by Ted Lewis
“The phone rang,” he says. “Who was it?”
“How do I know?”
“Why didn’t you answer it?”
“I was in the karsi, wasn’t I?”
“The phone’s supposed to be off.”
“They must have fixed up the lines.”
“And what else must they have fixed up?”
“What?”
D’Antoni slaps Wally’s face for him.
“It stinks. You know that?”
I get up off the bed.
“Leave him alone,” I say wearily. “It was probably the Fletchers phoning up to see if you’ve still got the top of your head on.”
D’Antoni releases Wally who nips round the back of him and out onto the landing.
“I want my guns,” he says. “Give them back.”
“Can I be in your gang if I do?”
“Listen—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Leave it out, will you?”
“I need them.”
“What for? So’s you can put the fear of God up Wally? Find some other way of passing the time.”
I walk out of the bedroom and along the landing and down the stairs and into the lounge. Wally’s already on the phone, getting through to the airport, obviously listening while someone else on the other end is giving him the rabbit. I walk over to the drinks and pour myself a vodka and Wally never takes his eyes off me; it’s like being watched by a shit-house rat, and it gets on my nerves, so I draw the curtains and slide open the window and walk out onto the patio. The swimming pool is a lighter shade of pale against the rest of the blackness. I walk over to its edge and contemplate its stillness but I’m not allowed to get my thoughts into any kind of order because from the balcony on the first floor comes the sound of D’Antoni’s voice asking me, in his own inimitable way, what I think I’m doing. I turn round and look up at the balcony but the light from the window below doesn’t illuminate D’Antoni’s figure. He’s probably lying on his stomach with a continental quilt over his head. When I don’t answer D’Antoni begins all over again, so to leave myself out of that one I go back inside and close the window and draw the curtains. Wally is in the act of putting down the phone and he even manages to make that look as though he’s been caught with his hand in the till.
“There’s one non-charter tomorrow,” he says, his tone already apologetic.
“And the good news?”
“It’s not till the afternoon.”
Before I have time to comment, D’Antoni is in the room.
“What were you doing?” he says to me.
I ignore him and sit down and close my eyes.
“Out there,” he says. “You want to get yourself blown away too?”
I continue ignoring him.
“Or maybe you won’t,” D’Antoni says, making for the drinks, waving a finger at me. “Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’re in on the deal. Maybe you just get the phone call and fifteen minutes later you slide open the windows to let them know they can come in now, it’s safe.”
“That’s right,” I tell him. “You finally twigged. While you were on your back catching flies I drove down into Palma and discussed the deal with them. They’ll be here any minute.”
D’Antoni stops pouring the drink he’s started pouring.
“You don’t believe me?” I ask him.
D’Antoni remains in the same position.
“Ask Wally. And if you don’t believe him, take a look out the front. The car’s out, and it’s pointing this way.”
D’Antoni looks at Wally.
“Don’t take no notice of Jack, Mr. D’Antoni,” he says. “Jack’s just having a little joke, aren’t you Jack?”
“Did he go out?”
Wally looks to me for help but he’s never going to get any so he says:
“Well, yeah, he went out, so to speak, but it ain’t like what he said. All he did was go out for a bevy, like. That’s all.”
D’Antoni rushes past Wally and into the dripping darkness of the entrance hall and peers out through the night-black glass. When he’s finally distinguished the shape of the Mercedes from his own contorted expression he comes back into the lounge as if he’s just taken one round the earhole from Ali.
“You were telling the truth,” he says.
“I was a good scout,” I tell him. “Dib dib, dob dob.”
D’Antoni puts his drink away, then hurries over to the cabinet so that it’s not too long a time between drinks. When he’s put the second one away he starts making himself a third and while he’s doing that he says: “I was right. Why should I trust anybody, just because they’re with the Fletchers? Bread is bread.”
He downs the third one but the drink only gets far enough to clash with a short sharp laugh that’s risen up as far as his throat. While he’s gargling with laughter, Wally takes the opportunity to slide off out of it, and myself, I can’t help considering the irony of the situation, if only D’Antoni knew how close he is to the truth, and how easy it would be for me to flesh out his fantasy. So I decide to tell him something to stop his wailing that is as close to the truth as he’ll ever get.
“Listen, mate,” I tell him. “I’m not here to knock you over. You’re forgetting when I arrived I didn’t even know you were here.”
“An act. It could have been an act.”
“So why are you still walking about? I didn’t even have to announce myself. And supposing it was a con, I could have laid you low any time I felt like it. So could Wally, come to that.”
D’Antoni clears his throat and pours himself another drink and although he doesn’t like to acknowledge it he sees the apparent sense in what I’ve just said, if not the four-fifths that remain submerged. So what he does is to take his drink and wander around the room with the grace of a bear covered with bees, voiceless for the time being. Eventually he homes in on a wicker chair and sits down and proceeds to stare across the room at me.
“You in the war?” he says.
“Oh, yes,” I tell him. “I was in the war. Only I fought it on the home front, seeing as I was three when it broke out.”
“Yeah, well neither was I,” he says. “Only, my brother was. He died a couple of years back. Big C. But one story he told me, when he was in the Ardennes slugging it out with Von Runstedt, he was called in before his top brass and given a very peculiar assignment, that being to take a few guys out at night and ambush some guys, wipe them out, and return to base. Only the peculiar thing was the guys they were ambushing were our own guys, and my brother was ordered to make the whole deal look as though the Krauts did the job.”
I sip my drink and say nothing.
“Naturally, my brother did the job. He did his work. Why shouldn’t he? He got his orders, and the people he got them from out-ranked the people he had to go to work on. So he did his job. Never did find out why it was done. He just did it.”
“Interesting,” I say to him.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
I get up and pour another drink.
“Why’d you go?” he says.
“What?”
“Out.”
“Like Wally said. I went out for a bevy. A drink.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Palma.”
“All that way. With all this on the premises.”
“I like drinking in company.”
“What kind of company?”
I turn round and face him.
“Company that doesn’t concern you. I mean, I was supposed to be coming here on my holidays. I could have made contingency arrangements.”
“Ass?”
“Whatever you like to call it.”
“You got that here too?”
“Have I?”
“What you mean?”
I spread my hands.
“Where?”
When it’s sunk in D’Antoni slowly lifts himself up out of his chair, then begins to move in the direction of the hall, the motion accelerating like a broken fi
lm being fed back into the projector. I drink my drink and listen to his progress round the villa, calling, at turns, Tina and Wally, and being answered by silence. Another drink later and D’Antoni reappears.
“Where is she?” he asks.
“Could be anywhere,” I tell him. “As long as it’s got drinks and fellers.”
“She’s out?”
“By now, that’s very likely.”
“She went out?”
“She stowed away when I went into Palma. In the back of the car.”
“And she didn’t come back?”
I shake my head.
“You left her there?”
“That’s right.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“She can take care of herself,” I say innocently. “I thought you knew that?”
“You bastard, you know what I mean.”
I shrug.
“Anything could happen,” D’Antoni says. “Supposing she gets smashed out of her mind and the cops pick her up and bring her home; maybe the guys’ve gotten in with the cops, maybe—”
“Yeah, and supposing Wally poisons you with his fried squid.” I get up and make for the drinks. “For Christ’s sake.”
“Listen, it’s not your ass. Maybe if it was you’d need three pairs of pants with your suit.”
I ignore him and make my drink.
“Yeah,” he says. “I can see it, if you were on the line. Under the covers, sucking on your security blanket.”
I start to walk across the room.
“Which reminds me,” I say to him, “I must go and check if Wally’s filled my hot water bottle.”
I walk out into the hall and start up the stairs. D’Antoni follows after me.
“You’re nothing, you know that,” he shouts after me.
I turn round. D’Antoni has one foot on the bottom step. “If I’m nothing, why aren’t you waving your shooters about?” D’Antoni doesn’t answer.
I look at him for a minute before turning away.
Chapter Thirteen
IN THE DARK, LYING on my bed, smoking, I consider what to do when I get back to London, whether to do it to Gerald and Les first or wait and see if they’ve got the sense to forgive and forget, and if they haven’t, wondering in what manner they’ll choose to remember. If, of course, after all these years of my allowing them to lie fallow they’re still up to moving for themselves. On the other hand, there’s probably one or two self-lovers who imagine that flaking me could take them to the top of their profession. On the other hand again, if I were to do unto Gerald and Les as they would do unto me, the same law that they employ might remain unconvinced that the readies that play such an important part in their decision making processes might not be so cast-iron and regularly forthcoming if the Old Firm was disbanded. Old Bill might even feel the need to put on a show trial, just to keep the paper readers happy, and I’d be number one down the steps. A number of possibilities, I think to myself. And all because I’ve lost my rag about being asked to top a wop whose shuffling off would be basically a matter of sublime fucking indifference to myself. I stub my cigarette out and reflect on how much good my holidays have done me. Even Cleethorpes had nothing on this.
From downstairs there is no sound whatsoever. D’Antoni is probably embarking on route for his third hangover of the day, whereas Wally is probably maintaining a low profile in the karsi belonging to the next villa which is approximately four miles down the road. Again, in the quiet, I try and work out which alternative I’m going to take, but the quiet is too quiet, it’s not like the night-buzz background back in Soho, and my mind goes as blank as the Spanish silence. But the silence doesn’t stay blank for very long. In through the windows drifts the far-off sound of a car gasping up the mountain road, a noise like a very small bronchial gnat. The sound drones on and on, never seeming to get any closer. Then, abruptly, it stops. For a minute or so, inside and out, everything is quiet again. Then the silence is broken by the sound of D’Antoni flip-flopping up the stairs, the noise of his beach-shod feet sounding like tripe being thrown on a monger’s slab.
Inevitably, he appears in the bedroom doorway.
“You hear that?” he says.
I don’t answer him.
“It’s stopped now.”
“Then I can’t hear it, can I?”
“It stopped out there on the road.”
“The noise?”
“An automobile. It stopped on the road.”
“It’s a steep road.”
“There’s only one reason to stop out there and that’s to call here because there ain’t nowhere else.”
“Maybe they ran out of petrol.”
“And maybe it’s Mickey and Donald and Goofy out having a midnight picnic.”
I don’t say anything.
“Where are the guns?”
“I forgot.”
“I want them.”
“No.”
“You really want me knocked over don’t you?”
I don’t answer him.
“I mean, you like the idea so much, why don’t you just go ahead and fix up the job yourself?”
There’s no answer to that either.
“So what are you going to do?” D’Antoni asks.
“You mean about knocking you over?”
“Listen, you bastard, the hills could be crawling with pistols.”
“Or, like you say, maybe it’s Mickey and Donald and Goofy on a midnight picnic.”
D’Antoni stands there for a minute or two, then he turns around and disappears into the darkness, pad-padding as far as the top of the stairs. Then there is silence again. Silence, that is, until the darkness is reversed by the illuminating of the hall and the landing from down below.
“What the Christ,” shrieks D’Antoni.
There is no immediate reply to that.
“Turn ’em off, you mother,” D’Antoni continues.
The lights go off, sharp.
After a little time has elapsed, Wally’s voice drifts up from the well of the hall.
“What’s the bleedin’ game, then?”
My earlier remarks have allowed a little brave petulance to act as a splint for his tonsils. D’Antoni tells him to shut up and keep quiet. I light another cigarette. Time passes and the silence gets heavier.
Eventually Wally says: “What’s going on?”
D’Antoni shuts him up again.
More time, more silence, and a couple more cigarettes. D’Antoni and Wally remain frozen in the black aspic. Then something happens.
It happens outside. The surface of the silence is rippling with the sound of footsteps on the gravelled part of the villa’s approach. For a little while this is all that happens. Then D’Antoni’s Disney croak floats into the bedroom.
“Now you hear,” he says.
I don’t answer him, neither do I move.
“They’re here,” he says. “They came for me.”
The footsteps get closer. Then they stop. I can hear D’Antoni crawling along the landing back in the direction of my bedroom, and while he’s on his way back, he makes another request to have his shooters back, but he’s cut short in the middle of his appeal by the sound of tinkling laughter from beyond the plate glass, or at least that’s the way Audrey would describe it. To me, it’s the sound of the well-pissed brass, and immediately I begin to feel a little more at home. Then the laughter is augmented by more of the same, in a slightly higher key.
“Broads,” D’Antoni says.
The laughter dies down, then wells up again.
“There’s broads outside,” D’Antoni says.
“They got Women’s Lib in the Mafia yet?” I ask him.
“What?”
I get off the bed.
“Forget it.”
I switch on the light. D’Antoni is on all fours, half-in and half-out of the bedroom doorway. He looks up at me like a cat caught in headlights.
“Get up,” I tell him. “You got nothing to worry about. It’s only W
ally’s skin and your philanthropist’s old lady.”
“What?”
“Gerald’s missus.”
D’Antoni looks back at me, his mouth hanging open.
“Mrs. Fletcher,” I tell him. “You mean to tell me you never met Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’s she here?”
“Well, seeing as how for one reason or another the villa’s in her name, why shouldn’t she be?”
“You know why she’s here?”
I let him off the hook.
“She probably came on account of Gerald and Les. See if you was all right, and that.”
“You know she was coming?”
“Not until tonight. I saw her in Palma. She’s staying there.”
Something I said seems to make sense to D’Antoni.
“She’s staying there, hey? That’s not bad.”
“What?”
“Her on the look-out in Palma.” He gets to his feet. “That’s not bad. They said they’d look after me real good.”
And they meant it, I think to myself.
The footsteps clatter across the flagstones and then there’s the noise of plate glass shuddering as one or the other of them try to slide the door open. It doesn’t. And from the language when it doesn’t I gather it’s Audrey that tried the sliding. I walk past D’Antoni and out onto the landing. By now Audrey is giving the plate glass a right seeing to, the shuddering glass accompanied by more of the language. I reach the balustrade and call down to Wally to put the lights on, but Wally is no longer there, which is no small surprise if he’s recognised the voice of Audrey. So I go downstairs and find the light switch and flick it on and Audrey and Tina are illuminated against the deep blackness like twin Cinderellas. I look at them and they look at me. It doesn’t need a breathaliser to rate their condition. In the hard light from the hall they look like two moths drunk with neon. Tina is grinning at everything in the whole world whereas Audrey is at the stage of drunkenness where the number of things that she finds amusing is rapidly diminishing. We continue to look at each other. Audrey is fucked if she’s going to indicate in any way at all that she wants to be let in. I smile at her for a minute to two, letting her bask in the sweetness of my smile, then I walk across the hall and unbolt the panel and slide it open.
“Enjoy that, did you?” Audrey says.
