Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

  Mind you, I felt that my pride was justified. The operation itself was classically simple. Exploitation of the victim’s weakness; and in this case Big Ed’s weakness was the desire to hide his philistine background behind a collection of objets d’art. Of course he didn’t know the first thing about art, but he listened to my flattery and erudition.

  And of course he was besotted by the Renoir I had picked up in the Portobello Road.

  It was dead simple, possibly all too simple. Whether he was a bigger fool than me is a matter for debate. He had only parted with money. God knows what I would have to part with before the whole thing was over and done with. Some of my blood – and some of my bones – at the very least.

  I was proud, and I was scared stiff.

  When I saw Eric Billings I was sitting at a table in a darkened alcove to the rear of the bar. From my position I was able to watch the door and see who came in without being easily spotted myself. Big Ed has a well-organised network of lackeys – most of them inexorably in his debt, most of them owing their life to him – and it only needed one solitary phone call for him to send out his heavy squad. I cursed my stupidity in ever having mixed with villains in the first place. But cursing wasn’t going to save me now. Nor was praying, if I’d been the praying sort: but how can you believe in God when you make your living in such an ungodly way as I do? I tell you, a man is born to this game. He finds that he has an extraordinary facility for inducing people to part with their money, and he capitalises on the gift. Sometimes it backfires. But not always.

  I was watching everyone who drifted into the bar. Outside it was one of those filthy nights when the sky seems to have broken in pieces – it was raining, the pavements were sodden, and a brisk wind was blowing. The night seemed apt in many ways, it matched my mood and my feelings. I sat there at the back and whenever the door opened I could feel the dampness blow in and it seemed to have stricken my bones. Although my glass was empty, I couldn’t get up to order another drink. Perhaps I’d had too much already. But I felt stone-cold sober, icily sober, my perceptions sharpened to a fine edge.

  Eric Billings came into the bar. At that time, of course, I didn’t know his name. He entered timidly and although he seemed desperately to be looking for somebody, I crossed him off my list of suspects at once. He didn’t have a villainous manner. He was wearing a gaberdine raincoat that was discoloured by rain and his hair was plastered down on his head. On the crown of his head there lay a handkerchief knotted at each corner, but this covered only a very small area of what seemed to me like a very large skull. He hesitated, hanging back from the crowd of drinkers at the bar, and then he pushed forward. He disappeared for a minute in the crowd and when he reappeared he was clutching a glass of what looked like Guinness, awkwardly, in both hands. He still seemed to be searching for someone. Because he didn’t interest me much, I turned my eyes back to the door.

  And then he was sitting at my table, slurping his drink noisily. He was staring at me and I was beginning to wonder if perhaps I had misjudged him, perhaps he was after all potentially dangerous. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a face so clearly stamped with the word idiot. His eyes are set wide apart and they bulge badly so that he has this constantly staring expression. He has a weak mouth with tiny lips that flap together like two loose pieces of flesh accidentally ripped from elsewhere. He looked positively harmless, but in this game you can never be really sure. Ninety-nine per cent certain, yes, but never totally so. I turned my eyes back to the door.

  After a bit I became conscious of this strange sound. It sounded like a restrained gurgle, as if he were on the point of vomiting. I moved away instinctively because with all my other worries I didn’t want to be vomited on as well – but as I moved I realised that he was speaking and that he was simply having some difficulty in getting his words out.

  ‘Would you like to earn twenty pounds?’ he asked.

  I said nothing for a time. It flashed through my mind that he might be homosexual, but he didn’t have that indeterminate femininity that you feel rather than recognise. I waited for him to enlarge on his proposition before speaking.

  ‘I would make it more, but that’s all I have in my post office account,’ he said.

  A sucker, I thought. A genuine, first-class nit. I leaned forward to hear more. But for a long time he said nothing and just kept staring. For a moment I felt the impulse – who can explain these things? – to stick my fingers into his rounded eyes. But there was no point in being that rude and offensive.

  After a time I heard this weird story about how he had been going around for two weeks looking for someone – and this killed me – who was prepared to assassinate – wait for it – a dog. I nodded my head. It was best in the situation to treat him seriously, although I did wonder at what time he would have to be back in his room in whatever institution contained him.

  He told me more. He said that the dog was ruining his life, he was on the point of losing his job, he had pleaded, begged, the dog’s owner to shut the creature up, he had become a nervous wreck.

  ‘There is an easy solution,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me, tell me,’ he said, and gripped my wrist.

  ‘Move,’ I replied.

  He slumped down into his chair. His flesh was pale, even grey, and he looked physically sick.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That would be an admission of defeat.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  He was leaning over the table and prodding me.

  ‘Will you do it? Will you do it?’

  I was on the point of telling him that he had some recourse in law and that he could quite easily get an injunction in the County Court: it sounded like a genuine nuisance. But I didn’t. I have found by experience that it is best to let people discover such basic facts for themselves. The world is such, the nature of man is such, that the element of competition enters into even the most simple relation of facts. Why should I tell him?

  ‘It’s a long time since I killed a dog,’ I said.

  ‘But you’ve done it before?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, on many occasions,’ I replied. ‘The last was a diseased alsatian in 1960 down in Clapham. Mind you, it was difficult and it was bloody –’

  ‘Will you help me then?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ I said, as if deliberating.

  His mouth was hanging open while he waited.

  ‘I’d need to look over the premises and size up the situation before I could decide,’ I said.

  He smiled then. The basic knack in my game – more a gift than something you can develop – is to recognise the possibilities of a situation, to know when you are on to what might be a good thing. I had such a feeling then. And I was willing to back the feeling, at least for the time being.

  What precipitated my decision to return with him to his room was the sight of one of Big Ed’s heavy boys in the doorway. He hadn’t seen me, but his gaze was travelling quickly along the crowd at the bar.

  ‘Meet me outside,’ I said to Eric Billings and I ducked into the lavatory. I climbed out of the window into a little yard and then went through a door into a lane. When I thought it would be safe, I walked round to the front of the pub.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Eric said.

  ‘Nature called,’ I said.

  ‘We can get a bus over there,’ he said.

  I felt exposed at the bus-stop and when a taxi came down through the rain I stopped it. Eric and I got inside.

  ‘My name’s Eric Billings,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

  I have a selection of names that I use at different times. Mostly I permutate any one of six Christian names with any one of six surnames. It gives some variety.

  ‘Matthew Churchill,’ I said. ‘But you can call me Matt.’

  ‘Do you always ride in taxis?’ he asked.

  ‘When I want to get somewhere in a hurry,’ I answered.

  I felt inside my coat pocket. Big Ed’s money, wrapped in yesterday’s Daily
Express, was safely there.

  ‘Rex has made my life a misery,’ Eric said.

  ‘Perhaps we can soon do something about that.’

  The situation would have to be played strictly by ear. Another necessary gift. Another essential knack.

  2

  As soon as I saw the room I decided it would be the ideal place in which to lie low. It was scruffy and not at all the sort of place I had planned to rent with some of Big Ed’s money: my dreams had taken me to a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. But stuff dreams. Survival was the issue now. I threw my sodden raincoat down on the sofa.

  ‘Is there any tea going?’ I asked.

  Eric, who seemed uneasy at my presence in the room, filled a kettle and lit the gas.

  ‘What about the dog?’ he asked. He still had that knotted handkerchief on his head and his long gaberdine was almost stiff with rain. It made me uncomfortable to look at him. I turned on the electric-fire and lit a cigarette.

  ‘First things first,’ I said. ‘And the first thing now is a good cup of char.’

  While he was making tea I had a look at the room properly. Along the mantelpiece there was placed a pathetic collection of objects. There was, for example, an old golliwog with buttons sewn into his face in place of eyes. Beside this was a school photograph in which I picked out friend Eric almost at once: the doltish expression and massive skull gave him away and the eyes, even then, had the same staring look.

  ‘I bet you were a bright lad,’ I said.

  ‘Well, the teachers didn’t think so,’ he answered.

  ‘Teachers,’ I said. ‘What do they know?’

  He brought me a cup of tea. His face was screwed up in an odd sort of way. Later, I was to realise that this was his thinking look. But at the time I imagined him to be constipated or suffering from a rebellion of his digestive fluids.

  ‘Teachers,’ he said. ‘You’re right about them.’

  ‘Of course I’m right,’ I said. I gave him my cigarette end and he put it down the sink. The essence of tidiness. ‘Let me tell you something. When I was eighteen I wanted to leave Eton. I’d learned enough anyway and besides I’d been offered a fellowship at All Souls. Do you know the headmaster went down on his knees and begged me to stay? You wouldn’t believe that, would you? Teachers. Where’s the dignity in it?’

  ‘Well, I never,’ he said, impressed.

  ‘That finished me with teachers,’ I said. ‘This tea’s rather good.’

  He blinked his eyes. He has this habit of blinking in a watery sort of way – as if you expect his eyes suddenly to melt and come running like tears, great liquid globs, down his face.

  ‘Eton,’ he said. ‘That’s where they have a boating song.’

  ‘You are a clever chap,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve picked up one or two things,’ he said.

  We sat for a bit in silence and drank our teas. He made a great deal of noise over his, slurping it up, shaping his tongue into a funnel and slurping the liquid up the groove.

  After a time he said, ‘About the dog –’

  ‘We don’t want to rush things,’ I said.

  ‘I went over the wall once to choke him with a bit of string –’

  ‘Wall? Wall?’ I asked. It was best to lay it on thick. ‘You didn’t say anything about my wall. That wasn’t very fair of you, was it? I didn’t think it was going to involve any climbing.’

  ‘It isn’t a high wall,’ he said. Frightened, all of a sudden, that I might leave. ‘There’s some glass along the top –’

  ‘Glass? Christ. Are there any machine-gun towers?’

  He stared at me. For a second I thought he was going to reply in the negative, but the exaggeration penetrated his thick skull and he smiled, pointing his finger at me.

  ‘Ha-ha,’ he laughed. ‘Machine-guns, ha-ha.’

  I finished my tea and got him to pour a second cup. He was easily dominated, docile, somewhat like a well-trained dog himself. Slightly more intelligent than a dog, I suppose. He came with the tea and then said – and I swear he said it –

  ‘No, there aren’t any machine-guns.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I said.

  ‘But there’s broken glass, as I was saying. The wall isn’t hard to climb. I went across it myself with this bit of string, but I didn’t have the heart to do it, you see. I’ve always been soft that way.’

  He began some fantastically boring story of how his mother had once given him a spray-gun, with which he was meant to kill the flies in the kitchen. With idiot cunning – and because he didn’t have the heart – he had emptied the gun into a clump of bushes. The flies survived, but he himself was beaten when the leaves turned yellow and withered. Whether he makes these yarns up, fabricates them in that apology for a brain that lurks the size of a pea in his enormous cranium, I’ve never been able to discover. If he does invent them then I’m sure he does so innocently, in the sense that he believes them to have actually happened. He doesn’t lie, not in the way that I have to do professionally. Of course, I believe my own lies for the duration of the act, but afterwards I always recognise them for what they are: a load of bullshit. But Eric, I think, believes implicitly in his own drivel. And therein lies the difference between our kinds of fabrication.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said.

  ‘About Rex,’ he said. ‘What sort of thing do you have in mind?’

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ I replied. ‘This will have to be planned and pondered upon before we can take appropriate remedial action. Your approach up to now has been crude, if you don’t mind my saying. A little subtlety is required.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’ Eric said.

  ‘First of all I must actually hear for myself what it is that the dog does. After that, plans can be laid.’

  ‘But I can tell you all that. Rex moans. He moans from midnight until dawn. Can’t you take my word for it?’

  ‘Eric, second-hand information is of no value. Ask any scientist. Observation, rationalisation, hypothesis. That’s how I work.’

  He sat down on the bed, his stiff gaberdine trying its best to remain standing. He hauled it off, folded it tidily, and laid it on the chair. I lit a cigarette and watched him. I’ve had no training in the descriptive use of words, no instruction in such things as similes and metaphors. So trying to describe Eric wasn’t easy. He sat on the bed and stared at the window and watching him I likened him to several different things: a rag that has been washed and squeezed until its fabric has all but gone: a bottle of milk left standing too long in the sun, gone yellow and curdled: a damp cigarette packet trodden in a flowing gutter: a slag-heap thrown up behind some quarry. The images have one common element; in each case their theme, their focal point, is that of a thing having been discarded, a useless thing, something thrown away because its only function now is as a reminder of futility. Eric Billings projected this same useless aura, this air of having been discarded, a scrap-heap man. He sat on his own bed like a foreign body, a fungus ripped out of the earth. These images amused me, because I’d never met another human being to whom they could so aptly be applied.

  I tested the sofa with my fingers. It felt much too hard to sleep on. The bed, on the other hand, looked more appealing. I trotted out the India story, although Eric would have believed anything. In this story I begin with a brief résumé of my army career, most of which was spent in the Far East. I win several decorations, am mentioned in despatches, and have my photograph in The Times; grinning at the camera, although visibly in pain, an impression strengthened by the blood on my khaki shirt. And then, a dangerous mission to check German infiltrators in North Pakistan, during the course of which I fall out of an aeroplane straight down a gully.

  ‘My back hasn’t been the same since,’ I finished by saying. ‘Naturally, I get a meagre pension from the government, but I’d rather have my back in good shape.’

  I wriggled uncomfortably on the sofa.

  I said, ‘This sofa feels a bit hard, Eric.’

&
nbsp; He was still thinking about my dangerous mission. His tiny mouth hung open and his eyes were glazed.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep here,’ I said.

  He stood up. ‘Are you going to stay overnight then?’

  ‘In the circumstances, don’t you think it would be better? I’d be able to hear the dog. I can start working on a plan.’

  He went across to the window. Suddenly he said, ‘Last week I threw down a lamb chop I’d covered with mustard and insecticide. But Rex didn’t eat it. It’s still rotting down there.’

  I moved over to the bed and put up my legs. I felt whacked and wanted nothing better than a good night’s sleep.

  ‘If your back’s really bad,’ he said, ‘why don’t you have the bed?’

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ I said. ‘It’s good to meet someone who knows the meaning of kindness.’

  He sat down on the sofa and began to weep.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t go on,’ he said. Crying, his face looked like a swollen balloon drifting through rain. ‘I can’t go on. He’s making my life a misery.’

  ‘Never mind, old chap,’ I said. I used my seaside manner and voice, the breezy one, the one that Britons everywhere used in the air-raid shelters when the bombs were falling and morale had to be boosted. ‘Things will get better.’

  After he had put out the light I could hear him wandering around in the darkened room. He was sobbing now and again, and sometimes he stumbled into pieces of furniture.

  I lay there thinking about what I could do with Big Ed’s money when the heat was off. The South of France? Italy? I dreamed of golden women wandering half-naked on sand. I dreamed of their being stretched beside me against a backdrop of sun and water, soft whishings up the beach. I could feel the heat begin in my thighs.

  And then Eric said, ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear him?’

  I opened my eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘Rex,’ he said. ‘Did you hear him?’

  ‘No. Get to sleep.’

  ‘I never sleep.’

  I listened. Through the dark came a faint, a tiny whine. The dog sounded as if it were in pain. I listened for a bit, but most of the time I could only hear Eric mumbling about his unhappy lot, the awful fate that had dropped on his shoulders with the dead weight of bricks. I felt slightly irritated, the way you do when you want to sleep and someone is coming between you and your objective.