Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  Duffy began to warm the spoon over the candle.

  ‘The rest, tell me the fucking rest, you scumbag.’ His tone was getting a bit hysterical, though his hand wasn’t shaking. It wasn’t shaking either as he uncapped the saucer and carefully tipped half the white crystals into the spoon. Then he carried on warming it.

  ‘There isn’t any rest.’

  But Duffy was scarcely listening to Gleeson any more. He was thinking about dead babies cut open and stuffed with bags of heroin and hurried over the border before they lost their natural colour. Dead babies who had to be under two years of age to be any use. Get past two and you’re safe: you can grow up like any other kid. Grow up to be an addict if you feel like it, or a pusher; it’s a free country.

  And he was thinking about a serious-looking girl with dark hair and eyes which grew larger as her body wasted away. A girl intelligent enough to recognise that her own weakness of character was killing her. A girl with a carpet that smelt from her washed-out syringes. A girl he had run away from in case he found out what happened to her.

  These two thoughts concentrated Duffy’s mind wonderfully.

  ‘There isn’t any rest,’ Gleeson whimpered. ‘Mrs Boseley wouldn’t tell me anymore. I don’t know where it comes from.’

  Duffy stared at the dissolved liquid in the spoon. He didn’t give a fuck about Gleeson, any more than Gleeson would have given a fuck about Lesley. Or any of them. He put down the spoon, and roughly wiped the dirt off the end of the hypodermic. He moved the tip towards the spoon.

  ‘Marvel,’ was all Gleeson said. Then again, softly, ‘Marvel.’

  Duffy put down the syringe, walked round the packing-case to where the powdered milk was, and kicked the tin very hard. Gleeson heard the tin land fifteen yards away, behind his back; then heard it roll for a while, hit something, and stop. That was the last he heard of the tin. His throat produced an involuntary squeak.

  ‘There isn’t any rest,’ he repeated. He was speaking very softly, as if he feared the Castrol just as much as the hypodermic. Duffy dipped the end of the syringe in the solution and pulled back the plunger. The liquid was sucked smoothly up into the transparent plastic barrel of the hypodermic.

  Briefly, Duffy laid the syringe down. He reached into his holdall and took out a pair of dressmaker’s scissors and a piece of string. He sheared straight up Gleeson’s right forearm, cutting through the jacket and the shirt at the same time. He pulled the flapping bits roughly back, and tied the string round his arm just above the elbow. He watched for a moment and saw the veins come up on the forearm. Gleeson still had good veins in his forearm, healthy, plump, fixable veins. Maybe he should fix Gleeson in the wrist, just below the handcuff. Or in the groin.

  Duffy felt he was bursting. His ear throbbed. He picked up the hypodermic, held it at an upward angle, and pressed lightly on the plunger. The solution sprayed out in a fine curve, spotting the packing-case on which he had been sitting. He imagined the spray from Lesley’s spike as she cleaned it out crazily on to her carpet. Then, with a sudden mental jump, he found himself remembering the spray from his cock as he sat downstairs in Dalby’s crepuscular wankpit. Spraying up, out and over the carpet; just the same. Duffy felt excited; he felt a bit crazy.

  The veins on Gleeson’s wrist offered a wide choice. Duffy approached them. He held the arm down firmly with his left hand, and moved towards a broad, meandering vein with the tip of the needle. Gleeson passed out; his shifting weight nearly toppled the chair over sideways.

  Duffy’s ear hurt. His back hurt too. So did his hand; he was quite out of practice at punching people. He replaced the hypodermic and walked down the shed to where the tin of Marvel had landed. He picked it up, walked back and tucked it into his holdall. Then he put the other things back – the lemon, the bottle, the saucers, the full hypodermic. He unlocked the handcuffs and put them away. Then he untied Gleeson’s feet. Now he was only loosely roped to the chair. Duffy waited for him to come round. It took about five minutes, but that didn’t matter; Duffy needed time to recover as well.

  Gleeson opened his eyes, and made his mutton-chops waggle as he shook himself back to consciousness. The first thing Duffy did was to turn round in front of him, haul up the back of his blouson, pull his shirt out of his jeans, and show him the tape recorder. Gleeson clearly couldn’t work out why he wasn’t dead; but Duffy didn’t feel like giving him a hand with that one.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all that, and I’d say, given the current attitudes of the judges, you’ll get at least ten years. Unless you land a softy who might give you eight. Now, you’ve got two choices, the clever choice and the stupid choice. The stupid choice means that you don’t do as I say, and as a result you get ten years, and Boseley and Dalby might just bugger off scot-free. The clever choice means that we get Boseley and Dalby and if we can wangle it that way, you get off; if they shop you, then you’ll have to go down, but I’ll speak up for you about how you came forward and volunteered information. You might get four or five.’

  Duffy assumed that Gleeson would pick the clever way, and told him precisely what he expected of him. As he finished, he added,

  ‘And by the way, just in case you’re not happy with being clever, but want to get clever-clever, I’ll have three copies of this tape made within an hour, and they’ll all be on their way to different addresses.’

  Gleeson nodded. He hadn’t said anything at all since he saw the needle coming towards him. Duffy hoped he hadn’t been struck dumb by the shock; he might be needed in the witness box, after all.

  ‘The ropes are pretty loose,’ he said as he walked off. ‘Put the chair back where I found it, will you? Oh, and turn out the light on your way.’

  Duffy drove fast to Bell’s flat – not out of need, but out of exhilaration. He dumped the tape and left Geoff to get on with the copying and the distribution. Then he went back to his flat and unpacked his holdall. He squirted the contents of the hypodermic down the sink. Then he took out the polythene bag with the unused half of the crystals, and carefully, delicately poured them back into the salt cellar, where they belonged.

  9

  THE FIRST THING HE did next morning was to ring Hendrick.

  ‘Oh, it’s Duffy, Mr Hendrick. Good news. I found the lighters.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I found the lighters. I was checking out the shed yesterday and I found them in the toilets. I reckon kids must have got in one dinnertime. They nicked a few, I’m afraid, but they’re almost all there.’

  ‘Good, Duffy, well done.’

  ‘So I think we can say it was probably McKay.’

  ‘I suppose we must conclude so. Poor fellow. He seemed so trustworthy too.’

  ‘Yes, well, you never can tell, can you?’ If McKay had had eight convictions for burglary and ten for handling, that would probably have made Hendrick trust him even more.

  ‘No, you certainly can’t.’

  ‘So I’ll get the lighters sent on, shall I, and we can call it a day. As a matter of fact I’ve managed to get myself the sack from Mrs Boseley, so it seems to be quite convenient all round.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Duffy, how did it come about?’

  ‘Well, I think she probably did the right thing, to be honest. I wasn’t really happy in my work.’

  ‘Oh. Some of the chaps adore it, you know.’

  ‘Yes, they’ve told me so.’ He thought of Casey punching him on the bicep with a ‘Cun’, herher’. ‘So you’ll get my bill in the morning, Mr Hendrick, and I hope you won’t mind my mentioning that prompt settlement would be appreciated. These aren’t easy days, as you doubtless know only too well yourself.’

  ‘No, indeed. Well, thank you. Goodbye.’

  Duffy dug out his Yellow Pages and looked up Food Importers. Three calls produced a near miss, a bugger off and a wrong number. He ploughed on. Eventually he got a yes: or rather, the three yesses he needed. Size, brand, and availability. Then followed two yesses of his ow
n. Yes, a gross. Yes, he did have a lot of Chinese friends. And one no. No, he didn’t need anything for the first course.

  He collected them on his way to work. Sixty-five quid’s worth of lychees rattling around in the back of the van. That put him in debt for the job, and he’d already spent – thoroughly spent – Gleeson’s well-worn oncers. He supposed he could always eat some of them.

  The man on the Cargo Terminal gate waved him through. Funny, there hadn’t been any of those spot checks recently. He wondered why. A case of lychees wouldn’t look all that probable, so he’d better take good care of the receipt from the Sino-Pak Food Company.

  Dalby’s shipment wasn’t due until the next day, Thursday, but Duffy wasn’t taking any chances. Freight had been known to arrive early, so he was covering that possibility.

  But it didn’t. Cockroach Airways were keeping to their schedule. ‘All 144 tins of lychees were killed,’ Duffy began to himself, ‘as a DC-10 … ’ That would be ironic. He’d worried about friends going on planes before now – Carol going off for ten days in Sicily with Somebody – but never before about freight. Don’t take off in the dark, he found himself whispering in the direction of Hong Kong.

  The Wednesday was quiet. Duffy stayed out of Gleeson’s way, stayed out of Mrs Boseley’s way, even stayed out of Tan’s way for no particular reason. He had his normally convivial lunch with Casey, and afterwards found himself nervously checking the back doors of his van. Yes, they were locked.

  On the Thursday he rang Willett and Carol and asked them what their work schedules were over the next couple of days. Willett answered in a tone Duffy recognised: the tone that said, I’m not asking and You’re not telling and You haven’t made this call. Carol answered with a tone equally familiar to Duffy: the tone that said, Are you asking me round, Are you asking me out, and which sounded disappointed at the end when he rang off without being specific.

  When he got to work he felt nervous. He parked his van half-way between the Terminal entrance and Hendrick Freight, down a little cul-de-sac leading to the shed of a now bankrupt forwarding agent. He walked to work and was overtaken on his way by Casey, who greeted him by hooting, accelerating savagely, mounting the pavement and swerving away at the last minute as Duffy thought he might have to jump on the bonnet or climb a twelve-foot wall.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Casey as Duffy arrived in a state of irritated shock.

  ‘Cun’,’ grumbled Duffy.

  ‘Herher.’

  The trouble was, for the next few hours it was up to Gleeson. They hadn’t spoken since their evening in the shed; they’d barely looked at one another. The only outward sign that anything had happened was that Gleeson was wearing a different jacket from the one he normally came to work in. Duffy wondered how he’d explained that to his wife: the neatness of the cut, the slashing of the shirt as well. Still, that was the least of Duffy’s problems. And certainly the least of Gleeson’s.

  At eleven Duffy found Gleeson tucked away behind a pile of cases, ticking off a list on his clipboard. Nobody else was in sight. Duffy passed the van keys over to him. A nasty thought crossed his mind, so he just said, quietly,

  ‘The tapes came out really well.’

  He left it at that and wandered back to his dunce’s corner. For the rest of the day he paid no obvious attention to the running of the shed. He trundled his trolley, loaded and unloaded at command, made what was to be a farewell visit to the canteen with Casey, and kept his head down. The last thing he wanted to do was make Mrs Boseley suspect that he was in the slightest degree interested in a certain shipment from a certain part of the shed. Nor did he fancy getting ankle-tapped by a forkie at this stage. At two o’clock he tried very hard not to watch as Mrs Boseley bustled out of her glass hutch and spoke to Gleeson. Indeed, he deliberately went and fiddled in his locker so that he wouldn’t see Gleeson fetch one of the company vans and back it up against a certain heap of newly arrived freight.

  But after that, he couldn’t keep his mind off what was meant to be happening. Gleeson would be backing up the cul-de-sac about now. He’d be opening the van doors. He’d have to make his decision now. The one decision Duffy had to leave to Gleeson, as he couldn’t foresee how Dalby’s lychees would be packaged. Gleeson either had to switch the documentation on to the case that Duffy had bought, or he had to open both cases laboriously, and transfer one gross of tinned lychees in each direction. And not drop one particular tin (which in the circumstances he wouldn’t recognise), or get careless halfway through.

  Now he was driving down the M4. Mind that lorry. Mind that bridge where McKay got crashed. Mind that bus. Mind that tricycle. Mind that cockroach. Careful that pigeon doesn’t shit on the windscreen. Looks like rain – put your wipers on, Gleeson, wipers. Don’t jump those lights. Smoothly. Mind that policeman. Well done, here we are, Number 61. Ring the bell, grovel as usual, hand it over, tug the mutton-chop deferentially to Mr Dalby, that’s right, back in the transit. Careful on the way back – you’ve still got my van keys on you. Nothing fancy. Change down into third. Yes, doing well. Through the gate. Into the shed. Disengage gear; handbrake; ignition. Brill.

  Gleeson walked over to Duffy and from a distance of a foot or so flung the van keys at him quite hard. Perhaps on the way back he’d been thinking of an angle Duffy hadn’t mentioned to him: what if Dalby discovers straight away that he hasn’t got what he thought he’d got? Duffy had his answer ready, just in case. It would obviously take Dalby a while, going through all those tins; and he might not do it till he got home, in any case. And then what would he find? The right tins, the right documentation, but no smack. He’d hardly pin that on the Heathrow courier; at least, not that quickly. He’d probably assume something had happened at the Hong Kong end.

  But Dalby might be on the phone to Mrs Boseley sooner than anticipated. So Duffy decided it was time to sever his connection with Hendrick Freight. He sauntered up to the glass office and sat down opposite Mrs Boseley without being invited. She looked up: the high bones, the scraped-back hair, the cold, dead eyes. He found himself thinking, I hope you come out grey; I hope you come out fucked up; I hope you come out with nightmares which make you have to take little coloured pills and I hope you get hooked on them and eat more and more and lose weight until your polar eyes pop out of your face. Duffy didn’t have a forgiving nature. But all he said was,

  ‘Well, I’ll be off now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I’d be off now. Get out of your hair. Collect me cards. You can pay me off. I don’t fancy coming back here tomorrow.’

  ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure.’ She paid him, and gave him his cards. She seemed more relaxed now than at any time since he’d been in the shed. Yesterday she’d been jumpy – as well as very puzzled at the way he’d ‘found’ the cigarette lighters. Now she seemed, not exactly serene, but her normal self – dauntingly in control. He couldn’t help taking a little stab at her as he left.

  ‘By the way, Mrs Boseley, what’s the E for?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Is it Eva?’

  She stared at him in an icily unamused manner.

  ‘Elizabeth? Egbert? Ethelred? Eskimo?’

  ‘It stands for Eff off, Duffy.’

  He grinned at her as irritatingly as he could, and clattered down the stairs. When he got to the van he had an unpleasant thought. What if Gleeson had driven straight there? What if he had slipped away and was even now on his way out of the country or something? I mean, it wasn’t exactly far to the airport, was it?

  But the tins had been changed, and Duffy reflected how fanciful his anxiety had been: men like Gleeson didn’t run. They didn’t like abroad for a start. They’d rather sit in an English prison for a few years and read the morning paper and eat the local food than skip to some hot country where the grub was spiced and the natives unfriendly. Not that Duffy felt superior on this count: he’d rather take a long lease on an English cell than paddle in the wildest foreign luxury.

/>   He drove home with care, absurdly solicitous about the welfare of the tins. He lugged them into the kitchen and put them on the drainer. He dug out his tin-opener and excitedly opened the first tin. Two lychees bobbed on the surface. He plunged in a forefinger and twirled it around. The fruit had an eerily smooth feel to them: it was like plunging your finger into a tin of eyeballs. He picked one of them up and bit into it. It had a fragrance as much as a taste: it was like eating the smell of roses. Duffy didn’t much care for eating the smell of roses. He thought he was going to have a lot of tins left over at the end.

  He was about to throw the first tin away when he had an unsettling thought. What if the heroin had been dissolved, as Willett suggested. What if it were swilling round in one of the tins, or several of the tins? That would screw things up. Depressed suddenly, he went on to the second tin. Then the third. On the fourth his fingers, sticky from probing the cans, slipped and the tin-opener skidaddled across the floor. Shit. This wasn’t going to be an exercise which would leave him in a good mood.

  He lined up the opened tins on the kitchen table in rows of ten. Ten, twenty, thirty. Duffy had seen enough lychees to last him a lifetime. Forty, fifty. Yet another good reason for not going abroad – cut down the chances of getting given lychees. Sixty, seventy. Duffy discovered his definition of hell: flying on a jumbo of Cockroach Airways and being fed meals of lychees. Eighty, eighty-six, eighty-seven. Uh-huh. Uh-HUH.

  Beneath the three lychees bobbing on the surface of the syrup there was a package. Carefully, Duffy lifted out the three fruit and piled them on top of tin number eighty-six. Then he washed his hands. Then he laid out a double thickness of kitchen towel on the table next to tin number eighty-seven. He’d have put down a strip of red carpet if he’d had it handy.

  He put in three fingers and lifted out a squat plastic bag. He laid it on the kitchen towel and held the tin up for inspection. There was a small tear at one point in the wrapper, and what seemed to be a pinprick in the curve of the ‘g’ of Chung Mon. No more than that, unless Duffy was missing something. From this direction, a pinprick in the lettering looked, well, almost obvious; but from the other angle, from the customs end? Duffy tried to imagine that as being their only clue in shipment after shipment of tinned goods. They’d be coming through regularly, month after month, and then suddenly there’d be a tin with a pinprick. What chance did Willett and his colleagues have?