by John Elliott
‘No, you were fast asleep. I must have dropped off myself.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Hallie said wearily. ‘You’re back and not arrested or worse. That’s what’s important.’
‘Want some coffee? I’m going to do some fresh.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’m going to try and sleep some more. Did you get paid? You made sure?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got it. A final fee. Their election deal is over. I got Walter to come with me. It made it easier. He leaves tomorrow.’
‘I’m glad. You might not care, but their politics stink. People won’t forget this, you know. Lambert’s got influence. Crime they shrug at, but this is different. And Antoine?’
‘Not there. Not in the picture anymore according to the gospel-spouting brother, though I got him to choke on that shit. That’s one pleasure I enjoyed at least.’ He moved across and sat on the bed. ‘Why don’t we take a trip? We could go hot style. North Africa say. Give people time to forget.’
‘What’s brought this on? You haven’t done something?’ She reached for his hand. ‘Tell me you haven’t darling.’
He squeezed her flesh. ‘Nothing’s happened. All I’ve done is frighten people. I just reckon you need a break. Time away from the shitty routine. We’ve got enough to last a bit and then, well we’re not kids, reality won’t faze us. In a few days we could be off. Think about it.’
‘I don’t know, Emmet. We’ll see if you’re really serious. One thing is for sure though, I’ll be glad when Walter Sembele is on that plane. I haven’t forgotten the look he gave you at the restaurant. Pure malevolence. Malevolence with relish on the side.’
‘He plays the manipulator. He lays on the superstitious jive, but underneath he’s just another scared human being who knows his time is nearly up. Don’t worry about him. He’s a transient now.’
‘A transient?’
‘It’s an old phrase of Minty’s for someone who briefly gave us grief but wasn’t important enough to have his name remembered. Go back to sleep. I’ll try not to wake you.’
*
The illuminated figures of the digital clock above the glass door of the oven slid from 10.18 to 10.19. Outside, the possibility of light remained remote. Agnes dropped her breakfast plate and coffee cup into the plastic draining tray, dried her hands and went back to the bedroom, where she seated herself in front of the mirror and began applying her make-up. Emmet Briggs was due at half past.
Finished with her choice of lipstick, she picked up a bottle of her favourite scent and was about to dab some behind her ears and on the front of her wrists when she saw its removal had toppled over the typed envelope, addressed to Emily Brown, which had arrived in the morning post.
Momentarily interrupting her toilet, she spilled out its contents on the one still unencumbered patch of the dressing table, as if to verify with her own eyes the continuing existence of the concert ticket, the backstage pass and the accompanying explanatory note. It was true. This evening, Wilson Loumans was booked to play solo piano at the Veterinarian Hall. Thanks to her anonymous tape correspondent, she already knew of Loumans’ link to her father in the past. Now, according to Chance Company, the pianist held recent information concerning his whereabouts. Their note was again signed R. Ayza, an enigmatic squiggle which either meant he had lied to her last night when he said he knew nothing of her presence in Greenlea, or someone else persisted in misusing his name. Whichever it was, she resolved, while re-stoppering the bottle, to treat him with caution when she caught up with him later today at the Belvedere.
Raising her head, she noticed, through the wing of the mirror, that several of the unread pages she had dropped from the latest instalment of the Fernando story had somehow ended up under the bed. With a sigh, she got up, knelt down and stuck her arm and head forward in order to retrieve them.
No sooner had her outstretched fingers managed to gather them together than she experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu. In the enclosed space between the bed and the carpet, the discreet odour of her newly sprinkled scent seemed to hover in her nostrils, coalesce, then metamorphose into the more pungent and insistent smells of musk and patchouli. In her mind’s eye, her black low-heeled shoes grew into crimson sling backs many sizes too large for any feet. She sensed her fingers touch not these sheets of paper, but others, which she had randomly scribbled over and stuffed into an empty shoebox when she had heard her mother’s voice outside the door. But where and when exactly and why had she hidden away, dragging the box with her under the bed?
An aroma of perfumes she would never use, papers whose details were lost, crimson shoes that clattered on the wooden surround. She tried to concentrate on each in turn. Dressing up in her mother’s things had been one of her favourite games, games that Sula usually regarded with complicit amusement. Perhaps there had been an accident of some kind and she had clumsily spilled too much of her mother’s perfumes. Perhaps that was why the sense of their smell now lingered in her memory. If it had occurred it must have happened when she was around four or five. He would still have been there. The bed under which she crouched would have been his as much as Sula’s. What was it she had scribbled on and then concealed? If found out, it would surely have only earned her a mild rebuke. Was the uncertain shoebox her equivalent of her father’s bluebird tin? Had he brought with him to America, for some reason, his hated Sonny Ayza drawings? Was that why she had sensed their familiarity when she had stumbled across them here in the flat?
There was nothing more. She had no inkling of what had happened next. Whether the memory was something she had partly imagined or a real episode she could not say. She straightened up and put the rescued pages on top of the rest of the text. The outer door buzzer sounded. She answered it and slipped on her coat.
Emmet Briggs was waiting for her, his back to the entrance, staring out into the surrounding murk. ‘The car’s over there,’ he said, indicating the shrouded adjoining block.
‘Do you mind if we go to Polygon first? There’s someone I need to see at 70 Westgate and by then the weather might have lifted for the rest of the journey.’
Emmet nodded. ‘Okay. This won’t last. Sooner or later a wind’ll spring up and shift it.’
Agnes fell in with his stride. He had on a long-peaked cap of brown leather and a short coat of the same material. A pair of plum-coloured slacks leading down to tan loafers adorned with acorn-shaped tassels completed his dress. There was no one else about. ‘It doesn’t look far on the map,’ she said, ‘but I’m still trying to find my way around.’
‘It’s a weird area. It’s south-west from here. So we’re going in the right direction towards the estuary bridge. I can’t take too long though because I must be back in the city this afternoon.’
He unlocked the door of a grey saloon. Agnes climbed in beside him. She had expected to enter a part of his own particular space, but instead the interior was purely functional. She could spot nothing extraneous. There were no personal items on view.
‘What’s weird about Polygon?’ she took up when they reached the main road and were following the blurred outline of a tram.
‘It’s a newish suburb. A planner’s botched dream of alternative living, but the way things panned out it’s become an enclave for people getting ready to die. We’ve got a local saying, opened in Panalquin, matured in Greenlea, closed in Polygon.’
He carried on explaining the analogy, but Agnes was no longer listening. She was thinking about the person she hoped to meet on her unannounced visit. They drove on in resumed silence until they entered the tunnel beneath Lagran Castle Bluff.
‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ Emmet said, ‘something about the man whose photographs we saw last night and something about me. I don’t want you to get upset. Remember I said I’d guarantee your safety. You have my word on that.’
Agnes turned towards him. His face was troubled. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘As you guessed, he means a lot to me.’
Emmet kept h
is eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘Okay, just hear me out. I was freelancing, like now, when I first arrived here. You see, I’d learned to look out for myself in the style I’d got into before I left back home. Understand I was still a kid. The adrenalin buzz hitched me up through my first individual hits and then I moved on bit by bit into a few experimental stick-ups. Naturally, my pickings were so-so, haphazard you could say, and soon gone. Sure they bought me a few good clothes and now and then a second-hand car and women, a cavalcade of women who called me Joe, Buck or Freddy, whichever name I told them. Lie up a little was my plan. Another hit. Another good time. Easy come, easy go, that’s what I reckoned, but somehow deep inside I knew I was watching my time waste away. So when the Zamir brothers offered to put me on their payroll I was secretly relieved.’
He paused to check Agnes’s reaction then, as she said nothing, he went on, ‘The job was straightforward enough. I was always there to pick them up at the agreed places. After the heists, I guarded them in a sequence of furnished apartments and hotel rooms. I was careful not to listen when they discussed future plans, and when they indicated someone needed a spanking I took care of it. The thing is all the inevitable hanging about for days and days, weeks even, and then the operation is successfully carried out. Well, it’s best shared in others’ company. In truth, they were relatively small-time, but my percentage was okay, better than I’d grafted on my own. They gave me shape and, as it turned out a passport for the future.
‘Then Minty Wallace came along. You won’t have heard of him, but believe me at the time he was the guy, not just local but national too. One day he came up to me in the Pheasant Bar and said, “Listen son, I’m hearing about you. Good things, real good things. Maybe I could tolerate your company. Come in with me and your future’s writ large.”
‘Well, join him and you’d joined for life. Going against him wasn’t an option. I took his offer. Wallace’s outfit before long became my life, THE LIFE we used to call it, until I met my future wife. Even then, if I’m honest, but that’s maybe a word you don’t want me to say. Anyway, nobody, least of all me, would have guessed that in the end I’d be the one to survive. Him and Jimmy Massoura and the rest of the troops. Now, here I’m back on my own again scrabbling up stray bits and pieces, while all Minty once had is fat zero, only to be reinvented and packaged as part of the Panalquin Experience Walk for visiting tourists.’
They emerged from the tunnel into the continuing swathe of mist. Agnes felt an emptiness gather and expand inside her. The man at her side for whom she had held an instinctive warmth was a gangster capable of terrible acts. ‘What has this to do with my father?’ she forced herself to say.
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. They were his photographs we saw last night.’
‘I met him when I worked for Wallace. It was back in the sixties over on the south bank in a little country town called Veldar.’
Agnes’s sense of apprehension increased. Her private feelings about her errant father were one thing, but the possibility that he had been involved with criminals was quite another. ‘You’d better tell me about it,’ she said, as she stared out the windscreen at the slowly enlarging stretch of dual carriageway emerging through the mist.
Emmet did not reply at once. Thoughts of Corinne, Alakhin, who he was due to meet very soon, and Little Sammy Tyrell bothered him. ‘Always start with the corpse,’ that had been one of Alakhin’s watchwords, but he did not want to begin with one of Corinne’s bodies nor, for that matter, Little Sammy Tyrell’s. ‘The detective resurrects the victim, lives with them and through them until the murderer resurfaces.’ Alakhin again, philosophising during a TV reconstruction. Strange how he had never tangled with Minty or the organisation. It was as though all crime had been individual according to his remit.
‘I was waiting on the platform at Veldar Station,’ he said at last. ‘Manny The Pilot was in the car, probably taking a few toots from his hip flask to pass the time. Wallace, Jimmy Massoura and the Japanese contingent were already in session back up at the villa we’d rented. Joe May, your father, was expected on the next down train from Panalquin. For some unknown reason, he had insisted on coming alone all the way from America.’
‘Japanese? What Japanese? Why Japanese?’
‘The head oriental was called Manoko. Ute or something like that. He had a henchman, whose name I don’t remember, and four others. It was a balancing act between them and ourselves. Minty had chosen Veldar as a gesture away from Panalquin and Greenlea, but to tell the truth I always felt they held more clout during the negotiations even though we had the territorial advantage. What the deal really was or who brokered it I never knew, except your father fitted in the middle somehow. They were involved in sorting some franchise demarcation on a need to know basis and that didn’t include me.
‘Anyway, they finally closed the options. The Japanese departed. Your father, as far as I know, went back to the States. Minty had his lawyer and accountant work on the details, but after a month or so we heard that Manoko had died and the whole thing petered out. Minty drew in his horns and returned to business as usual.’
Agnes shivered slightly. A sign for the estuary bridge with a right turn to Polygon underneath appeared ahead. ‘What was he like?’ she whispered, swivelling her neck to watch Emmet as he filtered into the slip road. ‘What did you make of him?’
Emmet tried to think back. ‘A civilian. He struck me as a civilian. That was my immediate impression when he stepped off the train and walked towards me. He was younger than me, smaller and with a lazy stride. His clothes weren’t proud. They looked as if he had simply picked up the first things that came to hand: a houndstooth sports jacket and olive fatigue pants. Not right. Not right at all for the occasion. Either he was so naïve he didn’t realise what he was getting himself into or he just didn’t care a damn about his own safety or what people thought. I didn’t know for sure. Later Manny said to me, “The kid’s gone into the lions’ den. Mark my words we’ll be picking up the bones.” I understood what he meant because nobody had said, “Take him back or see him on the train.” In the event, he came on his own and he left on his own. Just opened the door and strolled down the road.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘He chattered away in the car on the way up. I didn’t pay him much mind. You see, I had him down as a lightweight. Manny said a few things. Manny was like that, an affable fellow, especially after he’d had a few drinks. When we got to the house and he was in the parleying, well I wasn’t there most of the time.’
Tears came unbidden to Agnes’s eyes. ‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘Last night was the first time. I hadn’t thought much about Veldar. This is near enough to Polygon and where you want to go.’
Emmet’s banal phrase cut through Agnes’s remaining defences. No, she did not want to go. She did not want to be here, sitting beside him, asking him, of all people, what he thought of her father. Why try to drag a ghost from obscurity even if he were still alive? Why not ditch Emmet here and at the same time Emily Brown? There had to be a train or a coach, if not a taxi, back the city centre. Within the day, she could be gone, pick up a flight and ask her mother’s forgiveness later.
They stopped in a parking lot. ‘It’s quicker on foot from here,’ Emmet said. ‘Most of Panalquin is pedestrianised.’
Agnes got out. The chill of the now rising wind made her cheekbones ache. Through bleary eyes, she saw they were high up on the exposed flank of a hillside. Over the crumbling stone balustrade in front of her, she made out a jumble of low-rise buildings descending to the bottom in the dispersing mist. Emmet strode out ahead, making for an opening which presumably led to the way down. Leave at once in the opposite direction or follow him and then go after the visit? Agnes remained undecided.
‘The funicular’s coming.’ Emmet turned and, seeing her still standing near the car, called out, ‘We don’t have to go if you’ve changed your mind. We can drive straight to Alakhin�
�s.’ He moved back towards her. ‘I knew I was taking a risk telling you what I used to do. You decide.’
‘And your wife, what does she decide? How does she manage to stay with someone who does what you do? At least, whatever my father did he cut himself off from my mother and me beforehand.’
Emmet stood where he was. Her shoulders twitched and her face convulsed in a spasm of grief. ‘My wife’s changed,’ he said softly, ‘but she’s never denied the thing we had, the thing I believe we have, the thing I hope we always will have. Your daddy wanted to make a killing, wanted to sell his soul maybe. I don’t know exactly, but he was only playing at it. He didn’t fool anybody who was in the life. Like I said, he was a civilian.’
Agnes watched his lips move. Some of his words escaped her because of the wind. Overtaken by anger, by the need to strike out at him, to beat at him with her fists, anything to dent his infuriating composure, she strode towards him. ‘I don’t want to live the hurt,’ she blurted out. ‘Since I’ve been here all I’ve done is magnify the hurt.’
‘Life isn’t good, Agnes Emily.’
The straggling drift of the mist bore a smell she only now realised, a strange smell. Her breath rose in shorter inhalations. She was up close to him, but unlike him she found she could not hit out so easily. Footsteps made her pause. A woman holding a child by the hand came through the opening and walked past them. ‘The funicular’s arrived,’ Emmet said. ‘Seventy Westgate wasn’t it?’
They were the only passengers in the old-fashioned wooden cabin. Sweet wrappers and rounds of orange peel littered the floor. Emmet positioned himself midway along the semicircular bench by the windows. Agnes sat opposite. ‘I imagined something more up to date,’ she said.
‘It’s deceptive. They’re new, but they’re designed old.’
A bell trilled twice. The doors came to. The cabin smoothly began its downward journey.
‘You must know Alakhin as well,’ Agnes said, looking over Emmet’s shoulder at the scar of ochre earth, running like a faltering ribbon between the frosted humps of grass and tangled bramble bushes which separated one building lot from another. ‘As an adversary, I mean.’