Butcher (2 page)

‘You're thinking Edinburgh. Bass Rock. That lighthouse is a firm big thing, rises tall out the sea.'

‘Oh, it's tall, I remember that,' Eve said.

Gordy watched Doris on screen. She was talking by phone to Big Rock, who was conning her as he always did. ‘Doris never gets it, does she?'

Eve said, ‘She gets it eventually.'

‘I fucking hope she does.'

‘Oh, so do I, so do I. Sooner rather than later, Gordy.'

‘My money's on sooner every time.'

She finished her drink, looked at her husband with head tilted. He knew that expression. I'm on to a winner here.

‘Get me the same again, would you, Gordy?'

Gordy Curdy rose and took his wife's empty glass to the cocktail bar. He fixed the concoction just the way she liked it except he added a little more rum than usual. And bagza ice cubes. The rest was just for colour.

He opened a Miller's Light for himself. The can popped, fizzed, spluttered out foam.

Eve said, ‘I like that sound, Gordy.'

‘Pop fizz, aye. Reminds me of something.'

‘Does it?'

‘Trying to remember what …'

‘Try harder, lover.'

The intercom buzzed.

Eve Curdy was annoyed. ‘Oh Christ, who's that at this time of night? I don't suppose you can ignore it, Gordy.'

The intercom buzzed again. ‘No, but I'll deal with it fucking
fast
.' Gordy flipped a switch.

‘Somebody here to see you.' Mathieson's voice came through the system as if he had a clothes-peg clamped to his nostrils.

‘Who?'

‘Only Soutar.'

‘Send him down.' Gordy flicked the switch back.

‘Soutar, he's an annoyance,' Mrs Curdy said.

‘He'll only be here a minute.' Gordy Curdy saw that Doris was crying now. Big Rock had cut her to the quick. ‘Soutar brings me a lot of business.'

‘Frankly, Gordy, I don't like the way he squints. And why do we need Mathieson all the time?'

‘Home sec,' he said.

‘But he's always here, or somebody like him.'

‘He's a status symbol, sweetheart. Round-the-clock on-site protection. You want nasty big Alsatian dogs? Or that bloody awful fencing?'

‘Frankly, Gordy dear, I think we should do something
off the fucking wall
. Build lighthouses in the front and keep them on a really low romantic glow. I could look out the window and enjoy them.'

Gordy said, ‘Great. Hold the thought, lover.'

‘I'm holding more than that,' she said.

The door opened and Soutar came in. He was dressed in a black blazer and grey slacks and carried a black leather briefcase. He was a short bald man with one eye that didn't open all the way. Gordy Curdy never thought of it as a
squint
. It was a lazy lid. Lots of people had them.

‘Soutar, how are you?'

‘Sorry to disturb. I just have some papers for you to sign.'

‘Aye, fine. I'll have a gander.'

‘Hello, Mrs Curdy,' Soutar said.

Eve Curdy nodded coldly. ‘Hello Soutar.'

Soutar opened the briefcase. Mrs Curdy watched Doris Day and thought about lighthouses and rocks and planting plum trees in the backyard and having a whole harvest of plums every year. Gordy Curdy thought about cash, making cash, fucking
volcanoes
of cash.

Soutar took a gun from his briefcase.

Gordy Curdy smiled in surprise, then lost the smile when he looked into Soutar's eyes. He didn't like what he saw there. The lazy lid pulsed strangely and Soutar's eyes were darkly earnest.

This is no joke, Soutar's no joker.

Panicked, Curdy stuck a hand out defensively.

Mrs Curdy only turned away from the plasma screen when she heard the gunshot. She saw her husband fall and blood pump through his Hawaiian shirt.

Soutar shot her in the head.

The bullet knocked her up and out of her lounger with such force her head broke the plasma screen and compressed gas blew across the room amidst a hail of shards. Her head was trapped in the shattered frame.

Rock Hudson's voice said, ‘
I'm a sensitive, man
.'

Then the audio died.

Mathieson, who had the razor-cut look of a young marine, entered the room.

‘Done,' Soutar said.

‘OK. Let's fuck off.'

‘She looks good in the telly.'

‘A star,' Mathieson said.

Both men left, closing the door behind them.

On the way out of the house Mathieson said, ‘I better phone the man.'

Reuben Chuck stood in the living room of his riverside penthouse apartment and spooned an organic mix of chopped bananas, muesli and goat's yoghurt into his mouth. He gazed down at the Clyde where lamplight curdled on water. He felt calm, confident. When his phone rang he was in no hurry to pick up.

When he did he heard Mathieson say, ‘Done, dusted.'

Reuben Chuck put the phone down without saying anything. Dusted. Stardusted. The old order changes. There would be other phone calls in the course of the night. By morning he'd be calling all the shots and gathering all the booty.

2

‘I left my heart at Woodstock,' Betty McLatchie said.

Lou Perlman wondered how she'd drifted to the subject of Woodstock. Maybe he'd absentmindedly missed a beat. She'd arrived, prompt at 10 a.m., with mop and bucket and assorted detergents, and
he
certainly hadn't mentioned music or festivals. She was small, somewhere in her late forties, bright turquoise eyes, a smile that would crick a celibate's neck. Perlman detected a lively shade of her younger self.

She wore her yellow-grey hair piled up and held in place by clasps, an intricate arrangement. Her faded blue jeans, adorned with trippy little zodiac patches, were strapped to her hips by a thick belt with a fancy bronze buckle. Her clothes told the story: unrepentant hippy.

‘It was the time of my life, Lou. We were all so bloody young and free back then. We kicked ass.'

‘I remember being young,' Perlman said. And he did, through an old Glasgow fog.

‘I get so
embarrassed
when I think of the things I did,' Betty said, and laughed at past follies. ‘I had a fling with Country Joe.
And
two of the Fish.'

Perlman was intrigued by her candour. ‘I thought there were
three
Fish. One got away?'

‘I tried, mind. Oh, I tried.'

‘Did you see Bob Dylan?'

‘He didn't appear at Woodstock. People always make that mistake.'

Dylan, formerly Zimmerman. Perlman wondered if a name change would work wonders for him as well. Lou Perlman becomes Hamish McKay, say. A name denoting tweeds and sensible brogues and maybe a wee terrier dog. ‘About this house …'

‘It's a pigsty, Lou. Don't mind me saying. I'm just being truthful. Your Aunt Hilda told me to expect the worst.'

Lou's Aunt Hilda was known for exaggeration, but perhaps not in this case. ‘I live alone …' As if that explained everything.

‘Where do I start? This'll take weeks.'

Perlman shrugged. ‘Anywhere you like, Betty.'

He scanned the living room. Pigsty, well … He'd let the place go year after year, and apart from the occasional desultory attempt at dusting or knocking spider's webs down, he'd done pretty much fuck all.

Now Betty McLatchie was here to transform the place, at the behest of Perlman's aunts on the Southside, who worried about his well-being. They were kindly women, his aunts, although their concern sometimes became meddlesome.

He gazed at the collection of WWI medals he'd bought at a jumble sale because he felt sorry for the poor long-dead sod who'd gone through shite and shellfire to earn them; the big glass jars of predecimal coins, those huge brown pennies and tarnished florins he'd had since childhood; the vinyl albums long parted from their sleeves and the CDs that lay in silvery layers on the floor around the miniaturized sound system.

He dreaded the idea of all this being disturbed – but it was time for change. Time – he had time in spades right now.

Betty McLatchie said, ‘I'll get started then.' She produced a canister of air freshener and sprayed the room briskly. Off guard, Perlman tried to dodge the scented mist but felt a few drops of moisture fall against his face.

‘I know spraying's superficial, but I always say freshen the air before you start in earnest.'

‘Is that what you always say?' Perlman could taste the stuff on his lips. ‘What is that?'

‘Ocean Breeze.'

‘Ocean? It's no ocean known to man,' Perlman said, giving in to a brief coughing attack. ‘I'll let you get on.'

He went inside the kitchen and opened the door that led to a backyard. A tangled sanctuary of great ferns, old rhubarb stalks, a couple of maniac hawthorns beyond pruning. He lit a cigarette and made his way through the jungle where he knew there was a relic of a wooden bench somewhere. He pushed long hanks of obstinate grass aside and sat gazing at the back of his house. Black stone stained by a hundred years of the city's effluents. The window frames needed paint. A drainpipe was loose and rusted. Starlings bred there.

This catalogue of neglect and carelessness weighed on him.
I'm never here much. It's a place where I sleep and change clothes
. Excuses. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter. He listened to the wind in the trees and the way it slapped ferns and grass: one of those unpredictable Glasgow afternoons when the weather could go any direction. The sky was glowering, and grey as ash.

He thought, as he often did, about Miriam: his regular haunting. The last postcard he'd received had come four weeks ago from Copenhagen, a terse message with no suggestion that she was coming home to resume where they'd left off – wherever that was. A kiss, a light caress of her breast, vague suggestions of a possible future. Or else he'd misconstrued the situation, reading far too much into it. He wasn't sure about anything save his feelings for her, and sometimes even then he had moments of uncertainty.

She'd written:
lovely city, fond wishes
.

Four words, followed by M.

Fond, oy, what the fuck was
fond
? It was a word you'd use about a favourite uncle or a soup you liked. Four weeks. Had she forgotten the romantic dinner at La Fiorentina, and how they'd lain close together on the sofa in her loft-studio and he'd wondered if love was finally breaking through like a half-remembered song?

She needed time, she'd told him. He'd been sympathetic, of course: love was a serious commitment, a matter of the heart, an organ about as predictable as this city's weather. He was always so damned acquiescent where Miriam was concerned, so patient.

I never carped the fucking diem
.

He thought: let it go. Miriam,
neshumela
. He'd loved her so many years in silence he could go back to silence again. He'd be all right. He'd be OK, he was a survivor. But.

He heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner inside the house. He got up from the bench and wandered the thickets for a while like a melancholic poet in search of inspiration. Lou Keats. At the first drop of rain he went back indoors where music played over the drone of the antique Hoover. Betty McLatchie smiled at him and gave him a thumbs up.

‘I work better to music,' she shouted.

The song was ‘Hotel California'. The Eagles.

Perlman picked up his raincoat from the back of a chair. ‘I'll leave you to it, Betty.' He fumbled in his pocket for his keys, slipped one from the ring, and handed it to her. ‘Here. You should have this. If I'm not around, be sure you lock the front door before you leave.'

She took the key. ‘Fine.'

He went down the corridor, stopped in front of the mirror and thought about brushing his hair but some days all the brushing in the world failed to improve his appearance. What was it Miriam had said about him?
You have that just-out-of-bed look
. He scowled at his reflection, stroked the stubble on his chin, then left the house.

Outside, he saw no sign of his old Ford Mondeo and for one panicky moment he thought, some
gonif
's nicked it – but then he remembered he'd traded it for a used Ka only days ago, a balloon of a thing the salesman had talked him into buying.
Very popular wee car, Lou. Easy on the juice, but zippy
. Perlman understood zero about cars. A good car was one with a music system and a capacious ashtray. He drove down Dalness Street to Tollcross Road.

The Jew zips out of Egypt, smoking furiously.

3

Perlman walked through the Buchanan Street Galleries. Bright new Glasgow, scores of shops operating in a fluorescent haze. Mango, Next, Habitat. He looked in the window of Ottakar's. He was tempted to go in and sniff among the stacks. He loved the smell of books. Sometimes he'd open one just to inhale the scent of the binding, the whiff of paper. But today he had a lunch with Sandy Scullion – the highlight of the week, the month.

A kilted piper played ‘Amazing Grace' outside the Buchanan Street subway. Perlman paused on the corner of Bath Street. His instinct was to turn right and walk where he'd walked more than a thousand times, up the hill to Pitt Street HQ. The magnetism of old reflexes. Not today, not tomorrow. He didn't know when he'd go back. It was like being barred from a club you'd joined more than twenty-five years ago.

He headed past the old Atheneum, formerly a drama college, a wonderful red sandstone building now occupied by a company called Townhouse Interiors. He glanced at the Church of Scotland on the corner of Nelson Mandela Place and went down Buchanan Street in the worst kind of drizzle, omnidirectional, swirled by a slight wind. Buses roared in his ears. Taxis went past in sleek sharklike streaks. Pedestrians bustled around him. The natives, faces determined and toughened and fatalistic, looked like descendants of foundrymen, shipyard workers, grafters.