Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (12 page)

“You got a good opinion of yourself, you have.”

I decide to let the family discussion run its course without me. The brilliance of the exchange is making me
feel thirsty so I cross the bedroom and switch on the landing light and go downstairs and into the lounge and pour myself a glass of champagne, and I stand in the middle of the room drinking it and while I’m doing that I reflect that at this time of night, back in the smoke, I’d be having the same kind of drink, in a different kind of quietness, in the club, after all the punters had taken their last illusions home with them. And there’d be the soft comfortable sounds of the staff taking care of their clearing up, and I’d be sitting at my table, perhaps with Con or with Audrey, not saying much, perhaps discussing the merits or not of the Hammers’ new goalkeeper, or how funny it was to learn that George Clark had been found a danger to shipping near Putney Bridge, how surprising, who would have thought it, that kind of thing. And then after the conversation, and the champagne’d finished, I’d leave and take the slow ten-minute, near-dawn walk across Soho to my flat, picking up the papers on the way, and when I got in, I’d put some bacon in the pan, and while that’s sizzling slowly, I’d have a quick shower and then I’d get into my pit with my bacon sandwich and the papers and a pint mug of tea and I’d spend an hour drifting towards drowsiness, a mood orchestrated by the sound of the hotel dustbins and rest of re-emerging Soho, and to wake five hours later to the mid-morning thin London brightness streaming in through the flat windows. But instead I’m here in the splendid silence of the mountains (the image of which will be carried back a million Kodachromed times to Blighty), listening to the droning whitter of a family domestic drifting down from the Spanish heights, sparring with the nail-driving of a tenth-rate member of the Brotherhood. So I pour myself another glass of champagne and walk over to the window and draw back the curtain and look out at the mountains. It’s not yet quite dawn and that transitional thick uniform blueness flattens out all the different angles and perspectives, making the aspect look like a sketchy backcloth on BBC 2.

While I’m taking in this mind-reflecting monotonous aspect the sounds of Happy Families starts filtering down the stairs and the next thing I know the young bird has entered the room and has found the drinks and is pouring herself some champagne. Her entrance is closely followed by that of Wally, who’s opening line is this:

“I want to know how you got up here, that’s what I want to know.”

The girl takes a sip of her drink.

“I got a lift, didn’t I?”

“A lift? At this time of night? With a bleeding wop?”

“No, not with a bleeding wop.”

“Who with then?”

“Some students who were on the flight. They’d hired a car and they were going past here because they’re camping over at Solla, aren’t they?”

“All fellows, were they?”

“As far as I could tell. I mean, I suppose if I’d gone into the bushes with them I could have found out, like they wanted.”

“What?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, taking another drink.

“They asked you to go into the bushes?”

She looks at me in despair.

“What do you do,” she says, “in the face of such monolithic gullibility?”

“Where I come from,” I tell her, “what you do is that you very likely get a smacked arse.”

The girl turns on the look from upstairs again.

“And where would that be?” she says. “From under a wet stone?”

“Listen—” Wally begins, but I cut him off.

“It’s late, Wally. Let’s cut it all out, shall we?”

“Oh, Top Cat, this one, is he?” the girl says.

“Listen, Tina, this is Jack Carter. Know what I mean? Just leave it out, eh?”

“Oh yes? I heard about you.”

She pours herself another drink.

“You’re the one that does all the damage but never gets his name in the papers, isn’t that it?”

I just look at her and say nothing.

“Down our way you never buy a drink, isn’t that right?” she says.

I still say nothing.

“You on your holidays as well, are you?” she says.

That was the general idea, I think to myself, a happy holiday at the villa of your choice, under still warm Spanish skies in November, drinking Sangria with new-found friends while the friendly staff attend to your every whim.

“Wally,” I say, “I’m going back to my pit for what’s left of the night. If anybody else turns up, like, say, the Band of the Coldstream Guards, just leave me out of it, all right?”

I down my drink and walk out of the room and back up the stairs and into the bedroom. D’Antoni is still as he was left, feet apart, mouth apart, a human flytrap, miles apart from the reality of him being in the fantasy world of the Fletchers’ villa, miles apart from the real or imagined anxieties about the arrival of his own personal Furies. I wish I was as many points removed from my present, and none the less for the fact that when, for the third time that night, I get my head down, it’s lifted once more by the moth-like presence of Wally flitting by my bedside and whispering words of seduction. This time, he’s back on the theme of personal safety.

“Jack,” he says for openers.

So for openers I raise myself off the pillow and throat him and he coughs and splutters and I say to him:

“Wally, you really are pushing the good luck you’ve had all your
life
.”

Wally’s sweaty hands grip my wrists and try and force them off his neck; of course there is no danger of that but I don’t really feel like taking Wally’s lifeless form out of the bedroom and onto the patio and hurling him into the chasm and then going back to bed for the extra hour and a half.
So I let go of him and I let him massage his neck and get his breath back in order for him to lay on me whatever he considers urgent enough to put his life in my hands.

“I’m not taking liberties, Jack, honest I ain’t,” he says, “but I got to put it to you, straight up, you can’t troll out of it, not now.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Not now, not now Tina’s here. On account of, well, if the geezers turn up, she’s going to be for it as well, ain’t she? They ain’t going to leave her out of it, are they?”

“You leave her out of it, Wally,” I tell him. “You leave her out of it by sending her back on the plane with me in the morning. That’s the way she gets left out of it.”

“How can I do that?” he says. “I’d have to tell her what for, and Gerald and Les’d nail me up if ever I did that. You know what they’d do.”

“How the Christ do you think they’re going to find out?”

“D’Antoni’d tell them Tina’d been and gone in a day and she’d left with you. They’d work the rest out for themselves, wouldn’t they?”

“You’re giving them a lot of credit, Wally.”

“Jack, you know what they’re like.”

I have to admit, yes, I do know what those bastards are like, but I only admit it to myself, not to Wally.

“Jack, you can’t leave us in the shit,” Wally says. “I know you been dropped in it yourself, but, I mean to say.”

I lie back on my pillow and stare up at the dark of the ceiling.

“What’s she doing now?”

“I put her in the next bedroom. It adjoins your bathroom.”

I don’t say anything.

“Jack?” Wally says.

“What she have to say about the camp bed on the landing?”

“I told her I was kipping down there as I was listening out for you to arrive.”

“She wear that?”

“ ’Course she did.”

“And what about the Sleeping Beauty?”

“Haven’t told her yet, have I?”

“He’ll be well pleased when he gets back from Paradise.”

“He’ll be better pleased if he knows you’re staying.”

I don’t answer.

“Jack?”

“Wally,” I say to him, “there’s only two things I’m going to guarantee right at this precise moment in time. One, I’m going to get some sleep and you’re fucking off out of it and back to your pit on the landing.”

“Jack—”

“Wally.”

After a moment or so the shadow of Wally shuffles away from my bedside. I close my eyes and I blank everything out of my mind and wallow in the wonderful relaxed tiredness that’s going to usher me into the arms of Morpheus, but like sometimes during National Service, particularly one time in winter, in Oswestry of all fucking places, I’d been on duty all night, just aching for my pit, sometimes nodding off for a half minute and dreaming I was actually between the blankets, only to jerk back into the reality of the ice cold—I remember, when I’d finally signed off, and actually got between the blankets, that I was buggered, really dead, but sleep wouldn’t come. The more I’d urged it, the less likely it got that it would come, and in the end, I’d dropped into a deep sleep about five minutes after my official kip was due to be up. And now it’s the same fucking question, how the hell am I going to get off listening to D’Antoni’s rasping and Wally’s thrashing about on the other camp bed? And coupled with that, I can hear Tina moving about in the bedroom beyond the bathroom, sorting her gear out. And then eventually she gets herself sorted and decides to use the bathroom, of which she makes full use for approximately three quarters of an hour. Bottles are placed, clinking on the ceramics, tissues are torn, taps are run, the toilet is flushed approximately twenty-five thousand times. After that she seems out of ideas and finally
decides to go to bed and by that time I’ve given up on trying to sleep and I’m sitting in a cane chair, wide awake, smoking cigarettes, watching, in the half light, to pass the time, the slight un-symmetrical movements of D’Antoni’s open mouth as he inhales and exhales his sleep of the unjust. Finally even that loses its fascination so I get up from the chair and go over to the curtains and part them a little way. The mountains are now ochre—sharp in the dawning of the day. Boring, but ochre—sharp, nonetheless. I look at the nothingness. You can take in the whole panorama, from right to left and in between, there’s nothing in the landscape to relieve the monotony, to hold the attention.

I light another cigarette and at that point D’Antoni awakes. Although I have my back to him I’m made aware of the event by D’Antoni crying out at his moment of consciousness.

I turn and look at him.

He’s propped up on his elbows, one hand squirming across his chest for the butt of the automatic and his head is flicking from side to side like a fish trying to get a hook from its gills. His eyes are squinty from the amount of champagne he’s sorted but the lids are not bunged up enough to prevent his eyeballs swiveling about like Catherine Wheels, trying to spin to some kind of focus, to get him to some kind of reference point about who he is and where he is and why he’s who he is.

I smoke my cigarette and watch while D’Antoni co-ordinates himself, while he manages to release the automatic from its holster, while his eyes slow down and come to rest on his surroundings and his situation and finally on myself. And when his gaze has settled on me he holds the pose, as if by concentrating on me the reality of his situation will achieve a sharper definition.

All I do is to carry on smoking my cigarette. Eventually D’Antoni manages to speak.

“What’s wrong?” he says. “What’s happening?”

I don’t answer him. Let him sweat.

“What’s wrong?” he says again, only this time his words are accompanied by actions, those being to try to get off the camp bed, but of course he’s not sufficiently together to execute it properly so he and the camp bed go over in a swirl of sheets and cursing but no sooner has he hit the deck than he’s on his feet, still with a grip on his shooter, looking at me as if somehow I’m responsible for his falling out of bed.

He shakes a sheet from round his shoulders and advances towards me, arms at full slope.

“You bastard,” he says. “What goes on?”

I spread my hands.

“Nothing at all,” I tell him. “Not as far as I know.”

“What’s the idea of standing over by the window?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d see if the boring view might help.”

D’Antoni looks at me, then he backs off and sits down on the end of my bed.

“I feel terrible,” he says. “I feel like the cat’s crapped in my mouth.” He stands up and staggers towards the door.

“I got to get some sleep on a real bed,” he says.

He bangs against the door jamb and goes out onto the landing and somehow manages to avoid Wally’s cot and staggers off to find his bed. Suddenly I’m overcome with the sleepiness I’ve been waiting for, so to myself I say sod it all and I put out my cigarette and crawl into my pit and I don’t have to anticipate the feeling because the minute my head’s down my eyelids are heavy as flagstones and my mind begins swimming away from me, but unfortunately it doesn’t get far from the shallow end because the most God-almighty shrieking starts up as though it’s never going to stop, and that’s followed almost immediately by Wally cockling out of his camp bed and trying to decide what the noise is and where it’s coming from. As I’ve already sussed where it’s coming from and I’m totally awake again I get out of bed and walk through the bathroom and switch on the light and open the other adjoining door thus illuminating the scene in front of me, which is this: Tina, her shoulders on the
bedroom floor, her legs thrown wide still up on the bed, and D’Antoni, his torso straddling Tina’s, one hand gripping her throat, the other grasping the automatic, thrusting it into her left breast, making it rather less symmetrically attractive than when I was struggling with her earlier on. But what does add a certain attraction to the scene is that Tina is stark naked, waving and kicking her legs at whatever parts of D’Antoni are accessible, at the same time trying to grasp whatever hair D’Antoni has left on his head; from where I’m standing she’d be better off going for the hairs on his chest. Now, coincidentally to my opening the bedroom door, Wally appears on the scene, and his reactions are very interesting because whereas before, when D’Antoni mentioned Dunkirk, Wally was prepared to have a go and put his head on the block, now that he’s confronted with the spectacle of his naked daughter, legs akimbo and bollock naked underneath the heaving form of an American mafioso, he hesitates, weighing the consequences in the balance, and by the time he’s decided he should act in the role of the father, other things have happened to cause him to take several steps backwards, away from the forward motion he’d decided to execute; the other things being, that when I opened the door, and the shaft of light illuminated D’Antoni, which coincided with Wally’s arrival on the scene, D’Antoni obviously came to the conclusion that the naked girl, the shaft of light, the swift appearance of two other figures, all put together added up to a set-up, and that had caused him to loose off a couple of imprecise shots from his automatic, resulting on three other things; Wally’s retreat, my slamming shut the bathroom door, and louder and more hysterical screaming from the girl.