The Winter Man

by Perry Bhandal

  Moments of peace.

  Catharsis.

  So be it.

  He zoomed the screen. Chicken Jack’s face swelled to fill the screen, painfully thin, the pale skin pitted with acne scars.

  CHAPTER 13

  the life and death of chicken jack...the making of Nathaniel Winter...

  The apartment block Chicken Jack eventually emerged from must once have been an elegant Victorian building in a reasonably prosperous part of town, but it now found itself in an area which had fallen on hard times. It looked as if all the apartments were occupied behind their filthy, tightly closed, haphazardly curtained windows, but it didn’t look as if anyone had spent any money on the fabric of the building for at least half a century. The blacked out windows suggested that none of the occupants relished the idea of looking out onto the neighbouring streets or letting any fresh air into their fetid lives.

  Blake had been waiting for several hours. When the door to the block opened and he saw Chicken Jack emerging, he stared hard at the man he’d come to find. He wanted to be sure the face fitted the one that had come up on his phone.

  Chicken Jack’s suit was as white as his pockmarked skin, which shone like pitted marble as he stepped out through the main entrance of the block into the morning sunshine. Nothing about Chicken Jack looked healthy, but the suit was spotless, its creases razor sharp. He’d covered his eyes with expensive mirrored sunglasses, as if frightened that the bright light would damage his pink rimmed, insipid blue eyes, so light they almost disappeared into the dark cavities of his eye sockets. His mouth was a sneering slash. He was tall, at least six-feet-two, but painfully thin, his arms and legs jutting out like blades through the expensive white material. A crisp white, open necked shirt, cravat and matching handkerchief in the top pocket completed the look.

  A group of young men had been loitering threateningly around the steps but they parted respectfully to let him pass without him having to say a word or even acknowledge their existence.

  Blake, sitting in a parked car a few yards down the street, watched as his quarry climbed into a silver Mercedes, which was every bit as polished and meticulous as its owner, and pulled out into the traffic, music instantly blaring from the open window. Blake allowed a few cars to go by before pulling out and following.

  The Mercedes only travelled a few streets before stopping on a double yellow line outside a line of shops which included a deli. Blake swerved across the road into a space on the other side as Chicken Jack got out of the car and went into the deli’s café area.

  He was close enough to the window to be able to make out the face of the man who Chicken Jack was seated with. It was Fallon, the policeman from the interrogation room. The two of them looked comfortable together. Blake tried to work out what might be going on. Was Fallon working under cover? Was this a sting of some sort, or were they friends? There was no way of telling. Was it possible that the police were moving in on Chicken Jack just as he was? As he waited, Blake rolled Chicken Jack’s profile up on his phone again to refresh his memory. He had faced charges that included child trafficking, pimping and narcotics. He had served a few short sentences over the years but the police had never been able to pin anything really big onto him.

  After no more than a few minutes, their meeting seemed to finish. The two men shook hands. Chicken Jack slipped his shades back on and walked out to his car. Fallon was finishing his breakfast as he watched the Mercedes pulling away and noted Blake’s estate car following a few seconds later. He sighed deeply, drained his coffee and walked out leaving cash on the table under the empty cup, dialing on his phone as he walked.

  Chicken Jack terminated the call and slipped into the slow-moving traffic, keeping an eye on the family estate in the rear view mirror a couple of cars behind. He’d spotted the estate even before the sergeant had mentioned it. Fuck did he think he was pointing out the obvious. Shit! The day he needed a fat fuck like that to point out when he was being watched, he may as well turn himself over to the cops. Chicken Jack smiled at the thought of the number of people that would suddenly become very uncomfortable if he ever found religion and started walking the path of repentance and confession and all the associated statement-making and paperwork that entailed. He imagined the great cloud of flatus that would accompany the collective bowel emptying across the country and up and down Europe. There was just one reason why the Chickster remained at the top of his game when many around him had fallen, stripped away like the layers of a meteorite in perpetual fiery freefall, abraded away by laziness, stupidity and good old-fashioned greed.

  That reason was Insurance.

  Chicken Jack’s fondness for insurance was so much so that had the brokers at Lloyds of London known of it, their trading floor would be awash with semen.

  The insurance revelation had come to him when he was bent over, face down in a pillow and feeling his nine year old sphincter being stretched to tearing point by his sixteen stone social worker. Life up until that point had been fairly shitty to old Chicken Jack, then known as Pierre Lumbord. He’d grown up in the parts of Paris that most tourists didn’t see, those that did normally didn’t come back to Paris, or France for that matter. Every city had a shitty part, just like everybody had an asshole. Chicken loved making comparisons to the human body, especially with cities. There was the face, good-looking, that everyone saw when they were being encouraged to come to their city and spend their cash. There was the pussy, the places you could go to get laid, there was the brain, government and business, there were the roads and railways arteries and nerves and there was the asshole. Sometimes there was more than one asshole, but Chicken’s metaphors didn’t extend to including rare congenital disorders.

  Pierre Lumbord had been born and brought up in the north of Paris right bang smack in the middle of the asshole. His mother Janine was young when she had him and was already an addict, pimped out by the local hoodlum Franco who had shot his father dead as he handed over the contents of the grocery store’s till, simply because he didn’t like his face. Janine lived with a couple of the pimp’s other girls in a two-bedroom apartment, sleeping in one bedroom and turning tricks for fifty Euros a shot in the other. Pierre grew used to the rhythmic pumping in the room next door, comforted by it as luckier babies were by the rhythmic rocking of their cots.

  Even the occasional screaming ceased to disturb the toddler as he slept in his filthy bed. Sweaty and sticky fingers eased Pierre from his small mattress as each of the three took it in turns to feed the little boy his badly mixed little bottle of milk formula, cooing to him as he gulped at the grimy rubber teat. Miraculously Pierre never became ill, was never sick, no matter how badly mixed his powdered milk was or infrequently he was fed. He never had any jabs or any checkups. He sometimes went days without being washed, yet no sore developed. He never cried and when he was picked up he would smile a great toothless smile. Had Pierre become sick even once, he would have died; that much would have been obvious to any of the three women had anything been able to penetrate the drug and alcohol-induced fog that they roamed in. Miraculously he didn’t and his life went on, but this was life as decay, a slow ruinous onslaught by ambient bacteria that was eating away at the flesh within those soiled walls, held at bay by briefly glimpsed moments of joy, a tinkle of laughter, a kiss, a hug, a giggle, each emanating from the tiny form. Like a tiny wriggling maggot, little Pierre nibbled away at the dying, decaying flesh that surrounded him, keeping the infected alive.

  He took his first steps alone and tottered across sticky bedroom carpet and stood at the door of the second and watched the two shapes writhe and contort on the bed. When his mother finally saw him, her face wet with sweat and saliva, and her mouth open as wide it could go so as to accommodate the large pink prick, he smiled his toothless smile and held out his arms to her.

  Pierre giggled as his mother’s eyes widened in shock and she snatched her cupped hand away from the man’s balls and pushed with the other, his prick jumping free of her mouth and h
anging heavily in mid-air, a corpulent turgid horizontal exclamation, slick with her spit.

  He laughed and tried to run away from his mother’s outstretched arms as she lunged to pick him up; he put the extra speed he had at his disposal now that he was on two legs, instead of four, to good use and tottered round the door frame as his mother sprawled at the empty space where he stood a moment ago. Pierre staggered along the hall towards the stairs; behind him he could hear a deep shouting. Pierre liked the sound of the words in the air and tried them out. ‘Fukin bich, fukin bich, fukin bich,’ he repeated in his imp-like voice as he wobbled along the landing.

  Behind him he heard his mother scream his name. He doubled his efforts, swinging his arms, he liked this game, whatever it was; he hoped there would be more now that he was on two legs.

  The deep words in the air changed. Pierre liked the sound of these too.

  The top step loomed and little Pierre chortling, ‘Blak Bich, Blak Bich,’ stepped off the end and fell.

  Something clamped onto his ankle and he fell heavily against the wooden steps. For the first time in a long time Pierre started crying. His mother pulled him to her and held him, cooing and rocking, rubbing his side where he fell against the stairs.

  Slowly his crying subsided and all that was left was the occasional ‘Blak bich, blak bich’ as he fell asleep in her arms.

  What it was that had penetrated Janine’s stupor that afternoon she did not know. She did not have the mental tools with which to analyse and dissect the reasons why one minute she was so and the next minute she was different. She had no idea what it was that changed inside her and how it had been triggered, but something that had been screaming silently inside her had suddenly found a voice.

  Janine didn’t even notice the man leave, didn’t care that he had not paid. She picked herself up and collected the few possessions she had from her room. Keeping Pierre with her she went into the filthy toilet and lifted the lid of the cistern. She pulled at the thin string that was tied to the float and drew out a small black plastic bag. Pulling aside the waterproof zipper she checked the money was still there. She knew by taking it that she was signing her own death warrant. This was Franco’s stash, one of many, that he kept dotted around. She only knew about this one, drawn to it after hearing unusual clinking and scrapings that were very unlike his normal noisy exertions whenever he availed himself of their bathroom. One thing about Franco, you always knew when he was taking a dump.

  One day, when she was sure he had gone she had searched the toilet top to bottom, gagging at the thick stench in the air that filmed her nose and mouth and threatened to bring up her meagre breakfast. Swallowing down the thick phlegm that had built up in her throat, she had finally found the waterproof bag stuffed full of cash. She had replaced it as she found it. At that point she had been too scared of what Franco would do to her to consider taking it. But not now.

  Janine left with Pierre, flagged a taxi to the train station. She picked a station at random, not daring to return to her hometown, as that would be the first place Franco would look for her.

  Franco returned later that afternoon. He found the open cistern and the missing money bag. Janine wished she could have warned the other two girls that had shared the flat with her, but she could not have risked it. She hoped that they would be spared the inevitable spasm of violence that would spout forth from Franco like the gushing of freshly severed artery.

  For the next few years life changed for Pierre Lumbord and his mother Janine. His name became Pierre Laforge and his mother was Jeanette Laforge. The town of Toulouse was large enough for two new arrivals to join it anonymously, but was still small enough to have the communities that made the difference between a building and a home. Keen to conserve as much of the money as possible, but equally careful to avoid the worst parts of town, Jeanette settled on a small community mostly populated with first generation Indians and Muslims. She liked the smells from the shops and the friendly people who greeted her in broken and funny-accented French. That she was different from them was no problem. She was black. However, her skin was light, unlike Pierre who had taken after his father, a deep dark brown. Jeanette settled in a small block of apartments, the tenants were all poor but proud and the place was scrupulously clean. Many of her neighbours had small children too and soon Jeanette was able to go out to work, happy to leave her little Pierre with Manjit, her kindly next door neighbour.

  Pierre was a quiet withdrawn boy. Too quiet. Jeanette worried about him a lot. She had put him in a local nursery. However, he seemed to settle in okay. School was a year off so she didn’t have to worry about it yet.

  Jeanette worked at a local Muslim Cafe as a washer-upper in the kitchen, then as a waitress and as the years wore on and she became a trusted member of the family, the manageress.

  For a time, life was good. It was hard work, but it was honest work, and she was amongst people that she cared about and that cared for her and her son.

  The Muslim and Indian community thrived, along with the Italians and Native French, and much was made of the success of this town in France which, against the odds and Marine Le Pen’s National Party’s exhortations, had ‘integrated’, to the extent that the Prime Minister himself visited, to congratulate the town and their folk. Much was at stake in this community, for there were many detractors that sought to overthrow the convivial relations that they had enjoyed for many years. The incessant nibbling at the edges of their community by the Nationalists had threatened to overturn all their hard work. Ceaseless vigilance had prevailed. The elder representatives of each community stayed in continual dialogue. Their doors remained open to each other, regardless of the reckless and fickle deeds of the youngest amongst them. That way many an incident that could have been fanned quickly out of control by the racists withered and died, starved of the oxygen of hatred, as the community closed its ranks.

  The informal structure that had been employed to such success here had been written about much within the newspapers and been the subject of scholarly works also. The French government wanted to use it those for places where the melting pot had boiled over.

  In a country where the nationalistic opposition ran out of fingers when counting illustrative examples of the great integration experiment gone right, this was the one the government needed to combat the growing feeling of resentment within their borders.

  The choice of the face of this community was so important that the Prime Minister’s aides were dispatched to find their poster boys and girls. Their search ended when they walked into the Muslim restaurant and saw the light skinned negro manageress discussing the layout for a wedding party with the Muslim owner, and the white head waiter. The little black boy playing with the small light-skinned Muslim girl was enough to make the slim, conservatively-dressed civil servant shudder in political orgasm.

  The negotiations were short, the promise of the Premier’s visit and national television coverage for his restaurant more than made up for the inconvenience of having secret service men closing it down for the week prior to his arrival.

  On the big day everything went without a hitch. Jeanette was introduced to the dashing Prime Minister and his beautiful wife. She had expected her to be a stuck-up snob, especially if what she had seen of her on television was anything to go by, but she was charming and certainly seemed to be taken by her little Pierre. She smiled at the woman, liking her despite herself and wondering what she would have made of her had she seen her son with his hands outstretched to her as she sucked off a fat man for fifty Euros. Mentally she shook the image away. Damn, why was it that her mind insisted on reminding her of her past, and always with an image the depravity of which was directly proportional to the joy she felt at that point? ‘To keep you grounded, my dear, to ensure you appreciate what you have got,’ the good fairy whispered in her ear, drowning out the voice of the bad one on the other, ‘...because you’re a dirty whore...’

  They all sat at a large table filled with food as the newsm
en and reporters quizzed the Premier and his guests. Once the newsmen had gone, Jeanette & Pierre Laforge had lunch with the Prime Minister of France.

  Across the country, a flickering screen faithfully reproduced the live images from the cameras in the restaurant on the retina of the man sitting at the bar. His eyes widened as he took in the coffee-coloured woman that stood next to the Prime Minister. Then he smiled, showing small yellow nicotine-stained teeth that looked like little daggers, stark against his red mouth.

  Jeanette pulled the blanket over the sleeping form of her son. Both were exhausted after this very special day. She flopped into the armchair and closed her eyes. She looked back on the day’s events and couldn’t quite believe it. She opened her eyes and looked around the small threadbare apartment which she had shared with her son for the last three years: the dark green two-seater sofa that Pierre and her enjoyed cuddling up on during the cold dark winter evenings to watch the small black and white television with a remarkably clear picture; the little dining table set against the window looking out over the communal courtyard that they sat at for meals and homework. She remembered the tutting turbaned bespectacled form of Khansa, Manjit’s husband, as he went about the apartment at Manjit’s insistence, tapping and pulling, inspecting and noting in his little blue notebook as he stroked the triangular beard that sprouted from his chin giving him a piratical appearance, albeit a very cuddly and kind one. For the next three weekends he left his turban at home, preferring instead a handkerchief over his topknot as he went through the apartment fixing and mending. When she had tried to pay him he had raised his hands up in horror and refused any money. Jeanette told Ali, her Muslim boss, and he smiled knowingly and provided her with the means of thanking them for their kindness.