Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (11 page)

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say, but before I can lever myself up completely Wally is scuttling on his way towards the door. I lean on my elbow for a while, staring at the slightly less darker patch where the curtains are. Outside on the landing there are the sounds of Wally presumably settling down for the night. I shake my head in the darkness, but of course that will have as much effect as a duck breaking wind on the water, a futile gesture in the surrounding darkness of the mountains, an unseen release to my feelings. I stay like that for a few minutes longer, then I lower my weary bones back onto the sheets and close my eyes.

I’m just nodding off when I’m brought back to the land of the living by a voice from the landing.

“Goodnight, Jack,” Wally says. “Anything you want, you know where I am.”

Chapter Seven

I
T
’
S RAINING
,
AND THERE
’
S
this delicious smell, a smell of frying fish and damp raincoats, and this terrific sound, the splashing of chip fat and the beating of rain on Akrill’s plate glass window. I’m back in Villiers Street and I’m only third in a full house Saturday-night queue and at home there’s Man waiting with the wireless tuned to Saturday Night Music Hall. The mixed sound of the beating rain and the splashing fat gets louder and louder and the heat from the chip machine gets hotter and then I wake up and I realise that the heat from the frying chips is the breath of Wally on my face and the frying sound is the hissing noise he’s making and maybe the chattering of his teeth could account for the noise of the rain, but I couldn’t be too sure about that, not that I really care because I’m much too preoccupied with taking hold of Wally by his scrawny neck prior to putting one on him, but I don’t get round to doing that because somehow the tone in Wally’s strangulated voice makes me hold off until I listen to what he has to say.

“Jack, for fuck’s sake,” he croaks, “Listen. There’s some fucker outside. What I mean is, some fucker’s trying to get in.”

In the darkness I squeeze my eyes tight shut as an aid to concentration. And when I’ve concentrated I say to him: “Listen, you fucking chancer. All you fucking well heard was the sound of your bottle disintegrating.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t. Somebody’s outside.”

I begin to reach up for the light but Wally’s eyes, like those of a shithouse rat, have sussed out my projected action and before I know what’s happening he’s lying on top of me, gripping my wrist.

“Jack, no,” he says. “Don’t do it. They’ll see.”

I shake my wrist free and try and push Wally off the bed but he grips me like a demented leech and we both go off the bed, sheets and all, and as we cockle over the coffee tray is caught by Wally or the sheet and crashes down onto the floor. The noise is so startling that it temporarily stills our movement. We listen to the darkness. The only sound is that of D’Antoni’s breathing drifting off the camp bed.

“Listen, you cunt,” I begin, but Wally cuts me off.

“No, wait,” he says. “It’s right. I heard somebody. I mean, I couldn’t sleep out there, could I? Felt like Morden after the last train’d gone, didn’t I? So I’m just lying there on my back looking up at the darkness when I hear somebody walk up the front steps and try the sliding doors. The whole glass shuddered. So I got off my pit and went to the edge of the gallery and Christ if it doesn’t happen again. Straight up. So I come in here and tell you, don’t I?”

I lie there in the darkness and give Wally’s theory a little listen and I’m just about to tell him my views on everything when what Wally’s just said happens again. The shuddering sound drifts up into the gallery and along the landing. Wally’s in too much of a state of macaroni to tell me I told you so. I manage to unfurl the sheet off me and I scramble about and on the floor find my dressing gown and then I stand up and follow the sound of D’Antoni’s breathing. When I get to the camp-bed I carefully take the big shooter from his holster and reflect on how D’Antoni’s managed
to live so long. Then I make for the lighter darkness of the door that leads onto the landing and walk along the parquet work to the gallery rail. Down in the lower reaches the fish is still dribbling away but apart from that there are no other noises. Somewhere there must be some kind of light source because a couple of pallid reflections dance slowly in the plate glass as a result of the recent shudderings; but there’s certainly not enough light to reveal any movement I might make to any observer outside so I start to puss-cat down the steps. When I get down to the hall level I wait for a moment and have another listen. Nothing. So I take another step forward and just as I do that there’s more hissing from up in the gallery. I turn and look upwards and I can just make out Wally’s vague shape craning over the rail.

“Jack,” he croaks. “They’re up here. They’re outside the bedrooms up here.”

I go back up the steps.

“You what?” I whisper.

“Up here. They’re trying the bedroom wossnames.”

“Windows?”

“Yeah, them.”

“Which one last?”

“The one next to yours, wasn’t it?”

I go back down the hall and into the bedroom next to mine. Like everywhere else, the curtains are drawn right across the expanse of plate glass. The bedroom is roughly the same size and plan as my own so I walk across to the windows and stand there an inch or so away from the curtain and listen. Whoever was there isn’t there now because they’ve moved along a room and they’re trying the windows to that one and whoever it is isn’t doing the best job in the world of keeping quiet about it. Very carefully I find the gap in the curtains and slide my hand through and locate the bolts on the sliding glass and ease them out. I listen for a moment. Whoever is outside is still having a go at the other window. Even more carefully than
I slid the bolts, I exert some pressure on the window and it glides noiselessly open a few inches. Cool mountain air sidles in through the crack. The sounds from outside have ceased for the moment. I slide the window open a bit more and it’s as noiseless as before. It’s now wide enough for me to step through. If I want to. The attention the other window’s been getting starts up again. Very slowly I poke my head through the gap. I can just make out a shadow shaking at the handles of the next window. There only seems to be one shadow but that’s something I can’t be sure of so I straighten up and stand there and wonder what the Christ I’m going to do about it but as it happens I don’t have to come to a decision because the sounds from the other window stop and there’s the new sound of footsteps returning to the window I’m at. I step smartly out of the gap and stand shielded by the curtain, not moving at all. The footsteps stop and there is a short surprised breath from beyond the curtains and also I notice something else, and that is that there’s not only the aroma of the assorted mountains drifting in through the gap, there’s the smell of a rather cheap perfume, cheap and nasty but nice. Then the figure that’s wearing the perfume steps through the gap and into the bedroom and all I have to do is to reach out and grip the figure’s arms behind its back and slap a hand across its mouth and while all the threshing and squirming and suppressed squealing’s going on I call out to Wally, wherever he is.

“Wally, the light.”

A shadow scuttles in from off the landing and almost immediately the bedroom is suffused with the kind of glow my bedroom was suffused with and now I can see the figure I’m wrestling with and as I take it in it occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind the best of three falls with this particular opponent. The reason being that she’s got beautifully cut short black hair, she’s got a body that flatters the blouse and the satin trousers rather than the other way around, and in spite of the way I’m squashing
her face I can tell that she and everyone who ever gazes on it will be more than happy with the way it’s arranged and the effect that arrangement has. But what, at the moment, is unavoidably more interesting is Wally’s reaction to the intruder.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. “What you doing here?”

As he speaks he walks forward towards me and the girl, looking for the first time tonight as though he’s got a set of balls. The girl stops struggling but she doesn’t relax and neither do I except to take my hand away from her mouth.

“What the bleeding hell’s going on?” the girl says, looking at me as if I need to blow my nose. “Just what is this?”

“What do you mean, what is this?” Wally says. “What is
this
? Just what the Christ you think you’re doing? Eh? I mean, what are
you
doing?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she says. “Trying to get in the flaming villa, wasn’t I?”

“Listen, don’t come the snot with me,” Wally says. “I’ll haul you one off if you’re not careful.”

“Yes, I expect you will, seeing as how you’ve got somebody to hold me first. Just your drop, that is.”

And as the girl says, Wally’s drop it appears to be, because he starts to do just that so I let the girl go and she’s fast enough to dodge the swinger, leaving me to catch Wally’s wrist in my hand and get a grip on him.

“Ease off, eh?” I tell him. “Evens?”

Wally looks at me, then relaxes. I let go of his wrist.

“Well,” he says. “I mean to say.”

I look at the girl. She’s massaging her wrists where I was holding her. She looks back at me and she hasn’t grown to love me any more over the last minute or so.

“Well?” Wally says to her. “What about it?”

“What about what?” the girl says.

Wally takes a step forward but I speak to him and he stops.

“Wally,” I say to him, “when are you going to introduce me to the young lady?”

“Young bleeding lady?” Wally says. “My arse she is.”

“Charming,” the girl says.

“Listen, my girl, the day I call you a young lady’s the day you start behaving differently from the way you been doing the last seventeen years, all right?”

I take out a cigarette and as I’m lighting up I say to Wally: “I take it, then, Wal, that this happens so to speak, to be your offspring.”

“Too bleeding right,” Wally says.

“I wish I could say there’s a family resemblance, but I’m glad to say there isn’t,” I tell Wally.

Wally and the girl glare at each other. I blow out some cigarette smoke. The girl turns her attention back to me.

“Could I have one of those?” she says, indicating my cigarette, her expression the same as it’s been since I took my hand from her mouth.

“You smoke, do you?” I ask her.

“When you start smoking, then?” Wally asks her.

“What for?” she says.

“What you mean, what for?” Wally says. “Since when could you afford packets of fags on your grant, then?”

The girl gives Wally the kind of condescending smile she’d reserve for a twelve-year-old in a blazer who’d just tried to chat her up.

“I don’t necessarily have to
buy
them, do I?” she says.

“I see,” Wally says.

The girl snorts and the snort coincides with taking a cigarette from the packet I’m extending to her. She then makes a big production of putting the cigarette in her mouth and accepting the light I offer her and when she blows the smoke out it’s like the last time I saw Natalie Wood in
Rebel Without a Cause
on T.V.

“So,” Wally says, “let’s get back to starters. What the bleeding hell you doing here?”

The girl blows out some more smoke and says:

“Come for me Christmas vacation, haven’t I?”

“You what?” Wally says.

“Christmas with Daddy, isn’t it?” she says. “Dear Octopus time, isn’t it. Family ties and all that.”

“Christmas holidays?” Wally says. “Christmas holidays? You’re supposed to be in college another couple or three weeks at least.”

Another puff of the cigarette.

“Yes, well,” she says.

“You been slung out?” Wally says. “That’s what it is. You been bleeding well slung out. Jesus. I knew it. First off, when you first got the idea in your head, I knew it wouldn’t last, one way or another. Bleeding art school. I ask you. All your mates making themselves forty quid a week as temps and throwing it all over the place on the gear but you were so bleeding right, weren’t you. What you really wanted to do, wasn’t it?”

“I haven’t been slung out. I finished my exams, didn’t I? After you’ve finished them, there is bugger all to do, isn’t there? I mean, you just hang about, doing darn all. So I just left early. Lots of us did. Nobody cares.”

“Oh no,” Wally says. “Remember you said that when you’re out on your arse after you get back.”

The girl gives him her smile again.

“Anyhow,” Wally says, “what you mean turning up without warning? Why didn’t you let me know you was coming?”

The girl shrugs.

“Why should I?”

“ ’Cause it might not be convenient, that’s why. The Fletchers might be here. They might be entertaining or something. This isn’t my place, you know.”

“Really?”

“If you turned up and the Fletchers was here they’d be well pleased.”

“They would. The thinner one’s always fancied me.”

“Less of that.”

“Fetched after since I was twelve, he has.”