Perfect Match

by D. B. Thorne

  Inside was a carpet-tiled office with a desk, a couple of chairs and a TV on the wall that was showing a football match. It was being commentated on in a foreign language, and it took Solomon a couple of seconds to realize that it was Greek. Panathinaikos, he recognized their away strip. Behind the desk was a large man wearing a tracksuit and eating pistachio nuts. He had dark curly hair and a large, wide scar running from his forehead down to his jawline, interrupted by his eye socket, which had no eye in it. The scar looked old and was thick, as if a line of electrical cord had been inserted into his skin. He watched Solomon as he came in, then glanced up at the TV, reached for a handful of nuts, looked back at Solomon and nodded at him, looked back at the TV, shelling a nut at the same time and eating it. He watched a couple of passes, then looked back once again at Solomon.

  ‘You want to sit down?’ Arnold shelled another nut and put it in his mouth. He had big wet lips and his earlobes were fat, which Solomon had read was a sign of early heart disease, but given that Arnold must have weighed twenty stone, that wasn’t the only indicator.

  ‘No,’ said Solomon.

  This got Arnold’s attention, and he turned his body away from the TV so that he was properly facing Solomon for the first time. His eyelid was almost closed over the socket of his missing eye, and sunken, nothing beneath to fill it out. ‘Oh?’

  ‘My hope is that this won’t take us long,’ said Solomon. In and out, that was what Luke had said. We don’t want anything to do with this man.

  ‘You always talk like that?’ said Arnold.

  ‘I just—’

  ‘You want to take your glasses off, your hood off, at least.’

  ‘I’d prefer not to.’

  Arnold shrugged. ‘How’d you do business with a man whose face you can’t see?’ He put another nut in his mouth, chewed and nodded to himself. ‘Huh?’ He turned back to the football, then changed his mind and said, an edge to his voice now, ‘So sit down. Sit. Sit.’

  Solomon stayed standing for a moment, looking at Arnold, who was chewing busily and watching him without amusement. He cursed Luke silently, then pulled out a chair and sat down, head lowered, looking at the carpet tiles, which appeared older than he was, and in an even more desperate condition.

  ‘So,’ said Arnold. ‘You’re Luke Mullan’s brother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good guy, from what I hear.’

  ‘I’m here for the money. Eighty thousand. I can’t stay.’ Solomon had a sudden strange feeling, a reawakening of some atavistic childhood fear, of being lured into a monster’s lair that he would never get out of. He listened to Arnold chewing on his nuts, and heard the Greek commentator’s voice rising in excitement as Panathinaikos launched a counterattack.

  ‘I heard he’s got trouble,’ said Arnold. ‘That right?’

  ‘It’s nothing serious,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Arnold. Solomon tried to place his accent but couldn’t. London, certainly, but something else, and he didn’t think it was Greek. Or Turkish. ‘What’s up with your face?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Solomon.

  ‘Your face,’ Arnold said. ‘Come on. Look at me.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Need to see your face,’ Arnold said. ‘If we’re going to do business.’

  Solomon hesitated, then took off his Ray-Bans and put them in his pocket, took his hood off, and did his best to meet Arnold’s eye. He tried to fight a rising panic. He shouldn’t be here. He didn’t know what he was doing. Why was he doing what this man asked him to?

  Arnold looked at him and nodded, still chewing on his pistachios. ‘Huh.’ He reached down and picked up a blue plastic bag, put it on the desk. ‘Here. Hundred thousand.’

  ‘Eighty,’ said Solomon, alarms triggering in his head. Luke had said eighty. ‘We said eighty.’

  ‘Eighty, that’s yours,’ said Arnold. ‘Twenty, I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘No,’ said Solomon. ‘We don’t have any other business.’

  ‘What I heard,’ said Arnold, as if Solomon hadn’t spoken, ‘is you’re the clever one. You know how much I’m putting through that place outside?’ He gestured at the arches outside his office door.

  ‘No.’ And I don’t want to, thought Solomon. I want to go home, to my apartment. To order and normality.

  ‘Put it this way,’ said Arnold, placing both elbows on his desk and giving Solomon his full attention for the first time. ‘Even if I get one car washed every minute, twenty-four seven, charge each customer a hundred pounds, even then I can’t get enough money through. And I’ve got ten of these places. You get me?’

  Solomon got him. Arnold was washing his dirty money through his businesses, but he had too much of it. He’d cook the books so it looked like the business was making more money than it was, and hide his illicit profits in with his legitimate income. But he was putting too much money through, and it was going to show. Probably already was.

  ‘I do things the old way,’ said Arnold. ‘What I hear about you, you’re smarter than that.’ He sat back in his chair, grabbing another handful of pistachios as he did so, started shelling them. ‘Fucking pistachios, you start on eating them and it’s impossible to stop, you know?’

  ‘No,’ said Solomon.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. No, I won’t launder your money. No way.’ Solomon’s hands were shaking and he clasped them together so that Arnold wouldn’t notice. This was exactly what his brother had told him not to let happen. Don’t get involved. Get the money and leave. We want nothing to do with this man. God, life. How did people manage it?

  Arnold considered what Solomon had said, then replied, ‘You get a lot of girls, looking like that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can get you anything you want. She won’t care. Young, young as you like.’

  ‘No.’

  Arnold nodded to himself, then turned and watched the TV, where Panathinaikos were playing out a goalless draw. Solomon recognized the other team as Iraklis 1908. He looked at the blue plastic bag on Arnold’s desk and wondered what would happen if he stood up, took out twenty thousand, then left with the rest. Just turned and left. He knew that would never happen. Luke, maybe Luke could have done it. He pictured Luke standing up, standing over Arnold and throwing the twenty grand onto his lap, saying, ‘No dice.’ God, he wished his brother was here.

  ‘Your sister’s in hospital, that right?’

  Solomon didn’t answer.

  ‘Your brother, who knows where he is? Your sister is all on her own. So you can do this for me, make my money disappear, then come back. All clean. I heard you can do that.’

  Arnold paused but Solomon didn’t say anything to fill the silence. He just wanted to get out of there. Just wanted to hear the click, that click of his apartment door. The click that said, you’re safe. You’re home, safe.

  ‘Okay, so. Come here and pick up your money. Now, or the offer ends and I find another way to make you play ball. Understand?’

  ‘I don’t think my brother will be happy.’

  ‘Fuck your brother,’ said Arnold. ‘You know anything about me?’ Arnold stopped chewing and became very still, and Solomon realized that he was angry, that this man was on the edge of losing control of himself.

  Solomon closed his eyes, then took hold of the arms of his chair, stood up and walked to the desk. He picked up the blue bag. Thomas Arnold let out a long breath, then turned to him and smiled.

  ‘Okay, so, okay. Good. I want it back in seven days. Understand?’

  ‘Seven days?’ said Solomon. ‘No. That’s too soon.’

  ‘It’s when I want it,’ Arnold said. ‘Here.’ He wrote a number down on a sheet of paper, handed it to Solomon. ‘You call me. Yes?’

  Solomon took the paper without answering, then turned and headed towards the office door. As he reached it, Arnold said, ‘Hey? If you want a girl, I can get you one. They don’t mind me, they won’t mind you. We’re not so different, me
and you.’

  Solomon stopped, feeling Arnold’s gaze on his back like an electric current. He put his hand on the handle of the door and said, slowly and as calmly as he could, ‘How I look doesn’t define me. Believe me, we are entirely different.’

  He didn’t wait to hear Arnold’s answer, just opened the door and walked as quickly as he could out of the gloom of the archway and into the noisy evening of voices and sirens and marginal safety.

  eighteen

  KAY WAS PREPARED TO ADMIT THAT SHE WAS BEING STUPID. More than stupid. Petulant, selfish and unreasonable. Yes, all of those things. She didn’t have any right to resent Solomon for not wanting to see her, had no idea what he looked like, what his reservations might be, his fears or anxieties or, well. She didn’t know. Didn’t know anything about him, that was the thing, but she wanted to. She wanted to know him because so far everything she’d heard from him was brilliant, smart and certain, and that was good enough for her.

  So, okay. There was always more than one way to skin any particular cat, that she knew, given that so far the approaches she’d taken to making organic material interface with code numbered she didn’t know how many. A lot. And not a lot of success on the horizon either, or at least none that she could see.

  She couldn’t keep Solomon’s aborted investigation out of her head. She was honest enough to question why that was, whether it was because she thought there was still something in it, or whether it was just a way to get to him. But whatever, it kept playing on her mind. She went over the facts. Rebecca Harrington, found dead of an overdose in a canal. Just after an online date with a man called Caesar, going for cocktails at the Gypsy Queen. And the police had it down as suicide. So what? What was so remarkable about that? Nothing, except that Solomon’s sister had been found in the same canal, after an online date, the same drugs in her body. That was a coincidence too far. Or did she only think that because it meant she and Solomon had some kind of connection, some shared experience? Around and around it went in her head. God, it was pathetic. Like some kind of lovelorn teenager, obsessed by a pop icon she’d never even met.

  Yes, but still. She didn’t have anything better to do, and she was passing the Gypsy Queen on her way home anyway, so she might as well go in, mightn’t she? Have a look? No reason not to. She could try a cocktail. It was a nice evening. So. So that’s what she was going to do. Dammit.

  The Gypsy Queen was a traditional glaze-tiled pub off Hackney Road, which had once been grand and had then gone into a steady decline, its original fittings ripped out in preference to pool tables and fruit machines and Sky TV, until some enterprising owner had ripped out those pool tables and fruit machines and Sky TV screens and restored the whole place to its glory years, with the additional veneer of craft ales and a menu that offered gourmet burgers made with rare-breed steak. Kay looked at the list of beers, and searched the back of the menu, but the one thing she couldn’t find was cocktails, not even one. Not even a mojito.

  ‘Help you?’ said the barman, a young man with horn-rimmed glasses and an arm full of tattoos.

  ‘Do you do cocktails?’ said Kay, taking a seat at the bar.

  The man looked uncertain. ‘What kind of cocktail?’

  ‘Mojito?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said the man. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Rum. Mint.’

  ‘Well we haven’t got any mint, far as I know,’ he said. ‘I can do you a rum and Coke.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘It’s not Coke Coke,’ the barman said. ‘It’s locally made. Organic.’

  Please, thought Kay. Organic Coke? Wasn’t the whole point of Coke that it was full of refined sugar and about as antithetical to artisan sensibilities as it was possible to get? ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Did you ever do cocktails?’

  ‘Not, you know, as a thing,’ the barman said. ‘No.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, her mind turning.

  ‘So …’ said the barman, after a few moments.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, nothing then. I’m fine.’ She sat still at the bar for a few more moments until she came to a decision, then got down off the stool and left, the barman watching her curiously as she walked out of the door.

  Solomon had found it difficult to sleep, imagining, in his standby-red-light state of consciousness, that the blue plastic bag full of cash on his living-room coffee table was alive, possessed of a malignant power that was seeping into him through the walls as he lay in bed. And Arnold. Solomon couldn’t think of him as a person, instead he could picture him only as a castle, a huge dark castle filled with the savage cries of a furious ogre. It was as much as his mind was able to comprehend. He’d eventually found sleep at four in the morning and had woken at midday, which wasn’t that remarkable for Solomon, who didn’t have much to wake up for at the best of times. And that particular day he had more reason than normal for staying in bed and keeping the world at bay. His sister was in a coma, his brother was on the run, and he was on the hook for twenty grand of a criminal’s dirty money.

  A week ago things had been, if not fine, then at least manageable. He had once read a study of homelessness that had concluded that for most people, losing everything was just a string of three instances of bad luck away. The loss of a job and a spouse, and one long-lasting illness was all it took. One day, everything was fine; a month later, it had all gone to hell. Well, this irredeemable mess had only taken Solomon one week to arrive at. He closed his eyes against the light of the day spilling through his curtains and tried to think of a way out of it all, but in his mind there was no light to be found.

  What was it that Thomas Arnold had said? We’re not so different, me and you. That had got to Solomon, hit a nerve, had been more than he was willing to take. How I look doesn’t define me, he’d replied. Believe me, we are entirely different. How true was that? Solomon thought of Kay, of her generosity, of the time she’d called him with her hair pinned up. Night, you. That was what she’d said. And later she’d asked him for a drink, asked him out. And he’d said no. Solomon groaned in his bed, out loud, a sound equally despair and frustration. Because he did want to see her, he just didn’t dare. Which meant, did it not, that he allowed how he looked to define him, control him, dictate his choices. At least Arnold, with his horrific scar and missing eye, made no effort to hide. Jesus. He picked up a pillow and pressed it over his head, dismayed by his groggy logic. Did that make Arnold better than him? Did it?

  *

  Kay hadn’t slept well, turning the Gypsy Queen’s mysterious and inexplicable lack of cocktails over in her mind, trying to reach a conclusion that didn’t point in a sinister direction. She’d wondered whether she should tell Solomon but had worried that it might look needy, after the last exchange they’d had. I know you don’t want to go out with me, but I’ve been scurrying around town looking for excuses to call you up anyway. No, she’d need something more than a missing cocktail menu. There was nothing worse than looking needy. Nothing less sexy. That was practically scientific fact, and she was a scientist, so.

  She’d lain in bed and thought of Rebecca Harrington’s parents. Her bereft father, her quietly angry mother. They’d told her that there was a suicide note. No, no they hadn’t. Solomon had told her, because the police had told him. Whatever, there’d been a note. And if she hadn’t killed herself, then, well, it didn’t make sense. Why write a note if you’re not going to kill yourself, unless … Unless somebody made you?

  Which was why Kay was now back outside Rebecca Harrington’s parents’ council building. She didn’t feel at all certain about what she was about to do, on the far reaches of what constituted a reasonable theory. A long shot, that’s what it was. But still. She’d thought it through and believed that, on balance, Something Wasn’t Right. Which was good enough for her, what with the whole Solomon situation.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jean? It’s Kay. I came to see you a few days ago. About Rebecca.’

  There was a pause on the intercom, then Jean said,
‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I ask you one more question?’

  There was a longer pause this time, Kay standing in silence only broken by the shouts of some nearby kids playing basketball. Then the buzzer sounded and she pushed open the building’s door and made her way up to the third floor. She walked along the open balcony to Jean’s door, realizing as she did that she had no plan, no strategy for approaching this. Her imagination had gone only as far as buzzing Jean’s number, telling her who she was. What now?

  Jean was waiting beside her open front door, looking, if anything, even tinier than before. She hadn’t put make-up on and she seemed both older and more desolate. God, Kay thought. What am I actually doing here?

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Jean. ‘I gave you all I had.’

  Kay paused, then said, too quickly she knew, ‘She left a note. Rebecca, I mean. Did she leave a note?’

  Jean tilted her head, then said, carefully, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And was it …’ Kay had no clue how best to ask the next question. ‘Did it seem like her? Like something she’d write?’ Idiot, she thought. It was a suicide note. They’re not something people write often. But Jean didn’t seem to think the question was untoward.

  ‘It didn’t seem like her,’ she said. ‘No. But the police said, well, they told me that it was normal. When people aren’t in their right mind. They said they write strange things. They said I shouldn’t worry about it.’

  ‘Do you think I could see it?’ said Kay.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kay. ‘I mean, well.’ God, what did she mean? ‘I just think there might be something going on. Something not right.’

  Jean looked at her for some moments, then nodded quickly and walked back into her flat. Kay waited on the doorstep. She could still hear the sound of the kids playing basketball, and the distant drone of a helicopter somewhere over the other side of the building.

  Jean came back out of the gloom holding a clear bag with a piece of paper inside. ‘Here,’ she said, handing it to Kay with two fingers, as if it was contagious. Kay took it and held it up. The bag was a freezer bag, and inside was a piece of notepaper torn from a spiral-bound pad, one edge ragged, written in blue pen.