The Last Darkness (19 page)

A balcony, Perlman thought.

They took your known world away and they gave you a fucking
verandah
.

You drank tea and looked out at people on other verandahs drinking tea. What was that all about? So you could imagine you were the sahibs of the schemes, lords of some new order?

He turned off the lamp and lay down, pulling blankets up around his body. He shut his eyes and tried to let the day seep out of his mind. He thought of Billie Houston, and remembered the face of her attacker. Angular, dark-bearded: it wasn't a face that smiled a lot. Who was he? And why had he throttled Terry Dogue? Simply because Terry had witnessed the attack on Billie – or was there another explanation Perlman couldn't think of? He wondered about the identity of the man who'd taken Terry Dogue out of the hospital.

The night was popping with questions. And he had no answers.

He listened to the metallic tick of the cheap alarm-clock. Typical this, sleepy – and his damned head wouldn't stop churning. He thought of Colin, his damaged heart, the operation. And Miriam, dear Miriam's concerns. He felt privileged that she'd chosen him as the repository for her fears. She'd
needed
him. He remembered the feel of her hand on his. That intimacy. You're far too old to be infatuated, Perlman. Infatuation is what you grow out of, you
alter bokher
.

And he slid to sleep, down into the black canyons, and he woke only when he heard the girl climb into bed beside him.

‘I'm cold downstairs,' she said. ‘D'you mind me coming up to your room?'

He felt her body against him. How long since he'd shared his bed with a woman? Oh, Christ,
years
: he lived a monastic life. He occupied a cell of his own making. Was Sadie really cold, or was this some skimpy pretext, and she wanted to screw? Vulnerable and attractive – what in Christ's name could she possibly see in him?

Easy. You're kind and generous to her. Hers is a brute world. Scraping along, scoring dope. Living in fear of an arsehole like Riley. And you, Lou, you're fatherly. She doesn't have a father. That's it. She's a frightened wee girl a long way from home.

She caught one of his hands and rubbed it between her palms. ‘Nobody ever gave me the coat off his back before,' she said. ‘I want to give you something in return.'

‘There's nothing I want, Sadie.'

‘You don't find me attractive, eh?'

‘No, you're beautiful.'

‘You say the nicest things. Here I am. All yours.'

He turned on the lamp. He looked into her face. He hoped he appeared stern, resolute. Her eyes were dark, appealing.
Please take me, Perlman
.

‘You want me to go back downstairs?' she asked.

‘Oh
Christ
,' he said.

‘If you're worried about Aids, don't be. Honest, I'm HIV-neg.'

How foreplay had changed since his heyday. Here's the result of my clinical test, love. Now can we get down to it? He said, ‘I'm sure you're clean, love. Look, I'm almost fifty-six years old, and I appreciate your offer, it's generous beyond anything I deserve. It's just – I'm not a one-night-stand sort of person,' and he knew this was a lie, he desired her, in the muted light of the bedside lamp she looked alluring. But also innocent and easy to hurt, and he wanted to enclose her in his arms and just hold her and tell her the world was going to be fresh and clean again, if she gave it a chance, if she worked at it. His head was filled with conflict.

He felt a faint tingle in his scrotum, electrodes of sexual longing.

‘Sadie, love. This isn't the way.'

‘Okay, you tell me the way, you tell me what you want.'

‘You sleep here. I'll take the couch.'

‘It's not how I want it, Lou.'

‘It's the way it has to be, love.'

He shoved the blanket aside and stepped out of bed. I'm crazy, he thought. Leaving this girl and a warm bed for solitude on an uncomfortable couch. A bed of stones. What was he – some Jewish mystic, dressed only in a loincloth, freezing his willie off in the desert?

She said, ‘I want to thank you.'

‘No need,' he said.

‘I can't remember the last time anyone's been so kind.'

‘I'm not looking for repayment, Sadie.'

‘I'll fuck you, Lou. Whatever you fancy.'

‘No, love, no.' He moved out of the room before she could say anything else, because sooner or later he'd falter, and he'd be unable to convince himself that he
should
leave, and he'd get back in bed and they'd make love, or some semblance of it, and for a few minutes he'd be gratified, then when morning came he'd feel bad because he was just another bandit who'd used this girl, he was only one short rung up the moral ladder from that fuckwit Riley. And he wanted to believe he was better than that.

I don't want to fuck you, he thought.

Only to help. A helping hand. Accept that, lassie. You owe me damn all. But in Sadie's world when somebody did you a good turn, you owed that person. You paid back with the only thing you had. The debt was cleared.

Downstairs he lit a cigarette and lay on the couch with his eyes open. He felt tense and cramped, and his groin ached, and for a moment he thought – what the fuck difference will it make if I go back upstairs? would a spoke get twisted out of shape in the great cosmic wheel if an ageing Glasgow cop got it on with a junkie girl he'd busted a few years before? Man, woman, cop, junkie, these liaisons happened, desire, mad lust, what did it matter? You could always avert your eyes at dawn.

He crushed his cigarette out in an empty teacup and thought of an old truism:
a fuck missed is a fuck missed
. Stay upstairs, Sadie. Don't come down here. He summoned pictures of Miriam. He thought of her splattering a big canvas with paint, bold strokes of a brush. He imagined her standing outside the synagogue in Garnethill, the light-show of Glasgow spread beneath. Miriam Miriam. He adored the name, the way it began and ended with the same letter. The perfection of that closure. Eventually he floated into sleep listening to rain. It was a sleep so deep he didn't hear Sadie descend nor did he feel her kiss him lightly on the side of his face before she let herself out of the house and into the wet morning-dark streets of Egypt.

28

Artie Wexler woke afraid and confused. The red digital numbers of the bedside clock shimmered like the scales of tropical fish in shallow water. He had a sense of his throat closing, but he knew no physical agent was responsible for it, it belonged in the dream he'd just aroused himself from – dream? no, more a nightmare of a cold lime-green room and ornate iron grating overhead and the shadow of a man walking back and forth above him. The click of steel-tipped shoes on metal.

He was dry as a dead fire, needed water, reached for the glass he usually left beside the clock, couldn't find it. He sat up. He remembered he'd taken one of Ruthie's sleepers, maybe that was what had dehydrated him –

The dream had been about money. Right.

Tell me Artie, you remember taking that money?

Perlman's voice in the dream, and yet not; the way of dreams was to buff the edge of the known and replace anything familiar with a skewed facsimile.

He sat up on the edge of the bed. Ruthie was dead to the world. The digital clock read 4:25. The window of the bedroom was black. The sleet and rain had quit, no wind blew. Thirst scorched him. He'd have to go downstairs for water. He walked out to the landing, flicked a switch that turned on lights downstairs.

Halfway down he paused. He thought of Joe Lindsay dead. He thought of Nexus and the way Perlman had asked about it, and all that seemed such a long time ago. He reached the foot of the stairs, headed towards the kitchen. He pressed the button that turned on the spotlights. He wondered if Perlman really knew anything, or if he was firing from the hip – why had he mentioned money?

And then he remembered, as if the recollection were a small incendiary device from the past, the day he'd stolen Colin's hidden stash, and young Lou had taken the blame for it. I'd forgotten that, he thought. Maybe that's what Lou Perlman had been referring to: Colin's coins. That's all. Nothing more serious than that.

The little theft made him feel ashamed now.

He thought of places in the past where events had come together. You want to go back and change things round. Shift the furniture of your history. Revise the way you'd lived, the stuff you'd done.
I am falling to bits
, he thought.

Somebody killed Joe. Had that been in the dream too? He couldn't remember. He heard the wind chimes shiver, a soft timpani in the night.

Wind chimes. But no wind.

He felt a wave of vulnerability. He imagined his skull in a sniper's scope. He walked slowly to the sliding glass doors in the living room. The sensor lights shone in the yard. He pushed his face to the glass and, holding his breath, squinted out, looking for a sign of Reuben. The dog's movements often triggered the lights. But that didn't explain the chimes in the motionless dark.

The dog wasn't around. Probably curled up somewhere and sleeping. Poor Reuben, growing old and infirm, diminished vision and hearing. Artie Wexler felt a huge affinity with the dog. Going downhill, man and dog together.

He was about to open the door to call for Reuben when something at his back cast a shadowy reflection in the panes. He thought: ah, Ruthie, Ruthie's come down to look for me, and from outside came the bong of the wind chimes again, a sweet rippling effect as one chime collided with the next, and the next. He said, ‘I couldn't sleep,' and he turned, expecting to see his wife, but it wasn't her, and before he could register this fact he heard glass shatter violently behind him, a scattering of pieces as jagged as stalactites of ice, and he felt himself pitched back into pain, into the fury of wreckage, and back further, and as he fell through shards he reached for the hanging chimes and caught them, and brought all the hollowed bamboo sticks suspended by thin wires down around him, and he kept on falling like an axed tree, teetering back until he stood on the lip of the swimming pool, where he dropped with a splash, and sank through icy water.

In the depths of the freezing black pool his eyes registered nothing.

29

8:20 a.m.: Perlman ventured out into the rush-hour city, a cold morning, sky heavy, squalls of wintry rain. As a kid he'd always thought of winter as witches' weather, imagining pointy-hatted women scowling as they floated on broomsticks across chilly silver moons. The season diminished the city, and the tenements seemed withdrawn in a kind of anguish, disillusioned old men seeking comfort.

He drove in the direction of Mount Florida and listened to a tape of Brad Mehldau's Trio playing ‘Monk's Dream', and he thought of Sadie, who'd left some time in the dark hours. She'd scribbled a thank-you note on an empty Silk Cut Blue packet on the kitchen table.
Ta
,
see you, S
. She was out there in the city somewhere, dodging the monstrous Riley, and he wondered what kind of practical help he could give her. The idea of dispatching two big uniforms to eclipse Riley's doorway – that was laughable, something his tired head had tossed up. There had to be another avenue he could explore – but first there was Colin to see, and Lindsay's bizarre death to explore, and Dogue to track down, and the identity of the bearded guy, and Christ knows what else.

How could he make time for Sadie?

She came to my bed, he thought. And I didn't touch her. Bully for you. Now what did he feel? Hypermoral? Self-satisfied? None of the above? Face it, Lou. Not many young women throw themselves at you these days. And when one does, big shot, you toss her out of bed? Okay, so she wasn't exactly the Immaculate Virgin of Lourdes, but she was
sexy
. Some would call you a total
shmendrick
. Take the chances that come your way, Detective. The nights are long and lonely. Fuck it, fuck this debate, what it comes down to is this: I didn't screw her. Couldn't. End of. Who needs turmoil?

He turned on the wipers. Tenements and street-signs and traffic were thrown briefly into blur mode. The Trio had begun to play an idiosyncratic version of ‘Moon River'. It wasn't one of Perlman's favourites. He killed the tape. He was in Aikenhead Road now, southbound, passing close to Hampden Park, the refurbished National Stadium, downsized from the big funky crumbling bowl it had once been. Now it was neat and tidy, lacking any character.

He took a right turn into a grid of narrow streets, and when he found the Cedars he parked and walked inside. The lobby was empty. The woman at the reception desk was the one he'd encountered the day before. He hadn't noticed her ID badge before. Now he did. Fiona Marshall.

‘Mr Perlman?'

‘You remember me.'

‘I have a good memory,' she said. She had one of those posh accents as clipped as a well-kept hedge.

‘I'd like to have a minute with my brother,' he said.

The receptionist glanced at her watch. ‘Take a seat.'

Perlman wandered around the reception area while the woman made a phone call. She hung up. ‘You know where to go,' she said.

Perlman thanked her and went down the corridor to Colin's room. In the doorway he hesitated. Bad timing, the worst kind of timing for bringing unfortunate news, and asking a few questions that might be a little delicate. Colin's mind, reasonably, would be concentrated elsewhere.

Perlman stepped into the room, a bright hospital-visitor smile in place. Colin was sitting upright, gazing at a TV propped high on the wall. It played soundlessly.

‘Hey, my wee brother,' he said. ‘Twice in two days. Some kind of record, eh?'

Lou Perlman approached the bed, glanced at the drip hooked into his brother's arm. ‘Probably.'

Colin nodded at the TV. ‘
The Man in the Iron Mask
. I know it by heart … which may not be the right expression for somebody in my condition.'