The Last Darkness (12 page)

‘If I said that, I'd be a barefaced liar.'

Ruth Wexler said how sorry she was to hear the bad news about Colin. She hoped he'd return to good health. He'd always been so ‘robust'. Robust, Perlman thought. It was a word he'd heard to describe his brother a few times, usually by women who recognized that he had a wild energetic streak in him.

Perlman looked up Renfrew Street: he saw the Art School ahead and wondered if Miriam was waiting.

Ruth Wexler said, ‘I'll tell Artie you called.'

‘He can reach me through Pitt Street HQ. If not, I'll call back.'

He switched off the phone, stuffed it in his pocket. He walked uphill. The huge windows on the upper floor of the Art School threw out a soft light. Fancy wrought-iron work characterized the building. He needed a cigarette, but he wanted clean breath when he met Miriam. He wondered if he had a mint somewhere, rummaged in his pockets, found the crinkled remains of a packet of Polos, but no sweetie.

He approached the lights, saw her standing at the top of the stairs beyond the curvature of iron that spanned the gateway, and she raised a hand in recognition and he thought: This must be how wives greet their husbands when they arrange to meet them outside cinemas or restaurants or wherever. A little fluttery signal,
I'm over here, my love, thrilled to see you
. The thought appealed to him. He'd bound up the steps and clasp and kiss her under the lights. Her hair would glow. The kiss would burn and their bodies tremble.

She came down towards him. She had such grace in her movements she looked as if she could walk a highwire without pausing to consider the possibility of falling. You have this woman on a pedestal, he thought.

She slipped her arm through his and said, ‘New coat?'

‘Sewn and stitched this very day,' he said.

She smiled. ‘Fancy escorting me a little way?'

‘You lead,' he said. ‘I'll follow.'

As in a dance, he thought, a waltz across an empty ballroom. They moved together along Renfrew Street and Lou Perlman dreamed he was on the threshold of a thrilling new life, even as he understood he was travelling steerage on the same old battered boat of wishful thinking.

18

Artie Wexler looked from the window of Shiv Bannerjee's library across the expanse of the Clyde where it flowed, the colour of black ink, past Helensburgh, a few miles beyond the boundaries of Glasgow. Bannerjee's mansion, built by a tobacco merchant in the mid-nineteenth century, and embellished by subsequent owners, had a conservatory and a billiards room. Shiv had added a climate-controlled aviary where he kept tropical birds, flashy parrots and bug-eyed cockatoos imported from the rainforests.

Wexler turned when the door opened and Bannerjee entered the room, walking lightly as he always did; you always half-expected to see him in ballet slippers. His grey double-breasted jacket was fastened, and a black silk handkerchief flopped an inch or so from the breast pocket. A dandy, Shiv Bannerjee, everything about him just so, white hair immaculate, fingernails perfect: you could never imagine Bannerjee spilling a drop of food on himself, or tolerating a speck of dandruff on his collar.

‘I'm sorry to keep you waiting, Artie,' he said. He had a distinct but refined Glasgow accent. ‘You come on a sad night, old friend.'

‘How's that?' Artie Wexler asked.

‘Colin's heart attack for one. And now this. Look.' Bannerjee carried a brown paper bag in his hand. He walked to his desk, opened the bag, and allowed its contents to slide carefully out. A small red bird, stiff. ‘Poor little chap croaked an hour ago. We had him on an IV drip and penicillin. But sometimes, so far from their habitat, they don't make it.'

A bird on an IV drip, Artie Wexler thought. What world did Bannerjee occupy? Artie feigned an interest in the dead creature. Under lamplight, the feathers were the rich red of blood.

‘Shame,' he said.

Bannerjee stuck the dead bird back inside the paper bag. ‘Wine? Scotch?'

‘I'm fine,' Artie Wexler said.

‘Not so.' Bannerjee wagged a finger. ‘From the look of you, you're a long way from fine.'

Artie Wexler sat down and glanced glumly round the tall bookshelves, antique volumes in shadow. This room intimidated him – perhaps the weight of knowledge contained in the books overwhelmed him: so much he didn't know, so much he'd never know. About the world, about himself. Especially himself.

Bannerjee poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and gave one to Artie, then he stood with an arm stretched along the mantel of the marble fireplace. He was a second-generation Indian immigrant who'd worked in his father's wholesale outlet in Rutherglen, trading in those items called ‘sundries' – cheap footballs, aspirins, flashlights, batteries, corner-shop staples. Determined to improve himself, he'd studied hard, gone to Glasgow University, graduated with a first-class degree in Sociology, then entered politics and risen through the ranks of various Labour Party advisory committees. In a parliamentary by-election in 1993 he'd won a narrow victory over a Tory opponent in a vicious contest for the seat of a working-class area of Glasgow; and so, off to Westminster in a glow of glory, MP, possible Cabinet material – Minister for Scotland, perhaps, as some local newspapers predicted. He was Going Places. Magazines profiled him on glossy pages, drum-banging about what Asians could achieve in British political life.

His fall was as swift as his rise. The scandal was intricate, and difficult even now to unravel, involving the deposits of large sums of money to accounts held by Bannerjee's aides. Those who'd ‘donated' funds received in return preferential treatment – UK passports processed quickly for wealthy immigrants, payments for questions asked in the House on behalf of vested interests. It was tawdry, High Sleaze, unworthy of the honest Bannerjee the media had created. When he was exposed and tried for tax fraud and jailed for three months, his only excuse was that the pressures of power had affected his judgement. He'd been blind to his principles.

Greed induces amnesia, Wexler thought. Amen.

Shiv Bannerjee had worked hard at redemption. Fallen politicians often good-deeded their way out of their misdemeanours and felonies, and that was the route Shiv took. He toured blighted African countries, got himself photographed in famine zones wearing khaki safari suits and holding shrivelled babies over whose eyelids flies crawled. Shiv
schmoozed
on a global level and had set up a charity. And so he'd risen a little way, he had some measure of respectability again.

Wexler sniffed his sherry, turned the glass round in his hands. He couldn't shake his mood, his sense of doom.

‘What's on your mind?' Bannerjee asked.

Wexler rose, walked around the room, glancing at book titles.
A History of Jainism. The Jain Cosmology
. ‘I shouldn't have come here,' he said.

‘But you did,' Bannerjee said. He had a lovely smile: women were charmed by it. His diminutive hands were the colour of milk chocolate. ‘Unload, Artie. Tell me why you're here.'

‘Lindsay's disappeared.'

‘Disappeared? Explain.'

‘He missed dinner with me last night. He didn't turn up in his office today. His secretary doesn't know where he is. There's no sign of life at his house. His car's gone.' This litany seemed thin to Wexler as he recited it; there were scores of reasons for missing a dinner, or failing to turn up at your office.
Scores of them
. Not if you were Joe Lindsay, there weren't. You could set your fucking clock by Joe. ‘It's upsetting. It's uncharacteristic.'

‘You're letting Lindsay's apparent disappearance get to you, Artie.'

‘Do you ever wonder –'

Bannerjee held up a hand like a traffic cop. ‘Don't finish that question. The past is dead. The moving finger and all that. I'm sure there's some simple reason for Lindsay's absence. Perhaps he has a mistress you don't know about. Perhaps on an impulse he flew her off to Rome or Biarritz –'

‘He's the least impulsive man I ever met,' Wexler said.

‘Finish your drink,' Bannerjee said. ‘Unwind. Stay for something to eat.'

‘I better get home. Ruthie will be wondering.' He walked to the window, peered out. A boat sailed on the river, lights on water, snow flurries. ‘I feel this heavyweight guilt sometimes, Shiv. I know it's pointless, but it's a fact. I saw Colin today, and he looked like shite, and I thought – is this how the ending begins? Then I figured Lindsay's vanishing act into some kind of equation.'

‘Colin has a heart attack, and Lindsay behaves unpredictably, and you lump these things together and what do you come up with – fear of karmic retribution?'

‘Are you laughing at me, Shiv?'

‘I'm a little amused by the way you shackle yourself to your own imagination. How could there be any connection between Colin's cardiac arrest and Lindsay's quote unquote disappearance?'

Artie shrugged. ‘If I had an answer for that, you think I would have driven out here to see you?'

Bannerjee said, ‘Sleep. You'll feel better when you wake.'

‘Do you sleep?'

‘I sleep like a suckled baby, Artie. I wake with zest. I left my conscience in Westminster.'

‘I lug mine around like a bloody rucksack filled with broken bricks.' Wexler drained his glass. ‘Everything haunts me, Shiv. I can't sleep. I sometimes take one of Ruthie's pills. So I sleep a couple of hours. Big deal. The dreams are always upsetting. Waking is a reprieve.'

‘Have you considered counselling?'

‘And tell a shrink what? The truth?'

Bannerjee shrugged. ‘Maybe some version of the truth, Artie.'

‘There's no such thing as
some
version of the truth.'

Bannerjee picked up the bag that contained the dead bird. A red feather floated to the floor. ‘I don't know what more I can say, Artie. Except that Lindsay will turn up.' He patted Artie Wexler on the shoulder. ‘Don't fall apart, old chap.'

‘Easier said than done,' Wexler remarked.

19

At the end of Renfrew Street Miriam said, ‘I like this street.'

Perlman shivered, tried to hide his discomfort. ‘Me too.'

‘In summer especially.'

They'd walked as far as the Garnethill synagogue. Lou had forgotten the last time he'd been at
shul
. Years. He'd drifted. What was it – lack of faith or laziness? Or just too little time? Feeling guilty, he glanced at the gate, which was padlocked.

Miriam said, ‘Up here on a summer day you can see for miles. So many spires. The university. Churches. The old Trinity College.' And for a moment she was lost in contemplation of the lights of the western reaches of the city. He wished he was inside her head, caressing her thoughts: the ultimate intimacy.

The wind whipped at her coat. ‘It's cold. You want to get a drink somewhere?'

‘Why not?'

They went down the hill to Sauchiehall Street to a bar which had a kind of Latino ambience. It was exactly the sort of place – trendy, patrons who talked about themselves in very loud voices – Lou Perlman would never have entered in his life. But here he was, arm in arm with Miriam: I'll go anywhere.

‘Let's have margaritas,' Miriam suggested. Her face was bright from the cold air, and there was something childlike about her, a little girl who'd come indoors after building a snowman.

‘Fine by me.' He'd never had a margarita.

‘Are you on duty, Lou?'

‘In a way,' he said.

‘You're always on duty, aren't you?'

‘I have free time. Sometimes.'

She touched his arm. ‘You hate this place, don't you?'

‘Does it show,' he said.

‘You're gritting your teeth. It's too ritzy-phony. It's trying to be enchanting, only it isn't working. It's just not your style.'

Lou smiled. ‘Do I have a style?'

‘You like grubby little dives. You like bars where all you can get is bad blended whisky and beer, and the conversation is more football than Kafka.'

‘Is he that midfielder Celtic tried to sign last year from Sparta Prague, only he couldn't get a work permit?'

‘Come on, Lou. I think you're a wee bit ashamed of admitting you know something about books and paintings and classical music. It doesn't go with your gritty image.'

‘Me? I have an image?'

‘You're this long-serving city cop who lives his life in the streets. You're crumpled and dented. Glasgow bruises you and the work devours you and you mix with some bad people. But you still see a little light of goodness at the end of the tunnel. Justice will always prevail in Lou's world.'

‘You wouldn't be suggesting I have a wee streak of optimism, would you?'

‘You're a decent man, and you know it.'

Would you think me so decent, Miriam, if you knew the feelings in my heart for you? He watched the barman make the margaritas in a blender. He suddenly thought of cocaine fusing with Lindsay's blood. Neural meltdown. Pharmaceutical cocaine, McLaren had remarked. Pure.

‘Hello?' Miriam said.

He turned his face away from the liquid churning in the blender. He'd drifted. Always on duty, right. It didn't stop. The brain kept processing. You didn't have to be at the scene of the crime. In fact, it was sometimes better if you were elsewhere, free of place, of specific things. Your mind could roam then.

‘Sorry,' he said.

‘It's okay. Work and sleep, sleep and work. Lou Perlman's life.' She removed her beret and tossed her head, freeing hair to tumble, and it did, it tumbled in great strands on her shoulders. Oy: he ached to wind them round his fingers.

Their drinks came. Lou looked at the frothing yellow-green liquid. He sipped. He thought he was swallowing neon. Miriam was watching him over the rim of her glass, waiting for a reaction.