Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  Grabianski shrugged.

  “You’re here on business?” Resnick asked.

  “An old friend to meet.” A smile spread across his face. “Two, if we include you.”

  It was Resnick’s turn to smile. “That’s what we are? Friends?”

  They sat there a while longer, not speaking, two men who might easily have been mistaken for brothers; big men with broad, heavy features whose families had fled their mother country in the first months of the war. Sitting in that room, with so many framed photographs of generals and fighter pilots on the walls, it was unnecessary to ask which war.

  “Paul Palmer,” Grabianski said, paying for his second vodka. The slight shift of expression on Resnick’s face told him the name was not unknown.

  “What about him?”

  “If he was caught with a quantity of stolen goods on his premises, a few choice artifacts of the burglar’s trade, what are the chances he might see serious time?”

  “Depends. Sometimes, as well you know, there are extenuating circumstances.”

  “Not for the likes of Palmer.”

  Resnick thought he would chance another lager after all; if they were going to pull Paul Palmer it would be before the milk and Graham Millington could take charge. Just the thing to get an overdose of Andrew Lloyd Webber out of his system.

  “This isn’t professional rivalry, I take it?” Resnick asked. “I mean, he’s hardly in your class.”

  “Let’s just say there are reasons for shutting him away where his temper won’t do more harm.”

  Resnick frowned. “There’s some history of domestic violence, I know. Is that what this is about? The wife? Shana, isn’t it?”

  “Not only her.”

  Resnick laughed. “I should have known with you there’d be a woman involved.”

  “It’s not like that, Charlie.”

  “No?”

  “Not this time.”

  Resnick remembered the alacrity with which the television director’s wife had taken Grabianski to bed, bosom and bath. “Whatever happened to Maria Roy?” he asked.

  Grabianski shook his head, grinning despite himself. “You don’t want to know.”

  “And this time?”

  “I told you . . .” But Resnick was staring at him from close range and for a confirmed criminal Grabianski could be a hopeless liar. “This is different.”

  “Yes,” Resnick said, not meaning it.

  “Platonic.”

  “Of course.”

  “Charlie, she’s a nun for Christ’s sake!”

  Resnick’s laughter was abrupt enough to turn heads way back across the room.

  “No laughing matter, Charlie.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “This kid Palmer, he went for her. Could have been serious. Angry because she’s been talking to his wife, advising her, you know, getting into a refuge, taking the kids.”

  Resnick nodded. “How come you’re so certain about these stolen goods? They wouldn’t be planted, by any chance, to lend us a helping hand?”

  Grabianski shook his head. “Not my way.”

  “Okay. This is the second time I’ve got you to thank. Always assuming it pans out.”

  “Oh, it will.” Draining his glass, Grabianski swung round on the stool and rose to his feet.

  “You’ll likely not be around to see it go down?”

  “Likely not.”

  “Well,” Resnick stood and again the two men shook hands, “it was good to see you again.”

  Grabianski nodded and began to turn away.

  “I suppose I’d be wasting my breath telling you to keep your hands to what’s rightfully yours?”

  Grabianski kept on walking, through the door, along the broad corridor and out on to the forecourt where he climbed into the taxi he had instructed to wait. Before it had pulled away, Resnick was speaking to Lynn Kellogg on the telephone, informing her of the cab company and registration. “Get on to their controller, find out their position; if you can get the destination without arousing suspicion so much the better. Then call in Mark and Kevin, sort out the surveillance between you, let me know how it’s going. Send a driver to pick up my car and collect me here.”

  Grabianski stood in the first floor drawing room, heavy velvet curtains drawn against the night. He was wearing the same dark blue suit as earlier, smartly polished shoes, new white cotton gloves. He was holding a torch in one hand, a Polaroid camera in the other. The canvas holdall was on the floor near his feet.

  He positioned himself carefully before taking the pictures, capturing the paintings separately and together. They were, he thought, a wonderful pair. The first, earlier by some fifteen years, showed a farm boy close by the half-open gate to a field, some half dozen sheep in the middle distance, an avenue of poplars making a diagonal right to left behind. It was a perfectly respectable, cleanly executed rural painting of its time; the kind the Royal Academy in the 1880s would have cherished. Possibly still did.

  But it was the second that Grabianski cherished, an earlier study for what most critics considered Dalzeil’s masterpiece, Departing Day. It showed a stubbly, tilled landscape through the blur of fading light, the sun a yellow disc, faint through mottled sky. Patched along the low horizon were sparse purplish shadows, whether outbuildings or carts, or even cattle, it was neither possible nor desirable to know.

  What had happened to Dalzeil between the two paintings, Grabianski was uncertain. Had he been smitten by the influence of Seurat, sudden as Saul on the road to Damascus, or had he fallen under the spell of Monet, who had exhibited in London only a few years before this work would have begun? More prosaically, had Dalzeil’s failing health and badly deteriorating sight meant that this hazy vision of the world was the only one he had left?

  It didn’t matter. For Grabianski, most of what gave him pleasure in painting was here: the interplay of light and colour, the shifting texture of the paint, the mystery.

  It was exquisite.

  He felt a thread of envy for the woman who had lived with the joy of this painting for so long and considered what he was about to do. He checked his watch and unzipped the canvas bag.

  Divine turned his back in the direction of Resnick’s car before uncapping his flask and tipping an inch or more of whisky into Kevin Naylor’s coffee and then his own. Lynn Kellogg and Carl Vincent were somewhere off in the shrubbery, keeping guard over the rear of the house, while Divine and Naylor had positioned themselves to watch both the main entrance and the fire escape angling rustily down the side of the building. Resnick’s driver had parked in shadow fifty yards along the street.

  “Tell me why we’re hanging about here like this, Kev?” Divine asked, “when there are nice warm pubs in spitting distance.”

  “Overtime?”

  “Oh, yeh. Knew there was a reason.”

  “Hush up!” Naylor hissed. “Here he comes now.”

  They watched as Grabianski, somewhat larger than life, nonchalantly let himself out of the front door and headed for the low wrought iron gate, swinging the holdall a little as he walked. Beneath the even crunch of his feet on the gravel came the firm click of a car door and then the sound of Resnick’s feet approaching.

  Fifteen yards along, Grabianski stopped. “Coincidence, Charlie?”

  “Hardly that.”

  Grabianski scarcely turned as Divine and Naylor moved up on him from behind.

  “You wouldn’t care to show us, Jerzy, what you’ve got in the bag?”

  Grabianski hesitated but not for long. “Why not?”

  Naylor shone his torch as the zip was eased back; save some gloves, a torch and a camera, the bag was empty.

  “Not much of a haul,” Divine observed.

  “I’ve a receipt for the camera,” Grabianski said, “if you think that’s really necessary.”

  Resnick looked at him thoughtfully. “Why don’t you come and sit in the car? Mark, Kevin, give the place the once over just in case. Tell the others to call it a night.” />
  *

  Resnick told his driver to take a walk. He pushed a cassette into the car stereo and kept the volume low: Monk playing ‘April in Paris’, ‘I Surrender, Dear’. “Why the change of mind?” he asked. “Or was it a change of heart?”

  “How about a conversion?” Grabianski’s smile was as angular as the music.

  “How about you realised the risk you took in coming to me was too great? You must have known there was a chance I’d have followed.”

  Grabianski leaned back against the inside of the door. “The truth?”

  “What passes for it, maybe.”

  “You do know about the paintings? You know they’re rare.”

  Resnick nodded. “A little. The owner was in touch a while back about security.”

  “Always been a special favourite of mine, Dalzeil. Soon as I heard they were here I had to see them. And what chance would I have otherwise?”

  “Written and asked permission? Knocked on the door?”

  “Not my way, Charlie. Besides, half an hour with one of the unsung masters, worth any amount of risk. Like standing up to your armpits in cold water for hours just to catch a glimpse of an Ivory gull that’s got lost on its way from the Arctic.”

  “Any amount of risk?” Resnick said.

  “Come on, Charlie,” Grabianski laughed. “You’ll not bother charging me with this, scarce worth the paperwork. Besides, your lads, they’ll not find as much as a speck of dust disturbed. And then there’s always that small favour to repay.”

  Resnick reached over and clicked open the door. “London nowadays, isn’t it? Notting Hill? Camden? Work enough down there, I should have thought. Art galleries, too.”

  Grabianski held out his hand but this time Resnick didn’t take it; instead he watched in his rear view mirror as the tall figure merged into the dull glow of street lamps until he was no more than a purple shadow without shape or contour.

  A week later a package arrived at the community house addressed to Sister Teresa. It contained two Polaroid pictures of a landscape painting, which Sister Bonaventura assured her was firmly in the Impressionist tradition, and a single feather, mottled brown and white, close to five inches long. Sister Marguerite thought it might have come from a curlew, but Teresa assured her it was a whimbrel and produced her book as evidence. There was neither letter nor note.

  Only later, looking at the photographs alone, did she see, faintly to the side of one of them, the reflection of a man seemingly holding a camera. Her saviour. At least, that’s what she believed.

  Cheryl

  Cheryl had a scarlet embroidered leisure suit with padded shoulders and a matching belt, which she liked to wear when she delivered meals on wheels to the elderly, the housebound and the infirm. Cheryl thought it her mission to bring a little colour into their lives; she thought it cheered the old farts up. And it was true, although she hadn’t been doing the job long, four months this coming week, she would have needed more than the fingers of both hands to count the number of faces that smiled, positively beamed, when they heard the beep-ba-ba-beep of her horn, the rhythmic jabber of her finger on the bell. Not that she was letting it go to her head; she wasn’t the Angel of Old Lenton. At least, not yet.

  The truth was, though it paid less, she liked it as well, if not better, than any job she’d ever had. Bar work, waitressing, a discouraging six months serving up double sausage, double egg, bacon and chips in the police canteen, five years – Cheryl still couldn’t believe it – on the night shift at Pork Farms. That had been when her Vicki was little and sleeping over at her gran’s in the Meadows. Once Vicki had started at the juniors, Cheryl had gone to work there, playground attendant first and then dinner lady. That, she supposed was what had put the idea into her head, meals on wheels.

  When it had been time to go to the comp, Vicki had begged her mum not to follow there, too. Reminders about writing to her dad and tidying up her room while doling out the mashed potatoes. So Cheryl, whose first real boy friend, a pipe fitter from Bulwell, had taught her how to drive, if little else, and who’d had a driving licence since her eighteenth birthday, if rarely a car, took a test to show the supervisor she could tootle along at thirty without shaking up several dozen foil wrapped dinners, filled in a form with the fountain pen she more usually saved for notes about late payment of the rent, and gratefully accepted a uniform overall which she almost never wore.

  Drab, too drab: not the way Cheryl saw herself at all.

  As she drove, Cheryl played tapes in the van. Not that it was fitted out with a stereo, of course, but there was this natty little cassette player from Dixons she hung from the handbrake: Jackie Wilson, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Aretha belting out ‘Respect’ and ‘Think’; sometimes, when she was feeling soft and hopeful, ‘I Say a Little Prayer For You’. Once she had clapped her Walkman on old Tommy Vickers’ head and boogied him round the room to ‘Let’s Get It On’, Cheryl keeping time to the slivers of treble and bass that slid through the headphones, singing along at the top of her voice, “Don’t want to push!” Tommy had had to lie down afterwards for quite a long time.

  This particular morning it was raining, that fine rain like mist which dulls the sky and seeps, almost unseen, under the skin and Cheryl needed her scarlet suit and her music more than ever. She was playing Dusty, Dusty in Memphis; proof, if proof were needed, that white girls can have soul, the voice, yearning and strong. ‘Breakfast in Bed’. Cheryl braked sharply so as not to nudge a cyclist turning left off Lenton Boulevard and taking too wide a line. Her Vicki would still jump in with her now and then of a Sunday, those days she forgot she was near thirteen and it was no longer cool, jump right in amongst the pages of the News of the World and settle down to tea and toast and if they were feeling specially wicked, the pair of them, bacon cobs slavered all over with brown sauce. The kind of breakfast Dusty was singing about though, the kind you shared with a bloke, well, it wasn’t to say she didn’t have offers, but with a kid Vicki’s age it was difficult, specially since Vicki’s gran had passed on. No more easy all night sleepovers. For either of them. More often now it was a quick kebab, a glance at the watch and oops, sorry, got to be getting back.

  Cheryl’s patch spread all around the Radford Flats where they lived, down past the Raleigh cycle works and through Dunkirk towards the railway. Her first call this morning, though, was Lenton. Sherwin Road. Mary Cole, who’d been living there alone since her husband died not so long back and Mary herself had a stroke. She was over it now, well, she could move at least, with the aid of a stick, five minutes to get from the back room to the door in a sort of grudging shuffle, one side of her still set, paralysed really, Cheryl supposed. Once in a while, Cheryl had seen her blink back a few tears if something was said that reminded her of Ted, but normally she’d find a smile and even a joke sometimes about the cod.

  This morning, the trip to the door was slower than usual and at the sight of Cheryl, bright red on her doorstep, Mary broke down into tears, great gulping sobs that shook the half of her body that could still respond.

  Cheryl helped her back inside, put on the kettle and sat her down. “You’re not a social worker, Cheryl,” her supervisor would say. “You’re not a home help. There are others paid to do that. Trained. You have meals to deliver. Quick, in and out.” Easy to say, Cheryl thought, when you’re in an office most of the day rustling papers; not so easy sitting here watching the tears try to find a way down this poor old dear’s twisted mess of a face.

  Gradually, over a cup of strong sweet tea, the story emerged. Ted Cole had borrowed money the winter before last, sixty pounds that was all, at least all Ted had wanted was sixty, but the man who’d called round about the loan had talked him into borrowing seventy-five, which meant Ted having to repay the neat round sum of a hundred at a fiver a week. Which was fine from his pension and hers and whatever they got from social security. Only then Mary fancied a few days away at Mablethorpe, just a week by the sea, maybe that caravan site back down the coast, the place they�
�d stayed before, and Ted hadn’t felt he could begrudge her that. Nor a few presents for the nieces and nephews when they made the trip across from Glossop. Before you knew where you were it was winter again. Ted now owed a total of three hundred and seventeen pounds, which he had been struggling to pay off at seven pounds fifty a week, when he’d gone out in the frost one morning to fetch the Mirror, ten Embassy and a pint of milk and keeled over with his heart.

  The first Mary had known about the loan, any of it, was when the collector knocked on the door and expressed his condolences. “He were a lovely chap, Ted. Lovely. Tell you what I’ll do, this last two weeks, the repayments, I’ll say nothing. Stick it in out me own pocket, sign of respect. So if you’ll just get your purse, love, it’s seven fifty, and we’ll start as we mean to go on. Your Ted, he used to meet me in the pub, like, but easier for you, I dare say, if I come here.”

  This man standing there, face like steamed pudding and rings on the hand he stuck out towards her, rings that were heavy and dull.

  “You should have told him,” Cheryl said, “now there was just you on your own, you couldn’t easily manage.”

  “Well, I did. Because it was difficult. It was hard.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Oh, he was nice about it. Understanding, you know. Firm, but fair. I’ll say that for him, he was always fair. He offered to make a new arrangement, just for me.”

  “Nice of him.”

  “He said there was this new scheme for people like me, finding it not so easy, you know. Said how he would wipe out all the old debt, all the money Ted’d owed, and make out this new loan I could pay back little by little, just however much I could afford. He showed me this paper, I remember, well, of course, I never really understood it. But five pounds a week, he said, we’ll try that for a start. And well . . . well . . .” Mary plucking at the table cloth now and not quite able to stop the tears. “At first it was fine, but then I started to fall behind, and today . . . today he came right in here, into my home and he . . . I’ve swept it up now . . . but he took a china pot from that shelf there, mine and Ted’s anniversary ware it was, and dropped it, right there on the floor. Sorry, he says, clumsy. These clumsy old hands of mine. Do more damage sometimes than they’ve a mind. Next week, Mary, he says, ten pound. You’ll not let me down. And then he left.”