Solomon's Keepers (13 page)

The woman in black looks at him. ‘Mr. Barstow?’ she calls. He smiles and walks over. It isn’t usually her that he sees.

‘Hello,’ he says. His name is on a list in front of her. She’s leafing through a pack of beige folders to find him. ‘Batchelor, Banner, Barlow…How are you, Mr. Barstow?’

‘Chipper,’ he says, suddenly realising how hot he feels. He feels chipper all right, just probably looks like shit.

The woman looks at him and smiles again. Little flecks of crimson lipstick have attached to her teeth. She has a black blouse on that exposes a generous triangle of roasted skin below her throat. A shoal of brown and tan freckles swim there, putting Roman in mind of a colour blindness test he once failed. She hands him a sheet with a column of his previous signatures like a petition of clones. ‘Have you done any work in the last fortnight?’ Nah. Still looking in the local papers? All the usual stuff. When she’s done he looks at her and asks her cheerfully if she is going to hook up to The Big Connection tonight. He has a feeling. She turns quite mischievous and twinkly. ‘Oh I don’t go in for that sort of thing – he’s very naughty, isn’t he?’

Told you so, he thinks.

They get to Jake’s and he’s making breakfast; beans on toast, Worcester sauce, thick white bread and a Special Brew. They watch him eat it while they have a tin each and a couple of roll ups. Jake’s friend Sooya counts out the phials of Escanol from a rattling but hidden fold of her sari. She doesn’t smile. Roman knows her from the electronics showroom. She’s moving up. Jake has her drive the deliveries in the new development the locals call the Khyber Pass.

From Jake’s you can take a short cut across the edge of the new Tesco site. There’s an island of condemned old terraced houses behind grey weld mesh fences. A pair of JCBs is caged there like yellow dinosaurs and every day they munch off another piece of ugly history and leave a new ragged edge of bricks and wallpaper hanging above the old street. The buildings have been empty for years and it’s strange to see the preserved intimacy of a living room or a bedroom suddenly exposed to the elements. You half expect to see some old dear in slippers and a floral wrap totter up the stairs with a cup of tea and drop off the ripped boards. You there, dear? Splat! You could make a war film there. For some reason nobody is working today and the big JCBs stand idle. The boys wait to finish Windy’s joint before they squeeze between the fence panels at the far end and cross the street to the Bird in Hand. The pub is a big old three storey blockhouse and on either side there are little dark cottages that open directly on to the street. They look like a string of children holding a parent’s hand and leaning forward before crossing the road. The whole lot is on borrowed time. Six months, the landlord said. You couldn’t see anything behind the grimy nets in the windows but every now and again people would come and go through the little doorways. It was hard to imagine the way it would all be when the artist’s impression of the new site that he’d seen in the papers, with its clean red bricks, watercolour trees and suggested shrubs, became a reality. He and Windy would probably switch to The Granby.

They sit at the bar; watching American football and drink a lager each. The pub is doing sparse custom and the landlord eyes them cautiously but says nothing about dealing. Two brickies are taking forever over one game at the pool table. The bar is loud with the clicks of the cues and the dope makes it even louder and accentuates the comic rigmarole that passes for expertise; all the pointing at pockets, the leaning and straightening, calculations, rethinks.

‘They’re never going to finish. And look at the clink on the side. We’re fucked,’ Windy observes, gloomily.

‘Tossers,’ Roman snarls. ‘Fancy a bap?’

Roman doesn’t understand American football. The players hardly ever get anywhere. It’s all stop start. He likes the atmosphere though. It is definitely charged up. ‘They must all be on something,’ he says, ‘America tablets.’ Actually, that would be a good idea. They’d go like hot cakes, in fact like hot dogs. ‘Dargs,’ he mutters.

‘What’re you on about?’ asks Windy.

‘Nothing.’

The barman brings Roman’s bap. The ham is the real stuff – a thick fibrous wedge – but the bun is soggy with marge and covered in flour like talc, as though it had just got out of the bath. Windy sticks to crisps.

Roman watches Windy get another round in. He’s older than Roman. Maybe twenty-two but so thin he looks younger. He’s done some roofing. He wasn’t good with heights though – hence the name. His legs are like tent poles in his baggy denims, his shoulders sharp in his black leather jacket like a coat hanger. He has a long noble face that deserves better than the crew cut and meagre earrings; deserves something dashing. His blue eyes flicker like a sword fight.

‘Know what, Windy? Sometimes I wonder how you stay alive.’

‘I’m like a butterfly, mate. I live off air.’

‘And crisps,’ said Roman.

‘And fags,’ said Windy. They both laugh.

The pub being a dead loss, they head for the mall. You tend to offload Esky better later on, better rates too. Catch someone without a switch just before the play and you can take him for anything – even a fifty sometimes. Windy wants to check out new phones and get a lottery ticket. Roman fancies the girl in the sunglasses booth. It’s nudging three by the time they get there. Sergio is on security. They can see him through the double doors, standing in the middle of the gangway looking about him vaguely. Not a bad job. All you had to do was walk about and look big. Well, maybe answer a few questions, point at the store layout and once in a blue moon chase somebody. That was where Sergio’s credibility took a dive. Who was he going to catch? As they walk up he stands still, arms behind his swollen midriff like a skittle. You could imagine him being bowled over by some runaway yob and a giant claw lowering ten more in a row across the walkway.

‘Hey, Serge!’

‘Windy. Alright Roman, how’s your brother?’

‘Yeah. Where is everybody? Place is deserted.’

‘Friday, enit. What you up to. Usual?’

Windy goes all funny. ‘We’re, like, shopping, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah, right. Go on, go into Dixons and actually buy something. Give ‘em a heart attack’

Roman laughs. ‘Steady on, Serge! Think what you’re saying. We start buying stuff and it could rock the boat. People would start to worry. You could have a panic on your hands.’

‘Yeah,’ says Windy, ‘like, Sergio, we saw Windy and that fat boy buying stuff in Dixons. What’s that all about? Where’s the exit, Sergio.’

Sergio gives a long-suffering smile. ‘Yeah well it’s never going to happen, is it.’

‘Nah, not today anyway.’ Roman slips him his phial and watches his toothless crescent smile break out. You owe me, Sergio.

The three of them amble into the mall and turn left towards the Sunglass Hut. Their footsteps squidge on the smooth floor and the echoes run around in the huge open space. How do you kidnap a whole species?

The sunglasses booth is an oval glass counter in the middle of the walkway, like a boat grounded in midstream. The girl sits on a stool at one end, reading a magazine and sipping from a foam cup. Sergio and Windy saunter on beyond. Windy ducks into Dixons and Sergio hovers at the doorway. Roman starts at the far end of the boat and browses towards the girl. He takes in her heavy black hair and charred eyes first, then, when she puts the cup down, the silver stud under her mauve lower lip. She wears a short black tee shirt and black jeans. While Roman watches the girl slyly out of the corner of his eye, he is being watched from under the glass by the regimented and much steadier gaze of the expensive section; Attitude, E3, some old Ralph Laurens, the usual suspects. He returns the gaze of some rimless DKs. The girl looks his way.

‘Want to try any?’

‘What do you think would suit me?’ he says and smiles at her.

She straightens in her chair and considers his face. He’s a nice looking guy with fun in his eyes. Frankly, he’d look better without shades. He’d be okay if he could lose a couple of stone and shave that stupid bum fluff off his cheeks.

‘You’ve got a wide face. And you want something that follows your eyebrows, square at the top, like those, probably.’ She points past him. He notices her fingers, black nail polish and heavy silver rings.

‘What do you reckon to these, though?’ He says, sticking with the DKs.

‘I reckon you’d look like a Chelsea bun in those.’

Roman recoils and reconsiders. It isn’t the effect he’s after and he tells her. She takes two steps and stands across the counter from him. She looks really pretty when she smiles. Teeth like white peas in a mauve pod. ‘Yeah but it’s not what they look like in there, is it? It’s what they look like on.’

‘True,’ says Roman. ‘I’m after a sort of black, jazzy, cool kind of feel, maybe more of a fudge brownie than a Chelsea bun.’

‘You need more than sunglasses then,’ she says, laughing.

‘No kidding.’

He leans across a bit, elbows on the glass. She doesn’t move back.

‘How long are you going to be working here?’ he asks. He can hear himself sounding like some twat in a soap on the telly.

‘What, tonight?’

‘I mean, are you going to be working here for a while or are you just sort of…filling in or whatever.’

She tilts her head and looks him in the eyes. ‘I’ll just see what turns up. You never know. All these rich men that come by here…’

It’s Roman’s turn to laugh.

‘Think I’d be wasting my time, wouldn’t I?’ She went on. ‘Still, you get some nice people in here. It’s not a bad laugh.’

‘So what time do you knock off then?’

‘Eight.’

‘Eight and don’t be late.’ Inwardly he winces. What the fuck did he say that for?

‘I thought for a minute you were going to ask me out.’ She says.

‘Nah, busy tonight; connecting, how about another time?’

‘I don’t know whether my boyfriend would like that.’

‘If he’s big, don’t tell him.’

‘You’re cheeky.’

‘Well, is he?’

‘Is he what?’

‘You know, big.’ Her eyes were keeping up with his. He let his gaze yo-yo down and up her body and take in the pale skin where her tee shirt and jeans disagree. There is another piercing in her navel.

‘He’s big enough.’

‘Well, think about it and I’ll see you around.’ He shoots her his best conspiratorial glance as he draws himself up to go.

‘Okay. What’s your real name, Mr Brownie?’

‘Roman.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, really. What’s yours?’

‘Denise.’

‘Okay, Denise. Ever need an Esky switch, I’m your man. See you around.’

‘Yeah, see you.’

Nine

Rees sits back into the feisty buoyancy of the inflatable chair and paddles duck’s feet in the water. The movement turns him slowly as he drift backwards and his face comes into the warmth of the sun. He’s dozing, recalling travelling: the flight, the disgorgement into warmth, and the smell of cigars in the airport. They had travelled a long road by night in a bumpy, blacked-out van halting only once at a checkpoint where shadowy figures, visible only as buckles and burnished leather as they passed across the headlights, had queried the driver in the staccato of provincial authority and then confirmed them on their way with sudden deference to the name and signature on the torch-lit paperwork.

It’s hot enough to hold the world still and the silence is broken only by sighs from the poolside and the sprinkled monotonies of insects. The afternoon is anticipating the turning point when dishevelled daylight becomes a sunset; ripped seams are already leaking pink and the clouds are swabbing angry minerals from distant hills.

Rees is tired from the cumulative effect of months of exertion and his senses racing under the whip hand of Escanol. Each day leaves its mark. The Hookies need confirmatory bumps and scrapes that make KomViva an adrenaline ride. Their brains absorb the adventure but his body takes the knocks for real. And bodies remember. Hookies start each scat afresh; he is a palimpsest that retains each gouge and scratch at a deeper level. It’s getting to him. Outwardly he is strong from daily exercise; the gourmet eating has bulked the haggardness out of his muscles and turned knots and fibres into curves. Outwardly he’s mastered the rollercoaster of the drug and to his colleagues he has become a reliable performer. He rarely misses Zena in communication. He listens to Myron outline each scat and digests its elements, able to follow the guidelines where needed and improvise where it helps. They feel like old hands together. If Zena sends during the action he can adjust accordingly. Sometimes he surprises them with his own ideas; makes them laugh, makes them gasp, but he always delivers. Each day provides a schedule that taxes him but each is also a day of intensity, of sensory excess and of exclusive focus on his every move.

Myron is calling from the poolside. ‘Hey Rees, it’s a go. You wanna come and hear this?’

He spins the chair and looks across dazzling water. Myron sits at a table in the advancing shadows of a long whitewashed wall bewigged with purple bougainvillea. The tiled geometry of the house rises amongst trees beyond. He’s waving the satellite phone excitedly above his head.

‘We’re in business. Come and get it.’

Rees slides into the water and swims to the side of the pool in time to join Zena as she appears through an archway in the wall. They leave wet and dry footprints across the terrace. Myron fidgets excitedly. A row of perfect teeth glints amidst the silver topiary of his jaws.

‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself.’ Zena says.

‘Pleased doesn’t come close.’ Myron shrieks. ‘I am so looking forward to this one. Man this is going to be a scream.’ It already is.

These days the budgets are crazy. Each scat is a project in itself and to hit the weekly deadlines for live scats there are multiple projects overlapped. They are banking several per week and run one live. The catalogue is building all the time. The live event takes precedence and determines the main location; the bankers are improvised using whatever the ground team can come up with. Sometimes they’re the best. Live scats always began with the ‘Let’s get started’ routine and often include a recorded simulcrypt stream before splicing across to the live action. They call it warping. The effect to the Hookie is of jumping into a new environment, a shock. It’s already a favourite effect.

Each project has a staff appointed to work the location, buy the assets, bribe any gatekeepers, recruit the temps and dry run as much of the action as possible. As far as Rees can tell, Armand runs the overall team. It’s like a corporation. He has secretaries and researchers, buyers, fixers and an army of heavies, handymen and labourers who descend on a setting and work night and day until it is ready. Rees meets different people all the time and never knows who most of them are. He knows he has people that poll subscribers for views on the scats to date and digest their feedback and their ideas for the future. Myron owns the creative side. He provides lists of outlines to Armand and once they are approved it is his job to craft the detail and re-craft them in the light of whatever realities they find on the ground. Myron keeps this all moving with constant calls on his mobile phones and inexhaustible enthusiasm.

‘We’re going into the jungle, Rees.’ He says.

Rees turns and looks across the pool and out to the mountains beyond. ‘How long did I sleep on the plane?’

Zena laughs. ‘Most of it. Maybe six or seven hours. You were out cold.’

‘Really? Where are we?’

‘Cuba,’ Myron says, ‘tomorrow we’ll go East, to the jungle, atmosphere, exotica, wildlife; that’s what they want – we can get enough here for a whole jungle series. The variety…ever heard of a guy called Humboldt?’

‘The Lolita guy?’ Zena chimes in.

‘No, no, sonic landscapes. The unique sounds of a place. ‘The description that transforms the ear into the eye,’ all that stuff. German guy I think.’

A double nope.

‘We wanted a place that came alive aurally,’ Myron’s hands stretch an invisible accordion, ‘somewhere where you get a unique atmosphere, the depth of sound, layer on layer of rare and subtle sounds, who knows, maybe disappearing noises. We want to raise the anti for the backdrop. You know, really give a fantastic sense of place. Then when we splice into the studio we don’t lose…’

Zena likes the sound of it. ‘Great idea!’ It is good to be enthusiastic around Myron. It saves your eardrums. Rees has already zoned out.

Later they hit the old city of Havana as evening rolls in. There she is in all her faded glory: sagging and crumbling, peeling and flaking like a half eaten, sea-gnawed birthday cake. Along the front the grand Spanish colonnades lean drunkenly and the tall facades in their pastel-coloured finery totter out of step in the face of the onrushing waves. The ancient American V8 shakes itself and bawls as they roll around the curve of the Malecon. The big Cuban driver and the minder they call Rocky ride in front while Rees sits high on the back of the rear seat alongside Missy Jay. They meet the salt spray together as the waves reach and spit over the sea wall and tug sheets of foaming water between their wheels. The music from the jam box on the back seat is loud even over the boom of the engine and the huge bellows of the sea. When a sharp salt lash catches them both full in the face Missy Jay doesn’t miss a beat in her rap; ‘gonna find some fun, gonna give it some, gonna make it big, gonna make him jig…’ and she doesn’t stop bumping, nuzzling and writhing against him. They turn along a side street and a throng of passers-by looks up and waves. Missy Jay is up on one knee on the wet panel of the trunk, hands outstretched and hips gyrating in Rees’s restraining hands ‘gonna cruise aroun’, gonna ball this town, ain’t never gonna stop, salsa or hip hop, whatever gets em hot, when it hits the spot,…’ The children on the balconies grin and shout and a cyclist folds into the bonnet of a parked van. They know Missy Jay alright. Rees grins too. Even down here they know her straight away. He can see it in all these faces; but who is that guy with her? Who’s that guy with the shades with his arm around Missy Jay?

The other two cars catch up now we’ve slowed down and it becomes a convoy. All the vehicles are the same fifties refugees; bull-nosed, wide-finned museum pieces with engines that make the glass in the shop windows rattle as they pass. The newcomers are filled with the Politrak records people and Missy Jay’s protection.

Politrak Records have their own interpretation of the secrecy of the brief. The throng of trendies that Myron’s fixer has arranged turns out to be several hundred people and the square is impassable. The prow of the big V8 growls and snowploughs a dent in the crowd of revellers and its edge of blue police uniforms. It is obvious this is not going to work. Rees can see the Bacardi banner stretched across the side street ahead where the club is and there up on the balcony the old man with the girls ready to toss the goods but there is no way they are going to make it down there. Rocky is listening to instructions on the walkie-talkie. He taps the big Cuban on the arm and describes a horizontal circle with his hand. They divert down another street.

‘Third world debt, but they dying from aids, international jet set, give Keeley a raise, who gives a fuck, they just out of luck, ain’t our concern, we just let em burn…’

‘Get down,’ Rocky is yelling, ‘get your asses back inside, we’re outa here.’

Knots of children and seated matrons watch them pass. Everyone waves. Youngsters walking towards the square point and call out. They turn once again on to the Malecon and gun back around the wave-slick seafront.