Blaze Away

by Bill James

  ‘Other hazards: OK, perhaps you’ve bought a couple of works fair and square, as far as you know, but that might be so you could get a look at the rest pre a raid. This is how Iles might think. He’s devious and expects deviousness in others. And then there’s the matter of provenance. How did Jack get some of these pics? Iles could be very persistent and nosy about that.

  ‘If, for instance, you’d bought one of those Dutch things, it could be very difficult. There’s a well known work, Amelia With Flask. What’s its history before Darien? We need to find out. Perhaps you shouldn’t be hanging anything like that in The Monty, Ralph, or the club might go for ever down the chute. Lamb is certainly a possibility for us, but not the only possibility, Ralph, I urge you. I can put you in touch with various commercial interests. My family had exceptionally well-established relations with another London facilitator outfit, “Enduring Arbitrament”. I’m very much persona grata there, though not actually a member of the firm – yet. As I said – an apprentice. I’m trusted. I hear a lot via “EA”, as it used to be known at home in Hampstead. You can count on my and their discretion, Ralph, and my devotion to your cause. I owe you.’

  When Enz spoke of his family, he obviously meant his parents and siblings. But the word set Ralph’s thoughts going in a different direction – to Basil Gordon Loam’s present family: Irene, Dawn, Emily, Jessica. Ember had worked out a method of getting the support cash to them post BGL’s death. Obviously, it would be insensitive to roll up at their house with a bag of cash just after the funeral. (Incidentally, he would take care of those funeral costs and ensure things were done decently, exactly as if Enz deserved a proper show. A horse-drawn, glass-walled hearse if they fancied that.) But Ember didn’t want it to seem as though he thought only in materialistic terms. That would be narrow and unfeeling. Also, ostentatiously caring behaviour would be taken as a sign that he’d had something to do with the killing. He would have had something to do with the killing, would have had everything to do with the very justified killing, but this meant he had to be careful not to give any indication that he’d had anything to do with the very justified killing. Most people would surely agree that Enzyme should be shot, but they’d find a victory song-and-dance deeply vulgar.

  Ralph thought he’d tell Irene that for years The Monty had offered an unofficial insurance scheme to members, some of whom ran quite risky lives owing to turf battles, and/or in flagrante adulteries, and/or attempts to swindle associates in après-job share-outs, and/or prison stabbings and/or kickings. He’d say Enzyme had joined because of general prudence and consideration for the family, not any of those named reasons. He could inform Irene that Enz’s contributions had built quite a useful fund, which would now pay out, following the regrettable passing away. Ralph imagined it as a kind of Friendly Society, though there obviously wouldn’t have been any friendliness shown towards Enzyme because the verbose, breezily disrespectful, trigger-mad bastard didn’t qualify.

  ‘I’m glad we have reached a constructive agreement in our conversation, Ralph,’ Enz said.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘I’ll be happy to get things under way. No need for you to specify at this point the exact size of investment you’re thinking of. I believe I know the likely range. Well, we have already hinted at it, haven’t we? You would hardly want slipshod, economy jobs for The Monty. That would negate the whole objective. But now, if I may, I’d like to revert to that meaningful gesture I started with, but postponed because of your reactions then. I have in mind the handing over of the Smith and Wesson as a sign of the changes – wonderfully positive changes – that have taken place since my deplorable, pointlessly vindictive act of aggression against that noble male figure from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Ralph, I’m aware that another of your hates is the term “symbol”, so I won’t use it about our little ceremony. Let us just say that this spontaneous surrender of the weapon will have a more profound effect than is immediately evident when I pass the gun to you. May I do that, at this juncture?’ Ezn’s hand didn’t move yet towards the holster. It would be impudent. In any case, an unhurried, ritualistic progress had become de rigueur.

  Ralph gave a small, permissive nod. Courage garrisoned him now. His body produced no splurts. ‘I’ll store it in the chiffonier,’ he said. Ralph felt this would bring the bullying gun under the control, the mastery of The Monty and its venerable furnishings ending for ever that evil weapon’s power to harm the club’s supreme Blakeian distinction.

  ‘Thank you,’ Enzyme said. He reached up to his left shoulder and Ralph heard the minor, homely, mild sound of an unbuttoning. Enz produced the black automatic. They both stood, facing each other, so that the procedure kept due dignity, the pace still slow, weighty, significant. Each held an Armagnac glass down stiff-armed at his side. When Ralph took the gun with his free hand he could tell at once from the weight that the piece was fully loaded. This delighted him. He would have liked to kiss the muzzle, but that might be a give-away. If he could kill Enz with his own pistol and his own ammo it would give a charming, tidy completeness to the sequence that had opened with the anti-montage incident. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. Ember liked to think of himself as akin to a whirlwind if once aroused, and a slight on The Monty would always arouse him.

  Also, many of those in the bar on the night of his insurgent gunplay would remember that Enz used a Smith and Wesson .38, so, if they were brought into an investigation of Enz’s end, the police would learn he’d been done with what appeared to be his own weapon. They might decide it was suicide. They wouldn’t want to give a lot of time to inquiring into the death of a flitting nobody like Enzyme. Ralph put the S. and W. with elaborate, almost pious care into a drawer and closed it.

  Still with their eyes fixed unwaveringly on the other, they raised the Armagnac simultaneously and took small but committed swallows, as if following a time-blessed rite. For Enz, Ralph knew this moment would undoubtedly signal that he’d brilliantly bullshitted Ember into offering him mercy for the Blake abuse, and into dependence for savvy, insider advice on art deals. But for Ralph, rolling the Armagnac around in his mouth, then downing it, this was a kind of silent toast to his scheme for putting at least two rounds into BGL’s’s heart area soon, most likely .38s.

  When Ralph and he went downstairs, the bar staff and some customers looked startled to see the two of them together, both smiling. What had happened to Ralph’s rage and the ban? Enz glanced up at the montage. ‘So fine,’ he said. ‘So tasteful and inspiring. Such humanity.’ Ralph opened the door on to the street, and they shook hands there with thoroughness and energy, though not for an absurdly prolonged, phoney-looking time. ‘Goodbye, Ralph.’

  ‘Goodbye, Basil.’

  NINE

  That worried Enzyme – the ‘Basil.’ It meant something, and what it meant, he reckoned, was bad for him. To use his actual first name seemed to Gordon Loam a dirty, distancing trick; precise identification of a target, a sort of map reference for a drone. The goodwill handshake? A mockery. Things had become cold, formal, like execution preliminaries. God, had he been mad to surrender the Smith and Wesson, and to have surrendered it with a full chamber? Ralphy had looked so pleased to get the gun, you’d almost think he’d make love to it. What stopped him sticking a furled tongue intimately up the barrel?

  Enz decided he’d better get a replacement piece and fast. It hurt to think of the Smith and Wesson shoved into that mouldy drawer of the chiffonier. Of course, Ralphy was the sort to go for such a far-out, fancy word when what it actually was was a fucking old sideboard. He’d really lingered on the double f sound in chiffonier, hissing like an arched-back cat, just to show he could do the antiques racket trill. People of no class thought use of foreign terms gave them a leg up socially.

  Throughout those conversations with Ember, first in the bar, then in his office, BGL had felt there was nothing he could say that would change Ralph’s Billy-Blake-based hatred of him. Although Enz had given Ralph nearly all his best insight
s about facilitators; about the Frieze Fine Art Fair; the new, loaded young bidders; gradations of ownership risk; and art trade routes, a fair bit of it accurate, he didn’t think Ralph had been convinced, or even interested. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, move away from his infantile fury over the damaged collage and disturbed Worcestershire sauce. It was a kind of obsession. He ought to see a psychiatrist. This type of fixation, on the torn mythscape, the stained pool-table baize and the T-shirt, might be commonplace and a standard treatment easily available, possibly by tablets rather than sessions of electroshock to the brain.

  When Enz had spoken warmly about reaching a ‘constructive agreement’ between them, Ralph replied, ‘Well, yes.’ To Enzyme that had seemed slippery. Why not simply, ‘Yes’? Or, ‘Yes, absolutely, Enz,’ or, ‘Indeed, yes, Enz,’ if he wanted to elaborate? Enz was very sensitive to vocabulary and tone. What was the significance of that: ‘Well,’ spoken in a questioning, challenging fashion? Didn’t it show doubt? It was a hesitation word. It was a ‘maybe’ word. Could it be broken down into, ‘Well, yes, if you say so’? – meaning, I’ll go along with it for now because I need to lull and fool you, but I’ll hang on to my own thoughts, thank you very much, and my own thoughts towards you, Enz, don’t have anything to do with a constructive agreement – destructive, yes?

  Enzyme had come to The Monty very prepared and brought out some of his best jargon and phrasing – ‘vindictive act of aggression’, Ralph’s ‘inalienable mission’, people who’d ‘already bought their way into select, modish company’, ‘currency neutral’, a genuine technical term; and a chunk of flattery referring to Ralph’s ‘weighty financial resource’ – yet Ember hadn’t appeared persuaded. Although there’d been a few moments when he’d shown something like friendliness, it was only because he’d realized Enz had a gun and might be on a revenge trip after that humiliating public bawling out from Ember and the for-ever-and-a-day ban. Before this, hadn’t he actually told Enzyme to ‘bugger off’? Civil? Humane? Enlightened?

  One of Ralphy’s famous panics had seemed to hit him and, as a result, he’d agreed to talk and even invite Enz into the office. But it had meant nothing – just a ploy to keep himself safe. Once he was in his little comfort-zone throne-room with the chiffonier and all the other historic timber around him, he began to recover from that bad fright interlude. And when the Smith and Wesson was no longer a factor, but had been swallowed up by his decrepit, wormy piece of cherished double ff’d junk, Ralph could shake hands and even smile. There’d been no mention of cancelling the ban in response to all the priceless commercial counselling Enz had provided, though, just that ambiguous and very fucking unambiguous, ‘Goodbye, Basil.’ There were proper occasions for use of his real name, Basil Gordon Loam, a name with honour, achievement and excellent tailoring built-in. But a tactical aftermath chat with Panicking Ralphy at his shady club was not such an occasion.

  Enz realized there might be difficulties in getting a new pistol. The foul ‘I Spy’ column in the Press told everyone, without actually telling them – more sly ambiguity that wasn’t ambiguous – yes, told everyone who could do a bit of basic translating that Basil Gordon Loam had opened fire on a prime, chichi educational tableau at The Monty club, causing some obvious, grave damage and momentary havoc to members. The natural deduction would be that Basil Gordon Loam was rat-arsed drunk at the time, despite the grandeur of his family background.

  People who sold hot guns knew, of course, that they might be used in hot, unlawful jobs. That’s why their crooked businesses existed. And that’s why the businesses didn’t get a place in any city’s Chamber of Trade. Secret armourers wanted no trace back from one of these jobs to themselves as accessories. A no-good boyo who got stonkered and blazed away pointlessly in a social club, even a social club like The Monty, was not the sort of client they craved. If someone could shoot their gun off in stupid circumstances, the same someone might also shoot his mouth off in stupid circumstances, including boasts of how and where he got his weaponry.

  Guns: Amy and Leyton Harbinger, who’d previously operated from a renowned pub off Cork Street, supplying most of the armaments locally, were locked up for a while because of some carelessness or betrayal or random twirl of fate. The only remaining source hereabouts was Judy Rose Timmins, age forty-sixish, manner chirpy, eyebrows expressive, voice confiding, her legitimate commercial front an infants’ playgroup nursery. Enzyme’s Smith and Wesson and ammunition had come from her. She’d want to know what had happened to the pistol following that Monty daftness, as code-described in ‘I Spy’. Or perhaps she wouldn’t want to know – would rather not hear anything more of it – or of Enzyme.

  Just the same, he rang Judy now from his car and said he was coming over straight away to her Silver Bells And Cockleshells crèche. As he’d expected, she sounded puzzled and unwelcoming. However chirpy she might usually be, Enzyme realized the obvious urgency of his call must trouble her. Removal of the Harbingers had probably increased Judy’s trading, but also risk. At the end of their phone conversation, she asked: ‘Am I reading the Press right?’

  ‘The Press?’

  ‘William Blake on a plate, a steel plate.’

  ‘Oh, that Press!’

  ‘Yes, that Press.’

  ‘We can discuss.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  He noticed the insubordination in her tone, the outright one-upness. He’d said, ‘We can discuss,’ and she replied, ‘Yes, we can.’ What this suggested to Enz – what she clearly meant it to suggest – was that as soon as she’d realized why he’d phoned, she’d already decided they should inspect the reasons for his visit, really pick-over the reasons. She didn’t require an invitation. As convener, she wanted him to know that she would have charge of any meeting, and he’d better not expect much from it. Enz wondered how his great-great-grandfather, the industrialist and, eventually, Cabinet Minister, Sir Ivan Gordon Loam, would have dealt with this blazing insolence from a suburban childminder. But probably Sir Ivan didn’t know any childminder who was also a gunrunner and wouldn’t have needed her or him urgently even if he did. And Sir Ivan would have been too sharp to hand over an operational gun to a grudge-bearing dreamer like Ralphy Ember.

  TEN

  Driving the hire car, Liz Rossol followed Basil Gordon Loam across town in his Audi, trying to manage it so there was always one moderately sized vehicle between her and him for cover, but not more than that, or bigger than that, or she’d lose him. If he spotted the tail she’d probably lose him anyway. Although she’d done some earlier exploring here, he’d know the local roads much better than she did. He’d most likely fashion quick tricks at roundabouts and/or up side streets. In any case, he wouldn’t continue to his destination. So, tracking him would have no point. She wanted to know where he was going. Or where he had been going before he noticed the constant green Peugeot. That might help her to an explanation of what was happening, might end at least some of her confusion.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d gumshoed by car. The art business at her level now and then required a spell of crafty mileage and intelligent snooping: hunt the masterpiece. She’d taught herself the skills, but the skills didn’t always work. For instance, they couldn’t control the size of the vehicle immediately ahead. Sight of the target car might get blocked long-term by a furniture van if plentiful oncoming traffic meant you couldn’t overtake. Being so tall was a pain. Too much of her was evident behind the windscreen in a rear-view mirror.

  Did Gordon Loam routinely carry a pistol, not just for a collage shoot? Whether or not, she must try to stay with him, unobserved. An info famine had struck. She needed nourishment, however meagre, such as where was he going and why. She liked to find a pattern to things, a shape. So far she saw neither. All she saw was the back of his Audi, and that not all the time.

  On the train she’d decided that for her opening move she’d have a look at The Monty club. Last time she was here she hadn’t known it existed. The sole focus of her research then
had been Jack Lamb’s country place, Darien, and its reputation as an art sale centre. What had disturbed her, and still disturbed her, was the possibility of a link between the barmy, fusillade at The Monty and the general local art scene. That kind of publicized event was bound to produce special interest, although the bit of damage to The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell wouldn’t matter all that much, except perhaps to the named owner, Ralph Ember, if a Blake nut. Obviously, it was only a print and worth next to nothing.

  But he had spoken of bringing in costly, original, sought-after, quality stuff to hang in The Monty. That objective had been reported in the ‘I Spy’ column and could get picked up by media elsewhere. And might Ember be thinking of a purchase from Lamb, a well-known art dealer living in this very area? That must seem convenient and sensible. Even if he had different plans, there was bound to be widespread increased fascination for a while here with pic-’n-sculpt retail. That bothered her. It might jeopardize the proposed Cog operation. It might jeopardize Justin as second-stage pathfinder. Would it be wise in these changed conditions for George Dinnick to send Justin in for a detailed reconnaissance of what Jack Lamb had currently, to judge if a raid were worthwhile?