1998 - Armadillo

by William Boyd

ME:

  Oh, yes. Remind me, Mr Hogg.

  HOGG:

  I said: what’s your biggest fault? And what did you say?

  ME:

  I don’t recall. I made it up, probably.

  HOGG:

  You said—and I’ll never forget this—you said, “I’ve got a violent temper.”

  ME:

  Did I?

  HOGG: (musing)

  That impressed me, that did. That’s why I brought you into the family, into GGH. We all have faults, Lorimer—even I have faults—but not many of us will own up to them.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  “Slobodan, this is Torquil. Torquil, Slobodan.”

  “Call me Lobby. Everyone else does, ‘cept for Milo here.”

  “Milo?” Torquil looked at Lorimer curiously.

  “Family nickname,” Lorimer said, keeping his voice low. Slobodan couldn’t hear, anyway, he was round the other side of the Cortina, kicking the tyres.

  “Welcome aboard, Torquil,” Slobodan said. “You’re insured, completely covered. Clean driving licence, willing to work all hours. You’ve saved our bacon in our eleventh hour of need.”

  “Likewise, ah, Lobby,” Torquil said, shaking his proffered hand. They were standing outside Slobodan’s house, a faint sun spangling off the Cortina’s chrome, a gentle burbling noise of melting snow, in the gutters.

  “I believe I owe you a fee,” Torquil said, offering Slobodan a cigarette. The two men lit up.

  “Forty quid a week for the radio. In advance.”

  Torquil turned to Lorimer, who gave him forty pounds, which he handed to Slobodan.

  “Ta very much, Torquil.”

  “I’ll probably need extra for petrol,” Torquil said, “and meals.”

  Lorimer gave him another forty. He didn’t care, he was happy.

  “Come and meet my associate, Mr Beazley,” Slobodan said. “We’ll get your first job set up.”

  “I’ve got my A to Z,” Torquil said, hauling Lorimer’s street map out of his pocket.

  “That’s all you need for this job. And a car. What do you normally drive?”

  “I had a Volvo. Estate.”

  “Nice motor.”

  “But it was repossessed.”

  “Shit happens, Tork. It happens to the best of us.”

  “I’ll see you two later,” Lorimer said. “Good luck.”

  He looked back at the two men as they headed for the office, cigarettes on the go, both of an age, both solidly built, both overweight, one with short hair wearing a pin-stripe suit, one with a grey ponytail wearing an ex-Wehrmacht combat jacket. For some reason Lorimer had an odd premonition that they would get along. He had been uneasy about bringing Torquil so close to his family but the absolute need to terminate the continued presence and pressure of the man in his life had demanded swift action and this was the only feasible solution available. All he had said to Slobodan was that people called him ‘Lorimer’ at work, Milomre being hard to pronounce. Slobodan had barely paid attention. In the event, Lorimer thought, the less said the better—they were both resolutely incurious types, nothing much seemed to surprise them at all. Anyway, he had more complex problems on his hands, such as impending insolvency. He was still rattled from his lunch with Hogg, the man’s suspicions fuelling his paranoia, deepening, if that were possible, his utter ruthlessness. But how was he meant to solve the Gale-Harlequin conundrum quickly? He might have a better chance now his life was comparatively Torquil-free.

  He was on the point of ringing the bell to the family flat when the door opened and Drava appeared, her arms full of folders.

  “How’s Dad?” Lorimer asked. “Did the doctor come?”

  “He’s fine. Fast asleep. The doctor couldn’t tell what was wrong. Gave him some antibiotics and something to help him sleep.”

  “Sleep? Surely that’s the last thing Dad needs.”

  “Sometimes he doesn’t sleep for days. You go into his room at night and there he is laying there, eyes wide open. Excuse me, Milo, can’t stand here talking all day.”

  So it runs in the family, Lorimer thought, as he drove back to the City. In my father’s genes, this light-sleeper business. He wondered if he should put another night in at the Institute—because it was so sleep-orientated he always managed a good couple of hours there, even wired up to Alan’s machines. He wondered what the data was showing—they must have enough of it by now—wondered if Alan was going to be able to help. Where was Alan these days, anyway? He hadn’t seen him for ages.

  The Fedora Palace was down to one storey, the jagged concrete of its remaining walls just visible above the hoardings which, he noticed, were now embellished with a new name and logo: BOOMSLANG PROPERTIES LTD, the sans-serif type encircled by a stylized drawing of an acid green snake. Boomslang—who the hell were they?

  “No idea,” the site manager told him. Everything had been sold to this new company a matter of days ago, he said, and some young bloke had come along with these plastic signs and had stuck them up.

  Lorimer telephoned Boomslang Properties at an address in Battersea and arranged an appointment for six o’clock that evening. He had told the girl who answered the phone that it was an insurance matter and mentioned he was investigating the prospect of a rebate. The thought of receiving money always made people fix appointments promptly.

  Boomslang Properties was to be found above a shop selling expensive crockery and kitchenware in a prettified parade not far from Albert Bridge. A young girl in jeans and a large sweater printed with cartoon characters put her cigarette and magazine down and stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “We spoke earlier this afternoon.” Lorimer repeated his business patiently, “I’ve come about the Fedora Palace site.” He could see it was still ringing no bells.

  “Oh, God, yah…” She shouted: “Marius? Mr Fedora, insurance?” There was no reply. “He must be on the phone.”

  A giant of a young man, in his twenties, six foot four or five, blond and ski-tanned, stooped out of a door down the passageway, the sound of a flushing toilet in his wake. His sleeves were rolled up and he was wearing braces. He wiped his hands on his trouser seat before offering the right one in greeting.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m Marius van Meer.” The accent was South African, Lorimer thought, as he followed van Meer—his back the size of a coffee table—into his office, where he spun him some vague guff about a possible mis-estimate of the claim settlement and the possibility of a further tranche being forthcoming if, etcetera, etcetera. Marius van Meer smiled at him amiably—it was very quickly clear he had no idea what Lorimer was talking about. So much the better: Lorimer quietly dropped his cover story.

  “You do know there was a fire in that hotel?”

  “Ah, yeah, I did hear something about it. I’ve been in Colorado skiing these last few weeks.”

  “But you bought the site off Gale-Harlequin?”

  “This is really my dad’s business. I’m just learning the ropes, sort of.”

  “And your father is ?”

  “Dirk van Meer. He’s in Jo’burg.”

  This name sounded familiar, one of the southern hemisphere moguls, he thought. Diamonds, coal, resorts, TV stations, some of that order.

  “Would it be possible to speak to him?”

  “He’s a bit hard to get hold of at the moment. He’s the one tends to call me, you see.”

  Lorimer looked round the small office: everything was new—carpet, chairs, blind, desk, even the giant bag of golf clubs parked in the corner. He could hear the girl on the phone outside talking to a friend, arranging a dinner party. He was wasting his time.

  He stood up. “What does Boomslang mean, by the way?”

  “That was my idea,” Marius said proudly. “A boomslang is an African tree snake, beautiful but harmless. Unless you’re an ig.”

  “An ig?”

  “Yah. It eats igs. Robs birds’ nests. Beautiful lime green snake.”

  Lorimer cruised down
Lupus Crescent looking vainly for a parking spot and patrolled the adjacent streets for five minutes until Turpentine Lane yielded a few yards of vacant kerb. He trudged back towards the house, further bemused by this Gale-Harlequin/Boom-slang development and further frustrated: what did Hogg expect of him? Should he jump on a plane and fly to Johannesburg? He peered down at Lady Haigh’s basement window. The lights were on, she must—

  The blow glanced off the side of his head (it was that minute inclination of his head to the right that saved him, he later analysed) and his left shoulder took the full brunt of the club-swing. He bellowed his pain and shock, his left arm fizzing in agony, pricked by ten thousand hot needles, and, quite reflexively he was staggering round from the force of the blow as it was—he wheeled his briefcase in a self-protective arc. He heard a crunching noise as its edge went into his assailant’s face, a noise not violent so much as quietly and domestically satisfying, like a splash of milk falling on crisp cornflakes. His attacker screamed in his turn and staggered away, falling to the ground. Lights were flashing in Lorimer’s face—anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad—and he aimed a couple of kicks in the squirming, scrabbling body’s direction, the second of which connected with an ankle. The figure, wearing dark clothes, a hood over its head, clambered to its feet and limp-ran away, surprisingly fast, club or bat or two-by-four in its hand, and Lorimer fell over, himself, his head suddenly speared with a new form of nerve-end trauma. Gently he touched the hair above his left ear—wet, horrifically tender, a lump rising under his fingertips. Blood.

  No one came out and no one seemed to have heard anything—the whole ‘fight’ must have lasted three seconds. Inside, peering into the bathroom mirror, he discovered he had an oozing one-inch cut above his ear and a lump the size of a halved ping-pong ball. The big muscle on the back of his shoulder was dark red and badly contused but no bones seemed to have been broken. He wondered if he would be able to move his left arm in the morning. He stumbled out of the bathroom and filled a glass with medicinal Scotch. He was very pleased Torquil was not at home. He jammed the telephone receiver under his chin and punched out a number.

  “Yeah?”

  “Phil?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “It’s Lor—it’s Milo.”

  “Hey, Milo, my main man. Lobby’s not here. How you doing?”

  “Not so good. Somebody just took a swing at my head with a baseball bat.”

  “That scumbag who’s been bugging you?”

  “Rintoul.”

  “Do you, like, want me to sort him instead of his motor? Break all his fingers or something? It proper fucks you up, eight broken fingers, I tell you. Can’t even take a piss.”

  “No, just do the motor. He’ll get the message.”

  “Consider it done, Milo. My pleasure.”

  He drank his whisky and took four aspirin and managed to shrug off his jacket and kick away his shoes before sliding himself into bed beneath the duvet. He felt his shoulder and arm stiffening, as if being subjected to some localized freezing device. He felt too an immense weariness descend on him as the adrenalin flood seeped away or wore off or whatever happened to adrenalin when it was no longer needed. He felt himself start to shiver and for the first time the delayed shock made tears prick his eyes. What a vicious…What kind of desperate coward would…If he had not moved his head that fraction what damage might have been done to him? The only consolation was that he knew that, for the first time in years, he was about to sleep a whole night through.

  Torquil woke him at 2.15 a.m. Shook him awake, his big clumsy paw gripping his ruined shoulder.

  “God, sorry,” Torquil stepped back in alarm. “What happened to you? Look like shit.”

  “Someone tried to mug me. Got hit on the head.”

  “Bastard. Guess how much I made?”

  “Torquil, I’ve been attacked, brutalized, I have to sleep.”

  “I worked nine hours non-stop. Guess.”

  “I need sleep.”

  “£285. Lobby said the work’s there for me. Nights are even better. There’s a surcharge after ten.”

  “Congratulations.” Lorimer hunched into the pillow.

  “I thought you’d be pleased for me,” Torquil said, petulantly.

  “I am,” Lorimer mumbled. “I’m very pleased. Now go away and leave me alone, there’s a good boy.”

  234. 1953. It is one of the most astonishing facts in scientific history, Alan said, one of the most inexplicable occurrences in the history of the study of the human body. What? Consider this, Alan said, after millennia of sleep and sleeping, REM sleep was only discovered in 1953. 1953! Did no one ever look at another person sleeping and wonder why their eyeballs were moving? Well, did it exist before 1953? I said. Perhaps REM sleep is a late evolutionary refinement amongst human beings. Of course it did, Alan said. How do you know? Because we only dream in REM sleep, and people have dreamed since the beginning of time.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  “—and this is Adrian Bolt,” Hogg was saying, “Dymphna Macfarlane, Shane Ashgable, Ian Fetter, and, last but by no means least, Lorimer Black.”

  “How do you do ?” Lorimer said, coaxing his features into what he hoped was a smile of welcome. He was now familiar with the full meaning of the expression’ etched with pain’. He felt like Gerard de Nerval in the photograph by Nadar. A very sharp burin had been at work on his head but the ache in his shoulder had shown ambitious powers of improvisation in the hours since the attack. His whole left side was experiencing collateral damage, even his left foot seemed to be throbbing dully in sympathy. Hogg was introducing the GGH loss adjusters to their newest colleague, Felicia Pickersgill, a tough-looking woman in her forties with thick, badgery grey hair and a shrewd, unimpressed look in her eye. He had not really concentrated on Hogg’s preamble but he thought he recalled that she had held some senior rank in the WRENS or the army, something in the services anyway, before she had joined a bank and then an insurance company, probably Military Police, Lorimer thought, Hogg would respond well to that in a curriculum vitae. However, all Lorimer wanted to focus on was the wine in the bottles standing behind the plates of canapes on Hogg’s desk. He had vomited twice on waking this morning and had generously brandied his tea as a result. The pain had dimmed for a while but now he needed more analgesic alcohol.

  “—extremely pleased to welcome Felicia to GGH and look forward to her special expertise contributing to the success and reputation of the firm.”

  “Hear, hear,” Rajiv and Yang Zhi said in unison and Janice began to clap, but Hogg held up a palm for silence.

  “Felicia knows, as indeed you all know, that you represent the hand-picked elite of our profession. We are few in number but our power and influence is out of all proportion to our size. GGH has established itself as pre-eminent in the highly competitive world of specialist loss adjusters. Much of this success is down to you and your efforts. I know I can be a bit stern and severe (dutiful chuckles) but it’s because only the highest standards allow us to thrive. To thrive and flourish in a difficult, nay, harsh world. When things get tough, as an American cinema artiste once said—”

  (Oh get on with it, Lorimer thought.)

  “—the tough get going. Only the toughest survive here and Felicia, I know, is going to make a valuable contribution to our ‘special forces’. We look forward to working with her.”

  Hogg led the applause, Lorimer led the advance on the food and drink. He was on his second Chardonnay when Hogg pushed his big face up to his.

  “I hope you were listening, Lorimer, cleaned out the ear wax. Words of wisdom. What’s the matter with you? Look like death warmed up.”

  “Someone tried to mug me last night. Severe blow on the shoulder.”

  “Oh. Any advance on Gale-Harlequin ?”

  “I think I may have a new lead.”

  “I thought I might put Felicia on the case. Bit of back-up for you.”

  Lorimer did not like the sound of this. �
�I’m better on my own, I think.”

  “We only judge by results here, Lorimer.” Hogg turned away.

  Lorimer smiled weakly and popped a vol-au-vent into his mouth, drained his glass and refilled it and went in search of Dymphna.

  “Why are you walking in that canted-over way?” she asked. “You look awful.”

  “Random urban violence. But you should see the other guy.”

  “I don’t like the look of this Felicia. Do you think she and Hogg are lovers ?”

  “I refuse to contemplate that possibility.”

  “Shane thinks she’s been sent to spy on us.”

  “Could be. Hogg’s got a terminal dose of bunker mentality at the moment. Listen, Dymphna, you know lots of journalists. Could you introduce me to one who understands property deals ?”

  “I can always ask Frank.” Frank was her ex-boyfriend who had worked on the financial pages of The Times.

  “I just need someone who knows the ropes. I’ll give him the information, he can supply the analysis.”

  Dymphna lit a cigarette and looked interested. “What’s all this about? Gale-Harlequin?”

  “Yes. No. Possibly.”

  “That just about covers everything,” she said, sardonically. “I hear Hogg won’t pay your bonus.”

  “Who told you that, for God’s sake?”

  “Rajiv. Don’t worry, I’ll find you your journalist.” She looked at him meaningfully. “What’s my reward?”

  “My undying gratitude.”

  “Oh, you’ll have to do better than that, Lorimer Black.”

  Chapter 14

  The day of the Dupree inquest dawned bright and cloud-free, with a blue sky of near alpine clarity and a low blazing sun that cast sharp shadows and burned blindingly off the rows of car windows parked outside the coroner’s court in Hornsey.

  Lorimer walked slowly down the steps to the innocuous brick building—like a science lab in a new comprehensive school, he thought—not looking forward to his first appearance as a key witness and wincing as he inadvertently flexed the fingers of his left hand. Any movement seemed to affect adversely the big shoulder muscle (the trapezius, as he now knew it was called, having looked it up in an encyclopaedia), transforming itself into a pain-trigger, tracing itself back to the crushed fibres. His shoulder had now turned a lurid damson-brown, like some horrible algae infesting his epidermis.