The Cutting Room (31 page)

compulsion. Don’t ask me why, some kind of moral bypass, I

don’t know. Anyway, I thought that if he was involved you

might have found something, not necessarily the key to the

operation, just some sign that he was a deviant bastard, but there we are, I was wrong. Dinnae worry yourself, though,

we’ll get them. The business is getting too big. We may only have put the wind up them this time, but next time we’ll be

putting them behind bars. For all I know, Vice is sniffing

around them again. They got egg on their face last time,

that’ll make them more determined. It’s a matter of when,

not if.’

Now was the time to do it. To tell him about the

photographs, the library, McKindless’s visit to Anne-Mane.

The door opened and Rose came through.

`Right, you two, break time’s over.’

`You were going to tell him something there, weren’t you?’

`No.’

`You were, I interrupted you. I could see it in your face.’

`Rose,’ I lied, `I wasn’t intending to say anything. What

could I say? It’s not like I’ve agreed to anything.’

It was ten in the evening. The sale was set up and we

were alone in the building. For once there was no bottle of

wine open on the table.

`Please, Rilke, please don’t screw this up for me. I

really like him, and at my age I don’t suppose I’ve got too

many chances left. If Jim finds out about this scam, that’ll be the end. He doesn’t even like me smoking joints. He’s

serious about law and stuff. It’s strange but that’s one of

the things I like about him. He’s honest. I can trust him.’

`Don’t you want him to be able to trust you?’

She looked indignant. `He can! About things that matter.

Anyway, he’ll never know.’

`Rose .’

`Oh come on, you know you want to.’

And I did. I was fed up with my life. Fed up of working and

never having anything. Tired of searching my pockets for the price of my next pint. I’d sat next to Death that afternoon.

Why not take a risk? The only people who might get hurt

were us, and weren’t we used to that? I wanted something

good for a change. And if the money was going begging, well, why shouldn’t we have it? From what Anderson had said, it

was dirty money anyway, ill-gotten gains that could do us

some good. I should have known better. Dirty money

contaminates. It never goes begging and there’s always

someone else who can be hurt.

`How?

She sat on the desk and shook my hand. `Glad to have

you on board, partner. From my vast reading of crime

fiction and viewing of American movies I have decided that

in crime’ - I winced at the word and she patted my hand

- `in using one’s initiative, simplest is best. Did anyone at the hospital know that you were from here??

‘No, they thought I was a relative.’

`Good. So unless we hear otherwise, and I doubt we will,

the sale being tomorrow, we go ahead. Now, it’ll be no secret that we held the sale. That doesn’t matter. In my study of

initiatives, it’s the greedy who get caught. We’re not going to pocket the lot. We’ll just take a significant percentage.’ She was enjoying herself now, getting into the swing of playing the glamorous girl gangster, a role she’d been preparing for all her life. `What proportion of our sales would you say are in cash??

‘About sixty-forty, cash to cheques.’

It was true. Antiques is a cash business. Not just for reasons of tax avoidance, though it is a significant consideration.

Antiques dealers have overdrafts which, grouped together,

would surely. rival Third World debt. Many dealers hide

purchases from their bank manager with the anxiety of a

teenage daughter wearing a forbidden dress beneath her

school uniform. Some like to feel their money close to them.

They hide their roll against their body. Carry it around like a security blanket, crooning to it, calling it pet names: lettuce, spondulicks, filthy lucre. Secure in an inside pocket or a shoe, incubating it in the hope it might breed.

`Okay, so all we have to do is reduce the hammer price of

lots that are paid for in cash by a consistent percentage, and pocket the difference. Twenty per cent, say. Mind, we also

get twenty per cent of the commission from the seller and the purchaser, split it fifty-fifty and at a rough guestimate I would say we were in for a relative fortune. What do you say? Are

you in?’

She spat on the palm of her hand and held it out to me. I did likewise and we clasped hands, sealing our bargain.

`Bugger that,’ Rose laughed. `Come on, give us a kiss!’

I woke in the middle of the night. There was someone in my

room. I knew it as sure as I knew I was alive. I lay still,

convinced that if I reached out to turn on the light, a clammy hand with a grip like iron would grab my wrist. Into the

silence broke the sound of breathing. I cried out loud and

lunged for the lamp. It toppled and as it fell light cast about the room, revealing no one. I lay back on the pillows, listening to the sound of my own staggered breath.

My pictures blacken in their frames

As night comes on

And youthful maids and wrinkled dames

Are now all one.

Walter Savage Landor,

`Death of the Day’

GOD KNOWS WHAT ROSE had promised in her publicity:

dancing girls, marijuana, a chance to buy your own piece of

the One True Cross. Whatever she’d done, it was working. It

was 11 a.m., the auction was heaving, and we were like to run out of vin de pissypauvre before the sale began. It was a dank, dark morning, in a month of dark days. Outside the sky was a palette of grey, from the palest of charcoal to the leaden

gunmetal of the approaching storm. But inside the lamps were lit, there was free drink, old adversaries and the best stuff we

had seen in an age. I moved through the multitude, like a

smooth-tongued Judas, shaking hands, giving advice, smiling

all the way back to my two gold incisors, unsure if what I had agreed to do was worth it for a bag of Belt, but Hell-bound

anyway. There was a glass of warm white wine cradled in my

hand and a bottle tucked behind the rostrum because,

although it tasted like piss, and urine has never been my

cup of tea, I knew from experience that it was alcoholic. The bottle may have (often) let me down, but I was willing to give our relationship another try.

I was used to being host of this strange party. Master of

ceremonies for a legion of rapscallions and slubberdegullions.

Antique dealers, collectors, drop-outs and delinquents, all

ages, all persuasions, the high and mighty and the merely high.

I wasn’t nervous about conducting the sale. I was nervous

about afterwards.

Rose shone from the thick of it, hair pulled back in a

torture bun, so tight it raised her eyebrows in surprise. She held an arts and crafts vase up for inspection, describing it to a more-money-than-taste couple, in a professional manner

lifted from The Antiques Roadshow. She felt my stare and

turned, giving me a music-hall wink. I scowled back and

continued my perambulations, looking over the heads of the

crowd, no one matching my height but the Irish bhoys,

already in position along the back in a fug of cigarette smoke.

Jimmy James stood hunched close to the Calor gas heater,

mindless of the singe marks that already edged the hem of his dust coat, taking proxy bids, shaking hands, slipping tight

folded bungs straight into his pocket with a magician’s sleight of hand. No now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, just a whispered,

`Here’s for your trouble, Jimmy’ brief incline of the head,

acknowledgement so slight you might miss it, into the pocket

and no guarantees. Later he would stand against me, bidding mournfully, shaking his head at every response. Everyone was there. Barras traders and Paddy’s Market pedlars had left

long-faced relatives to freeze at the stall that Saturday.

In galleries and book shops,

Junk yards and antique marts,

In strip and dip warehouses,

Mother-in-laws `cleared out all that rubbish’,

Assistants played raffia-raffia-hip-hop,

Lovers peered tentatively round doors,

Tea was made,

Feet placed on desks,

Cigarettes smoked, Kisses stolen,

Customers ignored, Phones left unanswered, Because the boss was at a sale.

Textile dealers fumbled through boxes of napery, holding

whites and not-so-whites in the air, rubbing the stiffened

fabric of stains between their fingertips, sniffing with trained nostrils to see if they could discern coffee, say, from something more sinister, a mark no stain devil could dislodge.

Skinny Liz, no glamour girl, no, not any more, though

once perhaps, who knows? Daughter of a rag-and-bone man,

one of the old school, brought up on the cart - though she’d deny it; proprietrix of Forgotten Moments; not secondhand

or used, no; Vintage Costume and Evening Wear. Had slipped

down to her back-lane establishment; breathed in the earlymorning old-clothes smell; the Saturday-night sweat of

party dresses; unmentionable odour of inside legs;

long-unlaundered shirts; woollen bathing costumes (sink like a stone); down-at-heel dance shoes; and scuttled through her racks, until she found the right shade of black, pure bombazine.

Skinny Liz, not skinny at all, who dreams of peach satin

and bias cut, who sews slender young things into barely there gowns for `the loveliest night of the year’. Poor Liz, only ever seen in her shop, down Paddy’s, the Barras, auction sales and bar rooms. Who names her frocks after film stars: Greta,

Bette, Audrey, Grace, Marilyn and Joan. Skinny Liz clicked

open the enamelled clasp of a bugle-beaded evening bag and

searched its pockets out of habit.

Frederic the carpet man was at floor level inspecting pile,

checking for infestation.

`I spend more time on my knees than a boor. It’s no joke.

There’s an African moth can eat a whole house in a week.

Tiny moth, big appetite. Teeth, too, perhaps. Never met one

but seen its picture in a book, bloody terrifying. No joke, this game. Not a game at all when you think on it. As hard as

pulling a sailor off your sister. Then there’s weevils and fleas, beetles, roaches, lice, nits, ticks, mites, bugs and cockchafers - they’re the worst. Beasties and creepy-crawlies of all sorts.

Bloody entomology, carpet dealing. That’s me, entomologist

and rug specialist. No fun having some wife come back to the stall complaining her house is louping. Tell you, I find a flying carpet, I’ll fly away.’

Over at the jewellery cabinet, Niggle - his mammy’d sent

him out smart today - passed a string of pearls to Edinburgh lain. lain rubbed them against his front teeth, checking for the telltale graininess that only the real thing has.

`The texture of a woman’s nipple, that’s what you look

for,’ he whispered to Niggle. `Soft, aye, but there’s a

roughness there that feels good to the tongue.’

The boy blushed. He’s been weaned a while and had no

contact since, but he’s interested all the same.

Henry the coffin chaser was wearing a new-to-him black

coat.

`Looking good, Henry.’

`It’s a fine one, eh? Beautiful bit o’ Aquascutum.’ He drew

it wide, showing me the inside pocket, the original owner’s

name and measurements sewn inside. `I got it from an auld

bid out Mount Florida way. Husband died, Lord rest him.

Gave her a hand disposing of his bits and pieces. Fits like a glove. Aye, he had a smart suit, too, insisted on having him buried in it.’ He shook his head at the waste.

Henry has a circuit of churches that keep him busy all

day Sunday. He starts first light and is busy till evensong.

An assiduous reader of local obituaries, Henry is as

ecumenical as a banker. He ferries old ladies, of all

denominations, from home to church, monitoring their

health and their treasures.

A young tatterdemalion, whose father is a top advocate and

regular tea-room trader, brushed against me. His curls in dark disarray, wearing a long patchwork coat sewn out of a

hundred hamster skins. He smiled with rotten teeth and

dropped something gently into my jacket pocket.

`Brighten up your weekend, man,’ he whispered in an

accent they never taught him at the Academy.

Two old duffers, collectors both, hail-fellow-well-met one

another and the room relaxed, as rooms do when bores find

each other.

`Howie you doing? What’s with the suit? They caught up

with you at last??

‘The daughter’s getting married this afternoon. Rose

Bowery phoned me about a wee railway item I might be

interested in so I’ve jumped ship. I’ll no be staying long, mind. Her and her mother are up in the house the now, faces

tripping them.’

`Well, you ken women when it comes to weddings. It’s a

big deal for them.’

Father of the bride raised his eyes to the ceiling in miserable agreement. `It’s not even as if I like the chap,’ he muttered, helping himself to wine.

Young Drummond, not so young these last ten years, is

under constant observation. A dozen dealers follow in his

wake, touching what he has touched, searching for clues.

Voices whisper, `There goes young Drummond.’ Young Drummond who `has a good eye’, who, `knows his stuff’