Butcher Page 18

  He had a pain behind his eyes. Maybe the effect of the contacts, maybe tension. He found his painkillers in a drawer of the sideboard. He took one, throwing it back without water. He noticed his supply was dwindling – out of thirty prescribed, he’d devoured twenty-seven. He ought to be cutting them out instead of gobbling them.

  He sat in the armchair and lit a cigarette, and fingered the smooth surface of the card a moment before reading it. Why postpone it? What are you afraid of? Bad news, distressing revelations. Lou, I met somebody … he’s changed my life utterly.

  Or, I’m marrying Mario.

  Or, I was in a car wreck and I’m in hospital.

  He had the selfish thought that her hospitalization was preferable to the idea of her finding love. Shit, what was he doing – wishing pain on her, for God’s sake?

  He read the card, which had been posted five days ago from Barcelona, and the message was short: Nice town. Who needs Glasgow? Fondly, M.

  Still the fondly.

  So Barcelona now. Maybe Mario had been replaced by Juan or Pedro. What a mover she was. The world, oy, was her oyster.

  Who needs Glasgow? He translated this as Who needs Perlman?

  Definitely a brush-off.

  It hurt, he’d be a liar to deny it, but a little less than it might have pained him once. It was more a pen nib to his heart than a dagger. Just the same. Absence blunted hopes and dreams, always the way. I should have dreams, at my age.

  He got up and walked back down the hall to pick up the items of mail he’d dropped. Clean as you go. Don’t leave a mess. He put the post in a drawer, then paced the room, smoking and still holding Miriam’s postcard.

  Which he read again.

  She writes this five days ago. Or at least she posts it five days ago. Maybe she’s long gone from Barcelona by now. He set the postcard down on the shelves where his CDs were stacked. His mind drifted to the photograph in the loft, the one parked beside the bed, Colin and Miriam, happy partners. Latta, it had to have been Latta who put it there, because if Perlman believed one thing Miriam had told him before she’d flown out of his world it was the fact she despised her late husband, there was no love left between them—

  He remembered Tartakower’s latest little story: he’d do something about that, he’d get on to it now – but he couldn’t drive the shimmering mirage that was Miriam from his mind. He called the telephone company and asked when her connection had been cut off. A woman told him the line had been severed seven weeks ago, non-payment. He rang the electricity company and was informed by a man with a high-pitched voice that the electricity was paid quarterly and the next payment was due in a week.

  OK, OK. The phone was disconnected because she hadn’t paid. Forgetfulness? Or because she knew she wasn’t coming back? But if she’d decided she was staying away, why hadn’t she said so in one of the cards, and why had she left so many possessions behind – including her paintings? Had she just abandoned them? Unlikely. Maybe she was undecided. Maybe she hadn’t made up her mind if she was staying away forever—

  Do I care? Do I fucking care?

  Drawn back to the postcard, he picked it up. He studied it. A boring picture of crowds on a beach, sun umbrellas stuck in sand, palm trees. She hadn’t even troubled her arse to choose an interesting postcard, something artsy, say, a picture of something built by that guy – Perlman fished for the name.

  Gaudi.

  Because she didn’t care, or because she thought Perlman was blind to art and architecture. I wasn’t her equal.

  Suddenly he was angry, angry that he’d nurtured such a fragile hope for such a long time, angry that she’d gone without a fucking word of goodbye, and infuriated by allowing himself to be seduced by the postcards, which were like a form of slow faux striptease where she never took off a single garment, even if he was daft enough to believe that one day she might.

  He ripped the postcard down the middle, slicing the sun lovers and the sands and the sea, then he tore these pieces a second time, and a third, and the scraps fell from his shaking fingers to the coffee-table.

  He didn’t hear Betty McLatchie come into the room. He raised his face, looked at her, and stepped around the coffee-table as if to conceal from her the sight of the dismembered postcard.

  She wore a black overcoat, a black headscarf, black glasses, black Levis. Only her grey shirt and maroon Docs alleviated the severity of her appearance. ‘I should’ve phoned,’ she said.

  ‘No, no matter, it’s OK.’

  She sat in one of the armchairs and stared at the floor a while, then raised her face to look at him, and her sadness, so evident in her posture, crushed him.

  ‘It wasn’t Kirk,’ she said.

  For an uneasy moment he thought she was speaking factually, a terrible mistake had been made, the dead boy wasn’t her son. But no, she was talking in metaphor, the way you always did when you spoke about the dead. Passed on, passed away, popped your clogs.

  ‘Kirk would have sat up and said, “April Fool, Ma.” He liked practical jokes. But it’s the wrong month, the wrong bloody month.’ She opened her small black leather purse and tugged out a cigarette. Perlman lit it for her. She inhaled deeply.

  He sat on the arm of her chair and laid a palm on the back of her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ and wondered what else he could say when it came down to the extremities of feeling. Grief needed a new lexicon.

  She shook her head, blew a stream of smoke angled upward. ‘There’s this wee corner of me that’s always been optimistic. It’s like a candle burning away at the back of my head. I try to keep it going because I want to think the best of people and enjoy life. How the fuck do I keep that candle going now?’

  Perlman wanted to say it would take time, but the sentence was a candygram. He got up and fetched an ashtray from the dresser and took her dying cigarette from her hand and stubbed it. She appeared not to notice.

  ‘Do you believe in a God, Lou?’

  God made Perlman uneasy. As a kid he’d thought Rabbi Friedlander, with monumental beard and authoritarian voice, had been God. ‘I have good days when I imagine there might be some benign power out there. Most days, no. Like today.’

  She got out of the chair and wandered the room, ran a hand across the CDs as if checking for fresh dust. She paused at the coffee-table and looked down at the destroyed card. He wasn’t sure if she was reading fragments of it, or if the card was just an indefinable object in her field of vision.

  Betty said, ‘I was brought up to believe. But I got tired of the blether of ministers, Lou. All they can do for me now is bury my kid.’ She raised her face to him. ‘Why are some people …’

  ‘Just downright evil?’

  ‘Yeh. Why are some people like that? For God’s sake, Kirk was … harmless. Just a harmless boy. He had his faults. But he had no malice in him, Lou. None.’

  Harmless boys get murdered, the innocent die. Perlman sensed a slight reaction from the painkiller, not the normal mild detachment he experienced, but a contraindication, a sharpened awareness. Maybe the need to concentrate on Betty’s situation nullified the power of the anodyne.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘Get some air, go somewhere for a coffee.’

  ‘Why not.’

  He walked with her down the hallway. Outside, she moved along the driveway in slow contemplative steps, pausing now and again to adjust her glasses or her headscarf. He was about to open the passenger door of his Ka, but she said, ‘I feel like walking, Lou.’

  ‘Sure. Whatever you want.’

  They went some yards in silence. She slipped her arm through his without looking at him. He felt comfortable with the connection. She needed support, he’d give it.

  Perlman suggested a stroll in Tollcross Park, a fine expanse of greenery at the edge of Egypt, and Betty agreed. The thin sunlight lying across the park glowed pale against the big glass structure of the Winter Gardens. A group of runners in coloured singlets and shorts moved along one of the paths. Athletic crew, vibrant wi
th energy.

  They went toward the Winter Gardens. He saw himself and Betty reflected in glass. Anyone looking at them would assume: long-married couple. The deceit of appearances. He held the door open for her. Inside, the building was warm. Exotic plants flourished in a rage of rare colours and strange shapes. Perlman led her into the café, where they sat at a table and drank coffee under a window streaming with condensation.

  ‘I must be keeping you from something, Lou.’ She held her cup in both hands.

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

  ‘Who’s working on Kirk’s case?’

  ‘A man called Adamski.’

  ‘Will he go at it hard? Will he find who did it?’

  ‘He’s dedicated.’

  ‘That’s not answering my question—’

  ‘He’s got safe hands and some good people working alongside him.’

  ‘How long did you say your sick leave is anyway?’

  ‘It feels like from here to eternity.’ He knew what she was thinking: she wanted somebody familiar in charge of hunting her son’s killer. ‘I’ll stay in close contact with Adamski.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  She lit a cigarette despite the No Smoking sign.

  What the hell. You could take a day out for your grief, you could say fuck off to the rules.

  ‘I hate the taste of these things. I don’t know why I bother.’ She dropped her cigarette into her half-finished coffee. ‘You know what’s so bloody heartbreaking? The thought you’ll never see somebody again as long as you live.’

  He was edgy, anxious to move. Coffee, too many smokes, too little food. A transistor radio played somewhere, a penny whistler blowing ‘Tunes of Glory’. Without a word, Betty got up and went outside and stood motionless in the sunlight.

  Perlman followed. In a different mood she’d notice life bursting out all around her, she’d see the muscles of the world flexing. She’d see the runners break into a sprint far in the distance, or notice a small hawk rising graceful and free above the tree-line. She’d smile at a gaggle of young mothers going past with their toddlers in a ruction of unfettered laughter and hear a yellow plastic windmill in a kid’s fist whir.

  Betty, hands deep in pockets, was quiet. Perlman swept aside a strand of her hair where it had fallen upon the frame of her glasses. She took off her glasses and turned to look at him as if she wanted to thank him for his company and support, but she said nothing. She just rubbed her eyelids with her fingertips then stuck the glasses on again, but not before Perlman glimpsed that extraordinary blueness, which made him think of clear arctic skies. She’d been crying. There were veins of red in the whites of her eyes, but the blue was intact. She inclined her face against his shoulder and sighed.

  ‘Walk me back to my car, Lou.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She slipped her arm through his and they moved across the park. Halfway toward Wellshot Road she said, ‘Miriam’s the one who went away.’

  Out of nowhere.

  ‘I noticed the torn postcard,’ she said.

  ‘She’s the one, the endless tourist.’

  ‘Your aunts mention her sometimes. They don’t approve. I remember reading something about her court case. You spoke up for her.’

  ‘I believed she was innocent.’

  ‘That was the only reason?’

  The question was close to the bone. ‘I hate injustices,’ he said. I hated to see Miriam, vulnerable and lovely, harassed and harried by a fuck like Latta.

  ‘You must have pished some people off.’

  ‘I shop there regularly.’ He looked at her, but she’d gone into fade mode again, drifting in and out of the immediacy of things, a woman sleepwalking.

  She paused, stared the length of the street as if she’d seen something, or somebody she recognized, directly ahead. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary. A man opening a car and tossing a walking-stick into the back seat. A woman entering a tenement with two bulky Tesco bags. A white van approaching, a young man at the wheel. An orange cat ran across the street, streaking close to the wheels of the van. Rubber squealed as the van swerved to avoid it. The cat bolted between the railings that edged the park, and disappeared into shrubbery. The van drove on.

  ‘Close call,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Nine lives,’ Betty said. ‘Pity people don’t get so many chances.’

  ‘Some people,’ Perlman said.

  They reached his house. Outside, Betty unlocked her car.

  ‘Thanks for your company,’ she said.

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘Call me if there’s anything …’

  She patted his arm. ‘I will.’

  He watched her go, realizing he wanted her to stay.

  Indoors he felt solitude. He walked to the coffee-table and looked at the shredded postcard. In the drawer where he’d stuffed his unopened post he found the previous cards he’d received from the Wandering Miriam. He spread all three cards on the coffee-table, piecing together the jigsaw of the one he’d torn apart, and compared the handwriting on each. It was the same flamboyant script, great loops between the letters, a fandango in pale blue ink. He went inside the kitchen and removed the unreconstructed picture he’d pinched from Miriam’s bedroom, took it into the living room and contrasted the handwriting on the back of the photo with the postcards. Same handwriting, different sentiments.

  What had he expected to find?

  More than terse messages at least.

  He looked at the postcard pictures. The scene she’d sent from Florence was of tourists wandering in sunlight along a street where every vendor sold leather jackets. It wasn’t enthralling. Sunburnt faces and racks of leather. Where was the Duomo? The Ghilberti Doors? Did she think he was a fucking hick? Oh, he’ll accept anything I send.

  The card from Copenhagen showed the railway station covered in snow. Stunning, right. Not even The Little Mermaid, for Christ’s sake. Did she just dash inside a tourist shop and pick up the first card she saw and scribble some words and post the damn thing?

  To keep me nibbling.

  He sighed, then gathered the postcards and the scraps and the anniversary picture and stuck them back in the drawer. He listened to the silence of the house. The place felt empty, detached from the world. He left, locking the door behind him.

  He drove away in his funny wee car: voices were calling him.

  29

  On the steps of the Number One Fitness Centre Reuben Chuck called Ronnie Mathieson on his mobie.

  ‘How’d it go?’

  Mathieson said, ‘Done.’

  ‘No problems, eh?’

  ‘Clean as a whistle, Mr Chuck.’

  ‘See this as a part of a learnin process, Ron. One that never stops. Remember.’

  Chuck cut the connection and went inside, climbed the stairs to the upper gym, and walked into Glorianna’s room at the back, thinking of the three dead men: it didn’t matter if they’d hung the woman or she’d done it herself, the point was simple – he had three less problems. And if Montague could describe any of these thugs, so what? The corpses were locked in a building that had once belonged to Gordy Curdy, and had lain empty for more than two years. No estate agent had the place up for sale or rent.

  Glorianna wasn’t in her room. She’s late, but she’s never been late in her life.

  Chuck went into the stockroom. He’d find her conducting an inventory of supplies, towels, chemicals, or the vitamin compounds on which the Centre made an indecent profit. She wasn’t in the stockroom. He walked back, glanced at her empty lounger and a copy of last week’s Scotland on Sunday on the floor.

  She read this rag avidly: it’s important to stay informed, she told him. Chuck hated this particular publication because it had run a series of articles on Glasgow’s ‘underbelly’: Dear Green Place In Hands of Mobsters. Pure shite, Godfather stuff that would have the S-o-S readership deluded into thinking there was no form of commerce in the city, from casinos to football teams to day nurseries, that did
n’t have criminal personalities involved. His own name was mentioned as a former ‘associate’ of the late Curdy – notorious insurance scammer, embezzler, loan shark with ‘attachments’ to mobsters south of the border and beyond. Chuck had been outraged and wanted to sue the paper, but his lawyers advised against it on the grounds that he really didn’t need the public exposure a legal action would generate.

  They were right.

  As he moved downstairs, he called Glorianna’s flat. Her recorded voice said I’m not here to take your call. Have a great day. He tried her mobile but she must have switched it off. First time ever, he thought. She was a mobie devotee, called it her life-line. He sat for a while and wondered if she’d spent the night at Dysart’s. He was uneasy with this idea.

  He overheard Tommy Lombardo in the gym putting a dyed-blond gay guy through his paces with the weights.

  ‘Oh you, Thomaso, you make this so hard for me, you cruel boy.’

  Chuck gazed at the front desk where Zondra was signing some first-time customers in. He watched money change hands, then when he was satisfied she was running it through the cash register – and not into the pockets of her tight white shorts – he entered Lombardo’s little office and closed the door. I should be beyond this, watchin pennies. I own an empire. Old habits, picked up in poorer times when he was an ambitious kid low on the totem and countin change, died slow.

  Chuck used his mobile to call Rick Tosh’s number.

  Rick Tosh answered, ‘Howdy.’

  Chuck said, ‘Here’s the stuff you need, Rick. The Azteca Bank of Aruba. Account: 957 8671-045. Password: countdracula. You got that?’

  ‘Countdracula one word?’

  ‘One. You have the code I gave you for the transfer?’

  ‘Sure do. I’ll arrange the wire now. The money will be in your Luxembourg account tomorrow, less my commission. You’re cleaning house, man. Bigtime.’

  ‘Cleanin and accumulatin.’

  ‘Things move forward, Rube. No life in stagnant water, right? How’s the weather over there?’

  ‘What do you expect? I suppose you’re baskin in ninety degrees.’