The Last Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  He turned his face: shit. ‘She isn’t here,’ he said.

  Moon Riley said, ‘I’m not looking for Sadie, Perlman.’

  ‘So what the fuck are you doing on my doorstep?’

  ‘This isn’t a personal matter,’ Riley said.

  ‘Well, fine, call me at the office,’ and Perlman moved to shut the door in Riley’s face, but an intrusive foot blocked the attempt.

  ‘This is professional, Perlman.’

  ‘Professional like how?’

  ‘Business, Lou. Plain and simple.’ Riley pushed the door hard and Perlman didn’t have the strength needed to fend him off. Riley was a tough well-muscled wee shite. He had the brute eyes of an enraged stallion. His red leather jacket made noises similar to old door-hinges opening and closing. He wore his hair shaven close to his scalp, so that it looked like a thin film of charcoal.

  ‘What business would that be, Moon?’

  ‘I’m here on a mission, Jewboy.’

  ‘Sounds very serious,’ Perlman said, trying to make it light, but he was troubled by what he saw in Riley’s eyes and the way his voice was flat and purposeful. Physically, he knew he was no match for this hard young Riley, if it came to that kind of encounter. And he sensed that was where this locomotive was headed, and there was no emergency handle he could pull to brake the forward motion of events.

  ‘A sword, they said. Wrong.’ From under his jacket Riley produced an implement with a hooked blade more than a foot long. ‘I haven’t heard them mention a machete, Lou. Lovely piece of work.’

  Perlman imagined it slashing recalcitrant fronds in a jungle or hacking away gnarled branches. It would go through ancient knotted fibre like a blunt knife through soft margarine. What was it Colin had said? I had help now and again. He thought about the criminal interstices of the city, the spaces and intersections where lawless men colluded and plotted, and unlikely associates entered into murderous agreements out of convenience and profit.

  He wondered if Riley had been involved in helping Colin drag the body of Joe Lindsay along the railway line and hanging him from Central Station Bridge. If he’d been instrumental in killing Bannerjee, maybe restraining him in an armlock while Colin drove the screwdriver into the ear. Or had it been the other way round? Had he swung the machete through the cords of Wexler’s plump neck, or had that been Colin?

  Perlman backed off a couple of steps and Riley grinned at him. He had very sharp little teeth, those of a gnawing animal. A beaver, or some kind of rodent. He lived in damp tunnels and earthen lairs and he came out only at night to kill.

  ‘This is not an ideal situation for me,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Suits me down to the ground, Lou.’

  ‘Aye, well, you have the advantage over me.’

  ‘Isn’t life just fucking terrific?’

  ‘For some,’ Perlman said. He glanced at the mezuzah, which was hardly visible under the old paint. Usually he touched it for luck when he entered the house. Tonight, he’d been interrupted. Hence, no good fortune. He stared at the machete and found himself thinking of its curved blade severing his neck.

  ‘Your brother’s some guy,’ Moon Riley said.

  ‘Lotsa fun to work with, eh?’

  ‘Strong for his age, have to say. Impressed the hell out of me.’

  ‘He’s impressive, granted –’

  Moon Riley suddenly raised the machete in the air, then brought it down with such force that it seemed to cut through the chill hanging in the house, creating a strange funnel of warmth. Perlman wondered if space had texture, and the blade had just sliced it. He backed away a few more steps, watching Riley smile.

  ‘Just warming up, Lou.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to see you doing it seriously.’

  ‘You’re about to.’ And Riley swung the blade at an angle this time, not a downward slicing motion like before, but crossways, and level with Lou Perlman’s neck. Surprised by the change of angle, Perlman stepped back and the blade missed him by a couple of inches. He kept reversing, knowing that sooner or later he’d hit a wall and could retreat no further. And if he didn’t think of some way to protect himself very soon, he’d be headless in Egypt: which, he realized, had a biblical ring to it.

  ‘I’m still warming up,’ Riley said.

  ‘I wish you’d keep it that way.’

  ‘This one ought to do it.’ Riley grunted. The swing was mighty, and fast, faster than Perlman’s eye could follow. The blade came at him, curved and dreadful, and the sound it made was that of a person sighing. He tripped over a chair and fell backwards. He lay on the floor looking up at Riley, who laughed briefly.

  ‘I enjoy a spectacle. The Jew cop lies helpless.’

  ‘Are you by any chance an anti-Semite?’

  ‘Me? Some of my best friends.’

  ‘Right. Like Colin, you mean?’

  ‘Colin and me. We’re as close as thumb and thumbnail.’

  Lou Perlman wondered if he could pull off The Stall, a desperate tactic where you engaged the killer in banter while you thought up some means of escape. But that wasn’t going to be possible, because Riley was concentrating hard now, and he was all motion, swinging the machete furiously this way and that, a dervish of a man, swiping, slashing cushions, a sofa, whacking through the edge of a table, cleaving the upholstery of Lou’s favourite armchair. It was snowing feathers.

  ‘You see what this fucker can do? Eh? You see what it can cut?’

  ‘How could I miss it.’

  Riley was sweating heavily. He stood directly over Perlman, his legs spread apart. ‘Impressed?’

  ‘Scared would be closer,’ Perlman said.

  ‘You’re right to be.’ Riley slid on to his knees, straddling Perlman. ‘You are fucking right to be.’

  The machete came directly this time, no fancy angular stuff. The number-one route. It came down with the speed of a guillotine. Lou turned his face to one side and the blade whizzed within an inch of his ear and razored the rug below him. Too close, way too close. Death was whispering to him. He could even make out what it was saying.

  Riley cursed, laughed, raised the machete again, and said, ‘Geronimo,’ and this time when he brought it down he had his angle correct and Lou looked up into the blade and wondered if he had time to roll away. His brain was working in fragments of time too tiny to be measured. Twist, turn, or at least raise a hand and take the cut there, you can go through life without a hand, people do, they do it all the time, they can live with a stump, a prosthetic attachment, but no, Riley wouldn’t quit at just the hand, because that was a mere appetizer to a man who wanted the whole head supper. Okay, do it anyway, and Perlman raised his hand, fingers thrust up, palm turned out, the universal signal for stop.

  The crack was very loud and rang through the house.

  And Riley was no longer there. He’d slipped to one side in a listless way. Only the whites of his eyes showed. His mouth was open. The machete was still in his hand, but slackly held. All the force had been blasted out of him.

  Moon had waned.

  Lou raised his face and looked through the open door of the living room and the length of the hallway and he saw Colin, outlined in the frame of the front door and backlit from the street. He was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. His shirt was open at the collar. Lou rose to his knees and stared at his brother. He half-expected Colin to walk towards him, but that didn’t happen. The gun in Colin’s hand hung loosely at his side.

  ‘It was Kilroy’s decision to send Riley,’ he said. ‘I want you to know that.’

  Lou got to his feet. ‘You draw the line at killing your own flesh and blood, do you?’

  Colin shrugged. ‘I couldn’t let Riley harm you. That’s all.’

  ‘You want thanks,’ Lou said.

  ‘I want nothing.’

  ‘Okay. I’m grateful.’

  ‘I said I want nothing.’ Colin Perlman turned and began to walk. Lou moved, went after him, caught him before he reached the end of the drive.

 
; ‘Now what?’ Lou said.

  ‘I take a hike far away. I have emergency funds I can access anywhere in the world. Or better still, I go back to the Cedars and see how things turn out.’

  ‘You’re still betting on me.’

  ‘My wee brother,’ Colin said, and laid a hand on Lou’s shoulder. ‘That bet would’ve been null and void if I’d let Riley carry out Fat Leo’s instructions. What does that tell you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lou said.

  ‘You think about it.’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘Good. You’ll come to some conclusion. You usually do.’

  Colin dropped the gun from his hand. He looked at Lou and smiled. There was the old charm in the smile, the quack-medicine salesman’s come-on look. Trust me. This snake oil’s one hundred per cent. Cures everything, heartache included.

  ‘So, Lou. Am I a bad man, or just a very greedy one who wandered off the righteous path and into the jungle of lunacy?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to judge you.’

  ‘Right. You only get paid to do the legwork and apprehend the suspects. I forgot. The legal judgments are made elsewhere. As for the moral ones, who the fuck makes those?’

  ‘Everybody and his brother.’ Lou Perlman looked across the street. Ice formations hung in the dead branches of a tree. They gleamed like fireflies frozen at the exact moment of creating light.

  ‘Goodbye anyway,’ Colin said. He hugged Lou.

  Lou realized he was desperate for this contact, he wanted a moment of intimacy with his brother. He needed the world to go back to where it had been before truth obscured the lies. The fabricated world was more comforting, the illusions were more pleasant. Colin held him tightly, and Lou remembered their mother and the way she’d died and the broken plate and the spilled crab-apples. And their sad sad father staring into the mysteries of a coal fire and longing for his beloved wife. All Lou’s history welled up inside him, even as he understood that it was lost to him.

  Father, mother. Brother.

  ‘You know something, Lou? I just remembered that suicide you mentioned. Kerr, the milkman. I couldn’t remember it before. Suddenly it flashed back. Boyhood, eh?’

  ‘Memory,’ Lou said.

  ‘Funny old thing memory. We had some good times as kids.’

  Lou heard a car somewhere nearby. It had a hoarse sound.

  Colin moved away, then stopped. ‘You know something else? I can’t justify anything I ever did in my entire life, Lou. That’s quite a depressing thought on which to take my leave of you. You think I should find the nearest tree and apply the milkman’s solution?’

  Lou shook his head. ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘I accept the advice.’ Colin waved a hand lazily and turned left on to the pavement.

  Lou heard the car still, the meaty growl of the motor. Colin heard it too now, and stopped, turning his head in the direction of the sound and looking as if he recognized it. The lamps in the street, those that had any functioning bulbs, seemed dimmer than ever before. The car came into view, an antique, a classic, the one Lou had seen parked at the hospital. The one from which Fat Leo had emerged. He knew nothing about the makes of cars, just that Kilroy’s was old.

  Colin made a sharp sucking sound. He stared at the car as it moved under a light, showing a glossy pale-blue streamlined body polished to infinity, less a vehicle and more a moving sequence of reflections. The car slowed. A hand appeared in the open window. Lou saw Colin lower his head. The flare from the window was brief and the noise abrupt and cheaply theatrical, like the explosion of an air-filled paper bag. Colin moaned and went down on one knee and then toppled to his side on the pavement; and the car, picking up speed, roared down the street until there was nothing left of it but a strange vibration that hung in the air like a piano key struck and still echoing long after.

  Lou Perlman kneeled on the icy pavement and raised his brother’s head up between his hands. Colin’s eyes were shut, and his body had no tension in it, none of that tenacity of life. His neck lolled to one side, and his lips were wet and lax. His thick silvering hair was cold to the touch. Lou Perlman looked at his brother’s face and then, lifting his eyes, stared the length of the street, listening maybe for a sound of the car returning, or perhaps seeking some sight of it, but there was nothing except silence in Egypt.

  He stood up and shivered and all he could think of was how winter and grief were locked in a seasonal conspiracy, and he took off his glasses and pushed his knuckles hard into his eyes, a man lost in a strange grievous city that was the most familiar place on earth to him.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Glasgow Novels

  1

  She hadn’t planned on letting things go this far. She’d been ambushed by a variety of influences, the effect of wine and grass, the slow-burning jazz. His persistence was also a factor, probably the major one.

  He wanted her with a passion that was an anger.

  Fine. It suited her to have him off-balance. She lay beneath him on the rug and looked at the ceiling and listened to him whimper. He uttered words that made no sense, long vowels, sawn-off consonants punctuated by tiny grunts and plosives. The weird language of a man about to explode. Brutespeak.

  He groaned, then roared, and she thought of a zoo creature Filling the night with anguished noise. She saw his mouth open, and the shadow at the back of his throat. His roar died suddenly. He let his face drop into her shoulder and whimpered. Then he sighed as if he’d run a marathon and was approaching meltdown, a coroner’s slab.

  She made a tiny sound that was intended to be one of appreciation or gratitude, designed to reaffirm his ‘manhood’, or whatever he called that quality he needed to prove. He was of slight build, thin-shouldered. He slid out of her and rolled away, reached for his cigarettes, lay on his back and flicked his lighter. It was a smoothly cinematic motion. She saw it as if she were a camera. She often looked at the world like this, tight shots, close-ups: it gave her a sense of control over her perceptions.

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ she asked.

  ‘Spent,’ he said. He laid a hand on the back of her neck. ‘I hope I didn’t hurt you. I get carried away –’

  ‘If there was any pain, it was sweet,’ she said. Mr Bigcock, she thought. Major Dick. And I’m just cunt, poontang, beaver. I’m just something to poke on the floor of his flash flat among the empty wine bottles. A pick-up in a club, a shag. The things you have to do.

  ‘You want a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d prefer some air,’ she said.

  ‘You mean you want to go out somewhere?’

  ‘Just the balcony,’ she said.

  She got up, found her panties, pulled them on. She stepped into her jeans. She put on her white silk blouse.

  He reached for her ankle and held it. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘You’ll break my heart.’

  ‘Then join me.’

  ‘In a minute. I’m a bit stoned.’

  ‘Bring some wine. We’ll drink it outside.’

  ‘Anything for you.’

  She slipped her feet into her shoes. Jeans, blouse, shoes: what else had she brought with her? An overcoat. A bag. That was all. She didn’t want to leave anything behind.

  Come and go, no trace.

  She slid the balcony door open. The night was dense with the aroma of wet trees and rain on stone. Sparse traffic moved along Great Western Road towards Anniesland Cross. Up here, on the sixth floor of Kelvin Court, she had a good view of the northern reaches of the city: the high-rises of Drumchapel, the dense tenements and streetlamps of Maryhill. Further north, Glasgow gave way to the mysterious dark of the Campsie Fells. She’d camped up there once as a little kid in the days before her father had walked out and she remembered the smells of canvas and Calor gas and baked beans burning in a saucepan. The memory caused her a flicker of sadness. Baggage she didn’t need.

  He came out onto the balcony in a thick black robe. Looking pleased with himself, she thought. Freshly laid
. Ashes newly hauled. He carried two glasses of red wine. He swayed, almost slipped.

  ‘Just set it down for me,’ she said.

  He put the glass on the balcony ledge. ‘You’re a skinny little thing,’ he said.

  ‘With tiny tits,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not a breast man, personally.’

  ‘I eat like a horse, and I can’t gain a pound.’

  ‘You work out, I bet,’ he said. ‘You’re hard. Muscular.’

  ‘I do some press-ups. I jog.’

  ‘You dance nice,’ he said.

  ‘I’m flattered.’ They’d met in the Corinthian, once a bank, now a club and bar refurbished like a vast flamboyant wedding cake. After some desultory conversation, they’d danced. She remembered the music, the thunder of the bass, the staccato drumming.

  ‘You really move. Eye-catching.’ He smiled, opened his mouth as if he meant to say something, but a drugged synapse must have collapsed. He drank his wine in silence. She didn’t touch hers. She felt a pain between her legs. She was tender inside. She despised him for the hurtful way he’d used her body. She hated his skin and the idea of allowing him to fuck her.

  He said, ‘Christ, it’s chilly. You had enough air now?’

  ‘I like night. I like the air.’

  ‘I just realized I don’t know your name.’

  ‘I thought it was uncool to exchange names on one-nighters.’

  ‘Who said it was a one-nighter?’ He touched her shoulder. ‘I’d like to see you again.’

  ‘You never know,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me your name. Come on.’

  ‘Pass me my wine and I might.’

  He laughed. He was giddy, but full of himself and his prowess. He’d fucked her into ecstasy. She’d come back for more. Bound to. He stooped with mock courtesy. ‘At your service,’ he said.

  He reached for her wine.

  She pushed hard against his back, forcing all her considerable strength into her hands and arms. His glass went spinning from his fingertips and out into space and he said, ‘Hey, what’s this game?’ And she pushed again even before he had time to turn his face round, bringing her hands up from a lower angle than before, shoving him just under the hips and causing him to tilt forward.