by John Harvey
“Okay, got it.”
“You don’t have to eat it all, you know.”
“No, that’s all right. It looks wonderful.” She eased back into the armchair. “Good job I just canceled my dinner date.”
Resnick looked at her curiously. Tarragon mustard was about to drip over the edge of the plate and automatically he caught it on his finger and placed it on his tongue.
“Steak or scampi with a feller from a building society. All he’ll want to do is talk mortgages and try and smile his way inside my pants. I’m glad for an excuse to be out of it. But not them.”
That’s what I am, thought Resnick: an excuse.
“Sorry.” She tried the coffee. “I didn’t shock you?”
“No.”
“A lot of men, they don’t like women to be outspoken.”
“The same men who cook by numbers?”
She gave him a warm, crooked-toothed smile. “I’ve been mixing with the wrong types, obviously. It’s the job that I do. Everyone expects a commission on everything. It’s all a hustle. No percentage: no sale.”
A car alarm went off somewhere down the street. Miles came across the carpet to sniff the leather of Claire Millinder’s boots and went on his way, disapprovingly. When Rachel had sat there, Resnick remembered, the cats had jumped up into her lap and purred.
“Look, you didn’t mind? I mean, it’s a bit of a cheek, I know …”
“As long as you were here …”
“Not feeding your cats, I didn’t mean that. I meant my still being here when you came home. I should have left with my clients, made sure the house was locked behind me.” She set down her plate on the arm of the chair, crossed one leg over another. “I wanted to snatch some time to myself. I don’t know, it felt good here, sort of … the place I’m living, three or four years old, one of those studio apartments where the bed folds back into the wall and there isn’t room to swing … well, you know what I mean. This is different, a bit shabby, but it’s large, lived-in. You feel that things have happened here.”
With the outside of his shoe, he pushed at the nursery door. Something stopped it and it would open no further.
“That’s it,” Claire repeated, “lived-in.”
Resnick glanced at the phone, willing it to ring. One half of Claire’s sandwich remained untouched. He got up and moved towards the stacks of records. “I’ll put on some music.”
“No. No, don’t”
“Sorry, I thought …”
“I’d rather talk.”
He looked down at her, the crossing and re-crossing of legs, the smile, a little uncertain now. “I think I’d rather not.”
Claire drew a slow breath, lowered her head. For some moments neither of them moved and then, with a nervous laugh, she got to her feet.
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“Funny?”
“Strange. I feel so comfortable here, comfortable with you. All right, I thought, I’ll sit here, talk, relax, get to know him, know you better.” She pressed the palms of her hands together, once, twice. “That’s not what you want”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well …” Claire picked up the plate and her mug and set them on a table. “Best thing is …” She was reaching into her bag. “… I should give you your keys back.”
Resnick shook his head. “No.”
“Someone else from the office …”
“No.” His hand closed over hers, over the keys. “You like the house, you said so. You can sell it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
When he drew his hand away, a splodge of yellow remained near the knuckle of her little finger, mustard.
“Look,” she said at the front door, “you may not want to act on them, but there are some things you could do. To make the place seem a better buy.” Resnick waited. “First off, shift the timer on your heating, waste a little money, leave it on right through the day. People come to a place like this and as soon as they see the size of it, they’ve got these huge bills flashing in front of their eyes-gas, electricity, lined curtains, double glazing. They assume it’s going to be difficult to heat, cold. Surprise them.”
“Second?”
“More money, I’m afraid. Nip into British Home Stores and splash out on a few more lamps. That’ll help to make it look warm, too. Brighter.”
“There’s more?”
“Get a good cleaning person. A professional. I’m not saying regularly, just once, a whole day, two days.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“All of it?”
Resnick held the door for her as she stepped out on to the path. The street lamp elongated her shadow across the patchy grass. The repeated whine of a car alarm, the same as before, different.
“If I’m showing people round, I’ll make sure and phone first.”
“Leave a message at the station.”
“Of course.”
Now that she was outside the house, neither of them really wanted her to go.
“You still think I should drop the price?”
“Maybe not. Not yet, anyway.”
“All right. Good night.”
“’Night. And, listen …”
“No, it’s all right.”
“’Night.”
“’Night.”
He heard Claire Millinder’s footsteps, heard the door of her Morris Minor open and close. The car alarm was still sounding and he wondered how long it would be before someone came to attend to it, the owner or a passing policeman. Claire’s headlights cut a moving arc across the opposite wall and he caught a glimpse of her face before it was gone from sight.
Back in the living room, Dizzy and Pepper were picking their way fastidiously through the remains of her sandwich. Resnick looked at his records, thought about Johnny Hodges, thought about Lester Young, finally couldn’t decide. He walked into the kitchen and opened a drawer and removed the unopened letter from his former wife. Postmark: Abergavenny. He lifted the bowl from the sink, turned to the cooker and lit the gas. The flame licked along one edge of the envelope and held. When it was truly alight, Resnick dropped it into the sink and poked at it with the end of a knife, watching it burn.
The ashes he flushed away until nothing remained.
Fifteen
“Harold!” the voice had said, authentic as spaghetti sauce just-like-mamma makes (Mfr. Rotherham, Yorks.). “Freeman and I are at the Royal, the Penthouse Bar, be great if you joined us for a couple of drinks. Loosen up. Limber down. Give us all a chance to talk things through.”
“Screw,” said Harold, “you.”
He sounded as though he meant it.
“Who was that?” Maria had called from the stairs. Beneath her robe her legs were still shiny from her bath. The amount of time she spends slopping around in that thing, thought Harold, the rest of her wardrobe might go for junk.
“Nobody.”
“It must have been somebody.”
“That’s what he’d like us to believe.”
Harold left his wife to her own conjectures and his talcum powder and went off in search of solace. What he could have done with, right then and there, were a couple of lines of coke, let the linings of his nose know who was boss. Pow! Was it true, he wondered, opening a bottle of the next best thing, all those rock stars of the seventies, having their nostrils rebuilt from the inside? Harold shuddered: silver plate.
He looked at the depth of alcohol in his glass and decided to double it.
“Harold! Pour me a drink and bring it up here.”
He went over to the door and closed it on her screeching. “Screw you,” he said quietly, careful lest she hear and think he was being serious.
“Look at that, over there. Look at those.”
Grabianski peered around a giant pot plant, a decorated column. “Where?”
“There. Jesus, how can you miss them? The table in the corner, past the piano.”
Grabianski saw two women, mid-twenties, blac
k dresses slashed low, enough gold to affect the commodities index. “What about them?”
“Let’s go over.”
“Go over?”
“Join them.”
“Together?”
“What d’you mean, together?”
“At the hip?”
“Jerry, you’re not on something, are you?”
“Just hungry.”
“You’d prefer food to that?”
“Infinitely.”
Grice shook his head in near despair.
“Besides,” said Grabianski, “they’re probably waiting for somebody.”
“Sure. The first man to dangle a room key in front of them and ask them to feel his wallet.”
“We don’t have a room key.”
“We have better. A flat five minutes’ walk away.”
Grabianski stood up.
“That’s more like it,” Grice said. “Only mine’s the one on the left. Okay?”
Grabianski couldn’t see any difference. “That’s not where I’m going,” he said.
“You’re going to take another piss?”
“Going to eat. You stay here and catch an expensive sexually transmitted disease.”
Grice grabbed hold of Grabianski’s jacket. They were both wearing their best suits, the ones they had worn to burgle both the Roy and the Stanley houses. It had been Grabianski’s idea: he had been brought up on stories of Raffles, the gentleman burglar. His favorite movie was Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. When he looked in the mirror he was always disappointed not to see Cary Grant.
“We’ve left it too late,” said Grice, disgruntled.
“To eat?”
“Look.”
A couple of men had sat at the women’s table and were talking animatedly, craning their necks towards the display of cleavage, thinking already of the lies they would tell to their wives.
“Let’s go,” said Grabianski. “Still Chinese?”
“Chinese.”
Maria Roy changed what she was wearing three times before coming downstairs. It would have helped had she been able to recall which of her outfits Harold had last expressed an interest in, even noticed. Finally she settled for a silky suit, high at the neck, loose-fitting trousers, the color of tangerine. Perfume at the wrists, behind the ears, a dab or two between her breasts before raising the zip to the raised collar.
When she walked into the lounge Harold was so far into the bottle she might as well have wrapped herself in yesterday’s bin liners.
He was stretched out on the settee, one leg on, one off; there were three glasses arranged along the floor, each of them partly full. “That was Mackenzie,” he said. “On the phone, earlier. The shit wanted me to go to and slime around this fucking Freeman Davis, fucking little asshole, fucking little pervert.”
Who? Maria thought: Mackenzie or Davis? And who was Davis anyway?
“Ease me out, that’s what they think they’re going to do. Little by little, little by fucking step. Freeman can handle this, why don’t you let Freeman take care of that? Relax, Harold, learn to let go a little. Keep your eye on the overall picture, let Freeman cope with the day to day. Yes, fucking Freeman.”
He leaned on one elbow, reached down towards the glasses and missed all three of them.
“Fuck him! Fuck them all. Only reason they want me up in that fucking Penthouse Bar is so they can stand me by the window and push me out.”
Harold leaned too far and rolled, slow-motion, on to the carpet and was still.
“Fuck,” he said.
There was a glass panel between the sections of the restaurant, a screen, and somehow sculpted on it, in relief, the largest king prawn Grabianski had ever seen.
“Imagine that with garlic,” Grabianski said.
“Not while we’re sharing the same bathroom, I can’t.” They walked through the lobby, low black tables holding thickly padded menus, a party of four enjoying a polite G and T or two before moving to their table. A tall Chinese wearing a dinner jacket asked them if they would like a drink and they ignored him, up two steps past the end of the screen and into the body of the restaurant. The waitress moved confidently on high heels, in a skirt that was tight and split well above her right knee. “This way, gentlemen, please.” Her accent was almost pure Suzie Wong, with only a trace of the Notts-Derbyshire border.
Grabianski smiled as he shook his head and pointed off into the corner.
Grice nearly fell over his own feet staring at her leg.
“This place going to be good?”
“Rumor has it,” said Grabianski.
“Either way,” said Grice, looking round, “we’re going to pay for it.”
It never ceased to surprise Grabianski that a man who would blow £40 on fifteen minutes of massage relief could gripe continuously about a meal that went into double figures.
“May I get you gentlemen a drink?”
“Lager,” said Grice. “Pint.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we do not serve pints.”
“No lager?”
“We have only half pints.”
“Bring me two. Right?”
“Of course, sir.” She smiled a weary smile towards Grabianski. “For you, sir?”
“Tea. Please.”
“Chinese tea?”
“Yes.”
Deftly, she removed the pair of long-stemmed wine glasses, opened menus before each of them and moved off towards the bar.
“We’ll have the set meal for two.” Grice slapped the menu closed.
Grabianski shook his head.
“You know what your trouble is, don’t you?” said Grice.
“I expect you’re going to tell me.”
“Used to be, all you wanted out of life was another species to check off in your bird book and another sodding mountain to climb. Now it’s poncey restaurants and other men’s wives.”
“I think,” said Grabianski evenly, “I’m going to have the chicken and cashew nuts and the sizzling monkfish with spring onions and ginger. Oh, and the monk’s vegetables. Special fried rice, what d’you think?”
The waitress arrived with two glasses of lager, Grabianski’s tea and a decorated cup with a gold rim.
“May I take your order now?”
Grice jabbed his finger down the menu, ordering by the numbers; the waitress seemed to have transposed them on to her pad almost before he read them out. From Grabianski she got the words and an encouraging smile.
“And bring me a knife and fork,” said Grice to her back as she walked away.
Maria Roy made a perfect 0 with her lips and released a near-perfect smoke ring. Across the room, Harold had crawled back on to the couch and was snoring lightly. The television picture was on, the sound no more than a murmur. Maria was sitting in a deep armchair, legs tucked beneath her, ashtray and glass on either arm, reading. The trouble with shopping-and-fucking books was once you’d read one you’d read them all. And she distrusted all those female managing editors or PR directors who could reach orgasm at the touch of a button, enjoy oral sex between ground and eleventh floors in the executive lift, then step into a full meeting of the board, dabbing their lips with a scented tissue.
Even so, it made her aware of a certain itch; brought back the pressure of Jerry Grabianski’s thumbs at the center of her breasts, the weight of him on top of her. The care with which he had loved her.
Harold jumped in his sleep, threw out an arm and snorted loudly.
“Jesus, Harold!” shouted Maria. “Why don’t you shrivel up and die!”
Six hundred and forty-eight pages of wish fulfilment missed his sleeping head by inches. Why don’t I keep quiet about Jerry’s offer, Maria thought? Let him think the cocaine’s gone for good and wait until his dealer cuts him into four-inch squares. Serves the sorry bastard right!
She stubbed out her half-finished cigarette and lit another. Standing over her husband of more than twenty years, she saw the wisps of hair that curled from his ears, no longer gray but white, worry
lines spreading from the edges of his mouth, the way his eyelid twitched compulsively, another in a succession of bad dreams. The rug was pulled out from under his career and, through no real fault of his own, it was likely his life was in danger.
She hated him.
“How’s your pork?”
“It’s okay.”
“Better than usual?”
“Okay.”
“Because if it’s anywhere near as good as this chicken …”
“Jerry.”
“Yes.”
“The pork is pork, all right?”
“Mm.”
“So can we get back to business?”
“Go ahead.”
“Two places and then we’re out.”
“Out?”
“As in, over and.”
Grabianski lifted a piece of green pepper with his chopsticks, dipped it into black bean sauce, then bit into it, thoughtfully. “How come?”
“Sources,” said Grice.
Grabianski looked at his bowl, the dishes resting on hotplates. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Drag your mind from your stomach a minute. Up to now they’ve been-what d’you call it?”
“Impeccable.”
“Now I’m not so sure. I think a couple more at most.”
Laughter rose from the round table near the center of the room, coarse and loud, and echoed, one diner to another. Voices raised, the clatter of dishes as a hand came slamming extravagantly down. From the corner of his eye, Grabianski saw the manager appear at the far end of the screen.
“And then?”
“What d’you mean, and then? Like always, we scarper.”
Grabianski sipped jasmine tea. “How about this flat? Didn’t you tell her three months minimum?”
“I told her what she wanted to hear.”
A black woman walked in with a white escort, guided by the waitress towards their table. From the middle of the restaurant rose the unmistakable chant of the British football fan, the repeated sound of supposed chimpanzees.
“Banana fritters for that one!”
The laughter was raucous and harsh. The couple pretended not to hear.
“You know what I feel about unnecessary risks,” said Grice. “What we’ve always felt. It’s why we’ve kept clear of the law for as long as we have.”