The Big Man (32 page)

‘I’ll give you a wee while to think it over. But not too long. Times move on. So do opportunities. It’s up to you to grab them.’

He pointed to the picture of horses behind his desk.

‘You like the painting?’

‘Aye, it’s good.’

“‘Jockeys sous la pluie.” Jockeys in the rain. A man called Degas painted it. The real one’s worth a fortune. Imagine that. You catch what it looks like, just horses and jockeys getting ready for a race in the rain. And it’s worth a lot of money. Hm. But it’s good. “Jockeys sous la pluie”.’

He repeated the title like a magical formula. He gestured Dan round to his side of the desk. He put his hand up to touch the painting and swung it on a hinge. Behind it was a wall safe. Dan felt as if he was back in the front row of the Saturday matinee. Mason looked at him and smiled. This was a ceremony, to be conducted slowly.

‘Get it? Can you think of a better place for me to keep my money? The horses have always been the cover for where my money comes from.’

As Dan watched him make mystic passes with his fingers, unlocking the combination, he felt suddenly as if the safe were working Mason. He saw the way he stood before it, reaching towards it and wooing it with his fingers like an acolyte conjuring it to grant him access to its sanctum. The rapt, complacent concentration on his face was bestowed on him by its touch. The strangeness of the image distanced Dan from what was happening, made him an outsider to it. Like an unbeliever at a religious service, he felt the bizarreness of the rituals that had happened here, the weirdness of the assumptions that had underlain them. With the seductiveness of Mason’s voice gone silent, Dan was left to the discomfort of his own thoughts, the need to decide what he believed.

As always, he didn’t know. He had never deliberately formulated his thoughts or his beliefs into a system, always having sensed that to do that would be false. He had never imposed a
coherent shape upon his life but instead had allowed his life to elicit its changing shape from events as they happened.

What was happening now would be proof of what he believed, not what his mind told him he believed. All he could do was abide the outcome of this event of which he was a part. He couldn’t pre-empt the moment’s force with any foreknowledge of how things ought to be. No moral precept surfaced in him to find firm footing where there was no solid ground and calm the doubts in him. You didn’t define happenings, they defined you.

Matt Mason had taken money from the safe, began to count notes from a huge wad on to his desk.

‘Like a wee, dark womb,’ he said, smiling. That’s where all the social possibilities are born, Dan.’

As he watched the money accumulate on the desk, Dan didn’t know what he thought or felt. As if his very sense of himself were in thaw, impulses that were part thought, part feeling, broke off unevenly from one another and swirled, colliding in him. He needed the money. He wanted the money. Matt Mason had reconstructed his house from dead ideas. Dan thought of him touching the vase constantly, touching the metal box. It was as if he had needed to keep doing that to recharge his sense of himself. But those things had only a financial value to him. Only the price mattered and the price was a meaningless invention. Frankenstein’s monster desperately re-plugging himself into dead generators. Dan wanted Betty to stay with him. What had happened to Cutty Dawson didn’t need to happen. What difference could Dan make to anything anyway? The man Dan had seen with Betty had looked well-off. Dan had taken the same chances as Cutty. He wanted the money.

‘Five hundred,’ Mason said. ‘A hundred for training with Tommy. Four for the fight.’

The money was in tens. It made a small, uneven pile on the desk.

‘More than you bargained for, Dan, eh? Plus a wee bonus.’

Mason began to lay more money, note by note, on top of the pile. ‘Hey!’ Dan remembered saying in the Red Lion. Mason’s story about the snooker could be seen as yielding a meaning
different from the one Mason had given it. Johnny Fagan hadn’t put himself at risk against the two men for his own sake. Cutty was to get nothing. Dan thought of giving the money to Betty.

‘Seven hundred and fifty quid,’ Matt Mason said.

Still holding the much larger wad of money in his left hand, he lifted the money from the desk with his right hand and formally presented it to Dan.

‘If you’re wise,’ he said, ‘you’ll take it as a down payment on your future.’

Dan took the money, held it in his hand.

‘What about Cutty?’ he said.

He hadn’t known he was going to say that. The words had happened and Dan was as surprised by them as Mason was. Why had he said it? Was he seriously trying to get money for Cutty? Were the words just a ritual for making himself feel better in taking it? If Mason gave him some money for Cutty, would that make it easier for him to accept Mason’s offer?

‘What about him?’ Mason asked.

‘He gets nothing?’

‘He lost.’

‘He was half o’ the fight.’

‘Not my half, he wasn’t.’

‘But you’re the man that won the money.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Ye could give him somethin’.’

‘Aye. And I could give something to a blind beggar if I wanted.’ He smiled. ‘Unfortunate comparison. But I don’t want to.’

‘Ah think ye should, though.’

‘That’s interesting.’

They stood staring at each other. Mason was watching Dan expectantly, his eyebrows raised, his mouth slightly open. Dan knew in that moment that nothing he could say was going to change Mason’s mind. Mason knew the way it had to be and for him the interest of what Dan was saying lay only in the amazingness of hearing someone who thought it could be otherwise. But Dan couldn’t stop his mouth from talking. It was as if a part of him was still trying to redefine the terms on which one of them gave and one of them received the money, to haggle for
a contract both of them could sign, to justify the fact that each of them stood there with shared money in his hand.

‘He made you money,’ Dan said.

Mason shook his head.

‘He made you money,’ Dan said. ‘You made money from him.’

‘I made money from me. I arranged it. I picked my man. I got him ready. I made the bet. So who made me money? Me. Cutty Dawson was just an incidental factor. Something I had to calculate for. And I got it right. The same way I got you right. If it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been somebody else. If it hadn’t been you, it would’ve been somebody else. This was between Cam Colvin and me. We’re the ones who invested in it. We’re the ones who say where the wages go.’ He nodded at Dan’s hand. ‘I’ve paid you.’

‘But Cutty helped tae make it happen.’

‘Cutty did what he was told. Well, nearly. Except that he didn’t win.’

‘He should still get somethin’.’

Mason was getting impatient.

‘So you’ve got money,’ he said. ‘You give him something.’

Dan hesitated briefly.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then you match it?’

Mason’s hand paused on its way back to the safe.

‘What?’

‘Look. Ah’ll give Cutty what ye called the bonus.’ Dan counted two hundred and fifty pounds out on the desk. He looked back at Mason. Mason’s lips were pursed, as if he were trying not to smile. ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds. You double it. Fair enough?’

‘Sure,’ Mason said. ‘But that’s all you want? You don’t think I should pay him a pension? As well as a lump sum.’

Mason was smiling. He reached into the safe and left the rest of the money there. As his hand went to the door of the safe to push it shut, Dan knew this meant Cutty was locked out for good and that Dan himself was finally defined and from the confusion in him, instinctive as if some primitive sense of himself were calling out its name, came one word.

‘No!’ he said.

The word seemed to work his arm, and his hand, still clutching five hundred pounds, swung on the axis of his conviction, quenched Mason’s smile. Mason fell, and his head made dull contact with the wooden back of his chair as he settled clumsily on the floor. He didn’t move.

Dan listened to the silence – no one was coming – and stared into the darkness of the choice he had made, alive with unseen implications. But he had made it. The obliteration of a lot of vague possibilities clarified the real ones. Thought and action became fused, began to happen as one.

He stepped gingerly round Matt Mason, bent to check his breathing. He might have been peacefully asleep. Dan’s hand paused at the mouth of the open safe. He couldn’t see inside that small black hole. He found his hand reluctant to go inside, as though it might get bitten off. He had never stolen anything in his life. Even when his friends at school used to make the traditional group raids on Woolworth’s, it was a rite of passage he had never engaged in. But he forced his hand into the darkness and groped there. He came out with something wrapped in plastic and took a second or two to realise it was a gun. He briefly imagined it pointed at himself. Holding the gun in his left hand, he stretched into the safe again and brought out the wad of money from which Mason had paid him. He replaced the gun. He quickly counted out twenty-five tenners on top of the money he had left on the desk and replaced the rest in the safe. He pushed the safe shut gently, hearing it click. He put the thousand pounds together and stuffed it into his pocket. He made sure Mason was still unconscious, came out of the room and closed the door very quietly.

He checked that the keys were still on the hall table and moved, almost at a run, towards the lounge. Clamping a smile on his face, he pushed the door open.

‘Here, Frankie,’ he said.

The faces that simultaneously turned in response seemed to him threatening, but he nodded to them and winked.

‘Matt wants ye tae come through here wi’ us for a minute.’

‘Oh-ho,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘Serious business being discussed. ‘

‘When ye gotta go, ye gotta go,’ Frankie said.

Sandra raised a mock protest.

‘Don’t worry, ladies,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘I’ll keep you entertained.’

‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ Frankie said as he came out.

Dan closed the door.

‘So what’s this? You two need to call in expert advice? I knew it would happen.’

‘That’s right, Frankie,’ Dan said in a loud voice and grabbed his arm.

Frankie looked up at Dan in surprise. Dan put his finger over his mouth and walked past the door to Matt Mason’s study. Seeing Frankie about to say something, Dan grimaced, shook his head and raised a clenched fist in an orgy of warning signals. The ludicrousness of it was enough to stun Frankie into silence. Still gripping Frankie’s arm, Dan silently opened the cupboard in the hall where his travelling bag had been left. He lifted the bag out and eased the door shut with his foot. He let go of Frankie’s arm long enough to open the outside-door and pushed Frankie firmly out on to the step. He lifted the car keys from the hall table. He stepped outside, put down his travelling bag and eased the door delicately shut.

The coolness of the night hit him with the realisation of what he had done, like an anaesthetic wearing off. Frankie was staring in horror at the closed door, acting out Dan’s own feeling.

‘Whit the fuck is this?’

‘You’re drivin’,’ Dan said.

In Frankie’s eyes possibilities were trying to surface and drowning in disbelief.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘Ye’re on yer own, big man. Whit have ye done?’

Dan caught him and threw him against the car.

‘Ah’m countin’ ma chances in seconds, fucker,’ Dan said.

He opened the driver’s door and jabbed his forefinger at the seat.

‘In! Now!’

Frankie was bundled in. Dan gave him the keys, eased the
door closed and ran round the front of the car. He threw his travelling bag in the back seat as he got in.

‘Drive quietly till ye’re out the drive,’ he said.

‘Listen –’

Dan’s hand was on the back of Frankie’s neck. It felt like having his head caught in a clamp.

‘Drive now or Ah’ll break yer fuckin’ neck.’

Frankie let the car murmur out on to the roadway.

‘The hospital,’ Dan said. ‘As fast as ye can make it.’

As the car moved further away from the house, the silence was a widening separation. They sat in the same car but they felt like men travelling in different directions. The further they went, the more irrevocable became Dan’s sense of what he had done. From the bright and sudden certainty of that moment in the house, he was moving into shadow, towards what felt to him at this moment like a future of doubts that would only end when he did. Frankie’s head was making the opposite journey. Behind him was whatever had happened, which he didn’t know about. All he knew was that it was something very bad and very dangerous and that the further they went away from it, the worse their destination was likely to be. He was trying to work out ways to make that destination safe. Whatever had taken place back at Matt’s, there had to be some way to forestall its possible consequences for himself. But in order to do that, he had to know more about it.

‘All right, Dan,’ he said. ‘So Ah’m drivin’ ye. But at least tell me whit’s happened. Whit did ye do in there?’

Dan seemed to be wondering himself.

‘Ah knocked him out.’

‘Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ! Have you went mad? Why? An’ what’s this we’re doin’? You tryin’ to steal his car now? This is Matt Mason ye’re dealin’ with.’

‘You’re here tae take the car back, Frankie. After ye run me tae the station.’

‘Jesus Christ! Ah’ve to go back on ma own? Thanks very much. Why did ye have to involve me in this shite?’

‘Ah know, Frankie,’ Dan said. ‘Ah just picked yer name out the hat.’

‘Let’s go back now, Dan.’

‘Where to?’

‘Listen. If we go back right now, there might still be a chance. Ye can say it was just like a fit or somethin’. Maybe even that ye’re still a wee bit punchy from big Cutty. Somethin’ like that.’

Frankie was wishing he could convince himself. That might have given him a better chance of persuading Dan.

‘Ah’m goin’ back tae see Cutty. Ah’ve got money for him.’

Frankie was so busy trying to follow through with his own specious reasoning that it took him a moment to hear what Dan had said. When it registered, he almost mounted the pavement.