The Last Darkness (7 page)

He was possessed by a daft urge to proclaim his feelings. In another world, yeh. In a comic strip reality.
True Love Rescues Trapped Maiden from High Tower Hell
.

Miriam,
neshuma
.

‘I read somewhere you got a lectureship,' he said. ‘I meant to phone and congratulate you.'

‘You never phone, Lou. You never come to the house. But thanks for the thought.'

‘Art School … right?' He knew the answer. He'd read the two small paragraphs in the
Herald
half a dozen times. He'd hunched over them like a Talmudic student scrutinizing some sixth-century proverb for its concealed meaning. He was proud that Miriam's oil paintings, big bold ambitious explosions of colour, hung in collections and galleries and banks. The ones he'd seen suggested nebulae detonating in space.

Miriam said, ‘I'm teaching figure-drawing. Just for a year.'

‘Well, if you're ever short of a model,' he said, and wondered if it was a joke too far. Sitting naked in a class of students, Miriam watching and assessing him, thinking he was pale and a little overweight, muscles in dire need of toning. She'd compare him to Colin, and she'd find him lacking. In the red corner, Colin, sick and handsome. In the blue, Lou, lumpen cop. No contest. KO.

‘I'll keep that generous offer in mind,' she said, and she turned to the man who'd escorted her inside the hospital. ‘Artie Wexler. You two
must
know each other?'

Artie Wexler said, ‘We go back a long long way.'

Lou remembered Artie Wexler well, one of Colin's inner circle. Sixtyish, square-faced, brown hair thick and unreal, a weave maybe. Lou accepted Wexler's outstretched hand, which was hot and firm. Something at the back of Lou's mind prevented him from wanting to hold the hand for long. Something buried. He wasn't sure what.

‘How are you?' Lou asked. He wondered if there was anything between Miriam and Wexler, but he set this aside as the fevered fear of the anxious lover, even though he didn't have a lover's proprietary rights.

‘Considering the mileage, I'm fine,' Wexler said, and laughed in the easy way of a man who has prospered in life.

‘Tell me about mileage,' Lou Perlman said.

‘Still with the Strathclyde Police?'

‘Can't find my way out.'

‘Must be interesting work.'

People always said that. ‘It has its moments.'

Miriam said, ‘I'm going to look in on Colin now. Lou, phone me soon?'

‘I will.'

‘Is that a promise?'

He put a hand over his heart. ‘On my word.'

Wexler said, ‘Good seeing you.'

He walked behind Miriam and they passed through the door to the corridor. Wexler looked back once across the reception area and smiled at Lou, who wondered if he saw something a little possessive in the expression. Miriam and Wexler.
Aw, ballocks, your head's stuffed with keech, Lou
.

He stepped outside and lit a Silk Cut. Miriam's scent hung in the fibres of his coat. He had work to do, a dead man to identify; funny how the silent mysteries of the dead had kept him busier all these years than the noisy cravings of his heart. He walked to his Mondeo and, annoyed with himself, annoyed with the world,
his
world, booted the right front tyre hard a couple of times and said
she's not for you, she's not for you
.

Dear Christ, she's been married to your brother for thirty-two years. Thirty-two long years. That's a whole world, and you're not a part of it. So it's time, Lou, to grow up and move on, it's time.

9

Club Memphis, bankrupt, stripped of assets, was located in a loft not far from the Gallowgate. The club had been the property of a man called Bobby J Smith, more commonly known in Glasgow entertainment circles as BJ Quick. He wore tight blue jeans and a white T-shirt and a brown leather jacket. He was forty-five years old and lean as a whippet. He had an ear-stud attached to his left lobe, and a thin gold chain around his neck.

Quick fingered the chain and said to the man in the chair, ‘You're telling me you're fucking penniless. Don't have a brass fucking
farthing
to your name?'

The man roped to the chair wore only Y-fronts with a cross of St Andrew design. He had bald legs. ‘If I had the dosh, BJ, you'd get it. If I knew how to lay my hands on it, you'd have it. So let's get these ropes off and act like rational men.'

‘Rational? I've lost my club. I've lost my fucking livelihood. I've lost my
dream
!' BJ Quick gestured round the long drab room. A few old rock posters, cracked and creased, remained on the walls. The Killer thumping his piano. The King in black leather jump suit, lank of well-oiled hair hanging over forehead. Chuck Berry doing the duck walk, guitar held in bazooka position. ‘This is all I got left after the vultures came in. Life's work. Life's fucking work, arsehole. People like you put me outta business. Cretins.
Wankers
! People who wouldn't come up with the readies when they said they would.'

‘These are competitive times in the club business, BJ,' the man said. He had a big round face the colour of an unlit fluorescent tube. He was known as Vindaloo Bill on account of his addiction to fiendishly hot curries. ‘If you don't keep up, BJ, you go under.'

‘I didn't keep up, eh? That what you're saying?'

‘Rock Revival, big yawn. Okay for a couple weeks, man. But kids want acid dance or just a general fucking rave. You're a dinosaur, pal. Elvis is dead, by all reliable accounts. Jerry Lee's an old-age pensioner. These kids want Backyard Babies and Micronesia one week, and God knows what else next. You can't keep up with their tastes. You were beating off a dead horse, BJ. Even the name. Club Memphis? Past tense, pal. I mean,
you
might be obsessed with dead music –'

‘Fuck you, Vindy. Stick to the subject. You owe me
fucking money
, you hairy-arsed tub of shite.' BJ kicked Vindy Bill's kneecaps hard. ‘I dug in my wallet for you when times were tough. Here's a grand, Vindy. Here's another. Let me help you.' He bent an arm, tensed it, and drove the ramrod of his elbow into Vindy's face and blood poured out of a suddenly split lip.

‘Ah fuck,' Vindy said, spitting out a dollop of tooth.

BJ Quick looked at the blood dripping on Vindaloo's Y-fronts. He was furious, he missed his club, he ached for the nights when the place was packed and the music was loud and money was rolling in like tumbleweed in a gale. Okay, moronic oversight to forget setting loot aside for the tax people, and the VAT man, and the assorted legalized proctologists who probed his bum with rough instruments for the government's cut. Okay okay, mistakes were made. But he was damned if he'd suffer for his generosity to wallies like Vindaloo Bill. And he was damned if he'd hear his beloved Club Memphis criticized as
old-fashioned
. He walked to the window. He looked out. Snow blew in powdery swirls over chimney tops. He turned and stared the length of the loft.

Willie Furfee stood in shadow at the far end. He was a big man dressed in the neo-Edwardian mode that had been popular in the late 1950s, long jacket with velvet collar, drainpipe trousers, suede shoes with thick soles: brothel-creepers. He was a fully paid-up Teddy Boy, an anachronism. Sometimes at revivalist rock concerts he encountered fellow travellers and they smoked skunk together in the toilets and talked about funky little shops where you could still lay your paws on some authentic threads from the old days. They remembered legendary concerts they'd attended. No fucking Beatles she-loves-you-yeah-yeah shite, or poncy Rolling Stones stuff. Furfee and his like were pioneers along the rock frontiers, sworn to Little Richard, or Jerry Lee, sometimes even Gene Vincent or Eddie ‘Three Steps to Heaven' Cochran.

‘Got your blade, Furf?' BJ Quick asked.

‘Always, BJ.'

Vindy turned his head. ‘Blade?'

Quick chucked Vindy under the chin. ‘Time for some serious biz.'

‘A fucking blade, man? No way. That's not on.'

‘Oh but it is. The Furf doesn't like to use his razor, because basically he's soft-hearted. But he's awfully good with it,
pal
, and a man shouldn't be denied the chance of practising his skills now and again, right?'

Vindaloo shook his head vigorously. ‘I'll get you your money. I will.'

‘Aye, when pigs crap gold. Fuck
you
. I'm tired waiting.'

Furfee walked across the wooden floor, which had been burned and gouged by millions of cigarette ends and stiletto heels. He took an old-fashioned bone-handle razor from his jacket. He opened the blade, and it gleamed like a terrible mirror.

Vindaloo said, ‘Youse are kidding me, right?'

Quick asked, ‘Are we kidding, Furf?'

Furfee said, ‘Do I look like I'm kidding?'

Quick said, ‘The Furf never kids. What's your sign, Bill?'

‘Sign?'

‘Star sign, arsehole.'

‘Fuck. Pisces. So what?'

BJ Quick said, ‘Do us a fish, Furf,' and he grabbed the left arm and held it, and Furfee brought the blade down and carved a curving line in the skin of the backarm, and blood surfaced quickly where he'd cut. Vindaloo roared and wriggled around in his chair and tried to break free of the ropes.

‘Oh, for fuck's sake, don't cut me again,' he shouted. ‘Come on, BJ, we go back years, tell this guy not to cut me, eh?
Please
.'

‘Sit still and shut your face. Here, this'll help,' and BJ Quick stuffed a filthy rag he found on the floor into Vindaloo's mouth, just as Furfee drew another curving line with the edge of the blade, joining it to the first incision he'd made. Now he had two five-inch lines, each bleeding. Vindaloo tried to scream, but the thick rag muffled his sound.

BJ Quick said, ‘Nice work, Furf.'

Furfee took the razor away. ‘Want me to finish this, BJ?'

Vindaloo Bill shook his head with vigour. ‘Blllblllwoobbb,' he said.

‘Is that a no?' Quick asked.

Furfee said, ‘Hard to tell.'

‘Do the eyes of the fish now, Furf.'

Furf bent over the arm and made two deep punctures between the curved lines with a slight stabbing motion of his hand. The blade was wondrously sharp. Blood spewed down Vindy's arm and over his belly.

‘Star sign,' Quick said. ‘Scar sign more like.'

‘Ha ha,' Furf laughed.

‘The tail, Furf. Don't forget the tail.'

‘I wish this fucker would stop wriggling.'

‘You hear that, Vindy? Be still. Be very still.' BJ patted Vindaloo's cheek gently. ‘A fella cuts you, it's going to hurt like hell. Just think, this could be much worse. Eee gee, I could ask the Furf to
skin
you. He's got a diabolical skill for that. Skinning's worse than anything. You see somebody slice off the top layer of your skin and you start to think, what the hell will it be like if he skins my whole fucking
body
? Try and imagine yourself without your outer covering. Got the picture? Not a very pretty sight …'

‘
Abbbekkkkmmml.
'

Quick ripped the rag from Vindy's mouth. ‘You trying to say something?'

‘No more, please, BJ, I can't take it. The bloody pain –'

‘I'd like to finish the tail,' Furfee said. His eyes had the beatific light of a man in the extremes of pleasure. ‘You want me to go on, BJ?'

‘That's up to Vindy.'

‘I'll find you money. Swear to God.'

‘You hear that, Furf?'

‘Man swears to God. An old story.'

‘Ach, finish the tail, Furf.'

Vindaloo said, ‘Wait, no, listen, I can get you five K. That's all.'

‘Five K, eh? Zatso? I'd want it tonight.'

‘Aye. Tonight. No problem. Absolutely.'

BJ Quick said, ‘Eight sharp.'

‘Eight sharp, worda honour.'

‘Just remember this, Vindaloo. We know where you live.'

Furfee said, ‘Right. Ranfurly Road, Penilee.'

‘And does he live alone, Furf?'

‘Wife Mary, age thirty-four. Two kids. Tom, ten, and Cindy, seven.'

Quick said, ‘Wee doll that Cindy. A Goldilocks.' He untied the ropes, let them drop to the floor.

‘Don't come to my house, for Christ's sake,' Vindy said, picking up his clothes and groaning. ‘Please. I'll meet you anywhere.'

‘Govan subway station.'

‘Right. Fine. Fuck's sake, I'm bleeding all over the fucking shop here,' Vindy said.

‘Get dressed, Billyboy. Go home. Get the money.'

‘Dressed? I'm leaking
pints
, BJ. You got any bandages, anything like that, stop all this?'

Furfee laughed, a sound like a poker raked through cinders. ‘We look like a chemist to you?'

‘He'll be wanting rubbers next,' BJ said.

Furfee laughed again and wiped his blade dry against Vindy's shirt, which the injured man was trying to button with fingers shaking.

Vindaloo Bill, human colander, dripped blood all over the floor.

‘You can find your way out, I take it,' BJ Quick said.

‘I'm going, I'm going.' In slow measured steps, Vindy moved towards the door. He went out, stumbling, weeping.

‘What do you think?' Furfee asked.

‘I think it's bloody magical he can find money when he swears left and right he doesn't have any.'

‘Carving affects people,' Furfee said.

BJ Quick stepped around puddles of blood and walked to the window. He looked out at snow drifting lazily across the city. He observed a ghost of his own image in the glass and touched the promontory of hair that rose from the centre of his head and powered out over his brow. It was yellow, like a bird poised for flight from the bush of surrounding black hair. This style, a jutting pompadour with attitude, was rock ‘n' roll, flash, up yours.

‘Five grand's not going to get me the ante for a new club. Kilroy wants another ten before I can get this place back.' He breathed on the pane and drew the letters
KILROY WAS HERE
in the condensation with a fingertip, then rubbed them out. Leo Kilroy was the owner of the premises and he'd promised, in thon sleakit way of landlords, that BJ could have first option on the place if he could lay his hands on twenty-five K.
I can't hold that offer open too long, BJ
.