’
‘Why come to me? There are skilled cutters all over this city of damned souls. There are Muslim butchers and kosher butchers and abattoir butchers and butchers who churn out T-bone steaks and lamb chops. What makes you think this was somebody who worked for me?’
‘Because you know more bonecutters than anybody I can think of. Why shouldn’t I come to you? How many kids assisted you?’
‘Who knows, thirty, forty. More.’
‘At your trial I remember the prosecutor claimed at least a hundred, low estimate. You had a crowd coming and going.’
‘Such a gift for exaggeration that shmendrik. Only to make me seem more a monster and win for himself a bigger sentence, bigger headlines.’
‘I’ll give you fifty pounds for a name.’
‘Pah. Fifty doesn’t go far. I have Issy, this sorry creature, to feed. Admittedly my own needs are tiny. Tea, bread, a little margarine.’
‘OK, sixty.’
‘A hundred.’
‘You’re crazy. Seventy-five.’
‘Eighty.’
‘Done.’
‘Plus one for Issy.’
‘What is that animal anyway?’
‘Issy is more than an animal, Perlman.’
Perlman didn’t ask. Tartakower was fond of riddles.
Perlman took his wallet from his back pocket. ‘I want the name now.’
‘My brain, my poor memory, sometimes fuzzy … also keep in mind many of these boys came with made-up names, they didn’t want to work under their own identities, who can blame them? I had a Donald Duck working for me. A Mahatma Ghandi also.’
‘Come to the point,’ Perlman said.
Tartakower shrugged.
‘You push me, Perlman. I could get into mounds of shite helping you. Giving out information, these kids don’t want to be remembered—’
Perlman made to stick his wallet back, and Tartakower said, ‘Jackie Ace, he comes first to mind.’
‘Not his real name, I assume?’
‘What do you think? A flash boy with fingers, a sweetheart cutter. With a surgical saw, he cut like a dream. This is natural, this you don’t learn. But something wrong.’ Tartakower tapped his chest and frowned. ‘Something you sense.’
‘Sense, like how?’
‘Off, Perlman. Something off. How more explicit you want?’
Perlman shrugged. ‘An example of strange behaviour would be a start.’
‘They were all strange in their own ways, these boys.’
‘You any idea where he lives?’
‘I look to you a street directory?’
‘What else do you remember about him?’
‘Jackie Ace made friends easily. Played cards, took some of the other boys for a bundle. Poker, brag, always a winner. Did he cheat? Sure, but who could accuse him? Hands like his could’ve plucked a feather off a goose and the goose wouldn’t blink. Also he did card magic.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘What is this – Mastermind?’
Perlman laid money on the table, hoping the sight of green would encourage Tartakower, who squeezed his eyes in an act of remembering. He looked constipated. ‘What else you need to know? He’s got red hair and green eyes? He’s eight feet tall humpbacked? If it was me searching for Jackie, I’d go where people gamble on cards.’
‘Casinos.’
‘Fast as a rabbit fucking, Perlman.’
‘Faster,’ Perlman said. Jackie Ace, he thought. You start somewhere. The detection of every crime has a point of origin, that uncertain place where you have the first flutter. It pays off sometimes. Most times not.
Tartakower picked up the money, stuffed it into his pockets. ‘So call again. We’ll have strawberry blintzes and cream, you give me notice.’
Tartakower rose. Perlman stepped out of the flat. Just before Tartakower bolted the door, he said, ‘You’ll know when you see Ace, Perlman.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Tartakower didn’t embellish. The door was closed and bolted.
‘Hey,’ Perlman said. He knocked on the door, heard only silence from within. Tartakower wasn’t going to open up again. He’d already be sitting at the table counting his cash, then stashing it here and there inside his room. He probably worried about Perlman changing his mind and wanting the gelt back. He lived in a state of hermetic paranoia, everybody stole from him, everybody had it in for him. Plus he’d been cheated out of his life – so why open the door again to the man who’d sent him to hell in the first place?
Perlman descended to the street. No kids were around now. He walked to his car. His wing mirrors had been thieved. Fuckety fuck fuck. Pissed off, he did a little dance of rage and kick
ed his tyres a couple of times ferociously, then he calmed when he realized he’d been let off lightly. His wheels might have been stolen, his windows smashed. The whole car might have been seized and driven off to some yard and stripped down for parts.
He unlocked the car. When he’d driven as far as Govan Town Hall, he pulled to the side of the road and took his mobile from his pocket. Still irked by the loss of his wing mirrors, and the fact his coat stank of burned timber, he punched in a number he rarely used.
‘Hello.’ A frail voice, cracked a little.
‘Aunt Hilda,’ he said.
‘Louis? The same Louis who used to be my favourite nephew? The same Louis who goes to live in Egypt, forgets family, and phones once in a blue?’
‘OK, I’m ashamed,’ he said. He pictured Hilda’s face, florid from high blood pressure, eyes that were magnified behind thick lenses. She was his mother’s younger sister. At the age of ten she’d followed in the footsteps of Ettie and Ephraim, escaping Germany a year before Hitler’s war, aided by a Jewish action group that smuggled both her and Marlene into Switzerland. How they made the trip from Geneva to Glasgow was a story neither woman ever told.
‘When do we see you?’
‘Soon. I promise.’ Perlman felt guilty.
What the hell would it cost him to go eat some homebaked biscuits that had the heft of landmines, and swill Hilda’s watery green tea and stay an hour or so? But he hadn’t gone in how long? Not even with all the hours that hung so heavily on him during this ‘sick leave’. It was no great trek to the deep south of the city. He’d been devoured by the job too long, compelled by the need to go out day after day and night after night to check the city’s crime barometer. He’d turned into a meteorologist of the seamy side, cut off from clan, and lived a life of self-imposed exile.
‘I’m a million miles away, Lou? Aunt Marlene also would enjoy seeing you. Your poor mother, you think she’d be happy she knew you never came to visit her own sisters?’
He pictured the two old women in their somnolent parlour. Clay geese nailed to a wall, a grandfather clock with an inexorable tick that would stop only on doomsday, Marlene’s arthritic china-white hands twisted in her lap.
‘Have you heard anything from Miriam?’
‘Miriam. So this is the real reason you phone me? I may be old, but nobody’s fool, Louis.’
He knew he was blushing. ‘I was wondering about her.’
‘She doesn’t write you?’
‘One postcard from Florence, then another from Copenhagen.’
‘Me, I was privileged to get one from Amsterdam I don’t know when. Weeks.’
‘Did she drop a hint when she might come home?’
‘What home? Miriam, a global lady.’
Perlman didn’t want to think Miriam would stay away. ‘I’ll visit soon. Promise.’
‘Give me notice, I’ll bake. So how is Betty working out for you?’
‘She’s a genius.’
‘And not so bad to look at, nu?’
‘No, not bad at all.’
Perlman said goodbye, closed the connection. Hilda was always trying to matchmake. To her it was a travesty that Lou should be a bachelor, and as for that hopeless love he carried around like a precious picture in a wallet, did he really believe it was leading to the altar?
He speeded away.
My peripatetic Miriam, he thought. Amsterdam. Florence. Copenhagen. And men, she’d draw them to her, naturally, a lovely woman drinking coffee alone on some hotel terrace overlooking a lake. With gulls. Men would lust after her. He saw hotel rooms in the afternoon, blinds drawn, Miriam giving herself with spread thighs to a dark-eyed romancer, a man sophisticated in the ways of loving women. They’d speak Italian together, Miriam and this gigolo, and drink wine in bed and he’d lick spilled drops from her nipples and later they’d talk about Michelangelo and Leonardo. This sickening intimacy …
Loverboy would be called Mario or something like. He’d be an expert in a kitchen too, knowing a secret ingredient that brought putanesca to life, and just how to chop garlic for maximum flavour, and the precise time to pluck fresh oregano.
Lou couldn’t bear it, hated this fucker Mario.
14
Samuel Montague gazed up into his wife’s eyes. Strands of black hair fell across her forehead and she had a look of euphoric abandon. He was transported by her, by the intensity of lovemaking and the words she spoke: fuck me, fuck me hard and deeper into my cunt, Sammy, oh. Sweat created a film between their bodies. It dripped from her face and landed on his lips and he tasted its wonderful saltiness.
Straddling him, she rose and fell, her hands splayed on his shoulders, her nails digging his flesh as if she was determined to contain as much of him as she could at this crucial moment. He thought the same thought every time: this is the most exciting thing ever. His coming was a pure fire. He shouted her name and felt her shudder and she threw her head back in blissed release, and screamed even as he pushed himself up from the floor to penetrate her as deeply as he might. They were bonded, locked, devouring.
She laid her face against his and for a while they both breathed very hard. Their hearts roared. Neither of them was ever able to speak coherently for a time afterwards, but they made sounds, sighing, purring, intimate little half-words that would mean nothing to anyone else.
‘Hey, take a gander at this, boys,’ a man said.
‘A porn film, intit,’ somebody else said.
Shocked, Samuel Montague turned his face to the bedroom door.
Three men, masked in scarves, looked down at him. He saw only their eyes. He instinctively reached for something to pull over the naked bodies of his wife and himself, and found the edge of the sheet on the bed above them, which he dragged downward, but one of the men stamped on his hand and said, ‘Naw, don’t deprive us of the view.’
The pain caused Montague to groan.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Meg said. She scrambled for the sheet but one of the men kicked her in the shoulder and she slid away from Sammy, who tried to rise, defend himself, his wife, his home.
Montague said, ‘Please, Christ, don’t hurt her.’
‘That’s up to you, Sammy.’
‘If you want money just help yourself, there’s a couple of hundred pounds in my desk and my wife’s jewellery is in a room at the end of the hall and take the car if you want it, leave us alone.’
‘We want none o that crap,’ one of the men said. He wore white latex gloves. Montague noticed that they all wore them.
A shotgun was pressed into his forehead. He’d never felt such deadening fear in his life. This was the stuff of newspaper headlines, the kind you read and never imagined would happen to you. Suburban couple’s home invaded by gunmen.
‘That’s the gemme, be very still,’ the man with the shotgun said.
Another of the trio, this one small and cocky, said, ‘Lookit they pictures on the walls. It’s a brothel in here, widye believe what respectable people get up to in Bearsden, eh?’ He examined the Kama Sutra prints and the explicit lithographs Samuel and Meg had purchased during a trip to India.
The man bent down and picked up Meg’s discarded panties, brief and red silk, and he sniffed them. ‘Oh oh, I’m feeling something here, boys.’ And he grabbed his crotch.
Sam Montague said, ‘Just tell us what the fuck you want.’
The man still holding Meg’s panties pulled open a wardrobe door. ‘Widye look at this, boys? Here’s a wee kilt and a schoolgirl’s blazer and a nice short black leather skirt and – what’s this? – leather straps? Red silky rope? And look at this—’
‘Please stop,’ Meg said.
The wee man ignored her. ‘Here, sweetie, put this on.’ He tossed a transparent negligee to Meg, who turned away, pulling the garment over her shoulders quickly.
The big man with the shotgun jabbed Montague’s neck. Montague felt the blunt pain but this time made no sound. His left hand was a knot of agony. He reached with his right for Meg, who had her arms f
olded over her breasts.
‘Just tell me what you want,’ Montague said.
The third man, who’d been wandering the room, saw fit to kick in the glass cabinet that contained the Montague’s collection of wedding photographs. Glass flew all around, photographs slipped from shattered frames. ‘I hate fucking wedding photies,’ the man said.
Montague said, ‘If it’s not money and it’s not stuff—’
The wee man who’d rifled the closet said, ‘Talking of stuff, your wife’s a tasty-looking bird.’
The lascivious way the wee man said this set off a loud clock ticking in Montague’s head. It was wired to an explosive. If this little bastard touched Meg … He edged closer to his wife, who was staring at the intruders with a noticeable defiance. She was no weakling: she had a core of fortitude. ‘Big shots,’ she said. ‘Guns and destroying things and scaring people, oh, such big shots—’
‘Shut yer fuckin gob.’ The man who’d smashed the cabinet reached down and grabbed Meg’s long hair and twisted it back, so that her small pretty face was forcibly angled upward. ‘I canny stand a whining cunt.’
The wee man suddenly crossed the room, unzipped himself, flashing his stubby purple-headed cock and spraying urine at Meg, who averted her face but not before she’d been doused with piss. She made a gagging sound. Her negligee was soaked.
Enraged, Montague tried to rise but he was slammed in the gut with the shotgun and the blow blasted all air out of his lungs. Dizzy, he doubled over, face pressed into the carpet.
The big man said, ‘My wee friend has no fucking control over his bodily urges. If he fancied it, he’d shite on your nice rug. In fact, he’d shite in your wife’s mouth if the mood came over him.’
Meg said, ‘Disgusting bastard.’
The wee man zipped himself up and snorted and hee-hawed. ‘Speak dirty to me, gonny?’
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