by John Harvey
‘You motherfucking lawyers,’ he said, as he stood over me rubbing his right hand where the knuckles were bleeding.
‘Noth uh law-uh,’ I said as best I could through the blood and broken teeth. ‘Youff . . . been . . . thirved,’ I added with as much finality as I could muster, and I waved at the papers on the table.
The bartender was bending over me now. ‘You want me to call the cops?’ he asked and I waved him off. It would take too much time, I had a train to catch, and besides there was always the chance the cops would find some way to put me in jail for the whole thing.
The blonde woman was out of the bathroom and was wrapping a paper towel around the doctor’s hand. I leaned up on one elbow. The bartender gave me a towel and some ice, and I held it to my face. My ears were ringing and my vision was a little bad, but I could see that the doctor was deciding what he should do next. It was clear I wasn’t going to fight him and it didn’t appear that anyone in the bar was going to be a sympathetic ear for the story of his ugly divorce. So he kicked me once in the ribs and walked out the door.
‘Hey!’ the bartender yelled. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he said and went behind the bar reaching for the phone. ‘That’s just too fucking much.’
I pulled myself up and sat at the table. The doctor hadn’t taken the papers but it didn’t matter. He’d been served. I would mail the subpoena back to the court and they would take care of the rest. I had done my part here in Talkeetna in the shadow of the Great One.
I waited for the cops to come and start the whole new tangle of words that would eventually end in Dr Holebrook pleading to fourth-degree assault and enrolling in anger management classes. But here’s the strange part. As I waited for all that to start, I was suddenly in a perfectly good mood. I was not anxious and I wasn’t dreaming of somewhere else. I could see things in the room I hadn’t noticed when I walked in: the dust motes floating on the shafts of light, the fine smear of a bruise across the bottom of the blonde woman’s neck.
I’ve never been smacked like that before and I had always worried about what it would feel like. I realise now that I was having a light-headed shock reaction, but at the time I was surprised to be enjoying the emptiness in my head and the veil of blue lights drifting through my vision. I have been yelled at and threatened. I’ve been in loud little scuffles. I’ve even been shot with a high-powered rifle. But I had always avoided a sucker punch. Now my head was ringing like an empty wineglass and instead of being depressed about it I was exhilarated.
While the cops stood around in their creaking leather belts talking to me and taking pictures, I watched them with a mild disinterest. They brought the doctor back and talked to him outside by the cars, and now the doctor looked smaller, embarrassed, quite a bit deflated. It was beginning to dawn on him that the satisfaction he gained from punching me was going to be short-lived.
We were on opposite trajectories, of course. Later my bruises would be dark purple and I would long to eat a meal without wincing with pain. Later, too, my own anger would take hold, even to the point of filing a civil case of my own against Dr Holebrook to recover the cost of the dental reconstruction. But all of that was just another tangle of words which I wouldn’t be entering for a few more weeks. Just then, I was happy. I had served the papers and I was going to be able to ride the train back south through the delirious sunshine toward the coast. I thought about the train ride and the doctor, and about what the old gnostics would have felt climbing up Denali, where there was no God in those muddy little streams, and none in the alpine either. And earlier in the day when Dr Holebrook had been laughing and celebrating at the top of North America’s tallest peak, God would have only been that little thread of an idea the doctor had pinched between his thumb and forefinger but on which he could never quite gain purchase.
As I sat at the table in the bar I kept hearing a bell ringing and I felt as if some war was over. I couldn’t remember my childhood, and that was fine. Everything that had ever happened to me seemed from another time anyway, a time before the war, when trouble was brewing but I hadn’t been paying enough attention.
Now I seemed to be paying attention. When I walked across the little park to get on the train the cottonwood blooms drifted all around me, sparkling like planets and I held the frothy pink towel against my mouth. I thought about the doctor and I knew he was feeling bad. The thrill of his mountaineering accomplishment was gone now. He was feeling bad about being back in the world of lawyers and civil complaints. He was feeling bad about having to talk to the cops and he might even have been feeling bad about punching me in the mouth. But I didn’t care. As I grabbed on to the handrail and swung up into the train I knew that I loved the poor son of a bitch who had clambered up those cliffs. I loved him like gravity, like sunlight, like a mountain.
GEEZERS
Brian Thompson
When his brother-in-law arrived, Harry Tolman was watching afternoon racing. From behind the curtains he studied Cliff locking the doors to his motor and then remembering his fags and having to open up again. Motor. Harry shrugged. Walk like that, talk like that: it was bred in the bone. Only the elderly said motor or fags these days. As if to prove his point an incautious movement of his arm produced that sudden jolt a junior doctor at the hospital had described to him as a deterioration of the brachial nerve. Or somesuch. He winced as he walked to let Cliffie in. The two men embraced without warmth.
‘Let me say, straight off and before everything else, how choked everbody still is about Jean,’ Cliff said. ‘Even now, even after all this time.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘I tried to put into words how we all felt at the funeral, Harry, but you were out with the fairies that day and no mistake.’
‘If you say so,’ Harry said. He walked into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.
Jean, through her brother Cliff, had been his last connection to that wise-guy London thing and after she died he all too willingly let it drop. He had not been up the Smoke for a six-month and then only to drink at pubs where he knew he could not be recognised. Came home on the early evening train.
The seaside bungalow they stood in now was Jean’s choice of a nice place to live, just as the perennials in the flower borders were hers. Harry ate from plates she had chosen, slept under the duvet she had selected from the catalogue. Her clothes were still in the wardrobe. That was the story. She was his woman, he was her man.
That was the story and what the neighbours had not seen with their own eyes they invented. Harry Tolman was that nice man at 32 whose wife had died so suddenly. Kept himself to himself, had an unexpectedly flat belly and strong forearms, looked sixty, could be younger, could be older. A former soldier, perhaps. Politely spoken, but with that characteristic cockney croak. A one-time market trader, maybe.
Cliffie drummed his fingernails on the kitchen worktop. ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’ he asked.
‘Let me guess. You’re in trouble.’
‘Big time. But I mean big time.’
Harry smiled to himself. ‘Now don’t get me all excited, Cliff.’
‘My hand to God,’ his brother-in-law muttered.
‘So? What do you want, money?’
‘Be realistic,’ Cliffie snapped, with enough sudden bitterness in his voice to make Harry glance up from the kettle and take notice. ‘Would I ask you for money? Am I stupid?’
‘Then it’s business.’
‘I am asking a favour of you.’
His nervousness was beginning to annoy Harry. When he saw that, Cliff ducked his head in acknowledgement. Licked his lips. ‘This, then. You put your motor through the Tunnel, buzz off to France, drive to a meet with some lads we have business with there, deliver a certain package, money changes hands. And that’s it.’
‘What’s in the package?’ Harry asked.
But his brother-in-law had exhausted his small stock of guile for the moment and took his tea out on to the lawn, the set of his back and shoulders indicating a sour respon
se to sea-breezes and distant gulls.
Harry joined him. ‘So, what’s in the package?’ he repeated.
‘I told you, it’s a business thing,’ his brother-in-law said far, far too lightly.
They walked down to the sea together, hands plunged in pockets. It was one of those calm spring days when the grey of the water stretched all the way to the horizon and then seemed to curl upwards into sky. There was nothing to look at and no trick of the imagination could invent France, less than thirty miles away.
‘Come on, Harry, give me a break,’ Cliffie mumbled after another few minutes of uncomfortable silence. ‘I more or less told them you’re the man for the job. I mean you wasn’t named, I never named you, blah-blah-blah, but it’s all down to me to see it right, see it goes off.’
‘Is it drugs?’
Cliffie burst out laughing from pure nervous release. ‘Drugs?’ he cackled incredulously.
Harry threw his ice-cream cone into a wire bin and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. A total of eighteen years in prison, the last six in Parkhurst, had much altered his views on the life of crime. The sheer boredom of being banged up with other dreamers was worse than actual death: nowadays he lived on his pension and a little occasional delivery driving. In the old days he had a certain quiet class; as, for example, tooling Fat Tony up to Birmingham along the M1 in a stolen Aston Martin, establishing what turned out to be an unshakeable alibi and, as Tony said admiringly, a land speed record.
‘What do you drive now?’ Cliffie asked, punting him a double voddie in the Carpenter’s.
‘Nothing fancy.’
‘Good. That’s good. Look, I don’t want to put no pressure on you, Harry, but it’s my arse if I cock this up.’
‘How much is in it for me?’
‘A grand,’ Cliffie suggested, looking doubtful.
‘And what’s your end?’
‘Jesus, Harry, you don’t need to know all that. These guys I’m talking about – the geezers who want the job done – would have your balls off just for coughing in the wrong place. What I can tell you? Just that I’m bearing the heavy end of the load here, know what I’m saying?’
He glanced round the perfectly empty pub and then mouthed a single word: ‘Russians.’
If he had said his principals were the Band of the Irish Guards Harry could not have been more surprised. He stared at his brother-in-law, his thinning hair and faintly blue lips, the over-expensive suit hanging from sagging shoulders.
‘Who has the package now?’
‘Not relevant. I bring it to you. Then you drive it over. You know, just dead casual. It’ll be in the boot. A bit of cathedral bashing if you’re asked where you’re off to. Just a little spring break.’
‘How big is this thing?’
Cliffie hesitated. He brushed his lapel distractedly. ‘I need you to say yes before I go back to town. Then the final arrangements are made and then it goes down.’
‘When?’
‘When I tell you.’
Walking back up the road, Harry pointed out several plants he’d thought of growing in his own garden.
But Cliffie was jumpy. ‘Nice, I’m sure, but I’m seeing Bungalow City here, Harry. And that’s all I’m seeing.’
‘Where d’you drink these days?’ Harry asked him, far too casually.
‘Some things don’t change,’ his brother-in-law said.
But then again, some things change very nicely. Where before there had been a timber yard opposite the Bear and Staff in Stockwell, there was now a supermarket and its generous car-park. Harry sat munching a salt-beef, watching the pub door through binoculars. Cliffie was presently with a heavy-looking blonde in her forties. Two nights running they parked up round the corner and then walked in single file into the green painted pub Harry remembered very well from the days of his pomp.
On the third night they were inside, presumably boring the arse off their chosen cronies, when a black Lexus pulled up and a huge guy got out to fetch Cliffie. The poor chump actually came to the kerb to talk to the passenger in the Lexus with a v and t in his hand, a reckless piece of bravado. The conversation was short and Cliffie was still making his points when the car pulled away into traffic. He stood there looking lost. Harry felt sorry for him.
Cliffie followed the Lexus and Harry followed after, tooling along listening to the BBC World Service, a bit of a thing with him in recent years. The meet took place in a furniture repository, very Russian in its forlorn dilapidations. Harry watched through glasses from the perimeter fence of a skip hire company.
The Lexus people carried out a white parcel wrapped in gaffer tape and stood it on end. One of them lifted the hem and showed Cliffie the nature of the goods. A peachy white bum flared for the moment in the beams from passing cars. There was some jolly laughter.
‘Where was you last night?’ Cliffie shouted. ‘I told you to stay by the phone.’
‘Got the maps?’
‘I said to stay by the phone. You can’t mess with these Russian geezers. Now listen. The goods are in the back of my motor and I’m going to put them in yours. And then you’re going to drive to the spot marked X. Tomorrow. Have you got that? Not the day after, not some time over the weekend. Tomorrow.’
‘Are the goods perishable?’ Harry asked, just for the pleasure of seeing his brother-in-law sweat. Then he relented and put on his unlaced shoes. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
‘You stay right where you are. Here’s the map. Read the map.’
There really was a spot marked X. It lay less than a hundred kilometres from the coast, close to the Rouen-Paris motorway. Cliffie went over the plan, such as it was, again and again, passed across two hundred in notes and (a thoughtful touch) fifty in Euros for the petrol and a cup of tea and that.
‘You make the switch, right, and they’ll give you a grocery bag of dosh. Bank wrappers, all that.’
‘Do I count it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Cliffie said bitterly. ‘It’ll all be kosher, believe me. They are messing with people who could start a third world war. They know that. You’re just the bloody messenger. They ain’t going to cross nobody.’
‘Well, give me a clue. How much dosh?’
‘One hundred thousand in US dollars,’ Cliffie said. ‘Which is like chump change to these geezers. Soon as you got it, you bell me, I’ll meet you back here at the ranch.’
After he’d left, Harry walked into his garage via the door in the kitchen, opened the boot to his car and studied the package. He tore off some yards of tape, rolled back the fabric and touched a bare foot. It was warm. Just behind the ankle was an artery and he held his thumb to it. Whoever was inside the wrapping was drugged to the eyeballs, doubtless, but comfortable. In the circumstances. He went back to the kitchen, lit a small cigar and sat listening to the fridge.
Along that part of the French coast are dunes and marshes. Next to a rainswept golf course there is a lopsided clapboard property painted black, the kind of place only an Englishman would consider taking on as a commercial proposition. It is labelled MOT L. Derek Jukes greeted Harry like an old mate, which after all he had once been.
‘How’s Ricky?’ Harry asked, out of courtesy.
‘That little fairy! It was too quiet for him here. What it is, Harry, I’ve put you round the back, there’s like a row of three but two is boarded up. It’s the salt. Do you need to put the car under cover?’
‘No, mate. I’ll be out of here by three. Four at the latest.’
He passed across Cliffie’s two hundred inside an Oxfam envelope.
‘Good boy,’ Derek said absently. ‘I’ve had the old paraffin heater on all night. You’ll find it warm enough.’
It was, in fact, stifling. Harry laid the package on the bed and cut it open with a Stanley knife. Inside was a girl in her early twenties. As he had imagined, she was naked and none too clean – the smell of her was overpowering enough to make him open the window. He checked her pulse. It was slow but regular.
&nbs
p; Derek knocked at the door with a little tin box of works. He took in the situation at a glance, nodded, raised one of the girl’s eyelids. ‘She’s only a kid,’ he murmured.
‘Safe to risk it?’ Harry asked.
‘Run the shower. She’s going to be spewing her ring for an hour or so. Don’t worry, mate. I am a former medical orderly of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. You can’t get better, this time of the morning. I take it what we have here is battlefield conditions.’
‘You’re a straight-up bloke, Derek,’ Harry said.
‘Not exactly, not as such.’
He took out the syringe and shooed Harry into the bathroom.
She was called Marika. Passing through international frontiers as a comatose parcel was a bit of a thing with her – she had been abducted by Cliffie’s set of geezers three months earlier as part payment of a gambling debt incurred in Düsseldorf, where she had been unhappy, but not desperate, so to speak. This bold stroke had got up the nose of the Dusseldorf Russian, whose girl she had been, and so far three people had been killed in the ensuing business negotiations.
‘Well, now it’s all back to square one,’ Harry suggested.
‘You are crazy,’ Marika observed with Slavic despair.
‘You get to go home – Düsseldorf anyway – and the London geezers get their debt paid in cash. Where’s the prob?’
‘For something so simple they have to do me up like a turkey? Why not I fly to Düsseldorf? Why they need you?’
Harry considered. ‘Because when they get you back, they’re going to kill you.’
‘For sure.’
All this while she sat on the bed naked, accepting little spoonfuls of a lightly boiled egg. She seemed to sense that Harry and naked women had not been strangers in the past: her movements and gestures were entirely unselfconscious.
‘You don’t want to know why they kill me?’
