Butcher (22 page)

‘Hiding?' Lou asked.

Tartakower was flustered, and working not to show it. ‘Just gathering a few grocery items, Perlman. Is this now against the law?' He wore a threadbare ex-army coat and a tattered scarf knotted at his neck. His dirty brown shoes were cracked and the soles flapped.

‘Is that really a ferret, Tartakower?'

‘Sshh. She thinks she's a dog, Perlman. This delusion I encourage.' Tartakower rattled the creature's chain.

‘And the wee smout who ran away, what is he? Your lookout?'

Tartakower shrugged. ‘A lonely man takes his friends where he can find them.'

‘My heart flows over like a cheap cistern. He came to warn you I was here.'

Tartakower ignored the remark, and dragged both ferret and the grocery bag out into the street. Perlman followed. The kids on the corner whooped and cheered and shouted ‘
Issy! Issy!
' And then they came pounding along the pavement, all loose laces and happy faces, toward Tartakower. They jostled Perlman aside.

‘For Christ's sake,' Perlman complained, only just keeping his balance.

The kids huddled around Tartakower, patting the ferret, and firing Perlman glares of contempt.

‘What is this, Tartakower? Your gang?'

‘Fuck off, polis bastart,' one of the hoodies said. A big kid this one, maybe fourteen or older; you could imagine his future mug shot, a composition in resentment and disobedience.

Perlman said, ‘Shut your pointy face, scruff.'

‘Make me. Come on.' The boy held his hands out, inviting Perlman forward to fight. ‘Come on then, big baws. Feart, eh?'

‘Feart? Aye, right.' Perlman stared at the boy and saw in those eyes the bare aggression imposed by the blight of the city. He'd seen the look thousands of times, more than. These were the city's children, brought up in doomed housing, failed by parents and teachers and priests, and all those useless theorists and planners of civic order, shrinks, sociologists and politicians. These kids didn't give a damn, there was no future, tomorrow, fuckit, they might be dead. They lived in a world they knew to be volatile and cruel-hearted. They saw their unemployed parents' promises of better times vanish in a litter of useless lottery tickets or discarded betting stubs or racks of empties. They grew up with racial and religious intolerance, casual thuggery, older brothers imprisoned or dead – and who could say that some blissed-out terrorist, dreaming of an afterlife of willing virgins, might not just fly over Glasgow one fine day and drop a fucking bomb?

Tartakower, surrounded by this army, said, ‘Issy is popular. He's a hero to these boys.'

‘And you're what, Fagin?'

One of the kids said, ‘Issy's the fuckn greatest,' and picked up the ferret, smothering it in an embrace. The creature looked alert suddenly, pink tongue dangling. The kid kissed the ferret on the mouth.

Perlman addressed Tartakower over the bunch of hoods. ‘Why the hell do you keep a ferret?'

‘You'd prefer I kept a caged parrot? Curtail the movement of living creatures. Lock them in cages, throw them in jails. This is what you love.'

The big kid who'd tried to provoke Perlman said, ‘You're yella.'

The others laughed and stamped their feet. ‘Yella bassa polis,' they shouted.

Perlman looked at Tartakower, lord of this urchin legion. ‘Can you discharge your warriors, Ben? All I want is to talk.'

Tartakower gestured at the pale faces surrounding him. ‘I don't control them, Perlman.'

‘Come
on
,' Perlman said impatiently. He didn't enjoy the idea of a serious confrontation with these kids and the possibility of concealed weapons appearing. He tried to get closer to Tartakower but the phalanx of hoodyheids stood firm. A bloody preposterous stand-off, blocked by a circle of adolescent scoundrels. What has the world come to? He had an urge just to shove them aside, assert authority, get Tartakower all to himself. The kids stared at him grimly. All these faces that should have been innocent. What happened to childhood. What happened to street games. He remembered peever and girls' skipping ropes and singing, and he had a memory of playing ring-bell-skoosh or mooshie – marbles!

The ferret was being passed around like a beloved gang icon, stroked, caressed, kissed.

Perlman took his mobile phone from his coat. ‘I've had enough of this nonsense. Clear these kids away, Ben, or I call for some assistance. I can have backup here in minutes.' Pure bluff. Nobody from Force HQ would come to assist him even if he was in a gutter, dying with a blade in his ribs.

‘Some solution,' Tartakower said. ‘More cops.'

‘Bring em on,' one of the kids said.

‘Aye, bring yer polis pals here,' another said.

The kid who'd called Perlman big baws laughed. ‘We don't move. Right boys? We don't fuck off.'

A chorus of agreement. Right, we don't move.

Perlman sighed. They were ready for war, patrol cars and black marias, and a fresh entry in their juvenile records.

‘Is this what you want, Ben?' he asked.

‘Like a root canal.'

‘Then tell your enforcers to scatter.'

‘We don't fuckn move,' the enforcers chanted.

In another age they might have been choirboys, Perlman thought.

Tartakower plunged a hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of coins and notes and held them up in the air. ‘Boys, listen to me. I need a little time with this polis. OK?'

The kids formed a huddle, and conferred. ‘We take Issy,' one of them said to Tartakower.

‘For one hour only,' Tartakower said.

‘The whole day. Look at her, Tarty, she needs a shampoo, and a fuckin good brushin. You neglect her, so you do.'

Tartakower considered this. ‘Until tea time.'

‘You let us have him the whole day a coupla times. Even overnight wan time.'

‘Not this time, boys. Seven o'clock. Plus a few coins.'

Tartakower thrust money into the hands of the big aggressive kid. Somebody scooped up Issy and that was it – a collective whoop, an army jubilantly demobilized. They ran off along the street like they'd been blown by a sudden wind, shouting words that were incoherent to Perlman, a private slang, a personal language. And then they vanished round a corner, but not before a couple of them had pounded fists into the bonnet of Perlman's Ka.

Tartakower passed his grocery bag from one hand to the other. ‘OK. Talk.'

‘When did you form the army?'

‘Issy's their talisman. He's a symbol. A wild animal in a city. You don't think they connect with that?'

‘So you give them some money and the occasional ownership of Issy and they become your Praetorian guards. And sometimes they ferret-sit a whole day. Or all night.'

‘What can I do? They adore her. They wash her and clip her nails, things I don't have energy for.' Tartakower started to walk in the direction of his close. ‘A loose arrangement I have with these boys. I tell them surgical tales. They enjoy uplifting yarns about some schmuck leaking to death on an operating table. Amputations also they're fond of. And vivid descriptions of gunshot wounds. I keep their attention half an hour or so, which is more than their teachers.'

Tartakower's Hoodie Army. Perlman said, ‘That was my money you gave them.'

‘I remind you, mister, that was money we negotiated for information.'

‘Information that was pure shite.'

Tartakower took an apple from the bag, bit a chunk, offered the fruit to Perlman, who declined.

‘Let's talk about Jackie Ace – you
fucking
knew what he was. You knew he was a
transvestite
. You misled me by failing to say this—'

Tartakower had apple bits in his beard. ‘You come, you ask me for a boy not so right in the head. So I give you one. You saw him. He's not
strange
enough for you? In my estimation he's cracked all right … Plus he's no transvestite.'

‘I saw him.
Her
.'

‘You saw Jackie Ace, sure. You just got your terminology wrong. He's going
all the fucking way
, Lou. Imagine that.' Tartakower was simmering with glee. Saliva dripped from his lips. ‘This is sex-change we're talking. This is the big transformation, Mister Smart Polis.'

‘Is this another fable?'

‘Take it, leave it. One day years ago he says he's never felt he was a man. Always a woman inside, he says. I'm his priest? He's saving his money for a series of operations that don't bear thinking. My guts turn over. They'll cut off his
schlong
. Castrate him. A vagina they'll dig him out. Uh … This sounds to you sane behaviour?'

He watched Tartakower's face, all bearded guile. ‘Are you lying again?'

‘And tell me what I gain by lying?'

‘More fucking amusement.'

‘You deserve a kick up the arse now and again, Perlman. I sat four years in jail with all the scum of Glasgow, you think I'm jack-in-the-box eager to help you? So I throw you a body-swerve. Jackie Ace. You think a man. Then you find a transvestite. Now I tell you he's on some other evolutionary stage. I amuse easy at my age.'

Perlman said, ‘The hand was cut from somebody living.'

‘Somebody living? You sure?'

Perlman caught Tartakower's arm. ‘No more silly fucking games, Ben. No more daft jokes to inconvenience me, OK? I want a name or else you can get in my car and I'll drive you down to HQ and you can explain why you're impeding a police investigation into possible
murder
.'

‘I'm allergic to cars. Small spaces in general.'

‘I'm waiting.'

A pleading sound entered Tartakower's voice. ‘How many years now I knew your family in the old Gorbals. Your mother and father. One time I took your Aunt Hilda across the Govan Ferry to Partick. A journey that takes a minute, for her a transatlantic crossing.'

‘Ben, this is a woman who crossed God knows what rivers to escape the Nazis? She's going to think the Clyde's a transatlantic crossing? It's a pish of a river.'

Tartakower ignored this point. ‘Tartakowers and Perlmans, neighbours. Did we not exchange sugar in rationing times, buckets of coal, this and that, an easy flow between families. But you grow up, become a polisman and you dismiss history with a cruel stroke …'

Perlman said, ‘Get over it. I want a name. You don't give me one, fine, my car's over there. We'll go now.'

‘Wait … just wait.'

‘For what? More bullshit?'

‘Look, I got other possibles. I had this kid who loved cadavers,
loved
to get his fingers way deep inside the
kishkes
—'

‘Save the gory stuff for your gang of commandoes.'

Tartakower clutched Perlman's sleeve. ‘Also I had a girl about twenty I just remembered. Short-sighted, ugly as one of the Cinderella sisters, a wallflower, tells me amputation is her thing, she's done a couple of gangrened limbs in Africa or somewhere … this is one deranged
shiksa
, Perlman—'

‘Your chop-shop was chock-a-block with headcases,' Perlman said. ‘I'm tired of listening. Just get inside my car.'

Tartakower looked tearful. ‘OK, wait. Maybe I go over the top. Suddenly I remember another boy, skinny kid, all fingers and thumbs, big glasses, he comes to the surgery, he hangs around, he's checking this, checking that. He's keen to cut, I never saw anyone so keen. Maybe some potential skills but he's no Jackie Ace with the blade.'

‘So?'

Tartakower drew Perlman closer. ‘He starts following Ace around like Ace is some kind of fucking god. This kid's smitten. Thinks Jackie Ace craps gold bricks. Ace takes the kid under his wing and teaches him some rudimentary skills. I see them together, they whisper in corners.'

‘So what kind of relationship is this?'

‘He's attached to Ace like Darwin to fossils, Marconi to radio waves—'

‘Did this boy have a name?'

‘Harry Houdini. He was with me six months, seven maybe. Then one day gone,
pouf
, like his namesake. He's worth finding, Lou.'

‘And you're saying Ace would know?'

‘He might.'

‘You could have told me this before.'

Tartakower coughed and hawked up a chunk of phlegm and expelled it through the obstacle of his beard. It hit the pavement.

‘I could,' he said. Was that a sneak of a smile behind the enormous beard.

‘Fucker,' Perlman said.

27

Ron Mathieson drove the six-seater minibus along Paisley Road West. In the passenger seat Big Rooney smoked a cigarette and told a joke about a drunk man who confused nuns with penguins, but Mathieson wasn't paying attention. In the back of the bus Stip and Wee Vic laughed at the punch-line.

Take them to HiCon
, Chuck had said.

Mathieson looked in the rearview mirror. Wee Vic was slugging a can of Tizer and mouthing down a sausage roll. His acne was particularly red and raw-looking today. A pustulated face, like a pitted blood orange. Stip, a quietly spoken man with one eyebrow that met above his nose, studied a racing paper and talked about a horse that was a dead cert at the Kelso National Hunt meet tomorrow.

Rooney, formerly an amateur boxer, looked out the window and said, ‘I fought a coloured boy somewhere around here. I hammered him half-deid in the second round. Hamid somebody.'

‘Hamid and eggs,' Wee Vic said.

‘Scrambled eggs when I was through with him,' Rooney said.

Stip closed his newspaper and said, ‘For any youse diddies interested, this nag's called Yarrow Water. Two o'clock race. SP will be about four, but you can get him today at six or seven.'

‘The last tip you gied me is still running,' Wee Vic said.

Mathieson turned on the radio. He preferred some brain-dead pop music to the clunkety chatter going on around him. He just wanted to get to HiCon and be rid of these morons who'd fucked up a simple job and landed him in the shite with Chuck.