Ray arrived on time, wearing several layers of unmatched pastel linen and tasseled loafers without socks, looking like a man on a permanent vacation. If Zak had been trying to impress a new customer, he’d have worn something more formal, possibly tweedy, but maybe that was why Zak was just a shop assistant.
“What happened to your face this time?” said Ray. “Is that a rash or something?”
“Yeah, I’m kind of allergic to all kinds of things: cacti, dynamite, you name it.”
Ray was prepared to take it as a joke, and he didn’t need to understand his employees’ jokes.
“You look like crap anyway,” said Ray. “And this customer of yours is late.”
“Barely,” said Zak, looking at his watch. “Don’t worry. He’ll be here. He’s very reliable.”
There was already one customer in the store, in the back room, a woman in baggy pants and combat boots, a serious-looking camera slung over her shoulder, and her big dark eyes were looking out through ornate tortoiseshell glasses at an early map of America, one that had California depicted as an island, its northernmost part designated New Albion.
There was a newly framed item propped up on the floor, its face toward the side of Zak’s desk.
“What’s that?” Ray asked.
“A little something I picked up,” said Zak. “I thought you might like it. It’s not really a map, it’s more of a blueprint.”
Zak picked up the frame and turned it around so McKinley could see its design, its muted colors, its simple, schematized lines, that might be thought to look like an amoeba and its nucleus, or perhaps a fried egg. Ray made a wet noise deep in his throat to convey disgust, anger, contempt: a whole legend of resentments.
“Why would I want that?” he said. “The Telstar’s never been anything but trouble. Every day I own it I lose money.”
“Well, you’ve done your best, Ray. You got rid of the original architect, you got rid of the mayor’s right-hand man. What more could you do?”
McKinley’s face suddenly looked rather less carefree. Harshly, but quietly enough that he hoped the customer in the back room wouldn’t hear, he said, “I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s this buyer’s name, anyway?”
“Moore,” said Zak. There was no need to make up a false name. “I don’t know him very well. But he means business.”
“Maybe we can unload the Jack Torry map on him.”
“I doubt it,” said Zak.
“Get it out anyway. We’ll have the map case on your desk; that’ll pique his interest. Then you can roll it out with a big flourish. Go on.”
Zak hesitated a long time before he said, “It’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
Zak could see no point in lying. “I took it to Wrobleski.”
“I told you not to do that.”
“Yes, you did, Ray.”
“And what?” McKinley’s face opened up with anger and disbelief. “You let him keep it?”
“No. Wrobleski’s not in the market for maps anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he’s in a hole in the ground, one way or another.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wrobleski’s gone. Missing in action. His compound burned, his collection too.”
Ray McKinley considered this. It wasn’t the very worst bit of news he’d ever received. “But what happened to the fucking map?”
“Well, there was a lot of stuff going on in the compound. You know, women and tattoos.”
“No, I don’t know ‘women and tattoos.’ What are you talking about?”
“But you do, Ray. You know all about them.”
“What’s up with you, Zak? You come off your meds?”
Zak ignored that. He said, “At one time I thought it was Wrobleski who’d done the tattooing, but I don’t believe that anymore. And Wrobleski assumed it had to be Akim doing it, which was a reasonable assumption, because Akim was there when Wrobleski did the murders, and he helped him dispose of the bodies, so he had all the information he needed to make a map. So Akim could have done it, but he didn’t. Wrobleski was wrong. Akim was only the messenger, right?”
Ray flicked a glance toward the customer in the back room. Was she hearing all this? He said, “This isn’t the time or the place.”
Zak continued, “Well, it’ll have to do. Since Akim knew the details of Wrobleski’s murders, he was always in a position to rat him out. And I guess he ratted to you first. He told you all the dirty details so you could make use of them, didn’t he? You seen Akim lately, Ray? I think he’s another one who won’t be around much anymore.”
McKinley folded his hands extravagantly in front of him. He now looked like a man whose vacation had been irredeemably ruined. He said, “You know, I think it might be much better for your future health if you just shut the fuck up now.”
On cue, Marilyn, all feigned casualness, strolled through from the back room of Utopiates. Ray McKinley directed a professional smile in her direction, though it was less than full strength.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We have to close up the store now. My employee here is having a breakdown or something.”
“Too late for apologies, Ray,” said Marilyn.
He hesitated, looked at her guardedly.
“Do I know you?”
“Well, you put a leather hood over my head, so I can see why you might not remember my face. And you brought me here, didn’t you? You brought me to Utopiates, took me down to the basement, did the inking down there. This place gave me the creeps the first time I saw it. Instinct, I guess.”
“I don’t know what you two are playing at,” said Ray, “but it’s very dangerous.”
Ignoring this, Marilyn continued, “You paid Wrobleski to kill the architect of the Telstar, and then you marked his granddaughter with a map of the murder. That was pretty ugly of you, Ray.”
“Ah,” said Ray, “I think I’m beginning to see.” It took him a moment or two to grasp the full implications, but it sank in before too long. “Yes,” he said, “that was pretty sick of me, wasn’t it?” He did not mean it as an apology.
A car pulled up outside. It was a cheap, clean rental. Billy Moore got out quickly, to distance himself from this piece of junk he was forced to drive while his Cadillac was out of action, having sustained a little fire damage. He was inside the store before Ray had decided what his next move was, before he’d calculated how many moves he might have left.
“Ray,” said Zak, “let me introduce you to Mr. Moore.”
Another customer, another interruption. Ray had no idea if this was good or bad, and then he knew it was the latter. Billy’s right fist made dry, brittle, solemn contact with Ray’s chin. His head seemed to pull him backward, sprawling on his back across Zak’s desk. Then he was viciously scooped up, dragged into the back room, and tossed into a corner, where he landed brokenly, beneath the map of Greenland. Between them Billy and Zak tied Ray’s hands and feet with cord, but left his mouth free, to do some talking, no doubt to try to talk his way out of it.
“Come on, Ray,” said Zak, “we’ve worked out most of the story. Fill us in on the fine print.”
“I can do that,” Ray said. He showed a fine, glib pride as he started to explain. “This tattooing thing, it’s always been an interest of mine. I’d been doing it for years in an amateurish way, you know, just a leisure-time activity, cheap thrills, if I could find a more or less willing girl who’d let me work on her. I’m not saying I was any good. I knew I wasn’t. And I always had trouble knowing what design to use, but it was no big deal. I had no ambitions.
“And of course I knew Wrobleski—we go back a long way—and I knew what he did, and once in a while he did it for me. When you’re in real estate, there’s always somebody who needs killing. And in the beginning I thought I was better off not knowing the details, but then along comes Akim, who’s got one or two grievances against Wrobleski, and he wants to share, to give
me all the chapter and verse about what his boss does. He gets quite a kick out of describing it. You know, I’m not the only sick puppy in this story.
“And then, right, I have my brilliant idea. I like tattoos, I like maps, I especially like coded maps: I’ve found my subject. Akim describes events and I illustrate them, by putting a lousy tattooed map on the back of some random girl I pull in off the street, though okay, not so random in your case, Marilyn darling. Akim helped sometimes. Akim likes to watch. And that’s all it was, no big deal, no different from a couple of guys going out, having a beer, shooting some pool.
“And then I start having problems with Wrobleski. I ask him to do a simple job. And he won’t. I don’t like it when people say no to me. It’s the principle of the thing. I want to fuck with him. And I suppose I could have threatened to give an ‘anonymous tip-off’ to the cops, but I didn’t need to do that, did I? All I had to do was make sure Wrobleski knew the tattoos existed. And as fate would have it, my little sick friend Akim had been keeping an eye on the women. He knew where they were, knew where to find them again.”
Ray McKinley was not entirely surprised when Billy Moore kicked him a couple of times, once in each kidney.
“How did Wrobleski even find out?” Zak asked.
“Our Mr. Wrobleski had an occasional taste for prostitutes. Akim made the arrangements. Akim and I made sure he got a girl with a map of one of the murders on her back; I think her name was Laurel. He looked: he saw the map. Okay, it was a shitty map, and it was coded. But Wrobleski could decode it better than anybody else on earth. He could read the signs because he already knew what they meant. He realized that somebody knew his business, but he didn’t know who or how or why. And that bothered him. I liked it that way.”
“And how was this supposed to end?” said Zak.
“Wrobleski was supposed to kill the fucking mayor. If he’d done that in the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Billy Moore kicked Ray again, in the stomach, just to keep up his own morale. Ray McKinley seemed to be coughing up blood.
“So now you know,” said Ray thickly. “You can all sleep easier now. And where do we go from here? You want to call a cop? No. Why would you? Wrobleski’s gone. Akim’s gone. Old man Driscoll ain’t coming back. You don’t want a court case with a missing murderer and no bodies, do you? The real question is, and this is always the real question: what exactly do you want?”
It was not a question any of them had expected Ray to ask. They had expected denials, threats, perhaps pleading, but not this.
“I’m not unreasonable,” Ray said. “You know that, Zak. You want me to set you up in your own little shop, ‘Zak Webster: Map Seller to the Gentry’? Tell me what the price is. Tell me what these other two clowns want.” He turned to Billy: “Property, cars, drugs?”; and then to Marilyn: “Tattoo removal?”
“We want you to take a little trip,” said Marilyn. “Downstairs into the basement. We’ve got some women who are dying to meet you face-to-face.”
Ray McKinley started to say something, but Billy Moore grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him to his feet, and dragged him across to the other side of the room, tearing open the pale lime-green linen of his jacket in the process. Zak had opened the door that led to the basement, to another, different kind of underworld. Ray looked down the flight of steps, but could see only darkness at the bottom. Then he heard women’s voices, though he couldn’t make out any words. He could also hear a mechanical noise, an intermittent drone, a buzzing, the sound of a tattoo machine being brought to life.
“So much can go wrong when amateurs start tattooing,” said Marilyn. “They get carried away, scrawl obscenities all over your body, or your face, or your dick. And you know, a lot of beginners don’t care much about hygiene. There’s a lot of risk: blood poisoning, tetanus, hepatitis, toxic shock. You can imagine. But you won’t have to imagine.”
Billy Moore picked Ray up for the last time, one hand on his collar, one on his waistband, the weight evenly distributed, then tossed him forward, hard and fast, through the doorway, so he would have no chance of gaining a foothold as gravity pulled him down the steep decline of stairs. His legs and arms flailed, he grunted some indecipherable words, and then there was the sound of him hitting the bottom like a sack of root vegetables. A low, pale light flicked on, revealing female silhouettes, circling, homing in.
Zak closed the door to the basement. Then he closed and locked the store. He and Marilyn and Billy walked away. He felt no guilt. It was already well past closing time.
ALSO BY GEOFF NICHOLSON
FICTION
Gravity’s Volkswagen
The Hollywood Dodo
Bedlam Burning
Female Ruins
Flesh Guitar
Bleeding London
Footsucker
Everything and More
Still Life with Volkswagens
The Errol Flynn Novel
The Food Chain
Hunters and Gatherers
What We Did on Our Holidays
A Knot Garden
Street Sleeper
NONFICTION
Big Noises
Walking in Ruins
The Lost Art of Walking
Sex Collectors
Day Trips to the Desert
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geoff Nicholson’s debut novel, Street Sleeper, was short-listed for the Yorkshire Post First Work Award; Bleeding London was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award; Bedlam Burning was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and What We Did on Our Holidays was made into the movie Permanent Vacation. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Los Angeles.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Geoff Nicholson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nicholson, Geoff, 1953–
The city under the skin: a novel / Geoff Nicholson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-16904-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4299-5485-3 (ebook)
1. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6064.I225 C58 2014
823'.914—dc23
2013038778
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