by Unknown
Suhbataar was buttoning up his long leather coat.
Jerome was lying on his back doused in his own blood, just a few paces away.
And Rudi in the kitchen, with a broken nose.
How had all this come about? Only one hour ago we were in the back of a van and I had wanted Rudi inside me.
I heard myself whimpering, like Nemya under the table.
‘Don’t take it so hard,’ said Suhbataar, tucking the package containing the Delacroix under his arm. Why did his voice never alter? Always the same, dry, soft and gritty. ‘Your gang’s been on borrowed time for months. Rudi and Jerome were traitors. Mr Gregorski can’t permit you to walk away. Pawns get sacrificed in endgames. Your Interpol friend Miss Makuch and her Capital Transfer Inspectorate are too close.’
‘What?’
‘Innocuous name for an anti-mafia squad, isn’t it? That reminds me, I gave them an anonymous tip-off via a dead letter-box on Kirovsky Island. They’ll be here in a few minutes. Calm down. Ex-spies are an embarrassment these days, what with the IMF and trade delegations – nobody’s going to throw away the key on you for killing Jerome. The stolen pictures are irreplaceable, but nobody will believe you were the mastermind behind that. Fifteen years at most, out in ten. The prison reform lobby in Moscow is beginning to gain a little ground. Slowly.’
He walked towards the door.
‘Put it down! That’s my picture! That picture belongs to Rudi and me!’
Suhbataar turned, feigning surprise. ‘I don’t think Rudi is going to be dealing in stolen masterpieces for a while.’
‘I want it!’
‘With the greatest respect, Miss Latunsky, you don’t count. You never have.’
What had he said about Tatyana? ‘I’ll tell the police everything about Gregorski!’
Suhbataar shook his head sadly. ‘You’ve become a murderer, Miss Latunsky. Your prints are on the gun, the ballistics match up . . . Who’s going to listen to you? The only possible corroboration to your whistle-blowing is lying in this apartment, slumped in pools of their own innards.’
Pressing into my knuckles. I still had my gun.
‘If it becomes expedient to oblige you to stop telling stories, Gregorski will know where to find you. Even in Miss Makuch’s division, the level of corruption is startling. Mongolians long ago made corruption a national pastime, but even I’m impressed with you Russians.’
‘Drop the picture now drop it now you son of a bitch or you are dead dead dead dead DEAD! Put it down slowly and put it down now! Hands in the air! You know I can use this thing!’ I aimed the gun straight at where his heart should be.
A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.
‘Look at Jerome, you Mongolian fuck, that’s you in ten seconds’ time.’
Suhbataar smiled, an in-joke smile.
Fine. Fine. It will be his death mask. What’s the difference between one murder and two? I pulled the trigger.
The hammer clapped down on an empty chamber. I pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Again. Nothing.
Suhbataar pulled out five golden bullets from his jacket pocket, rattled them in his cage of fingers.
I was left alone staring at the locked door.
None of this happened. None of this really happened.
London
My smirking hangover gave me a few moments to make my last requests, and to take in the fact that whoever’s bed this was it wasn’t Poppy’s. Whash! Then it laid into me, armed with a road-surface shatterer. I must have groaned pretty loudly, because the woman next to me rolled over and opened her eyes.
‘Good morning,’ she said, pulling a sheet over her breasts. ‘I’ve lost an earring.’
‘Hi.’ I grimaced as pleasantly as I could, peering through the sheets of pain. Not a face I could imagine smiling easily. I hoped this wasn’t going to turn into one of those GuiltLine wake-ups when she tells you about her boyfriend and her dead brother and her run-over-last-month dog Michael and you end up wondering how many people are in this bed. Still. Stern, rather than neurotic. A strong profile. Late thirties. Not bad, but nothing so special. Either she had aged since last night or I was getting less and less choosy. Red hair. Quite heavily built. That’s right! I’d been at the private view on Curzon Street. Oil paintings by some artist friend of Rohan’s, Mudgeon or Pigeon or Smudgeon or something. This redhead had come up to me then, and we’d done the old quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks. Then – a taxi – a wine bar on Shaftesbury Avenue – then another taxi – that would be most of my money gone – and then another wine bar on Upper Street. Then to here, though how was anybody’s guess. What was her name? Cathy? Katrina? It was something convent schoolgirlish. I always have this problem with women’s names, once I’ve slept with them.
She found her earring and noticed the way I was looking at her. She cleared her throat. ‘Katy Forbes. The personnel manager. You’re in my flat in Islington. Delighted to meet you. Again.’
‘Hello. I’m—’ Something was gripping my windpipe. I fought free and found my Woody Woodpecker boxer shorts.
‘Marco. I know. The “writer”. We did just about get to the name-swapping stage.’
So I’d played the writer card. That was valuable information. I looked around me. A single woman’s bedroom. Lacy curtains, trees bobbing in the early autumn. A framed poster of an oil painting, with a big Delacroix written underneath it. The original was probably nice. A little nest of tissues and condoms down my side of the bed, and a bottle of red wine with almost nothing in it, but 1982 on the label. Why do the best things happen when I’m too pissed to remember them?
An Islington Saturday morning. A car alarm going off somewhere.
‘Well. This is jolly . . .’
She watched the end of the sentence dangling for a few moments.
‘I’m going to get up and have a shower.’ A horsey inflection to her voice. She must have seen me as a diamond in the rough, the old Lady Chatterley complex. ‘If you feel as ghastly as you look there’s some fizzy hangover medicine in the first aid box on the drinks cabinet. If you have to be sick, do try to get it all in the lavatory bowl. Help yourself to some coffee, there’s instant if you can’t figure out the percolator, but please don’t run off with the fake chandelier, it was expensive. And if you can cook I’d like some scrambled eggs on toast.’
‘Never fear,’ I said. ‘I am a casual shag to be relied upon!’ This wasn’t terribly funny but I blundered on anyway. ‘No bread knives through the shower curtain, guaranteed.’
Her face would buckle any mere bread knife. She put on her dressing gown and went through into the bathroom. I heard the pipes in the walls judder as she switched on the shower.
I got dressed, wishing I had clean clothes. I smelt hash in a burn on my shirt, between the lipstick and a stain that I tried to ignore. My bladder felt like an inflatable camping bed. I groped out of the bedroom and found the little toilet, where I wazzed the waz from outer space. Seriously, I was pissing for a whole 55 seconds. On the shelf next to the pot-pourri there was a picture of my hostess Katy Forbes and a baldish youngish chap in a punt under a weeping willow and for a moment I wondered if I shouldn’t split before hubby came home, but then I fuzzily recalled Katy saying she’d been divorced. We’d agreed that joining a pyramid savings scheme is a much more stress-free way to lose all your money and wreck your life. So. A leisurely, assault-free breakfast was in order. Odd though, the only use that divorcees normally find for photographs of their ex-husbands is for dart practice. Maybe he’s her brother. I thrust out the last few drops and mopped up the spray on the rim with a clutch of toilet paper, and pulled the toilet chain, sending the previous evening’s spermatozoa to the North Sea. Three seconds later a howl came from the shower. ‘Don’t touch the bloody water ’til I’m OUT!’
‘Sorry!’
I can cook, and Katy’s kitchen was well stocked. My hangovers never affect my appetite. In fact I like to bury my hangovers alive, in fo
od. I poured some olive oil into a big frying pan, chopped up some garlic, mushrooms and chilli peppers, and sprinkled some basil. I folded in a dash of cream with the eggs, and mashed up a couple of anchovies that were stinking the fridge out. Onto this Vesuvius of cholesterol I grated a light snowfall of Wensleydale, and perched a few stuffed olives around the crater. There was granary bread, so I lightly browned some toast. Real butter in a Wedgwood butter dish. I helped myself to a few sprigs of parsley from a shrub on the window-sill. Some fresh beef tomatoes on the side, with chopped celery, sultanas and a dollop of potato salad. The coffee percolator was the same model as my own, so no problem there. I slurped down a mugful of the magic brew and felt my hangover being shooed away.
‘Gosh,’ said Katy, coming through with her hair wrapped in a towel. Her grey tracksuit trousers and buttoned-up cardigan did not promise any frisky post-breakfast foreplay. ‘You’re no writer,’ she said, ‘you’re a food sculptor.’
‘We aim,’ I hummed, ‘to please.’
She picked up the Daily Telegraph from the doormat, sat down with it and dug in. She made straight for the Weekend section of the supplement, which I never read, even when I’m busy moving house and can be distracted by share prices in Singapore.
I joined Katy at the table. This was a nice room. There was an overgrown little garden out back. In the front was a raised pavement. I watched human legs and canine legs and pushchair wheels go by. On the pine dresser was a collection of mainstream CDs. All very Princess Diana: Elton John, Pavarotti, the Four Seasons. A Chinese rug hung on the wall, on the mantelpiece was a zoo of ethnicky sculpted animals. Terracotta tiles and Japanese lampshades. It was a room from the Weekend section of the Daily Telegraph. ‘The lack of morning-after recriminations is refreshing.’ I only meant it as a pleasantry.
She looked over the paper. ‘Why should there be any recriminations? We were both consenting adults.’ She slid in another forkful of egg. ‘Albeit bloody drunk consenting adults.’
‘True.’ I bit on a bit of chilli and had to swish my mouth out with water. ‘Would you like to be a drunk consenting adult with me again sometime?’
Katy thought about it for a full three seconds. ‘I don’t think so, Marco, no.’
Hey, she remembered my name. ‘Oh. Fair enough.’
I poured us some more coffee.
‘Katy, I hope this isn’t an impertinent question, but I saw the photo in the toilet and I wondered if I wasn’t treading on anyone’s turf here?’
‘Nobody’s turf but mine. He was my husband. We separated, then he went and died.’
I just kept the lid on a mysterious giggle. ‘Oh . . . I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what to say.’
‘He was a bloody clot. He always insisted on having the last word. It happened four months ago. Around Wimbledon time. Undiagnosed diabetes in Hong Kong.’
I let a respectable silence elapse. ‘More toast?’
‘Thank you.’
The doorbell rang. Katy went over to the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Registered delivery for a Mrs Forbes!’ yelled a man’s voice.
‘Ms Forbes!’ Katy said in a disciplining-the-dog-for-the-hundredth-time voice, peered through the peephole, and undid the bolts. ‘Ms! Ms!’
A lad in blue overalls and shiny hair and ears as big as a chimpanzee’s heaved a packing case into the hallway. He saw me and his face said, ‘Nice one Cyril.’ ‘Sign here please, Miss Forbes.’
She signed and he was gone.
We looked at the packing case for a moment. ‘Nice big present,’ I commented. ‘Is your birthday coming up?’
‘It’s not a present,’ she said. ‘It’s already mine. Come and give me a hand, would you? In the cupboard under the sink there’s a hammer and a cold chisel, in a box with some fuses . . .’
We prised open the lid, and the four sides fell away.
A Queen Anne chair.
Katy’s thoughts wandered a long way away. ‘Marco,’ she said, ‘thank you for making breakfast. It was really . . . But I think I’d like you to go now.’ There was a tremor in her voice. ‘You’re not a bad man.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Could I just hop into your shower?’
‘I’d like you to go now.’
The avenue was littered with autumn. The air was smoky with it. Not yet 10 a.m., it was crisp and sunny and foggy all at once. I’d try to get to Alfred’s by late lunchtime, Tim Cavendish’s by late afternoon, and back to my place by early evening in time to meet Gibreel. It wasn’t really worth going back to my flat now. I’d just have to smell of sex all day.
Katy Forbes wasn’t the stablest of campers but at least she hadn’t been a head-case like that vamp of Camden Town who’d tied me up to her bedstead with a leather belt and videoed herself releasing her pet tarantula on my torso. ‘Stop screaming,’ she’d screamed. ‘Baggins has had his sacs removed . . .’ It hadn’t been Baggins’s sacs that were at the forefront of my mind. Katy’s intellect must have impressed me enough to go for the writer identity, rather than the drummer. Even so. The Morning After Me was not overly impressed with the Night Before Me. I pass through many Mes in the course of the day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying in Bed Me, and the Enjoying the Hot Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.
I really am a drummer. My band’s called The Music of Chance. I named it after a novel by that New York bloke. I describe us as a ‘loose musical cooperative’ – there are about ten members, and whoever’s around performs on whatever’s happening. Plus, most of us are pretty loose. We play our own material mostly, though if I’m strapped for cash we’ll play whatever will put bums on seats. We’ve been offered a recording contract, by the biggest record company in southern Belgium, but we thought we should hold out for something more EMI or Geffen-sized. The Music of Chance is pretty big in the Slovak Republic, too. We played a few gigs there last summer that went down very well.
I really am a writer, too. A ghostwriter. My first published project was the autobiography of a pace bowler called Dennis Mackeson who played for England a few times in the mid-eighties, when it rained a lot. The Twistlethwaite Tornado got great reviews in the Yorkshire Post – ‘Not in a million years would I have guessed it that Mr Mackeson could bowl ’em out with his nib as well as his yorkers! “Owzat!”’ On the strength of the first book I’m currently writing the life story of this old guy Alfred, who lives on the edge of Hampstead Heath with his younger – though not by much – boyfriend, Roy. I go, he reminisces about his younger days, I tape it, jot notes, and by next week I write it up into a narrative. Roy’s the son of some Canadian steel tycoon, and he pays me a weekly retainer fee. It helps pay the rent and the wine bars.
You could get lost in these north-east London streets. I was half-lost myself. They curve around themselves in cul-de-sacs and crescents and groves. A few months ago I spent the night bonking the Welsh Ladies Kickboxing Champion in a caravan somewhere beyond Hammersmith. She’d said that the whole of London seemed like one vast rat’s maze to her. I’d said yes, but what if the rats happened to like being in the maze?
The leaves are covering up the cracks in the pavement. When I was a kid I could lose myself for hours kicking through fallen leaves, while avoiding dog turds and cracks. I used to be superstitious, but I’m not any more. I used to be a Christian, but I’m not one of those any more either. Then I was a Marxist. I used to wait with my cadre leader outside Queensway Tube station and ask people what they thought about the Bosnian Question. Of course, most people shrug you off. ‘I see, sir, no comment is it?’ I cringe to think of it now.
I guess I’m not anything much these days, apart from older. A part-time Buddhist, maybe.
I remembered to worry about Poppy’s period. A condom had burst on us, when was it? Ten days ago. Her period is due sometime at the end of next week . . . Give it another week, due to stress incurred by waiting for it . . . That’s two weeks before panic starts knocking, and three weeks before I let it in. Oh w
ell. India would love a little brother to play with. And when, in twenty years time, a professor of philosophy asks him ‘Why do you exist?’ he can toy with his nose-ring and answer, ‘rugged lust and ruptured rubber’. Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the condom shelf he wouldn’t be/won’t be sitting there. Unmix that conditional and smoke it.
Of course, I might be sterile. Now that really would be annoying. All that money wasted on unnecessary condoms. Well, there’s been AIDS to worry about, I suppose. Highbury playing fields. I’ve almost escaped. I like the Victorian skyline, and I like the pigeons flying through the tunnels of trees. Teenagers smoking on the swings. Last time I was here was bonfire night, with Poppy and India. It was the first time India had seen fireworks. She took in the spectacle with royal dignity, but kept talking about them for days. She’s a very cool kid, like her mother.
It’ll be bonfire night again, soon. You can see your breath. When I was a kid I used to pretend I was a locomotive. What kid doesn’t? Old men are walking their labradors across the muddy turf. There are young fathers on the pathways, teaching their kids how to ride their bikes without stabilisers. Some of these fathers are younger than me. I bet those are their BMWs. Me, I walk everywhere. That’s Tony Blair’s old house. A postman emptying a post-box. Walking past these old terraced houses is like browsing down a shelf of books. A student’s pad, a graphic designer’s studio, a family with their kitchen done out in primary colours and pictures from school fridge-magneted onto the fridge. An antiquarian’s study. A basement full of toys – a helicopter going round and round and round. A huntin’, shootin’, buggerin’ living room with paintings and fittings that clear their throats and say ‘burgle this house!’ to all the people trudging past to the Arsenal and Finsbury Park Unemployment Centres. Offices of obscure support groups, watchdog headquarters and impotent trade unions. Three men in black suits stride past, turning down Calabria Road, one speaking into a cell phone, another carrying a briefcase. What are they doing here on a Saturday? Must be estate agents. How come they end up with that life, and I end up with this one? I could have been a lawyer, or an accountant, or a whatever you have to be to afford a house around Highbury playing fields, too, if I had wanted to. I was adopted by middle-class parents in Surrey, I went to a good school. I got a job in a city firm. I was twenty-two and I was taking Prozac for breakfast. I had my very own shrink. I wince to think of the money I paid him to tell me what the matter was. When I told him I’d been adopted his eyes lit up! He’d done his PhD in adopted kids. But I discovered the answer myself in the end. I had stopped taking plunges. I don’t mean risks: I mean plunges, the uprooting and throwing of oneself into something entirely new.
