White Rage (36 page)

‘Anything else you need, Sergeant?'

I'm fine,' he said, and his attention was drawn to a small rectangular envelope propped against his keyboard. It was addressed to him. He opened it – it hadn't been gummed very well – and removed the contents. A photograph slid into his hand face down. He turned it over and felt a rush of recognition.

‘Did you put this envelope here, Meg?'

On her way out, Meg Gayle paused in the doorway. ‘No, I didn't.'

‘Any idea who might have been in here?'

‘Sorry, Sergeant. Is there a problem?'

‘No, no, it's fine.'

‘Right, goodnight,' she said.

He didn't answer. He looked at the photograph for a long time.

A classic Bentley, a driver, a streetlamp, a street sign, a date and time. It was night-time in the photograph, and the driver's face was obscured by shadow.
I was there when this was taken
, he thought. And so was Colin. He got to his feet and stuck the photo in his coat pocket and rushed downstairs to reception.

‘Jackie, has anybody strange gone upstairs tonight?'

‘People going up there are usually strange, Sergeant,' Wren said.

‘Seriously.'

‘I haven't seen anyone unfamiliar, if that's what you mean.'

‘Fine, thanks.' Perlman walked outside. Go home, he thought. Leave the transcription of the cassette for tomorrow. Tay can wait.

He'll have to.

He walked to his car and sat behind the wheel and smoked a cigarette. He removed the photograph from his pocket and examined it under the interior light. Who took this? Who sent it to me? Was this the evidence the anonymous caller had promised?

He peered hard at the shot. How could you tell if the picture was real or fake? And if it
was
real, who was the photographer? Who could possibly have been in the street at that particular time on that particular date armed with a camera? He pushed back his seat and stretched his legs. Three miles to Egypt. Three miles to ponder the photograph. After that, he'd call Miriam.

42

He let himself into the dark house and touched the mezuzah, then turned on lights as he moved down the corridor and into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and seized a brown-spotted chill-skinned banana he found in the salad tray. He unpeeled it quickly and crammed it into his mouth. He scanned the refrigerator again: slim pickings. He found a triangle of plastic cheese and picked the packaging off clumsily. As you got older, packaging irritated you increasingly. At sixty-five he'd probably have to set half an hour aside to crack open his cigarettes. At seventy, senile and trembling, he'd be totally bamboozled by a bag of potato crisps.

He walked inside the living room, his attention taken by a slight whispering sound. The turntable. The stylus had gone back to the off position automatically, but the disc was still turning round and round. A flawed device; it must have been spinning for hours. He chose another album to put on, placed the needle carefully on the slick surface of the record and listened to the first bars of Billie Holiday singing ‘What is this Thing Called Love'? He moved some newspapers and magazines from the sofa, tossed them on the floor, then sat down and undid his tie. The music calmed him. At times there was a sweet ease about it, at other times an eerie doomed optimism.
I saw you there one wonderful day
…

He opened the envelope and studied the photograph. You couldn't see the driver's face. But he didn't have any doubt that it was Kilroy. The man behind the wheel, although half-lost in an obscurity of shadow, was undeniably big and bulky. Blow this up and you'll get the Fat Man, he thought. If it isn't a fake. Why send a fake anyway?

Who'd falsify evidence? The picture needed to be examined by experts. And if it was real –

The Proc-Fisc couldn't disregard this item. He couldn't just cast this one aside.

He leaned towards the telephone, dialled Miriam's number.
I saw you there one wonderful day, you took my heart and threw it away
… ‘Hello, Lou,' she said.

‘How did you know it was me?'

‘Would you believe psychic?'

‘I keep an open mind.'

‘The truth is banal. I have caller ID.'

‘Damn, that's one mystery less,' he said.

‘I'm sure there are plenty of other mysteries.'

‘You're telling me? I'm falling over them all the time.' He tried to picture her, what she was wearing, whether she was standing or sitting or lying down. He had the mind of the inquisitive lover, possessive and yearning for detail; the fact that he wasn't a lover he deemed a mere technicality. They'd kissed. He'd touched her breast. He'd crossed barriers he'd never dreamed of crossing. In time, he'd span others.

He was about to mention the photograph, but why turn the conversation towards Colin? This is my dime, my time, he thought. I'm hungry and selfish in matters of the heart. Colin had her to himself for years.

‘Is that Billie Holiday?' Miriam asked.

‘Yes.'

‘I like her.'

The things you learn about the people you love, he thought. ‘When are you free?' he asked.

‘Are you asking me out again?'

‘I think I am.'

‘You're becoming very bold, Lou.'

He gazed round the room. Lamplight made crevices in the shadows. ‘How about tomorrow,' he said. ‘I'll rearrange my cluttered world for you.'

‘Lou, you never know what you'll be doing one hour to the next. If you're free, call me.'

He didn't want the conversation to end in uncertainty. He needed to know that tomorrow held romantic possibilities. ‘When I saw you, you know, in your dressing gown –'

She laughed. ‘When you copped a feel, you mean?'

‘Take me seriously.'

‘I do.'

‘Right, when that happened, I felt like a kid doing somersaults. Am I sounding daft and soppy?'

‘Totally. I don't mind.'

She opens the door a crack further. She says she doesn't mind. This is the kind of thing you pounce on. ‘So many things I've been meaning to tell you –'

‘Then tell me to my face.'

‘I will.'

‘Save them. Call me tomorrow,' she said.

‘Count on that.'

‘Goodnight, Lou.' She hung up before he could think of a way to detain her. He rose from the sofa and bopped round the room in happy dancing mode.

He stopped suddenly.

Somebody was in the room with him. Standing directly behind him. He didn't have to turn and check. He knew. The chill on the back of his neck, the sudden surge of heartbeat. He knew.

‘You're obviously in love, Perlman. What a surprise.'

She was blonde and she'd cut and curled her hair, and she wore a grey tracksuit and running shoes, but he knew that face. He felt foolish. She must have been watching him, and listening to his conversation with Miriam. Tracksuit, running shoes, kitted out for jogging.

Blum had been a jogger too.

He saw the little gun in her hand.

‘Love at your time of life,' she said. ‘There's still hope for the rest of us.'

‘Some things take you by surprise,' he said.

‘I'm going to shoot you,' she said.

‘I guessed when I saw the gun.'

‘I don't want to especially.'

‘But it's the programme. It's White Rage. You're doing Jews now.'

‘Flavour of the day,' she said.

‘Like Blum.'

‘Creepy type. Thought he was God's gift.'

‘But you were under orders.'

‘The movement needs victims, Perlman.'

‘And killers.'

‘I believe in my work,' she said. She had a mouth you could imagine doing outrageous things. Her green eyes shone with fervour.

‘What's your real name anyway?'

‘Names don't matter, Sergeant.'

‘You're subsumed by the movement. You give up your identity.'

‘I'm a wee cog in the big machine,' she said. ‘You like the hair?'

‘It suits,' he said.

‘Cut and curl,' she said. ‘This house was a piece of cake. I thought a cop would be more security conscious. Back door, crappy latch, I'm inside in a flash. What's she like, this love of yours?'

‘Let me count the ways,' he said.

‘You've got it bad.'

‘My soul's affected,' he said.

‘Deep stuff, Sergeant. You should have arrested me in the street, you know.'

‘Hindsight's easy, lassie. I couldn't make the match.'

‘And I couldn't believe you walked away.'

‘Mistakes, I've made a few.'

Billie Holiday was singing ‘Do Nothin 'Til You Hear From Me'. Perlman heard the words, but his mind was working elsewhere: a way out, an exit route, how? The gun sorely limited his options. His heart banged like a fist against a concrete wall.

‘Never mind, Sergeant. We all make them.'

‘That's such a wee gun,' he said.

‘It does a big job.'

‘Bobby used that one on Indra,' Perlman said.

‘How right you are.'

‘And you're the virus. Magistr32.'

‘You dig a bit, don't you?'

‘I like standing in holes.'

‘Good, because you're in a deep one now. And you can't get out.'

Perlman eyed the gun. He had a floating sensation, as if, filled suddenly with helium, he was rising to the ceiling. An out-of-body experience already, and you're not dead. He wondered about all the trusted responses, the suicidal rush, head down like a battering ram, the fast backward retreat, the
Me Jewish? You must be mistaken
strategy: none of these ever worked. He thought, this is going to hurt, no matter what I do. She has a bullet and my picture's on it.

‘Did Helen Mboto scream a lot?'

‘Playing for time isn't going to win you a reprieve, Sergeant.'

‘A hammer, repeated blows, she –'

‘She wasn't conscious much.'

‘Tilak Gupta, now, he really fell, right?'

‘He needed only slight encouragement.'

‘You get around –'

‘Speaking of getting places. This has been very nice, and I'd love to stay and chat.'

‘Wait,' and he raised his hands in front of his face.

She brought the gun up. Billie Holiday sang,
True I've been seen with someone new
. He stepped back half a yard. He'd miss fish suppers. He'd miss music. He'd miss Miriam. He had a hundred reasons for not dying. He wanted to tell this woman what they were, and how unfair it was to die when you'd finally
almost
declared your love.

He took another step back. The hallway was behind him, the door open to the corridor, the front door beyond that, the street. He wondered if he could edge out of the room in steps so small she'd never notice. Not even Houdini had a chance.

She fired a shot.

He'd never known such
intensity
of pain could exist. It put all the aches of his life in perspective. The bad back, the toothache, the sinus pain behind the eyes, the front of the skull, these were nothing, motes in the great cosmic drift of things. He brought his right hand across his chest to his left shoulder, which is where he thought he'd been shot. His fingers were instantly wet with blood. He couldn't stand up. Legs gone. He went down on his knees, rolled onto his back, groaned,
Christ such pain
. He slid towards the hallway like a man with his hands tied behind his back. She'd fire again, he knew that. She was looming down on him. His eyesight was tinted now, everything deep red at the edges, like paper burning.

He heard the gun again.

The shot missed him by the width of a thread. He heard the bullet kick into the floorboards beside his head, splintering wood. His thoughts swirled. The gunfire was audible in his skull. His body was sliding down towards the combustion chamber of a crematorium. Already he felt the raging heat. He slithered backwards through the fog and fire and smoke of his pain, even as she tracked him, gun held aloft.

‘Fuck it,' she said.

He reached up with his right arm, grabbed the edge of a shelf, brought it down in a clatter of books and old souvenirs he'd collected over the years with no real purpose in mind, war medals of WWI, a couple of old brass telescopes, some primitive flint tools gathered at an archaeological dig in Stornoway by Colin in the days of his youthful innocence, big glass jars of old pennies, florins, half-crowns, pre-decimal coins he'd collected just because he liked that metal-smelling dirty weighty old currency. The jars shattered, the coins rolled everywhere, the flint pieces broke, the medals clanked on floorboards. He was covered by his own silly keepsakes. He found the strength to keep pushing himself backwards, spine to floor, hips working, feet kicking for purchase against the floor.

Somebody was banging on the front door now. Thumping. Or was it a tattoo in some fevered corner of his own brain? And now a voice. Several voices, male, rough, upraised.

He saw her stare at the door. She was surprised, and then indecisive, caught between the sudden sounds from outside and the sight of Perlman lying before her. She fired another shot, this time levelling her gun at the door. The bullet split wood high, almost at the lintel level. He twisted his face and looked backwards and saw the front door open – not in any normal way, no geometric opening of space, the door was battered off its hinges and fell inwards and figures entered the hallway. He wanted to warn these intruders,
Get back, she'll shoot again
, but his mouth was too dry for speech. His tongue was numb, a flat stone between his teeth. Head tilted, he recognized a couple of faces, neighbours roused by shots, neighbours tired of the cyclical crime and violence in the city – vigilantes of a sort, he'd always supposed. There were three or four of them. They were men he talked to on the street from time to time. He knew some of their names. McQuillen. Spiers. Dunn. They asked him questions about becoming police volunteers, part-time cops on the beat, what did it take, how did they qualify? Sometimes he thought,
I look like a recruiting poster?
They wanted to meet violence with an approved, city-regulated violence of their own. Batons to the head of wrongdoers. A boot, a knee to the groin, to the skull. They wanted to be a posse. He'd always mildly disapproved of them for this urge to take the law into their own hands, but not now, they were heroes, saviours, fighters at the borderline where civilization met brutality. They'd come to his rescue. Praise them. Bless 'em all.