The Family Arsenal

by Paul Theroux

  ‘I can show you,’ said Muncie. ‘I mean, out the window.’

  ‘So he’s that close?’

  ‘No, Millwall. But you can see it from here,’ said Muncie, and he explained to Lorna, ‘See, I know these here houses. I do a lot of clearing. I never cleared this one as such, but blimey, some of the old boys around here got some great stuff for me shop. Victoriana like. Frames and that. Mirrors. Leaded windows. I flog them in the West End. That fireplace,’ he went on, hurrying across the room and rapping his knuckles on it in approval. ‘Don’t look like much but you could dismantle it easy. I’d give you a good price and hump it up to the King’s Road. Up there this thing’s a antique. They pay a tenner for a quid’s worth of grotty glassware.’

  Lorna shrugged and said, ‘You’re welcome to it. Take the whole fucking lot.’

  ‘I could give you a estimate,’ said Muncie uneasily. He spoke to Hood. ‘I do valuations.’

  ‘The great Arfa. He’s a thief,’ said Murf, pronouncing it feef, ‘but he knows his way around. Eh, Arfa?’

  ‘Yeah. Can we go upstairs? I’ll show you the place.’

  Hood said to Lorna, ‘Do you know where Rutter lives now?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘All I have is the fucker’s phone number.’

  ‘Stay here, honey. We’ll be right down.’

  She said, ‘It’s time to pick up Jason. Maybe I’ll see you.’

  They climbed the stairs and trooped down the hall to the back room. The broken door sagged on its hinges. Murf said, ‘Someone give that bugger a good kick and all. Think you can flog it, Arfa? It’s a antique. Heh-heh.’

  Muncie ignored him. He shuffled to the north window and pointed, saying, ‘He’s over there.’

  Through the river haze that hung beyond the funnels of the power station and the cranes, and gave the distant buildings the look of thunderclouds in an old etching, receding into browner air and finally a grey emptiness – any London view was like a view from an island: it might have been the sea way out there, it was so flat and featureless – were more cranes, the towers of a housing estate, slate rooftops and one squat black church steeple. The heavy layer of air pressed the low skyline and made it look as if it had just collapsed and was smouldering. Hood followed Muncie’s finger, from island to island, but that was a ruined island, dead under its own stifling dust, and all the visible brickwork was dark, reddened by dampness and age. Apart from the church steeple there was nothing that held the eye, nothing to seize; and watching, Hood had the illusion of it slipping from focus, sailing away, becoming mists.

  ‘Millwall,’ said Muncie, tapping the glass.

  ‘It looks like an island,’ said Hood.

  ‘It is an island,’ said Murf. ‘Isle of Dogs. I wouldn’t live there for anything.’

  ‘That’s where Rutter lives,’ said Muncie. ‘I could tell you where his boozer is, but you don’t want to go there. The Swan, up Lime-house.’

  ‘Diabolical,’ said Murf.

  ‘It looks like an island,’ said Hood.

  Muncie pulled his sleeve across his nose. ‘No,’ he said. He blinked. ‘He might have heard of me.’

  ‘The great Arfa,’ said Murf, grinning.

  ‘But he knows Murf,’ said Hood.

  ‘So he was telling me,’ said Muncie. ‘He was going to slip him a blade. That’s what he said.’

  ‘I should have stuck him and all,’ said Murf, with a show of bravado. ‘I could have. A real spill. Right in the chops.’ He danced across the room pretending to hold a knife against an invisible throat. ‘Widdy-widdy boom!’ he said, thrusting with his hand. ‘So long, Willy-baby.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hood. ‘Look, Muncie, I want you to be our advance man.’

  Muncie glanced nervously at Murf. ‘I don’t want to get involved.’

  Murf made a face.

  ‘Anyway, I’m tied up.’

  ‘The great Arfa,’ said Murf.

  ‘How would you like him to lean on you?’ Muncie whined.

  ‘Widdy boom!’ said Murf, flailing his arms, making the stabbing gesture again. He laughed in Muncie’s face.

  ‘You don’t have to get involved,’ said Hood quietly.

  ‘What do I do then?’

  ‘Just find out if he’s at home,’ said Hood. ‘Show us the house. That’s all. We’ll do the rest.’

  ‘It’s simple – suss it out,’ said Murf. ‘After we take care of the geezer you can go clear out his house. Don’t have to do no estimates. Get some nice stuff. Chairs and shit. Eh, Arfa?’ Murf elbowed him companionably, rocking him sideways, but Muncie’s expression remained solemn. He came to rest, upright again, and frowned with worry.

  ‘He’s tough is Rutter,’ said Arfa, pronouncing it Ruh-uh. ‘He’s killed blokes and all.’

  ‘Like who?’ said Murf, mocking. ‘Huh, Arfa?’

  Hood said, ‘Anyone we know?’

  Muncie’s eyes widened and he pointed to the floor. ‘Yeah,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Downstairs. Her old man!’

  22

  Shadow and mist mingled to make night in the late afternoon. Hood had said they should wait until it was dark, but darkness was not long in coming that November day. They took a bus to Greenwich, and out of the side window Hood saw the haze thicken by the minute, the dense air brimming in the streets and rising up the flat-fronted houses. Walking to the tunnel entrance – a Victorian brick dome propped at the edge of the embankment – Hood looked across the river. There were not even shadows in Millwall, only a few twinkling lights and one feeble beacon. Here, some trees were fretting by the riverside, but over there – offshore – it was as if the island he had seen earlier had sunk and now, where it had been, stray boats were making distress signals. No church, no cranes, no buildings, not even mist; and though the river shimmered with snakes of light it too was empty.

  ‘In here,’ said Muncie, and led them past the clanking elevator cage and down the circular stairwell to the tunnel. It was the sort of glazed endless corridor Hood had seen when he was high, a tube of echoing tiles, without doors or windows, stretching away, and ringing with the footsteps of people he could not see. Voices chimed from the walls and his own footsteps gulped. Murf stopped once to write MILLWALL WANK – ARSENAL RULE.

  On the far side of the river they emerged from the stairwell and its stink of urine and chalk to a dark muddy garden and a maze of earthworks. Muncie hurried into the road, to Rutter’s; Hood and Murf sat on a bench in the little park. Greenwich, banked with lights, lay across the water, the Royal Naval College rising from the walkway to trees and the turrets of the Observatory, a symmetry of floodlit stone with its lovely proportions reflected intact in the water, crusted with a blaze of lights. To the right were the masts and spars of the Cutty Sark, simulating dead trees, and further over the blacker precincts of Deptford – more islands.

  Hood pointed to the Naval College, which the odd light and the falling mist gilded. He said, ‘That’s a beautiful building.’

  ‘Beautyful,’ said Murf. ‘Go like anything.’

  For a moment, Hood thought Murf was agreeing. Then he saw how the building lighted the smile of excitement on Murf’s face – an eagerness to destroy: Murf was imagining blowing it up. Without saying why, Hood began telling Murf about Verloc, as he had once told Lorna – how the ponderous man in the overcoat had tried to blow up the Observatory, how he had blown his young brother-in-law to bits. And as he told it he reflected that the incident had no complexity: the men had the minds of children; and the child, who was wise, was inarticulate, ineffectual. It was a simple tale, a shadowy outrage, a bout of madness. It started, it squawked, it was gone; a story of self-destruction.

  Murf listened, and Hood could see the Naval College exploding on his eyes. He tugged his ear-ring and said, ‘Provo?’

  ‘Verloc?’ said Hood. ‘No.’

  ‘No wonder he fucked it up.’ Murf sang, keeping the tune in his nose. ‘Arfa’s taking his time.’ He laughed. ‘He’s scared, he is. Thinks he’s going to get rompe
red.’ Murf sang again, stamping when he said boom, then said, ‘Yeah, I should have stuck the geezer and all.’

  ‘Look,’ said Hood. A low black boat was going past, almost without sound. It ploughed the water, a creeping shadow with lanterns on its bulkheads, and behind it a laden barge, like a snooping whale. There was a look of funereal stealth about it, and the small voice that carried from the hidden deck muttered, emphasizing the immensity of water. It passed out of sight and then waves began beating the river-wall like an eruption of surf. The backwash made the reflections of the Greenwich lights dance in eddies, like wind through fire, feeding the blaze and making separate flames leap all over the river’s surface.

  Murf said, ‘What’s that?’

  A crackle, like sticks of dry kindling coming alight. Murf bowed his head to listen, but the sound was familiar to Hood. It was rain, sweeping from the far side of the river, crackling towards them, making the surface flames small and numerous. They heard it clearly before it descended on them a moment later, like the tropical rain that had surrounded Hood with this simulation of burning – a murmur from Vietnam, pattering on leaves before it drenched him, a few warning drops, then a downpour.

  ‘We’ll have to sit it out,’ said Hood, ‘or Muncie won’t find us.’

  ‘We’ll get soaked.’ Murf stood up, as if to avoid it, and walking up and down the narrow promenade next to the iron guard rail he beat his hands on his streaming coat and shouted into the storm, ‘Hey Arfa! Let’s go, mate – stop wanking!’

  Now Greenwich and all its lights were filtered through the drizzle, and as the rain grew heavier the opposite bank began to recede, losing its contours; the storm wrenched the land away by blending it with the night sky, and it diffused the lights so they matched their spangled reflections in the river.

  Filfy wevva, Murf was saying, as he returned to the bench and put his collar up. The two crouched there, like wet roosting crows in their black coats, watching the river’s changing dazzle, saying nothing more. For Hood, the time moved with the pace of the rain, slowly as it dripped and more quickly when the wind sprang up and blew it harder into his face. It gusted as sped the minutes, then it slowed and poured and the time dragged. And it seemed to him as if his life was not made of action, but an absence of it, this waiting at a river’s edge in rain that stopped him and moved the river.

  Raising his voice against the wind, Murf said, ‘But I’m glad it’s you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This fucking offensive. You’re the guv’nor now. I’m dead glad it’s you.’ He screamed impatiently, ‘Arfa!’

  Hood said, ‘I’m the guv’nor all right.’

  Murf turned his dripping face to Hood’s and with hoarse enthusiasm said, ‘Give it to ’em, son.’

  ‘One villain at a time,’ said Hood. He heard a muffled cry and splashing feet and saw Muncie running clumsily from the far end of the park. ‘There he is.’

  ‘The wanker,’ said Murf. He stood up and danced in the downpour. ‘Hey, Arfa!’

  Muncie was out of breath, his hair was plastered flat to the top of his head and hung in strings at his ears. He gasped and wiped his face on his sleeve, then said, ‘I seen him go in. But he’s a crafty bastard. He parks his motor up the road and sneaks in by the back way. The house was dark before he come, so he must be alone.’

  ‘He doesn’t travel alone,’ said Hood.

  ‘Well, he ain’t travelling, is he?’ said Muncie, backing away slightly as if expecting Hood to hit him for contradicting him.

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Murf. He laughed loudly. ‘The great Arfa.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Hood.

  They crossed the small park and entered the road, walking east, past the abandoned earth works and a high wooden fence marked with Millwall slogans and swaying in the storm. The old church looked only blacker in its windy corner. Up another road, past more temporary fences: but nothing showed above the fences – here there were no buildings, and the streetlights illuminated only the broken cobbles of the road and the holes filling with rainwater. It looked like the newest ruin, knocked sideways and devastated, and not a soul to be seen: a glimpse of the end.

  A bus lumbered past, lighted but empty, and pitching in the uneven road. It appeared from the darkness at one turning and entered the darkness beyond the last streetlamp. They walked up the street that ran along the eastern margin of Millwall, and then they saw – on a side street and set back – a terraced row of four bowfronted houses. Somehow, these houses had been spared the destruction that was obvious around them. They stood alone on the derelict road, another island of damp eroded walls in a flat sea of rubble.

  ‘The one with the light,’ said Muncie. He hunched and indicated the house, concealing his pointing finger with the flap of his jacket, as if afraid of being seen. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Where you going, Arfa?’

  ‘Out of this filthy rain.’

  ‘You’re already wet, you silly bastard.’

  But Muncie was running, stamping in the puddles. He vanished behind a fence, fleeing in the direction of Greenwich.

  ‘The great Arfa.’

  ‘Wait here,’ said Hood. ‘I’m doing this alone.’

  ‘Let me come wif you.’

  ‘Sorry. I need you here. If anyone goes in after me, you thump him.’

  ‘Take this.’ Murf jerked the knife out of his sheath and handed it to Hood. ‘Stick the bugger. Like I should have.’

  Hood slipped the knife into his pocket and walked towards the house, feeling safely hidden by the driving rain. He detoured around the lighted front window and ducked down the side entrance to the rear of the house. He climbed a wobbly fence and found himself in a dark back-garden, at the bottom of which was a high wall. A ladder in the weeds tripped him, and he paused and heard a boat’s thudding hoot and the water’s splash, and he smelled the oily air; the river lay just behind the wall, and now – his eyes growing accustomed to the dark – he saw a steel door in the bricks. The entrance was wide enough to take crates from a boat moored on the other side, Rutter’s own quay.

  He walked over to the house and tried the door, then raised himself for a look through the window. Locked and black; but he wouldn’t kick the door down, he didn’t want to give Rutter time to respond. He made his way to the front of the house. Ring the bell and wade in, he thought; give him the chance he’d given Lorna. He waited, fingering Murf’s knife. The light burned in the front window, but the curtains were drawn. Holding himself against the house he sidled to the window, and easing himself near he peered through a slit in the curtains. He sipped air and looked again.

  In a chair drawn up to an electric fire, and still in his raincoat, was Sweeney. The man sat clutching a drink against his chest with his mutilated hand. He frowned and sat up, finished his drink, then stared into the empty glass. Bastard, thought Hood. He trembled and fought an urge to break in and kill him. Sweeney! But another thought cautioned him, and he slipped away.

  ‘– Because it wasn’t Rutter,’ Hood was saying on the way back, in the echoing footway tunnel under the river.

  ‘Bloody Arfa,’ said Murf. He kicked the tunnel floor. ‘But who was it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Hood angrily, his voice ringing on the wall. ‘I don’t know these creeps.’

  ‘You should have stuck him, just for the hell of it,’ said Murf. He saw Hood’s rage and seemed anxious to calm him.

  ‘I want to get the right man,’ said Hood.

  ‘Maybe it was the geezer you seen.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hood. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

  ‘But where’s Rutter?’

  Hood said, ‘That’s the funny part. He’s probably out looking for me.’

  ‘Eyes front,’ said Murf. ‘It’s Bill.’

  A policeman in a helmet and gleaming rain-cape was coming towards them, wheeling his bicycle through the tunnel.

  ‘Nice old pushbike you got there,’ said Murf, and grinned sh
owing the scowling policeman the stained pegs of his teeth.

  23

  The house on Albacore Crescent was lighted; its plump stove-shaped front, with the windows’ brightness sloping across the leafless hedge, had never looked safer or more snug, and the glow on the curtain folds gave it a stove’s warm flicker. In the rising curve of the road those bright ledges attracted him; then the instant moved and he remembered he lived there. All the rest of London drifted on the shallow swell of night, hidden places that were only inaccessible-sounding names, like Elmer’s End and the Isle of Dogs; but the house was secure, and the enlarging light gave it a cheerful fortified look in the darkened road.

  He had just left Lorna’s with Murf. After his night and day there, in the locked house where she sat like a child baffled by the pain of a nightmare; and after that glimpse of Sweeney at Rutter’s in the bare room of dead air set in a reach of the river – those island prisons – he was astonished to return to his own house, which he had convinced himself was another uncertain island, and find Mayo in an apron cutting vegetables for a stew and Brodie lying in front of the television set – home! It was a cosy picture composed of safety and warmth, the stewpot bubbling on the stove, the television’s blue hum, the gas-fire’s simmering. He had not noticed before how they were protected, and though he could see Lorna’s from his upper window her house was an island as shadowy as Millwall, where she crouched, a castaway with her own wreckage. The last thing she had said to him was, ‘Now I’m going to give the fuckers their money back.’ He couldn’t help her that way anymore. Upstairs, the man in the painting stared, and in another room the small arsenal was stacked; but these were props for another play. Downstairs, a more ordinary drama met his eye. He came in with Murf, and entering like labourers after a long day’s work they shouted, ‘It’s only us!’ Murf looked around and said, ‘Now, where’s me slippers and me pilchards.’