Boxer, Beetle (11 page)

At about six in the morning I’d had to plead with the night porter to let me up to Grublock’s annexe. (‘Night porter’ was a demeaning title for a man who spoke ten languages, had his own staff of twenty, earned as much as a good lawyer, and could reportedly procure you anything from a bottle of 1959 Château Mouton Rothschild to a prostitute who looked like Lyudmila Putin at thirty minutes’ notice, but it was Grublock’s choice.) Security was fierce, of course, but he recognised my face from previous visits, or perhaps just my smell, and seemed willing to do whatever it would take to get my trimethylaminuria out of his lobby, where, as in the lifts, twenty-four-hour financial channels ran silently on plasma screens.

‘Fishy,’ said Grublock, descending the curving stairs into his living room. His ruddy face, pink shirts, small pot belly and public school affability never seemed to match the vampiric Scandinavian furniture. (Or all the Nazi stuff, really.) ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing here? Why didn’t you call if it’s so important? I might not have been up yet.’

‘I know who killed Zroszak.’

‘Go on.’

‘He came to my house. He’s an Ariosophist.’

‘A what?’

‘They were a German secret society.’ I began to explain but Grublock cut me off.

‘Fishy, I’m already quite sure he’s working for the Japanese.’

‘You have to tell me what Zroszak was looking for. I’m involved now. He had a gun, this man.’

‘Well, you’re safe here. And if you must know, he was looking for a beetle. Now, I need to make some phone calls to sort all this out – Teymur first – so if you’re going to stay here I suggest you have a wash. Your bouquet is even more intolerable than usual.’

I knew Grublock wouldn’t tell me any more. And I wasn’t even sure if I could believe what he’d already told me. Undressing in Grublock’s enormous marble bathroom, where the shower could exfoliate a block of cement, I thought about the letter from Hitler to Philip Erskine. How deliriously proud Erskine, whoever he was, must have been when he read it. ‘I have received gifts from popes, tycoons, and heads of state, but none have ever been so singular or unexpected as your kind tribute.’ That couldn’t just be a beetle. Grublock was mocking me. Mocking me tonight, of all nights, when my life was in danger because of a job I was doing for him for free.

Still, I didn’t feel so shaken after a hot shower, and as I dried myself off with a monogrammed towel and put on a monogrammed dressing gown I was looking forward to watching Grublock mobilise his forces. ‘There could be clues in my flat,’ I started to say as I strolled out of the bathroom. I stopped when I remembered that Grublock might still be on the phone.

He wasn’t on the phone, though. He was sitting in an armchair with his hands behind his head. And the Welshman was standing at the door with his gun pointed at Grublock. He looked at me.

‘Sit down, please. You needn’t worry about the panic
button. I’ve disabled it.’ He didn’t sound nearly as angry with me as I probably would have been with someone who’d just thrown a cup of toxic piss in my face. How had he got in?

‘You’re making a laughable error,’ said Grublock evenly. ‘You don’t know who’s employing you, do you? You’re paid through a blind escrow account.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s me. I’m paying. You’re working for me. You just don’t know it. Look, Zroszak was nearly there. I was fairly sure that, one way or another, I’d have what I wanted within a couple of weeks. Then I was going to sell it. Once the Japanese heard that you were on the hunt too – and as long as they didn’t know you were working for me – the price would probably double or triple. I just didn’t expect you to move so fast. I didn’t think you’d get to Zroszak before he told me where to find the fucking thing. And I certainly didn’t expect you to break into my home. I’m very rich but I’m in over my head, you see. This is just my hobby. But if you hurt me now – your own client – who else is ever going to hire you again?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you.’

‘I can prove it. Bring me my laptop and I can show you.’

‘You trust this man?’ said the Welshman, nodding towards me. His blue eyes were so beautifully clear and pale that he looked almost as if he had some sort of glaucoma.

‘Yes, I suppose so, up to a point,’ said Grublock. ‘Why?’

‘He can find things.’

‘Yes,’ said Grublock. Then the Welshman shot him through the forehead.

Grublock slumped sideways in the armchair and a trickle of blood ran down his nose and he made a noise like the click-rasp of my computer’s hard drive when its gigaflops are overstrained.

The Welshman turned to me. I saw he was wearing white latex gloves.

‘Don’t become hysterical, please,’ he said.

‘Are you really looking for a beetle?’ I stammered.

‘Does that sound plausible to you?’

‘No.’

‘Precisely.’

So Grublock had been lying after all. But what about later on, with his story about the blind escrow account? Was he just trying to protect himself? I couldn’t tell. Employing an assassin to drive up an auction prize was the sort of thing Grublock might very easily have done – once, to discourage a rival developer from trying to buy a site in Peckham before he could raise enough money himself, he’d planted a story in the
Evening Standard
which claimed that the children in the adjacent council estates had formed a sort of ketamine rape tribe armed with bicycle chains and samurai swords – but then where did that leave the Thule Society tattoo?

‘What are you looking for, then?’ I said.

‘You’ve heard of a Jewish boxer called Seth Roach?’ said the Welshman.

‘Sort of.’

‘I’m looking for Seth Roach’s grave.’

‘I don’t have any idea where that is.’

‘No.’

‘Does that mean you’re going to kill me?’

‘I’m not going to kill you yet. I’m going to take you with me. You’re going to help me find it.’

The morning light peeked in through the windows of the mortuary, pasty and trembling like the sort of ghoulish little boy who would rather see a dead girl than a naked one. This mortuary wasn’t like a proper mortuary in an undertaker’s, with insectile steel instruments and formaldehyde; it was just a cold brick room where dead men waited on trolleys without even an out-of-date periodical to read until they could be taken off in a van to the crematorium in Hackney to which St Panteleimon’s Hospital sent its departing guests. This morning, the body on the trolley didn’t really look or smell dead – or, anyway, it didn’t look or smell any more dead than it had the night before, when it was still talking – which made Sinner nervous, because, although he wasn’t squeamish, he didn’t like the thought of Ollie Renshaw waking up and grabbing his wrist as he reached into his pockets.

Until consumption of the spine began to coil him up, Renshaw had been a writer of begging letters. A tall, squinting, blond man who would respond to even the most banal statement of fact with a dribble of polite laughter, he moved from lodging-house to lodging-house carrying his private reference library: an old army bag full of telephone directories, out-of-date
Who’s Who
s, annual reports of charitable societies, clergymen’s lists and so on, each volume marked with dozens of careful pencil ticks next to the names he’d already tried. Constantly swapping aliases so that the police and the Charity Organisation Society couldn’t catch up with him, he wrote to ask for money to buy a wheelchair for his daughter Ruth, although for a few pence he would also write
letters, good ones, on behalf of other men in the spike. It was often assumed that he’d taken to this unreliable racket out of desperation, but actually Renshaw, on his return from the Battle of Passchendaele, still only eighteen years old and with no feeling in his left hand, had decided that a fellow who had survived what he had survived should never have to do another honest day’s work in his life, and had consequently become a professional of sorts: back when he had money for a carriage and a clean collar, he used to pose as the earnest young envoy of a deposed Russian countess who needed somebody trustworthy to help her get her millions of roubles to London, offering 10 per cent of the gross in exchange for a bit of help with bribes and bank charges in the early stages. When he was no longer presentable enough to pull this off, he invented Ruth. Then he got spinal tuberculosis and ended up in St Panteleimon’s Hospital in Blackfriars, like Sinner, and then he died of it and ended up here in the mortuary, which they didn’t always bother to lock up because everyone at St P’s knew that it was bad luck to go inside. The dead should be left alone – although in Poland, Sinner’s father had once told him, they would cure an outbreak of the white plague by digging up the body of the first person to die of it and burning their heart.

Sinner’s hands were shaking so hard that he could scarcely unbutton Renshaw’s trousers to see if he had any money sewn into the lining. Although he did not have tuberculosis himself, something deep within his body seemed to aspire to that romantic disease and was now guessing haphazardly at the symptoms – so his skin was yellow, he vomited three or four times a day, and he bruised like a ripe peach. If he tripped over in a corridor he would fall to his knees and have to lean against the wall for a minute or two before he could get up.

After things had gone wrong in New York, they had never really gone right again. He recalled the day after Rabbi Berg’s
dinner, when he’d spoken to Frink through the locked door of his room.

‘Let me out.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your dinner.’

‘I’ve got to train. Fight’s coming up.’

‘The fight’s off, Seth. It’s all off. You know that.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ said Frink. ‘You’re asking me why? First chance you got, you tricked us, you ran away, you stole Judah’s wallet, you got wankered, and you stabbed me in the fucking hand. You think Judah’s going to have you back in his gym after all that? You honestly think we’re going to let you out in public again? We’re going home before you get yourself thrown in jail, son. And, by the way, the Aloysius Fielding purse was supposed to pay for our ticket back, remember? That’s out. So Judah’s going to give me a few dollars a day to help in the gym, and he’s going to lend me some more, until we’ve got enough. Which is more than we bloody deserve. Especially since I’ll be a fat lot of use with bandages on my hand.’

‘I want to fight.’

‘You could have, Seth. You could have. This was your shot. You would have won, too. It would have been the beginning of something. You knew that. You’ve always been so bleeding predictable, but I thought just this once you might have made an exception. Because it’s not just you that has to deal with this. It’s me. You’ve fucked it all up for me, too. After everything. Do you give a toss about that, Seth? I don’t suppose you do. Little prick.’

Despite Frink’s anger, he seemed to soften before Sinner did; and on the steamboat home, and on the train to Euston, and even as they queued for a bus, he kept trying to strike up a conciliatory conversation. But Sinner didn’t respond. He was so sick of listening to Frink that he almost began to regret not murdering the older man back in the bar. There
was only one human being in the world who was allowed to make him feel guilty, and that was his sister Anna. He refused the offer of a spare bed for the night. Instead, he went straight to the Caravan.

Over the next few months, Sinner began to wish more and more that he could have stayed in New York, that he could have got a rematch against the city that had broken his unbeaten streak. All that glory Frink had talked about: he knew he deserved that. How could it possibly have escaped from him for ever in just one evening? He should still have been out there, but instead he was back in London, where every night was different. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and go back to their flat. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and the other man would pay for a room in the Hotel de Paris or another hotel. Sometimes he’d sleep in a park until the police moved him on. Sometimes he’d sleep among the tramps at Embankment. Sometimes he’d catch a few hours’ kip in one of the all-night cinemas off Leicester Square before the usher woke him up with a torch, newsreels playing over and over in the distance, Mussolini and King Edward. Sometimes he’d even spend a shilling to get into a lodging-house dormitory. The problem was that Sinner did have friends, of a sort – Will Reynolds, say, who ran the Caravan – but the moment he had to ask them for help he would no longer be able to tolerate their friendship, so the only people he touched for money were people he didn’t like, and although there were a lot of those, he soon ran out of likely prospects. There were his parents, but he was happy not to have seen them for three years, and if he ever did see them again it would be when he was champion of the world, not when he was broke. There was Albert Kölmel, but you didn’t want to owe anything to Albert Kölmel, however small. And there was Frink, but that was still out of the question. He wished he could see Anna, but he didn’t know where she was.

So before long he started to look around for posh sissies
who would not only give him a bed for the night but pay him, too. They weren’t usually hard to find, although once he ended up having sex with an indifferent maid while her master watched from an armchair. He often stole cash and jewellery on his way out, because he knew they wouldn’t go to the police, and with the money he began to drink more than he ever had before, because without Frink he didn’t even need to stay sober for fights or training, and life didn’t really feel any different until one night in December he realised that something pretty awful must have happened to him because not only could he not find any posh sissies in Covent Garden who would stop to talk, but he also couldn’t even get the bouncers to let him into the Caravan. And in fact he couldn’t remember much of what had happened between that day and the day he’d found himself sipping tea in St Panteleimon’s Hospital.

You were lucky to get a bed in St P’s, one of the very few charitable hospitals of its kind in London. But you weren’t expected to keep the bed for long. Every day the trolley was brought into Sinner’s ward to take someone away. Last night it had been Ollie Renshaw, and that was why Sinner was here in the mortuary for the third time since Christmas. On the first two attempts he hadn’t found any money on the corpses, but the schmuck Renshaw was certain to have some stashed away, and then Sinner could leave the lung house and get his first drink for several weeks. Admittedly, he didn’t seem to want a drink quite as much as he had back then – in fact the thought made him feel a little bit sick – but since he’d been promising himself a drink thousands of times a day for all that time, he didn’t really have any choice.