White Rage (38 page)

A nurse came in and took his pulse, his blood pressure. She was a big woman with a perm that had imploded in a thicket of flattened curls.

‘What time is it?' Perlman asked.

‘Midday.'

‘Are my glasses anywhere?' he asked.

‘Right here.' She picked up his glasses from the surface of the bedside table and passed them to him.

He put them on one-handed. How clear the world looked again. A couple of discs of simple glass bring you back from the murk. ‘How's my blood?'

‘Acceptable,' she said. ‘Considering.'

‘Here, any chance of a smoke?'

‘Aye, right, about as much chance as me and Richard Gere making a wean thegether.'

‘You and Dick would make great parents, pet.'

‘None of your flannel,' she said. ‘I'll be back with some grub.'

Perlman watched the wide-hipped nurse disappear beyond the curtain. He wondered where they'd put his clothes. What had he been wearing anyway? A blood-soaked shirt? Trousers, probably also bloodstained. What were a few stains, if you weren't particular? Had he been wearing his coat? He scanned the space. No closet. The big drawer of his bedside table was the best candidate. The trick was to lean from the bed and slide the thing open.

If you can't manage that, Lou, you're going nowhere.

But it was dumb and stupid to
think
about movement. Here's the chance to kick back, cool your beans, get pampered, fed, never have to raise a finger to help yourself, get bathed in bed, you want anything you just press a wee bell and somebody eventually comes, easy living, no problems.

I'm in a movie, he thought.

I'm the man who has to rise up from his sickbed and, no matter what the cost, go in search of justice.

I'm the Federal Agent who groans as he gets up. He's still clinging to his badge of office, his responsibilities, his sense of duty.
He has to get up
. Bed just isn't an option.

I'm the
parshoin
, the superhero.

He twisted, groaned,
oh God have mercy
, stretched for the handle. Then rested. He was breathing hard. Shattered muscle, chipped bone, God knows what else the bullet had done.
I'm kidding myself
about getting out of here
. His face was damp and cold. His body sweated. He felt mildly fevered. Scullion was right when he'd asked: How come you never want to do what's best for you?

Because it's in the fibre. The marrow. You're an
eigueshpart
bastard. What other kind of man could have silently loved a woman for so many years? Only a stubborn one. Only a single-minded old bastard who wouldn't listen to the cries of his own body but preferred instead to stare at the grainy silver screens of childhood, where men absorbed their pain without fuss.

He removed the drip, lowered his hand, grasped the handle, slid the drawer open. The pain pincered his upper arm and shoulder. Tears came to his eyes. He needed pethidine, morphine, whatever took away this sense that somebody was boring a hole through flesh and nerve and bone with an electric drill.

He saw his clothes piled in the drawer. The shirt was bloodied. The trousers looked okay, give or take some red stains. His coat had been folded. His shoes were on the floor, half under the table. He lowered the uninjured arm, plucked the trousers from the drawer, drew them up to the bed.

Christ, all this was
tiring
. He remembered now. Hadn't his benefactor given him a wadded-up piece of paper last night? Or had he conjured that up from his opiated sleep? He stuck his hand in the pocket of his trousers and fumbled among a keychain, coins, a book of matches, some indescribable lint –
oose
was the word for it – and retrieved the paper, which he spread on the bedsheet.

A name and an address.

He didn't know the name, and the location of the address was only slightly familiar to him. Okay, it meant something, otherwise the Samaritan wouldn't have given it to him. Was it the one-eyed man's address? Or something else? Perlman's head felt like a basketball being tossed through a series of hoops and hitting the rim each time.

Who the hell was the benefactor anyway? And why had he been outside Perlman's house at the
exact
time of the shooting? He didn't believe it was pure chance. He had the feeling that the Samaritan had been lingering nearby for a purpose.

But what?

He
craved
answers. He let his head slide back towards the pillow. Another big question: how to get into his clothes and out of here with a minimum of suffering? He lay very still and considered the problem. He needed help. An assistant.

He knew of only one candidate who'd obey without creating problems. He reached in an awkward manner for the telephone, imagining his hand to be pale grey suddenly, and the slats of Venetian blinds laying darker strips of shadows across his skin. Any moment now the credits would roll and he'd be out of this monochromatic world of pain and whooshed back into the drably sensible reality with which he was familiar.

45

She left her room in Langlands Road shortly after 2 p.m. She hadn't slept all night – mind meandering, thoughts tumbling, memories of Perlman flitting through her head – but she felt alert. She'd cut her hair even shorter than before and rinsed the blonde out of it, and now her style was that of a very young schoolboy, side-parted. She wore a pair of granny glasses, baggy old jeans with holes in the knees, tan trainers, a brown wool jacket and a dark paisley scarf. The charity-shop eclectic look, a kind of downmarket fusion, the style – or lack of it – that might be adopted by an impoverished student finishing her thesis on some arcane aspect of Elizabethan theatre.

She walked to Govan Underground station. She passed a veiled woman selling copies of the
Big Issue
, and a couple of beggars she'd seen a few times before, shivering young dopers in balaclavas, chalk-coloured hands held out for alms. The board of a newspaper stand read:
White Rage Killings: More Fears

She went inside the station and down to the platform and heard the rumble of an incoming train approach from the black of the tunnel. She boarded, avoided the faces of her fellow passengers, rode to Buchanan Street, exited, walked to Killermont Street. She'd given up her usual long stride; the clothes she wore somehow imposed a slight shuffling mode of walk, modest, less self-assured.

I fucked up
, she thought.
I missed an open goal
.

She passed the bus station and moved along Hanover Street.

She'd look for a cab. She was forever looking for cabs. Sometimes she felt she lived her life in the back of black taxis. She coughed in the polluted air. The stench of diesel from the bus station was overpowering.

She saw a taxi, raised a hand, watched the cab come swooping in to the kerb. She climbed in the back and the driver swivelled his red razor-nicked neck and said, ‘Let me take you away from all this, sweetheart.'

‘Any time,' she said.

‘My wife's an awfy jealous woman,' he said. ‘She'd have a fit.' He laughed at his own banter. Running off with a woman half his age, leaving a scandal in his slipstream after a life of respectability and fidelity, fancy that.

She settled back in the seat and took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She had a single lash turned inward against the eyeball and it pricked her. She pushed it aside with a fingertip.

She'd say,
I screwed it up. I need another chance
.

She pulled her scarf around her head and looked from the window. The city was washed in yellow light, and indifferent.

46

‘Easy there, son,' Perlman said. ‘Hard as it might be, think of me as very delicate porcelain.'

Carefully, Murdoch helped Perlman to a sitting position. ‘I'm trying, Sergeant.'

‘Just say porcelain porcelain over and over to yourself and you'll start to believe it.' Perlman's legs dangled from the bed. Call me Dick Tracy, he thought. ‘What clothes did you bring me?'

‘The best I could find.' The young constable opened a plastic grocery bag and spilled the contents on the bed. ‘A shirt, a pair of trousers, socks. I tossed in boxer shorts.'

Perlman thought of the neatly dressed Murdoch rummaging through his house. Had he stumbled on the dirty laundry pile? Had he seen the heap of burnt-down cigarettes in the bedside ashtray and the crumpled sheets and the hole singed by loose ash in the mattress and the pillowcases that didn't match? Perlman felt a tiny tweak of shame. But was it his fault that his former cleaning woman, Maggie McGibbon, had quit the job a few months ago because of her bad back? Pardon me, I haven't had time to look for a replacement.

‘You'll need to help me, Murdoch.'

‘I don't think this is too smart, Sergeant.'

‘Did I ask for an opinion, Dennis?'

‘No, actually –'

‘Then do as you're told. The underwear first.' Perlman stood upright. His head felt like an egg that had been spooned empty. His bandaged arm, stiff and useless, reminded him of stories told by amputees about how they could still feel missing limbs. His arm was a phantom.

A little embarrassed, Murdoch assisted him into the blue boxers. ‘No need to be coy,' Perlman said.

‘I'm just not used to helping grown men into their underwear.'

‘Avert your eyes, Dennis. Now the trousers.'

Perlman couldn't recall owning trousers like the ones Murdoch produced; heavy and black and tight at the waist. Where the hell had they come from? What forgotten quarry of discarded clothing? He did up the zip without the constable's help.

‘The shirt,' Perlman said.

‘This is going to be awkward.'

‘Drape the shirt over that shoulder, Dennis. I can manage the right arm.'

Murdoch held the garment in such a way that Perlman could push his right arm into the appropriate sleeve, then the young policeman gathered the left side of the shirt and hung it over Perlman's left shoulder. Murdoch did up the buttons.

‘Never thought you'd signed on as a nanny, did you, Dennis?'

‘No, Sergeant.'

‘You're good. You've got that special touch.'

‘I've waited all my life to hear that,' Murdoch said.

Perlman managed a very fragile smile. This is a fucking stupid mistake, he thought. I'll kill myself if I walk out of this place. My black and white world will be ablaze with colour, and I'll be dead.

‘You've got permission to leave?' Murdoch asked.

‘What am I, a prisoner? I leave when I like.'

Murdoch looked concerned. ‘Sergeant –'

Perlman said, ‘Don't nag, Dennis. You're too young to
kvetch
.'

‘They won't let you out of here.'

‘So they'll strap me in a straitjacket against my will? Coat, please. Then socks and shoes.'

Murdoch hung the coat over Perlman's shoulders. He stooped, slipped the socks on Lou's blue-veined white feet, then the shoes. He tied the laces.

‘You brought a car, Dennis?'

‘My own.'

‘Good. Lead me to it. Slowly, slowly. Just until I get the circulation pumping again.'

Murdoch held the curtain aside. Perlman stepped through it, like a forgotten actor crooked with age, about to make a comeback appearance. A dilapidated old man, attached to an elaborate arrangement of tubes, peered at Perlman from the next bed. He was clearly edging towards the last exit.
The indignity of hospitalized death
, Perlman thought, and kept moving. Murdoch was wary at his side, ready to catch if Perlman stumbled.

The nurse with the wrecked perm appeared in the doorway. She looked as if she had a bedraggled miniature poodle on her skull. Perlman held up a hand, palm outward. ‘Say nothing. Don't chastise me. I'm leaving.'

‘You think you'll make it out of here?'

‘I'd rather be out there than in here, Nurse. Believe me.'

‘And when you need painkillers, what? You'll just ring some little bell in your head, will you?'

‘I've got killers to catch,' Perlman said.

‘So I'm told –'

‘And I'm not going to catch them lying here.'

‘You'll drop in the street.'

‘I'm a durable old sod.'

‘Stupid old sod is more like it.' She took a small pill box from her uniform. She opened it, removed two capsules, dropped them into Perlman's hand. ‘You were due for medication anyway. You're going to need it, Sergeant. If you run into the doctor on the way out, I never saw you. Do we have an understanding?'

‘You're a wee darling,' he said.

‘You might not think so well of me later,' she said.

He slipped the pills into his coat pocket and kept walking, Murdoch alongside him. ‘Sometimes you find charity when you least expect it, Dennis.'

‘And trouble,' Murdoch remarked.

‘Trouble I always expect.'

They passed the front desk together, then walked out of the building. The sky was unexpectedly white and high in Perlman's vision. He blinked, felt woozy. A quick sharp ache hacksawed his upper arm. He was tempted to take one of the capsules, but he'd resist until he felt he was about to faint.

Murdoch's car was a bulbous little green thing, a Ford Ka.

‘What planet's that from? Am I expected to get in there?' Perlman asked.

‘It's bigger than it looks.' Murdoch held the passenger door open and Perlman, bending none too comfortably, made his way into the car. He grunted. The secret of movement, he thought, was to be aware of your limitations. Head upright, left arm completely still, don't bend unless you have to.

Murdoch turned the ignition key. Perlman asked, ‘Did you tell anybody you were coming to the hospital?'

‘No, Sarge.'

‘Am I detecting hesitation, Dennis?'

Murdoch drove out of the car park. ‘Hesitation?'

‘A pause, a tiny wee measure of time?'