White Rage (5 page)

Kids were screaming.

‘Put that gun away,' she said.

‘Aw, fuck you.'

He fired at a range of four feet directly into her forehead. She made a weird sound, as if her breath had all been sucked back into her throat, then she slipped to the floor and lay on her side. Little kids were sprayed with her blood and brain-soup and bone fragments. He wanted to linger, say something to calm them down, explain why he'd had to shoot the woman, and how he was sorry they witnessed it, but some things had to be done, he had a duty.

They'd thank him one day. Some of them anyway.

He rushed from the room. A man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was big and bearded, and wore a white turban.

A raghead, Bobby thought. This school was crawling with these fuckers.

The man shouted. ‘What the devil do you think you're doing?'

Bobby fired a shot that hit the man in his chest.

The man slumped against the wall and said, ‘Oh no, oh no.'

Bobby raced down the corridor, crossed the kitchen, left the building the way he'd entered it, and skidded across the yard to the trees. Then he was moving quickly beneath a sky the colour of cold volcanic ash. He was running, and the motorway roared and spat damp spray nearby.

When he'd run as far as Scotland Street he remembered he was still carrying his shoes. He sat on the pavement and put them on and he thought: You're a prince, Beezer. A national hero. He didn't feel the rain now. He didn't feel his sodden feet inside the chunky shoes. He was running a Union Jack up the flagpole of his imagination, then saluting it with great dignity; and the brass bands in his head played patriotic marches.

6

Perlman drove his battered Mondeo east along Edinburgh Road, past housing estates that had been built in the mid-1950s and early '60s to accommodate the mass exodus of people from the doomed slums of the old city. These communities, Cranhill, Easterhouse, Barlanark, were once considered part of a great utopian experiment in living. But entire blocks of flats had decayed, some in the space of less than twenty years, while others lay gutted and abandoned. So much for the dark, wacky craft of social engineering, Perlman thought.

He smoked one blue Silk Cut after another.

The idea of seeing Miriam after four months brought him pleasure, but also tension. He pictured her as he'd last seen her: black-veiled and sad-eyed at Colin's funeral, and yet in some way
above
her grief, as if an inner grace prevented her from a public display of loss. She'd floated over her sorrow – assuming sorrow was what she felt. Who could say?

She'd told Perlman last December she'd known for years of her husband's philandering; so maybe her love for him had died long before his death. The revelations that came later, the murderous secrets of Colin's life, would surely have harmed her more than any exposé of his infidelities. Marriage to a serial philanderer was heartbreak, but a less brutalizing shock to the system than marriage to a killer.

Miriam,
hartzenui
.

Perlman lingered over her name. He loved the way it began and ended with the same letter, self-contained and private, as if the M's were two strong doors. He loved how the name included ‘i am', like a concealed statement of pride. I Am. This is me. How I am. The sound of the name pleasured him –

Christ, this is a daft road for you to take, Lou, he thought. This is some retarded adolescent
mustang
rearing in your head. The lover denied his true passion. The bandage you've kept wrapped round your heart for more years than you can remember. He believed Miriam knew what he felt. How could she not read it in his face or his eyes, or in the clumsiness he showed in her company?

This line of thinking derailed him; what were the rules when it came to loving the wife of your dead brother? Was a matter of taste involved, an etiquette unknown to him? He concentrated on the rattle of his Mondeo. The car was dented side and front where it had been struck twice in separate minor accidents.

Music. He needed music. He stuck a CD in the deck he'd had installed recently. An old Paul Butterfield album,
Buried Alive in the Blues
. The sound zipped him back to the early '70s, when he'd been a constable pounding a beat in Partick. Colin had already graduated and worked five years in a local brokerage firm, before leaving, as so many Scots did, for London and fortune.

Lou remembered seeing him off at Central Station in the dreamy haze of a midsummer night. Colin, drunk on ale and giddy with notions of prosperity, had climbed clumsily inside a carriage, suitcase in one hand, crumpled coat slung over his arm, a burnt-down cigar between his lips. He'd worn his best suit, a blue single-breasted worsted he'd bought at Burton's. It was probably the last time he'd ever shopped at a chain of off-the-peg tailors.

Details came back sparsely. The unexpected press of Colin's lips on Lou's forehead –
ae fond kiss
, Colin had said,
and then we sever
; the only time Lou had ever been kissed by his brother. The splatter of cigar ash on Colin's dark blue lapel. He looked, Lou remembered, so damn
confident
. He knew he was going to make it in the big city, in the toughest playground of them all.

London changed him. Money changed him. And what a fatal talent he had for making it.

Perlman turned off Edinburgh Road and into Barlanark. He drove slowly down Hallhill Road. The rain had stopped at last. In the eastern sky a weak sun carved a thin rainbow beyond a water tower. A tiny miracle. Another sign, Perlman thought. Maybe it's spring. Finally.

Got caught up in a landslide. Bad luck pressing in from all sides
… Perlman pressed the stop button of his CD deck as he entered the cemetery. He hadn't been here for months. The dead didn't care if you neglected them, so why did he feel guilty? He parked, got out. His legs were stiff and he felt the dull ache the hellhound had caused. Did you reach a time when you were nothing but the sum of all your petty pains? Take me away, stick me on a codeine drip.

He turned from the ranks of headstones and looked across the street beyond the cemetery wall. He saw a row of shops: a Chinese restaurant, Haddow's off-licence, and – ah yes – the inevitable tanning parlour. These establishments were the rage in Glasgow. People who'd never been further than the Gallowgate strolled the streets looking as if they'd just come back from Jamaica.

He walked between the headstones. He was the only visitor in the cemetery; there was no sign of Miriam. He wondered at the existence of a Jewish burial ground in this part of Glasgow, where there was no Jewish community. It was probably safe to assume that Barlanark's Jewish population was close to zero. The Jews generally hadn't settled in the east of the city – although Perlman chose to do so, in a small area known as Egypt located in a network of streets behind Parkhead Cross. His
klatsch
of aunts berated him whenever he saw them. Why choose Egypt? Always you have to be the contrary one, Louie? What is it, this need to live in the east end? The Aunts – he thought of them as a chorus from a Greek tragedy – managed to make ‘east end' sound like Hong Kong, exotic and just a little dubious.

He liked Egypt. He found it a friendly place. He was reasonably popular, perhaps on account of being a cop, an accessible one: he'd responded a few times to a local burglary or a streetfight. He induced a sense, however small, of security – although there were a few in the community, ex-cons and small-time neds, who regarded him with sullen suspicion. He was known to the local kids as The Detective. Sometimes they clustered round him on the street and questioned him about baddies and guns and what it was like being a polisman.

He read headstones.
Deeply mourned by. Sadly missed by
. He came across the grave of Nancy Meizenburg, buried in 1975 alongside her husband Joe. Nancy, a small bright-eyed sparrow of a person, had given Lou piano lessons when he was twelve, thirteen. He could still hear the incessant tick of her metronome, and see the yellowing keys of the piano. She coerced him into playing ‘The Merry Peasant' until he had it down note-perfect.

Memories of the dead, the lost music of boyhood.

He kept moving. Damp earth sucked at his shoes. He glanced at other stones. Krasewitz. Matafsky. Guberman. Old European Jews, survivors of pogroms, camps, who knows what they had to live through and how far they had to travel to reach Glasgow?

The sun was milky. The air still smelled of rain. Overhead, a coven of crows, sinister in their concentration, flew quickly. He walked the lettered rows where more recent graves had been dug. No headstones here. It was the custom that a year pass between the funeral and the raising of the stone. The new graves were marked with simple plaques of wood. In Row S, he found Colin's name, and he stood before it, lowering his head a little.

A little leap of association made him think about the voice on the telephone:
I think you should know, Sergeant, I saw Kilroy drive his Bentley the morning after your brother was killed
…

Lou had asked, ‘Who is this?'

The man said:
I'll be in touch
…

Or maybe he'd said:
I'll get back to you with details
… Whatever, the sense was the same. Who was the caller?

He stared at his brother's name hard, as if he might somehow conjure an answer from the grave. A stranger's voice.
I'll be in touch
… Maybe it was only some
nishtikeit
bent on causing mischief, but he'd sounded authoritative, knowing. So who was he and what did he want and why hadn't he called back?

Perlman bent to pick up a stone. It was wet in his fingers. He placed it on the grave to mark the fact that the site had been visited. He became aware of a figure moving in his direction between the graves.

She wore a long black coat and boots. Her head was uncovered. Her hair, shoulder-length the last time he'd seen her, had been cut short. It gave her face a stark kind of beauty. She moved across wet earth with glorious balance. Perlman's heart was a leaf in the wind.
I should learn to unfeel
, he thought. What would the Aunts say if they knew his secret? Your dead brother's wife, you crazy? It's incest practically.

He walked a few paces to meet her. He felt coy, unsure of how he was expected to behave. Four months without seeing her; he was out of practice. He wanted to hug her, touch her face, kiss her forehead. And more, God help him: his urges were carnal and deep. When she was close enough, he opened his arms instinctively. She stepped at once inside his embrace, and pressed her face against his chest. He held her this way for a time and thought it strange to feel so alive in this place of the dead, and stranger still to be holding his brother's wife a few feet from the place where Colin lay.

‘I missed you,' he said. Christ, he longed to let his language soar.
I missed you
. A weary wee platitude. He wanted to speak of love and commitment, and open all the doors of his heart for her to see how he'd furnished the rooms. Come live with me in these chambers.

‘I went to Florence,' she said.

‘I heard.'

‘I had to get away.'

‘Did you paint in Florence?' Why couldn't he think of a scintillating comment, an insightful response?

She stared across the cemetery. He detected a slight flicker of hurt in her eyes. It must cause her pain to come back to this place; a dead husband, after all – there was surely some sense of loss, a quiet grief. There had to be a few memories of good times. It couldn't all be anger and regret and the bitter taste of betrayal in her mouth. She took a couple of steps away from him and studied Colin's grave. Then she set a pebble alongside the one Lou had left.

‘I didn't feel much like painting. I bought canvas and some paints. But …' She shrugged indecisively.

‘When did you come back?' he asked.

‘Nobody told you? Last week.'

‘How was Florence?'

‘Quiet,' she said. ‘I like Florence. Off-season anyway.' She gazed at him and smiled. He thought that smile would melt the polar ice-cap and swell oceans. Her voice, low-pitched, almost husky, belonged in an old-style Left Bank café where candles burned and the chanteuse sang with painful intimacy of broken hearts, and the zinc counter was dented.

She said, ‘Poor Lou, you don't know what to do with your hands, do you? You never did.'

He was unaware that he'd been tapping the pockets of his coat in a pointless way. Big hands. Hard to hide. Thick fingers. ‘I find them useless except for brushing my teeth and buttoning my coat, just about.'

‘You obviously don't use them to run a comb through your hair.'

He raised a hand to the spiky disarray of his hair, suddenly self-conscious. Leo Kilroy had made some comment about his hair earlier, which had irked him. But he'd gladly let Miriam say anything she liked about his appearance. She could reconstruct him if she wanted. Build me up into a new man, love. Consider it a challenge.

‘My hair has a mind of its own.'

‘It's so
you
. That just-out-of-bed look.'

‘Is that compliment or critique?'

‘You work it out.' And again she looked across the cemetery, as if something in the distance had demanded her attention. He followed her line of sight. The arc of the rainbow still hung beyond the water tower, colours fuzzy.

‘How did two brothers turn out so differently?' she asked.

‘Who knows? I like your hair, speaking of hair.'

‘I needed a change,' she said. She reached out and took one of his hands. ‘There. I'll keep it still.' She held it pressed between her own. Her skin was cold. She no longer wore a wedding ring, he noticed.

‘Do you know a cop called Latta?' she asked.

‘Not very well. Why?'

‘He's one of the reasons I came back.'

‘I see him around from time to time. Fraud Squad. Black hair, bad teeth.'