Butcher Page 2

  ‘I know spraying’s superficial, but I always say freshen the air before you start in earnest.’

  ‘Is that what you always say?’ Perlman could taste the stuff on his lips. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Ocean Breeze.’

  ‘Ocean? It’s no ocean known to man,’ Perlman said, giving in to a brief coughing attack. ‘I’ll let you get on.’

  He went inside the kitchen and opened the door that led to a backyard. A tangled sanctuary of great ferns, old rhubarb stalks, a couple of maniac hawthorns beyond pruning. He lit a cigarette and made his way through the jungle where he knew there was a relic of a wooden bench somewhere. He pushed long hanks of obstinate grass aside and sat gazing at the back of his house. Black stone stained by a hundred years of the city’s effluents. The window frames needed paint. A drainpipe was loose and rusted. Starlings bred there.

  This catalogue of neglect and carelessness weighed on him. I’m never here much. It’s a place where I sleep and change clothes. Excuses. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter. He listened to the wind in the trees and the way it slapped ferns and grass: one of those unpredictable Glasgow afternoons when the weather could go any direction. The sky was glowering, and grey as ash.

  He thought, as he often did, about Miriam: his regular haunting. The last postcard he’d received had come four weeks ago from Copenhagen, a terse message with no suggestion that she was coming home to resume where they’d left off – wherever that was. A kiss, a light caress of her breast, vague suggestions of a possible future. Or else he’d misconstrued the situation, reading far too much into it. He wasn’t sure about anything save his feelings for her, and sometimes even then he had moments of uncertainty.

  She’d written: lovely city, fond wishes.

  Four words, followed by M.

  Fond, oy, what the fuck was fond? It was a word you’d use about a favourite uncle or a soup you liked. Four weeks. Had she forgotten the romantic dinner at La Fiorentina, and how they’d lain close together on the sofa in her loft-studio and he’d wondered if love was finally breaking through like a half-remembered song?

  She needed time, she’d told him. He’d been sympathetic, of course: love was a serious commitment, a matter of the heart, an organ about as predictable as this city’s weather. He was always so damned acquiescent where Miriam was concerned, so patient.

  I never carped the fucking diem.

  He thought: let it go. Miriam, neshumela. He’d loved her so many years in silence he could go back to silence again. He’d be all right. He’d be OK, he was a survivor. But.

  He heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner inside the house. He got up from the bench and wandered the thickets for a while like a melancholic poet in search of inspiration. Lou Keats. At the first drop of rain he went back indoors where music played over the drone of the antique Hoover. Betty McLatchie smiled at him and gave him a thumbs up.

  ‘I work better to music,’ she shouted.

  The song was ‘Hotel California’. The Eagles.

  Perlman picked up his raincoat from the back of a chair. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Betty.’ He fumbled in his pocket for his keys, slipped one from the ring, and handed it to her. ‘Here. You should have this. If I’m not around, be sure you lock the front door before you leave.’

  She took the key. ‘Fine.’

  He went down the corridor, stopped in front of the mirror and thought about brushing his hair but some days all the brushing in the world failed to improve his appearance. What was it Miriam had said about him? You have that just-out-of-bed look. He scowled at his reflection, stroked the stubble on his chin, then left the house.

  Outside, he saw no sign of his old Ford Mondeo and for one panicky moment he thought, some gonif’s nicked it – but then he remembered he’d traded it for a used Ka only days ago, a balloon of a thing the salesman had talked him into buying. Very popular wee car, Lou. Easy on the juice, but zippy. Perlman understood zero about cars. A good car was one with a music system and a capacious ashtray. He drove down Dalness Street to Tollcross Road.

  The Jew zips out of Egypt, smoking furiously.

  3

  Perlman walked through the Buchanan Street Galleries. Bright new Glasgow, scores of shops operating in a fluorescent haze. Mango, Next, Habitat. He looked in the window of Ottakar’s. He was tempted to go in and sniff among the stacks. He loved the smell of books. Sometimes he’d open one just to inhale the scent of the binding, the whiff of paper. But today he had a lunch with Sandy Scullion – the highlight of the week, the month.

  A kilted piper played ‘Amazing Grace’ outside the Buchanan Street subway. Perlman paused on the corner of Bath Street. His instinct was to turn right and walk where he’d walked more than a thousand times, up the hill to Pitt Street HQ. The magnetism of old reflexes. Not today, not tomorrow. He didn’t know when he’d go back. It was like being barred from a club you’d joined more than twenty-five years ago.

  He headed past the old Atheneum, formerly a drama college, a wonderful red sandstone building now occupied by a company called Townhouse Interiors. He glanced at the Church of Scotland on the corner of Nelson Mandela Place and went down Buchanan Street in the worst kind of drizzle, omnidirectional, swirled by a slight wind. Buses roared in his ears. Taxis went past in sleek sharklike streaks. Pedestrians bustled around him. The natives, faces determined and toughened and fatalistic, looked like descendants of foundrymen, shipyard workers, grafters.

  He loved the faces of Glasgow.

  He crossed the street. Sandy had said one sharp. Perlman would be punctual. He had no excuse not to be. His life, formerly so crowded, so intricate, was flat as day-old Irn-Bru.

  Princes Square was a flash place of boutiques and cafés under a glass Art Nouveau roof. He saw Scullion at a table outside the Café Gerardo.

  Perlman sat, shook Sandy’s hand.

  ‘Good to see you, Lou.’

  ‘Is that a wee tash you’re trying to grow, Sandy?’

  Scullion fingered his lip. ‘I’m giving it a shot. Madeleine likes it.’

  ‘Wives are biased.’ Perlman picked up a menu. ‘I counted how many times in my life I’ve shaved. I got a figure of close to fourteen thousand. That’s a lot of razors plus a lot of cuts. So now I think, what’s a bit of scrub?’

  ‘Counting shaves is a sign of …’ Scullion didn’t complete the sentence.

  ‘I know already.’ Perlman looked at the menu. ‘Why do chefs put soy and bok choi into everything these days? Take a perfectly good omelette and turn it into an oriental egg fuck.’

  ‘You prefer we go where you can get a deep-fried Mars bar?’

  ‘Death by grease.’ Perlman put the menu down and looked at the inspector. His thinning sandy hair, which he used to comb with a side parting, he now wore cut short into his scalp. He looked harder, tougher, more polis-like. His pink skin had a glow of good health and good deeds. He was happily married, and there were two kids. Scullion had a full life. He could switch off when he went home at nights. Crime wave, what crime wave? Perlman had never been able to put work behind him. Even now, when he was on ‘sick leave’.

  ‘How’s the shoulder, Lou?’

  ‘Some days nothing. Other days I take a painkiller.’ He didn’t want to talk about the bullet that had passed through his shoulder. He dreamed sometimes about the way he’d been shot, and in the dreams the bullet always found its intended target, his heart. He died and saw his own funeral. Miriam wasn’t among the mourners, but his aunts wailed in the background like a bad Greek chorus.

  He scanned the menu again: smoked haddock and ratatouille en croute. ‘Does anybody ever ask about me, Sandy?’

  ‘Superintendent Gibson always does.’

  ‘A sweetheart. She phoned me once a while ago.’

  A waitress with dyed black hair and a tiny silver nostril ring stopped at their table.

  Scullion said, ‘I’ll have the pasta with tomato and basil. Lou?’

  ‘Burger and chips,’ Perlman said. He looked at the
waitress. ‘I don’t want any fancy sprinkle of soy and mustard on my plate.’

  The waitress smiled. ‘Burger and chips is burger and chips.’

  ‘I’ll also have a lager, please,’ Scullion said.

  Perlman asked for sparkling water.

  ‘Right away.’ The waitress went off.

  Scullion propped his elbows on the table. ‘Mary Gibson’s always had a completely inexplicable soft spot for you. But Tay – he’s like a cat with a lifetime supply of free cream. He’s delirious he doesn’t have your, er, troublesome presence around Pitt Street.’

  William Tay, chief superintendent, a dour concrete man who was rumoured to smile every ten years or so, had been marinating all his life in joyless Presbyterianism. He was a Christian soldier in the Onward sense, battling the forces of darkness in Glasgow in God’s name.

  ‘He’s an anti-Semite,’ Perlman said, and made a phooo sound.

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘He reminds me of Goebbels. I always feel he’s about to lecture me on the master race … I could go back to work tomorrow, Sandy. For Christ’s sake, I’m OK. Really.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Lou. Tay has the medical people dancing to his flute. They wouldn’t wipe their arses without his say-so. You won’t pass a physical in the near future. Count on it. Tay’s never liked you. And he likes you even less ever since Miriam’s trial.’

  ‘I’m ostracized,’ Perlman said. He didn’t want to rehash Miriam’s trial. Anything to do with Miriam was like cutting a vein. ‘So what the fuck am I supposed to do with myself?’

  The waitress appeared, set the drinks down.

  Perlman looked at her apologetically. ‘Pardon my language.’

  ‘I’m the brass monkey that hears no bad words. Your food’s coming right up, guys.’

  Perlman watched her go. ‘I like her. Leave her a sizeable tip, Sandy.’

  ‘You said on the phone this was your treat.’

  ‘A Jew and a Scotsman haggling over who pays the bill? There’s a bad joke buried in there.’

  Scullion lifted his glass. ‘Cheers, Lou. For what it’s worth, I wish you were back.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Sandy. Now what about my question?’

  ‘Find a hobby. Go to football matches. You used to do that a lot.’

  ‘When men played. Now it’s fashion models with poncey tinted hair and Boss jackets and unsavoury incidents in nightclubs.’

  ‘Then get out of town. When did you last leave Glasgow?’

  Perlman was always uneasy out of the city. ‘Can you see me at the top of the Eiffel Tower grinning like a doolie? I ask for an idea and what do I get? Mince.’

  Scullion looked inside his beer. ‘Then I don’t know, Lou.’

  The clouds in Perlman’s head massed darkly. He’d never been a man to despair, not even when he found himself confronted with the most base acts of his fellow human beings – but now he yielded all too easily, and uncharacteristically, to the glooms. ‘I’m just a wee bit lost, sonny boy,’ he said.

  Scullion frowned. ‘Come round for dinner some night, Lou. Madeleine’s always on at me to invite you.’

  ‘Fish pie?’

  ‘I swear, no fish pie.’

  Madeleine’s fish pie had become a routine between them. Perlman couldn’t remember how the pie banter had even started. He was losing touch, an idle mind forgets.

  The waitress brought their food. Perlman surveyed his burger and chips. Scullion curled pasta strands round his fork.

  ‘I just realized you’re not wearing glasses, Lou.’

  ‘Well done, Sandy. One day you’ll make a fine cop. I replaced the Buddy Holly specs. The contacts sting sometimes, but at least I’m not carrying the stigmata of those heavy old frames on my hooter.’ Perlman stuck a chip in his mouth. ‘Tell me stuff. I’m deprived.’

  ‘Junkie teenage mother puts baby in spin-drier. Headless man in clown costume found on the banks of Hogganfield Loch. Two victims of apparent spare-part surgery operations discovered, one in Barlanark, the other in Possil.’ Scullion spoke in tabloid headlines between bites of pasta. ‘And the gangland slayings.’

  ‘Some villains got it, big deal. No matter who took over, eventually some other gunslinger will come in. Anyway, who’s going to miss bad bastards like Jimmy Stoker and Gordy Curdy? Racketeers and hoormeisters and killers.’ He stuck another chip in his mouth, felt he was heading for a rant, changed the subject. ‘I read about the headless clown.’

  ‘An odd one.’

  ‘What was he doing dressed like that? And who chopped off his head?’ Perlman poured brown sauce on his burger. He was boiling with the need for action, and falling out of harmony with the things that mattered to him. This headless clown took his fancy. He picked up his burger, tasted it. The blandness of factory beef. ‘Mibbe he was on his way to a fancy-dress party. Or else it was a case of goodbye cruel circus, I’m off to join the world.’

  ‘He hasn’t been ID-d, and the head hasn’t turned up either.’

  ‘Was it a clean cut or a hacked job?’

  Scullion dabbed his mouth with a napkin. ‘This isn’t doing you any good. It’s unhealthy.’

  ‘So? I’ve spent my life exploring the unhealthy.’

  Scullion’s mobile rang. ‘Excuse me.’ He took the phone from his pocket. Perlman looked round Princes Square. He fixed his attention on an aged man sitting at a table outside one of the other eateries. Talking to himself. Or an imaginary companion, a dead wife, or just praying somebody would come along and help him out of his solitary conversation.

  Scullion tucked his mobile phone away. ‘Shite. I have to go.’

  ‘I hope it’s something tasty.’

  Scullion stood up. ‘Routine. You remember routine, Lou? I think you’ve forgotten the humdrum of every bloody day. It’s not all headless clowns and gangland slayings and mystery.’

  ‘It is for me.’

  ‘I’ll call about dinner.’

  ‘I’ll be by the phone, paralysed.’

  Perlman hung around for a couple of minutes after Scullion had gone. When he asked the waitress to get the bill, she told him that lunch had already been paid for.

  ‘Did he leave you a good tip?’

  ‘Very generous.’

  Perlman got up. He dropped three pound coins on the table.

  The waitress said, ‘You don’t have to. You didn’t even eat your burger.’

  ‘No appetite, love.’

  He walked up Buchanan Street where the afternoon light was already shading toward dark. He raised the collar of his coat and went in the direction of the Galleries: a dead clown, a rainy city.

  Instead of driving back to Egypt, he crossed the Clyde and travelled south to Ibrox, passing the monolithic red-brick stadium where Glasgow Rangers played football. About a quarter of a mile from the stadium he parked outside a bar in a street of grey sandstone tenements and sat smoking a moment in his car. Then he flicked his cigarette out the window and punched in a number on his mobile.

  He said, ‘Meet me. I’m outside the Jaycee.’

  ‘Gimme five.’

  Perlman closed the connection. He saw two stout girls, faces flushed from a heavy midday session, come out of the Jaycee Bar, arguing. Identical twins, he realized, each wearing the red white and blue scarves of Rangers’ fans.

  One said, ‘Brian Laudrup’s the best we ever had at The Brox.’

  ‘Away to fuck, it was Davie Cooper, Coop, go wee man.’

  ‘Za matter of opinion.’

  They squared off, fists raised, then apparently thought better of it and went back inside the bar for another drink.

  Perlman saw The Pickler approach from the other side of the street. Perlman beeped his horn lightly and The Pickler stepped toward the car and peered in through the window. Perlman reached across, unlocked the door, and The Pickler slid into the passenger seat.

  He smelled overpoweringly of mothballs.

  ‘New car, eh, Mr Perlman? Very nice. What does she get to the gallo
n?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  The Pickler examined the instrument panel, touched the dashboard, opened the glovebox and took out the Owner’s Handbook. ‘What’s the cubic capacity of the engine? Is it a 1297 cc?’

  ‘I never read the book,’ Perlman said, bored with car talk already.

  ‘You should, Mr Perlman. I’d be asking questions. MPG. Horse power. I think she’s 68 or 69 bhp. Standard tranny, I see. Four cylinders, right?’

  ‘Gimme a break,’ Perlman said.

  ‘You want me to look under the bonnet?’ The Pickler was already halfway out the car.

  Perlman tugged him back. ‘The car runs. I’m satisfied.’

  The Pickler settled back in his seat. ‘I’m no delighted with the colour, have to say. Purple’s too … soft.’

  ‘Vermilion,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Vermilion, eh?’ The Pickler jiggled the gearstick. ‘So how’s life anyway?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Perlman regarded The Pickler a moment, who was fingering buttons on the dashboard with great interest. A squat man with a collection of sagging chins, he wore an ill-fitting old brown suit and an old-fashioned collarless shirt – clothes that had never been his to begin with, inherited, borrowed, or shoplifted from Goodwill.

  ‘I hear you’re no back on the job yet,’ The Pickler said.

  A man with sources, Perlman thought. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’re outside looking in, eh? Here, that could be my job description as well.’ The Pickler chuckled.

  Perlman didn’t want to dwell on the subject of his exile, nor any similarities between himself and his snitch. ‘This headless clown,’ he said.

  ‘Oh aye, I read about him.’

  Perlman took out his wallet and gave The Pickler a twenty. ‘I’m mildly intrigued.’

  ‘OK-doke. I’ll sniff aboot, see whit I can, find.’

  Perlman saw the note vanish in the depths of The Pickler’s pocket. You’re sucking thin air, Lou, dying from lack of a fucking purpose and trying to buy your way into a world where something, anything, intrigues you.