Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (32 page)

“So he’s still in there now.”

“That’s right.”

“And he’s all tooled up.”

“I just told you.”

I shake my head.

“You done well, Audrey. It’s almost as good as how well you done that time in Wembley when your helpful efforts meant a lot of talking to the Filth before everything was back to normal again.”

Audrey throws one at me but I’ve seen that one coming a mile off, but that doesn’t prevent her launching into a jawbone solo.

“You ponce, I could be topped by now on your account.”

“Not on my account, darlin’. Anything you get in this life’s down to you.”

“Yeah, like Con and Peter seeing to you when they done D’Antoni.”

“Yeah, about that,” I say to her. “You done very well in that department. Now you’ve made sure D’Antoni’s fixed up with a shooter that makes it nice for everybody, doesn’t it?”

“I thought you liked things the hard way.”

I grab hold of her again.

“Listen, between you and Wally, you really fucked things up.”

Tina says:

“I know I’m only here on me holidays, but what’s happening? What’s all the shooters going off for?”

I don’t have to tell her to shut up because another voice does that for me and that voice belongs to D’Antoni.

Of course I don’t move until he tells me to, and when he does it’s for me to turn round with my arms raised. Which, of course, I do.

D’Antoni’s leaning against the jamb of the open bathroom door. Apart from the shooter he’s pointing at me, he’s naked except for Audrey’s negligee, which he’s wearing round his thigh like a tourniquet, the blood making the pale pink purple. So there we all are, a trio of nudes and me, only because the way D’Antoni’s looking at me I’m feeling more naked than the lot of them put together.

“You bastard,” D’Antoni says to me. “I knew it all the time. It stank all along. You came here to set me up, you mother.”

“Well,” I say. “About that. It’s not really what you think.”

“Don’t try,” D’Antoni says. “It’ll make no difference. You know that.”

I shrug in agreement and consider the irony of the situation. I feel rather like Bobby Charlton would if the ref accused him of diving in the area.

“But I want to watch you wait for it,” he says. “That’s going to be some fun.”

He slips a little on his injured leg and while that’s happening I flick a glance at the bed ostensibly to check if it’s possible for D’Antoni to see beyond Tina and suss out the shooters, but what in fact I do see is Tina’s hand, out of sight of D’Antoni’s vision, very slowly and cooly working its way towards the nearest of the pair, set off so elegantly as they are against the silk of the sheets. I try to catch Tina’s eye so’s to tell her not to, but she has her gaze, quite rightly in the event of what she’s doing, fixed on D’Antoni.

“There is this,” I say to D’Antoni, “and whatever you think, you ought to hear me out; those characters down there, they want me too. So if you choose to believe me, I
could do you a favour while doing myself one, I mean, help you get out.”

“He’s right,” Audrey says. “Jack’s right. He really is.”

D’Antoni smiles at us.

“Sure—” he begins, but Tina interrupts him.

She interrupts him by calling my name and snatching up the shooter from the bed and attempting to throw the shooter in my direction but there’s no point in my attempting to catch it because D’Antoni, as I knew he would, has fired automatically in the direction of the disturbance, and he’s good, because the bullet enters Tina’s flesh at her throat, causing a very neat thin arc of blood to surge out onto the parquet flooring, and not such a neat sound to rattle around in the bubbles on the inside of her throat. The shooter she was holding echoes the rattle in her throat as it hits the floor, then Tina falls slowly sideways and snuggles down against the silk sheets, her body covering the second shooter, the jet of blood still pouring out of her with a perfect regularity, like the water from the mouth of Gerald’s fish.

I, myself, don’t bother to move because, of course, D’Antoni’s shooter is now back covering me. The sound in Tina’s throat begins to die down and from downstairs there is nothing but silence. After a while D’Antoni speaks.

“All right,” he says. “O.K. Now you, Audrey, you walk across to the bed and you kick the shooter towards me.”

Audrey, who has been as stone as the downstairs sculpture ever since the bullet hit Tina, does as she’s told, but in the process Audrey slips in Tina’s blood and goes arse over elbow between me and D’Antoni and I use this distraction to simply open the door and nick out and close it with a little help from a couple of shots in the woodwork from D’Antoni; my departure is also orchestrated by a few descriptive screams from Audrey, something to do with me leaving her in it, but I reflect that it’s time for her to be a little more philosophical regarding the ways of the world. I mean, how am I to get her out of it if I’m still in there with her?

I leg it down the landing and take temporary cover in the doorway of Audrey’s room, but it’s like I thought, D’Antoni doesn’t come blasting down the hall after me. I wait a minute or two and then call downstairs.

“Peter, it’s me. You going to play silly buggers or are you going to let me down?”

“What’s going on up there?”

“You could always come up and see.”

“You didn’t top him, then?”

I don’t answer that one.

“Only Wally’s down here and he’s getting a bit concerned about the state of his offspring.”

Wally’s voice drifts up from the stairwell.

“Yeah, Jack, what’s going off?”

“Nothing.”

“Where’s Tina?”

“She’s on the bed.”

“D’Antoni in there with her?”

“Yeah. And Audrey.”

“What they doing?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I? They’re in there and I’m out here.”

There’s silence from downstairs.

“Am I coming down or aren’t I?” I call down again.

“Yeah, all right,” Peter says.

I leave the doorway and go to the balcony and look down. Peter’s still by the fish but now he’s no longer crouching, he’s leaning against the fish as though he’s waiting for a beach photographer to take a snap of him. Con’s standing by the lounge corner, a drink in his hand, still with his leather hat on. The odd man out is Wally, who is halfway up the stairs and still climbing.

“Where you going, Wal?” I ask him.

“Something’s up,” he says.

Now he’s at the top of the steps.

“Nothing’s up, Wal.”

He keeps on walking. I put a hand against his chest.

“Where you going?”

“I got to see what’s going off.”

“You go in there and you’ll get topped.”

Wally’s about to give me an answer to that when from down the corridor there’s the faint sound of a door handle being turned and with the instincts of a stoat Wally darts into Audrey’s bedroom, out of sight. Myself, I’m a little slower, and for the second time today I find myself looking at D’Antoni and his shooter, only this time it’s pointing into Audrey’s neck. Audrey is still naked but D’Antoni has got himself into his sports shirt and slacks, and he says to me: “I don’t have to explain the situation to you.”

I express my understanding by not moving. D’Antoni jabs the shooter further into Audrey’s neck and she starts moving down the corridor. They progress a little way and then from downstairs comes Peter’s voice.

“You coming down or what?”

D’Antoni and Audrey stop. D’Antoni says:

“How many of them?”

“Two.”

“Tell them I’m coming down and tell them how I’m coming.”

I clear my throat.

“Peter, he’s coming down, only with Mrs. Fletcher, if you get my meaning, so don’t boil it over, all right?”

Silence.

“You heard me?”

“Yeah, he heard you,” says Con. “Didn’t you, Peter?”

Eventually Peter says: “Yeah, I heard.”

“Tell him you’re going down first,” D’Antoni says.

“I’m coming down first,” I tell Peter.

There’s no answer.

“Peter!”

“Right.”

I hope various thoughts apropos of Peter’s brief aren’t going through his mind in terms of capitalising on the present situation, but I don’t, at the moment, have a great many alternatives at hand. I look at D’Antoni and Audrey
and Audrey looks back at me and says: “You couldn’t just do as you were told, could you?”

I don’t answer her. D’Antoni says: “All right. Move.”

I turn round and start to move to the top of the steps. Down in the hall, the tableau is as before, except that by the fish Peter is a little less relaxed.

“Start down,” D’Antoni says.

I turn back to D’Antoni.

“Where do I go when I get to the bottom?”

“Just start down,” D’Antoni says, and while he’s saying that, beyond his shoulder I see Wally nick silently out of Audrey’s room and start off down the corridor towards the bedroom where Tina is. Christ, I think to myself, that’s all we need to elevate the balloon. But, like I say, I’ve no choice; at present I have to do what D’Antoni tells me to, so I start down the stairs, not quickly at all. I’m half-way down before I sense that D’Antoni and Audrey are standing at the top of the staircase, watching my progress.

“Stop there,” D’Antoni says.

I do as I’m told.

“You by the fountain. Throw your piece as far as you can throw it.”

“Fuck off,” Peter says.

“You better tell him that isn’t the way to talk, Mrs. Fletcher,” D’Antoni says to Audrey.

“Do it, Peter,” Audrey says to him.

Peter doesn’t answer and also he doesn’t look as if he’s inclined to follow D’Antoni’s instructions.

“Peter,” I say to him. “Don’t be a cunt. Gerald won’t thank you for getting Audrey topped.”

Peter looks disgusted.

“Oh, fuck it,” Peter says, and throws the shooter listlessly in the direction of the bottom of the stairs.

“That’s fine,” D’Antoni says. “Now the other guy.”

Con spreads his hands.

“You came too late,” he says. “I already had mine cleaned out.”

D’Antoni weighs that up for a moment.

“Just move over to your partner,” he says.

Con downs his drink and puts his glass on the floor and straightens up and walks over to the fish and stands next to it and clasps his hands in front of him like he’s on an I.D. parade.

“Fine,” D’Antoni says. “That’s fine.”

Which leaves me, standing on the steps, like an employee of the Grand Old Duke of York.

“Now,” D’Antoni says. “I been waiting for this. I figure this is a good time as any to pay you off for the good job you done on looking after me. It’s bonus time, Carter.”

For the moment, I don’t move.

“You’re not going to beg?” D’Antoni says. “You’re not going to ask for help from your dear old mother who’s been dead all these past years?”

I don’t say anything.

“Pity,” D’Antoni says. “I would’ve liked that.”

If, I’m thinking to myself, I dive now, off the stairs, I’ll probably break my fucking neck, but at the same time, there’s no percentage in staying on the stairs, so I get myself mentally set up for the move, but before I can make it the stairwell is as full of sound as the noise of a shooter rattles round the plate glass and the plasterwork. But the odd thing is, I don’t feel any pain, and the scream isn’t mine, so I twist round and look in the direction of the noise and it’s not come from D’Antoni’s shooter at all because his shooter is spinning away from him, closely followed by a piece of shoulder, and he’s clawing at where it used to be. At the same time, Audrey is augmenting the noise D’Antoni’s making, but unlike D’Antoni, she’s no longer upright, she’s thrown herself to the balcony floor, and because of her position I can see the top half of Wally, holding the shooter that Tina buried beneath her, holding it two-handed, all set to let D’Antoni have another one, which of course D’Antoni is more than aware of, but being without his shooter, there’s not a lot he can do about it,
and by now he’s beyond rational thought and so he starts moving towards Wally, as if that will help, like a goalkeeper trying to narrow the angle. I also notice that Peter, always the opportunist, has raced across to where his shooter lies, and Con, he’s placed himself in a position to get better cover from the fish, adjusting his leather hat as he does that thing.

At the same time, Wally lets go two more shots.

They’re both wild, naturally. But at Wally’s range, it doesn’t matter. The first one doesn’t make an awful lot of difference to D’Antoni’s present condition, it hits him in the left wrist, causing a minor explosion of flesh and bone to shatter down over the edge of the balcony. Normally, of course, the effect would have D’Antoni on his knees, screaming the way he wanted me to scream, but the situation being what it is, a matter of life and death, it doesn’t even slow D’Antoni down, he keeps going forward, and it’s the second shot that counts, because that one catches him in the stomach, dead centre. The power of the shot flips him round, like a dealer flipping over a card, so that he’s facing the opposite way to where he was going, and as he’s still moving, that means he’s going towards the top of the stairs, but between him and that destination is Audrey’s quivering body, which he’s no longer aware of, because he trips over it, sending him headlong to the top of the steps—but he prevents his ultimate demise by hanging on to the end of the balustrade; he tries to pull himself to his feet, but a great internal shudder causes him to slip a little bit, cough, and expel a great gout of blood in the general curving direction of myself. And that, basically, is the last conscious act his body performs, because three, sharp, sweetly measured shots ring out from the floor below and form a three-leaf clover around D’Antoni’s heart and then D’Antoni very slowly lets go of his grip on the balustrade and comes to rest with his torso lying head first down the first three steps, his legs still on the balcony.

Down below, Peter cries out in triumph.

“How about that?” he says. “Who wins the glass ash-tray, then?”

But his self-congratulation is short lived because Wally appears at the balustrade and, still two handed, points the shooter in the direction of Peter’s voice; and if D’Antoni had lost his grip on rational thought, Wally’s present state of mind makes D’Antoni seem as lucid as Norman Vincent Peale. He looks like Karloff’s stand-in as he hangs over the balustrade, homing in on Peter.