Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (18 page)

“I know you’re not going to answer me, but I also know you’ll do what you’re told because your mouth is all microphone; you’re not going to tell Wally about anything that’s happened this afternoon. Tina went to bed. After that I put you to bed. That’s all that happened. All right?”

Like I said, he doesn’t answer, but I know he’ll do as I say because he doesn’t want to worry about me as well as the cowboys he imagines are going to appear on a rim of the surrounding hills. What he does do is to stay just as he is, face down and naked, motionless.

Then I leave the bedroom and go down the stairs to the basement to free the Widow Twanky.

I must say, the basement is a blessed relief from the rest of the house. It reminds me of when I was eighteen and just in the smoke, working at the North Star, and it was always a treat to go down to the damp coolness and put a new barrel on and get away from the madhouse upstairs, which on reflection is not a dissimilar situation to the one I’m in at the moment. Except of course at the North Star it wasn’t part of my contract to go about unlocking garden gnomes.

It doesn’t take me long to discover which door Wally’s behind because at the sound of my footsteps he starts banging on the door, but the banging stops as quickly as it starts; Wally’s obviously realised it could be either of his keepers.

I unlock the door. Wally’s face peers at me from behind slotted angle racking, his face divided in two by a can of
film, the can looking like a false nose placed symmetrically as it is right between his eyes.

We survey each other like that for a moment.

“What’s going on?” Wally says.

“Nothing’s going on,” I tell him. “They’re both sleeping it off.”

Wally emerges from behind the racking.

“Sleeping what off?”

“The booze.”

“Oh, yes.”

“It’s all right. D’Antoni fell asleep, so Tina cleared off to bed. I got sick of the sound of D’Antoni’s snoring so I hauled him to bed myself.”

“You sure?”

I look at him.

“I was only asking,” he says.

Nevertheless he trots off upstairs to have a look for himself. By the time I get to the lounge Wally’s checking what’s going on upstairs. When he reappears he says:

“Her doors are locked.”

“So?”

“Why they locked then?”

“How the fuck should I know? Maybe she didn’t want him going in after her.”

“You seen her. You really believe that?”

I shrug.

“She was just prick-teasing. Seventeen-year-olds do a lot of that.”

Wally sits down, looking very glum.

“I dunno,” he says. “I dunno what to think.”

I walk over to the window and look out through the gap in the curtains at the other curtain, shimmering away in front of the empty mountains. Behind me Wally mumbles on about what he doesn’t know.

“Wally,” I say to him. “You got any old newspapers lying about the place?”

The afternoon passes into evening. I’m lying on my back on the sofa and Wally’s in the kitchen lashing up whatever we’re going to be sitting down to tonight. Nothing else is happening. The ceiling is the same as it was half an hour ago. I light another cigarette and I’m just finishing it when there’s a slight movement and the now familiar perfume glides into the room. I raise myself up on my arm and look at her. She’s wearing white jeans and a dark blue tee-shirt approximately the colour her bruises will be by now. She walks over to where I am and picks up my lighter and cigarettes and carries on over towards the windows.

“You all right?” I ask her.

She lights her cigarette.

“Bloody smashing,” she says.

As she inhales, a great shudder goes through her body.

“Well,” I tell her, “now you know.”

“Yes, now I know.”

A minute later Wally comes.

“What’s been the matter with you?” he says to Tina.

“I been lying down.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was worried about.”

She doesn’t answer that one.

“Why’d you lock the doors, then?”

“To keep the insects out.”

Now it’s Wally’s turn to keep quiet.

I got up off the settee.

“What’s that smell you got coming out the kitchen, Wal?” I say to him.

“What? Oh, that. Yes—”

“Smells t’rific. You sure you’re not letting anything spoil or anything?”

Wally gets the idea and reluctantly clears off back to the hot stove. When he’s gone Tina says:

“What happens when D’Antoni wakes up?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

She turns to face me.

“How do you know?”

“Well, he came to me, you know, after you’d been together, and he said he felt really terrible about what had happened, didn’t know what came over him, know what I mean? Really terrible he felt. Asked me if I would see my way clear to apologise for him, like. Just couldn’t bring himself to face you, he said, after what he’d done.”

“I don’t want the jokes,” she says, “I just want to know he’s had enough for today. I mean, otherwise I’ll go and lock myself in my chalet again.”

“I’ve told you. You’ll be all right.”

“You really do, don’t you? You really think you’re all the Super-Heroes rolled together in one costume.”

“It’s a good thing for you that I do,” I tell her, and walk out of the lounge and up the stairs and into the bedroom she’s just come down from. I unlock the bathroom door and start to run a bath. The door to D’Antoni’s room is still closed and it stays like that until I’ve been lying in the bath for about five minutes. Then the door opens and D’Antoni appears. He’s wearing one of his sports shirts and a different pair of slacks. We look at each other then D’Antoni flips down the toilet seat and sits down.

“That’s two I owe you,” he says.

I don’t answer him. After a while he says:

“But what I don’t figure,” he says, “is why? Why put your head on a block? Over a thing like that?”

I still don’t answer him.

“I mean, I could take you out over a thing like that,” he says.

I lie back and close my eyes.

“Hey?” he says.

Another silence.

“Nobody hurts me. You know that?”

I lean forward and run some more hot water into the bath.

“I should cut it off and stuff it in your mouth.”

“I thought that was reserved for squealers,” I say to him.

D’Antoni is quiet for a minute or two. Then he says: “In your case, maybe I’ll make an exception.”

“All right, only do you mind waiting until I’ve cleaned my teeth?”

D’Antoni looks at me a little bit longer, then he eases himself up off the toilet.

“You know, you’re going to be a whole lot luckier if those guys
do
show up,” he says. “I mean, that way, you only get to be shot.”

I ignore him again and all that’s left for him to do is for him to make his exit. After he’s gone I just lie in the bath for about half an hour, my mind as blank as the silence of the mountains.

Chapter Ten

D
INNER
.

I suppose you’ve got to hand it to Wally. He’s done a huge Spanish prawny dish with fried rice and he’s done it a treat. Under different circumstances it would be a Meal to Remember, one of the Great Meals. But as things are, it’s about half as jovial as things were during the Last Supper. D’Antoni spends the whole time alternating between looking at me and looking at Tina, his expression the same for both of us, a sort of hate-filled contempt expressed by a smirk. And Wally of course, in between dishing up, he’s wondering what the fuck the looks mean, if I’ve been straight with him or not, and he spends more time biting back his questions than eating his dinner. D’Antoni is still stoking himself up on the booze, but like I say this time it’s not causing him to have the verbals; it’s just making his expression smoulder even more grotesquely. Tina looks a little better than she did this afternoon but she’s putting as little effort as possible into moving her knife and fork about. On the other hand, I notice that she doesn’t seem to be having any trouble in lifting her glass.

So as the atmosphere is laying heavily on my tits, the minute I’ve finished eating I get up from the table and
go through into the lounge and sit down and light a cigarette and pick up an old
Express
off a pile on a nearby table and for the fifth time I read how Liverpool knocked out the Hammers in the fourth round, as if I cared. By the time I’ve almost finished D’Antoni appears, bringing his anaesthetic with him.

“You checked everything outside?” he says to me.

“Yes,” I say, folding up the paper. “I checked everything. Everything’s fine. I’ve land-mined the road all the way to the airport and the mountains are all dynamited. I left the plunger on your bedside table, all right?”

D’Antoni takes a drink.

“O.K. Give me all that crap. I’ll do it myself, O.K.?”

He starts moving towards the windows.

“Gone a bit chilly out,” I say to him. “Mind you don’t catch cold.”

I pick up another paper but before I can sort out the sports page the lights go out. Then I hear D’Antoni making his way across the room. A few seconds later the curtains part a little bit and let some post-sunset light into the room. Then there’s the familiar sound of the window being slid open. D’Antoni manages not to stumble outside. After he’s disappeared I sit there in the dark passing the time by trying to listen to D’Antoni’s progress. Maybe he’ll imagine one of the mainland-bound jets has got machine guns sticking out of the portholes and while he’s shaking his fist at it he just might fall over the wall and into the canyon below. In fact I’m just thinking I might go out there and give him a helping hand when suddenly the room’s full of light again and when I’ve got used to it I can see that Tina’s the one that’s pressed the switch.

“What’s this?” she says. “Meditation time?”

Even if I was going to answer her I’m not given any time because D’Antoni re-enters through the windows like a Widnes forward playing against St Helens. He hurtles across the room and snaps off the light without having to push Tina out of the way because the minute she saw him
coming through the curtains she moved in the opposite direction even quicker than the way D’Antoni made his entrance. Then I hear D’Antoni making his way back across to the window and his progress is illustrated by a description of his grasp of the situation.

“You bastards, you’re gonna set me up,” he screeches. “That’s what you’re gonna do. Set me up, you mothers.”

The window is slammed to and there’s the sound of the heavy curtains being over-lapped.

“I was standing right in the light,” he screams in the darkness. “There would have been no problem. They could have fixed me with a pea-shooter.”

“It was just our way of making sure,” I tell him. “Saves looking. Now we
know
there’s nobody out there.”

“Listen, I wasn’t even carrying out there. I wasn’t even protected.”

The source of Tina’s perfume is a little bit closer to me in the darkness. I can hear D’Antoni moving back across the room. Then the lights go on again and now D’Antoni’s moving towards where I’m sitting.

“That’s why you took them, wasn’t it?” he says. “So it shortens the odds. Makes no difference if they take me out or not, ain’t that right, hey?” He stops a foot or so away from me. “You better give me that stuff back,” he says. “Otherwise—”

“Otherwise you’ll what? Break my back?”

D’Antoni looks at me for a while then he turns away and makes for the booze. When he’s made his drink he says:

“Jesus. I’d be safer calling a press conference and just telling everybody where I am.”

“Then why the fuck don’t you do that and give us all a rest?”

He doesn’t seem to hear me because he says:

“I should have done what Wally did. Gone down south right away. I should never have done what I done.”

I get up and say to Tina:

“Wally still in the kitchen?”

She nods.

“Well I’m going to bed. If I was you I’d go and help him finish the washing up.”

“If you’re going to bed, so am I.”

I shrug.

“In that case, tell Wally what you’re doing. I don’t want him waking me up more than a dozen times tonight.”

I walk out of the lounge, leaving D’Antoni pouring himself another drink. When I get to the bedroom I put on my pyjamas and lie down on the cot and look at my watch. It’s only a quarter to ten. Well, I think to myself, you’re supposed to do something different when you’re on your holidays. About five minutes later the Mystery Tour Operator appears in the doorway.

“He’s at it again,” says Wally.

I don’t say anything.

“He’s on his third bottle of champagne. That’s not counting the wine he had.”

“Then we should have a peaceful night.”

“It’s what he might do before he sparks out.”

“He won’t do fuck all.”

“He wants me to stay with him.”

“So stay with him. Then when he’s flaked out you can have a good night’s kip in your own pit.”

“Can’t you come down?”

“I thought you’d be happier me playing Fairy Godmother to your offspring.” There’s a silence while Wally tries to figure out the lesser of two evils. Then there’s the sound of water running down the plug-hole.