Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

by Ted Lewis

I SIT ALONE IN the kitchen, mopping up the dip from my empty plate with the remaining slice of bread, when in comes Audrey, wrapped in the negligee I’m more than just somewhat familiar with. She approaches the table and takes one of my cigarettes from the packet and lights up and then goes and props herself up against one of the work surfaces. I light myself up and the two of us look at each other.

  “Have a good night, did you?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “All right, was it?”

  “You going to knock me about, are you?”

  I smile at her, but in fact to give her several round the earhole is what I would dearly like to be doing right now. But I swallow because it would only give her more satisfaction than she’s already getting at the moment.

  “Why should I do that?” I ask her.

  “Why shouldn’t you? Don’t tell me you undergone a complete character change.”

  “Maybe I have,” I say to her. “Maybe the holiday done the trick like Gerald and Les said it would. Made a new man of me, it has. Completely changed my life. Given me a completely new perspective. Just like the travel brochures said.”

  “Did they say to stay out of the sun as well?”

  “You what?”

  “To avoid going bleedin’ barmy.”

  “Well, I wonder about that. About what’s barmy. I mean, you’re going back to the pair of them. You got Gerald’s halitosis to look forward to till you’re eligible for your pension.”

  “At least I’ll live to see that day.”

  I smile at her and shake my head.

  “Depends what you call living.”

  Audrey shrugs.

  “Well, for starters, the last four or five hours could qualify as a definition,” she says.

  I don’t say anything. Audrey alters her stance and adopts a woman to woman pose, confident and risqué.

  “Honestly, I was surprised. Well, I mean, you know me. I can usually keep going the longest, know what I mean? But not last night. Not with him. He was still going strong well into injury time.”

  “Pity you won’t be able to have him as a partner.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. He could certainly add experience to the board of directors, as it stands, so to speak.”

  I pick up my cup and drain down the last of the tea and instead of throwing the cup at her I help myself to some more tea. While I’m doing that, out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Audrey is looking at her watch.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that came in very handy last night.”

  She looks at me.

  “I’d have thought a stop-watch would have been more use.”

  Audrey keeps looking at me for a minute or two before she says: “What time you say you were leaving?”

  “Ten past three.”

  “Isn’t there anything earlier?”

  “If there was, I’d be getting it.”

  “So you’ll be staying most of the morning.”

  “Yeah, pity about that one.”

  She looks at her watch again and she seems about to say something else when in walks D’Antoni looking spruce and shiny as sandalwood like he’s just spent a couple of hours in a high-class massage and sauna, which is a fair simile, considering that he’s recently been getting the treatment from Audrey. He walks over to Audrey and puts one of his hands on one of her tits and says:

  “So you’re an early riser.”

  “I could say the same about you.”

  If I was to ever seriously reconsider my decision about D’Antoni, now would seem to be as good a time as any.

  “When you get back,” D’Antoni says to Audrey, “I want you to do something for me. I want you to say thank you to Gerald and Les for looking after me so well. And when you tell them that, I want you to look them straight in the eye and smile at them and for you to really mean it.” D’Antoni looks round at me and laughs. “That’s funny, hey?” he says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “And if you do tell them, it won’t matter,” he says. “Because by that time, I’ll be long gone.”

  He laughs again. Audrey disengages her left tit and moves from between D’Antoni and the work surface.

  “Anyway,” she says. “My bath’ll be ready by now.”

  “Yeah,” D’Antoni says. “I turned it off.”

  “Thanks,” Audrey says, and goes out of the kitchen.

  D’Antoni looks at the kitchen table.

  “That all there is, tea?”

  I don’t provide him with an answer.

  “Well, this morning, it don’t matter,” he says.

  He opens a cabinet and gets himself a cup and sits down opposite me and pours himself some tea. He takes a drink and pulls a face and takes another sip and says: “Jesus.” He shakes his head. “Jesus,” he says again.

  I put my cigarette out and light up another one.

  “You wouldn’t believe last night,” D’Antoni says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Christ. I known some in my time. I seen all the tricks. But that was all of them rolled up into one, you know that?”

  There is more silence from myself.

  “If you wouldn’t get your balls cut off, because of your situation, I would recommend that with no reservations whatsoever.”

  “You would.”

  “No reservations whatsoever. I had some heads, I never yet had one like the one I had last night.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “Never.”

  I’m just about to see him off when the phone rings, but only a couple of times. D’Antoni leaps up in the air and knocks his tea all over the table.

  “The phone,” he says.

  Then he rushes out of the kitchen in the direction of the phone, even though the sound is no more. I hear him shouting for Wally, as if that’s going to provide him with some kind of answer. I take my cigarette packet out of the spreading lake of tea and walk out of the kitchen and across the now sun-bright hall and into the still-curtained lounge. D’Antoni is standing in the middle of it like somebody who’s turned up at Wembley on the wrong day.

  “The phone rang,” he says.

  I walk past him on my way to the drinks and manage to restrain myself from putting him right through the plate glass beyond the curtains.

  “You heard it,” he says. “It could have been a signal.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” I tell him, pouring my drink.

  D’Antoni walks over to me and stands behind me inches away. He stabs a finger dead centre between my two shoulder blades, causing me to pour some of my drink over my fingers. “Listen, less crap from you, hey?”

  Now I have the perfect excuse for smashing D’Antoni into the ground; before, he may have sussed the reason why I felt like planting him, and I would under no circumstances give a character such as D’Antoni the satisfaction of knowing something like that. But this response is fraught with no such barriers. I turn round and draw back and the phone rings again, just twice, then stops. D’Antoni whirls round and his movement puts him out of my range so I’m left standing there like a hammer-thrower who’s let it go in the wrong direction.

  “You see,” D’Antoni says, striding towards the phone and pointing at it. “It’s got to be. It’s got to be a signal.” I’m beginning to have the same opinion, but not for the same reasons as D’Antoni. I turn back to the drinks and pour myself a large one and down it and turn round again and begin to walk out of the lounge.

  “Ain’t I right?” D’Antoni says. “A signal. It’s got to be.”

  I keep going and turn the corner and start towards the stairs. The sound of bathwater being turned on greets me as I begin to climb.

  Behind me D’Antoni says:

  “You got to give me back my—”

  I turn round and grab him by the collar of his robe and push him up against the nearest plasterwork.

  “Listen, you cunt,” I tell him, “you’re lucky to have reached half past nine this morning. You’re lucky
I didn’t cop for you before I cleaned my teeth. So if you want to stay lucky, stay away from me, or I’ll solve everybody’s problem for them.”

  I turn away and go up the stairs and open the door to Audrey’s bedroom and my first impression is that it’s even bigger than mine, and it’s decorated differently too, showing evidence of Gerald as interior decorator; there is a mirror along all of one wall behind the bed, and the whole ceiling is mirrored. On one wall, there are a dozen beautifully framed pornographic photographs. I look into the mirror behind the bed and it becomes a movie screen, reflecting my imagination of the scenes it was fed the night before. Then my concentration is broken by the running water being turned off. I look towards the closed door of the adjoining bathroom. There is the sound of rippling water. I walk over to the door and open it without making a sound. Audrey is just lowering herself into the bathwater, her back towards me. I wait until her little bum is touching the surface of the water and then I say to her:

  “Now then.”

  She shrieks as if the water’s scalded her cheeks and rises up and twists round to face me. I don’t say anything else. I just look at her.

  “Jack,” she says to me. “Now look, Jack. You said you wasn’t going to knock me about, right? You told me that, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I told you that.”

  “You did, didn’t you. You told me.”

  I begin to walk towards her.

  “Jack, you did, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s true, relating to previous events. That’s what I told you. But if I knock you about now, it’ll be to do with a completely different set of events.”

  Audrey pushes herself up against the rose pink tiling.

  “Jack!”

  I get to her and give her one, just to make her shut up. When she’s done that, I sit down on the edge of the bath and light a cigarette.

  “You hear the phone just now?”

  Audrey looks at me and a different tear comes into her face.

  “The phone?”

  “Yeah. Rang a couple of times. Two rings each time.”

  She doesn’t say anything to that.

  “Well, it did. Two rings each time.”

  “I had the bathwater running, didn’t I?”

  “So you did.”

  There is a silence.

  “Come on, Audrey,” I say to her. “Let’s be having it.”

  It’s a little while before she answers.

  “I’m going to say it again, Jack. Stop being a pighead and cop for him.”

  I give her the look and from the expression I get back I know for certain she’s never going to ask that one again.

  “Right,” I say to her. “So I’ll say it again. Tell me the things that you know, Audrey.”

  Audrey slides down the tiles and perches on the couple of inches of the bath on her side.

  “Got a fag?”

  I pass the packet to her, and she begins to take one out but what happens is in the process she accidentally shakes half a dozen out and they land on top of the mound of bubbles that’s snap crackle and popping on the surface of the water. I light up the cigarette she manages to get into her mouth and after she’s inhaled and exhaled she says:

  “I come up here to tell you, didn’t I? But you didn’t want to know, did you? You couldn’t see why I’d come.”

  She inhales some more and I wait for her to go on.

  “I didn’t hear the phone just now. Straight up. But I was expecting it to ring like that. Only not this morning. Late this afternoon or tonight. But not this morning. Because you were going on an afternoon flight, I wasn’t too worried. See, if it rang twice like that, and I wasn’t by the phone a second time to pick it up first ring, then the fact that I didn’t answer meant that an hour from it ringing I’d be in my bedroom keeping D’Antoni occupied so’s it be easy for them to walk in and get it over with.”

  “And me?”

  “Well, just because you’d turned it down, there’d be no reason for you to interfere with two old mates going about their business would there?”

  “Two old mates?”

  “Con McCarty and Peter the Dutchman.”

  I don’t say anything for a minute or two.

  “So,” I say eventually. “That’s what you intended to tell me. When they’ve done for him it’s down to them to see to me.”

  “That’s what Gerald and Les’ve told them, yes. But I knew you’d be gone before they got here, so after the barneys and that I thought, stuff it, why should I?”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  There’s another silence between us. Audrey breaks it by saying:

  “That’s why I humped with D’Antoni last night. So’s it wouldn’t seem too previous, like, if I came on strong after the phone calls.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Why should I tell you if it wasn’t?”

  “I wonder.”

  I throw my cigarette in the bathwater.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” I say. “Con and Peter. The favours I done for them.”

  “They just work for the firm.”

  “Yeah, I suppose they do. I mean, Peter I can understand. He’s been looking for this one for years. But Con, though.” I shake my head.

  “Well, I suppose, as they say, that’s life.”

  I stand up.

  “So what you going to do? Clear off out of it?”

  I bend over and scoop up a handful of bubbles out of the bath and look at them.

  “You put Wally in on what’s going off?”

  “You’re joking. He only gets to know when they’re coming down the drive.”

  I turn my palm downwards and shake the bubbles back into the bath.

  “So what you going to do?” Audrey asks again.

  “I’m going to wait and have a chat with me old mates, aren’t I? I mean, must be all of three days since I set eyes on them.”

  “You’re barmy. You could be well out of it.”

  I lean over the bath again only this time it isn’t bubbles I pluck out of it, it’s Audrey. I sit her down on the edge of the bath that I’ve been sitting on and I tell her: “Listen, you thick bitch, for years and fucking years I kept those two wankers upright, and by default, yourself. It’s because of me you got interested in how the firm was run, and consequently got a taste for running it, and consequent to that you got stacked away what you got stacked away in our joint and non-native bank accounts. And now you, the three of you, you all think if I’m not seen to jump for once in my life then I’m eligible for the drop and I’m not even accorded the honour of facing it out on my own patch, they can’t wait five fucking minutes to switch me off, and I’ve been responsible for every thread in their mohairs. So that being the case, I intend enjoying the last day of my holidays, and instead of sending Gerald and Les a card to tell them what a good time I’ve had I’ll express my enjoyment and gratitude in a different way, in a manner which will also challenge their cloud seven assumptions about themselves and about myself. All right?”

  Audrey pushes my hands from her shoulders and digs up a bit of bottle from somewhere. “Listen, you cunt, you don’t have to come on like this. All you have to do is walk downstairs and screw down D’Antoni and it’s like the magic wand, everything is back the way it should be. Midas isn’t sticking to his gilt any more. Jesus, I only came on strong about D’Antoni this morning in the hopes you’d spring to your feet and do him there and then.”

  “Oh, yes,” I say to her. “About that.”

  I give her one across the face and as she’s ensured that I no longer have a grip on her shoulders she falls backwards into the bath and bunches of bubbles fly up and stick to the tiles like an explosion of disturbed amoeba. Audrey splashes around in an attempt to resurface, spitting the suds from her mouth as though she’s just taken one in the mouth for the first time. I bend over and grasp her slippery arms and pull her up out of the water.

  “So,” I say to her. “Now we’ve got that
out of the way, the plan stays the same.”

  Audrey spits out the last of the bubbles.

  “You what?”

  “The plan. What everybody’s fixed up between themselves. Remember that?”

  “What, you want me to keep D’Antoni busy like I did last night?”

  I wipe a dribble of bubble from the corner of her mouth and support it on the end of my little finger.

  “Exactly like you did last night,” I say to her, transferring the bubbles to the centre of her lips.

  She brushes the bubbles away and says:

  “Why should I? I’ve got myself to look after now. Why should I do that, now I know what you’re up to?”

  “For the reason, my love, that you told me what you told me. Even though you did leave it a bit late.”

  I take a grip on her jaw with my thumb and forefinger and shake her head a little bit.

  “You were going to do it anyway. Now you can really enjoy it, seeing as you got my blessing.” I let go of her. After a little while she says:

  “You’re never going to row yourself out of this one. You know that, don’t you? Even if you get off this island.”

  “Listen, loved one, I’m going to get off this island, because I want to see the faces of Gerald and Les when I turn up in the role of my surrogate postcard. So have your bath and be downstairs in fifteen minutes because that’s the time I’ve got you down to start performing.”

  I turn away and begin to walk towards the bathroom door.

  “What happens,” Audrey says, “if everything goes your way? I mean, just supposing, like, you get out of here; you see to Gerald and Les and the same law and everybody else, just supposing all that comes off. What happens to me?”

  I stop walking and turn to face her.

  “What do you mean, what happens to you?”

  “We still partners, are we?”

  “I thought we dissolved that in a hotel room in Palma.”

  “Did you really?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “There’s still a simpler way,” she says.

  “I’ll see you downstairs in fifteen minutes,” I tell her, and turn away again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  DOWNSTAIRS IN THE LOUNGE, D’Antoni is peering out through the still-drawn curtains, poised shiftily like Grigsby in The Lady from Shanghai.