Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (20 page)

I walk round to the driver’s side. The door’s unlocked. I get in and try not to look as if I’m going to have to get used to the left-hand drive. I light a cigarette and push the key in the ignition. Wally sticks his head in through the rolled down window.

“You ain’t going to be long, eh?” he says.

“Tell you what I’ll do,” I say to him. “If I’m not back by Friday next week you can use my aftershave for ever and ever.”

I flip on the lights and turn the key and the engine turns over first time. I release the handbrake and the car slides forward and out of the garage. For the next ten minutes I drive at about five miles an hour and when I’m on the mountain road I drive even slower, the hairpin bends and the canyons being what they are. About three quarters of an hour later, when I’ve negotiated the last bend and I’m on some relative flat, I stop the car and have five minutes to calm my nerves. I never did like driving, and that last three quarters of an hour’s just about done me for the rest of my natural. So I sit there and have a smoke and try to imagine what’s in the envelope Audrey’s brought over. Knowing Gerald and Les, it’ll be a letter informing me that there’ll be a Mr. D’Antoni staying at the villa for a couple of days, and would I afford him every courtesy. Those bastards. I’m really going to enjoy seeing them again, and giving them my opinion of recent events. That will be what I call pleasure.

I flip the cigarette out of the window and a voice behind me says:

“This as far as we’re going, then?”

I close my eyes. There’s a rustling of soft clothes and when I open them again Tina’s finished climbing over the seat and is sitting alongside of me.

“Didn’t go very far in the bedroom, did we? So I thought—”

I twist round in my seat and grab her shoulder.

“Bloody hell,” she says. “That hurts.”

“Listen,” I tell her, “I don’t give a fuck about that. I’m out on business. Now get out of it and clear off back to the villa.”

“You what? I can’t walk all that way back up there.”

“You should have thought of that.”

“Anyway, it’s not bleeding safe. I still hurt from what that bastard done you know. It’s bleeding painful.”

“You should have thought about that, too.”

“Oh, piss off.”

I light another cigarette.

“Listen, Wally’s going to disappear up his own arsehole when he finds you’ve gone missing, you know that, don’t you?”

“So?”

“So that’s another reason.”

“All right. Take me back, then. ’Cause that’s the only way I’m going back. I mean, you’ve got to be joking.”

I blow out some smoke. She’s right. She can’t walk back up there. On the other hand, I ought to clout her and sling her out and to hell with her. But I’ve had enough for one day, and the prospect of dealing with Audrey in one of her pissed-up states is already tiring me out.

“I don’t even know how long I’m going to be,” I tell her. “I may even be all night. What you going to do then?”

“I’ll go to the club. No one will mind, will they? They haven’t before.”

“In that case I should stay there the rest of your holidays if I was you.”

“Charming.”

“I thought you felt like that,” I say to her, switching on the ignition. We drive on for about quarter of an hour without either of us saying anything. Eventually Tina breaks the silence by asking me for a cigarette. I hand her the packet and the matches and when she’s lit herself up she gives the packet and the matches back to me by placing them in my lap but the thing is, once she’s done that, she doesn’t remove her hand, so I say to her: “I told you, I’m on business. You keep on like that you’re walking back.”

“A twist,” she says. “A real twist, that is. The bird walking back because
she
makes the pass.”

Chapter Eleven

T
HE FRONT OF PALMA
by night is not as ratty as the back of Palma is by day. But that of course is thanks to the lighting. The lights inside and outside the hotels and the fairy lights along the beaches do the same kind of job that the lights do around Piccadilly Circus, translate tat into magic.

I find the Hotel Los Toros. It’s opposite the beach, just over the road from all the thatched parasols. I park the car on the beach side. Tina makes no move to get out.

“The club far from here?” I ask her.

“Ten minutes,” she says.

“You’ve not forgotten where it is?”

“I was only here in August, wasn’t I.”

“So in that case you won’t have any trouble finding it.”

“You going over there?” she says, indicating the hotel.

I don’t answer her.

“Only I thought I’d have a drink with you before I went to the club,” she says.

“You thought that, did you?”

She doesn’t answer for a while. Eventually she says:

“All right, I’ll go. I’ll be at the club when you’re ready.”

She opens the car door and gets out and begins to walk away. I let her get about ten yards from the Mercedes then I stick my head out of the window.

“Hang on a minute,” I say to her.

She turns round and hurries back to the window my head’s sticking out of, then she waits for me to say what I’ve got to say.

“Just supposing I do get through tonight, it might help if I knew the name of the club.”

She doesn’t quite spit at me.

“Picador,” she says.

“Ta very much,” I say, and smile at her. She looks at me for a long moment before she turns away.

I wait until she’s out of sight before I get out of the Mercedes. Then I walk over to the hotel and walk up the steps. The steps divide a raised narrow frontage that supports four parasolled tables on either side. The tables are deserted all except one. And at that one sits the old dad that was a member of the Dagenham boys’ party on the flight over. He’s still wearing his Robin Hood hat and his Hammers scarf and his foam-backed overcoat and he’s staring out to sea as if he’s waiting for his dentures to wash up on the next wave. I pass by him without him being aware of the fact.

I push inward on the plate glass and two things are immediately released into the night air; first, there’s that dreadful, female, bathed-and-powdered, after-dinner smell, all antiseptic and expressing the determination to have a good time in spite of the old man. And the other thing is the sound of a Hammond organ fitted with a rhythm attachment. The organist is playing “South of the Border” and he’s so bad and so out of time that if it wasn’t for the rhythm box you’d think he was playing free form.

The organ is set up in a small ballroom that opens out from the other end of the bar on my left. There are two middle-aged women dancing together in the centre of the floor and there are various families dotted around in the low seats, thinly spread in the off-season emptiness.

I decide that before I meet Audrey a nice stiff vodka will be in order so I walk into the bar and sit on one of the bar stools and the white-coated drunk of local colour drifts along the bar and raises his eyebrows by way of inviting my order. I ask for a vodka and tonic and I get it poured the way I got it in the cafe the day before; vodka four-fifths up to the rim, and only enough room for a few bubbles from the tonic bottle. Nevertheless I manage to get some of it down and dilute it a bit more with the tonic. I’m just taking a second sip when one of the Dagenham sons rounds the corner from the ballroom, carrying a tray of empties. As I’m the only one at the bar it doesn’t take him long to suss me out as having been on the plane, and as the barman is temporarily missing that’s his excuse for a bit of bonhomie.

“They supposed to have waiter service through there,” he says, “but it’s quicker to do it your bleeding self.”

I look at him.

“Don’t know what work is, this lot,” he says.

I manage not to smile.

“You staying here, are you?” he says.

I shake my head.

“Smart. The cement’s not even dry. The hot water only comes on when you don’t need it, mid-day. Bleeding manager’s a wanker, and the agency girl, she’s never here; poking with a fellow what owns a place round the corner. That’s all she does all the time.”

“So, taking everything by and large, you’re having a good time?”

“Oh, we’re having a good time, yeah. Just the fucking place.”

This time I do allow myself a smile.

“Thing is about this kind of an holiday, you get to meet some right characters, know what I mean?”

Even though I don’t, I nod, so that I don’t have to say anything.

“I mean tonight. The missuses want to go on this barbecue up in the mountains with about forty thousand other
people. Well, me and we can get burnt sausages back home, so it seems reasonable that as they want to go, and we want to stay here, they should go, and we should stay here, right? You’re joking. If we’re not going, they’re not going, and that’s that, arms folded, legs crossed, eyes fixed on the pelmets, the flaming lot. We don’t go, they don’t go. Like kids, they are. So we says to them, all right, as we’re staying here, and you’re not going, what’re you going to do? Not bleeding well staying here with you, that’s for sure, they say.”

He hits himself on the side of his head.

“Unbelievable, isn’t it. We won’t go up there with them, so they won’t go, they’ll martyr themselves, but on the other hand, they’ll go somewhere else, so long as it’s without us. Beyond me, that is.”

The barman reappears.

“Oh yeah,” the Dagenham son says. “Two rum and blacks and a vodka tonic. And I’d better have one for Dad, I’ll have a rum for him, no black. Give him any more beer and he’ll be knocking us up all night.”

He gives me a wink. The barman dispenses the drinks with all his native warmth.

“Anyhow,” the Dagenham son says, “in the end they go off to this club, the mum as well, and leave me and Barry to it down here, which on its own can’t be bad. But a bit later on this piece on her own, she comes down and sits at the next table. Maybe she’s getting on for forty but you’d never know it. So’s my old woman and this one makes her look like a pensioner. Mind you, she’s obviously got the bread to coat it.” And your old lady can’t, I think to myself, you being an impoverished Daghenham worker.

“Anyway, we soon get rapping and it’s plain she’s had a few and now me and Barry are wondering what we got on our hands as the impression she’s showing out is the kind of thing you only read about in
Men Only
, in fact at one point Barry asks her if her name isn’t Fiona, know what I mean?”

I’m beginning to think I do.

“What is her name, by the way?” I ask him.

“What? Oh, turns out to be Audrey as a matter of fact.” He picks up his tray of goods. “Don’t look like an Audrey, though. A lot classier than that, know what I mean?”

He gives me a wink and an elbow and then he goes off in the direction of outside to deliver the old dad his rum. I get off the stool and stroll down towards the ballroom part. The organist has left off for the time being so I don’t have to break step with the rhythm box. There is a step down creating a division between the bar and the ballroom. Once I’ve taken this step I turn to my right, the direction the Dagenham boy appeared from. And, as they say, my suspicions are confirmed. There, at the table closest to me, is Audrey, couched in conversation with the number two son. Of course, Audrey notices me straight away, but I can tell immediately that she’s in the kind of mood where she’s going to have as many pounds of flesh as she’d need to open a Wimpy. And in that mood, if I want to find out what happens to be in the envelope before Boxing Day, I’m going to have to play the scene the way she’s going to direct it. So I move to the table and stand there until Audrey gives up on this part of the game and deigns to recognise my presence.

“Evening,” she says, settling back in her seat. I look at her and the number two son turns round to look up at me and it’s not an unfamiliar look, the old askance eyebrows asking the silent question.

“Evening,” I say to Audrey.

“Do we know you?” the Daghenham son says.

I shift my attention from Audrey to Barry.

“ ’Course you do,” I say, smiling. “I’m the bloke that stands by your table and says ‘Evening’.”

“I know where I seen you before,” Barry says. “You were on
Who Do You Do
doing an impression of a clever bastard.”

“Stand-out, was I?” I ask him

“You are now,” he says. “So just push off.”

A voice behind me says:

“What’s this?”

“A clever bastard,” Barry explains.

Benny puts the drinks tray down on the table.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “You’re right. He’s a right clever bastard, he is. Susses out the situation through in the bar and comes round here and starts moving in. Yeah, a right clever bastard.”

“Well, just push off,” Barry says. “Then maybe we’ll forget what a clever bastard you are.”

“Oh, I’d hate you to do that,” I say to them, sitting down on a seat between Audrey and Barry. The sons look at each other. Then Benny leans over, his face a few inches from mine.

“Listen, my son,” he says, “you made your point. You’re a brave cavalier. Now if I was you I’d go and try out your technique in one of those Guitar Bars. You’re less likely to get hammered in one of those.”