“There’s a lot of them on the road,” said Clean Head.
“It could be that,” I said, “or it could be someone changing their helmet and their jacket and looking like a bunch of different riders on different bikes.”
“A motorcycle?” said Nevada. “I’d been looking for a car. But a motorcycle, they could pack it up and put it in the people carrier and carry it around with them.”
“If it was small enough,” said Clean Head.
“Around 60cc,” I suggested. There was silence while this sank in.
I said, “They could even alter details on the bike. Use decals, make it look like a different colour. Switch the number plate. We’d think it was a different one but every time it could be the same bike.”
“It could be,” said Clean Head. “Or it could also just be that there’s a lot of small bikes on the road.”
I said, “Let’s review what we know. There are two of them. A man and a woman. Both blonde. Both athletic types. Kind of Germanic-looking. For the sake of discussion let’s call them the Aryan Twins.”
“I like it,” said Nevada. “The Aryan Twins. Heinz and Heidi.”
“And they’re also looking for Easy Come, Easy Go.”
“We don’t know that for certain. I’m playing devil’s advocate here. All we know is that they are buying up all the jazz they can find. How can you be certain they’re after that one record?”
I’d been thinking about this. “When I was at the boot fair that guy…”
“Heinz,” said Nevada.
“Right. He pushed me away from a box of records I was about to look through. What he didn’t know was that I’d already given it the once-over.”
Nevada shrugged. “So what?”
“You see, he just shoved me aside and looked through that one box and then he went away.”
“So?”
I said, “He didn’t bother with the others.” Nevada was looking at me now. I could see her mind working behind her blue eyes. “I think that’s because he’d seen me go through the first two boxes. So he wasn’t interested in them.”
“Because you’d already been through them,” said Nevada.
I nodded. “That’s right. He didn’t check the other crates because he didn’t have to. I’d done it for him.”
“Because we were looking for the same thing.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But the good news is, they haven’t found it yet. We haven’t found it, but neither have they.”
Nevada looked at me for a moment, processing this, then nodded. “Otherwise they wouldn’t still be looking,” she said.
“Exactly. So we’re all looking for the same thing and they haven’t found it yet.”
“But they’re certainly proving to be a nuisance.”
“I agree,” I said. “So I’m going to fix their wagon.”
“What do you mean?” said Nevada.
I said, “When it comes to vinyl in London, don’t fuck with me.”
13. VINYL CRYPT
The next day I put the plan into action.
We drove north, making judicious use of the bus lane through Barnes and speeding across Hammersmith Bridge. I looked down at the birds wading in the water. The sun glittered on the Thames. The birds picked their way delicately across the mud.
“Don’t let the other vehicle lose us,” I said to Clean Head.
“If there is another vehicle.”
We went to visit Tinkler in hospital, staring at his absent face and trying to think of encouraging things to say to each other. Then we drove to the Vinyl Crypt.
The Vinyl Crypt is located in what used to be a bus garage in north London, near Highgate. We took a fairly discursive route there, zig-zagging from Victoria to Ladbroke Grove to Regent’s Park. I leaned forward in the taxi and said, “It’s good that you’re not making it too easy for them, but make sure you don’t lose them.”
There was just a disgusted sigh from the driver’s compartment. I looked to Nevada for support, but she wasn’t offering any. Instead she gazed at me languidly and said, “What are we doing, exactly?”
“In a word,” I said, “sabotage.”
“French is such an expressive language.”
Lenny’s Vinyl Crypt was a legend among record collectors.
You might once have found a gem at Cheapo Cheapo in Soho or even stumbled on something no one else had spotted at the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill. But no one has ever found anything of value at Lenny’s.
A few times I’d thought I’d got something—some wonderful treasure—but when I got it home it was always knackered. I persisted, foolishly, for years buying stuff from there. Always thinking I had beaten the jinx, but always finding some hidden scratch or pressing glitch that would ruin the listening experience.
“It was like a dolls’ hospital for damaged records,” I told Nevada. “No one who had any good or interesting LPs to sell would ever take them to Lenny’s. It’s for the unwanted, the cast-offs. If a charity shop can’t sell its records or if you hold a jumble sale and you’ve got some real dross left over, you go to Lenny’s and dump it for a few pennies.” I looked at her. “It’s where bad little records who didn’t say their prayers at night or brush their teeth end up.”
“Poor bad little records,” said Nevada. “But why would any of this have prevented Tomas Helmer’s ex-wife dumping the records there?”
“It wouldn’t,” I said.
“Then why the hell haven’t we been to this place?”
“Because we only just found out that was her raison d’être.”
“Great,” she said. “More French. It should be raison d’agir, actually, since we’re talking about her motivation to action.”
“I stand corrected.”
“At least, anyway, we’re racing there now.”
“That’s right.”
“And they might have the record.”
I smiled. “Even if they don’t, we can make good use of the place.”
* * *
Lenny was wearing a beret that might have looked jaunty or hip on somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t also sporting the swamp-varmint long grey hair and long scary beard combo as popularised many years ago by ZZ Top. He also wore a smart-looking camelhair coat and a tartan scarf, both of which made absolute sense given the icy temperature in the Vinyl Crypt.
It was a big damp concrete space, lit by the merciless glare of long fluorescent tubes hung by chains from the high curved ceiling. The walls of the building were green corrugated steel reinforced by girders sunk at intervals into concrete blocks in the floor. The space was big enough to accommodate several double-decker buses, which of course it once had. It always made me think of an aircraft hangar and there was a ghostly smell of fuel that had never left the place. Lenny had fitted it with narrow rectangular tables that had once served a school refectory. They lined both walls of the long structure.
The tables along the walls were stacked with crates of records. There were additional crates underneath. There were more tables, of various shapes and sizes, dotted in the centre of the cement floor, enough of them to make the big space seem almost cramped.
One of the tables was an elegant old walnut antique that had at an earlier time enjoyed the loving attentions of a French polisher. God knows how it had fallen into Lenny’s hands. Now it was chipped and battle-scarred and served as his shop counter. He sat behind it and watched me go through his NEW ARRIVALS, JAZZ bins.
There was a small white portable refrigerator grumbling away beside Lenny’s table, and he sat in front of it sipping from a glass of pale pinkish-purple fluid. No one knew what was in the fridge and Lenny, who was notoriously unfriendly, wouldn’t tell anyone. No one knew what he was drinking, either, although guesses ranged from Ribena to the blood of newborn infants.
Now Nevada was standing in front of his table with a doubtful expression on her face. She could be outside, sitting in a nice, warm, comfortable cab. “I understand you want to see me,” she said.
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“He wants to see your platinum card,” I said, glancing up from the table where I was flipping through the records.
“Doesn’t he trust you?” Nevada was looking over her shoulder at me.
“He trusts me but not necessarily my buying power.” I resumed my search through the bins. My nose was twitching with the spicy smell of some exotic fungus that was attacking the grubby heaps of vinyl.
I heard Nevada say, “What on earth is that you’re drinking?” The muscles of my shoulders tightened as I prepared myself for one of Lenny’s rudest put-downs. But, to my astonishment, he said, “Mineral water with a little Crème de Cassis.”
“Cassis?” said Nevada. “That’s lovely. Have you tried it with champagne? Lovely with champagne.”
“Sadly, I don’t have any champagne here,” said Lenny.
“Disgraceful,” said Nevada, and for the first time in living memory I heard Lenny chuckle. “Have you tried Crème de Framboise?” she said. “That’s very tasty too.”
“Yes, I sometimes drink the Framboise. It depends how I’m feeling.”
“It depends on how fruity you’re feeling.”
“That’s right!” Now they both laughed, him sounding like a rusty hinge on a seldom-opened door, her gurgling with merriment. I couldn’t believe it. I drifted over to the table where they were talking, under the guise of looking through some boxes of appalling Euro disco junk. I had never seen Lenny like this. She totally had him where she wanted him. If he’d been a cat he would have purred.
“I don’t have any champagne,” said Lenny. “But I do have this.” He spun around on his chair and opened the refrigerator. He took out a tall green wine bottle with a white label and set it on the table. Nevada let out a meretricious squeal of delight and Lenny said, modestly, “It’s a Chablis.”
“It’s a very good Chablis,” said Nevada. “My god, the Valmur.”
Lenny nodded and took two glasses out of the fridge. Unlike the tumbler he’d been drinking from before, these were proper wine glasses made of slender, shapely crystal. The neck of the bottle chinked against them musically as he poured the white wine. “It’s the Grand Cru, isn’t it?” said Nevada.
“Yes, the Moreau-Naudet,” said Lenny happily as the wine glugged.
“The 2007?”
“Yes, the 2007.” He filled two glasses carefully. I felt left out, like the hired bumpkin flipping through my smelly vinyl on the other side of the room. But I knew what response a request for a glass of my own would get.
“You can taste the limestone!” cried Nevada.
I looked on the bright side. If she couldn’t cater to her clothes fetish here, at least she could indulge her wine obsession. And that would keep her out of my hair while I looked.
“I generally save the wine,” said Lenny. “Until the end of the working day, or for a special occasion.”
“The end of the working day is a special occasion, I always say,” said Nevada. They drained their glasses and were working on a refill by the time I finished looking through the bins. I strode over purposefully and joined them.
“It isn’t here,” I said.
“Are you sure?” said Nevada.
“Yes,” I said. “And nobody resembling Helmer’s ex-wife, or indeed anyone else, has brought any interesting jazz records here for months, if not years.”
“That’s right,” agreed Lenny happily, sipping his wine.
I looked at Nevada.
“It’s just perfect.”
* * *
As we drove away in the taxi Nevada said, “All right, explain to me what we just achieved.”
“Apart from you drinking Grand Cru Chablis?”
“And spending a huge fortune in my funds, yes.”
“It isn’t a huge fortune,” I said. “It’s less than you spent on the Stone Circle 10 bug buster.”
“But at least I saw some return for that. Some value. I don’t see any value in buying a huge quantity of rubbish vinyl that you yourself assure me does not contain the record we’re looking for.”
“You haven’t bought it yet,” I said.
“I’ve agreed to buy it, in principle,” said Nevada. “And he’s seen my platinum card as a token of our earnest.”
I gave her my best confident smile. “If things pan out, you won’t have to buy anything.”
“And just how likely are things to ‘pan out’?”
“Ask Clean Head,” I said.
“Clean Head? Why? Ask her what?”
“If she’s sure she didn’t shake off our tail completely.”
“I’m not going to ask her that,” said Nevada. “She’ll bite my head off. You only reminded her about twenty times on our way here.” She didn’t look convinced and I could feel my best confident smile beginning to slip a bit. Just then my phone rang. I answered it.
It was Lenny. “I tried your friend’s number, but there was something wrong with her phone, so I’m phoning you instead, to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said, repressing the urge to tell him to get on with it.
“Well,” he said, “it went down exactly like you said.” And he told me all about it. When he finished talking I hung up and looked at Nevada. She was smiling at me.
“It worked, did it?” she said. “Whatever this evil scheme of yours was?”
“Yes,” I said. “It worked. How did you know?”
She shook her head. “It’s written all over your face. Well, go on. Tell me what happened.”
I leaned back in my seat and sighed. We were speeding through Belsize Park, on the way home. I said, “About ten minutes after we left, they turned up.”
“Who did? The Aryan Twins?”
“Yes. Apparently they were very friendly and charming.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Or at least she was,” I said.
“Heidi.”
“Yes. Heidi wanted to buy up his entire stock of jazz albums. Lenny regretfully explained he’d just sold, or promised to sell, the whole lot, including all the dire rubbish in the basement—he didn’t say dire rubbish, you understand—to us.”
Nevada was watching me. “And they made a counter offer.”
I nodded. “That’s right. And Lenny said he couldn’t do that to a friend. So they doubled the offer.”
Nevada squealed and I smiled. “But Lenny stood fast. And they kept raising the ante. In the end they paid him five times what we’d agreed.”
“Five times!”
“That’s right. Now apparently they’ve gone off to rent a truck big enough to haul the records away.”
“A truck!” Nevada exploded in laughter. She laughed until she cried. She laughed so hard that Clean Head looked over her shoulder at us, a little surprised and anxious, and then returned to watching the road. Nevada gradually subsided and wiped her eyes. “Five times,” she said. “So that’s the going rate for selling out a friend these days.”
“That’s the going rate.”
She sighed and rubbed her face. “All right. But what have we actually achieved, besides making Heinz and Heidi waste their morning doing this transaction?”
I counted on my fingers. “We’ve also wasted their money. A great deal of their money.”
Nevada nodded in agreement. “A shit load of their money.”
“And we’ve given Lenny a significant boost to his income.”
“He’s such a nice chap. He can buy some more excellent Chablis.”
“And,” I said, “we’ve helped him get rid of one of the largest collections of dodgy jazz records in the world.”
“All very well, but…”
“But we’ve also lumbered the Aryan Twins with the task of picking up and then looking through every single fucking one of those records.” I looked at her. “That should keep them out of our hair for a while.”
Nevada chuckled. “You really do have a twisted mind, don’t you?” She peered contentedly out the window at Fulham rolling past. We were heading for Putney Bridge. A thought s
truck me. I took out my phone and dialled a number. “Who are you calling?” she said.
“Lenny again. I just thought of something.” Lenny answered and I said, “Listen, as soon as they’ve collected the records I think this would be a good time for you to take a holiday.”
He wasn’t slow. “You think there might be repercussions?”
“I think it would be a good idea if you were out of the country and unable to be found for a few weeks.” There was a long pause at the other end. I said, “You’ve got plenty of money for a holiday now, haven’t you?”
Lenny seemed to gradually warm to the notion. “Yeah, maybe Greece, eh? Mykonos will be nice this time of year.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Lenny’s tone grew jubilant. “Would you ask your friend if she’s ever been to Mykonos? And if she hasn’t, would she like to go? And even if she has, would she like to go again? Would you ask her that? If she’d like to go with me?”
“You know what, actually, Lenny? I won’t.”
“Okay, fair enough, I quite understand.”
When we got to my house Nevada asked if she could come in. “I’m expecting a call and my phone’s packed up. So I gave them your landline number.” She walked through the front door with me and the cats rose lazily to greet us. Nevada settled comfortably on the sofa and the cats went to join her. “They should call about five o’clock,” she said, glancing at the phone beside the sofa. It was now five to five.
“Who?” I said.
“My office.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t visualise Nevada having an office, or working in one. I perched on an arm of the sofa and watched her caress the cats. “Would you like some coffee?” I wondered if I had the energy to make the good stuff. The phone suddenly rang, causing the cats to jump off the sofa. I looked at the clock. The office was a little early.
Nevada scooped up the receiver, listened for a moment, then covered it up and looked at me. “Would you mind?” she hissed. “I know it’s terribly rude, but I’m supposed to make a confidential report.”
“No problem,” I said, although in fact I was little stung to be turfed out of my own house. I went out the back door into the garden. The sky was dark and heavy with the early evening of winter. The air smelled cold and clean and distantly of burning leaves. I remembered Tomas Helmer standing here and the smell of his cigar. The cat flap rattled behind me and Fanny came gliding out to keep me company. Turk, the traitor, stayed indoors. Through the window I could see Nevada playing with her absent-mindedly while she spoke on the phone. Then she hung up and waved to me.
Written in Dead Wax Page 14