by Ted Lewis
For Wally, his expression isn’t too full of the usual self-doubt and anxiety mixed in with that natural expression of his apology for being alive. In other words, he looks as though his Grannie’s just caught him giving a labrador a hand-job.
“Hello, Wally,” I say to him, my words effectively jamming all the alternatives that are racing in my mind about the manner of our meeting, but in spite of that a part of my brain fixes on the fact that Wally is sweating somewhat in the class of Pancho Gonzales. “Warm for the time of year.”
The entire lower part of Wally’s face begins to move and I realise from all this muscular activity that Wally’s trying to get his laughing tackle into training in order to say something to me. Finally he manages to make the tape.
“Jack,” Wally says to me, “it ain’t like what it appears to be. Know what I mean?”
I shake my head.
“Oh yes,” I say to Wally. “Now I feel really at ease. What it appears to be, a shooter shaking in your sweaty little palm, that isn’t what it really is at all. The million reasons for the shooter and your sweat, they’re all beside the point. I can relax about them. I can leave all that out. Thanks a bunch for setting my mind at rest, Wally. Just allow me to thank you for your warm and wonderful welcome.”
Wally does a bit more lip trembling and the shooter drops its angle slightly in deference to Wally’s embarrassment. I fold my arms.
“Well then,” I say to Wally.
“Look,” Wally begins to say, but I interrupt him and describe, in detail as graphic as I can muster, what I think of it all so far, since I stepped onto the fucking aeroplane. Wally’s shooter trembles at each new twist in my story, and when the shooter’s twitching enough to shoot holes in himself let alone in myself, I say to him:
“All right, Wally. What is it? Are you piss-green about night-walkers or did Gerald and Les tell you that I might not be in too good a mood by the time I got here, seeing as there was nobody there to meet me at the airport? Or is there something else, some message Gerald and Les wanted you to deliver when I got here, some message they’d rather have you impart?”
“Jack—” Wally says to me.
I begin to walk towards him.
“Fuck the shooter,” I say to him. “On you a shooter is just decoration. An embellishment. As dangerous as a bunch of flowers. You’re not even a creep, Wally. A creep finds the ability from deep down inside him, in this kind of situation, to smile, he can galvanise his mouth even though his guts are somewhat less than iron. A creep has guts of a sort, Wally, but you have none. None whatsoever.”
Wally moves his lips like a bad ventriloquist and shakes his head like a poorly-made ventriloquist’s dummy.
I continue my advance.
“Tell me what you have to tell me, Wally,” I say to him. “Before I get to you.”
But I don’t get to him. Because a voice behind me says something and that causes me to stop walking.
“Well,” the voice says, “it’s Jack Carter, I guess.”
The voice is American. I don’t turn around to see what sort of American. I don’t do anything. It’s a situation in which you wait to be told what to do, and then it’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re going to do it.
“It’s O.K.,” the voice says. “You can relax. You can turn around if you want to. Only remember, your man there ain’t the only guy in this room that’s carrying.”
I look at Wally a little bit longer until finally Wally averts his eyes and then I turn round and look at the man who’s spoken to me. He’s wearing a white oatmeal short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, coat style, not tucked in to the waistband of his slacks, which are white and very sharply pressed. He is wearing canvas moccasins and it strikes me how sensible it is of him to be wearing dark glasses so that the lights wouldn’t disorient him for what might have been a crucial second when he switched them on. But the most striking objects of his apparel are the two holsters he’s wearing. One is a standard shoulder holster built to house an automatic. The other one is to carry a .38, and is fixed on the belt of his slacks, only partially visible because of the way his shirt’s hanging. Only this holster hasn’t anything in it. The occupier of the shoulder holster is pointing straight at me, and it’s not being held the way Wally’s holding his companion piece.
The man isn’t tall, isn’t short. His muscular arms are black with hair, and what’s left of the hair on the top of his head is extremely well barbered. His face is broad without running to fat, his shoulders are broad too, but the flow of his shirt doesn’t quite conceal the slightest of paunches that blemishes his otherwise well cared for body. Twin lights dance in his dark glasses.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess this is Jack Carter.”
“I bleeding told you it would be,” Wally says.
There is a silence.
“Well,” I say. “Now we know. I’m Jack Carter. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.”
With his free hand the man takes off his dark glasses and allows himself a small quick smile, then his face is impassive again. His eyes flick up and down from my head to my feet, judging. Then he puts the automatic back in the holster and un-sticks himself from the wall and walks over to a low glass table. On this table there is an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne in it. Next to the bucket is a glass jug filled almost to the top with squeezed orange juice and slices of orange and lumps of ice. There are also some glasses on the table.
The American takes the champagne bottle out of the ice-bucket. “Wally, see to the drapes, will you?”
I hear Wally get up from the chair behind me and walk somewhere and press a button and there’s a whirring sound as the curtains draw together, but I’m not interested in Wally’s execution of this operation. All my attention is fixed on the man with the champagne bottle. He pours some of the champagne into a tall glass and then fills the other half of the glass with orange juice from the jug.
He looks at me.
“Want some?” he says.
I don’t say anything. He pours another one anyway. Wally shifts past me and makes for the entrance hall. The American picks up one of the glasses and offers it towards me. I walk a few steps forward and take the glass. I notice the American doesn’t pick up his own glass until I’ve taken hold of mine, and that he stays on his side of the table. There is some more whirring and swishing out in the hallway and Wally re-appears and begins to walk down the steps back to our level, but when he sees the look I’m giving him he stops in mid-step looking something like the character in the old joke who’s walking in backwards pretending he’s going out.
“Skol,” the American says. “A votre santé. Cheers. All the rest of that crap.”
I look at the American again. He’s still watching me over the top of his glass.
I take a drink myself. It’s a great drink. One of the best. A favourite of mine.
“Wally, less light, hey?” the American says.
Wally looks from him to me like a mongrel who’s just shit and wondering who’s going to give him the biggest hiding. He does a kind of bantam step and gets himself down onto our level and flits about doing whatever necessary to get rid of the main lights, doing his best to avoid any eyeball contact between me and the American. We, the other parts of the trio, we stand there holding our drinks, looking at each other, until such time as Wally has finished his chores and doesn’t know what else to do with himself apart from to pretend he’s not in the room, he’s not in the villa, he’s not even in Majorca, he’s anywhere in the fucking world other than where he happens to be at this precise moment.
I finish my drink and take a couple of steps forward and put my glass down on the glass-topped table. Wally tries to ease himself out of my line of vision as if in some way that will make me forget he’s there, but there’s no chance of that because I say to him:
“Wally, I know what you’re like. I know you’re just a frightened little rat-bag. I know you’re feeling like shovelled shit at this particular moment. And I kno
w you’re likely to get your dentures in a twist if you try to speak to me. But that’s what you’ve got to do, Wally. Speak to me. Tell me all about it. You don’t want me copping for you, but look at it this way: if you don’t speak to me, I’ll cop for you. If you do speak to me, I probably won’t like what you’ve got to say, and I’ll still cop for you. So you really can’t lose, can you? It boils down to the same thing one way or another.”
There is silence from Wally. The American takes another drink and continues to look at me and I continue to look at the American. Then Wally says:
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I take my eyes off the American and turn my gaze on Wally.
“I mean …” Wally says, taking his hands out of his pockets and not being able to find anything better to do with them, putting them back again.
“Wally,” I say to him, not shouting, “just tell me what the fuck’s going on.”
Wally looks at the American but there’s nothing for him there.
“Well, we had to be careful, didn’t we? I mean, you know.”
I shake my head.
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, I mean. The situation.”
“What situation?”
Wally looks at me as though I’m giving evidence for the prosecution.
“The situation,” Wally says. “This.”
“This being what?”
Wally begins to speak but the American cuts in on him and says to me:
“You’re asking some pretty damn stupid questions.”
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Well, for a start, here’s another one. Just who the fuck are you?”
Now it’s the American’s turn to give Wally the eyeball treatment.
“And here’s another,” I say to him. “I know it might sound, well, a bit niggling, a small point, I know. But the shooters. The pair of shooters front of and back of me, just when I’m starting off me holidays. I mean, I don’t mean to carp.”
The American’s hand strays to his breast, not too far from the automatic’s holster.
“You sure this is Jack Carter?” he says to Wally.
“ ’Course I’m bleeding sure,” Wally says. “Christ, I should know. I mean. Fucking stroll on.”
Wally’s uncharacteristic anger seems to reassure the American a little bit.
“So why,” he says, turning back to me, “the games? The charades? Why the crack at the Oscar?”
I look at him and I look at Wally. After I’ve done that I pour some more from the jug into my glass and take it over to the chair Wally was sitting in when I made my entrance, and sit down. The only thing that breaks the silence of the room and the mountains surrounding the villa are the ice cubes in my glass.
The American concentrates on me for a while longer until he slowly turns and focuses his attention on Wally. Now Wally’s beginning to regret his previously reassuring anger. He doesn’t actually move, but the impression he gives is of moving about five miles backwards from where the American is. Still, of course, with his hands in his pockets. It occurs to me that by now his bollocks should be red raw.
The American doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything for so long that finally Wally has to say something himself. He draws on his great reserves of imagination and ingenuity and says to the American:
“What?”
Wally’s response doesn’t stop the American looking at him and it doesn’t stop the American not saying anything to him. Wally eventually manages to swing his eyeballs in my direction and he looks at me as if I can get the hook out of his left gill, but from me he gets the same response as he got from the American. A clink of ice, a mask of face, and Wal, beside himself, farting in the wilderness.
But as in all situations, as in all of life, the point of no longer fucking about has to be reached, a situation has to be resolved, a decision has to be made. Things have to be answered and answered for. Likewise, this situation.
I always believe, in all situations, in being as direct as possible. Up to now, I think to myself, this is the way I’ve been, what more could I have said or done so far? Apparently not enough, so, being a little trier, I try again.
“Wally,” I say, indicating the American. “Who is this?” Wally goes blank again.
“You know who it is,” Wally says.
I close my eyes, because if I left them open I’d have a lovely bead on Wally and I’d hurtle my glass across the room so that it smashed against the thickness of his forehead. “Wally,” I say to him, eyes still closed, “he knows who I am, he knows who you are, you know who you are, I know who you are, and I know who I am.” I stand up. “So for fuck’s sake, who is he?”
My eyes snap open as my voice reaches shouting pitch. Wally shakes like Krakatoa.
“Well, he’s the man, isn’t he?” Wally says. “I mean, he’s the geezer.”
“What geezer would that be Wally?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Which man, Wally?”
Of all the silences thus far, the one that follows is the longest. Because during this silence things are beginning to dawn on Wally, and on the American. They’re beginning to get my meaning, so to speak. They’re beginning to realise that I’m not actually bananas, they’re beginning to realise that I don’t actually know what the fuck is going on. The silence is broken by Wally. It’s his turn to close his eyes.
“Oh, Christ,” Wally says.
“Yes,” I say, agreeing.
“Now wait a minute—” the American begins, but I cut him off.
“No, you wait a minute. Let Wally speak. While he’s still capable.”
More silence.
“Wally?” I say.
Wally makes a decision and decides to handle the situation this way; he decides to talk to me as though I know what’s happening really, as though I’ve had a temporary lapse, and it will all come flooding back to me as his discourse progresses and refreshes my memory.
“Well,” Wally begins, all brightness and snap. “This is Joe, isn’t it? Joe D’Antoni? The geezer? The friend of Gerald and Les’s friends? The ones from over the water?”
I don’t say anything. I just let him wait for the interruption he’s hoping for until he can’t wait any longer and he has no choice but to go on.
“The Americans,” Wally says. He’s like a club comic straining (sweating) for the first laugh.
“The Americans,” I say. “Yes, I know about the Americans.”
Wally’s bowels almost open in relief and gratitude. At last, I’ve agreed with something he’s said. He’s no longer on the left hand of God. From now on it’s downhill racing all the way.
“Yeah, that’s right. You know, the Americans. What come over all the time. Their friend. This is their friend, Joe. You know. The geezer what’s staying here. At the villa, like.”
I nod my head and say:
“This is Joe, who’s staying at the villa. The friend of the Americans.”
“Yeah, just for the fortnight, like.”
I nod my head again.
“Just for the fortnight.”
Wally’s smile seizes up owing to the fact that it’s the American’s turn to speak to him.
“What is this?” the American says.
Wally begins to spread his hands but before he can finish the action the American has taken hold of Wally by the throat and in that manner he guides Wally along until he’s close enough to the wall to be able to slam Wally up against it.
“What is this?” the American asks again, which is pretty stupid of him because all the breath has been driven out of his lungs and even if there were any left it would have been impossible for Wally to force any of it past the grip the American has on his trachea. So, naturally, Wally doesn’t answer. And naturally the American gets a little bit more mad and gives Wally a selection of back-handers across the chops, to which Wally can only respond by giving a fair impression of a spectator watching a speeded-up tennis match. In the end the American gets tired of that and
leaves it out and turns towards me. Sweat is black under his armpits.
“You didn’t know?” he says.
Oh, I think to myself. Comes the dawn.
The American looks at me for a moment longer then he goes over to the table and pours himself another drink. He gargles half of it away then smashes the glass down, causing the remains of his drink to fly out his glass and splash all over the knees of his crisp white slacks, but for the time being all he’s interested in is describing in as many ways that he can think of his opinions of Gerald and Les. While he’s doing that more sweat appears on his Samuel Fuller brow and his eyes glaze over and he looks like someone who’s just thrown up after eight hours’ boozing. But even though the American is temporarily oblivious to the room and anything in it, Wally stays where he is, stuck to white wall like a gargoyle and approximately the same colour. So I take the opportunity of the American’s absence of mind and walk over to Wally and talk to him a little bit.
“So apart from the geezer,” I say to him, “what additional aspects of the situation am I supposed to know about?”
Wally darts a glance at the American and even Wally can see that the American’s not with us so he says:
“Look, I don’t know nothing, do I? I mean, I only know what Gerald and Les and the geezer tell me, don’t I, and that ain’t exactly choc-a-block with extraneous information, is it?”
“Just tell me what you do know, Wally.”
Wally breathes out and seems to lose six inches in height.
“All I know is what I already said.”
“Say it again.”
“Look, I get a call, don’t I? From Gerald and Les, right? Tell me this geezer’s coming for a fortnight. Just passing through, so to speak. So I’m to turn over the villa all nice for his stay, like, as if I don’t keep it like a bleedin’ palace all the time. And they also mention that you’ll be here for the same period, keeping a watching brief, so to speak.”
