Blue Rondo

by John Lawton

  She didn’t, but it struck Troy as a minor miracle. This was a woman who had danced naked on the rim of hell for thirty-five years.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you, Freddie. But the fact of the matter is I’ve been turned down for younger women twice in one week. My life is in pieces. My children don’t want to know me. I can’t even begin to think how I’ll tell them if Lawrence opts for divorce. Dammit, Freddie, I’m fifty years old and there’s no one in my life. No one. A loyal, decent man has left me for one of your cast-offs – it is over between you and her, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Troy lied. When was it ever over?

  ‘And a shit of a man I shouldn’t let near me with a bargepole, who I only want because I want to be wanted, treats me like a rag he’s wiped his thingie on and thrown away. Jesus Christ! I keep asking myself, what have I done with my life? What have I done to deserve this? To have it all come down to this. What have I done?’

  She sobbed now without restraint, slid off the chair to her knees and puddled on the floor. Troy gently lifted her up, and sat her on his lap, much as she used to do with him when he was nine or ten and she was fifteen and he’d grazed or cut or bruised himself.

  It was like watching a ship approach on the horizon. Troy could see. And seeing it so clearly did not offer any way out. It had that same sense of inevitability. Heading for them inexorably and, however indistinct, never less than obvious. Masha slumped on him, wept into his chest. A woman several times larger than life now seeming smaller than she was, curling up like a child, her feet not touching the floor. Then her head lifted and Troy saw the wind hit the sails, felt the rigging stretch taut, and saw her face approach his, a close and blinding blur. She kissed him, he kissed her back – foundered on the barren skerry of her want.

  Masha fumbled. Clumsy as a teenager. His shirt tore, buttons pinging off like bullets; her knickers snagged on her heels and she ripped them off with one hand without bothering to look. She fell back on the floor, he banged an elbow and pulled back, wincing. Masha locked both hands behind his neck and drew him down.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I have to have someone right now. Please.’

  She wriggled and scrambled until she had her skirt round her waist, his trousers pushed below his arse, his cock in her hand ready and far too willing.

  He found he had literary expectations of incest. An arsenal of clunky metaphors mostly to do with looking-glasses and cameras, all telling him what he was supposed to feel in the midst of the outrageous. But it didn’t feel outrageous. It felt like the culmination of a long seduction his sisters had begun on him before he was ten. They’d dressed and undressed in front of him, bathed in front of him, fucked all his friends, bored him with the details of every love affair they’d ever had. All, from the vantage-point of being flattened on her breasts and joined humping at the groin, seeming like a mixture of flirtation and proxy-sex. He wasn’t outraged at himself or her, simply because it felt as though they’d done this all their childhood days. And what was childhood but a journey without maps? What was the adult life but the piecing together of the jigsaw of childhood into a map, into the illusion of coherence? It felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.

  Part of his mind was asking when the searing light of common sense might return. As it usually did, one split second after the betrayal that was orgasm and ejaculation? But it didn’t. Once he had recovered an ounce of energy he took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet. She cast off the rest of her clothes, with not a hint of coyness, stepped out of her high heels, stood naked in the light of a forty-watt reading lamp while he kicked off his. Then they went upstairs and fucked again.

  The cricket sat upon his shoulder. He flicked it off with a finger.

  § 32

  It was still dark. Not quite dawn. Masha was standing, pulling her hair out of her eyes with one hand, vaguely looking for something with only moonlight to search by. ‘My clothes?’

  ‘Downstairs. Where we left them.’

  She was not hiding. At least, not from him. Not yet. She stood, five foot two in bare feet, stark naked, half in shadow and half out, looking back at him and said, ‘Downstairs?’

  ‘Downstairs. On the floor.’

  ‘On the floor?’

  ‘We did it on the floor. We came upstairs when you said your back ached.’

  ‘Did we?’

  She went down to gather up her clothes. Any minute now he expected to hear the door slam. With that, reality would surely return. But she came back upstairs, laid her clothes across the chair and got back into bed. Side by side, looking straight ahead not at him.

  ‘I really hate having to wear yesterday’s knickers. It makes staying over anywhere such a drag. At least I’ve spared myself that. They’re ripped to shreds. Sasha always carries an extra pair in her handbag, but I’ve never really known if that’s her idea of forward planning or an advert.’

  ‘Let’s not mention Sasha,’ he said.

  ‘She wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I doubt many people would.’

  ‘No – I mean she wouldn’t understand being left out.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  There was a pause as Masha lay on her back and arranged her hands, the heels of each upon a breast, fingers pointing heavenward, tips touching like the buttresses in a church roof, thinking. ‘You know, Freddie, I don’t think we should ever tell anyone. Not anyone. Not ever.’ Then she said, ‘Would you just hold me? That’s all. Just hold me.’

  He wrapped an arm round her. Ah, well, he thought, there were worse things in life than fucking your sister. Weren’t there?

  § 33

  Troy lay awake watching the dawn light bounce off the wall of the building opposite his window. Masha was sleeping now, her breathing regular as a metronome. He caught the phone at its first ring.

  Jack. Again.

  ‘There’s been another. Much closer to home. Adam and Eve Court.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s an alley behind a pub in Wells Street. Leads from Eastcastle Street to Oxford Street. Shall I pick you up?’

  ‘No. I’ll walk over. I’ll be there in about a quarter of an hour.’

  It was so familiar. And a shock to think he had not been abroad in the city at this time of day in ages. It was London bleached out, its day only just begun. Winos around Soho Square, growling at him incomprehensibly, a crazed monologuist, poised flamingo-like on one leg in Great Chapel Street, pointing a finger at Troy and calling him a ‘sinner’, to no denial from Troy, prostitutes in Berwick Street smiling at him, a beat copper in Poland Street who recognised him and saluted, and then the crush of police cars and detectives in Oxford Street at the narrow entrance to the unlikely named Adam and Eve Court. Once he saw it he knew it. He’d just never known it had such a momentous name.

  They let him pass with murmured good-mornings, yawning and sighing. For a second Troy wondered if he smelt of sex, then realised these men had probably been up all night and reeked of beer and fags themselves. Jack’s car was parked face on at the top of the alley, headlights on dip to light up the court better than the day could manage at that hour. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

  Kolankiewicz said, ‘For once I cannot blame him. This one is messy.’

  He lifted a rubber sheet. Rearranged by someone with a passing knowledge of human anatomy, these bloody joints of meat might pass as a facsimile of something that had once been a living, breathing human being. This one had not been dead as long as the other: it was wet with blood and guts. The smell of it smothered beer and fags. Smothered sex. Smothered everything except the stench of vomit when Wildeve returned. ‘Sorry, chaps. I’ll be fine now. Have you got anywhere?’

  Troy said nothing, Kolankiewicz said, ‘It looks much the same. Male. About twenty. Big. Put Humpty back together and I’d say about five eleven or six foot. Big in the chest and arms, plenty of muscle, not much under fifteen stones. And just like the last, no clothes, no head, no hands . . . and no cock that
we’ve found. And taken apart with a mechanical saw.’

  Kolankiewicz draped the rubber sheet over the remains.

  ‘Semen?’ Troy asked, talking to Kolankiewicz but watching Wildeve.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where was the body?’

  ‘In dustbins, with the night’s rubbish from the pub. Binmen found it about an hour ago,’ said Jack.

  ‘Then it is different from the last. They tried to conceal the last.’

  Kolankiewicz said, ‘Is it not concealment of a sort?’

  Troy said. ‘No. I think we were meant to find this one.’

  And Jack said, ‘I agree. They’re making no effort to hide it. In fact, they’re taking the piss. They’re holding up two fingers to us, and yelling, “Catch us if you can.” ’

  They left Kolankiewicz to it. Driving back towards the Tottenham Court Road, Troy said, ‘Taking the piss? Isn’t that what you said about Brock getting blown up?’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ Jack replied.

  When Troy got home Masha had gone.

  § 34

  Troy was pootling – he could term it no better – through a version of Erroll Garner’s version of ‘I’ll Remember April’. The left hand still baffled, slam-dunking down so solidly he couldn’t believe it wasn’t a clenched fist. The telephone rang.

  ‘Hiya, Topcop.’

  ‘How did you get this number, Mr Rork?’ Rork said, ‘I knew you had me down for some kind of dummy . . .’

  Correct.

  ‘. . . but I’m not such a shmuck I can’t work an angle and get hold of an unlisted number.’

  ‘The embassy?’

  ‘Ask me no questions Topcop . . .’

  Still a shmuck.

  ‘. . . and I’ll tell you—’

  ‘Cut the crap, as you Americans are so fond of saying, and tell me what you want.’

  ‘What I want is to take you out to lunch and do you a favour.’

  ‘You mean you want to pick my brains?’

  ‘Jeez . . . Did a bear eat your nuts in the night? Ease up, Mr Troy.’

  ‘OK. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the pub opposite the end of your alley. I figured we could go back to the diner and have egg ’n’ chips again.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I’ve a better idea. A much better idea.’

  Out in St Martin’s Lane Troy managed to beckon to Rork and flag down a cab with a single gesture.

  ‘Where to, guv?’

  ‘Do you know a good eel-and-mash?’

  ‘Watney Market, guv. Pete Wallis’s Eel Pie.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy, for reasons he could not fathom. ‘Not Watney Market. What’s the name of the one in Whitechapel? The Mile End Road.’

  ‘If there’s one there’s ’alf a dozen.’

  ‘Frank . . . Frank. . .?’

  ‘Frank Tritten’s. You mean ole Tritt-Trott’s.’

  ‘Why so?’ asked Rork, settling back in the cab.

  ‘A culinary delight.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Let me surprise you. The journey should take about twenty minutes. You can tell me what’s on your mind.’

  ‘Nah. Let’s have a working lunch. I prefer to do business over lunch.’

  ‘Have you been busy? I know you went to see Christy. I saw you there.’

  ‘And I saw you, Mr Troy. But it’s who else I saw that figures. All in good time. I shall – what’s the word? – relish the adventure. We goin’ east right? I’ve never seen the East End. During the war I used to listen to Ed Murrow. All those planes, all those bombs. All those plucky Cockneys. Got to admire those guys.’

  ‘That,’ said Troy, ‘was a long time ago.’

  Rork gazed out of the window. Every so often he’d point to the obvious and ask, ‘St Paul’s, right?’, ‘Tower of London, right?’, or variations on that theme.

  The cab pulled up in front of Frank Tritten’s Fish and Mash in the Mile End Road, halfway between Whitechapel and Stepney Green Underground stations. Troy paid off the driver. Rork stared at the sign over the window.

  ‘Is this, like, the native cuisine?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

  They took seats. A wooden booth – a table as solid as a butcher’s slab, a gleam of moisture across its swirling veins – a steamy smell of fish in the air. Rork sloughed off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves with the look of a practised trencherman before he’d even glanced at the menu.

  ‘Anything that’s de rigger?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think one should look at the ladies while they eat,’ said Troy.

  They had arrived as a group of four old ladies were finishing their eels. It looked to Troy to be a weekly outing, a ritual they had probably begun as young women at the turn of the century. They were dressed as only old women could be, in the fanciful hats and long skirts of the Edwardian era. Perched on the edge of modernity, for ever lost in a sunnier, bleached-out age buried under two world wars. Gumshoe could not resist and turned to look just as the old ladies, one after another, whipped out their false teeth, spat them into their handkerchiefs and sucked, toothless and gummy, on bones of eel, cheeks collapsing like tents in a blizzard.

  ‘I guess not, but I meant more what’s de rigger on the menu. What’s unmissable. Now – what would you recommend?’

  ‘The eels,’ said Troy. ‘I can definitely recommend the jellied eels.’

  ‘You been to this neck o’ the woods before?’

  ‘My first beat as a uniformed copper, 1936.’

  ‘Mine was South Bronx. Same year.’

  ‘Or a plate of whelks. . .’

  ‘Y’know I’m kinda peckish. Great word that – peckish. Sounds like something Charles Dickens made up.’

  ‘You’re thinking of Pecksniff. In Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit.’

  ‘Could be . . . whatever . . . but it sounds just like what it means. Peckish. I’m peckish, so maybe I’ll have both.’ He turned to the waitress – ordered ‘like big helpings’ with three rounds of bread and butter. ‘An’ you?’ he said to Troy.

  ‘Oh, I’m still recuperating. You know. Invalid food. Just a bowl of vegetable soup and a cup of tea.’

  Troy was going to enjoy this. He’d never met anyone not born to it who could get through a bowl of jellied eels or a plate of whelks. Most non-Londoners were put off simply by the appearance. Most wouldn’t even taste them. He’d been hoodwinked into trying them his first day in Stepney by his old mentor Sergeant Bonham. A sergeant and two old coppers giggling into their tea while an upper-crust rookie choked on one of the most disgusting textures ever to foul his palate. Salt and rubber. Never again.

  ‘Like you said, Topcop, I been busy.’ Rork pulled a small folder of photographs from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Which implies that Mrs Cormack has been busy.’

  ‘Yep. But not as predicted. See for yourself.’

  He fanned out the photographs across the marble. Troy took out his new reading-glasses, an inevitable and he hoped less than permanent consequence of his injuries, fought off self-consciousness and sifted through the pile. Some simply showed Kitty shopping in either Bond Street or somewhere very like it. Running through her husband’s millions. None showed her with Vince Christy. One had Kitty and Troy emerging from Goodwin’s Court into Bedfordbury, at which point Gumshoe seemed to have given up on them, for the majority showed her with one man. Getting out of a cab, emerging from the Quo Vadis, entering the Gay Hussar, on the steps of Claridge’s, flagging a cab outside the Embassy club, embracing in the street, a stolen kiss by London lamplight . . .

  ‘You see my point?’

  ‘Impossible not to.’

  ‘You know this palooka?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  The waitress bought Troy the time he craved. Slapped a fishy feast in front of Rork and one small bowl of synthetic-looking vegetable soup in front of Troy. Rork delayed the inevitable. Swallowed a slice of bread almost whole,
belched delicately into his fist and, as he reached for his fork, said, ‘So?’

  Troy hesitated. Waiting for the first quiver of revulsion on Gumshoe’s face. Gumshoe bit down, Gumshoe munched and Gumshoe smiled.

  ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. Tell me, Topcop, you ever eat gefilte fish? Me, I’ll eat anything. Gefilte fish, chop suey, shish kebab. Anything. Only thing I can’t abide is pretzels – cardboard with salt on. My ex-wife says I have a stomach like a basement boiler. But, like I was saying, you try gefilte fish and food holds no terrors for you. Sits on the belly like lead shot. This, now, this is good. Do they have places like this in Soho? I could eat like this every day.’

  Gumshoe one – Troy nil, thought Troy.

  ‘You know what it needs?’ Rork was saying, whirling around in search of a waitress. ‘Just a dash of horseradish. Not the white, the red. The red horseradish would suit to perfection.’

  Troy accepted defeat politely. ‘If you want gefilte fish, try Bloom’s about a hundred yards down the street. Now, you were saying?’

  ‘Oh, yeah . . . mmmm . . . man, this is. . .’

  If Rork had had false teeth he, too, would have been spitting them into his hanky the better to suck on the bones.

  ‘Just get on with it. I can survive without a running commentary.’

  ‘Sure. Whatever. This guy. This guy she sees all the time. That is, when she ain’t seeing you. You know him?’

  ‘Yes. I know him.’

  ‘Un-huh?’

  ‘Daniel Ryan. About Kate’s age. They grew up together. Not half a mile from where we’re sitting now.’

  ‘Like, old flames?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘No. Not like me.’

  ‘Suit yourself. What can you tell me about him?’

  Troy wondered if this was perspicacity or chance phrasing – that Rork had not simply asked, ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s no “palooka”, as you put it. He’s one of our most successful boxing promoters. Perhaps not a national figure, but certainly a London face.’