Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

by Ted Lewis

  “Cheers,” he says, smiling broadly.

  “Cheers,” I say, and raise my own glass and take a long drink but not as long as his: it takes me all my time not to spit it out all over him because he’s given me the wrong fucking drink. He’s got the vodka and I’ve got the gin. And gin to me is like water to a Jock; it turns my stomach. The smell’s enough to make me throw up. The driver catches my expression and spreads his hands and raises his eyebrows to ask why? I push the glass over to him and get up and order another vodka and tonic and the lad behind the bar puts a glass and bottle on another tray and so I take the second tray back to the table and sit down again and by that time the driver’s finished his drink and started mine as if there’s no difference between the two drinks. Then we both stare out of the plate glass windows at the dusky pink evening. A bus draws up outside the leather shop opposite and unloads a load of tourists so that they can play a part in supporting cottage industries. The taxi driver makes a gesture at them and grins and I think to myself, yes, and wouldn’t you like the percentage.

  The lad from behind the bar comes round to the jukebox which is about two feet away from my right ear and shoves in a coin and there is a whirring sound and then the bar is full of music, Spanish popular variety. I manage about two and a half sides of this Eurovision reject stuff before motioning to the driver it’s time for us to go. He looks disappointed. I wonder if he’s on commission from here too.

  Outside it’s a little bit cooler than before. The tourists are still in the leather shop and the bus driver is talking to a representative of the local filth who looks like something out of Pirates of Penzance. No wonder they need shooters, with that clobber. Otherwise they’d die of embarrassment from all the verballing they got.

  This time I get in the front seat and we’re out of town inside three minutes and making for the mountains again. I try and get out of the driver how long it’s going to take us to get to the villa but all he does is to keep looking at his watch and giving me the fucking time, so in the end I give up before he thinks I’ve gone round the twist.

  We carry on in silence for a further twenty minutes until we reach the foothills and a place called Incas. On the outskirts there’s a walled set-up that looks as though it could be the local nick. The driver catches me looking at it and says one word.

  “Cemetery,” he says.

  I don’t say anything. He points at the walls.

  “People, in there,” he says.

  I look at him.

  “See,” he says, then starts another charade. First he closes his eyes for a second then looks at me and makes a cut-throat gesture. I nod, then he takes his hands off the wheel and mimes digging. I nod. He shakes his head and digs again, and shakes his head and says, “No.” I nod. Then he points at the walls and looks at me. I nod. He takes his hands off the wheel again, mimes gripping something and pushing it away from him. This time I don’t nod. He sighs and points groundwards and shakes his head. I nod mine. He nods his. He points at the walls, then makes the gripping gesture again. This time I get it. He’s putting something in the walls. But although I am getting it I frown signifying my perplexity and now he beams and nods his head vigorously and goes through the gripping motions again and again points at the walls.

  “People, in there,” he says.

  I light a cigarette and turn my gaze to other pieces of local colour.

  It takes us about ten minutes to get through Incas and then the road begins to rise even more steeply and there’s no choice but for the road to become a never-ending series of hairpin bends rising up and up into the dusk. At the first bend the driver indicates the nub of the corner and points upwards to the top of the mountains.

  “One hundred twenty-four,” he says. “One hundred twenty-four.” Then he laughs and reaches down between his legs and comes up with half a bottle of Hine and shoves it in my direction. I look at him and remember the treble vodka and tonic and treble gin he’d knocked back and shake my head. He unscrews the top and takes a long pull and I don’t give a fuck whether there are one hundred twenty-four fucking bends just so long as we negotiate all of the bastards safely.

  It’s like a location for a rotten movie. The road dog legs steeper and steeper and the drops get deeper and deeper and the brandy in the bottle gets lower and lower. I begin to look back to the hours spent on the plane almost with nostalgia as the car grinds round each new bend. At one point we meet a tourist coach head-on and so the taxi driver reverses back round one of the bends, faster than the speed he’d formerly gone round it. Then he pulls in against the slanting face and somehow manages to get a couple of wheels up on the slope. The bus manoeuvres by and the strains of “O Sole Mio” sung in about six different accents drifts through the evening air and finally rattles away into the distance with the slip-stream of the bus, but not before the taxi driver’s caught the melody and started sending his own version across the deepening purple of the canyons. Then, before he crashes back through the gears, he reaches for the bottle again but before he can start unscrewing the cap I take the bottle from him. He looks at me, surprised at first, then grins and gestures for me to take a drink but instead of doing that I take a couple of hundreds out of my wallet and press them into the driver’s hand. It’s time for him to look surprised again but not as surprised as when I roll my window down and hurl the bottle out into the spacious canyon. He begins to speak but I cut in on him.

  “Incas?” I say to him.

  He looks at me. I say it again.

  “Incas?”

  He frowns and nods.

  “People in walls?”

  Another frown, another nod.

  I mime him drinking from the bottle and then I point to each of us.

  “People in walls,” I say to him.

  This time he just frowns. Then he turns away and takes it out of the gearbox and we’re off again. Faster than before. I shake my head and light another cigarette. You can’t win away from home.

  Chapter Six

  HALF AN HOUR LATER the taxi stops and I half expect the driver to try and have the last laugh by attempting to leave me on the empty mountain road. Because that’s where we are. Nothing but empty mountain road. No obvious features to justify stopping the car. Just silence. I look at the driver. He points at the roadside.

  “Villa,” he says.

  I look at the roadside. All there is is a load of still foliage and beneath the foliage what must be a small inclined plateau and beyond that the usual sheer mountain sides.

  “The villa,” I say.

  “Sí, sí,” he says, pointing as if his hand is on an expander. “Villa.”

  I look closely at the undergrowth and eventually I manage to detect a darker patch in the uniform gloom of the foliage.

  “There?” I say.

  “Sí, sí,” he says, then waves his arms, hands limp at the wrists, flapping away from him, to signify beyond and upwards past the gap in the foliage.

  “Ah,” I say and sit there for a moment thinking various thoughts. After I’ve thought them I get out of the car, and he gets out of the car and hauls my luggage out onto the road and stands there. He obviously has no intention of moving any further so I pick up my luggage and begin to move towards the gap. After I’ve taken a few steps I feel a hand on my arm.

  “Excuse me,” he says.

  I put the luggage down and turn to face him.

  “Fare,” he says, “the fare.”

  You’ve got to hand it to him, he really is a little trier. I smile at him and take hold of his open neck shirt and lift him up and carry him a few steps back to the car. Then I sit him down on the bonnet and still keeping a grip on his shirt I take my wallet out and lay it down on the car’s warm metal and flip it open and with my thumb and forefinger I slide out a couple of hundred peseta notes and stuff them in the pocket of his shirt. He knows that I know that he’ll already have been squared up by Wally but even at this stage he feels obliged to give me a long spiel whether I understand it or not so I just
carry on holding him on the bonnet until he’s finished, until he realises there’s nothing he’s going to say will make any difference, in any language.

  When he’s finished I give him two minutes’ silence, just giving him the eyeball contact before I let go of his shirt. He slides his arse off the bonnet and plants his feet on the ground but other than that he doesn’t make any movement. I give him a pat on each cheek, backhand, forehand, then I turn away and pick up my luggage and make for the gap in the undergrowth. Behind me the driver clears his throat and there is the sound of spit hitting the road’s dusty surface with some force but I don’t bother to turn round. He’s lost if he’s got to spit. A minute later the car barks into life and tires scratch the road’s surface as the driver u-turns and begins to make it back down the mountain. The sound of the car dies and dies and so here I am, up in the fucking mountains, in the middle of a road as empty as Gerald’s head. I turn round to look down the mountain at the dark plain stretching away to the flat curve of the sea. The only way I can tell the difference from land and water is by the endless strip of resort lights. But at least there are lights. Not as heartwarming as the one’s I’m used to. But there are lights. Unlike behind me. I turn round again and look at the foliage and the darkness of the gap and of the mountains beyond. A few more words flow through my altitude-ventilated brain. Then I pick up my luggage and make for the gap. The gap’s well over a car’s width and now I’m up to it I can see that beyond it there’s a track that over here is meant to pass for some kind of drive, a kind of approach road disappearing into the dusk. The fucking taxi driver probably knew about this approach, and fuck him. So I start off down the track. The ground is hard under the skimpy layer of dirt, the sound my feet make is subtle and resonant at the same time. I’m conscious of a slight rise as I progress along the track, and in front of me, although it never seems to get closer, there’s a kind of phony back-lit horizon preceding the genuine silhouette the twilit mountains are making, indicating a small roll in the landscape, concealing a night-reflecting dip.

  My Christ, I reflect, the track’s going to be a roller coaster, a Gerald and Les switchback, designed for the tourist in search of the unusual, a mystery tour for those with a taste for the out of the ordinary, horizons unlimited, who knows, beyond one of the humps you might find a fucking villa.

  I trudge on.

  I have to admit, the night smells are not unpleasant. They’re not Gerrard Street, or Frith or Greek, there’s no sourness, no close atmosphere of animal, vegetable and mineral decay, no rising around of spit-slick late Saturday night pavements, but they have a certain Spanish je ne sais quoi. Not that there’s any way they’re going to alter the thoughts that are lodged in my mind.

  I reach the brow of the first hill. The first small horizon reveals the aspect of a second, further horizon. I look down into the depths of the intermediate depression. No villa. How you say: Fuck all Hacienda. Just quiet mountain gloom, lying undiscovered at the bottom of the depression. I put my luggage down and take my cigarettes out and light up and think about vodka and tonic, slices of lemon, cubes of ice. And eggs, two eggs; Gerald and Les by name. I finish my cigarette but I don’t finish thinking about those two. I pick up my luggage and set off again.

  The second horizon, another depression. More gloom at its base. But this time I can pick out an even deeper darkness crouching in the shadows. A slight rise, and from my viewpoint, on top of this rise, an oblong the scale of a cigarette packet. I concentrate hard and after a moment or so’s concentration I come to the conclusion that this must be the villa. Unless of course it’s a Spanish Public Karsi for nightwalkers that get caught short. But even a Public Karsi has lights. This place, no lights. Of course, it could be the wrong place. It needn’t be Gerald and Les’s at all. But that would be too easy. It’s got to be theirs. It’s got to be, because if it was anybody else’s and I was staying there, it would be all lit up and there’d be a welcoming party and everything on ice, not to mention being met at the airport and dropped straight on the doorstep. Oh no. This belongs to Gerald and Les. Wally’s probably in his pit snoring holes in the mosquito net. No fucking idea I’m ten minutes away from him. Likely he doesn’t even know I’m meant to be coming. Well, he soon will. No danger. He’ll be the one who’ll get the surprise party when I interrupt his fucking snoring.

  I start down the slope. The closer I get to the villa set-up the more details I can make out. The first thing I notice is the high surrounding wall and the thought occurs to me that it’s lucky for Gerald and Les I’ve been around for the last five years or they’d have a bigger and better wall to look at when they’re on their holidays. I can make out quite a few arched gateways, their vacuums filled with wrought iron—the kind of arrangements you find in Hendon or Bromley, separating the houses from the garages. But high as the wall is, one angle of the gradient enables me to see the villa. As far as I can make out it’s set on a kind of man-made plateau and the building’s got more split levels than a cracked mirror, a suitable reflection of the collective personalities of Gerald and Les, so many split levels it ought to be called the Villa Schizophrenia. But it’s not called that, because when I get to what I imagine are the main gates, the name I’ve been led to expect is there on the wall, inlaid in a different stone. So at least I’m at the right place.

  I put my luggage down and try the handles. Nothing. I don’t really believe it. So I try them again. It’s quite true, the bastards are locked. My first reaction is to scream Wally’s name and give the gates a good kicking, but that would be stupid. That would spoil the kicking I’m going to surprise Wally with in a few minutes’ time. I don’t want anything to spoil that. So what I do is leave my luggage where it is, and do a tour of the walls and their assorted gates. When I get back to where I started from I have the knowledge that all the other gates are locked and shuttered just like the main one. That knowledge makes everything nice and neat and engenders all kinds of lovely thoughts in my mind. Saying Boo to Wally is being sweetened up by all these lovely thoughts I am having.

  I climb up the main wrought iron and sit on top of the wall and look at the villa. Dim, night-reflecting light from the motionless swimming pool is mirrored in acres of plate glass splashed right across the front of the villa but beyond this pale phosphorescence there is still no internal illumination (illumination that is other than ephemeral). So I turn about and go down the other side of the wrought iron. The track I’ve walked from the mountain road continues this side of the wrought iron, a little better made up than the other side, curving away from the main bulk of the villa, ending up at what I take to be the garage, set much lower than the rest of the building, so that its flat roof is on a level with the footings of the villa itself. Rising up on my right to the level of the villa itself is a sort of scrubby shrub-cum-rock garden and winding their way up this slope are some irregular slabs of stone serving as steps that are meant to get you to the upper level, or to help you break an ankle, whichever. I negotiate these steps and now I’m faced with half an acre or so of flagstones surrounding the still swimming pool. I walk across the flagstones towards the villa. Occasionally the flagstones break to allow squares of soil to support bushes and small trees. There’s also landscape furniture, tables and chairs and benches over by the pool. When I get to the villa itself I can see that the cloistered arches are resting on a three-foot-high stone platform that runs the whole length of the front of the villa, mosaic and glowing from the reflected light in the plate glass. In the plate glass a figure moves but it’s only the ghost of myself. I stare at the apparition and reflect on its presence. Then I reflect on the presence of Wally beyond the glass and I walk up the steps and inspect the shiny blackness for signs of a way in. In the darkness I work out that one of the plate glass panels is meant to glide open and give entrance to the villa’s interior. I almost don’t try to shift it; I don’t want to do one other thing that will confirm the pattern, that will cause me to place myself head first through the plate glass. But I ove
rcome my distaste at being proved right and give the slider a go, and on Mrs. Fletcher’s life, it moves. The fucker moves. It’s open. There’s a way in. No need for any over-emotional forehead work. It moves. There’s a way in. I step forward.

  I’m in a hall. Rectangular, echoing the face of the villa. But it’s not as quiet as it was outside. There’s the sound of running water, like someone pissing against porcelain but it’s more constant than the noise of ten Saturday night drunks. I locate the noise and it’s coming from an odd shaped lump in the centre of the hall, thrown into relief by the night-whiteness of the far wall. I walk over to the lump and discover it’s a small fountain, the stone carved in the shape of some curlicued, non-existent fish. The water is spewing out from between the fish’s thick lips and I wonder how long Gerald had to sit still so that the stone carver could make such an exact likeness.

  I start to move slowly down the broad steps and when I’m three down the whole place is suddenly flooded out with light. I blink my eyes and when they’re open again the first thing I focus on is an antique wooden straight-backed chair about halfway across the room from me, just before another drop to another level that flows onwards to the panavision proportions of the windows opposite. The interesting thing about this chair, the reason it’s much more interesting than all the other various items of furniture and objects that run the whole length of the front of the villa, mosaic’d and glowing from the reflected light in the plate glass, is its contents. Wally. Good old Wally, wide awake and pointing a shooter at me.