Butcher Page 4

  ‘Do I make you uneasy, Dorco?’

  Dorcus smiled. He knew he looked gormless when he smiled. He hated his smile. He hated his whole face in fact, except when he had the surgical mask on. ‘I don’t, ammm, so-socialize much.’

  Chuck dismissed this. ‘You’re an artist, Dorco. An artist has no social obligations. You don’t have to doff your bunnet to any wanker. You remember that.’

  Dorcus had never thought of himself this way. He was uplifted. It was the same feeling he’d had whenever his father directed a kind word at him, a very rare event. Judge Dysart, a permanently preoccupied man, had been miserly with praise.

  Chuck asked, ‘You’ll have somethin for me day after the morra, eh?’

  ‘Yes, y-yes o—’

  ‘I want to know I can count on you one hunnerd and one per cent.’ Chuck squeezed Dorcus’s shoulder tightly.

  ‘Count on me, of course you can c-count on me.’

  ‘Where did you say you’d trained, Dorco?’

  ‘I‘m … St Andrews.’

  ‘St Andrews, aye. A man who graduates from a place like that is somebody special. Remember that.’

  Dorcus pounced on some loose words like a cat on a bunch of baby rodents, and forced out a complete sentence. ‘I have the assistance of a capable nurse, Ms Payne. She’s a wonderful—’

  Chuck interrupted. ‘Good help’s essential. A right hand, somebody you can trust. Where did Nurse Payne train?’

  ‘Erm, the R-Royal Infirmary.’

  ‘I had my tonsils whipped out there. Coincidence, you say? Coincidences are meant to tell us somethin.’ Chuck winked, as if sharing a sly secret with Dorcus. ‘They have purpose, Dorco. They have meanin. Don’t you forget that.’

  The hand squeezed Dorcus’s shoulder harder. Dorcus felt his eyes water behind his glasses. Chuck grinned up close, and Dorcus could smell marzipan on his breath.

  ‘I might come off as a hard-arsed businessman, but I have beliefs in other directions …’ Chuck looked mysterious and knowing, tapped into hidden sources of information. His slitty eyes became even more narrow. ‘One day mibbe I’ll tell you more.’

  Chuck released him.

  Dorcus had lost the thread somewhere around the word coincidence. His head had gone rambling. He worried about his house sitting empty and vulnerable. His two Dobermans, Allen and Glen, prowled the grounds in his absence, but dogs could be shot or thrown poisoned food. He had an alarm system protecting windows and doors, but he fully expected that one day the Slab People would scale the thirteen-foot stone wall separating his property from the putrid wastelands of the towers. He’d strung razor wire along the top, but when the Slabbites were inebriated they didn’t give a damn about personal safety, and once they’d climbed the wall they’d break a window and get inside the house and ignore the alarm; they didn’t give a monkey’s about anything.

  Blood on the wire. Blood was currency to them. Scars were medals of courage.

  Chuck said, ‘Ahoy in there.’

  ‘S-sorry, I sometimes d-drift—’

  Reuben Chuck patted the side of Dorcus’s face. ‘Drift away, Dorco. Drift all you like. You’re entitled.’

  Dorcus took off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve. It only made the lenses worse. It was a stupid thing to do. Just stupid. You ass. Rainwater on glass, glass on wet duffle, did you expect a successful outcome? Oh, for God’s sake Dorcus. He felt his skull tighten.

  Reuben Chuck clamped Dorcus’s shoulder again. ‘I get the feelin you’re hard on yourself, Dorco. Artists are their own worst critics. You know what your problem is? You don’t know how to relax.’

  ‘No, y-you’re right, I …’

  ‘It just so happens I know somebody who could help, Dorco. Beautiful girl. She’s got ways of making the world go away. And don’t you even think about openin your wallet. It’s on the house.’

  ‘But but.’

  ‘Tcchhhh,’ Chuck said. ‘Consider it done.’ He checked his Gucci SilverTone wrist-watch. ‘Time and tide. I’m always under pressure. I’ll send Glorianna over to you. She’ll phone first. Awright? She’ll make you feel a whole new man … And the next shipment. You remember where to deliver it?’

  ‘I d-do, yes.’

  Reuben Chuck hurried to his parked car, which had been running all this time. A very large muscular man in a black leather coat had been sitting behind the wheel, waiting and watching. Chuck collapsed the umbrella and tossed it in the rear seat, then he stepped into the back of the car and gave a tiny flick of his head, goodbye.

  Dorcus waved. Nice car, a Jag-you-are.

  Anxieties crowded him. Don’t send me anybody. Please. I don’t need. I don’t need a woman—

  I have Nurse Payne.

  He made semaphore-like signals with his arms upraised to catch Chuck’s attention, but the Jag was already roaring off into the blackening arteries of Glasgow.

  8

  Inside the abandoned bowling-alley Reuben Chuck said to the blindfolded man, ‘You haven’t told me what I want to know, Danny.’

  ‘Away tay fuck,’ Turpie said.

  ‘You’re wastin my time, Danny.’

  Chuck stood with his hands clasped behind his back. Some people love punishment, he thought. Turpie had been punched and kicked and mauled. His lips were split and his mouth leaked blood. Blood dripped from his skull and soaked his blindfold.

  Chuck sighed, looking round at the assembly of his men who stood in shadows behind him. They were big men, some with shaven heads. They wore dark suits fashionably cut. Chuck knew they had handguns, knives, old-fashioned clasped razors, concealed in their clothing.

  He turned to Turpie again. ‘Say the numbers, son. All you have to do and you’re out of here.’

  ‘I telt you. I gave a vow to Stoker.’

  ‘A vow to a dead man, come on, what’s that worth?’

  ‘Means something in my book,’ Danny said. He was speaking with the difficulty of a battered prizefighter whose mouth was so numb it felt more like a protruding snout than a hollow where you placed food.

  Struggling with impatience, Chuck surveyed the bowling-alley, rundown and drab. He’d acquired the property in the past week, thanks to the putsch, but hadn’t decided if he’d keep or demolish it. The place smelled of bowling shoes worn by hundreds of different punters, the ancient jukebox was covered in dust, and some of the lanes were warped by damp.

  He addressed his men. ‘This guy has a death wish, boys. Karmic irresponsibility on his part.’

  Danny Turpie said, ‘You’re talking pure shite.’

  Chuck spoke slowly. ‘Life’s not precious to you, is it, Danny? You’re throwin it away on account of a promise that has absolutely no value. In my book this is an affront to destiny.’

  Danny Turpie said, ‘Destiny my arse.’

  Chuck was aware of his crew growing restless. These men failed to understand why he was still giving Danny Turpie a chance. They were stoked to rip Turpie’s fucking head off his shoulders and put his corpse through a meat-grinder and never mind the bla-bla, the karmic babble.

  ‘Numbers? I’ll give ye a fucking number,’ and Danny Turpie sang in a blood-thickened voice, ‘Hallo, hallo we are the Billy Boys.’

  ‘A singer, eh?’ Chuck surveyed his gang. ‘We’ve got ourselves a singer, boys.’

  ‘Hallo, hallo we are the Billy Boys. Up to our knees in Fenian—’

  Chuck tuned out this sectarian trash. Some people didn’t grow beyond the boundaries of their narrow-minded upbringing: football was a pagan form of worship, and stadia had become cathedrals of malice. ‘Right, right, Turpie. Game’s over. Chance after chance. And you’re showin no respect for me.’

  He nodded to his black-suited platoon.

  The men quickly encircled Danny, grabbing him and throwing him down on the lane. He kept singing defiantly until somebody smacked him a few times in the mouth, and even then he managed to utter a few miserable phrases. Some of Chuck’s men produced a rope, binding Turpie’s hands behind his back, then
tying hands to feet and pulling tightly. They positioned him facing the bowler’s end of the lane. Danny struggled fiercely but pointlessly against the ropes. Chuck removed the blindfold without looking into Turpie’s eyes. The men, having stewed too long in the adrenalin of delayed violence, hurried back to the top of the lane and picked up dusty old bowling balls from racks.

  Chuck had done a lot of violence when he was a younger man, but he’d lost the appetite for it and, besides, there were problematic questions involved – when you hurt somebody for their stupid obstinacy, what were the repercussions in the greater scheme? For example: did you fuck up your own reincarnation?

  I’m no comin back as a silkworm, no way.

  He looked on. He had no choice. He couldn’t show weakness in front of the big men. They were a cunning gang with predatory instincts, and if they caught a whiff of vulnerability in their Boss, they began to lose respect. He’d still be the Big Man, sure, but there would be noticeable differences – the men would be slightly less responsive in obeying orders, or they’d talk behind his back and clam up dead silent as soon as he approached.

  Worst case, they might begin plotting against him.

  So he was tough. Because he had to be.

  He watched the black bowling balls thunder down the lane at great speed. They screamed toward Danny, and clattered into his face, skull, groin, knees. Danny shouted a couple of times. A few gutterballs missed him completely, small mercies. A second fusillade began. The balls racketed and vibrated and kept coming, ten, twenty, more, black cannon-balls. Danny’s leather jacket was scarlet and blood puddled around him.

  Chuck said, ‘That’s enough, boys.’

  He walked to where Turpie lay and nudged him with his foot.

  Turpie didn’t move.

  Chuck stared at the mass of flesh formerly Danny’s head. Shattered nose, hair matted like red webbing, eyes shut, mouth wide. Danny was deid.

  He glanced at his crew with a look of recrimination, then gazed back down at Turpie. How come Stoker, himself dead and buried, could maintain such loyalty from beyond the grave? You had to admire the fortitude of Danny Turpie’s vow, if not his obstinacy. He wondered if any of his boys would do for him what Turpie had done for Stoker. He had his doubts.

  ‘Clean and lock up before you leave, boys.’ He walked away from Turpie and in frustration kicked the jukebox and it cranked into action. An old Lonnie Donegan tune played: ‘Nobody’s Child’. He kicked the jukebox again but the song wouldn’t quit.

  Somebody said, ‘Mental wee cunt, Turpie. Always a heidcase.’

  Chuck stepped outside. The night rain had stopped and the air smelled clean. He thought about the access numbers to Bram Stoker’s bank accounts, and how they’d died with Danny Turpie. Mibbe.

  Ronnie Mathieson, tinted glasses, jaw as smooth as glass, drove Chuck in the Jaguar to the Number One Fitness Centre, situated in a small business park in Crossmyloof, south of the river. Chuck paused before he got out and turned to Mathieson.

  ‘The bank’s the Clydesdale, Ronnie,’ he said. ‘The branch on Buchanan Street. Find out who runs it.’

  ‘Will do.’

  As Chuck climbed the steps to the aquamarine glass doors of the Fitness Centre he was struck by the realization of how many more interests he had than before. Apart from an upmarket bistro and a chain of health spas and a factory supplying bootleg Aberdeen Angus beef, all of which were in his possession before the deaths of Curdy and Stoker and their various underlings, he now found himself the owner of a fleet of buses equipped for the transportation of the handicapped, a squadron of taxis and minicabs, several brothels, a casino, an underground pharmaceutical concern geared to produce E and speed and assorted designer drugs, a textile company in need of reorganization, plus four boutique hotels scattered throughout Glasgow, three tenement blocks in Partick, two fish and chip shops, a dry-cleaning chain, one point nine acres of prime city-centre land licensed for commercial development – and, of course, the clapped out bowling-alley. He had his lawyers, Roman, Glebe & Hack, going twenty-four hours a day on all the paperwork, documents of ownership, deeds of exchange, the reassignment of which involved some serious diddlin and fiddlin – whatever it took. This wasn’t the old days when you could just seize whatever took your fancy, today you had to make it appear legal, so you needed inventive suits who knew the score. More, you needed layers of suits, solicitors and clerks and an assortment of other figures who worked for lawyers, but whose affiliation with the law was not easy to define.

  Chuck was blasted out of his thoughts by a sickening eye-scalding cloud of chlorine. Annoyed, he sought out Tommy Lombardo, who was in the ground floor gym training a muscular Romanian woman to lift weights.

  Tommy was urging her on in his enthusiastic way. ‘Concentrate, Slaca, concentrate, hold aw the air in yer lungs. That’s my girl. Aw the air, keep it in. Know when to release it. Hang on.’

  The woman sweated, trying hard to please Tommy. ‘So deefycull, Tommy.’

  ‘You’ll get it.’

  ‘Tommy,’ Chuck said. ‘A minute.’

  Tommy Lombardo looked round. ‘Mr Chuck, I didn’t see—’

  ‘I telt you to go easy on the chlorine. Explain to me why the first thin I notice as I come through the front door is the heavy stink of the stuff? This place is mingin.’

  ‘I musta used too much.’ Lombardo, who was six foot four inches tall, had gobbled enough steroids to make him the Muscle King of Glasgow. He also pumped iron every spare minute he had. Chuck was convinced the steroids had interfered with certain important cerebral connections, because Tommy was incapable of just about any task he was given – except that of attracting a certain clientele to the gym, gays who wanted look-at-me-sweetie muscle tone, butch lesbians who fancied themselves weightlifters, and assorted good-looking women who had nothing better to do than come down here and admire Tommy’s musculature and even touch it. They were groupies, these women. They kept the membership high.

  ‘That smell drives customers away, Tommy.’ Chuck spoke slowly, as if to a child.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Chuck.’

  ‘And why is there nobody at the reception desk? I telt you, Tommy, make sure there’s always somebody to sign in the customers. Remember?’

  ‘It’s Zondra’s fault, Mr Chuck. She’s always slipping out for a smoke.’

  ‘Then deal with it, Tommy. Tell her don’t smoke. This place is meant to promote health.’

  ‘Right, I’ll say to her. Don’t smoke.’

  Chuck patted one of Tommy Lombardo’s biceps. Hard as rock. Like his brain. ‘I don’t have time to be runnin round checkin on employees.’

  Chuck walked away quickly. When people don’t do the job you pay them for, if they don’t follow orders … Flashpoint. Business stress. Self-control wanted, Rube. He gulped air that tasted of bleach. He walked through the reception area and climbed the stairs to the upper gymnasium where a half dozen people were working the machines. A white-haired overweight woman pounded the Lifestride treadmill, and an elderly guy, his expression one of stark fear at the idea of cardiac arrest, rode the Sportsart bike.

  Chuck thought of this area as the Drop Dead Zone.

  He found Glorianna in a private room at the back. She was lying on a lounger, earphones attached to her head and an iPod on her flat belly. She wore white shorts and a blue singlet with the logo Number One Fitness. Her hair was curled, black with blonde highlights. Her espresso-brown eyes were just a shade too wide for her slender face, but Chuck thought her straight nose perfect in all ways, the nostrils pleasingly symmetrical. He had a thing about noses.

  He tapped a finger on one of the earphones and startled her.

  ‘Rube, oh wow, you like scared me.’ She affected American speech rhythms and expressions occasionally, because her ambition was to emigrate to California. Years ago, she’d been devoted to Baywatch and Beverly Hills 90210. She dreamed cinema. She studied the gossip magazines, who was divorcing who, what star was being unfaithful to wife or husband
. She took voice lessons and drama classes in preparation for the moment when she hit Tinseltown.

  She removed her earphones and Chuck heard modern jazz issue from them.

  ‘That Lombardo will be the death of me.’

  ‘I know. It stinks down there, so I got Zondra to send for the Oxydoro guys, who’ll be here within the hour and reduce the chlorine levels.’

  ‘You’re a star.’ Chuck ruffled her hair.

  She was quick and sharp and you didn’t have to spell things out for her. She took action when it was needed. He’d given her control of all six Number One Fitness Centres, not just because he was very fond of her, and they shared an intense sexual history – because he trusted her more than anyone else in his tiny circle of intimates. Bottom line, she protected his interests.

  She said, ‘Tommy’s so thick I bet he doesn’t even recognize his own reflection in a mirror. I told him, one more fuck-up and you’re on your bike.’

  ‘He brings in the clients … Lissen, I need you to do somethin.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I have this guy I do some business with. He’s a bit out there, very high strung.’

  ‘The kinda guy who thinks Relax is something you take when you’re constipated.’

  ‘Right. I want you to call him.’

  ‘And?’ Glorianna took a tube of skin cream from a box that contained dozens of similar cylinders. She opened it and worked the cream into her thighs. Chuck contemplated women and all their assorted creams. The whole lotion–skin relationship was a mystery to him.

  He said, ‘I’m thinkin mibbe one of your massages will do the trick.’

  She looked at him with an expression of disbelief. He’d never asked her to do this kind of thing before. ‘And if my massage doesn’t work? You want me to fuck him, Chuck?’

  ‘Now hang on a minute, sweetie. I’d never ask you to do anythin like that. Keep in mind I need his business, and I don’t want to send him some rough tottie.’

  ‘If he needs a great massage, Rube, that’s what he’ll get.’

  ‘It’s not like I’m pimpin you—’

  But you’re using me, she thought. ‘I don’t fuck strange men, Rube.’