by William Boyd
At the checkout counter he turned and surveyed the patient queues of customers waiting to pay their money—there was no one he recognized, but again he had felt that strange sensation of being observed, as if someone who knew him was lurking near by just out of sight, playing a game with him, seeing just how much time could pass before he was discovered. He waited at the door a while by the news-stand, buying some papers and magazines, but no one emerged who was familiar.
He decided to breakfast at the nearby Cafe Matisse (Classic British Caffs no. 3), where he ordered a fried egg and bacon sandwich and a cappuccino, and flicked through his weighty pile of reading matter. He preferred the Matisse at this time of day to all others, early, before the shoppers trooped in for elevenses, when the place was mopped and swabbed and relatively smoke-free. He had been coming here for four years, regularly, and had yet to receive even a nod of welcome from the staff. Mind you, he had outlasted them all: the turnover of personnel at the Matisse was extraordinary. He saw that the rangy South African girl was still here and the lugubrious Romanian too. He wondered vaguely if the tiny Portuguese one had left, the one who flirted with the bikers—the wealthy middle-aged men, paunchy in their leathers, who descended in a group at prearranged times of the week to drink coffee and stare lovingly at their immaculate Harleys, all spangling chrome, parked up on the pavement in full view. Maybe she had indeed gone, perhaps she’d trapped one of these portly, well-heeled free-spirits into marriage? For he saw there was a new girl doing the front half: she looked darkly Latin, with long, wiry hair, the slim body of a sixteen-year-old but the face of a haughty duenna.
“Thanks,” he said to the Romanian as she suddenly clattered his sandwich down in front of him. She swept off as ever, wordlessly, with a toss of her blue-black hair.
The Matisse owed its name to a single reproduction of that Master’s work, a late-period blue nude which hung on the wall between the ladies’ and gents’ lavatories. Its cuisine was notionally Italian but the menu boasted many a familiar English standard—cod and chips, lamb chops and roast potatoes, apple pie and custard. As far as he could discern, not a single Italian currently worked in the place but it must have been the traces of that influence, perhaps lingering on in the basement kitchen, that ensured at least the coffee’s surprising excellence. He ordered another cappuccino and watched the customers come and go. Everyone smoked in the Matisse, apart from him; it almost seemed to be a condition of entry. The counter staff and the waitresses smoked during their breaks and every customer, young and old, male or female, fervently followed suit as if they used the place as a brief smoking respite from their otherwise smokeless days. He looked around him now at the types scattered around the big gloomy rectangular room. A middle-aged couple—style: Eastern European intellectual—the man looking uncannily like Bertolt Brecht, both bespectacled, both in drab zip-up waterproof jackets. A table of four consumptive hippies, three men with lank hair and poor beards and a girl (rolling her own), bead-swagged with a flower tattooed on her throat. In one of the booths down the side was the obligatory lost-waif couple, two chalk-faced girls, black-clad, talking worriedly in furious whispers—too young, in trouble, pimp-fodder. And behind them a man smoking a tiny pipe who looked like a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, tangle-haired with big muddy shoes, unshaven, wearing a collarless shirt and baggy corduroy suit. At the counter two unnaturally tall girls were smoking and paying. Breastless, hipless, they had swan necks and tiny heads—models, he assumed, there must be an agency near by—they drifted in and out of the Matisse all day, these lanky, freakish females, not beautiful, just differently made from all the other women in the world. All human life ventured into the smoky interior of the Matisse at some stage; if you sat long enough you would see everyone, every prototype the human species had to offer, every product of the gene pool, rich or poor, blessed or afflicted which was the key to the place’s strange and enduring allure, in his opinion. Even he, he realized, must sometimes attract such idle speculation—who is the quiet young man in the pin-stripe suit? A journalist on an upmarket weekly? A lawyer? A Eurobond dealer?—with his dry cleaning and pile of newsprint.
“Fancy a drink this evening?” Torquil asked, leaning round Lorimer’s office door. Then coming in and mooching about as they talked, fingering a picture frame (Paul Klee) and leaving it a degree or two awry, touching the leaves of his potted plants, drumming a rhythm on the flat top of his PC.
“Great,” Lorimer said with scant enthusiasm.
“Where is everybody?” Torquil said. “Haven’t seen you for days. Never known an office like it, all this coming and going.”
“We’re all on various jobs,” Lorimer explained. “All over the place. Dymphna’s in Dubai, Shane’s in Exeter, Ian’s in Glasgow—”
“I don’t think our Dymphna likes me at all,” Torquil said, then grinned. “A cross I shall just have to bear. What’re you up to?”
“Tidying up a few things,” Lorimer said ambiguously—Hogg was very against discussion of their respective adjustments.
“Hogg’s given me this Dupree job to finish off. Seems pretty straightforward. Paperwork, really.”
“Well, it is, now that he’s dead.”
“Topped himself, didn’t he ?”
“It happens. They think their world has been destroyed, and, well…” He changed the subject. “Look, I’ve got an appointment with Hogg. Where shall we meet?”
“El Hombre Guapo? You know, Clerkenwell Road? Six?”
“See you there.”
“Don’t mind if I bring someone along, do you?”
Hogg was standing, scarfed and coated, in the middle of his orange carpet.
“Am I late ?” Lorimer asked, perplexed.
“See you in Finsbury Circus, in ten minutes. I’m going out the back way, give me five minutes. Leave by the front door—and don’t tell Helvoir-Jayne.”
Hogg was sitting on a bench beside the bowling green in the small oval square when Lorimer arrived, his chin on his chest, looking thoughtful, his hands thrust in his pockets. Lorimer slid himself down beside him. All around the neat central garden were the leafless plane trees with their backdrop of solid, ornate buildings with a few frozen workers smoking and shivering in doorways. The old city, Hogg always said, as it used to be in the great days—which was why he so liked Finsbury Circus.
Twenty yards away a man expertly juggled three red balls to an audience of none. Lorimer realized Hogg was staring fascinatedly at the juggler, as if he’d never seen the trick done before.
“Bloody marvellous,” Hogg said, “sort of mesmerizing. Run over there and give him a pound, there’s a good lad.”
Lorimer did as he was told, dropping the coin in a woollen hat at his feet.
“Cheers, mate,” the juggler said, the balls still following their apparently tethered trajectories.
“Bloody marvellous!” Hogg shouted from across the square, and gave the juggler the thumbs up. Lorimer saw him rise to his feet and stride off without a backward glance. Sighing, Lorimer followed briskly but had still not caught him up by the time he entered a modern pub set incongruously in the corner of an office block with a good view of the giant ochrous waffle iron of the Broadgate Centre opposite.
Inside, the pub smelt of old beer and yesterday’s cigarette smoke. A row of lurid computer games winked and clattered, thundered and swooshed, trying to entice players, the technobarrage competing successfully with some jazzy orchestral muzak emanating from somewhere or other. Hogg was having a pint of pale, frothy lager drawn for him.
“What’ll it be, Lorimer?”
“Mineral water. Fizzy.”
“Have a proper drink, for God’s sake.”
“Half of cider, then.”
“Jesus Christ. Sometimes I despair, Lorimer.”
They carried their drinks as far away as possible from the squawking and beeping machines. Hogg drank two-thirds of his pint in four huge swallows, wiped his mouth and lit a cigarette. Neith
er of them removed their coats—the vile pub was cold as well.
“OK, let’s have it,” Hogg said.
“Standard torching. The subcontractors were running late, facing a big penalty, so they started a fire in the gymnasium. It must have got out of control. There was no way they wanted to destroy five floors and all the rest.”
“So?”
“So I still can’t see 27 million quid’s worth of damage. I’m not an expert but the place wasn’t trading, wasn’t finished. I can’t see why the claim is so large.”
Hogg reached inside his coat and drew out a folded photocopy and handed it to Lorimer.
“Because the place is insured for 80 million.”
Lorimer unfolded the copy of the original Fortress Sure policy and leafed through it. He could not make out the signature on the final page.
Lorimer pointed at the scrawl. “Who’s that?”
Hogg drained his pint and stood up, ready to fetch another.
“Torquil Helvoir-Jayne,” he said, and headed for the bar.
He came back with a packet of beef and horseradish crisps and another foamy pint. He munched at the crisps carelessly, causing a small shrapnel fall to dust his coat front. He swilled lager round his clogged teeth.
“So Torquil over-insured.”
“Way over.”
“Big premium. They were prepared to pay.”
“Everything was dandy until those arseholes started their fire.”
“It’ll be a hard job proving it,” Lorimer said, guardedly. “Those guys, Rintoul and Edmund, there’s a kind of desperation there. Semi-nuclear, I would say.”
“It’s not their problem—or rather,” Hogg corrected himself, “let’s make it Gale-Harlequin’s problem. Pass the buck. Say we suspect foul play and won’t cough up.”
“We’ll have to pay something.”
“I know,” Hogg said venomously. “As long as it’s nowhere near 27 mil. Pitch it low, Lorimer.”
“Me?”
“Why not?”
“Well…I’ve never done anything this size. We could be talking millions of pounds.”
“I hope we are, Lorimer. Big bonus for you, my son. Big day for GGH. Big smiles at Fortress Sure.”
Lorimer thought about this a moment.
“Torquil has fucked up,” Lorimer said, reflectively.
“Big time,” Hogg said, with almost glee, “and we have to pull the baby out of the burning bush.”
Lorimer admired both the mixed metaphor and the use of the first person plural.
“Go to Gale-Harlequin,” Hogg said. “Tell them we suspect arson. Police, fire brigade, inspectors, hearings, eventual prosecutions. Could take years. Years.”
“They won’t be happy.”
“It’s a war, Lorimer. They know it. We know it.”
“They paid the big premium.”
“They’re property developers. My heart bleeds.”
Despite his instinctive alarm Lorimer felt his heart quicken at the prospect. Applying the arcane formulae that calculated, graded and further refined the amount of the loss adjuster’s bonus, Lorimer considered that he could be looking at six figures. There was one other matter that troubled him, however.
“Mr Hogg,” he began slowly, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but why, after all this, has Torquil come to work at GGH?”
Hogg gulped lager, noisily expelled carbonated breath.
“Because Sir Simon Sherriffmuir asked me, as a personal favour.”
“Why would he do that? What’s Torquil to Sir Simon?”
“His godson.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. As clear as a gnat’s chuff, eh?”
“Do you think Sir Simon knows something?”
“Have another cider, Lorimer.”
12. The Specialist. Hogg says to you: “It’s a big world, Lorimer. Let your mind play with the concept ‘armed forces’ for a moment. That concept contains your army, your navy and your air force, not to mention ancillary or subsidiary services—medics, engineers, cooking, sanitary, police, etcetera. These larger subdivisions are divided in turn into battle groups, army corps, regiments, wings, battalions, flotillas, squadrons, troops, flights, platoons and so on. All very organized, Lorimer, all very neat and proper, all very above board and as obvious as a warm white loaf, sliced. Thoroughly thought-through, plain for all to contemplate and analyse.
“But in your armed forces you’ve also got your specialist elite units. Very small in number and with vigorous and highly demanding selection procedures. Many fall by the wayside. The choice is fundamental, is absolute, membership very restricted. SAS, SBS, Navy Seals, your Stealth bombers, spy planes, saboteurs, your FBI and Ml5, gents and sleepers in the fields. Secrecy shrouds them, Lorimer, like a shroud. We’ve all heard of them, but we know next to fuck-all about them, in brutal reality. And why is this the case? Because they do vital jobs, jobs of vital importance. Covert operations. Counter-insurgency. Still part of the larger concept of ‘armed forces ‘,yes—but a tiny sub-sub-sub-section, and, also to be borne in mind, one of the armed forces’ most deadly and violently effective components.
“That is us, Lorimer. This is the analogy to hold on to. Like them we are specialists, the specialist loss adjusters. Everyone knows what a loss adjuster does in the wider, above-the-board, larger world. But, just like the elite forces, no one really knows what us specialists get up to. But that large world needs us, Lorimer. Oh, yes. Just as the armed forces have to rely in certain circumstances on the SA S or the bomb-makers or the assassins. You see, only we can do certain jobs, the difficult jobs, the discreet jobs, the secret jobs. That’s when they call the specialist loss adjusters in.”
—The Book of Transfiguration
“Mr Rintoul?”
“Yeah.”
“Lorimer Black. GGH.”
“Oh yeah. How you doing?”
“Fine. I thought I should let you know that we are going to contest the claim on the Fedora Palace.”
“Oh. Right.” Rintoul paused. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“It’s got everything to do with you.”
“Don’t get you.”
“You set fire to that hotel because you didn’t want to pay the penalty charge.”
“Fucking lie. Lies.”
“We are going to contest the Gale-Harlequin claim on the grounds of your arson.”
Silence.
“I thought it only right to let you know.”
“I’ll kill you, Black. Fucking kill you. Say nothing or I’ll kill you.”
“This conversation has been recorded.”
The phone was slammed down and Lorimer hung up, his hand trembling slightly. However many death threats he had received in this job—a good half-dozen or so—they still unnerved him. He took the cassette from his answer machine and popped it in an envelope, marking it ‘Fedora Palace. Rintoul. Death threat’. That would go up to Janice for the master file which was kept in Hogg’s office. On the tape Rintoul had not actually admitted he had started the fire so it would not stand as legal evidence—it did not explicitly incriminate him. The death threat was unequivocal, though, and Lorimer hoped that would make him safe—it usually did. When they knew they had been recorded it stayed their hand. It was a useful bit of extra insurance.
93. Two Types of Sleep. I have learned through my conversations with Alan that there are two types of sleep: Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM) and Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (NREM). REM sleep is paradoxical, NREM sleep is orthodox. Alan told me, after studying my EEC patterns, that I was experiencing far more REM sleep than is the norm, which, he said, makes me very paradoxical indeed.
He told me about the stages of NREM sleep. Stage 1—sleep onset. Stage 2—deeper, we see changes in the EEC patterns, sleep-spindles, K-complexes, but you are still aware of outside stimuli, your brain activity taking the form of short sequences of waves. Stages 5 and 4 plunge you ever deeper, showing decreased vigilance, this is what we call ‘deep slumber’
. We believe, Alan said, that NRE M sleep in the deep slumber phase is essential for body repair. REM sleep is for brain repair.
—The Book of Transfiguration
El Hombre Guapo was a large tapas bar just off the Clerkenwell Road, lined with sheets of carefully distressed stainless steel. The floor was stainless steel too and portions of the Berlin Wall were hung horizontally in chains from high beams creating a distinctly different kind of false ceiling. The staff wore grey boiler suits with many zips (of the sort favoured by combat fighter pilots) and the driving, relentless music was played punishingly loud. It was popular with young journalists from the style pages of broadsheet news and with futures and derivatives traders—Lorimer thought it a strange place for Torquil to choose.
As ever, Torquil was already installed at the bar and half way into his drink—whisky, judging by the smell on his breath. He offered Lorimer one of his cigarettes and was politely turned down. Lorimer ordered a triple vodka and soda with plenty of ice—Rintoul’s last words were still echoing in his inner ear.
“That’s right, you don’t smoke,” Torquil said incredulously. “Why not? Everybody smokes.”