The Bad Fire (48 page)

He rummaged in the pockets of the coat. Empty. He fingered the wedding ring, checked it for an inscription, found none. He felt the softness of the dead man's palm. He undid the buttons of the coat, slid his fingers inside. He had an uneasy sensation, a stark sense of trespass. Going through a dead man's clothing in front of twenty or so night-crawlers – he knew he ought to have waited until the poor bastard was inside the ambulance before starting this rudimentary exploration, but he'd always been impetuous. A weakness in his psychological structure, too late to fix.

He called to Murdoch. ‘Son, get these bloody gawkers out of here. Scatter the whole crew of them. And don't be polite either. Use the authority of the uniform, and
lean
if you need to.' He gestured to the small crowd. Murdoch and his fellow uniforms began to make the appropriate loud noises,
Come on, move along
,
nothing for you to see here, shove off the lotta you
. The pedestrians began to shuffle away. They'd regroup further down the street, of course: death was magnetic.

Perlman took off his glasses, wiped them on the cuff of his coat, then returned to his examination of the suicide's jacket. The label read:
Tailored in Italy for Mandelson's of Glasgow
. Mandelson's was an expensive menswear shop in Buchanan Street: it wasn't where Lou Perlman bought his clothes. He slipped a hand into the inside pocket. Two spare buttons wrapped in clear plastic, nothing else. No wallet, no keys, nothing. It was the same with the side and breast pockets. All empty. Perlman frisked the trouser pockets: nothing – no loose change, hankie, crumpled slip of paper, match-book. A dead man, a well-dressed, well-nourished Caucasian, with no identification and only one personal possession, an anonymous gold ring.

Chilled, Perlman cupped his hands and blew into them. He stood upright. His joints felt like fused metal. He gazed at the man's face and for a moment had a fleeting sense of familiarity. From where? He turned and squinted across the narrow river where the old Renfrew ferryboat lay at anchor: a relic of a dead Glasgow, it had once carried passengers downriver. Now it had been adapted as a floating venue for theatrical and musical events. Perlman had attended a concert there some time ago, a swing revival band from Rotterdam.

He looked down at the suicide again. No ID. No farewell letter.

Maybe that was the way he'd planned it. Just a nobody at the end of a rope with nothing to say. Sad. Perlman nodded at the two orderlies from the ambulance.

‘You can take him,' he said.

They lifted the dead man into the ambulance. Perlman caught himself staring at the corpse's shoes, and he thought of the man's soft hand again, and he had one of those moments when you realize, with a quickened skip of pulse, that appearances are only surface. Stir the pond and the silt shifts and sometimes something unexpected emerges from the murk.

2

The young man walked through the park with his hands in the pockets of his big heavy coat. He listened to a breeze rattle the skeletal branches of trees. He saw a half moon in the sky. Glass from broken lamps and hypodermic syringes littered the ground. He passed a bench, glanced at a man who lay there in a tattered sleeping bag that oozed pieces of insulation. The man's head was covered in a hood, and he snored. A drunk, a beggar.

Beyond the sleeper, the young man saw the statue and a pale light hanging above it.
You'll find a figure carved in stone. That's the place where you wait
. He tried to read the inscription on the base, but couldn't make out the letters because too many vandals had come this way with spraypaint. Who was this fellow who'd been honoured by a statue? A political hero? a great poet? He couldn't have been so very important if he'd been placed in this tiny swathe of park so far from the city centre.

The young man wondered how long he'd have to wait. He walked round the statue and tried to keep warm – a problem in this refrigerated city so far from home. Now and then he touched his short black beard, which was cold. The breeze came up again, arctic, and he lifted the collar of his coat against his neck.

In the darkness to his right the headlights of a car flicked on then off, and again. The sign. He walked forty or fifty yards until he reached the street. He was aware of tenement windows on the edge of his vision, so many families living one on top of the other, creatures in hives. He smelled food frying, and realized he'd eaten nothing save some tangerines and a banana and handfuls of
garinim
in the last twenty-four hours. He remembered the long shuddering train journey from one end of Europe to the other, and before that the voyage on the rusted fishing boat that ferried him from Port Said to Athens, and the stench of rotten sardine in the airless hold where he'd been obliged to travel, a foul odour he could still feel at the back of his throat.

He reached the car. The passenger door swung open.

‘Get in.' The face of the man behind the wheel was in shadow.

The young man climbed in, closed the door.

The man behind the wheel said, ‘Call me Ramsay.'
Cawmeramzay
.

‘Please … You will have to speak more slowly.'

‘Going too fast for you, Abdullah?'

‘Abdullah? That is not my name –'

‘Look, if I choose to call you Abdullah, that's your name, okay? Stick your backpack on the floor and show me your passport.'

‘Why?'

‘You could be anybody. That's why.' This Ramsay, concealed in shadow, spoke English with an impenetrable accent. Words ran together, letters fell from the end of words, it wasn't the well-schooled English of the teachers in the schools the young man had attended. Cautiously, he handed his passport to Ramsay, who opened it and checked it with a glance.

‘You look like your photograph, Abdullah,' Ramsay said, passing the document back.

‘Of course. But my name –'

‘Fuck the name. Who gives a shite? Me Ramsay you Abdullah. Let's keep it nice and simple.'

The manner in which he said ‘Abdullah' was offensive. It was a joke name; as if all Middle Easterners were called Abdullah. The young man thought of the passport he'd been given in Athens, which identified him as Shimon Marak, a naturalized Greek of Israeli birth, and he realized that assumed names were simply tools of deception, and unimportant so long as you never lost sight of your real identity.

Ramsay said, ‘Here's how it is. One, I'll drive you to a place where you'll live. It's not fancy, but I don't expect you're accustomed to the Ritz. The address is 45 Braeside Street. Commit it to memory. Two, don't ask me any questions because the chances are I don't know the answers anyway. You follow me?'

‘Yes, yes. I follow.' The young man had expected a warmer reception. He'd anticipated an ally in this alien city, somebody at least kind. But Ramsay's attitude was the opposite.

I constructed an ideal in my head, Marak thought. Now I must absorb the reality. I am not here as a tourist with a camera. Ramsay's hostility was unexpected, but what did it matter in the long run?

Ramsay turned his face, and Marak saw his profile for the first time. The nose that terminated in a sharp point, the backward slope of forehead, the strange way the chin ran almost without impediment into the neck. Ramsay's hair was thick and brushed high from his scalp. One wedge, perhaps gelled, jutted from the front of his head, a promontory.

‘I'll drive you to your new home, Abdullah.'

‘I'm tired. It's been a long journey.'

‘I don't want to know anything about it,' Ramsay said.

The young man fell silent and stared from the window. He was aware of crossing a narrow river, the same one he'd travelled over earlier on his way to meet Ramsay. He'd ridden in a black taxicab driven by a pockmarked man who spoke as incomprehensibly as Ramsay. Laughing, the cabbie had said,
You another fucking illegal then
? He'd agreed with the driver: Yes yes. Illegal yes. Another foreigner.
Och, there's always a shortage of dishwashers at the kebab joints
. He'd smiled at that too and nodded eagerly. I understand nothing, Mr Driver. I am moron. You do not know if I am Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, whatever. I am just idiot from a distant country.

He saw the glare of the city, the night sky ablaze with electricity. Ramsay switched on the radio and listened to some kind of popular American music.

‘You like the golden oldies, Abdullah?' Ramsay asked.

‘Pardon me?'

‘Ah, the tunes of yesteryear,' Ramsay said. ‘The memory lanes of our lives and times. The way we were.'

Splish splash I was taking a bath
, the singer sang.

‘Bobby Darin,' Ramsay said.

The young man glanced at Ramsay as the car passed under a streetlamp and saw that the protruding bolt of hair was a peculiar yellow emerging from the blackness of scalp. He wondered about this decoration, this dye, and whether it signified anything.

‘Bobby Darin,' Ramsay said again. ‘You're listening to a dead man's voice. Amazing when you think about it, Abdullah, intit?'

Abdullah.
Enough
. The young man looked at a red traffic light. The colour of his feelings. He pressed his palms together hard. ‘Call me Shimon. I prefer that.'

‘Whatever bangs your bongo, pal,' Ramsay said, and beat a hand on the dash in time to the song. ‘
I was splishing and a-splashing. Splashing and a-splishing
. Got it? Altogether now, Abdullah.'

3

Sidney Linklater, forensics expert, was a Force Support Officer, a civilian attached to the Strathclyde Police. He was in his early thirties and spent all his spare time in wellies and raincoat trudging through the mud of ancient graveyards in pursuit of his hobby, charcoal rubbings of headstones.

Perlman thought this ghoulish, given the nature of Linklater's work, which took place in a world of decaying corpses and maggots channelling through rancid flesh. Why didn't Sid have a hobby that took him well away from death? There was nothing sickly or weirdo in young Linklater's appearance; he had the healthy open face of an eager boy-scout making his first successful sheepshank. Maybe he just felt at ease with the dead: they couldn't hurt your feelings, couldn't let you down. Had some flighty young number broken Linklater's tender heart?

He needs another life, Perlman thought.

Presently, Linklater hovered over the body that had been removed from the Central Station Bridge. Undressed, stretched on an examination table, the corpse had the look of a man just a little annoyed by his departure from the world. Things left undone, that cruise of the Nile never sailed,
Crime and Punishment
only half-read.

His flesh was pallid under the glow of two arc-lights. Linklater carefully examined the blue-purple marks left by the rope. Lou Perlman, who couldn't quite shake off the tiny feeling of familiarity the dead man had aroused, turned and gazed into the shadows beyond the lamps. He didn't like forensics labs, organic matter floating in bottles, amputated hands or feet suspended in formaldehyde. He didn't like the smell of chemicals and medicinal soap.

He said, ‘Don't know about you, Sid, but I'm seriously convinced he's dead.'

‘He's crossed the great divide all right,' Linklater remarked, and looked at Perlman over his glasses.

‘So is there a chance we can wrap the poor bastard up and get the hell out of here?'

‘Indeed we can,' Linklater said. He drew a sheet over the dead man's body, then scrubbed his hands at the sink.

Perlman stepped into an adjoining room, a storage area for chemicals and equipment; there was a shaky table and an electric kettle, mugs and tea-bags. He plugged the kettle into the wall and set two mugs beside it. One of them contained a dead fly, which he dumped on the floor. He dropped a tea-bag in each cup.

‘Bloody cold in here,' Linklater said. He found a stool and sat on it, stretching his long legs.

‘Is there milk?' Perlman asked.

‘
Milk?
Lucky there's tea, Lou.'

‘I like mine milky.' Perlman couldn't wait for the kettle to boil. When the water was hot, he poured it into the cups, and shoved one towards Linklater.

‘We don't have a spoon either,' Linklater said. ‘Cheers.'

Perlman poked a fingertip at the tea-bag, then sipped his tea. Utter pish. He made a face. ‘Right. One dead man. Apparent suicide.'

‘Apparent,' Linklater said.

‘Except. No evidence he climbed the concrete column to the girders. No wee crumbs of concrete under the fingernails or on the soles of the shoes. No rough or broken skin, no chipped fingernails. Just oil stains.'

‘Agreed.'

Perlman swirled the awful tea around in his mouth before swallowing it, and thought how quickly you could get used to rubbish if you had no alternative. We are obliged to choke down a load of shite and we don't even taste it after a while, especially the utterances of politicians. Bad mood, Lou. Fatigue, three in the morning and a corpse you don't need,
ballocks
.

‘All right, Sid, so no evidence the poor sod did any climbing. And if he came down from the rail tracks above, how come he's not totally
covered
in crap? We're probably talking about a half century of oil leaks and who knows what substances on the track.'

‘I don't think there's any deep mystery here, Lou. There's grease on his coat.'

‘My main concern is whether it's enough. You come clambering down from that bridge to the underside, Sid, and it's not going to be here a smudge, there a smudge, is it? You'd be
bathed
in black lubricants. I also bet there's layers of soot trapped up there from away before the Clean Air Act. You might not remember our fair city in its foggy heyday. Darkness at noon. The air was pure
schmutz
. You know what the people looked like? The Living Dead, Sid. You could leave the house nice and clean at eight a.m. and your pores would be clogged with coal smoke in a matter of twenty minutes … The good old days, Sid, when you sucked down a ton of pollutants on a daily basis.'