by Paul Harris
Chapter Thirteen
Hell is a City
“Hell is a city much like London. A populous and smoky city where small justice is shown, and still less pity.”
Cak Lazlo had a new job and it suited him down to the ground. He had been introduced, by a mutual acquaintance, to a man in an office; an office that was little more than the backroom of a back-street gambling den. The man had a lot of friends and a lot of money. He had spoken to Cak at length about going places, achieving ambitions, and about the cream rising to the top. He had pointed out that Cak was that cream. He had asked Cak a lot of questions. He had asked him if he had ever killed a man and had been extremely impressed with Cak’s confident response. The man had been able to furnish Cak with gainful employment on the spot without any paperwork or National Insurance numbers to complicate matters. The man had demanded loyalty and, in return, he had given Cak the keys to the company motor pool.
And now, Cak was no longer attired in the worn paramilitary clothing of former times. Instead, he was wearing an expensive three quarter length black leather coat and tan leather brogues. He drew his finger along the scar on his cheek and spat on the floor. A woman, who was cowering in a corner, cringed as he spat. She had only, that very morning, scrubbed and polished the tiled kitchen floor. She had still been on her hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water when Cak had violently assaulted the front door with his knuckles. The child had opened the door; a child of about nine years of age, who now clung to her mother, pleading silently with wide open eyes.
Her father, in great distress, was rather animatedly explaining something to Lazlo. He had his hands clasped together in supplication, appealing to Lazlo’s better nature. But Cak Lazlo possessed no better nature. He did not feel the pain of others. The image of Cak Lazlo holding a bread knife to her father’s throat as he wept for his life would leave the little girl traumatised for many years to come.
“But, I don’t have it!” her father stammered.
Cak seemed displeased. With a sudden and rapid movement he placed his empty hand around the man’s throat and began to squeeze. The woman could not suppress an agonising yelp. The child started to cry, wiping her face on her mother’s apron. The man sank to his knees.
“You have to pay me,” said Cak, slowly and deliberately. “You have no choice.”
“I can pay you in two weeks,” gasped the debtor as the colour of blood poured into his face.
“You have only one week. I will return in a week from today. Believe me, I’ll be back.”
“I believe you!”
Cak released the grip on his windpipe and his child ran towards him, throwing her arms around his neck.
“And if you’re not here, then I’ll hunt you down. I’ll hunt you like a man hunts a bear, and then I will kill you.” Cak spat on the floor again and, as he turned to leave, firstly giving the woman a glare of some significance, he swept a pile of china plates from a worktop. They smashed on the floor as the man climbed to his feet.
The Portrait of a Killer
Even Buffalo and Lola get bored sometimes. They were alone and together; a recipe for nothing more than general antagonism; strumming their fingers on the polished surface of the bar and sighing indignantly at one another’s limp attempts to spark conversation. Drinking beer had become a routine, similarly as mundane as any other routine. The bar staff were disinterested and so were the drinkers. Today, there seemed to be an air of antipathy between the two sides. The drinkers were peculiarly unenthusiastic about drinking and the staff were equally so about serving them.
“It’s gone back to how it was.”
“What has?”
“This gaff.”
Lola sighed but refused to be drawn into anything resembling conversation. Things were always quiet either side of a bank holiday weekend and today was no exception. A black Labrador slept soundly at the feet of a man who was reading the local Gazette. As he wearily turned the newspaper around to check the cricket report, Lola caught sight of the headline on the front cover. He’d seen it before, earlier in the day. An appeal was being lodged by one of the men who had been convicted of a vicious murder in the neighbourhood some few years earlier.
“Where’s Rod?”
Buffalo shrugged. “Text him.”
“You text him.”
“You haven’t worked out how to text yet, have you?”
Lola sighed again.
“Okay, I’ll text him. Fancy one down the Volunteer?”
“You don’t like the Vol.”
“Do you, or not? Make your mind up before you get the next round in.”
“Before I get the next round in?” repeated Lola with some degree of incredulity. “I got the last one in!”
Buffalo gazed at his friend with what could only be described as astonishment.
“I did!” reiterated Lola.
“Playing those games again, are we? Okay, I’ll get yet another one in down the Vol.”
Lola held his glass to his lips and drained the very last dregs from it, and then muttered, “Yet another one, my arse,” to himself, and then said to Buffalo, “Text Rodney and let him know where we’re going.”
As they prepared to take their leave, Buffalo took his phone from his pocket and began to key in his secret password. His head bent down and his phone in front of his face, he didn’t notice the Labrador now lying prostrate across the floor of the pub. As his suede desert boot pressed down on the dog’s tail, the animal sprang to its feet with a piercing yelp. Buffalo lost his balance and, still clinging to his phone and gazing at the screen, lunged toward the table where the man had folded and placed his newspaper. The man’s glass went over as Buffalo inelegantly collided with it and the last mouthfuls of cider spilled out over his newspaper, blurring a black and white photograph, a familiar face, the portrait of a killer.
The man was magnanimous under the circumstances and required no recompense. His dog walking duties had been fulfilled and he was about to embark on the return leg, home to a mouthful of Listerine to disguise the smell of apples. The dog found a corner to cower in as Buffalo and Lola finally departed, Lola in a fit of unsuppressed giggles and Buffalo still attempting to unlock his I-phone.
The fresh air, although stiflingly muggy on that particular day, seemed to do them good as they took the short walk from public house to public house. Their spirits were lifted and their conversation became more animated. Buffalo put his phone back in his pocket.
“What did Rod say?” asked Lola, still flushed with amusement.
“I don’t know yet!” snapped Buffalo, still flushed with embarrassment. “I only just sent it. Can’t you walk any quicker?”
“Not in this heat, no.”
“You need to lose some weight.”
“Look who’s talking.”
As they passed the entrance to the Underground station, a double-decker bus passed them. A young woman was vacantly staring out of one of the lower deck windows. She was pretty but lost, with wide, searching eyes. As Buffalo passed comment on the haunting nature of the young lady’s expression, he realised that Lola was no longer at his side. He stopped and turned around, looking back towards the station entrance but could not see Lola trundling up behind him. A beggar sat in the entrance with a dog curled up beside him. He had an empty tin between his knees with the word “help” scrawled on the side. Passengers side-stepped the forlorn figure, who could not have been more than twenty-four years old, as they hurried for their trains. Some small coins were thrown nonchalantly into the tin and Lola, with a complacent grin on his face, emerged from the station.
“Where’ve you been?” demanded Buffalo.
“Burger!” was the one-word reply as Lola swallowed whole, without chewing.
Buffalo shook his head in resignation. “Is it raining in there?”
“I told you, it’s hot. I sweat a lot when it’s hot.” Lola took another huge bite of his burger and, as he did so, its contents slid out from between the bun and landed on the p
avement at his feet. Lola was distraught and paid no heed to the mound of tomato ketchup that was beginning to pour down the front of his t-shirt.
“No one sweats that much,” said Buffalo, “it’s not humanly possible.”
Lola tossed the bread into a nearby litter bin. “I do.”
“Well, give your head a wipe, but not with your shirt. You’ll look like you’ve been in a car crash.”
And then Lola noticed the stains down his shirt. He stretched the white cotton fabric across his rotund stomach to make a formal examination. “Clean on, this was!”
“Yeah, last week, maybe.”
At the entrance to the Volunteer, Lola paused again and leant against a stone sill. He licked his dry lips and could taste salt on them from the numerous beads of sweat that had threaded their way between the features of his face during their short walk.
“What now?” asked Buffalo.
“Just catching my breath.”
“We’ve only walked a hundred yards!”
“It’s more than that!”
“A hundred and fifty?”
Lola took a huge breath and levered himself into an upright position.
“You look like you’re going to have a coronary.”
“I feel like I’m going to have a coronary!” Lola pushed the door open, staggered into the Volunteer, and found respite on a barstool.
Pushkin
Although a mere novice at the art of persuasion, Cak Lazlo felt that he had delivered his message extremely clearly and that his client would be far more forthcoming on the occasion of their proposed meeting set for one week hence. With a satisfied smile, he put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and began to retrace his steps back to his car which he had parked at a discrete distance away. Turning a corner, he vanished into the early evening commute. People were hurrying all around him, carrying shopping bags and briefcases and rolled-up newspapers. They milled around outside the station, waiting for taxis and buses. A beggar sat on the floor, eyeing Cak’s leather jacket as it flapped past his head, with a strange expression between defeat and curiosity.
Cak had more names and more addresses yet to be visited. They were carefully written into the leather-bound pocketbook that he carried everywhere with him. These were of no great urgency though. He had time to do a little research, follow the connections and join the dots, before finding the best way to strike and to get the result that his employer demanded of him.
He paused outside a public house. Purely out of instinct, he paused; a gut instinct. Someone had written on the white rendered wall of the pub in black marker pen; two words: “Don’t Forget”. Cak never forgot anything. Although he despised drunks; those that idled their time and money away, whilst all around them were fortunes to be made, he nevertheless pushed the door open and entered the bar. As the sparsely scattered drinkers turned to face him, they saw in Cak Lazlo’s face the very soul of pertinacity.
He eyed them all with a malicious scowl, each one by turn; and each one turned from him with a shudder. That is, apart from two men, who had paid no heed whatsoever to his arrival. They were sitting at the bar, one of them leaning heavily on his elbow, ensconced in their own voluble conversation. Cak approached the bar and stood only yards away from them and still they paid him no attention. A barmaid appeared in front of him, wearing a well-practised flirtatious smile.
“What can I get you?” she asked, cheerfully.
Cak did not reciprocate her smile. He uttered but one word, “Espresso”.
Taken slightly aback by his curtness, her smile faded, and she too gave an involuntary shudder as she felt a vague chill beginning to permeate the atmosphere. She brought him his coffee and set it down on the bar. As she reached for the change that he had left there for her, a roar of laughter sounded from a far corner of the room. There was more laughter, and loud attempts at animal noises, and still more raucous laughter. Cak gently tapped the back of her hand with one of his large rusty fingertips. She looked into his face and saw him silently express curiosity.
She snatched her hand away, clutching the money in her clenched fist. “The golf society,” she explained. “I’m sorry about the noise. They play every Wednesday.”
Cak glanced at the clock that hung amongst the spirits behind the bar. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. “Golf makes you very drunk then.”
The barmaid laughed nervously and then went to see why the golfers were making such a commotion. The newcomer’s perceived objection to the boisterousness of the golf society had now drawn the attention of the two men who were sitting languidly at his side. Cak noticed that one of them had a novel and most distinctive way of adorning his clothing with some kind of sauce. It was he who spoke first, wobbling a little as he struggled to raise himself upright on his barstool. “They’re just having a laugh, mate.” Sweat glistened on the man’s shiny scalp. “You should try it sometime.” The man smiled triumphantly as if he had delivered words of genius.
Lazlo turned away and, if anything, his scowl deepened and his brow became more furrowed.
The second man ran his fingers through his part ginger, part brown, part grey beard. “He don’t look happy,” he whispered to the fat man with the sauce stains.
“Happy!” spat Lazlo without looking up at his tormentors. “A wise man once said that happiness is your biggest enemy. It weakens you. It puts doubt in your mind. Suddenly you have something to lose. That man was right.” He took a sip of coffee. “Do you imbeciles have anything to lose?”
Buffalo and Lola gave each other nervously searching glances. Each looked as confused as the other. “Nutter,” mouthed Lola silently.
“Did he call us imbeciles?” whispered Buffalo.
“I have a dog called Android,” said Lola, addressing Cak. “He gets lost all the time.”
“You are a drunkard and you are a fool and you will die in solitude, like Pushkin’s Russian knight, silent, sad, and bereft of reason.” With his analysis of Lola’s fate more or less complete, Cak finished his coffee, spat on the floor, and left them with confusion still buzzing loudly in their heads.
“They like a bit of leather in the East,” remarked Lola to his friend as soon as the stranger was out of earshot.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that before.”
“Who’s this Pushkin geezer he’s on about anyway?”
“He’s right, you know. You are an imbecile.”
“Why?’
“You really never heard of Pushkin?” Buffalo was almost speechless.
“No, I really never heard of him.”
Buffalo took a mouthful of beer and swallowed it with a complacent air. “He played for Real Madrid in the sixties; the great Madrid team. They won everything, they did.”
Lola shrugged.
“Hungarian geezer, from Bucharest,” Buffalo continued, dazzling Lola still further with the infinite depth of his knowledge.
Next Door’s Cat
There was sunshine and there was snow. Both at once, together, and at the same time, and this strange anomaly drew me to the window where I peered out at a wonderful spectacle. But, it wasn’t snowing, it was blossom blowing in the wind, high up into the sky where it danced and darted until there was a lull in the breeze and the delicate petals slowly descended to the ground like so many parachutists, until the wind picked up again and the performance was repeated.
I looked out upon a magnificent summer’s day. The sun beat down with savage ferocity and steam was rising in a haze from the tarmac road. The sky truly was sky blue with not a single cloud to augur the end of the well-reported heat wave. And although the trees lining the opposite side of the street were now almost shorn of their erstwhile beauty, birds lined every branch and bough and rejoiced as they zealously harvested a bountiful crop of plump red fruit. They raised their open beaks and, as one incoherent choir, sang a rapturous praise to summer.
In the melee, cherries, literally bursting with juice, dropped from the trees onto the grass verges below. I watched two thrushes
swoop down to the ground where they stood and whistled in triumph before gorging themselves of their bounty. Whilst the two birds and I were otherwise distracted, a silent danger lurked nearby. Next door’s tabby cat was crouched, completely motionless except for the occasional twitch of his tail. His whiskers bristled with anticipation as he eagerly watched the two songbirds obliviously pecking at the fallen fruit.
He crept towards them ever so slightly and then froze again. Still, he could not control the instinctive movements of his tail. He opened his mouth wide, exposing his sharp white teeth, almost as if he were yawning with boredom. There he crouched for what seemed an indeterminate amount of time, stealthy, and patient; far more patient than I could ever have been. He watched the birds hop amongst the dry grass, foraging and pecking as if he were a curious observer, an ornithologist with a passion for wildlife.
He strained as if he were about to creep forward once more or even execute a fatal pounce and, then, a commotion altered the scene beyond recognition. It was as if an artist’s canvas was being torn to shreds. The birds in the trees flapped and wailed, and climbed to the highest branches. Their chatter became a more sombre chorus. Next door’s cat leapt towards his prey, but they had taken flight before he had even left the ground, and were not at all aware of his threatening presence.
I heard the bark of a dog, and then another, and so did next door’s cat. Even from my window, I could see his ears stiffen, the tension in his limbs, and the curve of his spine. The shrill and excitable shouts of a man could not stem the barking which was becoming more repetitive and aggressive. The cat leapt for a tree but could not climb it. His claws slid back down the trunk as they splintered the bark. He ran in a circle into the road and then swiftly raced away into the distance.
Two dogs came chasing after, straining on their leads, and Bo Billox agitatedly skipping along after them. “Heel!” he was shrieking, “Heel!” The dogs ploughed on heedlessly, quickening their pace until the little man with no neck was forced to break into a sprint. Next door’s cat was well out of sight and gone by now, but still the dogs would not give up their pursuit.