by Alan Trotter
_____ came around the bed to get Cansel’s gun. The skin of Cansel’s arm had melted to the sheet and _____ separated them with difficulty. There was a long .38 in Cansel’s grip. _____ took the handkerchief from my pocket—the one the woman in the streetcar had given me. He used it to pick the hot gun out from Cansel’s fingers.
The knock at the door came again and now a voice called for Mr Cansel. He didn’t answer.
I thought about opening the door, letting whoever was outside into the room, to see what would happen. Something to get us off this dead path, so there would be no more getting sent by Swagger to inspect corpses or kill them again while they screamed at us with wide eyes. I was sick of it. But I put the chain on the door. And I went to the window, which was large and already partway open. As I pushed it all the way up, my left hand slipped from the blood on my fingers and I jarred my elbow hard against the window frame. I’d been cut, I remembered. Out of the window it was maybe a five-metre drop to the roofs of a line of off-duty cabs. I showed _____.
There was another knock on the door, but no louder, and another shout for Mr Cansel, another shout just as low on courage. It was the same hesitant half-voice from the hotel lobby—the voice of the hotel peeper, still unsteady on its feet. He was waiting. He’d wait until the prowl car boys arrived if he could. We had time.
_____ tossed the gun back onto the bed and put himself through the window so the right half of him tipped into the open air while the left half wriggled in a hotel room where a man had just been burned and stabbed. He turned his body around so he hung attached to the building by his fingertips. Then he dropped onto the hack beneath. He managed it quietly, gracefully even. The sounds of a conversation came from the corridor: the hotel dick explaining to someone, one of Cansel’s neighbours maybe, why it would be indiscreet just to open up the door and see what was going on in the room, whatever the noise, however bad the smell was.
I followed _____ through the window.
*
I landed badly, denting the roof of the hack and bending my ankle as I tipped hard onto my side, my hip going into the hood, my shoulder into the windshield, and then fell, kept falling, off the hood and into the ground.
_____ helped me to my feet, he picked up my hat and brushed gravel from my knees with it, windshield glass from my shoulder. I was sick of it all and my knees hurt and I could have been anywhere else. I grabbed _____ by his lapels and shook him. He hung there, not objecting, and I shook him again.
My voice was bad. It comes and goes and it was bad now. I was filled with an anger I hadn’t noticed grow.
I said, ‘He’s go ing to keep push ing us a round.’
The vocal chords, what happens is that they can’t close, so air escapes through the voice. When it’s bad I sound like a leaky bellows. It tremors too, when it’s bad.
I shook _____. I said, ‘He will p ush us a round until we ’re spent, then hand us to the buzz ers.’ I breathed, and shook at _____ some more. ‘And they ’ll light us up.’ I put _____ down so I could put my hands around the pain in my neck. I bent toward the ground and he laid a hand on my back. I could feel the blood from my cut hand running into the collar of my shirt, and I’d lost my mind, I was done with it all.
I shook his hand from my back and stood straight, taking my hands from the pain. ‘I get lit up,’ I said, ‘it’s go ing to be for some thing I chose.’
When the voice gets bad the struggle with it reaches my eyes too.
I took a while to breathe. _____ waited. There was still no one with us in the alley, no one at the window.
I said, ‘I’ve got some where else I w ant to be,’ and left him.
*
After that I went and got the small folding shovel _____ kept under his sink, and dug up the box of money I kept buried in the scrubland at the back of the building. I got dirt in my cut, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to deal with it. I took the money.
Bernard took me in to see Fylan as soon as I asked, no objections, which was white of him. First Fylan said, ‘You’re going to scare the marks, coming in here looking like you look, Box. Go home,’ but I shook my head, no, and he moved from watching the tables through his office door and told me to sit down. He poured me a whisky from a bottle in his desk into a little paper cup like a dentist would give you to rinse your mouth.
‘You know you’ve got dirt and blood on your collar?’ he asked. ‘You cut yourself shaving? I always took you for part golem.’ I took the little paper cup and drank it down. Sitting made me wince. I had to lay the leg straight out, the leg I’d twisted in the fall.
Fylan sighed. He opened a drawer and then a second and a third before he found a roll of gauze. He came round and took my cut hand from my lap and put it palm up on top of his leg. He wrapped it and folded the bandage into itself so it held. Then he sat again, poured himself a paper cup of whisky and said, ‘What is it, Box? Where’s _____?’
I said, ‘I ’ve got the mo ney that Hol comb owed.’
*
At Evelyn Heydt’s she took one look at the state of my collar and my hand and—without asking why I’d come, without shock, with only kindness in her voice—offered me her bathroom to clean myself up.
I washed the cut and the blood and dirt from myself as well as I could and then refitted Fylan’s bandage. There wasn’t much I could do about the shirt, but the water was good and hot and it steamed the mirror and made my face shine pink and bright.
When I came out she laughed at the bandage and did it again, did it right.
*
We sat together and I didn’t feel any of the pull away from her, forwards and out of her apartment, back to _____. I was sharing time with her—and now there was no panic, nowhere the feeling that I was sitting outside an empty room looking in. Instead we were exactly what we seemed to be: two people in a room together, talking. And she was exactly what she had seemed to be: kind and beautiful. She talked to me easily, as if she was used to finding me at her door, as if she was used to doing kindnesses for me.
I asked her about her job and she talked to me about it. She seemed to know everything there was to know about teeth. There’s a lot to know about teeth, you’d be surprised. She asked to see mine and then frowned when I showed them to her. I must have looked pretty worried, because she laughed at me then, too. She got me to open my mouth again and then she tapped on one of my teeth. She said it was squint. If it was pulled the rest would have more space and it would all straighten out. ‘Don’t get it pulled though,’ she said. ‘I like your smile. You shouldn’t change it.’ My smile was big and dumb and I couldn’t stop it, not for minutes.
I sat with Evvie and I thought how I wanted to be there, not just then, but whenever I could be useful to her. I wanted to be there when there was nothing for us to do or say, and I wanted that to be long lazy years. The world could keep screwing itself deeper into all that nothingness unattended. I wanted to watch beside her eyes as her laugh wore wrinkles there—it would be a good way to spend the time, to see the things she might laugh at become a part of her beauty.
And I didn’t need to say any of this, to struggle out a breathy, painful word of it. Like a miracle, she knew it. Somehow the good thoughts burned bright enough to be seen through all the rest of me, and she let me take her hand into mine and we sat like that, hand in hand.
*
I found myself remembering things I hadn’t thought about for a long time, and I sat there remembering them, forgetting where I was. I remembered being in a car with _____, though I couldn’t remember where we had got the car or where we were taking it, but _____ was driving and he drove very well. There was a peacefulness to him while he was driving. He was driving so smoothly, so gracefully, that I wanted to see if, without looking, I could feel when we were turning a corner, when we came to a stop, so I closed my eyes. Except I fell asleep, in the car, and I fell asleep in the memory too.
Evvie woke me. She was standing over me, and I guess I looked pretty content laid out on
her couch because she had a curious, playful look on her face. She saw I’d woken and said, ‘Hello there, happy bear.’
She said I was going to have to leave and she was going to go to bed. I said the next time I was going to come round I’d call her first, and she gave a small, quick nod of agreement. I smiled big at that, a smile all over my face all at once like an egg cracked into a pan. I got her to kiss me on the cheek at the door, and she did, kissed me once on the cheek, and then I got her to kiss me quick on the lips, and without much of even a second’s hesitation, I got my kiss, and before I could even smile she had closed the door.
*
I went to the New Europe, where I knew the peeper. He said I couldn’t stay there unless I put on a clean collar, and he lent me one, and we sat and listened to the radio. He was too earthly tired even to speak much by then. He was glad when I went upstairs to sleep and left him to his tiredness.
The next day I began to find out what had happened to _____. That he had gone with Swagger and Childs and there’d been some shooting. That _____ had been out in the middle of the street and that he had his back to Swagger, when Swagger shot him twice, and that was the end.
Interlude
In a single movement, Charles loops the wire over the man’s head, turns so that the two of them are back to back, and pulls hard, his hands together and each gripping a leather-wrapped handle of the wire, the base of his thumbs braced against his left clavicle. He bends forward at the waist, so that the other man is hoisted by the wire at the neck, becoming a wriggling, rasping sack that Charles is carrying over one shoulder. Hector sits in the darker corner of the back room, no more than a metre away. The wire has slipped through the skin in the man’s neck and, as his legs bicycle and his body swings across Charles’ wide back, Charles can feel the wire sawing through his throat, up and into the cartilage of the Adam’s apple, then the jerk as it enters deep into the larynx, carving an entrance for blood to flow into the lungs and adding to the quiet flailing noise in the back room of this bar some of the sounds of drowning. When it’s over Charles lays the new corpse down on the floor.
‘Should I applaud?’ asks Hector.
Charles wipes his brow: the work has made him sweat. ‘Only if you feel moved to,’ he says.
‘I don’t,’ says Hector. ‘Not your fault. This whole trip so far has been a tour of dissatisfaction.’
‘Yes,’ says Charles.
A tour of dissatisfaction: nothing excites them. The woman who they had talked to: when all pretence (on their side) had been dropped, and she was lying to them about the dimensions of her life, inventing her name, children, home town: the dissatisfaction arrived before even the conclusion. Hector suspected the details she was giving them, finding them too plausible, as though, particularly in the domestic elements of her life, she was relying on the truth.
After that everything she did, whether it was to repeat them exactly as she had given them before, or seemingly to forget them and replace them with alternative facts, confirmed his suspicion. They brought things to an abrupt end and Hector demanded another attempt.
And now Charles had dispensed with this fictitious man.
The man had done his best, summoned his life greedily, desperately, his eyes ransacked the corners of the room for it, the outline of the door, the unplugged telephone that, even if it had been connected, would only have been to the man at the bar, who knew where things in the back room were heading, and to whom they had given money not to care.
The fictitious man had been plausible, flawed, godly, hard-working, entrenched in loneliness and unable to work his way from it. He had names, dates, and then he died, and it had meant nothing, and redeemed nothing about what they had done in the train, and nothing about the woman and her children, who seemed tediously like they might have been actually her children, straightforwardly the reason for her pleas.
This job, that had started out so promisingly, with a neatly handwritten letter asking for a death, as polite a contract as was ever taken out on a life, so strange that it seemed the trip might accrue strangeness, might be blessed with interest—but here they were, slaughtering ghosts and bored with it.
‘We’ll get some sleep,’ says Hector. ‘We’ll get some sleep and then tomorrow we’ll finish this job and maybe it will provide some interest, and either way we’ll be done.’
‘We’ll get rid of this,’ says Charles, gesturing to the body, ‘we’ll get some sleep, and then tomorrow we’ll have our wits about us. We’ll be able to take from this nuthouse whatever there is to be taken, and either way.’
‘Either way we’ll be done.’
PART 5
Years later, a phone call.
It wakes me, and at first I take the confusion to be mine, my tiredness keeping me at arm’s length from sense. Then I recognise the voice and tell it to calm down, go slow. But the words come in gusts, and every one sounds cracked, broken over a knee before it’s sent down the line.
This much I can figure: something deeply bad is with him at the far end of the call, it has shattered him and his language, and he wants me there.
I press words back into the rush, like, Wait and Slower, but I am pushing a tack into a wall while it falls onto me. Finally I get from the crackle of his broken words where he is, and I go to him.
*
I get there second to the police. Two of them: I push at the open door and as it creaks wide they turn to me and touch their holsters. I raise my hands obligingly. They have been standing over him. He is sitting on a footstool so small, so insufficient for the job, that it might be funny if it wasn’t for his grin.
‘What do you want?’ The younger policeman, cheeks like scoops of ice cream. ‘Go back downstairs.’
I tell them that he called me. They relax slightly without taking their hands away from their guns.
‘Called you when?’ says the older one. Black hair, face like a claw hammer.
I shrug, and say thirty minutes, maybe forty.
‘Take a seat there and use those big hands to keep your knees warm,’ says claw hammer. ‘Nothing in your pockets is worth getting shot for.’
I sit facing the grin—the chair sagging under me until we are almost as low as each other. Everything human in his eyes seems to have left. If he was in pieces when he called me then he has been put back together wrong, with a smile that isn’t his.
‘You got any other explanation you want to give for the noise?’ the older button asks him. ‘Any good enough we shouldn’t take you in?’
‘Make a stop on the way to wipe that look off your face,’ says scoops of ice cream, raising an unconvincing fist.
Then from somewhere behind the grin he speaks, and his words aren’t air-filled and broken any more. He says, ‘I hope you’re liking this.’
‘What’s that?’ says the younger button, his cheeks turned cherry pink.
‘I said I hope you’re enjoying this, because you’re on this case for one more second,’ he says. ‘As soon as you see what’s behind that door it gets too big for you and you’re back on the benches.’ He has looked towards the bedroom door, closed tight, and the two police follow his look, the younger trying to play a smirk but scared. They draw their guns.
When they open the door, when they see what is in there, they swing their guns around like the walls are under arrest, like the air is under arrest. They shout at us to get on the floor, to get down on the floor and keep our hands up, keep our hands in sight, and I get on the floor, though every lick I’ve ever taken is telling me to do anything else, even if it’s jump through the window, anything other than be restrained, be kept here with things gone as wrong as they’ve gone behind that door.
And he gets down on the ground too, the broken grin still on his face, his face inches from mine, like looking into a mirror, and I watch as the cuffs go on him and feel the metal tighten round my own wrists.
Then, in the end, after a lot of talking between themselves, months of talking about me over the top of my head,
they bring me here.
*
Polly grows used on her visits to being questioned by young men in uniforms. They don’t understand her reasons for visiting, and have been educated to know that if something does not make sense to them the failure can’t be theirs but must belong to the old woman: she must, in fact, not understand her reasons for visiting. There must be some foolishness in her. (Maybe there is some foolishness in me, she thinks, to come here.) She is confused, and in need of a firm, kindly hand to send her safely home. Every time she arrives, she finds herself passed around a new pack of young men in white smocks, having to account for herself to each of them in turn—each slightly more senior than the last, none of them older or wiser than a fresh pot of white paint.
*
Until once she happens to visit on a Sunday, and she finds them responding to her differently, deferentially, with greater courtesy and fewer questions. They smile and nod and couldn’t be much sweeter if she was carrying a police badge. From that day on she always wears a church hat to visit. That is all it takes to impress these unimpressive men, a church hat and a smart skirt, that is how simple these young men in smocks are. Now instead of wasting her time asking her why she wants to see such a dangerous man, and telling her not to be fooled by the way he looks, instead of all that, they just ask if she knows where she is going. And more: they offer coffee, they ask if she needs help with her bag. All for wearing the right hat. So, fine—she dresses up like a respectable old lady and says oh, thimbles when she drops her pencil, if that’s what it takes to be left alone.
*
Some of the young men she has even started to recognise one from the other, though they all wear the same bad haircut. Some have taken to calling her Mother, which they mean as a kindness, though who could wish for such sons?
