Armadillo

by William Boyd

  Ivan was, to Lorimer, the living, breathing representation of the skull beneath the skin, his head a gaunt assemblage of angles, planes and declivities somehow supporting a pendulous nose, large, bloodshot eyes and a thin-lipped mouth with a partial set of skewed brown teeth that seemed designed for a larger jaw altogether, an ass’s or a mule’s, perhaps. He smoked between twenty and thirty small, malodorous cigarlettes each day, never seemed to eat and drank anything on a whim – whisky at 10 a.m., Dubonnet or gin after lunch, port as an aperitif (‘Très français, Lorimer’) and had a rare, distressing, body-racking cough that seemed to rise from his ankles and made its appearance at roughly two-hourly intervals, after which he often went and sat quietly alone in a corner for some minutes. But those rheumy, bulging eyes were alive with malice and intelligence and somehow his feeble frame endured.

  Ivan began to enthuse about ‘almost an entire garniture’ he was assembling. ‘It’ll go straight to the Met or the Getty. Amazing the stuff coming out of Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary. Turning out the attics. Might have a couple of things for you, old chum. Lovely closed helm, Seusenhofer, with beavor.’

  ‘I’m not so keen on the closed.’

  ‘Wait till you see this. I wouldn’t wear a white shirt with that tie, my dear old china, you look like an undertaker.’

  ‘I was having lunch with my ma. Only a white shirt will convince her you’re in gainful employ.’

  Ivan laughed until he coughed. Coughed until he stopped, swallowed phlegm, patted his chest and drew heavily on his cheroot. ‘God love me,’ he said. ‘Know exactly what you mean. Let’s have a look at our little treasure, shall we ?’

  The helmet was of average size and the bronze had tarnished and aged to a dirty jade, encrusted and flaky, as if it were covered by a vibrantly coloured form of lichen. The curved cheek plates were almost flush with the nose guard and the eye holes were almond-shaped. It was more like a mask than a helmet, a metal domino, and Lorimer supposed that was another reason why he instantly coveted it, why he desired it so. The face beneath would be almost invisible, just a gleam from the eyes and the lines of the lips and chin. He stood staring at it, some ten feet away from where it had been placed on a thin plinth. A small two-inch spike rose from the centre of the cranium.

  ‘Why’s it so expensive?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s nearly three thousand years old, my dear friend. And, and it’s got some of its plume left.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Lorimer approached. Some strands of horsehair trailed from the spike. ‘Come off it.’

  ‘I could sell it to three museums tomorrow. No, four. All right, twenty-five. Can’t say fairer. I’m making almost nothing.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I’ve just bought a house.’

  ‘Man of property. Where?’

  ‘Ah… Docklands,’ Lorimer lied.

  ‘I don’t know a soul who lives in Docklands. I mean, isn’t it just a teensy bit vulgaire?’

  ‘It’s an investment.’ He picked the helmet up. It was surprisingly light, one cut sheet of bronze, beaten thin, then shaped to fit a man’s head, to cover everything from the nape of the neck and the jawbone up. He knew infallibly whenever he wanted to buy a helmet – the urge to put it on was overpowering.

  ‘Funerary, of course,’ Ivan said, breathing smoke at him. ‘You could chop through this with a bread knife – no protection at all’

  ‘But the illusion of protection. The almost perfect illusion.’

  ‘Fat lot of good that’d do you.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got in the end, isn’t it? The illusion.’

  ‘Far too profound for me, dear Lorimer. It is a lovely thing, though.’

  Lorimer replaced it on its stand. ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘As long as you don’t take for ever. Ah, here we are.’

  Petronella, Ivan’s remarkably tall, plain wife, with a rippling swathe of thick, dry, blonde hair down to her waist, came percussively down the stairs with a tray of coffee cups and a steaming cafetière.

  ‘That’s the last of the Brazil. Good afternoon, Mr Black.’

  ‘We call him Lorimer, Petronella. No standing on ceremony.’

  270. The current collection: a German black sallet; a burgonet (possibly French, somewhat corroded) and, my special favourite, a barbute, Italian, marred only by the absence of the rosette rivets and so ringed with holes. It was the strange music of this lost vocabulary that drew me first to armour, to see what things these magical words actually described, to discover what was a pauldron, a couter, a vambrace and fauld, or tasset, poleyn and greave, beavor, salleret, gorget and besague. I derive a genuine thrill when Ivan says to me: ‘I’ve an interesting basinet with letten fleurons and with, astonishingly, the original aventail – though of course the vervelles are missing,’ and I know exactly – exactly – what he means. To own an armour, a suit entire, is an impossible fantasy (though I once bought a vambrace and couter of a child’s armour, and a shaffron from a German horse armour) so I settled instead for armour of the head, on helms and helmets, developing a particular taste for visorless helmets, the sallets and kettle hats, basinets, casques, spangenhelms and morions, burgonets, barbutes and – another dream, this – the frog-mouthed and the great helms.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Stella shifted beside him, her knee touching his thigh, making it hot almost immediately, so he slid another couple of inches away from her. She was asleep, soundly, deeply, a small snore gently emanating from time to time. He squinted at the luminous figures on his watch dial. Ten to four: the endless dark centre of the night, that period of time when it is too early to get up, too late to read or work. Perhaps he should make a cup of tea? It was at moments like these that Alan had told him consciously to note and analyse what was going on in his mind, systematically, one by one. So what was going on in there?… The sex had been good enough, sufficiently prolonged to send Mrs Stella Bull off to sleep almost immediately, Lorimer reflected. He had been intensely irritated by the visit to his family but that always applied, and, equally true, seeing his father like that always unsettled him, but that was hardly out of the ordinary… He enumerated other subject headings. Health: fair. Emotional? Nothing, as it should be. Work? Mr Dupree’s death – very bad. Hogg, Helvoir-Jayne – all a bit uncertain, unresolved, there. Hogg seemed more than usually on edge and that communicated itself to everyone. And now the Dupree business… Solvency? There would be no bonus now on the Dupree case even if Hogg had been prepared to share it with him; Hogg wouldn’t let him deal with the estate – that was normal practice, it would go through now, unadjusted. The house in Silvertown had swallowed up almost all his capital, but there would be more work along shortly. So what was it? What was there in that macédoine of niggles and worries, shames, resentments and preoccupations that left him alert and tireless at four in the morning? Standard anxiety-insomnia, Alan would say too much going on.

  He slipped out of bed and stood naked in the bedroom dark wondering whether to half-dress or not. He pulled on Stella’s towelling dressing gown – the sleeves ended in mid-forearm and his knees were showing but it would do as precautionary decency. Stella’s daughter Barbuda was still away at school so the coast was clear, in theory. Barbuda had walked into the kitchen late one night, sleepy and pyjamaed as he had searched the fridge, naked, looking urgently for something savoury to eat. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat and it was fair to say that things had never been quite the same between them since then, in fact he thought Barbuda’s previous indifference had turned, after that chance meeting, to a peculiar form of hate.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, he tried not to think of that night nor of what degree of tumescence he had or had not displayed. He stared out at a corner of the brightly lit scaffolding yard visible through the kitchen window. A tight row of flat-bed lorries, the enormous shelves of planks and pipes, the skips filled with clamps and extenders… He remembered his first visit here, on business, one of his early ‘adjusts’. Stella
walking him coldly round the yard, £175,000 worth of material stolen. Everything had been painted the Bull Scaffolding colours, ‘cerise and ultramarine’, she had assured him. She had been away on a Caribbean holiday. The security guard had been pounced on, bound up and had watched helpless as the team of villains had driven off three trucks laden with the requirements of next day’s scaffolding job, an entire tower block’s worth in Lambeth.

  It was an obvious con, a clear scam, Lorimer had decided, a cash-flow problem needing to be speedily resolved, and with anyone else he would have been confident that the £50,000 cash he was carrying in his briefcase would have proved too tempting. But it soon became equally obvious that this small, wiry, blonde woman with the hard but oddly pretty face was, in loss adjuster’s parlance, ‘nuclear’ through and through. ‘Nuclear’ from ‘nuclear shelter’ – impermeable, unyielding, impregnable. She was proud: a single woman, no support, her own business, a ten-year-old daughter – all bad signs. He returned to Hogg and reported his conclusions. Hogg had openly scoffed and had gone back himself the next day with £25,000. ‘Just you watch,’ he had said, ‘those lorries are parked up in a warehouse in Eastbourne or Guildford.’ The next day he called Lorimer in. ‘You were right,’ he said, chastened somehow. ‘A grade-A nuclear. Don’t get many like that.’ He allowed Lorimer to be the bearer of the good news. Rather than telephone (he was curious, he wanted to check her out further, this genuine grade-A nuclear) he drove back to the Stockwell depot and told her Fortress Sure would honour her claim. ‘I should fucking well think so,’ Stella Bull had said, and then asked him to supper.

  He sipped at his scalding tea, one sugar, slice of lemon. They had been sleeping together, off and on, for nearly four years now, Lorimer reflected. It was by far and away the longest sexual relationship of his life. Stella liked him to come to her house (Mr Bull, an obscure figure, was long ago divorced and forgotten), where she would cook a meal, drink a lot, watch a video or late-night television, then go to bed and make fairly orthodox love. The visits sometimes extended into the next day: breakfast, shopping ‘up West’, or lunch in a pub – a pub on the river was what she particularly liked – and then they would go their separate ways. They had spent perhaps five weekends together in three years and then Barbuda went to boarding school near Reigate. Since then, during term-time, Stella had taken to calling more regularly, once or even twice a week. The routine did not change and Lorimer was intrigued to note that its increased regularity had made nothing pall. She worked hard, did Stella Bull, as hard as anyone he knew – there was good money to be made in scaffolding.

  He exhaled, feeling suddenly sorry for himself, and switched on the television. He caught the end of a programme devoted to American football – the Buccaneers against the Spartans, or something similar – and watched it uncomprehendingly, happily diverted. He brewed up again when the commercials came on. This time it was the music that drew him back to the screen, a familiar piece, both surging and plangent – rejigged Rachman-inov or Bruch, he guessed – and as he tried to remember he found his attention drawn by the images, pondering vaguely what on earth this clip could be advertising. An ideal couple at expensive play. He: dark, Gypsy-ish; she: laughing blonde, forever tossing and flicking her big hair. Sepia, then heightened colour, much camera tilt. Yacht, skis, scuba-diving. Holidays? A sleek motor on an empty autobahn. Cars? Tyres? Oil? No, now restaurant food, tuxedos, meaningful looks. Liqueur? Champagne? His hair was luminously shaggy. Shampoo? Conditioner? That smile. Dental floss? Plaque detector? Now the fellow – bare-chested, in morning light – smilingly waves off his beauty in her nippy sports car from his mews pad. But turns away, suddenly miserable, angst-ridden, full of self-loathing. His life, despite all this expensive sex, fun, play and consumerism, is clearly a sham, empty, bogus to the core. But then, at the end of the mews, another girl appears with a suitcase. Dark, seriously pale, chic, simply dressed, shorter glossy hair. Music soars. They run to each other, embrace. Lorimer was completely obsessed by now. Sonorous, throaty voice, caption fades up: ‘IN THE END THERE IS ONLY ONE CHOICE. STAY TRUE TO YOURSELF. FORTRESS SURE.’ Good God Almighty. But in the whirling, slow-motion embrace he had seen something that both disturbed and moved him in its serendipity. The slim, dark girl at the end of the cobbled mews. The girl returning to the morose hunk. He had seen her not forty-eight hours ago, he was sure of it: she was, indubitably, mystifyingly, the girl in the back of the taxi.

  Chapter 3

  The phone on Lorimer’s desk rang: it was Hogg, bluntly ordering, ‘Up here, sunshine.’ Lorimer took the fire stairs to the floor above, where he discovered that the configuration of the place had been altered over the weekend: Hogg’s secretary, Janice – a plump, cheerful woman, with enormous green joke spectacles, iron-wool hair and a jangling charm bracelet on each wrist – and her typing-pool (an ever-changing cycle of temps) had been moved across the hall from her boss, and three large grey filing cabinets, like standing stones, were now parked in the corridor outside her new office. Rajiv and his young assistant Yang Zhi had also been displaced – neat stacks of cardboard boxes with cryptic serial numbers stencilled on their sides were being carried to and fro. The ambience was one of mild chaos and peppery irritation. Lorimer could hear Rajiv shouting at his secretary with unfamiliar emotion.

  ‘One sugar and a slice of lemon, isn’t it, Lorimer? Digestive or Garibaldi?’

  ‘Yes, please. But no biscuits, thanks, Janice. What’s going on?’

  ‘Mr Helvoir-Jayne moving in.’ She emphasized the ‘heever’ with some vehemence. ‘He needed a bigger office so I’ve moved, Rajiv’s moved, and so on.’

  ‘Musical chairs.’

  ‘I think that would be altogether more jolly, Lorimer, if I may be so bold. He’s ready for you.’

  Lorimer carried his tea into Hogg’s office, a large but spartan place, as if furnished from some 1950s, low-grade, civil-service catalogue, everything at once solid but nondescript, apart from a vivid orange sunburst carpet on the floor. The dusty reproductions on the ivory walls were Velazquez, Vermeer, Corot and Constable. Hogg was standing at a window, gazing fixedly down at the street.

  ‘If that stupid arsehole thinks he can park there…’ he said, musingly, without turning.

  Lorimer sat and sipped quietly at his tea. Hogg wrenched open the window, admitting a keen draught of wintry air.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he shouted. ‘Yes, you. You cannot park there. It’s reserved. You cannot park there. Do you speak English? Well, understand this: I am calling the police now. Yes, YOU!’

  He closed the window and sat down, his pale face dead, and took a cigarette – untipped – from a silver box on his desk, tapped an end a couple of times on a thumb-nail and lit it, inhaling avidly.

  ‘There are some stupid fucking bastards loose on this earth, Lorimer.’

  ‘I know, Mr Hogg.’

  ‘As if we don’t have enough to cope with.’

  ‘Exactly’

  Hogg dipped a hand into a drawer and pitched a green file at him across the desk. ‘Get your incisors into this. A right shagger.’

  Lorimer reached for the folder and felt a small hammer of excitement vibrate through him. What do we have here? he thought, admitting that this curiosity was one of the few reasons he stayed in the job, this thrill of unknown encounters and experiences ahead – this and the fact that he couldn’t think what else he might do with his life. Hogg stood up, tugged fiercely at his jacket and began to pace steadily up and down the length of his vivid carpet. He smoked his cigarette rapidly, with a small flourish, a little shooting of the cuff of the smoking arm as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Hogg, rumour had it, had been in the services in his youth; certainly, he always praised military types and virtues, and Lorimer wondered now if it might have been the navy – he smoked very strong navy cut cigarettes and there was something of the captain on the poop deck about the way he paced his ground.

  ‘Hotel fire,’ he said. ‘Severe damage. Twenty-seven million.�
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  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And I don’t think we should pay a penny. Not a red cent. Smells bad to me, Lorimer, nasty, nasty pong coming off of this one. Nip down and see what you think. It’s all in the dossier.’ He skipped nimbly over to the door, opened it and closed it again.

  ‘Did you, ah, meet our Mr Helvoir-Jayne?’ Hogg’s stab at ingenuousness was laughable, as he studied the smouldering end of his cigarette intently.

  ‘I did. Just a few words. Seems a very amiable –’

  ‘I’m convinced his arrival here as co-director and this hotel fire are connected.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor do I, Lorimer, nor do I. The mist clears in the paddy field but we still do not see the leopard. But just you bear my observation in mind.’ Hogg leered at him, ‘Softly, softly catchee monkey.’

  ‘Who’s the monkey? Not Mr Helvoir-Jayne?’

  ‘My lips are sealed, Lorimer.’ He edged closer. ‘How can you drink English tea with lemon? Disgusting. I thought there was an alien smell in this room. You want to put milk in your tea, Lorimer, else people will think you’re a nancy boy.’

  ‘People have only been milking their tea for a hundred years.’

  ‘Raw bollocks, Lorimer. Heard anything on the Dupree front?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Reminded, Lorimer asked him about the Fortress Sure advertisement. Hogg had never heard of it, or seen it, but he said he did remember some recent campaign that had not pleased the board (Hogg had some connection with the board of Fortress Sure, Lorimer recalled) and it had either been rejected or consigned to less prominent slots while a staider or less flashy message was developed. It had cost an arm and a leg, Hogg said, and somebody had been royally shafted. Perhaps that was the one? Lorimer considered that indeed it might have been and he thought pleasantly about the girl again, thought about the luck of him rising that early, the pleasing coincidence.