Raucous

by Ben Paul Dunn

  Raucous looked at the Turk, received no nod or shake, turned to the man and took a step cutting the two-meter space between them in half. He didn’t take the second. To do so would mean impaling himself on the sharp flick-knife the man had produced as if it were attached to a quick-draw mechanism on the inside of the forearm. Raucous could feel the steel point pushing into his chest through his rough check shirt. He was looking directly into the man’s smug face. The same face he had smashed with his elbow the day before.

  “That isn’t Timothy, Raucous,” The Turk said. “This is Simon, his twin.”

  Raucous examined every feature of Simon’s face as if it would help with mental calculations. He saw no physical difference.

  “I repeat” Simon said, “You’re thick.”

  Raucous took a step back, Simon left the knife where it had been in the air, and then with a quick, smooth movement, he concealed the knife in his Armani suit sleeve.

  Raucous placed his right fist into his left palm and rubbed his knuckles. Simon smiled. And they stared each other down like two boys in a playground fight the night after watching a Sergio Leone classic.

  “Timothy will be along shortly,” Turk said. “I am led to believe he will be accompanying Jim.”

  Raucous took his time turning, not wanting to back down from Simon’s stare but needing to show the Turk. Raucous smiled and fixed his gaze on the Turk. “You really believe Jim is going to walk through that door, after what I told you?”

  “That is what the man means,” Simon said.

  “And I’m the thick one?”

  The heavy oak door opened in silence. Well oiled hinges and perfect weighting made the whole thing seem built of card. Timothy walked in alone.

  Simon and Turk waited for Jim. Raucous sat down in an antique wooden chair with a worn leather seat. He had his back to the door.

  “Jim is not blessing us with his presence?” Turk asked.

  “He wasn’t where he should be,” Timothy said. His words carried a small lisp caused by the large split in his lower lip. “I couldn’t find him. And he hasn’t been seen since the fight.”

  Timothy had a large swelling around his eyes, the black of bruising from elbows driven hard. He nodded his approval to Raucous.

  Simon produced a phone as quickly as he produced his knife. He pressed a single button and the sound of a ringing number came through the speaker. The number rang for fifteen seconds and then was switched to an answer phone. Simon pressed a button to end the call and slid his phone into the back pocket of his chinos. “He’s not answering.”

  The Turk looked down at his desk, examining the back of his large hairy hands. He tapped his fingers in quick rhythmic rolls. He inhaled deeply and looked up at raucous. “Do you have something to do with that?”

  Raucous still smiled. He enjoyed being the smartest man in the room. “In a roundabout way, I guess,” he said.

  “Enlighten us,” Turk smiled. “Where exactly is Jim?”

  “I couldn’t tell you exactly where he is right now, but in an average car, following the speed limit, I can tell you he got to be in the town he was heading for sometime yesterday morning.”

  “You are sure of that?” Turk asked.

  “As sure as someone can be, when they are this thick.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He was part of Christian’s life. He was old now, visibly thinner, the bulk of manual work faded to leave sinew and skin. His full, flat features had developed troughs and angles. A wasting away of a sculptured face chipped down by time.

  The name wasn’t there, but the memory was. This man was the first Christian had ever hit.

  The two lives never entwined. There was no overlap. This wasn’t science fiction. Two worlds did not collide.

  But unmistakably him. Twenty years on, an illness taking him down. Ben thought of John Wayne in The Shootist, an old bastard of a killer, coughing up shit, hopped up on morphine while Richie Cunningham from Happy Days learnt the reality of a gun-man’s life.

  Ten a.m as Ben left the house, unwashed, unclean and heading for coffee. The man was standing outside the tobacconist pulling on a filterless cigarette, making no effort to hide.

  The image hit Ben’s eyes, kicking memory into work. A flick of a million connections and Ben saw the past.

  Christian aged six, in toweling shorts and blue striped shirt. A Queens Park Rangers kid. Short blonde hair and the piercing blue eyes. Christian climbed on the old man’s knee. Their mouths moved but Ben heard no words. A faulty film recorded on a hand-held played out as remembrance. The audio cable was disconnected.

  A battered brass military Zippo, a rasp, smoke and a flame. An inhale and the crackle of burning tobacco and paper with a circular red glow. Christian’s right hand was encased in a child’s lace-up red boxing glove. He swung and the old man blocked. Ash fell from the cigarette and the old man laughed at someone Ben could not see. Christian swung again and the old man blocked. Christian dropped his arm. The old man looked to a person out of frame, his mouth moving and each silent word encased in passive smoke drifting between his lips. Christian swung again. The old man’s cigarette flew from his fingers and mouth. He looked to Christian and smiled. He rubbed Christian’s hair with a big gnarled palm. There was a sprinkling of blood on the old man’s teeth.

  “Still fighting?” The old man asked.

  Ben jumped at the voice. A familiarity without knowing why.

  “I’m not who you are looking for,” Ben said.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you. What happened to you?”

  “You aren’t from our lives.”

  “Our? I was in yours. Still am.” He held his right index finger to his lips, "But, shhhh, that’s a secret.”

  Ben entered his mind, he shut down externally. He entered a trance. His eyes lost focus, and would have rolled up white if they could like a possessed character actor destined to die in a John Carpenter B-Movie. He looked dumb, distanced from the world with an open mouth and the unfocused stare of a lobotomised Jack Nicholson. Jim took Ben’s arm and ushered him into the pub.

  The Somerset Arms was dying quickly. A Wetherspoon had opened and every ancient pub with expensive pints had caught a terminal disease and was never coming back. The only money coming in was from the residents of Pistachio Villa, community apartments. As if no one would ever understand the exotic equivalent of nut house. The hilarious civil servant who had conjured the name must be fun at the Christmas Do waving around his useless Social Sciences degree and writing witty replies on Facebook posts to kids who used to bully him.

  The lounge bar, shaped as an L, held a collection of the genetically slow or emotionally incapable. Some, once almost regular people, reduced to human ruins through events beyond their control. They were now the latest first-line in human drug therapy, which managed to remove any trace of individualism and replace it with a long glazed gaze.

  The medication they took was not to be mixed with booze but with no one to control their lives or anyone to care, they spent their days supping beer, downing vodka and entering the ethereal world of mixed medication and alcohol aggression in a nicotine stained pub adorned with brass farming instruments and flowery wallpaper.

  “Do you remember?” Jim asked.

  Ben sat transfixed. He stared at the bar. No one felt unease, at least four mental collapses happened here a day.

  Ben didn’t answer. Jim grabbed the inside of Ben’s right thigh and squeezed. A camel’s bite he had called it at school. But that was back in the 60s. Ben yelped and woke. He turned to Jim.

  “I don’t know your name. I know some things you did, but I don’t know you.”

  “You had better start remembering. Another day and all of this ends. No more easy life.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s easy to hide when no one is looking. Only now everyone is. And you’re the penultimate. A game of very expensive hide-and-seek started seventeen years ago. Four years ago they thought it had ended. Now they know it hasn’t
.”

  Jim sipped at his long grouse whisky and water. Ice rattled on the rim.

  Ben squinted and looked

  “Are you playing?” he asked.

  Jim smiled with the glass still at his lips. He placed the glass down, perfectly central on the stained beet mat. He stared at Ben’s eyes as if they were the wrong colour.

  “I think the big kids in the playground want me to go home. And I’m too old, ill and tired to say no.”

  Ben, blinking, unable to find peace with the presence of this man stuttered, “I don’t understand what you want.”

  “I owe a debt,” Jim said. I’ve been paying it for years. Looks like I can’t keep on. You need to go home.”

  Jim squinted as if defocusing Ben’s face would give him the image he wanted. Ben moved his weight forward toward the table, rocked on the balls of his feet to stand. “I’ll go now,” he said.

  Jim grabbed Ben’s shoulder. He prevented Ben from standing. Pulled him back down again.

  “Not the expensive flat you’ve got. That, soon as you know, will be gone. You need to go back to where you were born.”

  Jim looked at Ben and shook his head slowly. The words, the way of speaking, the shame and coward that came through were never there as a boy.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll speak again.” Jim rose to his feet and let a roll of twenties in an orange elastic band fall from his palm onto the table. “Drink yourself silly, you won’t get the chance again.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Turk asked the Twins to leave. He wanted Raucous alone. Raucous hadn’t asked but he wanted one-to-one. He needed the Turk alone. They didn’t ask why or complain, they followed his orders as if he were never to be questioned. Raucous waited to hear the thump of the door close against its frame. The noise never came. He turned to look at the door. It was closed. He turned back and the Turk was leaning forward, half-a-meter closer to Raucous than before. His hands were clasped.

  “Do I need to ask the question?” Turk asked.

  Raucous leaned back; if he had a cigar he would inhale and blow rings in the air. “The answer is, I’m here for the money I’m owed.”

  “I don’t owe you any.”

  Raucous leaned forward, “Seventeen years of my life inside and I never spoke.”

  “You had nothing to tell”

  “I had plenty. I learnt more. But I stayed quiet.”

  Turk leaned back and unclasped his hands. His eyes never left Raucous. “And how much do you believe that is worth?”

  “My cut, the original figure. No interest, just what I should have banked back then.”

  “It wasn’t my operation.”

  “Nothing could have happened without your compliance.”

  Turk blew air from his mouth as if it were a cold winter morning. “You seem to have educated yourself during the years. I never remember you using so many words.”

  “A lot of time in solitary with books.”

  “Any particular favorites?”

  “Treasure Island.”

  The Turk squinted, unsure. He knew there was meaning, but he couldn’t find it.

  “Associate with any character in particular?” he asked.

  Raucous nodded.

  “Ben Gunn,” he said.

  Turk smiled showing yellow nicotine teeth worn down by grinding. “You believe you were abandoned?”

  “No, I just like cheese. For the trip you are about to send me on to meet Jim, I’ll stock up on Parmesan.”

  Turk waited. Raucous knew he didn’t get the reference, but was pretending to ponder like an intellectual in on the joke.

  “I can offer you work,” Turk said. “But as you see, if what you believe were true, with all the money from that little heist, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be retired, long since.”

  “No, you love this life. The attention, the young women. No amount of money would get you out.”

  Turk raised his eyebrows, surprised that someone knew the truth

  “Had I been involved, I would no doubt be like the rest, very dead. It didn’t end well. Were you not inside you’d be dead too. Each of those men would have taken a million and been happy before. A million, that’s a lot of money. That’s retirement. No more criminal bullshit, or the game of school-kid bullies acted out as adults. But when that type of money falls a certain person’s way it is never enough. They want it all. And they each tried and they each died. I was intelligent enough to stay out. You were lucky enough to be inside without a share to be killed for.”

  They let the idea float in silence. Turk was passive, waiting.

  “The money is somewhere,” Raucous said.

  “Obviously, most was never recovered. But deposit boxes, property taken back by the state, hell, i knew some of them well, had grown up with a couple, and they would have gone treasure Island and buried the stuff and drawn an incomprehensible map and told no one. That money will be found many years into the future, and no one will know what the hell it was for.”

  Raucous pursed his lips and thought. He looked up, tired. “That almost sounds like you believe it,” he said.

  “You are asking for a share of something I had no involvement in. And certainly no come back from. But I can do with a man. Timothy and Simon, as efficient as they can be, don’t understand us. They are failed public school psychos who want the gritty life. They aren’t you.”

  “You haven’t asked me why Jim has run.”

  “I don’t know that he has. You are the only one saying so. I have no idea what there is between you, other than an angry father. Bring him back and I would be very willing to speak to him.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  Turk opened his top drawer and removed a gun. A small snub-nosed .38 revolver. Six-shot rotary chamber. A gun Dirty Harry may carry in his sock.

  “Traceable?” Raucous asked, knowing it was for him.

  “Yes, if you leave finger prints all over it. Otherwise, no.”

  Turk produced a key. “Ford Transit. Parked outside. White, obviously.” Turk smiled at himself. “White van man, hell, it’s what you were heading for anyway before you blew it.”

  Raucous didn’t answer. He knew that was what most thought of him. He reached with both hands and took the gun and key. He stood pushing the gun into the back of his jeans.

  “Take one of the twins for security,” Turk said.

  “Which one?”

  Turk shrugged.

  “Either or, I don’t care. I can’t tell them apart for shit.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  She tried sneaking up on him, but he turned just as she reached out to touch his shoulder. Jim was standing outside the tobacconists and he was pulling on a filterless.

  Jan knew h would be waiting. He had shown too much to Ben. Jean knew the old man couldn’t walk away.

  “I saw you in the reflection,” Jim said. “Pub?”

  Jean shook her head.

  “I don’t go in there with those loons. Have you seen the place? Full of dead-eyed morons.”

  “Suggestions?” Jim asked as he exhaled smoke.

  Jean hated smokers.

  “I usually jog right now, but looking at your state I’d say if you accepted you’d be offering yourself to suicide.”

  “Probably still take you,” Jim said.

  Jean looked him up and down.

  “Not too many can in your shape.”

  “You carry a gun?”

  “Never needed one.”

  Jim’s eyes moved from Jean’s face to the road. He didn’t swivel his head, his eyes tracked past her into the traffic. Jean looked around and saw a white Transit van. It wasn’t flying a union jack on its wing-mirror, but the big guy driving sure looked like he had a house draped in one. He gave them both an emotionless stare as he cruised past at twenty miles per hour.

  “You may now,” Jim said.

  “Fat men in vans don’t scare me. Or are you planning on shooting me?”

  “Do you still draw like Audie Murphy
?”

  Jean stared. It was him, and he knew. Audie Murphy. His films hadn’t been shown in years.

  “And drink my milk,” Jean said.

  “You always liked Audie Murphy.”

  “A real genuine all-American hero. What’s not to like?”

  “Shit actor.”

  “The worst.”

  Jim’s eyes looked to the traffic again. Jean watched the same white van pass in the opposite direction. It looked like the true-Brit van-driving handyman had picked up a wall-street broker from a car-crash. The high-class suit gave them the same dead stare with added smug smile through swollen lips and bruised face.

  “Do they know you, or can you pick a fight with anyone from safety of the pavement?” Jean asked.

  Jim turned slowly, stared into Jean’s eyes

  “You not recognize one of them?” He asked.

  “Not the people I hang with. I’m more your solitary type. If I had to make a list of what annoys me most, sitting right there at number one would be people. What about you?”

  “Betrayal.”

  Jean nodded approval.

  “Good choice, but that’s essentially people too. So what have you got to say? You were all enigmatic yesterday. Is someone coming to find me, or do I have to make it back to a tree before being seen in this hide-and-seek mystical claptrap?”

  Jim looked at the white van

  “Looks like we’ve already been found,” Jim said. “A day early, but you never can plan.”

  The white van pulled up to the curb. The doors opened and the two men stepped down with ease and walked around to stand facing Jim.

  Jim nodded a hello to them both. They returned the greeting.

  “Wow, who would have thought we would have bumped into you today, Jim,” Timothy said.

  Timothy reached out quickly and grabbed Jim’s collar. Jim swung a right uppercut into Timothy’s ribs and connected clean. Timothy released his grip and staggered back against the side of the van. A hollow ring sounded from the thin panels.

  Timothy stepped forward and caught his breath. Raucous held up a hand to stop him.

  “You could have blocked that for me,” Timothy said.