Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (29 page)

I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“You’re too late if you think you’ll get there just in the nick of time.”

I sit on the edge of the bed, thinking. I come to a decision but before I can get off the bed the sound of Audrey and D’Antoni giggling their way up the stairs drifts in through the open door. Then there’s a slight pause and after that the clink of a bottle and the opening and closing of a bedroom door. Followed by the turning of a key.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Tina says.

I don’t bother getting up off the bed. Instead of kicking in doors, I decide to expend my energy in a different way. I turn and look down at the pale indistinct shape of Tina and remember how distinct it had been on the wall downstairs.

“All right,” I say to her. “Since you been asking for it.” I lift my legs back on the bed and go down on her and for once in her life she doesn’t come up with a pertinent comment on the action. Not one that sounds like any word that has yet been invented, that is.

Comes the dawn.

I open my eyes and not for the first time since I came to the villa it takes me a minute or two to bring my senses to bear on where I actually am. Then, when I’ve established that, I turn my head to my right and my eyes pull focus on the open-mouthed, closed-eyes face of Tina. She’s snoring very, very softly, looking more like one of the plaster madonnas in the background of the Life Room than the character she played out in foreground. I look at her for a moment or two, then I reach out for cigarettes and while I’m doing that Wally appears carrying a tray which supports
the morning pot of tea. His reaction on seeing the
tableau vivant
on the bed is not to drop the tray, all he does is to hesitate slightly on his course to the bedside table, and when he reaches it he places the tray on the table top with the dignity of a goalkeeper who’s picking the fifteenth ball out of the back of the net. I light my cigarette. Wally turns away and begins to walk out of the bedroom.

“Well it’s not as though you didn’t have no idea what she was like,” I say to him.

Wally keeps on moving.

“Wally.”

He stops.

“Turn round when I’m talking to you.”

Wally turns round.

“Don’t come it with me, mate,” I tell him. “All right?”

Wally doesn’t say anything. I take a draw on my cigarette.

“I’ll have the lot for breakfast.” I tell him. “O.K.?” Wally nods briefly, then turns away and goes out of the bedroom.

I smoke some more of my cigarette. Tina opens her eyes.

“Was that the silly old fart?” she says.

“Shut your mouth,” I tell her, and get out of bed.

Chapter Fifteen

I
SIT ALONE IN
the kitchen, mopping up the dip from my empty plate with the remaining slice of bread, when in comes Audrey, wrapped in the negligee I’m more than just somewhat familiar with. She approaches the table and takes one of my cigarettes from the packet and lights up and then goes and props herself up against one of the work surfaces. I light myself up and the two of us look at each other.

“Have a good night, did you?” I ask her.

She doesn’t answer.

“All right, was it?”

“You going to knock me about, are you?”

I smile at her, but in fact to give her several round the earhole is what I would dearly like to be doing right now. But I swallow because it would only give her more satisfaction than she’s already getting at the moment.

“Why should I do that?” I ask her.

“Why shouldn’t you? Don’t tell me you undergone a complete character change.”

“Maybe I have,” I say to her. “Maybe the holiday done the trick like Gerald and Les said it would. Made a new man of me, it has. Completely changed my life. Given me
a completely new perspective. Just like the travel brochures said.”

“Did they say to stay out of the sun as well?”

“You what?”

“To avoid going bleedin’ barmy.”

“Well, I wonder about that. About what’s barmy. I mean, you’re going back to the pair of them. You got Gerald’s halitosis to look forward to till you’re eligible for your pension.”

“At least I’ll live to see that day.”

I smile at her and shake my head.

“Depends what you call living.”

Audrey shrugs.

“Well, for starters, the last four or five hours could qualify as a definition,” she says.

I don’t say anything. Audrey alters her stance and adopts a woman to woman pose, confident and risqué.

“Honestly, I was surprised. Well, I mean, you know me. I can usually keep going the longest, know what I mean? But not last night. Not with him. He was still going strong well into injury time.”

“Pity you won’t be able to have him as a partner.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. He could certainly add experience to the board of directors, as it stands, so to speak.”

I pick up my cup and drain down the last of the tea and instead of throwing the cup at her I help myself to some more tea. While I’m doing that, out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Audrey is looking at her watch.

“I wouldn’t have thought that came in very handy last night.”

She looks at me.

“I’d have thought a stop-watch would have been more use.”

Audrey keeps looking at me for a minute or two before she says: “What time you say you were leaving?”

“Ten past three.”

“Isn’t there anything earlier?”

“If there was, I’d be getting it.”

“So you’ll be staying most of the morning.”

“Yeah, pity about that one.”

She looks at her watch again and she seems about to say something else when in walks D’Antoni looking spruce and shiny as sandalwood like he’s just spent a couple of hours in a high-class massage and sauna, which is a fair simile, considering that he’s recently been getting the treatment from Audrey. He walks over to Audrey and puts one of his hands on one of her tits and says:

“So you’re an early riser.”

“I could say the same about you.”

If I was to ever seriously reconsider my decision about D’Antoni, now would seem to be as good a time as any.

“When you get back,” D’Antoni says to Audrey, “I want you to do something for me. I want you to say thank you to Gerald and Les for looking after me so well. And when you tell them that, I want you to look them straight in the eye and smile at them and for you to really mean it.” D’Antoni looks round at me and laughs. “That’s funny, hey?” he says.

I don’t say anything.

“And if you do tell them, it won’t matter,” he says. “Because by that time, I’ll be long gone.”

He laughs again. Audrey disengages her left tit and moves from between D’Antoni and the work surface.

“Anyway,” she says. “My bath’ll be ready by now.”

“Yeah,” D’Antoni says. “I turned it off.”

“Thanks,” Audrey says, and goes out of the kitchen.

D’Antoni looks at the kitchen table.

“That all there is, tea?”

I don’t provide him with an answer.

“Well, this morning, it don’t matter,” he says.

He opens a cabinet and gets himself a cup and sits down opposite me and pours himself some tea. He takes a drink and pulls a face and takes another sip and says: “Jesus.” He shakes his head. “Jesus,” he says again.

I put my cigarette out and light up another one.

“You wouldn’t believe last night,” D’Antoni says.

I don’t say anything.

“Christ. I known some in my time. I seen all the tricks. But that was all of them rolled up into one, you know that?”

There is more silence from myself.

“If you wouldn’t get your balls cut off, because of your situation, I would recommend that with no reservations whatsoever.”

“You would.”

“No reservations whatsoever. I had some heads, I never yet had one like the one I had last night.”

“You haven’t.”

“Never.”

I’m just about to see him off when the phone rings, but only a couple of times. D’Antoni leaps up in the air and knocks his tea all over the table.

“The phone,” he says.

Then he rushes out of the kitchen in the direction of the phone, even though the sound is no more. I hear him shouting for Wally, as if that’s going to provide him with some kind of answer. I take my cigarette packet out of the spreading lake of tea and walk out of the kitchen and across the now sun-bright hall and into the still-curtained lounge. D’Antoni is standing in the middle of it like somebody who’s turned up at Wembley on the wrong day.

“The phone rang,” he says.

I walk past him on my way to the drinks and manage to restrain myself from putting him right through the plate glass beyond the curtains.

“You heard it,” he says. “It could have been a signal.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I tell him, pouring my drink.

D’Antoni walks over to me and stands behind me inches away. He stabs a finger dead centre between my two shoulder blades, causing me to pour some of my drink over my fingers. “Listen, less crap from you, hey?”

Now I have the perfect excuse for smashing D’Antoni into the ground; before, he may have sussed the reason why I
felt like planting him, and I would under no circumstances give a character such as D’Antoni the satisfaction of knowing something like that. But this response is fraught with no such barriers. I turn round and draw back and the phone rings again, just twice, then stops. D’Antoni whirls round and his movement puts him out of my range so I’m left standing there like a hammer-thrower who’s let it go in the wrong direction.

“You see,” D’Antoni says, striding towards the phone and pointing at it. “It’s got to be. It’s got to be a signal.” I’m beginning to have the same opinion, but not for the same reasons as D’Antoni. I turn back to the drinks and pour myself a large one and down it and turn round again and begin to walk out of the lounge.

“Ain’t I right?” D’Antoni says. “A signal. It’s got to be.”

I keep going and turn the corner and start towards the stairs. The sound of bathwater being turned on greets me as I begin to climb.

Behind me D’Antoni says:

“You got to give me back my—”

I turn round and grab him by the collar of his robe and push him up against the nearest plasterwork.

“Listen, you cunt,” I tell him, “you’re lucky to have reached half past nine this morning. You’re lucky I didn’t cop for you before I cleaned my teeth. So if you want to stay lucky, stay away from me, or I’ll solve everybody’s problem for them.”

I turn away and go up the stairs and open the door to Audrey’s bedroom and my first impression is that it’s even bigger than mine, and it’s decorated differently too, showing evidence of Gerald as interior decorator; there is a mirror along all of one wall behind the bed, and the whole ceiling is mirrored. On one wall, there are a dozen beautifully framed pornographic photographs. I look into the mirror behind the bed and it becomes a movie screen, reflecting my imagination of the scenes it was fed the night before. Then my concentration is broken by the running
water being turned off. I look towards the closed door of the adjoining bathroom. There is the sound of rippling water. I walk over to the door and open it without making a sound. Audrey is just lowering herself into the bathwater, her back towards me. I wait until her little bum is touching the surface of the water and then I say to her:

“Now then.”

She shrieks as if the water’s scalded her cheeks and rises up and twists round to face me. I don’t say anything else. I just look at her.

“Jack,” she says to me. “Now look, Jack. You said you wasn’t going to knock me about, right? You told me that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I told you that.”

“You did, didn’t you. You told me.”

I begin to walk towards her.

“Jack, you did, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s true, relating to previous events. That’s what I told you. But if I knock you about now, it’ll be to do with a completely different set of events.”

Audrey pushes herself up against the rose pink tiling.

“Jack!”

I get to her and give her one, just to make her shut up. When she’s done that, I sit down on the edge of the bath and light a cigarette.

“You hear the phone just now?”

Audrey looks at me and a different tear comes into her face.

“The phone?”

“Yeah. Rang a couple of times. Two rings each time.”

She doesn’t say anything to that.

“Well, it did. Two rings each time.”

“I had the bathwater running, didn’t I?”

“So you did.”

There is a silence.

“Come on, Audrey,” I say to her. “Let’s be having it.”

It’s a little while before she answers.

“I’m going to say it again, Jack. Stop being a pighead and cop for him.”

I give her the look and from the expression I get back I know for certain she’s never going to ask that one again.

“Right,” I say to her. “So I’ll say it again. Tell me the things that you know, Audrey.”

Audrey slides down the tiles and perches on the couple of inches of the bath on her side.

“Got a fag?”

I pass the packet to her, and she begins to take one out but what happens is in the process she accidentally shakes half a dozen out and they land on top of the mound of bubbles that’s snap crackle and popping on the surface of the water. I light up the cigarette she manages to get into her mouth and after she’s inhaled and exhaled she says: