And so it was that I walked into the trap with my eyes wide open.
As I came alongside the car, the nearside rear window was lowered. I looked in. The man was sitting on the far side of the car, the coffee in his hands. The couple in front, a man and a woman, were wearing suits. The man with the coffee caught my eye, but the look did not have the same apocalyptic depth with which he had regarded me earlier.
I held his gaze for a few moments, then I reached out, opened the car door and got in. As I settled into the seat and closed the door, I noticed that he gave a small nod to one of those in the front. A look that said he had completed his part of the bargain, and that the rest was up to them.
The woman turned and looked at me for a few moments, as if studying my face, making sure she had the right person. Perhaps she hadn't been expecting me to have a beard.
No one spoke. Then there was a gun. I had time for one thought. A gun? Why was there a gun? This was no place for a gun. I had never seen a gun in my life, not for real, not in someone's hand, and certainly not pointing at me.
Why was there a gun? That was my last thought, and then there was nothing more. Not from that small street just across the road from the café where I'd worked for the previous five years.
And the next time I was really aware of anything, I was sitting at a desk in a small, square room, and the two people from the front of the car were sitting opposite me asking why I hadn't died in the plane crash.
Part Two
22
The common language of coffee is changing. In the old days, before the marketing world had got hold of it, coffee was mellow or strong or smooth. Now it has understated spice aromas, or an elusive syrupy texture, it erupts on the palate and explodes on your tongue, it's citrusy and vibrant, sometimes lemon, more often grapefruit, it's nutty and velvety, chocolaty on the nose, with a smooth, dry finish hinting of almonds. Beans from Africa and the Middle East produce a surprising and exciting coffee, floral, with citrus and berry flavours; the South and Central American beans produce a familiar, unadulterated coffee, oozing nuttiness and cocoa; the Asian coffees are audacious and insistent, earthy and herbal. Flowers/nuts/herbs.
It's throwing words around, tossing them up in the air and picking some of them out at random. People can't just drink something and say, yep, that's good, or, a little too strong for me, or, hmm, could do with a touch more milk. Everything has to be caked in obfuscation, and just like the finest confectionary is enrobed in the very best Belgian chocolate, coffee itself is now enrobed in words.
It conflicts me. I enjoy that side of it, enjoy the swagger and the metaphor and the microscopic shades of insinuation, yet the conceit of it all is like fingernails drawn down a blackboard. Maybe it's because I'm from the west of Scotland. At even the slightest suggestion of artifice and pretention, you would be shot down and told to pull your neck in. There are two types of cups of coffee in the world. Good and bad. With slight variations. That's how I was brought up.
Even that will likely be changing now. I'm from the last generation of people who looked askance at posturing and affectation. Now it's taken for granted.
Then there's the other thing, something which I rarely admit to anyone. I don't have the nose or the palate for it. I try, I've done endless company tasting sessions, coffee cupping, but I struggle to separate one cup from the next. I've listened to the experts, who have extolled the virtues of one bean over another, who have pointed out the difference of applying forty pounds of pressure when tamping (levelling the coffee in the filter head) over more or less pressure, water at precisely 93°C, espresso machine pressure set at 9 atmospheres, the precise size of the coffee grounds, exactly 10g of coffee for 180ml of water for filter coffee, endless variables that can make a million, billion different cups of coffee from the same beans. Or, if you're me, just the one cup.
It's fun though, and I like it, and when you get someone who takes it too seriously, with the conceit of the coffee connoisseur, commenting affectedly on the notes and the palate and the finish, it's easy enough to glance over their shoulder at the next non-connoisseur in the room and share an amused eyebrow, although my amusement would be covering my envy.
Despite my upbringing, maybe I could have drifted into being one of those people, disguising my own lack of palate with hubris and a few rehearsed phrases, but now I have Brin and Baggins to shoot me back down.
In my café, we serve coffee. People drink the coffee. Then they leave.
*
There was never much decoration on the walls of the Stand Alone. An old Klimt print in a battered frame – I assumed it was a print, but then liked to think that it was an original; a map of the world, a map that seemed more out of date every day we went to the café in the early '90s, as eastern Europe fragmented; and the Sgt. Pepper album sleeve. It wasn't a large poster of the most famous album cover of all time, the Beatles in fancy dress surrounded by cardboard cut-outs, but the actual vinyl sleeve, bent at the edges round the shape of the disc where it had once been thrust into a bag.
That was all. The café was bright, and had a wonderful feel. It was designed to be somewhere that made you want to sit in and hang around, to have a second cup of coffee or that pastry you really didn't need. Big windows, lots of sunlight – well, it was Glasgow, so perhaps there wasn't so much sun, but there was light – and a warmth and cosiness about the place.
I stood on the promenade by the Clyde outside the Stand Alone for the first time in twenty years. I'd arrived in Glasgow from Dubai the night before and checked into the Marriott at Anderston. I'd slept in a bed for the first time in four months, although I was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that it had been that long.
From the Marriott, that morning, it had been a short walk down to the river and then along to the Stand Alone.
The windows were still floor to ceiling, but the lower two thirds were now darkened so that you could no longer see the patrons inside. The window in the middle had been embossed with the name Stand Alone, but with sub-standard material or paint, so that several of the letters looked faded. Similarly the guttering looked old and in need of repair. I'd never noticed the guttering before. I don't suppose one does, unless it's in a bad way.
From the outside at least, the café was rundown. I walked towards it without trepidation, nevertheless. It wasn't as though I was coming here out of nostalgia or because of some old-fashioned romantic notion. I hadn't thought about the Stand Alone so much in recent years, and now it was just somewhere I had to go in order to get my life back.
I opened the door and stepped inside. Everything looked the same, just older. The counter was in the same position at the back, the tables and chairs were all, as far as I could recall, in exactly the same places, and indeed were likely to be exactly the same tables and chairs.
For some reason my eyes immediately went to the album cover of Sgt. Pepper. It was still hanging in the same position, although it looked slightly different from my position by the door.
'Close the door, mate, eh? It's Baltic.'
I nodded at the woman seated nearby and closed the door, wondering how long I'd been standing taking in the old scene. And she was right. Springtime in Glasgow, and the living is freezy.
She was alone at a table, there were a few other tables occupied. There was little conversation and no music playing. I felt like my walking in had been the only thing to happen in the joint in the last half hour.
I walked towards the counter. Janine was there, as somehow I'd known she would be. Janine, like Coronation Street or your wonderful old uncle who never seems to grow any older, would always be there. If the Stand Alone was still standing, Janine was going to be there too.
She watched me as I approached. As I got to the counter I glanced up at the cover of the LP. Closer now I could see why it was different. Black marker lines had been put through the faces of John, Ringo and George. Only Paul, in his shiny, light blue tunic, standing behind the drum, holding the cor anglais, had bee
n left untouched.
I stared at it for a second then looked at Janine. There was a younger guy – who wouldn't even have been at school the last time I was in here – making someone a coffee behind the bar. It wasn't obvious for whom, among this sad collective of customers, it was being made.
'Ringo's not dead,' I said. 'Why's he crossed out?'
Actually, why would you cross out John and George because they were dead?
Janine looked up at the album and then back to me.
'It's not about being dead,' she said. 'You of all people should know that.'
Life had been something of a head scratcher for some months now, and I'd been getting by largely by not thinking too much about things. Thinking only left me in a worse mental state than when I started. I needed to switch off and be business-like. Take everything at face value and analyse how it would help me move forward to my ultimate goal of going home to Brin and Baggins.
Comments such as You of all people should know that did not help, however. What was I to make of that? I really didn't know.
'Can I have a flat white, please, Janine?' I asked.
Ask fifty baristas from fifty different cafés how they make their flat white, and you'll get fifty different answers. One shot or two, always medium size, or the size the customer requests, a small latte, or the same size but served in a different cup, or completely different from a latte (of course it's completely different from a latte!), steamed milk and a small layer of microfoam (that thing baristas make using the steam wand on their espresso machines), or no milk and all microfoam folded into the espresso for the velvet texture throughout, a latte with less milk, a cappuccino with less froth...
To the disdainful it's the very essence of today's style over substance society, just a slightly different way to put milk, foam and coffee into a cup. To my kin in the coffee world – and even to the likes of me, who would buy coffee beans by throwing darts at a map – it's the essence of a civilised society. The nuance of small things in a society that has moved on from wars and crime and rape. (Although, clearly the nuance of small things needs to co-exist and thereby push those more serious issues into the past, rather than wait for them to leave the table.)
Janine nodded. It did feel kind of weird asking for a flat white in the Stand Alone, but that had been part of the language of my profession for some time now.
I had begun to wonder who was running my Starbucks back in Bristol. It would be a relief, but also kind of sad, to find out that they weren't missing me at all.
'Sure. Take a seat and I'll bring it over to you.'
I sat at the table nearest the counter, although mostly because it was farthest away from where everyone else was sitting. I looked around the old place as I waited. The inside of the Stand Alone only confirmed the impression from the outside. Not much had changed other than a process of un-arrested, natural decline. Perhaps that was why the windows had been darkened; so that the decay inside was less visible.
Every few seconds I found myself looking at the Sgt. Pepper cover, and the three crossed-off Beatles. I ran through their post-Beatle lives, or indeed anything that could have happened in the past twenty years, to try to think what separated Paul from the others. I thought of the Paul is Dead conspiracy, and my article which took it as fact. But that was something which was known back in our day in the Stand Alone, not something which had changed in the past two decades.
Yet, there was an obvious correlation to what had been happening. Three of the Jigsaw Men were incarcerated. One of them remained. Three of the Beatles were crossed off. One remained.
Was the Jigsaw Man related to the Beatles? Was he the Beatles? That couldn't be it. The Beatles were the Beatles.
Janine placed two cups of coffee on the table and sat down opposite me.
'Mind if I join you?' she said. 'Pretty slow in here today.'
'Of course not,' I replied.
'What's it been?' she said, settling down. 'Twenty years?'
'More or less.'
'You look all right on it.'
'Thanks.'
I couldn't bring myself to say you too, such a mundane convention of conversation. Yet she did. She looked exactly the same, as though she'd given herself over to cryogenics. Or she was a vampire. It was getting so that I would have entertained all possibilities. Maybe she just had a good quality skin care regime.
'Jones was in here last week,' she said.
I choked very slightly on my coffee, laid down the cup, coughed the discomfort away. Stared at the table, didn't immediately look up at her. Had I come back and not expected to hear her name?
'Is she a regular?' I managed to ask.
'Hasn't been here in twenty years,' she said.
We looked at each other over steaming coffee for a short while. There was nothing in her voice. No teasing, no questioning. She was gormlessly stating facts, as if with no intent.
'What about Henderson or Two Feet? They ever come around?'
She shook her head, then made a small movement with the cup at her lips as if smelling the coffee.
'Coffee's still pretty good,' I said.
'Thanks. I haven't seen those two since the old days. Hadn't seen any of you until Jones came in. She was looking for you.'
That was unexpected and I didn't like the sound of it. Events and people and timelines were piling up, and I didn't know what to make of it all. One thing I didn't want, though, was for Jones to be at the centre of it. Or, indeed, to be involved in it at all.
'She say why?'
'Said you two were making plans. Said she wondered if you'd run out on her, but she was kind of joking when she said it, so I don't believe that's what she was actually thinking. Did you run out on her?'
'I'm here, aren't I?' I said defensively, words that were so transparent that I might as well have blurted out the whole story of Jones and me and the two days and my moving house in case she returned.
'She might come back,' she said, 'so I guess you can wait. Or you can leave me a number and I'll pass it on if she shows up.'
I didn't know what to say to that. I hadn't wanted Jones contacting me years earlier, and I didn't want it now. Immediately I imagined getting everything straightened out, getting home to my family, and then Jones phoning on the first night. With a calendar, just so that Brin could see the full details.
Not knowing what to say, I ignored the suggestion, and the slight discomfort I felt over asking the next question, which was the reason I was here and which was making me nervous.
'When was the last time you saw the Jigsaw Man?' I asked.
She smiled, the barest movement of her lips. Perhaps in her eyes too, but I wasn't looking. And only in the smile did I notice the lines in her face. A tiredness I'd not seen on arriving at the café. It had been twenty years after all, and Janine had been older than all of us back then.
'He comes and goes,' she said.
That, in itself, was a surprise. I was genuinely expecting her to say she hadn't seen him since he left all those years ago.
'So when was the last time?'
'Been a while. Six months maybe.'
'Shit, you saw him six months ago? Was he here? Was he doing...'
And for the first time since I'd walked in I thought of the jigsaws. Where had my head been all that time? The Stand Alone. The Jigsaw Man. Jigsaws. Wasn't that what the place was all about? The Jigsaw Man putting the pieces together. Solving the puzzle.
I looked over at his old table. There was a gap. No table. No jigsaws. Then, looking around the café, I realised that the gap overshadowed everything. Although the table where the Jigsaw Man had sat was not in the centre of the room, it had dominated it in the past. He was the focal point. The café was all about him, about a man sitting in silence thinking things through. The warrior-poet, problem solving so we didn't have to. It was from this that the atmosphere of the café had come.
Now that he was gone, and his table was gone, the café got its atmosphere from the gap. There was nothing th
ere, and there was nothing in this café. There was a darkness, as if the energy had been sucked from the place.
I glanced at the other customers and wondered what brought them here. Who were they? Why come here, to this stifling emptiness?
'He doesn't do jigsaws anymore?' I asked, my gaze still on the gap.
She shook her head, then lifted the cup back to her mouth, seemingly to cover the shadow that crossed her face. What do you call the Jigsaw Man who no longer does jigsaws?
'Who are these people?' I asked, lowering my voice, indicating the other customers. It seemed so strange that anyone would come in here. Were there others like me, searching for the Jigsaw Man? Searching for something that used to be here, but which had gone a long time ago? But then, that wasn't why I was here. I was searching for the Jigsaw Man so that I could get my family back. And ultimately what would that involve? In essence I was aiming to lead the CIA or the NSA or the FBI – or whoever the hell it had been back there in that little room, which I still couldn't quite believe had been near the top of a skyscraper in Dubai – to him, thereby turning him in. I was looking to betray the Jigsaw Man.
She looked at her coffee. She wasn't answering. Maybe it was a pointless question.
'What does he do when he's here?' I asked. It was hard to imagine the Jigsaw Man chairing a meeting to discuss turnover or delivering a six-monthly report to the staff.
'He asks if you've been here. You or Jones or Two Feet or Henderson. He has a coffee or two. Usually sits and looks out the window. He got the windows darkened the first time he got back from Laos. Then he leaves.'
'Are you in love with him?' I asked, not really knowing where that question had come from.
'Yes,' she said.
I nodded and looked into my coffee. That was why I had asked. I was here to betray the Jigsaw Man, and the person I was hoping would be my main informant was in love with him. Could I believe anything she said to me?
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 13