Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  Fanny had apparently decided to relocate to the chair in the corner of the bedroom, and hopped onto it. She curled up on the cushion, gave me a pointed stare for having disturbed her, and went back to sleep.

  Turk sauntered lazily in, hard little paws tapping on the floor. She jumped up on the bed. I was surprised to see her. Despite being the intrepid explorer and implacable mouse-killer, she was amazingly skittish. Any sudden noise should have sent her fleeing for the high timber.

  If the sound I’d heard had been real, she would be hiding in a distant corner of the house right now.

  Instead she ambled across the bed, insolently treading over me on her way to the windowsill. She paused, then hopped up, neatly ducking under the curtains. Only her tail protruded as she took up her position there, staring out into the big world.

  So I must have dreamed it. The sound. My mind had conjured it with hypnagogic vividness. And I knew what it was now. I recognised it.

  The gunshot from the record.

  I was even dreaming about the damned thing.

  Seeing Nevada had driven all the other questions from my mind, but now they were crowding back in on me. There had been a message from the bank waiting for me when I’d got back from Japan yesterday. It confirmed the transfer of funds from Mr Hibiki.

  And once again I thought, no record was worth that kind of money. So what was going on? I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Turk stirred on the windowsill. Fanny snuffled in her sleep.

  Why was it worth so much to him? And not just to him.

  Someone else had also wanted it, badly enough to be willing to kill for it.

  But the one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind was the smile Mr Hibiki had been smiling when he slid the album in with the others. He hadn’t smiled like that when he had first got his hands on it, or when he first listened to it.

  Only when he had filed it safely away with the other thirteen Hathor albums.

  It had been a smile of triumph.

  Ever since I’d seen it, I’d been trying to convince myself that this was just a case of an obsessive collector finally completing a set. Filling an annoying gap. Crossing it off his mental list.

  But I didn’t believe that. This was about more than a man and his record collection.

  Behind the curtain, Turk chattered as she spotted a low-flying bird. I rolled over and tried to find a comfortable spot for my head on the pillow. My mind kept turning the question over and over. I needed to know. What the hell was Hibiki up to? Who were his competitors—the people behind the Aryan Twins? What was going on?

  Of course, there was one person who might be able to tell me.

  But I was damned if I was going to phone her.

  I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. Fanny snored on her chair. Turk stirred from time to time on the windowsill, to get a better vantage point. My mind kept turning over and finally I gave up and got out of bed. I checked the clock.

  This morning I had to collect Tinkler.

  * * *

  Some people come out of hospital addicted to the painkillers. Tinkler came out addicted to grapes. The first thing we had to do when they discharged him was go to the local Marks and Spencer and buy him some to take home. We got Clean Head to drive us into Hammersmith.

  She had opened the panel that separated driver from passengers and asked me about Nevada, and I told her she was away in Japan on business. This seemed to satisfy Clean Head and she even made some remark about what a lucky girl. She had completely missed out on the whole period when Nevada had been dead, which was an odd thing to contemplate.

  Tinkler’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it. “It’s Maggie. A text message.” He frowned. “It says, ‘Have you seen the papers?’”

  “Well, that’s a silly question,” I said. There were probably no two other grown men in London less likely to pick up a newspaper. Tinkler frowned at the phone.

  “She’s also sent us some links.” We looked at each other. “Better click on them,” he said.

  They were both newspaper sites. The first headline read DJ FINDS MILLION DOLLAR LP.

  The second one, CRATE DIGGER STRIKES GOLD.

  The first article featured a photograph of me taken by some nonentity at a record fair years ago, in which I managed to look both pretentious and educationally subnormal. Of course, this rogue picture over which I had no control was the only one that had crept out into cyberspace to announce my presence to the world.

  But that wasn’t my worry at the moment. We looked at each other.

  “How the hell did they find out?” he said.

  “Nevada’s people must have let it leak.”

  He was frowning at me. “Why?”

  I shrugged, but I was beginning to guess. I said, “What’s the point of beating the opposition if the opposition don’t know it?”

  “Ah, I see.” Tinkler nodded.

  “Plus it will have the effect of calling off the dogs.” I realised that now I’d got over the shock of this exposure, I was oddly relieved.

  “You mean the Aryan Twins.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean now they can just pack their bags and slink back off to… Arya? Is that a place?”

  “No.”

  “So that’s the last you’ll see of them,” said Tinkler. After a moment he added, helpfully, “Assuming they’re not vengeful types.” He put the phone away and settled back in the taxi seat. “Speaking of Nevada…”

  “Yes?”

  He sighed. “So… she’s alive and we’re all rejoicing that she’s alive.”

  “Correct.”

  “But you don’t want to go out with her anymore.”

  “Correct.”

  “Even though she gave every sign she wanted to.”

  I said, “I couldn’t. How could I? After what she did.”

  Tinkler sighed again and said, “Not everyone has your high standards of moral conduct.”

  “Look, she never cared about me.”

  “She seemed quite fond of buying you nice clothes.”

  “She was just managing me. They needed me to find the record. So they put her in to sweeten the deal.”

  Tinkler sighed again. “Well,” he said, “she sure was sweet.”

  * * *

  When I realised I actually, for the first time in my life, had some serious money, one of the first things I did was to blow a small fortune on some very high-end ca phe cut chon coffee beans from Vietnam. These would arguably make a cup of the finest coffee in the world. I should have been excited about this, but for some reason as I prepared it at home, carefully grinding the beans in my little kitchen, all I could think was how much work it was. Maybe I should have just bought a jar of instant.

  Nevertheless, now that I was back from Tinkler’s I was glumly determined to set about making my first pot of the stuff. And it was almost ready when the doorbell rang.

  The cats scooted into hiding, as they tended to do, and I went to see who it was.

  It was a slender young woman, medium height, in her twenties. She was wearing suede boots, faded jeans and a quilted jacket with an unusual black and white check pattern that looked vaguely Indian. Her vulpine features were so striking I would have made the same blunder as with Nevada—assuming she was another model–stroke–starlet stumbling around looking for rehab—except that hanging from her shoulder was a black bag with a bold red and yellow logo that read AMOEBA MUSIC, HOLLYWOOD.

  I knew Amoeba. It was one of the biggest record stores in America.

  She looked at me. Her skin was the colour of ca phe cut chon with a generous splash of cream stirred in. Her eyes were a disconcerting shade of bronze. The large mass of curly hair framing her face was brown, with broad streaks of a tawny golden shade that made me think of lions.

  She looked tired, but oddly alert. She smiled. “That smells good,” she said. She had an American accent.

  “Just making some coffee, the hard way.”

  “How hard can it be? Look, I’m really sorr
y if I’ve got the wrong address, but is this you?” She handed me a copy of one of the newspaper articles I had seen on Tinkler’s phone. It was the one with the picture, of course. I looked down at it, at the girl holding it in her hand, eager and a little hopeful.

  And so it begins, I thought. “I’m afraid it is,” I said.

  She folded the piece of paper. “Your photo doesn’t do you justice.”

  “That photo wouldn’t do the Hunchback of Notre Dame justice.”

  “You know, that really does smell good,” she said, looking over my shoulder. She smiled again. She wanted a cup of coffee. I didn’t blame her. So did I.

  “Look…” I said.

  “Oh listen,” she said, “I’m not going to put the arm on you for money or anything.” She held up the folded piece of paper. “Because of your sudden new wealth or anything.” She had read my mind. Now she smiled at me. “That’s just not me.”

  “How did you get my address?”

  She took out another piece of paper. Here was printed out a web page, where some joker had posted a scan of one of my Vinyl Detective cards online, helpfully displaying my contact details, including my address, to the world at large.

  “Is this why you’ve come here?” I said. “You want me to find a record for you?”

  She shrugged. “Look, can we talk inside?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’ve retired.”

  She gave me a droll look. “Isn’t it a bit early to retire?”

  “It’s been a short but eventful career.”

  “Maybe I can convince you to come out of retirement.” She smiled at me. She wasn’t giving up. I sighed. The coffee was getting cold. “I came all the way from LA to see you,” she said.

  That was it. Even if she was a total nutcase I had to talk to her now. “All right, come in.”

  “Thanks.” As she brushed past me I caught a whiff of her perfume, a smoky, insistent spiciness. I poured coffee for us and she sipped appreciatively. “The real stuff is always better than the instant,” she said, as if she had been sent by the fates as a caution to me.

  Then she looked around the kitchen. “Holy shit. Where did you get all those tomatoes?”

  “It’s a long story. If I said, ‘from Wales’, that would be the short version.”

  “Okay.” She drank her coffee and I finished mine. The caffeine hit my veins and I began to feel impatient and a little testy. “So…” I said. She looked up from her cup.

  “So anyway,” she said. She took out the piece of paper with the news story. “I’ve come here because you found my grandmother’s record.”

  My heart sank. I could see the way this was shaping up.

  I said, “Even if the record did once belong to your grandmother, any claim she had to ownership would have lapsed long ago.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “When I said it was my grandmother’s record, I meant she sings on it.”

  * * *

  “Rita Mae Pollini was your grandmother?”

  “Sure.”

  She must have read the doubt on my face because she snapped her fingers a few times, her hand going up and coming down with metronomic regularity and began to sing ‘Running from a Spell’.

  The hair on my arms went up. The voice was very similar—but what really gave it away was the rhythmic quality, the fast-moving bebop inflection she brought to the piece.

  Two things were for certain. She could really sing. And she could have been the reincarnation of Rita Mae Pollini.

  I sat and looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. She finished her coffee, set the cup aside and took out what looked like a silver cigarette case with the initials REE engraved on the top.

  I said, “Does the other side say FER?”

  “What?” She looked at the case. “FER. Oh, I get it. Reefer. That’s funny. But this is just tobacco.” I supposed that this was a relief, after recent high jinks, but the last thing I wanted was a cigarette stinking up my house. She must have read my mind, because she said, “Okay if I smoke in your yard?”

  “Be my guest, I guess.” She headed for the front door, but I showed her to the back, where the garden was larger, and nicer. I led her through the sitting room.

  “Hey, cats.” She nodded at Fanny and Turk, who were sprawled on the floor in a square of sunlight and then paid them no more attention. Not a cat lover, then.

  I opened the back door and went out with her. It seemed only sociable.

  We stood in the garden together, our breath fogging on the cold bright air. It was a sunny winter morning with the frost gleaming as it melted on the stones of the footpath. She removed a cigarette from the case and one of those lighters that is like a miniature butane torch. It hissed and spat out a tiny blue flame, almost invisible in the daylight, and she lit her cigarette.

  Breathing in hungrily, she exhaled a cloud of smoke then put the lighter back in the cigarette case and closed it. She looked at the silver case, then at me.

  “It stands for Rodima Eden Esterbridge,” she said, indicating the engraved initials.

  “Quite a name.”

  “That’s why my friends call me Ree for short.”

  “Look,” I said. “It’s very nice to meet you…”

  “Likewise.”

  “But if you want me to find a record for you—”

  “Not a record.”

  “What then?”

  “A whole bunch of records.”

  * * *

  “It all started at my grandma’s birthday one year. She decided she was going to write her memoirs. She’d been talking about writing her memoirs ever since I can remember, so no one paid her much attention. But this particular year she actually went up in the attic to get what she called her ‘memory-bilia’. And she discovered that some bees had built a huge nest in the corner of the attic.”

  I said, “Bees? Honey bees?”

  She nodded. “Very definitely honey bees. This huge nest, right on top of all her stuff. So she got these insect-control guys in to deal with it. They said they’d have to spray.”

  Ree looked at me. It was cool in the garden and the sky was high and blue and empty, with just a few tiny white wisps of cloud, promising that it would soon be colder still. “Grandma didn’t want to be around when they sprayed the poison, so she got out of the house.”

  “Very wise,” I said.

  “Maybe not so wise. Because next thing you know, we’ve not only got an attic full of dead bees, there’s also about half a ton of honey which has melted and poured all over my grandmother’s things.” She gave me a rueful smile. “Turns out the bees keep the honey cool by fanning it with their little wings. Kill the bees and you turn off the natural air conditioning in the hive.”

  “And the honey melts.”

  “Right. You would have thought these dedicated insect specialists, the exterminators, might have been aware of this interesting fact about our friend the honey bee.”

  I said, “We have the same company here. They do boiler maintenance.”

  “Anyway, the contractors figured everything that got buried in the honey was ruined, so they just threw it all in the garbage when they cleared the honey out. By the time my grandmother got back, all her ‘memory-bilia’ was gone. Gone forever.”

  “I guess she wasn’t too pleased.”

  “She was hysterical. She turned blue in the face and we thought she’d had a heart attack. When finally we got some sense out of her, it turns out that the only things that were really crucial, that she couldn’t afford to lose, was her set of Hathor LPs.” She looked at me. “She had the entire run, original copies. Fourteen albums.”

  “I’m impressed. A girl who knows her West Coast jazz discographies.”

  “How could I forget? Those fucking fourteen albums haunted my teenage years.” She tried to take a puff on her cigarette, but it had gone out while she was talking. She took out her lighter and
relit it. “Anyway, after the big honey disaster we looked for the records she’d lost. And, without telling her, we eventually found a complete set of those fourteen titles. It wasn’t easy. We searched every record store in southern California. We surfed the net. We bust our asses. We spent a lot of money. It took us a year, but we found them. And we gave them to grandmother on her next birthday.” She took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled and squinted at me through the smoke.

  “She wouldn’t even listen to them. She just took one quick look at the records, said they weren’t the originals, then she threw them in the shit-can. Well, all except two of them. But we found those later.”

  “Not the originals?”

  “No,” she said. “It seems that was the deal breaker.”

  A passenger jet trundled in the sky high above us, coming in to land at Heathrow, leaving a white contrail against the blue. Ree studied the streaks of vapour, then looked at me. “We were all in tears, but she didn’t care. She was furious. I rescued the records from the garbage, but she said I ought to just burn them.”

  “So, not a brilliantly successful birthday present, then.”

  Ree shook her head and smiled. “No. She said if they weren’t the originals, they were no use to her.”

  “I wonder exactly what they were,” I said. “These non-original albums.”

  “I’ve got them here.”

  “Here? The records?”

  She looked at me. “Oh yeah.”

  I felt the first stirrings of an old familiar excitement. “Can I see them?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and we went inside. As we went through the kitchen she said, “What are you going to do with all these tomatoes?”

  “I’m using them to make sauce for pasta and pizzas. It’s the world’s easiest and tastiest sauce.”

  “Well, man, give me the recipe.”

  I said, “You just casserole the tomatoes with garlic and basil and thyme. And olive oil.”

  “Hang on, hang on.” She wrote it down, asked me about cooking times and temperatures, took the note and folded it and put it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said. “Now, those records. The funny thing is, Grandma didn’t seem that interested in playing them. She wanted them, but she didn’t want to listen to them.”