by Steve Mosby
‘Mr Hughes will be with you in a moment.’
The bodyguard left.
While I was waiting for Mr Hughes to arrive, I wandered over to have a closer look at one of the pictures.
I was standing outside the Colosseum in Rome, and it had taken me a while to find. It’s not a small thing, of course, and there were occasional streetmaps posted on signs that made it seem easy: a snail shell of rock, curled under the heart of the city like trapped wind. How could you miss it? But I’d wandered the tall streets for what felt like hours without success, and then finally succumbed to the heat, unfolding a curl of Euros to buy a ham cheese panini and a can of Coke. The can had looked out of place: as red as sunburn against the drained, dirty tones of the buildings. Those two things together cost the equivalent of eight pounds. I mean, fuck this city.
Dull traffic lights blinked yes and no as I walked, attempting to regulate the cars and mopeds whooshing past. My rucksack was stuck to my back with sweat, and I ate and drank as I wandered, my head held down over the backpacker’s shuffle. Finally, after an age of walking, the city had unfolded itself like a flower and I’d seen it.
It wasn’t as big as I’d expected. It seemed tall and wide – as though it was something tired that had lain down there rather than been built – but still: not as big as you’d think. For one thing, only half of it was actually complete, with white plaster patches giving only a general illusion of the original form. At the base, shops had been structured into its circumference. There was a McDonald’s, a Disney and a few others I didn’t recognise. They seemed to detract from the size and scale of it. Just another shopping centre. A man in a yellow boiler suit was trawling the sunny square in front of it, picking up litter with electronic clippers.
I watched from above, where the Colosseum seemed very still, like a painting, or maybe a mountain in the distance. There were small people moving around it: tubby tourists in garish outfits, wearing cameras like bulky black medallions; stick-thin, burnt-brown locals swinging around on high-stepping pedal-bikes; couples, merging at the arm; old men, their walnut-textured skin cooking slowly in the sun. The sounds all reached me late, and seemed to come from nowhere: noises abstracted from their source. Behind me, the nasal buzz of a scooter was more located and real.
I tapped my way down the steps and crossed the square.
Closer to, the Colosseum became physically more impressive, but also seemed more brow-beaten and weathered. The shops looked even more out of place, like stalls set up around a beached, dying whale, but they had become integral to its structure. Red and purple graffiti tags looped across the remaining stone of the surface. In fact, almost every spare inch, to a height of around seven feet, was filled with names and pictures. Above the graffiti, the Colosseum began properly: brown and crumbly as tilled soil. It looked like a breeze would damage it; as though a heavy wind might redistribute two thousand years of history as dust across the old city around it.
I paid the entrance fee, peeling off more notes from my thinning bundle, and was allowed through a clicking turnstile onto a stone walkway, overlooking the skeletal, overgrown remains of the Colosseum’s guts. It was like looking into an old beehive, with most of the middle scooped out to reveal the layers of honeycombs inside: a husk of a place. A great ellipse of stone terraces curled around the central floor of the arena, which had been stripped away over time to uncover underground cells, tunnels and passageways. Grass was stuttering out of the rock. Nature seemed to be reclaiming the place, even as it was being branded, franchised and hollowed out: robbed of its original meaning even as it was traded on. And all the time, the sun was pressing down hard upon it, like a hot amber palm. Tourists were taking whirring, flashing snapshots. There was the trudge of feet, and the sucking, scratching sound of bored straws exploring the bottom of cardboard cartons.
Half the people in the world: if you told them to take a pilgrimage to a public toilet, they would – cameras and fat fucking children and all. The other half would go and daub graffiti on it when they thought nobody was looking. And all of them would imagine it meant something.
I found a place by the barrier and slid my backpack off with a mixture of relief and revulsion. The air – although warm – instantly chilled the back of my T-shirt, which had been stained beige by a mixture of sweat and dust. At least I was clean. The night before, I’d bedded down at a campsite two bus journeys out of the city centre, and I’d managed to get a shower and tidy that morning. But I’d last washed a T-shirt a few weeks ago, if you could call that a wash: standing at a dirty outdoor sink, squinting in the sun, mashing it up in grey, foamy water.
Now, uncaring of my appearance, I unclipped the side pocket of the backpack and drew out my notebook. The stone barrier, although rough on my elbows, provided a good place to lean as I took the top off the pen, opened the notepad at the scribble page and tested the nib with a few blue curls of ink. It was working fine. I flipped back to the first free page in the pad.
And then I looked up at the Colosseum – which had once held fifty thousand Romans, screaming for blood – and I started to write.
‘Impressive piece, isn’t it?’
I turned away from the picture to see Walter Hughes, moving into the room. Once again, I was surprised by how easily he got around for such an old man – carrying his cane with a swing, like some kind of dapper toff, but not really requiring it. His bodyguard followed him in, closing the door behind. I wondered if he’d gone to a school where they taught you to do that. Not really.
Hughes poured himself a brandy, or whatever the fuck it was.
‘In fact, it’s one of my favourites. Would you like a drink?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling confused. ‘What the hell is that?’
I looked at the writing again. When I didn’t try to take in the words, it just seemed like a sheet of paper with some text scrawled upon it. But the moment my eye caught a sentence and started to follow it, my head was filled with images of the Colosseum. The heat on my skin and the sweat on my back. Hughes moved over beside me, appraising the picture. I forced myself to look at him instead, but he remained focused on the writing.
‘I particularly like this bit, here.’ He gestured with his drinks hand; the brandy rocked in the glass. ‘The attention to detail.’
I looked where he was pointing, and could immediately see a fuzzy spray of red graffiti over rough brown rock. The right-hand side of my face felt warm, and I could hear somebody saying something in Italian behind me.
Hughes’ voice pulled me back into the study.
‘The graffiti adds such an unexpected element, don’t you think? There’s contrast between the old building and the new shops – obviously – and then somewhere in-between you have this graffiti. This vandalism of both, with the youth of the city claiming the space as their own. I find it poetic.’
I didn’t say anything; I just looked at him. He was one of those men who looked thoughtful by looking blank.
After a second, he turned to me and smiled.
‘You’ve never seen anything like this before, I take it?’
I shook my head.
‘What is it?’
‘Come and sit down.’
He gestured over to the seats in the centre of the room, and we moved across. Before I could sit down, however, he picked up a towel from the side of the nearest chair, unfolded it and laid it out over my seat.
‘There.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I’d never realised that my ass was potentially that damaging.
‘You’re sure you won’t have a drink?’
‘No. Thanks anyway.’
I glanced back over at the picture, almost nervously, and saw Hughes smile, his face creasing quickly from one position to the other.
‘You’re stunned, aren’t you? Obviously, you are. It happened to me the first time I encountered his work. I have been addicted ever since.’
Summing things up to perfection for once, I said:
‘I don’t understand
what just happened.’
‘Neither do I,’ Hughes admitted, ‘in that I can’t explain it. All I know of the artist in question is that he is a man of genuine talent, which isn’t anything you don’t now know for yourself. I was first exposed to his work some time ago – by chance – and I’ve spent the intervening years collecting all I can find.’
I shook my head, still feeling strange.
‘It was like I was there.’
It had been, too. The words had seemed to turn into sights, sounds and smells as they passed through my eyes. My mind had flipped them over, moulding them into what had felt like an actual experience. I could still feel the sun on my face, and hear the sounds of the city; the sensations were fading, but my skin was still tingling.
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ Hughes said. ‘They say a picture paints a thousand words, but in this young man’s case, his words paint a thousand pictures. And he is young, from what I can gather.’
He swirled the brandy around in his glass thoughtfully, and then looked back up at me.
‘You must excuse me. My passion for art – I will speak for hours if people let me. And of course—’ he glanced at his bodyguard, who had positioned himself by the door, ‘— people tend to. What brings you here, Mr Klein? What is it that you imagine we can do for each other? Interest me quickly, or I might talk about art again.’
I said, ‘I might have what you are looking for.’
He paused, and then took a sip of brandy.
‘I see.’ The glass went around once between his fingers. He studied it, and then frowned. ‘You didn’t think that last night, though, did you?’
‘I didn’t have it then. But I think I may have it now. It depends.’
He still wasn’t looking at me.
‘What does it depend on? Whether I let you out of this room alive?’
He glanced up at his bodyguard, who eased himself away from the wall, his eyes fixed on me. Startled by the speed in which the encounter had flipped, I still managed to stand up pretty quickly, moving into the centre of the room to gather some space around me. All the training I’d done felt like nothing.
Pay attention.
The man circled me slightly, relaxed, and I took him in again, trying to strip away that intimidating glare – and the sheer fucking size of him – leaving only a bunch of areas I wanted to either hit or avoid.
But before we could do anything, Hughes held up a hand.
‘This is such a nice room,’ he said, peering at his glass intently. ‘And I would hate to see anything get broken. Books dislodged – anything like that. Furniture overturned.’ Finally, he looked up. ‘So perhaps you should tell me what’s on your mind.’
I didn’t take my eyes off Hughes’ bodyguard. He paid me the compliment in return.
‘You killed Claire Warner, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she stole something from me.’ Hughes sounded bored. ‘It took us a while to find her, but we did in the end. And then she wouldn’t tell me where she’d put it. You might recall: she was very wilful.’
I didn’t say anything, but I remembered all right. I can have any man I want. That almost banal confidence had half-disguised the fact that she was a young girl, only just beginning to come to terms with the power she had over men.
‘In truth,’ he said, ‘it was an accident. I don’t think she actually believed we were going to hurt her until we did, and the surprise made her fight back.’
I glanced at the cut above the bodyguard’s eye, and pictured Claire’s slim, ringed hand punching him as she kicked loose and ran for her life.
Good for you.
He saw me looking and I smiled at him. If Claire could hit him then so could I. And I hit harder than Claire did. I hit hard enough to put people on their backs.
That was when he reached inside his neat black jacket and produced the pistol I’d seen last night.
He smiled back.
‘She almost got away,’ Hughes said, ‘and – regrettably – she had to be shot. It was most unfortunate. But it had taken us such a long time to find her again that there was no way we were going to let her leave so easily.’
‘I can imagine.’
Even to me, my voice sounded empty and beaten. What the fuck was I doing here? I’d had ideas about confronting Hughes, taking charge of the situation, but they’d been vague at best, and what had really driven me here – taxi aside – were thoughts of Amy, and the contents of the text that Hughes had been searching for. Pale blue blouse.
The same thoughts pushed the next thing out of my mouth before I’d had a chance to okay the words.
‘It was a snuff text, wasn’t it?’ I said. Two and two clicked together in my mind, and I glanced up at the pictures on the walls. ‘And it was by the man who wrote these things. It was a description of somebody dying.’
Suddenly, it made perfect sense. I remembered what Graham had told me:
It’s more when I just look at the whole printout and take it in all at once. Like the words form a bad shape on the page that I don’t want to see.
I felt myself growing blank.
Amy.
‘That’s how it was sold to me, yes.’ Hughes sounded as bored as ever. ‘However, I have no way of knowing whether it was genuine or not. In fact, I never even got the chance to read it before it was stolen from me by that whore.’
Pale. Blue. Blouse.
I looked back at the bodyguard – or through him. He was smiling but I didn’t even see it properly. He was holding the gun badly, I noticed: pointing it half at the floor.
Maybe two and a half metres between us.
‘And you’re telling me now that you have this text?’ Hughes said. ‘If so, just produce it, and then you can be on your way.’
‘I don’t have it here.’
It felt like the words were falling out of me.
‘Well, where do you have it? And what is it you imagine you want in exchange for it?’
Impatience, but also an air of concession – as though a trivial wish might be granted to save him the bother of redecorating the wall behind me. So this was the key moment. And what I should have said was: I want you to get me access to the cameras at the train station. I want you to tell me where I can find this artist. I want you to tell me where and how I can find the people who did whatever it was they did to Amy – if it even was Amy. This thing which may or may not have been genuine.
That’s what I should have said.
But I was thinking: she screamed se har(d thyt wf jjkpeopllr hurt h..r
I was thinking: Long Tall Jack, the pins and knives man.
Biting something.
‘Mr Klein?’ Hughes said. ‘What is it that you want for the safe return of my property?’
When you box, they teach you how to move. You don’t actually take steps so much as glide from place to place, the idea being to lift your feet off the canvas only as much as you need to in order to move. Once you get used to it, it’s quicker – and it’s also far more efficient. Many boxers use their opponent’s foot movements as guides to what’s about to be flung their way, the same way a dancer might. The less movement you make, and the quicker and smoother you do it, the more unpredictable the attack is when you send it out.
I’d practised this gliding step on the Scream every night for months, usually with a hard left jab to the head or abdomen. It had become instinctive; I didn’t have to think. Hughes’ bodyguard moved quicker than the Scream, and he managed to get the gun up to meet me, but my jab turned into a grab and I found myself with a two handed grip on the top of his wrist, pushing the gun away in a wheeling, straight-armed circle.
I head-butted him, but not well – a desperate thing, really – all the time moving my fingers around the gun. We began wrestling over it back and forth. Our arms swung, fighting for purchase, and I stumbled back a little, realising how strong the man was, and how I was going to die if I let go. I was terrified.
/> ‘Gentlemen.’
Hughes sounded bored and disinterested, even as my adrenalin kicked in and sent my heart skyward.
The bodyguard gritted his teeth as we fought. I felt like I was about to – and just like that, the resistance gave somewhere and the gun went turning upwards and banged once, loudly, under his chin. Blood misted out of the top of his head, puffing up to the ceiling, and his entire body went slack, hitting the floor like a dead weight. The gun tumbled from both our grips as I half-fell to one side.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
Hughes cried out in genuine alarm.
‘Oh my god!’
His bodyguard was lying face-up on the floor, with blood flowing out of his nose in a dark-red stream. Literally pouring out, painting stripes down the sides of his blank face and pooling under his ears: it looked like all the blood in his body was leaving him. His eyes slowly closed.
And even more blood was simply falling out of his neck. A square metre of carpet was soaked dark crimson. And then more. And more. Creeping out.
‘Paul!’
Well, Hughes was out of his chair, moving over. After a blank second, I scrambled for the gun – and got it – but the old man wasn’t interested in me. We crossed paths awkwardly: me trying to point the gun at him defensively and failing, him falling to his knees beside the corpse.
‘Call an ambulance!’ he said. ‘Now!’
I was so shocked that I almost did – probably would have done if I’d been physically able. Instead, I just stood there, eyes wide, staring at the pair of them. Hughes had taken his bodyguard’s limp hand in his own, and was crying.
‘Paul.’ He turned to me without looking at me, as though I was bright like the sun. Told the chair to my left: ‘Call for an ambulance!’
