Butcher (10 page)

‘Robbie Robertson. Will do. By the way, you got a phone message, Mr Chuck. An Inspector Scullion.'

Scullion, he knew Scullion. Chuck relaxed, laid his palms on his knees.

Scullion could wait.

13

Mid-afternoon in moribund Govan: Perlman drove down a side-street, his progress instantly stalled by a gang of kids in hooded jackets and tracksuit pants. They kicked a ball around and they weren't moving for
anything
. He tooted his horn, a brisk little sound. The kids ignored it. Glasgow defiance.
Bloody hell
. Perlman parked the Ka and got out. The ball bounced toward him and he trapped it with an elegance that surprised him.
I could've been a player. Nightclubbing and stoating lassies hanging on my arm. Suits by Armani, no sweat
.

The kids stared at him, waiting. He kicked the ball back to them, using the outside of his foot to impart spin, an intention that failed. The hooded kids hooted –
ya ya
– and went on with their game. Street football, goalposts chalked on a wall.

Perlman locked his car outside a fire-scorched tenement that was scheduled for demolition. He took a deep breath before he entered the building, edging past a bent sheet of steel meant to discourage trespassers, but this had been battered and hammered so many times that any security function it might once have served was a bad joke. Discoloured whitewash hung in sheets from the walls. The smell of sewage flowed from a burst pipe somewhere out back.

The alpha scent was charred wood.

He stepped along the passageway carefully, wary of broken glass and excrement and the possible hazard of used needles that might lie concealed underneath. He approached the stairway, looked up through the gloom. No sun ever reached in here. The only thing that bloomed was a parasitic blue mould visible through plaster cracks, like varicose veins.

He climbed to the first landing. Flakes of brown plaster fell from the uppermost ceiling, concealed in dimness way overhead. The window on the landing had been replaced by plywood: there was no opening where any breathable air might enter. Perennially sour twilight. I should turn and piss off back down the stairs before I choke from ash and effluence.

Polisman found deid in horror tenement
.

He climbed the second flight. He was faced by three doors, three separate flats. Two of the doors were buried behind steel. These
verboten
flats were probably used as squats or shooting galleries, dopers and drifters sneaking in and out. Perlman wafted the offensive air in front of his face:
feh
. The places I go. The environment was depressing, but it wasn't despondency he felt – in fact he was zapped by the bee-sting of purpose and anticipation. On the move again, ransacking the stockroom of his experience, coming here and playing a long shot.

He knocked on the one door that wasn't hidden behind steel. Nobody answered. He rapped his knuckles again. No response. He waited, then banged a fist against the wood.

A voice came from the other side of the door. ‘Who is it?'

‘Perlman. Let me in.'

‘I've got nothing to say to you.'

‘Open the fucking door,
schlemiel
,' Perlman said.

The door cracked a slit, a huge beard appeared. ‘You on your own?'

‘You kidding? I brought Tonto
and
The Lone Fucking Ranger.'

‘Come in, come in quick.'

Perlman entered a tiny one-room flat. The man who'd opened the door, Tartakower, seventy-eight years old, was hunched, dressed in a singlet and a pair of old black trousers four or five sizes too big for him. He shuffled into the kitchen, Perlman followed. Plywood had been bolted over the window here as well. A paraffin lamp glowed on a table, throwing a parsimonious light that illuminated cheap bits and pieces of furniture. An animal of some kind – dog, cat, ferret, who could say in this pervasive gloaming? – lay huddled in a cardboard box.

Tartakower bent over the table for a battered tin teapot. ‘You want tea, Perlman?'

Perlman didn't want anything except to ask a couple of questions and then be gone. He saw the silver hairs in Tartakower's huge beard gleam. A mass of chest hair grew over the collar of his singlet, and tangled with the vast bush of his beard. Where one began and the other left off was anybody's guess.

‘How is it I have come to this?' Tartakower said. ‘The firemen, they should've let this place burn to the ground.'

‘Second that motion.'

Tartakower poured strong tea with a trembling hand. The animal in the cardboard box stirred listlessly. Tartakower raised his face and his eyes glistened as he looked at Perlman. ‘At least this poor creature gives me loyalty. As for the rest of my life, ah …'

Perlman thought: no, I don't want the epic tragedy of Ben Tartakower's existence. I don't want his
tsuras
. He'd heard it already how many times. ‘I need to ask you a question.'

Tartakower rolled over Perlman's remark, his deep voice rumbling out of hairy sources. ‘I don't have my music even. Some
gonif
stole the record-player and took the LPs. My Mendelssohn, my Bach, Schumann, gone. Who says Jews have all the luck? I go out, they break my door, steal from me. I'm a prisoner. And the
untermenschen
in this building, they threaten my life. Knives, guns, knuckledusters, swords even, you name it.'

‘You have family, they'd help you.'

‘Family? They call me
schnorrer
. Don't talk to me about family.'

Perlman felt it coming, the story of Tartakower's rise and fall: a fine surgeon once, also an accomplished cellist, the wife he never loved fucks some goy fancydan, steals his money, leaves him, he tries suicide, the pills fail, this should surprise him? He loses his surgeon's licence, he's so blocked he can't play his beloved cello, life's a ladder and he's heading to the bottom but before he hits it he borrows money from a rich cousin – never repaid – and rents a big house in a backstreet in Langside which he operates as an unlicensed private clinic, a chop-shop, running a string of young surgical assistants to help him through cut-price operations, abortions, removal of bullets from wounded crims no questions asked, the occasional crazy foray into plastic surgery, a woman dies on the operating table … and he, the great Tartakower, surgeon and professor, gets busted. Four years in the nick for practising medicine without a licence, a sob story, a soap.

Perlman couldn't bear to hear this yarn again. A pre-emptive strike was needed. ‘You could get out of this dump. Social services, go see them.'

‘Social services. You think it's easy, ask for a handout? How would you know?' Tartakower swatted the air with a skinny hand. ‘Your job, a pension, my heart doesn't ache for you. What do you want anyway? I don't see you in years, and you turn up and tell me you have a question.' He slurped his tea then stared into his cup. ‘You put me in jail, Perlman. A fellow Jew, you put me in jail, I do my time, I walk out a free man and my debt to society is paid and look around you, call this freedom? This is living? I'd be better dead.'

Perlman held up a hand to stop Tartakower's flow. ‘They moved you to the open prison at Noranside after eighteen months in Barlinnie, in case you'd forgotten. With you it's always selective memory. Let me ask what I came to ask, so I can get out of here.'

Tartakower had the face you saw on one of life's victims, the expression that suggests there might be a deep pleasure in the ache of sorrow; the supplicant angle of head that invites all the blows of misfortune. He was a man waiting for a bus to hit him.

‘When you were operating your unlicensed surgery—'

‘Don't overlook I did some good work there, Perlman. People on waiting lists for a bed in some germ-infested NHS hospital, I helped them, you wouldn't believe how many—'

‘Including the woman you killed.'

‘An accident. Tell me they don't happen.'

‘They happen more often when you're strung out on amyl nitrate or ether.'

‘This tragedy you need to remind me? I was weak-willed, too much pressure, I had a habit. So? Now I'm clean.'

Perlman said, ‘Back to the question I came to ask. Did you ever run any talented young student surgeons through the place?'

‘I had eager students looking for hands-on experience they couldn't get quick enough in universities. Why are you asking, why are you digging up old graves? Some of these kids went on to eminence.'

‘Did any of them – how do I put this? – did any of them strike you as
wrong
? They were in medicine for the wrong reasons?' No, this wasn't it, not quite. Perlman tried to rephrase it, but Tartakower spoke first.

‘What are you fishing? Do you mean criminal types?'

‘Mibbe. More like a guy who wasn't glued together the right way. Somebody whose laces were loose.'

‘Is it a psycho you're looking for?'

‘Could be.'

Tartakower scratched his beard. Flakes of dried food drifted out of the massive tangle. ‘This I need to ponder, Perlman.'

‘How much ponder and how much money?'

Tartakower pulled out his empty pockets. ‘Remind me what money is.'

‘The man I'm looking for is skilled. I'm not talking any old bonechopper, Ben, you understand? I'm looking for somebody gifted.'

‘And
meshugane
. With thoughts you don't want to hear and questions you don't want to answer. I need time to think.'

‘You don't have time.'

‘Oh, I should be in a hurry to do Perlman a favour, the man who incarcerated me? What is this individual alleged to have done?'

‘He cut off somebody's hand. A clean cut.'

‘Why come to me? There are skilled cutters all over this city of damned souls. There are Muslim butchers and kosher butchers and abattoir butchers and butchers who churn out T-bone steaks and lamb chops. What makes you think this was somebody who worked for me?'

‘Because you know more bonecutters than anybody I can think of. Why shouldn't I come to you? How many kids assisted you?'

‘Who knows, thirty, forty. More.'

‘At your trial I remember the prosecutor claimed at least a hundred, low estimate. You had a crowd coming and going.'

‘Such a gift for exaggeration that
shmendrik
. Only to make me seem more a monster and win for himself a bigger sentence, bigger headlines.'

‘I'll give you fifty pounds for a name.'

‘Pah. Fifty doesn't go far. I have Issy, this sorry creature, to feed. Admittedly my own needs are tiny. Tea, bread, a little margarine.'

‘OK, sixty.'

‘A hundred.'

‘You're crazy. Seventy-five.'

‘Eighty.'

‘Done.'

‘Plus one for Issy.'

‘What is that animal anyway?'

‘Issy is more than an animal, Perlman.'

Perlman didn't ask. Tartakower was fond of riddles.

Perlman took his wallet from his back pocket. ‘I want the name now.'

‘My brain, my poor memory, sometimes fuzzy … also keep in mind many of these boys came with made-up names, they didn't want to work under their own identities, who can blame them? I had a Donald Duck working for me. A Mahatma Ghandi also.'

‘Come to the point,' Perlman said.

Tartakower shrugged.

‘You push me, Perlman. I could get into mounds of shite helping you. Giving out information, these kids don't want to be remembered—'

Perlman made to stick his wallet back, and Tartakower said, ‘Jackie Ace, he comes first to mind.'

‘Not his real name, I assume?'

‘What do you think? A flash boy with fingers, a sweetheart cutter. With a surgical saw, he cut like a dream. This is natural, this you don't learn. But something wrong.' Tartakower tapped his chest and frowned. ‘Something you sense.'

‘Sense, like how?'

‘Off, Perlman. Something off. How more explicit you want?'

Perlman shrugged. ‘An example of strange behaviour would be a start.'

‘They were all strange in their own ways, these boys.'

‘You any idea where he lives?'

‘I look to you a street directory?'

‘What else do you remember about him?'

‘Jackie Ace made friends easily. Played cards, took some of the other boys for a bundle. Poker, brag, always a winner. Did he cheat? Sure, but who could accuse him? Hands like his could've plucked a feather off a goose and the goose wouldn't blink. Also he did card magic.'

‘What does he look like?'

‘What is this –
Mastermind
?'

Perlman laid money on the table, hoping the sight of green would encourage Tartakower, who squeezed his eyes in an act of remembering. He looked constipated. ‘What else you need to know? He's got red hair and green eyes? He's eight feet tall humpbacked? If it was me searching for Jackie, I'd go where people gamble on cards.'

‘Casinos.'

‘Fast as a rabbit fucking, Perlman.'

‘Faster,' Perlman said. Jackie Ace, he thought. You start somewhere. The detection of every crime has a point of origin, that uncertain place where you have the first flutter. It pays off sometimes. Most times not.

Tartakower picked up the money, stuffed it into his pockets. ‘So call again. We'll have strawberry blintzes and cream, you give me notice.'

Tartakower rose. Perlman stepped out of the flat. Just before Tartakower bolted the door, he said, ‘You'll know when you see Ace, Perlman.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Tartakower didn't embellish. The door was closed and bolted.

‘Hey,' Perlman said. He knocked on the door, heard only silence from within. Tartakower wasn't going to open up again. He'd already be sitting at the table counting his cash, then stashing it here and there inside his room. He probably worried about Perlman changing his mind and wanting the gelt back. He lived in a state of hermetic paranoia, everybody stole from him, everybody had it in for him. Plus he'd been cheated out of his life – so why open the door again to the man who'd sent him to hell in the first place?