To Indigo Read online

  There was a tall black-haired man standing at one of the flashing machines, trying for a payment. But it wasn’t Joseph. None of them were Joseph. Was he going to be fashionably late, as I’d tried to be?

  I went to the bar. They don’t stock Wincott’s there, despite what he had said. I had a half pint of Guinness, and sat down in the corner under a window with pale green and red diamonds.

  After twenty more minutes I was two thirds down the glass. People had gone out, come in. The dealer in the corner had approached the oldest middle-aged couple and sat down with them. They talked in low earnest voices. I kept my eyes off them. Perversely I asked myself if it were weed or crack or straight heroin they wanted, he in his baggy trousers and shirt with tie, she fake ash-blonde and floral jacket.

  Perhaps this was Joseph’s latest ploy. To call me to him, see if I’d turn up, and not turn up himself. He must be watching somewhere. Where?

  “May I sit here?”

  I jumped.

  A man stood over me. I’d never seen him before. He wore an expensive male cologne. I’m never keen on this fashion among men, although I realise I’m outdated. To be clean and deodorised is one thing, but perfumed – quite another. Yet to be fair the scent was subtle, not overpowering.

  He gestured towards the chair that faced mine. The rest of the pub had gradually filled up. I could hardly refuse him. Besides, there’d be no point in my staying much longer.

  “Yes, of course.”

  He sat.

  “Warm, for April,” he remarked.

  He wore a collarless white shirt, loose, not tucked in at the waist band of his gun-grey trousers. He was swarthy, olive-skinned with thick black hair and a solid looking blue-black moustache.

  “Yes.”

  He smiled and sipped his drink. It appeared to be a straight Coke, no ice or lemon. “And you,” he said.

  My mind had wandered. A shadow had passed the open door. But it wasn’t Joseph.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Mr Phillips,” said the man, “shall we get to business?”

  It was then that my startled eyes, swirling back to focus on him, saw instead the man I’d seen previously on the train. He was still bald and still in his brown shirt. He leaned at the bar, watching us casually, what might be a Bloody Mary, or only a tomato juice, in his hand.

  “That’s Mr C,” said my sudden companion. “It’s quite all right.” He turned his dark head and nodded, friendly, at the bald man, ‘Mr C,’ who nodded back and turned away.

  “What is this about?” I asked. The most crazy idea of undercover policemen surged through my mind.

  “No, Mr Phillips, that is to be my question.”

  He had an educated voice, with the faintest hint of an accent, which might be Greek – or Egyptian, even something farther south-east of the Med. Accents aren’t my forte.

  “Your question. What…?”

  “Precisely. What is this about?”

  “What is wh…?”

  “No, no, Mr Phillips. Let’s cut to the chase, as they say.”

  “Why are you calling me Phillips?”

  “Because, Mr Phillips, that was the name I was given on your behalf.”

  I stared at him. “Who gave it to you?”

  He lowered his eyes with a knowing modesty. His lashes were like a woman’s, as with the Mediterranean or Middle Eastern male type they often are.

  “Someone gave it to me,” he said, “who supposed you were in a little trouble. That you might need – a little assistance.”

  I sat there. I noticed in a sort of blind irrelevance the black hair at his throat, a thin tarnished chain on his right wrist narrow as a hair, a wind-up watch. Although his clothes were of quality they had no labels.

  Something snapped home in my brain. “When you say trouble…”

  “No. It is you who have said the ‘trouble’.”

  I heard Lewis Rybourne’s voice in my head first. “Oh, Roy. What shall I do?” Yet somehow Rybourne didn’t fit this kind of thing; I couldn’t imagine it, that he might know someone from this – calling. And then instead a female voice, high, light and foolish, said to my inner ear, as it had through the phone – “… my friend – she doesn’t see him now… I really can’t help you.”

  Tish Ackrington. She’d panicked after my call. She’d phoned up her hit-man acquaintance. Someone’s found out – she couldn’t tell him it was her fault I had, not that it had been. And he must have said, I’d better pay him a visit. And then Brown Shirt had gone to my hotel. All the while I’d been checking Joseph Traskul wasn’t on my trail, ‘Mr C,’ had been. And now here was this one, using my pseudonym, relaxedly loose as his shirt and dangerous as an adder.

  “I think – I may have been misunderstood,” I said.

  “No, not at all. You have someone in your life who gives you some grief. Isn’t that so, Mr Phillips?”

  I’d said nothing of that to Tish, but twittering idiot that she was, I reckoned it was easy enough even for her to put two and two together.

  “I’m very sorry but…”

  “I see,” he said. He looked directly into my face and smiled again. His perpetual smiles were quite unlike Sej’s. This man’s smiles all had a definite purpose. They were masks.

  “I’m extremely sorry,” I said, “if you’ve been bothered unnecessarily.”

  “Ah well now, Mr Phillips. You see, in our line, very often we find a customer is at first a little unsure. For example, he may not be quite certain what we are able to offer him, nor if he’s able to afford to recompense us for our very fine work.” He sipped once more at the Coke. “We operate on a sliding scale, shall I say. And we have several forms of merchandise. If one’s not suitable, it is very conceivable something else can be suggested. We are most flexible, Mr Phillips. Do please, for your own sake, give this a little more thought before making your final decision. The package can be something very small, or something of medium size. Or, naturally, our deluxe model. Everything will be tailored to your own particular needs. This can, to some extent, apply also to our prices.”

  I gazed at him in sick fascination. He was not like similar characters in my books. Most of those had been of the eastender sort, fists on the table and words unminced.

  The deluxe model. I assumed this meant murder. And the other options – the packages – beating up, hospitalization, or just intimidation, a warning.

  I looked down at my drink.

  The man across from me said, “Guinness. Have you ever drunk it in Ireland, Mr Phillips?”

  “No.”

  “You should.”

  He knew too much. It seemed fruitless to deny it all again.

  “Er, Mr…”

  “Call me,” he said, “Cart.”

  I thought Cart was what he said. He didn’t remonstrate when I employed it. “Mr Cart…”

  “Just Cart. In this matter, I am at your service.”

  “At this point I’m not sure I do need your – any help.”

  “That was not the impression I, or my colleagues, received.”

  “I may have overreacted.”

  He wasn’t smiling. Above the rim of his glass his adder-black eyes stuck to mine.

  Could I shake him off?

  I doubted it. I cursed myself. I, not Tish, was the idiot.

  Inside some compartment of my mind also, a low voice whispered that after all, this man was one of business, as he said. He did what he was paid for. And – if Joseph Traskul were as insane as I’d first believed, to have access to this atrocious alternative – might become necessary. Or was he insane? Was he maybe only different to the rest of us, spontaneous – compassionate. Brilliant.

  And against all that, the other thought. And if he is my son?

  I said, “I value very much the fact you’ve contacted me. It’s still possible I may need – but right now there have been sudden other developments.”

  “This can happen.”

  “Can I ask…?”

 
He waited. His eyes were gelid now. They didn’t blink, or move away.

  “If I required… something very slight. A small package.”

  “A thousand K,” he said. “That may seem a lot, but there is my team to consider.”

  “And – what…?” I stopped. “It may not be necessary, but if…”

  “A few little impacts,” he said softly. “A little breakage, perhaps. Whatever you prefer. Nothing too serious. Enough to show the error of the way.”

  A lurch of nausea in my gut.

  I evaded contact with his eyes.

  “But if it doesn’t come to that?”

  “Then I will wish you a happy life, Mr Phillips. And you will be one thousand pounds the richer.”

  Perhaps I had incriminated myself enough he would now let me off.

  He had seemed to be right handed, but he reached over and took my own right hand with his left. I stiffened in alarm, but he was scribbling something across my palm in black biro. He let me go and I looked down at it. A mobile number.

  “You will have to call me in the next few weeks. After that the mobile will have been stolen, or before that, should you do something else, such as tell another. In fact, Mr Phillips, I do advise you not to tell anyone. For your own sake.” More familiar, this. More like one of my own characters. But Christ. What had he done to Tish?

  “It’s not in my interest to say anything,” I said. “Thank you,” I added lamely.

  “It has been a pleasure to meet you,” said Cart. He rose and turned at once, glass in hand. He walked straight past the bar and into the snooker room. He had ugly black shoes, hand-stitched. Brown Shirt, he of the Bond-Flemingesque name, had already vanished.

  Duran phoned me the next morning.

  He said, “Hi, Roy, how are you doing? She said like you might need some extra security at your place. Glad to hear you’ve come round to it, mate. We live in interesting times.”

  “Aren’t you in Bristol?”

  “No, mate. I’m on the train for London. I can fit you in 2nd of May.”

  “I’m not sure what’s needed.”

  “Leave it to Uncle Duran. We got lots of packages,” he added, unnerving me utterly. “You there, Roy?”

  “Yes. Look, I’ll call you later this week, early next, OK?”

  “OK, mate. See you.”

  I spent the last days of April in the ordinary way. That Thursday Franziska came and scoured through the house. She commented the kitchen was much cleaner than usual. She gave me a haughty, slightly venomous look when she said it. Hours later it came to me she perhaps thought I now had a girlfriend, some aged person like myself, and this ridiculous female had cleaned the sink and surfaces.

  Franziska too made a comment on the piano in the front room.

  “Should polish this,” she hectored me. “Have you polish?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Not,” she severely said, “spray. Will ruin the wood. And leave the lid up.”

  “The lid?” This was unlike the lavatories, where she always insisted lids should be left closed, which apparently was benign Feng Sui.

  “Let ivories breathe.”

  I was taken both by the old-fashioned English expression ‘ivories’ for keys, and the formula of allowing them oxygen. Maureen had said that, and the piano in the doll flat over the Co-op was always left with the lid raised. Though things were sometimes untidy and dusty there, the kitchen and bathroom were always clean, and the piano dusted, though never, I think, polished.

  When Franziska had gone, I sat on the paving at the back in the deck chair, drinking tea. It was a warm afternoon, the leaves unfurling fast on neighbouring trees and trellises.

  The fir stood dark and unexceptional.

  I thought, I shan’t see him again.

  I hadn’t seen her, my Maureen, since that night of our parting those years ago.

  Like most of us, after a deep but not crippling blow, I just got on with my life. I told myself it was the regular sex I missed, which was true yet not the whole picture. Months after I found myself down that way, and looking up saw different curtains in her windows. She’d been faithful to her word. She must have married her new old lover and gone elsewhere.

  The following year I met Lynda Boyle at a rather flabby disco in Lewisham.

  She was totally unlike Maureen. To begin with Lynda was over one year my junior. Thin, and with long limp mousy hair, she danced badly, and wore big glasses and a skimpy dress that did her few favours.

  I was at the bar, with Danny Collins oddly, the confrere from the library I’d been with that night I met Maureen.

  We’d secured our drinks, and were looking round at any talent, when Lynda came up and began trying to get the barman’s attention.

  Lynda was short, five foot three in her heels. No one took any notice of her, except Danny and me.

  “Stupid bird,” he said. He leaned across and shouted in her ear over the raucous music, “Wave a note at him, luv. He’ll see that.”

  And she said, “I haven’t got a note. It’s all coins.”

  Then Danny said, “Hang on, I’ll do it.”

  And he bawled at the barman, and the barman came and Lynda got her round of drinks for herself and her two friends.

  “What a shower,” said Danny. “Look at them.”

  One girl was fat and one thin like Lynda.

  They huddled to one side, and sometimes went out on the floor together to gyrate to the music. But they moved like creatures whose bones have been unhinged.

  There was a girl that night, I can’t recall her name. She had jet-black dyed hair and she’d danced with me several times. She was one inch taller, but had taken off her shoes on realizing. Then she was one inch shorter.

  Afterwards I figured it out that she was only trying to make her male escort jealous. This finally worked; he came over and shoved me aside so hard I nearly fell, lugging her off shoeless and raven-locked into the night.

  Disconsolate I went out and it was raining. Danny had to catch the train, but Lynda Boyle was standing weeping under the neon sign.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  She raised her raining eyes to me. No glasses now. “Someone trod on them,” she sobbed.

  “On – what – who?”

  “My spectacles. It was Sherry. She pushed me. She’s jealous because she’s so fat. And they fell off and someone just trod on them. Look.” She showed me the ruination of her glasses. “I can’t afford to get a new pair, not till next payday. And I can’t see without them.”

  I’d been going to get a taxi anyway. Some of them always hung around the disco after midnight, like vultures, ready to charge double and a half. “Where do you live?”

  She snivelled something.

  She didn’t have a coat and her bare shoulders were dewed with rain. She had a nice skin, and her hair, though very thin now it was wet, gave off a pretty smell. I put my leather jacket, (yes, I had one then), round her shoulders, and when the cab swarmed up I took her home. She lived with her parents in an end-of-terrace “mansion”. She let me kiss her outside the door. She wasn’t Maureen. But she seemed to be available. She had already confessed she’d split up with her boyfriend three nights ago and was puzzling as to whether she should come off the Pill. I was nearly twenty-one. What was I likely to do? I did it a week later, having taken her, by then in new glasses purchased by her father, to my room in Brampton Way.

  She refused to do a thing with the light on. But once it was off she was up and ready. She rocked the house with her noise. I was embarrassed but not unflattered. Maureen had never been that loud. But then too, Maureen had never been that desperate.

  XIII

  (‘Untitled’: Page 220)

  SUMMONED from the bed of Klavdisa, Vilmos followed the tongue-less servant in a daze.

  The City before dawn was in its darkest and most abysmal mode. Now and then uncanny lights flitted through the black, overcast sky. Most likely they were lightnings, but for Vilmos they
had ominous shapes, like those of racing greenish mares or lions, whose heads were skulls.

  The Master’s servant had sometimes indicated his – the Master’s – purpose, by means of gesticulations and grimaces. On this excursion he revealed nothing, and when Vilmos had clapped one hand on his shoulder the dumb man thrust him off with a controlled violence that warned of strength.

  “But I was called to the house, you know as much, five days back,” Vilmos had protested.

  Klavdisa all this while had kept to one corner of the bed, shivering. She was afraid of the Master, his alchemic reputation. Vilmos, having been with her for over three days and nights, had thought himself obscured from all search.

  Truth to tell, he had dreaded that the Master would locate him now. What had appeared in the chamber, blurred as it was by his fainting, had left an impression of deep horror. And this had grown rather than diminished as time went by.

  When they reached the building above the river the servant led him to its street door.

  Vilmos had the urge to run away, but a line of light was showing in the east. He had an aversion to daylight, it hurt his eyes. And so he slunk inside.

  The Master was seated in the main hall, in his tall chair. A fire crackled on the hearth and the toad sat there, warming itself, the Master’s strange pet, which had always been about the house, so far as anyone knew. Some said it was as old as the Master himself, a creature therefore in its seventieth year. Vilmos had never beheld it before.

  “I’m here,” said Vilmos, affecting nonchalance.

  “Oh, is it you?” said the Master, as if he had not had Vilmos brought.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “I? Do you think I want something?”

  “Yes. I was dragged here…”

  “It is the Great Powers.” said the Master, terribly, “which want something of you. I am only their instrument.”

  “You have told me, jesting, I’ll assume, I’m the Devil’s.”

  “So you are. I will tell you something else, however, Vilmos. The Devil is himself punctilious and fastidious. He does not like you very much, though he intends to use you.”