Butcher

by Campbell Armstrong

  Perlman watched Scullion leave the station and go out into Gordon Street. He remained a while inside, listening to trains; he’d always loved trains as a kid, he’d enjoyed maps and wondered about the names of distant destinations, what were they like? York, Penzance, Bristol. And yet here he was, as he always was, embroiled in the complicated city of his birth.

  He walked out into the cold sunlight. Skelped by the wind, he returned to his parked car. Flying solo, aye, wherever the journey took you.

  Inside his car, he phoned Joe Adamski on his mobile. Adamski was a Detective Sergeant in E Division, which covered the east of the city.

  Adamski asked, ‘How’s that bullet wound?’

  ‘I’m getting over it,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Can’t be easy. A bullet. I also hear you’re not flavour of the month at Force HQ.’

  ‘Try flavour of the year, George. Never mind that, the decade. They’re calling it sick leave. I’ve got another name for it.’

  ‘The cauld shoulder.’

  ‘A very cauld shoulder. I can’t step inside Force HQ even if I was in the vicinity and desperately needed a pish. Officially I’m unofficial.’

  Adamski had a throaty voice, like the rasp of a hedge cutter. ‘That’s a raw deal.’

  ‘That’s what I think … Joe, I need a wee favour. I’ve got a missing person in your district. It’s a personal thing. I promised somebody.’

  Adamski said, ‘Pen’s in hand.’

  Perlman took the photograph of Kirk McLatchie from his pocket. He gave Adamski a brief description, colour of eyes and hair, age and address.

  ‘That address,’ Adamski said. ‘That’s the badlands.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll be grateful if you can get me anything. Let me give you this mobile number, OK?’ Perlman read it out.

  ‘I’ll get back to you if and when,’ Adamski said.

  Perlman thanked him, then sat for a time watching traffic on Wellington Street. He considered the decomposing hand: what had become of the rest of the body? Had it been cut into pieces and dumped somewhere? Or was the hand the only thing amputated? Keep an eye open for one-handed people.

  12

  Baba Ragada wore a white turban and an ankle-length white robe. His face was gaunt, skin stretched like papyrus over bone. He spoke in a deep monotone Reuben Chuck found hypnotic.

  ‘Speak to me of your spiritual journey.’

  Chuck, who squatted on the parquet flooring at the Temple of Personal Enlightenment, formerly a Salvation Army Hall, found Baba’s seemingly simple questions heavily loaded. He might appear to be asking one thing, when really he was seeking an answer to something altogether different. The man had more layers than a sherry trifle.

  ‘You’re talkin about my karma?’

  ‘Everything is a karmic matter. I am saying this. As your ship sails the ocean, your horizon changes. You see the curvature of this great planet alter every move you make on your epic journey. Does a passing cloud distract you from the horizon? Does an albatross in flight startle you? The great Gitavoga says we see eternity in the heart of the simple nettle, but must always be careful how we grasp it. I am saying, are you sailing in the true direction or do you allow thin winds to blow you off course?’

  Reuben Chuck sniffed sandalwood incense. He liked it, found it restful. He pondered the Baba’s words – how to answer the questions, there’s the rub. Imagine you’re a galleon on a wild sea. Aye, right. Wasn’t easy. Wind in the sails. He dismissed a bunch of potential responses, none of which would have answered Baba. I shifted seventeen ton of topqual purloined Aberdeen Angus beef … I arranged for the murders of my enemies … I have further plans of a fiscal nature …

  Bigtime negative karmic acts, titanic.

  He was aware of Baba Ragada staring at him, waiting. He had eyes that suggested numinous encounters with the true nature of things. All patience and quiet concentration, this Baba.

  ‘I sent forty blind inner-city children to Ayr on one of my buses.’ Chuck smiled a little. He was sure this generosity would delight Baba.

  Baba listened, then said, ‘On his deathbed Gitavoga’s disciple Kativaka said, “All my life is as a hummingbird’s. I pass now into the cycle of rebirth and when I return I may not remember I had wings.” You understand me, Reuben?’

  ‘Uh, all I was pointin out is I donated bus and driver.’

  ‘I am saying this to you. Your actions along the journey may not result in spiritual advancement, nor in a rebirth of joy. Nobody has a guarantee.’ Baba Ragada smiled, as if a mention of a guarantee was some kind of guru in-joke. He spoke so softly Chuck strained to hear. ‘All generous acts are selfish.’

  ‘Selfish? How?’ Chuck was both surprised and offended but hid his reactions well.

  ‘I am saying this. Krishna reminds us that a rich man with too many possessions may find no spiritual advancement in giving them away. What is the sacrifice involved when a man who is weighed down by material things gives away all his earthly goods, and yet remains in his heart attached to them and feels the pang of their loss? Even if this man becomes the most humble beggar, the act remains questionable as a true spiritual event in his life, unless he has realigned himself with cosmic truth. Perhaps not even then.’

  Chuck hadn’t read this Krishna stuff. He kept meaning to. It was such a fat book. But so was the Bible, and he’d ploughed through that. Most of it anyway. Some of it. Well, Genesis and Exodus, and one time, pissed out of his mind on rum and coke, he’d plunged into Revelations, which was a right old nightmare. ‘Are you sayin I should have driven the blind kids myself.’

  Knock off point. Karmic wheel grinds into reverse, squawk.

  Baba sighed softly. ‘When you have divested yourself not only of material objects but have also cleansed your soul of resentments and grudges and demands of the flesh, only when the heart is as unsullied as new-fallen snow – only then can you be certain you are acting from unconditional love.’

  Reuben Chuck struggled with this concept. In his world, everything was conditional. How you behaved. How you ran your businesses. Was he supposed to have loved his enemies and allowed them to flourish? Oh aye. And how would that have gone down? Mr Reuben Softee, that’s how. The gaffer’s gone all funny on us. He disny even eat meat for fuckzake. He has sprouts and goat’s milk, by Christ. Also he quit the bevvy. Let’s depose him. Let’s kick shite out of him. Kill the king.

  As for his possessions, how could he give up his penthouse?

  He looked at Baba and saw the long eyelashes quiver. Baba did his spooky eye routine. He drew the irises up into his head somehow and all you saw were the whites, blank and terrible. It gave Chuck the creeps first time, but he was used to it now.

  ‘Understand,’ Baba said. ‘Forty blind children taken to enjoy some sea air, this is not a sin.’

  ‘Plus as much ice-cream as they could eat. Also free rides at the local carnival. And they walked along the promenade to enjoy fresh sea air on their wee faces.’

  Baba Ragada seemed not to hear this. ‘The intention is good in itself. The execution is the problem in universal terms. You must listen to your heart’s voice.’

  And whit was the heart’s voice exactly? Pondering this, Chuck gazed slowly round the room. He’d always imagined most gurus led simple lives when it came to ornaments, but Baba had been accumulating over the months many items that were clearly of value – large oriental tapestries, handmade from silk, hung on the walls. Intricate panoramas, depicting exotic trees and half-moons and stages in the Krishna’s journey. There were also a couple of large carved-wood statues of the Buddha, one of which showed him surrounded by snakes. Several antique Tibetan handbells stood against the wall. He wondered how much of his own monthly donations had gone into the acquisition of this stuff. He knew he’d paid for the expensive parquet flooring, because he was the one who’d suggested it, and probably the fat embroidered silk pillows Baba sat on. The stained-glass windows, which showed mostly lambs and shepherds and a Christ with an eye recentl
y vandalized, had obviously been the property of the Sally Ann before the Temple took over.

  In one corner he noticed a galvanized bucket which was placed directly below a rain mark in the suspended ceiling. Get in a roofer, he thought, win some points in the circle of life and rebirth. Call in a glass repairman and have Christ’s eye fixed. Yo ho score. He’d also jack up his monthly contributions which were presently running about three grand. And why not? When he’d been a Catholic he’d lashed out dosh with frenetic energy, money for a new church organ, a marble pulpit, and a sporty wee car for Father Skelton.

  There was a piece of work, that Father Skelton, paedophile. Boys here, boys there, in the bushes, in toilets, the confessional even. About fifty of the abused came forward when Skelton was arrested and shamed. Skelton fled the country the minute he was bailed and was last heard doing missionary work in Calcutta.

  Rome took care of its own.

  Chuck left the church in disgust. His soul needed another kind of infusion. If he feared anything more than the loss of respect, it was the prospect of damnation. OK, so there was no actual hell in this Enlightenment culture, but there was always that other threat, reincarnation in a form you didn’t want. Somethin disgustin.

  Like plankton. Life span three seconds. But here was the problem: if you came back as plankton or anythin else, how did you ever know? It wasn’t as if plankton floatin in the deeps had a memory of being Reuben Chuck, right?

  And Chuck had no recollections of ever being anybody or anything else. So this was tricky.

  Some kind of amnesia had to be involved in the reincarnation process.

  ‘The heart’s voice speaks in the language of charity,’ Baba said. He lifted one emaciated hand and pointed at Chuck.

  ‘Charity,’ Chuck said.

  ‘Free yourself!’

  Penny dropped. ‘I donate that bus to the blind society, do you mean?’

  Baba went into white-eye mode again, as if receiving reams of data from an infinite source of wisdom. ‘There is another blindness beyond the physical, Reuben. Blindness of the spirit, which affects many souls.’

  A firework exploded in Chuck’s head. ‘I’ll give you the bus, no strings.’

  Baba’s eyes swivelled back into place. ‘The Temple cannot accept such a donation.’

  ‘It’s in fine condition. And you could make good use of it, travellin to spiritual conventions or whatever. Take it, Baba. Don’t refuse it.’

  Baba looked thoughtful. ‘Our transportation is often uncertain, I know …’

  ‘I’ll throw in any refurbishment you need, a complete mechanical check, and a paint job.’

  Baba Ragada said, ‘Your heart is generous, Reuben.’ He reached out and clasped Chuck’s hand. Chuck had never touched Baba’s skin before. It was cold and you could feel the bones. Did he ever eat? His hand was as heavy as a sparrow’s body.

  ‘There is one small matter,’ Baba said. ‘I understand you need to assign legal documents of ownership. Is this so?’

  ‘A mere detail,’ Chuck said dismissively. ‘My lawyers will deal with any paperwork.’

  ‘I am moved, Reuben. Truly moved. You are beginning to understand the cycles.’

  Reuben Chuck experienced a flame of elation. Blessed by Baba. He’d jumped a notch on the wheel. Lookin good. Lookin peachy. And all it had cost him was a bus, but that was a gift, therefore a tax deduction, and why did he need another bus anyway? Scarfin diesel like a drunk on wine. He had plenty of buses, a fleet.

  Baba Ragada stood up slowly. ‘It is time now for my hour of meditation. May your dreams be scented with flowers.’

  Chuck bowed his head. He always did when Baba took his leave. When he raised his face again, Baba had disappeared behind a saffron-coloured curtain beyond the heap of pillows, as if by divine magic.

  Chuck walked out of the Temple. Mathieson was parked in the Jag whistling ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’. He opened the rear door and Chuck climbed in.

  ‘Everything OK, Mr Chuck?’

  ‘The berries,’ Reuben Chuck said. ‘Call Willie Farl. Tell him the Temple needs some roof work. Today. Also contact that glazier who did the tinted windows in my penthouse and tell him to fix some stained glass on the double. What’s his name?’

  ‘Robbie Robertson. Will do. By the way, you got a phone message, Mr Chuck. An Inspector Scullion.’

  Scullion, he knew Scullion. Chuck relaxed, laid his palms on his knees.

  Scullion could wait.

  13

  Mid-afternoon in moribund Govan: Perlman drove down a side-street, his progress instantly stalled by a gang of kids in hooded jackets and tracksuit pants. They kicked a ball around and they weren’t moving for anything. He tooted his horn, a brisk little sound. The kids ignored it. Glasgow defiance. Bloody hell. Perlman parked the Ka and got out. The ball bounced toward him and he trapped it with an elegance that surprised him. I could’ve been a player. Nightclubbing and stoating lassies hanging on my arm. Suits by Armani, no sweat.

  The kids stared at him, waiting. He kicked the ball back to them, using the outside of his foot to impart spin, an intention that failed. The hooded kids hooted – ya ya – and went on with their game. Street football, goalposts chalked on a wall.

  Perlman locked his car outside a fire-scorched tenement that was scheduled for demolition. He took a deep breath before he entered the building, edging past a bent sheet of steel meant to discourage trespassers, but this had been battered and hammered so many times that any security function it might once have served was a bad joke. Discoloured whitewash hung in sheets from the walls. The smell of sewage flowed from a burst pipe somewhere out back.

  The alpha scent was charred wood.

  He stepped along the passageway carefully, wary of broken glass and excrement and the possible hazard of used needles that might lie concealed underneath. He approached the stairway, looked up through the gloom. No sun ever reached in here. The only thing that bloomed was a parasitic blue mould visible through plaster cracks, like varicose veins.

  He climbed to the first landing. Flakes of brown plaster fell from the uppermost ceiling, concealed in dimness way overhead. The window on the landing had been replaced by plywood: there was no opening where any breathable air might enter. Perennially sour twilight. I should turn and piss off back down the stairs before I choke from ash and effluence.

  Polisman found deid in horror tenement.

  He climbed the second flight. He was faced by three doors, three separate flats. Two of the doors were buried behind steel. These verboten flats were probably used as squats or shooting galleries, dopers and drifters sneaking in and out. Perlman wafted the offensive air in front of his face: feh. The places I go. The environment was depressing, but it wasn’t despondency he felt – in fact he was zapped by the bee-sting of purpose and anticipation. On the move again, ransacking the stockroom of his experience, coming here and playing a long shot.

  He knocked on the one door that wasn’t hidden behind steel. Nobody answered. He rapped his knuckles again. No response. He waited, then banged a fist against the wood.

  A voice came from the other side of the door. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Perlman. Let me in.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Open the fucking door, schlemiel,’ Perlman said.

  The door cracked a slit, a huge beard appeared. ‘You on your own?’

  ‘You kidding? I brought Tonto and The Lone Fucking Ranger.’

  ‘Come in, come in quick.’

  Perlman entered a tiny one-room flat. The man who’d opened the door, Tartakower, seventy-eight years old, was hunched, dressed in a singlet and a pair of old black trousers four or five sizes too big for him. He shuffled into the kitchen, Perlman followed. Plywood had been bolted over the window here as well. A paraffin lamp glowed on a table, throwing a parsimonious light that illuminated cheap bits and pieces of furniture. An animal of some kind – dog, cat, ferret, who could say in this pervasive gloaming? – lay h
uddled in a cardboard box.

  Tartakower bent over the table for a battered tin teapot. ‘You want tea, Perlman?’

  Perlman didn’t want anything except to ask a couple of questions and then be gone. He saw the silver hairs in Tartakower’s huge beard gleam. A mass of chest hair grew over the collar of his singlet, and tangled with the vast bush of his beard. Where one began and the other left off was anybody’s guess.

  ‘How is it I have come to this?’ Tartakower said. ‘The firemen, they should’ve let this place burn to the ground.’

  ‘Second that motion.’

  Tartakower poured strong tea with a trembling hand. The animal in the cardboard box stirred listlessly. Tartakower raised his face and his eyes glistened as he looked at Perlman. ‘At least this poor creature gives me loyalty. As for the rest of my life, ah …’

  Perlman thought: no, I don’t want the epic tragedy of Ben Tartakower’s existence. I don’t want his tsuras. He’d heard it already how many times. ‘I need to ask you a question.’

  Tartakower rolled over Perlman’s remark, his deep voice rumbling out of hairy sources. ‘I don’t have my music even. Some gonif stole the record-player and took the LPs. My Mendelssohn, my Bach, Schumann, gone. Who says Jews have all the luck? I go out, they break my door, steal from me. I’m a prisoner. And the untermenschen in this building, they threaten my life. Knives, guns, knuckledusters, swords even, you name it.’

  ‘You have family, they’d help you.’

  ‘Family? They call me schnorrer. Don’t talk to me about family.’

  Perlman felt it coming, the story of Tartakower’s rise and fall: a fine surgeon once, also an accomplished cellist, the wife he never loved fucks some goy fancydan, steals his money, leaves him, he tries suicide, the pills fail, this should surprise him? He loses his surgeon’s licence, he’s so blocked he can’t play his beloved cello, life’s a ladder and he’s heading to the bottom but before he hits it he borrows money from a rich cousin – never repaid – and rents a big house in a backstreet in Langside which he operates as an unlicensed private clinic, a chop-shop, running a string of young surgical assistants to help him through cut-price operations, abortions, removal of bullets from wounded crims no questions asked, the occasional crazy foray into plastic surgery, a woman dies on the operating table … and he, the great Tartakower, surgeon and professor, gets busted. Four years in the nick for practising medicine without a licence, a sob story, a soap.