by Ned Beauman
He wasn’t on the phone, though. He was sitting in an armchair with his hands behind his head. And the Welshman was standing at the door with his gun pointed at Grublock. He looked at me.
‘Sit down, please. You needn’t worry about the panic button. I’ve disabled it.’ He didn’t sound nearly as angry with me as I probably would have been with someone who’d just thrown a cup of toxic piss in my face. How had he got in?
‘You’re making a laughable error,’ said Grublock evenly. ‘You don’t know who’s employing you, do you? You’re paid through a blind escrow account.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s me. I’m paying. You’re working for me. You just don’t know it. Look, Zroszak was nearly there. I was fairly sure that, one way or another, I’d have what I wanted within a couple of weeks. Then I was going to sell it. Once the Japanese heard that you were on the hunt too – and as long as they didn’t know you were working for me – the price would probably double or triple. I just didn’t expect you to move so fast. I didn’t think you’d get to Zroszak before he told me where to find the fucking thing. And I certainly didn’t expect you to break into my home. I’m very rich but I’m in over my head, you see. This is just my hobby. But if you hurt me now – your own client – who else is ever going to hire you again?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you.’
‘I can prove it. Bring me my laptop and I can show you.’
‘You trust this man?’ said the Welshman, nodding towards me. His blue eyes were so beautifully clear and pale that he looked almost as if he had some sort of glaucoma.
‘Yes, I suppose so, up to a point,’ said Grublock. ‘Why?’
‘He can find things.’
‘Yes,’ said Grublock. Then the Welshman shot him through the forehead.
Grublock slumped sideways in the armchair and a trickle of blood ran down his nose and he made a noise like the click-rasp of my computer’s hard drive when its gigaflops are overstrained.
The Welshman turned to me. I saw he was wearing white latex gloves.
‘Don’t become hysterical, please,’ he said.
‘Are you really looking for a beetle?’ I stammered.
‘Does that sound plausible to you?’
‘No.’
‘Precisely.’
So Grublock had been lying after all. But what about later on, with his story about the blind escrow account? Was he just trying to protect himself? I couldn’t tell. Employing an assassin to drive up an auction prize was the sort of thing Grublock might very easily have done – once, to discourage a rival developer from trying to buy a site in Peckham before he could raise enough money himself, he’d planted a story in the Evening Standard which claimed that the children in the adjacent council estates had formed a sort of ketamine rape tribe armed with bicycle chains and samurai swords – but then where did that leave the Thule Society tattoo?
‘What are you looking for, then?’ I said.
‘You’ve heard of a Jewish boxer called Seth Roach?’ said the Welshman.
‘Sort of.’
‘I’m looking for Seth Roach’s grave.’
‘I don’t have any idea where that is.’
‘No.’
‘Does that mean you’re going to kill me?’
‘I’m not going to kill you yet. I’m going to take you with me. You’re going to help me find it.’
8
FEBRUARY 1936
The morning light peeked in through the windows of the mortuary, pasty and trembling like the sort of ghoulish little boy who would rather see a dead girl than a naked one. This mortuary wasn’t like a proper mortuary in an undertaker’s, with insectile steel instruments and formaldehyde; it was just a cold brick room where dead men waited on trolleys without even an out-of-date periodical to read until they could be taken off in a van to the crematorium in Hackney to which St Panteleimon’s Hospital sent its departing guests. This morning, the body on the trolley didn’t really look or smell dead – or, anyway, it didn’t look or smell any more dead than it had the night before, when it was still talking – which made Sinner nervous, because, although he wasn’t squeamish, he didn’t like the thought of Ollie Renshaw waking up and grabbing his wrist as he reached into his pockets.
Until consumption of the spine began to coil him up, Renshaw had been a writer of begging letters. A tall, squinting, blond man who would respond to even the most banal statement of fact with a dribble of polite laughter, he moved from lodging-house to lodging-house carrying his private reference library: an old army bag full of telephone directories, out-of-date Who’s Whos, annual reports of charitable societies, clergymen’s lists and so on, each volume marked with dozens of careful pencil ticks next to the names he’d already tried. Constantly swapping aliases so that the police and the Charity Organisation Society couldn’t catch up with him, he wrote to ask for money to buy a wheelchair for his daughter Ruth, although for a few pence he would also write letters, good ones, on behalf of other men in the spike. It was often assumed that he’d taken to this unreliable racket out of desperation, but actually Renshaw, on his return from the Battle of Passchendaele, still only eighteen years old and with no feeling in his left hand, had decided that a fellow who had survived what he had survived should never have to do another honest day’s work in his life, and had consequently become a professional of sorts: back when he had money for a carriage and a clean collar, he used to pose as the earnest young envoy of a deposed Russian countess who needed somebody trustworthy to help her get her millions of roubles to London, offering 10 per cent of the gross in exchange for a bit of help with bribes and bank charges in the early stages. When he was no longer presentable enough to pull this off, he invented Ruth. Then he got spinal tuberculosis and ended up in St Panteleimon’s Hospital in Blackfriars, like Sinner, and then he died of it and ended up here in the mortuary, which they didn’t always bother to lock up because everyone at St P’s knew that it was bad luck to go inside. The dead should be left alone – although in Poland, Sinner’s father had once told him, they would cure an outbreak of the white plague by digging up the body of the first person to die of it and burning their heart.
Sinner’s hands were shaking so hard that he could scarcely unbutton Renshaw’s trousers to see if he had any money sewn into the lining. Although he did not have tuberculosis himself, something deep within his body seemed to aspire to that romantic disease and was now guessing haphazardly at the symptoms – so his skin was yellow, he vomited three or four times a day, and he bruised like a ripe peach. If he tripped over in a corridor he would fall to his knees and have to lean against the wall for a minute or two before he could get up.
After things had gone wrong in New York, they had never really gone right again. He recalled the day after Rabbi Berg’s dinner, when he’d spoken to Frink through the locked door of his room.
‘Let me out.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your dinner.’
‘I’ve got to train. Fight’s coming up.’
‘The fight’s off, Seth. It’s all off. You know that.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ said Frink. ‘You’re asking me why? First chance you got, you tricked us, you ran away, you stole Judah’s wallet, you got wankered, and you stabbed me in the fucking hand. You think Judah’s going to have you back in his gym after all that? You honestly think we’re going to let you out in public again? We’re going home before you get yourself thrown in jail, son. And, by the way, the Aloysius Fielding purse was supposed to pay for our ticket back, remember? That’s out. So Judah’s going to give me a few dollars a day to help in the gym, and he’s going to lend me some more, until we’ve got enough. Which is more than we bloody deserve. Especially since I’ll be a fat lot of use with bandages on my hand.’
‘I want to fight.’
‘You could have, Seth. You could have. This was your shot. You would have won, too. It would have been the beginning of something. You knew that. You’ve always been so bleed
ing predictable, but I thought just this once you might have made an exception. Because it’s not just you that has to deal with this. It’s me. You’ve fucked it all up for me, too. After everything. Do you give a toss about that, Seth? I don’t suppose you do. Little prick.’
Despite Frink’s anger, he seemed to soften before Sinner did; and on the steamboat home, and on the train to Euston, and even as they queued for a bus, he kept trying to strike up a conciliatory conversation. But Sinner didn’t respond. He was so sick of listening to Frink that he almost began to regret not murdering the older man back in the bar. There was only one human being in the world who was allowed to make him feel guilty, and that was his sister Anna. He refused the offer of a spare bed for the night. Instead, he went straight to the Caravan.
Over the next few months, Sinner began to wish more and more that he could have stayed in New York, that he could have got a rematch against the city that had broken his unbeaten streak. All that glory Frink had talked about: he knew he deserved that. How could it possibly have escaped from him for ever in just one evening? He should still have been out there, but instead he was back in London, where every night was different. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and go back to their flat. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and the other man would pay for a room in the Hotel de Paris or another hotel. Sometimes he’d sleep in a park until the police moved him on. Sometimes he’d sleep among the tramps at Embankment. Sometimes he’d catch a few hours’ kip in one of the all-night cinemas off Leicester Square before the usher woke him up with a torch, newsreels playing over and over in the distance, Mussolini and King Edward. Sometimes he’d even spend a shilling to get into a lodging-house dormitory. The problem was that Sinner did have friends, of a sort – Will Reynolds, say, who ran the Caravan – but the moment he had to ask them for help he would no longer be able to tolerate their friendship, so the only people he touched for money were people he didn’t like, and although there were a lot of those, he soon ran out of likely prospects. There were his parents, but he was happy not to have seen them for three years, and if he ever did see them again it would be when he was champion of the world, not when he was broke. There was Albert Kölmel, but you didn’t want to owe anything to Albert Kölmel, however small. And there was Frink, but that was still out of the question. He wished he could see Anna, but he didn’t know where she was.
So before long he started to look around for posh sissies who would not only give him a bed for the night but pay him, too. They weren’t usually hard to find, although once he ended up having sex with an indifferent maid while her master watched from an armchair. He often stole cash and jewellery on his way out, because he knew they wouldn’t go to the police, and with the money he began to drink more than he ever had before, because without Frink he didn’t even need to stay sober for fights or training, and life didn’t really feel any different until one night in December he realised that something pretty awful must have happened to him because not only could he not find any posh sissies in Covent Garden who would stop to talk, but he also couldn’t even get the bouncers to let him into the Caravan. And in fact he couldn’t remember much of what had happened between that day and the day he’d found himself sipping tea in St Panteleimon’s Hospital.
You were lucky to get a bed in St P’s, one of the very few charitable hospitals of its kind in London. But you weren’t expected to keep the bed for long. Every day the trolley was brought into Sinner’s ward to take someone away. Last night it had been Ollie Renshaw, and that was why Sinner was here in the mortuary for the third time since Christmas. On the first two attempts he hadn’t found any money on the corpses, but the schmuck Renshaw was certain to have some stashed away, and then Sinner could leave the lung house and get his first drink for several weeks. Admittedly, he didn’t seem to want a drink quite as much as he had back then – in fact the thought made him feel a little bit sick – but since he’d been promising himself a drink thousands of times a day for all that time, he didn’t really have any choice.
‘I thought you Jews had rules about touching the dead.’
Sinner turned.
‘Of course, we Christians do too, but we’ve never found it necessary to write them down.’
Connelly, one of St Panteleimon’s priests, stood in the doorway of the mortuary. He was an Irishman in his forties, so dedicated to his pursuit of contraband tobacco that he reportedly slept standing up in cupboards for no more than ten minutes at a time.
‘Are you his brother, Roach? His nephew? His long-lost son, even? Is that why you’re here?’
‘He had something of mine,’ said Sinner.
‘Oh yes, he owed you some money, I expect? A silver tosheroon?’ Connelly smiled thinly. ‘I have always tried to be charitable with your kind. I have prayed for patience. But after a time the Lord stopped giving me patience, perhaps because you are all so disgusting. I am going to call the police. You will stay here.’ Connelly closed the door and locked it, leaving Sinner alone with Renshaw.
Sinner looked around. One of the mortuary’s windows was probably just big enough to climb out of, but it was too high to reach. So he pushed Renshaw’s body off the trolley on to the floor, then wheeled the trolley over to the opposite wall and climbed up on it. But he couldn’t lunge to break the window without the trolley’s squeaky wheels slipping sideways under him, so he had to get down off the trolley, drag Renshaw’s body across the floor, wedge its arm under one of the trolley’s wheels like a brake, and climb back up on the trolley. By then he was too tired to break the window with his fist, so he took off Renshaw’s boot and did it with that.
The rain and wind rushed into the mortuary like looters into a vault. Sinner was wearing nothing but woollen long underwear. Two years ago he could have climbed a drainpipe dipped in hair pomade, but this window was very small and he was feeling very weak. Finally he got one knee up, cutting himself badly on the rind of broken glass around the edge of the window, and then the other knee, and then he tumbled out on to the wet cobbles on the other side, feeling something crunch in his shoulder and his underwear rip at the groin.
Lying on his side, a crushed snail, he tried to look around, but the day was intolerably bright after the gloom of the mortuary and the rain stung his face. Then there was a shadow across him. He wondered if this was how his opponents used to feel at the end of a fight. The shadow said, ‘Are you quite all right, Mr Roach?’ Sinner groaned and wiped his eyes. He didn’t immediately recognise the face of the man who stood there with an umbrella, but the voice was familiar – posh almost to the point of parody. It took him a few seconds to locate it in his memory, and then a few seconds more to shake off the feeling of disbelief. It was the cunt who’d come uninvited into his dressing room at Premierland that night after the Pock fight. Bearskin or something.
‘What the fuck are …,’ began Sinner. He tried to get to his feet but he couldn’t.
‘It’s really you,’ said Erskine. ‘It really is you. Well, well. Isn’t this the most extraordinary good luck? And this is only the fourth morning I’ve spent in Blackfriars. I so hoped I’d find you. Although I’d heard you were in a lodging-house, not a hospital.’
‘Ain’t in either, now.’
‘Quite. You haven’t been well?’
‘Middling,’ said Sinner flatly.
‘You certainly look as if you could do with a hot bath and a hot meal. Some good venison sausages, perhaps.’
Sinner hadn’t eaten sausages in months. He was so sick of bread and butter. ‘Where?’
‘Since our last meeting, I’ve taken a flat in Clerkenwell.’
‘Nice, is it?’
‘Indeed, now that I think of it, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t go there now. I’ve got a cab waiting. It’s the least I can do.’
‘Sounds all right by me.’ Sinner had never begged for anything in his life, but he thought he would be willing to now.
Erskine looked up and down the street, looked back down at Sinner, seemed to come t
o a decision, and then said in a harder tone, ‘On the other hand, I think my father would be very upset if he found out he was paying for a vagrant’s bed and board. I feel sure of that, in fact.’
Sinner struggled to his feet at last and stood there with rain dripping from the tip of his nose, his cock like a dead baby mouse. ‘Come on, mate. No use playing about. I know what you want.’
‘Do you?’ said Erskine.
‘I remember what you said before. You can do your experiments and I’ll take your fifty quid and you and me and your dad and your earwigs will all be even, right?’
‘I’m delighted that you remember my proposal, Mr Roach, but I’m afraid that as of today the terms have changed. I think I’m going to ask for rather more, you see, and I’m going to offer rather more in return. I will give you a room of your own for as long as you want it. I’ll give you clean sheets and clean clothes. I’ll give you as many sausages as you can eat, kosher or otherwise. I’ll give you generous pocket money. I’ll even let you continue to destroy yourself with drink, because I know that if I didn’t you’d run off within the hour. I’ll give you very nearly everything you ask for, and, with my help, perhaps one day you’ll be fit enough to return to pugilism. But in return, I don’t merely want to examine you every so often. I want ownership outright.’ Erskine’s voice here was not quite as confident as his words. ‘I want to buy your body as one might buy a dog or an armchair. I won’t restrict your freedom in any meaningful way, but until your death you’ll submit to whatever experiments and observations I wish to perform in the service of my theories. And after that, I will have custody of your remains.’
‘Fuck off, you cunt of a. …’ Sinner couldn’t find the words.
‘Or I’m quite content to leave you here in the rain. It’s entirely your choice. If you don’t want to buy back life at a fair price.’