Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (25 page)

Inevitably, he appears in the bedroom doorway.

“You hear that?” he says.

I don’t answer him.

“It’s stopped now.”

“Then I can’t hear it, can I?”

“It stopped out there on the road.”

“The noise?”

“An automobile. It stopped on the road.”

“It’s a steep road.”

“There’s only one reason to stop out there and that’s to call here because there ain’t nowhere else.”

“Maybe they ran out of petrol.”

“And maybe it’s Mickey and Donald and Goofy out having a midnight picnic.”

I don’t say anything.

“Where are the guns?”

“I forgot.”

“I want them.”

“No.”

“You really want me knocked over don’t you?”

I don’t answer him.

“I mean, you like the idea so much, why don’t you just go ahead and fix up the job yourself?”

There’s no answer to that either.

“So what are you going to do?” D’Antoni asks.

“You mean about knocking you over?”

“Listen, you bastard, the hills could be crawling with pistols.”

“Or, like you say, maybe it’s Mickey and Donald and Goofy on a midnight picnic.”

D’Antoni stands there for a minute or two, then he turns around and disappears into the darkness, pad-padding as far as the top of the stairs. Then there is silence again. Silence, that is, until the darkness is reversed by the illuminating of the hall and the landing from down below.

“What the Christ,” shrieks D’Antoni.

There is no immediate reply to that.

“Turn ’em off, you mother,” D’Antoni continues.

The lights go off, sharp.

After a little time has elapsed, Wally’s voice drifts up from the well of the hall.

“What’s the bleedin’ game, then?”

My earlier remarks have allowed a little brave petulance to act as a splint for his tonsils. D’Antoni tells him to shut up and keep quiet. I light another cigarette. Time passes and the silence gets heavier.

Eventually Wally says: “What’s going on?”

D’Antoni shuts him up again.

More time, more silence, and a couple more cigarettes. D’Antoni and Wally remain frozen in the black aspic. Then something happens.

It happens outside. The surface of the silence is rippling with the sound of footsteps on the gravelled part of the villa’s approach. For a little while this is all that happens. Then D’Antoni’s Disney croak floats into the bedroom.

“Now you hear,” he says.

I don’t answer him, neither do I move.

“They’re here,” he says. “They came for me.”

The footsteps get closer. Then they stop. I can hear D’Antoni crawling along the landing back in the direction of my bedroom, and while he’s on his way back, he makes another request to have his shooters back, but he’s cut short in the middle of his appeal by the sound of tinkling laughter from beyond the plate glass, or at least that’s the way Audrey would describe it. To me, it’s the sound of the well-pissed brass, and immediately I begin to feel a little more at home. Then the laughter is augmented by more of the same, in a slightly higher key.

“Broads,” D’Antoni says.

The laughter dies down, then wells up again.

“There’s broads outside,” D’Antoni says.

“They got Women’s Lib in the Mafia yet?” I ask him.

“What?”

I get off the bed.

“Forget it.”

I switch on the light. D’Antoni is on all fours, half-in and half-out of the bedroom doorway. He looks up at me like a cat caught in headlights.

“Get up,” I tell him. “You got nothing to worry about. It’s only Wally’s skin and your philanthropist’s old lady.”

“What?”

“Gerald’s missus.”

D’Antoni looks back at me, his mouth hanging open.

“Mrs. Fletcher,” I tell him. “You mean to tell me you never met Mrs. Fletcher?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’s she here?”

“Well, seeing as how for one reason or another the villa’s in her name, why shouldn’t she be?”

“You know why she’s here?”

I let him off the hook.

“She probably came on account of Gerald and Les. See if you was all right, and that.”

“You know she was coming?”

“Not until tonight. I saw her in Palma. She’s staying there.”

Something I said seems to make sense to D’Antoni.

“She’s staying there, hey? That’s not bad.”

“What?”

“Her on the look-out in Palma.” He gets to his feet. “That’s not bad. They said they’d look after me real good.”

And they meant it, I think to myself.

The footsteps clatter across the flagstones and then there’s the noise of plate glass shuddering as one or the other of them try to slide the door open. It doesn’t. And from the language when it doesn’t I gather it’s Audrey that tried the sliding. I walk past D’Antoni and out onto the landing. By now Audrey is giving the plate glass a right seeing to, the shuddering glass accompanied by more of the language. I reach the balustrade and call down to Wally to put the lights on, but Wally is no longer there, which is no small surprise if he’s recognised the voice of Audrey. So I go downstairs and find the light switch and flick it on and Audrey and Tina are illuminated against the deep blackness like twin Cinderellas. I look at them and they look at me. It doesn’t need a breathaliser to rate their condition. In the hard light from the hall they look like two moths drunk with neon. Tina is grinning at everything in the whole world whereas Audrey is at the stage of drunkenness where the number of things that she finds amusing is rapidly diminishing. We continue to look at each other. Audrey is fucked if she’s going to indicate in any way at all that she wants to be let in. I smile at her for a minute to two, letting her bask in the sweetness of my smile, then I walk across the hall and unbolt the panel and slide it open.

“Enjoy that, did you?” Audrey says.

“I always enjoy seeing you, Audrey,” I tell her. “You coming in?”

She’s about to give me an answer to that one when I notice a movement behind her shoulder and she sees that I’ve noticed and that the movement has nothing to do with
Tina and therefore instead of giving me the answer her expression changes into a mirror-image of the one I was giving her beyond the plate-glass, and the movement which in fact has drawn my attention is the parting of some bushes on the perimeter of the block of light and the emergence of the Dagenham boys, flicking the dewdrops off their prick-ends, grinning into the bright plate glass as though they’re seeing Blackpool Illuminations for the first time.

“What the fuck’s this?” I say to Audrey. “You gone into the mystery tour business?”

“There’s no mystery about this, darlin’,” Audrey says, walking past me into the hall. Tina begins to sway in after her, like a reed caught in the slipstream of a powerboat.

“Wally!” Audrey shouts. “The above have arrived. Start mixing the drinks.”

Behind me, the lounge lights come on, and Wally emerges from round the corner and gives her the big glad.

“Hello, Mrs. Fletcher,” he says. “This is great. It’s really great to see you.”

“I know it is,” Audrey says.

Wally starts back-pedaling into the lounge.

“Yeah, it’s great. A real treat. Unexpected, like,” he says.

There’s a marked change in the tone of Wally’s voice. He now sounds like a snide kid whose mother’s arrived on the scene to put everybody who’s in the right in the wrong. Audrey, followed by Tina, follows Wally into the lounge. Meanwhile, the Dagenham boys have filtered into the hall, the movements of their necks making them look like geese. I turn to face them and give them the look. Son number one looks back but from the state he’s in it’s difficult to tell whether anything as specific as my expression is registering. Number two son says:

“This is favourite. Better than Pontinental.”

“Too bleedin’ right,” says Benny.

They start to move in the general direction of Audrey and Tina, sniffing like mongrels on heat. And I never did like dogs.

“You going in then?” I ask them.

Number two son snaps up.

“You what, sunshine?” he says.

“I said, you going in?”

“Yeah, that’s where we’re going. In.”

“Only I thought you might be supplementing the rate of exchange by running a taxi service.”

The sarcasm doesn’t reach as far as Benny who says: “We hired one of them runabouts for the fortnight. Jesus, it’s even worse than one of our Friday afternoon cars, ain’t it?”

Barry ignores him and musters himself to make a reply to me, and it’s sort of like him trying not to be sick in reverse, all sweat and swallow.

“Here,” he says, putting his hand in his racing jacket and pulling out some pesetas. “You done your job smashing. Have a drink on me, my old son, and don’t tap me again on the way out.”

I’m just about to do more than tap him when Audrey reappears in the hall and says:

“I thought you two was dying for a flamin’ drink?”

“We are,” says Barry. “We was waiting for the butler here to fetch it.”

“He’ll fetch you something else if you carry on like that.”

The boys grin at what they imagine to be Audrey’s very funny joke and shuffle off through into the lounge as if they’re entering a Chinese chippy on a Saturday night.

I watch them go through and I’m considering following them and serving them their drinks in my own inimitable way but I don’t get to do that because I’m distracted by a noise up above my head, something that sounds like a foal breaking wind. I look up and I can see D’Antoni’s head at floor level on the balcony, peering down from the top of the stairs, his lips pursed and responsible for the farting sound.

“What’s going on?”

His voice is a cross between a whisper and a shout.

“It’s party time,” I tell him.

“Who is it?”

“It’s a delegation from the T.G.W.U.”

“What?”

“It’s all right. It’s not the Boston branch of the Mafia.”

“Listen—”

“You want to find out, come down and join the party.”

D’Antoni’s disembodied head begins to wobble and the veins on his forehead stand out like a printed circuit.

“Listen—”

I walk into the lounge, where I don’t have to listen, at least to him. The scene in there is very cosy. Everybody has got their drinks, due to the speed Wally has used to demonstrate his eagerness to please. The two Dagenham boys are still looking round like they’re in St Paul’s Cathedral. Tina is sitting on the floor, and Audrey is sprawled out on one of the leather sofas, her legs splayed out in front of her, feet shoeless, her drink clutched to her bosom. She raises a leg and plants it on the table in front of her. Benny is distracted from his appraisal of the villa’s architecture.

“Christ—” he says. “Stockin’s.”

Audrey looks me in the eye and says:

“Yeah. I used to wear them for a friend of mine what I used to have.”

Barry says:

“My old lady wears stockings.”

“Yeah?” says Benny.

“Yeah. Surgical. A right turn-on, they are.”

They both laugh, fit to bust their anoraks.

“And winceyette drawers. And then she wonders why I’m out pulling every night.”

More laughter.

I go over to the drinks and make myself one and when I’ve done that I go and sit down opposite Audrey. Audrey ignores that fact and says to Wally: “Bring some music, Wal, will you?”

“Yeah, sure. Anything in particular?”

“No, I’m not particular. Something with a bit of balls. Make a change round here, that would.”

“So would being particular,” I say to her.

Audrey looks at me and smiles her sweet and sour and cocks another leg up onto the table. Barry is slightly to my left, swaying a bit, not believing his luck at being able to see right up to the maker’s name.

“If you’re not careful,” I say to Audrey, “we’ll be able to see all the way up to the top of your clouts.”

“Clouts,” Audrey says, snorting with laughter. “Bleeding clouts. Tell where you was brung up, can’t you.”

“You can tell that,” I tell her. “Also, you can tell where you weren’t.”

Audrey gives out with her fishwife cackle, to prove how coarse and drunk she is, but she’s not being as clever as she thinks she is, because I’ve seen this act before, that act being appearing more drunk than you actually are, to give yourself an opportunity to bluff the opposition into a false sense of security, but what as yet I’m unable to suss out is who the performance is aimed at, and for why.

While these thoughts are coursing through my mind, Wally has sorted a cassette and bunged it into the machine which is custom-built into the wall adjacent to the back of my head. He’s chosen a Shirley Bassey, which in the circumstances is a complement to the act Audrey is putting on for the benefit of the assembled company. And, after all, “Big Spender” is the number Audrey always uses when she’s auditioning hopefuls at the club. And while she’s listening to the music, now, she allows her features to relax into the kind of expression she normally reserves for the more successful of successful applicants, the ones who occasionally have to go through the rigours of an extra audition, that audition not necessarily being anything to do with the act they’ll be presenting on the club stage, in public. So in the event, my gaze strays over to the closed-eyed figure of Tina, chin-on-knee on the floor, swaying
very slightly to the beat of the number, and I consider whether or not Audrey is boiled up enough to have her revenge on me in that direction.

Barry manages to break the rabbit/ferret syndrome of his gaze and moves to get a little closer to the object of his fascination, sitting down on the leather next to Audrey. He strikes a pose not unlike a down-and-out character out of
Film Fun
, presented with the just rewards of a job well done, those being a fat cigar, bangers and mash, and a bottle of pop.

“Well,” he says, “this is better than feeding rum and blacks to the old lady.”

“Yeah,” says Benny. “All it does is give them headaches.”

More Tweedledum and Tweedledee laughter.

“Here, darlin’,” Barry says to Audrey. “Rum and blacks give you headaches?”

“I don’t get headaches,” Audrey says.

“No, I didn’t think you would.”