Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  “No,” the old gentleman had said. “I doubt if they would. Or perhaps should.” He had chuckled at his small joke and so had Tick-Tock.

  “But I’m afraid that the chap from the British Museum is going to be on my trail tonight. He simply won’t take no for an answer. He keeps telling me that the watch isn’t really priceless, but I don’t think that one can place price on sentiment, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I say, I have an idea. I know I’m going to put this wretchedly,” Tick-Tock said, but he didn’t. He had put it as smoothly as any proposition I’ve ever heard. It was his idea that the old gentleman should keep the watch for him, but only for the night. Tick-Tock would drop round to get it the next morning.

  The old gentleman had protested, of course, but Tick-Tock had already thrust the watch upon him. When the old gentleman had made his final feeble protest, Tick-Tock struck. He had said that if it would make him feel more secure, the old gentleman could put up a pledge of perhaps fifty pounds. Caught between greed and flattery, the old gentleman had agreed.

  There had been an exchange of names and addresses and telephone numbers and then they had made their good-byes. I had rejoined Tick-Tock in the bar shortly thereafter. The old gentleman and his wife had just been leaving. Tick-Tock had raised his glass in salute. The old gentleman had nodded and smiled, but a little nervously, I’d thought.

  Tick-Tock had tossed me a small card on which a name, an address, and a telephone number were written. “He gave me a wrong address, a phony telephone number, and a phony name.”

  “How do you know?”

  Tick-Tock had smiled at me and he had looked very much like Tyrone Power all made up to look like an Indian maharaja. “Because that’s my business, mate,” Tick-Tock had said. “To know.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  AS I MENTIONED, TICK-TOCK had changed in the more than ten years since I had last seen him. He didn’t look like Tyrone Power anymore. He looked more like Gandhi.

  “I know you,” he said. “I remember you. You’re Saint-something-or-other.”

  “St. Ives.”

  “Yes. St. Ives. What do you want?”

  “Maybe he wants a party, Tick-Tock,” the girl said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Information.”

  He stared at me with dark eyes that had lost their flash and sparkle. All that remained in them was a kind of dead cunning. He had been not quite plump when I had last seen him, with quick and graceful movements, but now he was stick thin and when he moved, he jerked. He no longer wore a turban and what little hair he had left was egg-shell white and his dark skin, once smooth and supple, was dry and stretched with tiny deep wrinkles that gave him the tight, drawn look of a poorly done mummy. Tick-Tock was a mess and he was not quite forty.

  “Information, is it? Well, come in.”

  We went into a sitting room that opened onto a primitive-looking kitchen. The sitting room was furnished with some old chairs and couches that seemed to have been rescued from a rescue mission. There was a four-color print of Jesus on one wall and in two of the chairs were sprawled two more young girls, one a blonde, the other a brunette. They both wore see-through blouses. The blonde wore a short skirt. The brunette wore pants. They smiled at me professionally.

  “If you want one of these cunts, it’s five quid for short time upstairs,” Tick-Tock said in a mechanical tone. “Or you can have all three of them for a tenner.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Get out,” he said to the girls. The two blondes and the brunette shrugged and left through the door that led to the kitchen.

  “Want a drink?” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Whisky?”

  “With water.”

  “Whisky’s seventy-five pence.”

  “All right.”

  He went over to a chest, took out a bottle of whisky, poured some into a smeared glass, and added water from a pitcher. He handed it to me. I gave him a pound. “Thanks very much,” he said and made no move to give me the change.

  “Want anything else?” he said.

  “What have you got?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got hash and I’ve got pot. I’ve got cocaine. I’m fresh out of heroin.”

  I shook my head. “What the hell happened to you, Tick-Tock?” I said. “I thought you were into gold.”

  “What happened to me?” he said. “Two years in Dartmoor is what happened to me. And a cunt. God, I hate cunts. When was the last time I saw you?”

  “Almost a dozen years ago.”

  “I remember now. It was in the Ritz, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That was the night I quit the watch business.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the week after that my partner and I went to Paris and we spent almost every penny we had buying gold. We bought 1,280 ounces for forty-five thousand dollars U.S. A good price then. And we brought it back here with no trouble. No trouble at all. Then I went on a diet and lost two stone. It took me two months and I damn near starved, but I lost it. Then we had it all set. These two cunts and I would fly to Goa.”

  “With the gold,” I said.

  “That’s right. With the gold. You know how much gold was bringing in Goa then?”

  “No.”

  “Ninety-four dollars an ounce. Christ, it’s more than that now, but do you know how much our profit would have been? Seventy thousand dollars. Net. For a plane trip.”

  “What happened?”

  “My partner and I got greedy. We decided that since I’d lost so much weight, we could rig a special girdle so that I could carry fifty pounds with no problem. Originally I was going to carry forty pounds and the two cunts were to carry twenty each. But with me carrying fifty pounds, we only needed one cunt. She could carry thirty and look a little bit preggy, you know. It was what is known as an economy move. You want another drink?”

  “You’ve watered the Scotch,” I said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “Watered Scotch. I’ll take another.”

  He fixed me another drink. “That’ll be a pound,” he said. I paid him.

  “So what happened?” I said. “The girl you left behind blow the whistle on you?”

  He nodded glumly. “She blew it all right. We barely stepped foot in Heathrow before they were swarming all over us. You asked what happened to me. Well, prison is what happened to me. Two years of it. Have you ever been in prison?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “I couldn’t stand it. I went crackers. I lost even more weight until I was nothing but skin and bones—just as I am now.” He held out a thin arm for me to inspect. “My hair fell out. I developed ulcers. My teeth went. And when I got out after two years I looked just about as I do now and who would buy a gold watch from somebody who looked like me?”

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “You’re right. Nobody. So now I’m into brothel-keeping—on a small scale, of course. I push a few drugs, because if I didn’t, I couldn’t keep the cunts. I run an after-hours boozer with watered-down spirits and I sometimes peddle information for a fair price and what is it that you’re after?”

  “That partner of yours.”

  “Him!”

  “You’re still in touch?”

  “Oh, yes, we’re still in touch. After all, he’s a fine Christian gentleman, he is. I went to prison and he did buggerall. But every Christmas he comes around to see me with a big basket of treats.”

  “He faked those watches for you, didn’t he? Could he fake anything else?”

  “Him? He could fake the crown jewels if he put his hand to it. He’s a bloody artist. What d’you have in mind?”

  “Maybe a sword. Could he do an old sword?”

  “No problem. He’d have to pray over it for a while, but he could do it. He takes his religion seriously. As I said, he’s a proper Christian. After all, when I got out of the nick, didn’t he s
et me up in this wonderful business I’m in? That’s true Christian charity, isn’t it?”

  “You’re bitter, Tick-Tock.”

  “You damned right I am.”

  “How much for his name and address?”

  The dead cunning in his eyes moved over to let the greed in. “How’d you find me?”

  “Manny Kaplan.”

  “Oh, him. What have you got on, St. Ives?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come off it. If you be needing an old Indian gentleman,” he said with a quaver, “I could play me old granddad now instead of me.”

  “I don’t think so, Tick-Tock.”

  “Just the name and address, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Fifty pounds.”

  “Jesus.”

  “My ex-partner will be glad to introduce you to him.” He pointed to the print of Christ on the wall. “He brought that around last Christmas. The cunts like it. Fifty pounds, please.”

  I counted him out fifty pounds. “His name’s Billy Curnutt with a C and two t’s and he lives over his shop at fourteen Beauclerc just off Hammersmith Grove.”

  “What kind of a shop?” I said.

  “He’s a locksmith when he’s not down on his knees praying.”

  I rose. “Okay, Tick-Tock. Thank you very much.”

  “One more thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He might be in low spirits.”

  “Why?”

  “His wife left him this past Christmas Eve. I hear he’s not over it yet.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s also something else.”

  “What?”

  “It was the only good news I got last year.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE CHRISTMAS TREE TIPPED me off that something was wrong, which only demonstrates just how quick I am. If someone still has the Christmas tree up in the middle of May, fully decorated, although a bit brown, with the presents still lying beneath it, I tend to view it as unusual, even odd, although I had once kept mine up until the fifteenth of March.

  I had had trouble finding a taxi and I hadn’t arrived at the shop of William Curnutt, locksmith, at 14 Beauclerc Street until a quarter to six. Curnutt’s shop had a big plate-glass window and behind the window was a drawn tan shade that had large white letters on it that spelled CLOSED. The locksmith’s shop was nearly in the center of the block of small shops. Above the shops was a layer of flats. In the center of the block was a flight of stairs that seemed to lead up to the flats.

  I went up the stairs and down a hall until I came to 14-B. I knocked, but nobody answered. I tried the door, more out of curiosity than anything else, since it was a locksmith’s door, but it opened, so I went in.

  The Christmas tree, a Scotch pine, I decided, was near a window. It was a big, fat tree, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Although the base of its trunk rested in a pail of water, there was a thick ring of brown needles on the mauve carpet and on the still unwrapped packages.

  The furniture in the sitting room was neither good nor bad, just serviceable, sturdy stuff of no particular style that had been bought to last a long time and still had five or ten years to go. The lemon curtains were drawn, but two floor lamps were lit. On the walls were old mezzotints of Biblical scenes. David was about to do Goliath in with a slingshot. Adam and Eve were being driven out of the Garden of Eden by the stern forefinger of an old man with a long white beard who looked mad as hell. Some Roman soldiers rolled dice near a cross to which Christ was nailed. There were several others, all hardnosed, fundamentalist stuff, that seemed to hold out faint hope of there ever being a happy ending for the human race.

  I went through the rest of the flat. There were two bedrooms, one of which must have been that of a child, a bath, a small dining room, and a kitchen. The beds were made, the bathroom looked scrubbed, and in the kitchen, which was almost fussily kept, things were laid out for tea.

  The entire flat, except for the desiccated Christmas tree, which I took to be a sort of shrine, was almost too neat, as if it had just been cleaned by an overly conscientious daily, or as if its occupant couldn’t abide a speck of disorder. There were no overflowing ashtrays; in fact, there were no ashtrays at all. No empty glasses or teacups. No ring around the bath. No bits of shaved beard in the basin. No unwashed dishes in the sink.

  A flight of stairs led down from the kitchen, presumably to the shop beneath. I went down them and came out into a workshop that seemed to be even more tidy than the flat above. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Tools of all description were carefully set into wall clamps and brackets. Rows of nails, bolts, and screws were meticulously sorted and stored in capped, labeled jars. A long, sturdy workbench with two big vises dominated one wall. Against another was a small industrial oven. There was also a gas-fed forge, some key-making machines, and several banks of blank keys.

  In the center of the workshop was an old-fashioned blacksmith’s anvil that must have weighed half a ton. Propped up against it was a man with a broken neck. He wore tan shoes and gray slacks and a white shirt. There was no tie. He was about fifty, I thought, although it was hard to tell because his head hung down at such an acute angle that his gray eyes seemed to peer up at me almost upside-down.

  Although it was my second dead body of the day, I wasn’t sure what I should do. So I stood there in the neat workshop and felt my palms grow slippery and the sweat gather in my armpits.

  After a long moment, I made myself kneel down and touch his hand. For some reason then it was important that I touch him, as if it were the least that I could do for him, now that he was dead. The warmth had gone from his hand. It wasn’t cold, but the warmth had gone from it.

  I patted his rear pocket. There was a wallet in it. I took it out, opened it, and looked at the photograph of the woman who was too carefully posed with the five- or six-year-old child. The woman looked as though she were forty-five or forty-six, almost too old to be the mother of the child, a girl, but I somehow knew that she was and that she had left with the child on Christmas Eve and that now neither she nor her daughter would ever open the presents that lay waiting for them underneath the aging Christmas tree upstairs.

  There were some cards of identification in the wallet that said that it belonged to William Wordsworth Curnutt, locksmith, who was fifty-one, and a resident of 14-B Beauclerc Street, London, W.6. Other facts pertaining to the deceased included the information that he was a member of the Basic Baptist Breakfast Club, that he was male, five feet seven inches tall, weighed ten stone, had gray eyes, gray hair, no prominent scars, and that a gray suit was ready at the cleaners.

  I put all the cards and scraps of paper and mementos that accumulate in a man’s wallet back into the compartments that they had come from, after rubbing each one on my pants knee—to confound Scotland Yard, I suppose. Then, because I’m nosy, I opened the wallet lengthwise to find out how much money Billy Curnutt carried. There were four one-pound notes and the torn half of a playing card. It was the one-eyed jack of spades. It was poker size, rather than bridge size, but I thought that any kind of playing card would be a strange thing for a Basic Baptist to be carrying around, until I turned it over and saw the white letters that were reversed into its deep red front. The large letters spelled out SHIELDS and then in smaller letters underneath, A Gambling Emporium.

  I stuffed the wallet back into the dead man’s hip pocket and stood up holding the half card. I stood there, my back to the front of the shop, and I remember thinking that what I should do was to hurry with the card down to 221 Baker Street and knock up the principal resident there, tell him my tale, let him figure out what the card meant, and if he couldn’t, perhaps he wouldn’t mind giving his brother a ring.

  That was the London I really wanted, of course, the London of clopping hansom cabs, and killing fog, and Sherlock Holmes, and bad drainage, mass poverty, a thirty-two-year life expectancy, and Queen Victoria.

  Wh
at I had was London of the seventies with roaring inflation, a fading youth cult, a housing pinch, a Parliament that seemed to have lost its way, Queen Elizabeth, and a church-going Baptist forger with a touch of genius who preserved old Christmas trees and who lay dead at my feet of a broken neck at age fifty-one.

  I like to think that I was lost in thought, but I’m afraid that it was fantasy again. Whatever it was, it kept me from hearing them. They must have been in the front of the shop, which was separated from the work area by a heavy tan curtain. I think I might have heard the curtain rustle. I sometimes still pretend that I did and that I carefully planned what followed.

  But I don’t think that I ever really heard them. I don’t even think that I knew that they were there until they grabbed me from behind and slipped the cloth sack over my head. But I remembered what had happened the last time somebody had grabbed me from behind. I had used a couple of gutter tricks and I’d wound up in jail. I didn’t use any gutter tricks this time, not even any pseudo-karate. I fainted. Or pretended to.

  It wasn’t easy, pretending to faint. I had to make my body go completely limp. The body doesn’t want to do that because if it does, it’s going to fall, and if it falls, it’s going to hit something hard, and that’s going to hurt. But I fell anyway and whoever had been holding me let me fall, out of surprise or out of hope that I would hurt myself and thus save them the trouble.

  One of them said shit and the other one shhh. Then I heard them moving across the room. A door opened and closed. I took the cloth sack off my head and got up. Then somebody started pounding at the shop’s street door. A voice yelled, “Mr. Curnutt! You in there?” It was a policeman’s voice. I’m not sure how I knew that. I just know that I knew.

  I didn’t want to talk to any more policemen. Not just then. So I went the way that those who had grabbed me had gone. I went out the back door and down the alley. I didn’t run. I wanted to, but I didn’t run. And I didn’t stop shaking until I was sitting in the bar at the very top of the Hilton with a double shot of I. W. Harper in front of me and another one already inside. I still don’t know why I ordered bourbon. I really don’t much like it.