The Bad Fire (5 page)

She wandered through the greenhouse with the half-drunk shot of Absolut in her hand. She wondered what Christopher Caskie looked like now. They'd corresponded a dozen or more times through the years. His letters were usually in response to her inquiries about Joyce: was she doing all right? In his last letter Caskie had written that his wife had died of cancer.

A blackbird flew over the greenhouse and was briefly reflected in sunlit glass. From inside the house the radio played Artie Shaw's rendition of ‘There's A Small Hotel'.

6

Captain Zeke ‘Marvel' Stock, Eddie's superior, was so big and wide that some of the men in his command referred to him as the Eclipse. He weighed an imposing three hundred pounds plus, much of it solid muscle. Eddie sometimes thought of the captain as an African tribal chief, a man you expected to arrive at a crime scene held aloft by a congregation of bearers.

Presently, Marvel was motionless under a traffic signal, and the red stop light gave the impression that his face was smeared with the bloody innards of a goat sacrificed in his honour moments before.

Eddie gazed at the dead man in an expensive overcoat who lay face-down in the middle of the street.

Marvel twisted his huge neck and scanned the grey edifice of a twelve-storey office building. ‘A jumper,' he said.

‘He's sidewalk salsa all right,' Bobby Figaro said. Figaro was Marvel's right-hand, yes-man and all-round gofer.

‘Anyone got his name?' Marvel asked.

Figaro had it, of course. Figaro always had the scoop. ‘John Boscoe Bentley, an address on East 32nd. According to what was in his wallet, he worked down on Wall Street for a brokerage firm called Something Somebody and Something Else Incorporated. I gather from a preliminary inquiry – to wit, a phone call to the company CEO – he was something of a player. How he came to be on the ledge of this particular building,' and Figaro shrugged.

‘Coulda been pushed,' Marvel said.

‘All possibilities will be explored, Captain,' said Figaro, with his ever-ready halogen-bright smile.

Detectives and uniforms were already inside the building, knocking on doors, asking questions; because it was only seven a.m., the building was largely unoccupied save for custodians and a cleaning crew, also a few lonesome workaholics, some of them demented guys who'd been in the place all night trying to balance ledgers or make sense out of spreadsheets.

Mallon stared at the corpse and wondered about a life terminated this way – whether he jumped or was pushed, it was a hell of a place for a guy to die; the hard pavement of a city street. He thought of his father and realized how few details he had about the old man's death. Was he gunned down in the street? At home? Were there witnesses? What calibre weapon? The questions buzzed him like gnats.

He watched Marvel yawn. It was an awesome sight; the mouth opened like a giant oyster about to yield a pearl. Gold fillings flashed in his mouth, which became one vast maw. ‘I need coffee,' Marvel said. ‘Somebody be good enough to get the captain a shot of strong java, huh?'

‘There's a joint round the corner,' Figaro said. ‘I'll go.'

Figaro disappeared. Brown-nose Figaro. Marvel looked at Eddie Mallon.

‘Say, this ain't your shift, is it, Mallon?' Marvel said. ‘Come to that, it ain't my shift either. So why have I dragged my sorry ass downtown at this time of day, you ask? Lemme tell you. Because I ain't been home, Eddie. I been struggling with paperwork. I been wrestling figures. Budgets. City Hall needs numbers to crunch.'

‘Way over my head,' Eddie said.

‘Way over mine too.' The captain lit a small brown-papered cigarette and stared at the corpse. ‘My brain feels like a punchbag. I just stepped out for some air and take a look at this body we got here. What brings you out?'

‘I need to talk with you,' Eddie said. ‘I want some leave.'

‘You got vacation time coming to you?'

‘This would be leave of absence. Family reasons.'

‘Somebody sick?'

Mallon saw lights go on in the upper floors of the building. He imagined the dead man, John Boscoe Bentley, falling through space, through darkness: what did you think as you dropped? You knew you were going to hit ground hard, and you'd break, so what went through your mind in those few seconds? Nothing? Everything? Or was it all just one blind deep-red searing panic? And at the end – what? A fraction of acceptance? A microsecond of tranquillity? Maybe you just blacked out, or your heart exploded out of fright halfway down.

‘My father died.' Eddie turned to look at Marvel.

‘Say. Sorry to hear that. Real sorry. How did it happen? Was he sick?'

Eddie said, ‘He was shot.'

‘
Shot
. Jesus Christ.'

‘I don't know the circumstances.'

‘Shot. Fuck. Fucking world we live in.' Marvel sucked on his cigarette and stared into the lit end a second. ‘You got any heavy cases on your desk as of now?'

Eddie said, ‘There's the dead girl we found in the empty brownstone …'

‘That junkie kid nobody can ID?'

‘Yeah,' Eddie said. He pondered the mystery of the missing teenage girl, a runaway from somewhere, and the fact her identity hadn't yet been established. Somebody must be missing her, waiting up for her, insomniac parents in a small backwater township in a faraway state.

‘Tom Collins can deal with that,' Marvel said.

Tom Collins was Eddie's partner, a dark-jawed second-generation Irishman.

Eddie said, ‘Apart from the girl, it's stuff that can wait.'

‘Stuff that can wait, huh? I never heard of stuff like that before,' Marvel said, and smiled. ‘Must be new on the market. I gotta grab myself some of that good shit. You take the time you need, Eddie. You want any help, you know where to turn.'

‘I appreciate that,' Eddie said.

Marvel dismissed the gratitude with a quick motion of his hand and was already moving away, drawn towards the door of the building by the sight of Figaro, who was clutching a cardboard cup of coffee.

An ambulance appeared, lights whirling. Eddie Mallon watched the paramedics emerge. He saw them surround the body. And he felt weirdly lonely, out of touch with this world of his, as if he'd already left it, and was airborne, flying back to a place he barely remembered.

Glasgow, a city seen through a rainy mist, a fuzzy sketch in damp charcoal.

7

In the doorway of his parents' bedroom Mark Mallon asked, ‘How long will you be gone, Dad?'

‘A couple of days,' Eddie said. He marvelled at how tall his son had become; magically, he'd stretched from five feet to just under six in the space of a year. He was almost as tall as Eddie himself. Facially, he resembled his mother; he had a delicacy about him that gave him an androgynous look. Girls loved it. They worshipped the way his long hair lay against his shoulders. They telephoned him constantly. High-pitched little voices filled with squeaky hope:
Is Mark home?

Claire was packing. She took special care with Eddie's best suit, a navy blue number for the funeral. It wasn't too late to change his mind, he thought. Cancel the airline ticket. But he'd already phoned Joyce and given her his arrival time, and she'd yelped with excitement at the idea of seeing him, and he felt good he'd been able to give her this much pleasure just by buying an airline ticket and rearranging his life for four days or so.

‘Did somebody really shoot Gramps?' Mark asked.

‘It seems that way.'

‘Boy,' Mark said. ‘You know why?'

‘I don't know anything yet,' Eddie said. He flipped the pages of his passport, saw a picture of himself taken seven years earlier. Black hair, no grey. Face leaner. He thought he looked passably attractive in this picture, but gravity hadn't given him jowls back then.

‘Was he, you know, like a crook?' Mark asked.

‘A crook? What makes you ask that?'

‘Something Granma once said. He was in jail for a while.'

‘Sixty days. It was nothing, a mistake,' Eddie said.

‘Why didn't he ever come visit?'

Eddie shrugged. ‘He never got around to it, that's all. He was perfectly happy to stay home. He didn't like travel.'

‘So why didn't
we
visit
him
?' Mark asked.

Good question, and Eddie Mallon had no easy answer; only excuses. He'd graduated high school, gone to the Police Academy, got married, bought a house in Queens, settled down, raised a kid, took his vacations in places as far away from any city as he could get, isolated cabins in Idaho or Montana, National Parks in Tennessee or Kentucky. A life went rushing past and it preoccupied you, and suddenly you realized you were never going to read
War and Peace
or sit drinking blood-orange juice at a sidewalk cafe in Florence or sail the Greek islands for a month. And all you could say to your son when he asked why the family had never visited Glasgow was, ‘Somehow we just never found the time, Mark,' which wasn't a good explanation but close to the truth.

Thirty years of life. A bubble in the wind, drifting.

He touched his wife's hand. ‘I wish you were coming with me.'

Claire zipped his case, smiled at him. ‘It's only a few days. Anyhow, somebody's got to hold down the fort here.'

‘Hey, I could do that,' Mark suggested. He was suddenly eager.

‘Why does that offer make alarm bells ring in my head?' Claire asked.

‘You think I'd throw all-nighters, big parties, invite hundreds of kids,' he said.

‘Did I say that?' Claire asked.

‘You don't have to,' Mark said. ‘But it's what you think.'

Eddie stuck his passport in a hip pocket of his black jeans. He put his airline ticket in the inside pocket of his pale grey linen jacket, patted the place as if to reassure himself of something.

He looked at Claire. He was about to say it a second time:
you could still come with me
. Claire and Jackie Mallon had never met; the old man had always existed on the periphery of her life. Once or twice they'd talked on the phone and he'd made her laugh, but that was it. He was a dead stranger who'd spoken in a funny accent she sometimes didn't understand.

‘If you're ready, I'd better get you to JFK.' She glanced at her watch, rattled car keys in her hand.

He gazed round the room in the manner of a man taking his leave of a place he'll never see again. Why did this departure from wife and son make him feel so goddam
melancholy?
He'd be back before they knew he'd even gone. They had lives of their own. Mark had friends, girls, serious hanging-out to do. Claire had a part-time job with Century 21 and every Wednesday and Friday she went to a health club where she rode an exercise bike and checked her pulse rate and blood pressure, then drank lo-cal fruit smoothies with her pals in a health-food bar.

‘Ready,' he said.

8

Sun burned fiercely on the mouth of the Clyde. A launch, a thirty-footer, was anchored about a quarter of a mile from shore. Christopher Caskie stood unsteadily on deck and watched small boats sail towards Ardrossan, Ayr, the Isle of Arran. Sails dazzled yellow and white in the hard light.

Caskie was a card-carrying landlubber. The sea affected his stomach. The rise and fall of water was gentle but it made him queasy anyway, and he had to sit down. He closed his eyes, felt the sun on his eyelids. His short white beard was warm.

He heard footsteps on the stair that led from the lower deck. The man who appeared was six feet six inches tall. He had a tubercular appearance, circles the colour of grape juice under his eyes. His pear-shaped face was too small for the rest of his body. He wore a black silk shirt and white slacks. He farted quietly, sighed with pleasure, then sat down beside Caskie.

‘There's nothing in the world as satisfying as a good healthy expulsion of gas,' the man said. His name was Roddy Haggs.

Caskie said, ‘I suppose that depends on your priorities.'

‘Ah. Are bodily functions off-putting to you? Note to self: do not discuss gases with Caskie.' Haggs studied other boats in the vicinity with his binoculars. ‘Look at that.
Look
at that. Fuck me. I know what I'd like to do to her. Ooo.'

The object of Haggs's lust was a tanned blonde teenage girl in a neon lime bikini who dived from a small yacht about three hundred yards away. She vanished underwater, then surfaced laughing. She climbed back into the boat. She had a melodic laugh. Her water-flattened hair was pressed to her skull.

‘Very nice,' Caskie said. He felt Haggs expected an appropriate response. They were members of the same club: men of the world. But different worlds.

‘
Nice?
Show some enthusiasm, Caskie. She's completely shaggable. What they call a
babe
. Don't tell me you wouldn't fancy a poke at that crumpet.'

A high-powered speedboat passed, sending waves towards the launch, which trembled a little. Caskie felt his stomach tighten.

‘Beer?' Haggs asked.

‘I'll pass.'

Haggs popped a lager and slurped it. ‘I'm fascinated by the idea of squeezing out whatever deep secrets the former jockey knows about good old Jackie's mysterious enterprise. I'll pop him like a bloody flea. Talk to me about the daughter.'

Caskie shrugged. ‘Divorced. Intelligent. She had a fondness for amphetamine a few years back but she kicked it. I seriously doubt she knows anything. She was close to her father. But I don't imagine for a moment he discussed his business with her.'

Haggs said, ‘Which leaves Senga.'

‘Senga's a good-hearted sort, but probably hard as bloody nails if you step on her toes the wrong way. I don't think she's privy to anything either … I'll tell you one thing, Haggs. Her heart may be good, but it's broken right now.'

Haggs was silent for a time, cracking his knuckles. Caskie wondered if the silence was some form of sympathy, then decided it was more likely that Roddy Haggs didn't have a clue what to say about grief. He just wasn't good with little sounds of commiseration, the
so sorrys
and the
oh dears
that were the basic currency of response to human tragedy.