Written in Dead Wax (13 page)

I hated to think of that. The poor records would be ruined. I said, “We would like to speak to her. The ex-wife.”

“She isn’t around.”

“Do you know when she will
be
around?” said Nevada. Even an expert might have said she sounded polite.

I said, “The thing is, we’re interested in acquiring his record collection.”

The woman laughed. “Well, you’re out of luck. She’s already got rid of half of it.” Half of it, I thought. My heart began to hammer.

“She’s sold it off?” I said.

The woman laughed again. “Oh, hell no. She’s been giving it away. For free. That’s her way of getting back at him. I get the impression it wasn’t a dream marriage.”

“Apparently not,” said Nevada.

The woman nodded. “So she’s taking his priceless collection that he scoured the world for and is dumping it at charity shops. Nifty piece of revenge, huh?”

“But she’s still got some of the collection to dispose of? The records, I mean. The ex-wife.”

“I guess so.” The woman shrugged. She lifted the drill and squeezed the trigger. It buzzed to life. She was ready to get back to work.

“Well, listen,” I said. “Could you please ask her to get in touch with me?” I took a business card out of my pocket and handed it to her. “I’ll be happy to save her any more trips to the charity shop.”

“I think she kind of likes them,” said the woman. “The trips.” She turned to the ladder, sandals slapping as she stepped onto the lowest rungs.

“Aren’t those things slippery when you get up there?” said Nevada.

“When I get up there I take them off.”

She disappeared up the ladder and we turned and walked back up the steps to the shadowed driveway.

As we walked out the front gate and into the road, we moved apart to let a jogger pass us on the pavement. A woman, serious-looking and sweaty. “What now?” said Nevada. She took my arm and we walked down the hill towards the river.

I said, “Have you ever heard of a boot fair?”

* * *

At four o’clock the next morning the alarm went off. The cats flinched at the unaccustomed noise, never before heard in their furry little lifetimes, and reluctantly stirred and jumped off the bed as I got up.

Sitting stunned and blank in a hot bath for the next half hour brought me to something resembling full consciousness and a cup of real coffee finished the job. The cats fled at the sound of the grinder, of course, but I felt I owed myself at least this. I made enough to fill a thermos. It gurgled happily and grew warm to the touch as I poured the fragrant coffee into it.

Out the window I imagined I could see the first hint of pink tendrils spreading across the sky. I was beginning to warm to the whole dawn patrol aspect of today’s mission.

I was just tightening the lid on the thermos when the doorbell rang.

Nevada was standing there. She gave me a malevolent look and said, “I’m out of my mind.”

“Well, you’re in the right place for expensive psychiatric care.” I nodded at the elegant white outline of the Abbey, just beginning to make itself seen against the dark sky. She sprawled in a chair, setting her bag down between her feet. She rolled her head and looked at me. Her face was pale and there were lilac shadows under her eyes. She looked like an undead beauty in some erotic Euro horror flick.

“Where are the kittens?”

I hadn’t seen them since they’d fled the grinder. “Through there, I think. They’ve probably gone back to bed.”

“Sensible girls.” She closed her eyes and for a moment I thought she’d gone to sleep herself. Then she sighed and began to rise, laboriously and bonelessly from the chair. “Well, I suppose we’d better get going.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door. I followed her, picking up the thermos. She glanced at it.

“Coffee?” she said.

“Yes.”

“The proper stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The boot fair, or car boot sale, or—if you were American, car trunk sale—was being held at a green field just off the A205 where the Mortlake Road becomes the Kew Road. It was evidently a sports field that someone didn’t mind hundreds of cars being parked on. Maybe the meandering muddy ruts in the turf made athletic confrontations all the more piquant. Clean Head dropped us at the main road and we walked up to the entrance gate. There were already a dozen people there.

“You see?” I said. “Early birds.”

“Early vultures,” said Nevada. She was still more than a little pissed off.

“If we’d left it any later we would have been swamped with competition.”

“It looks like we’re going to be swamped anyway.” She was looking unhappily at her boots, which were squelching on the wet grass, mud oozing up around them.

“I told you to dress sensibly.”

“For me, this is sensibly. And anyway you didn’t quite convey the backwoods nightmare which lay in store.”

“This isn’t the backwoods. It’s Kew.” We were at the gate now. “There it is,” I said. The stall holders were busy setting out their wares, taking stuff out of the boots of their cars and loading it onto a rickety variety of folding tables. There was one table covered with boxes of records. It was situated at the far end of the field. “As soon as the gate opens, we have to get way over there,” I said.

I bought tickets from a sullen man in a day-glo yellow vest and then turned and walked back towards the road.

“Where are we going?” said Nevada. As we walked away from the field, people were beginning to pour in from all directions. A flock of early vultures. She glanced nervously over her shoulder at them as we walked past. “Won’t we lose our place in line?”

“We’re not going to wait in line,” I said. She glanced at me in surprise then grinned.

“A bad boy. I like that.”

Beside the sports field there was another field, consisting of allotments used by the local gardening enthusiasts. Access to this was through a narrow alleyway which was open to the public. I had also noticed several places on the far side of the cultivated area, adjacent to our objective, where it was possible to cross into the sports field. We made our way gingerly across square plots of vegetables and flowers. “Don’t step on any cabbages,” I said. We came to a row of low green sheds. Behind them was a wire fence. Beyond that was the field and the boot fair. The fence was a low, half-hearted effort and at several points it was quite possible to simply step over it.

“Excellent,” said Nevada. She looked at me. The smudges under her eyes were fading now and colour had come into her cheeks. “Commendably devious.” She started towards the fence but I caught her by the elbow.

She looked at me in puzzlement.

“We have to wait,” I said.

“Wait for what?”

“Opening time.” I checked my watch. “Ten minutes to go.”

She sighed. “What is the point of us sneaking in here if we aren’t going to get in there
early
?”

I indicated the stewards patrolling the field in their day-glo vests. They were escorting a cute young blonde woman off the site. I could see she was trying to sweet-talk them and making absolutely no headway. If they would kick
her
out, what would they do to me?

I said, “If we go in there early they’ll chuck us out. And they might not let us back in.” At the gate the blonde was propelled off the premises, the crowd watching her departure with unabashed hatred.

“Plus we’d attract the opprobrium of the crowd,” said Nevada, watching with keen interest. “So what’s the point of being here? Where we’re standing. Where you dragged us.”

“The point is that when it is time to go in, we can just hop the fence here and, oh, look what happens to be right there on the other side.”

“Ah,” said Nevada. The table with the records was directly in front of us. It would take us about three seconds to get there. “There is method in your madness after all.” She seemed grudgingly impressed. “Let’s drink some coffee while we’re waiting.”

“Sorry.”

“What do you mean, sorry?”

“I left it with Clean Head.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Nevada.

“Poor girl looked like she needed it.”

“That ‘poor girl’ has got me paying her approximately the gross fiscal output of a small nation for the privilege of chauffeuring us on this early-morning jaunt. And now she’s also got the fucking coffee.” These and other complaints filled the time and before I knew it, it was six o’clock and time to cross the fence.

I climbed over it, holding a strand of wire down for Nevada, then both of us were running to beat the sudden influx of customers, who were like a stampede. Nevada disappeared into the throng, presumably in search of high-fashion bargains, and I made a beeline for the table with the records.

Half of them were in cardboard boxes on the ground and I was glad I’d got to these early. Within a few hours the damp from the earth would have soaked up through the cardboard and begun to attack the records. It wouldn’t have much effect on the vinyl, but all the covers would soon be write-offs.

I squatted in front of the boxes, comfortable in my dawn patrol crate-digging shoes, and started flipping. The first box had no jazz, just a lot of European-inflected easy listening, including a fairly astonishing number of LPs by Nana Mouskouri.

I made a mental note to go back and look for the one on Philips produced by Quincy Jones, and hurried on to the next box.

This was full of budget classical records. Nothing there for me. There were two more boxes. The next one was mostly twelve-inch singles and hip-hop. Onwards.

As soon as I began flipping through the last box I knew this one had come from the Unknown Jazz Fan. Or rather Tomas. Or rather his wife. It was all jazz, all immaculate. But it was uniformly New Orleans and Dixieland. Laudable stuff, but not my cup of tea.

Too early, pre-swing. There wasn’t even any Fats Waller. I flipped past the last record and reluctantly accepted the truth.

It wasn’t here.

I moved back to the first box to look for the Quincy Jones Nana Mouskouri opus—was it called
The Girl From Athens
?—when something hit me so hard it knocked me off my feet. I found myself lying on my back on the damp grass, winded and staring up at the thug who had done it.

He had shoved me aside and now he was going through the box with intent mechanical speed. He had close-cropped blonde hair and wore a brown rough-woven sweater, khaki combat trousers and some expensive-looking running shoes. His big shoulders rose and fell as he flipped through the records. He was large and burly, built like an athlete. And he had an athlete’s physical arrogance.

My shock and incomprehension were now giving way to a murderous rage. I struggled to my knees and began to rise from the ground. A hand caught my arm and helped me up. Nevada was standing there. I said, “That fucker knocked me over.” My voice was shaking.

“I know. I saw.” The blonde hulk finished looking through the box and turned and walked swiftly away from us. He hadn’t found anything, anyway.

Now that I was on my feet I was incandescent with rage. Watching him go, I said, “I’d like to…” I fell silent. I’d been meaning to say “put a bullet in his head” but I decided I’d better not, for all sorts of reasons. Nevada looked at me.

“Well, don’t you want to finish looking through that box?”

“I already had,” I said. “I was just going back to double-check on something by Nana Mouskouri.”

“Is that the girl with the glasses?”

To my surprise, when we got back to my house Nevada dismissed the cab and came in with me. “I thought you were knackered,” I said, as we opened the front door.

“Delightful expression, that.”

“I thought you’d want to crash.” I walked into the sitting room with her. She looked around the place, and then looked at me.

“I thought I could crash here.”

For an instant you could have heard a pin drop but then Fanny emerged scrabbling from under an armchair where she’d wedged herself and came to join us, emitting a series of ingratiating squeaks. Nevada instantly dropped to her knees. “Oh look who’s here! Aren’t you lovely? Yes you are. Shall we rub your chin? Yes we’ll rub your chin. We’ll rub it. Where’s your sister? Not that we don’t love you, but where’s your sister?”

“Would you like some coffee?” I said. I was keenly disappointed that the cat had appeared just when she had. I felt like some moment of monumental importance had come and gone and I’d blinked and missed it.

“No thanks,” said Nevada, rubbing Fanny’s head. “Coffee will wake me up. I want to get a couple of hours sleep. Do you mind?” She shot me a look.

“No, no,” I said. “It’s just through…”

“Through here,” she said. “Right. Thanks. Wake me in a couple of hours.” She walked through to the bedroom, Fanny following her. I stood in the sitting room feeling abandoned, conflicted, exhilarated and a number of other things I couldn’t even put a name to.

“Right,” I said, “I’ll just wait here and, and, uh, and…”

The bedroom door closed.

“I’ll wake you in a couple of hours,” I said to the closed door.

The next two hours may not have been the longest of my life but they were certainly contenders. I busied myself making lunch, then tried to read, which was impossible, and ended up cleaning the kitchen, then tidying the living room, then sorting out my recently acquired LPs. Finally, when two hours had passed, virtually to the second, I went and knocked gently on the bedroom door. There was no reply, so I opened it quietly and looked in.

Nevada’s clothes had been unceremoniously piled in a chair.

She was sprawled on the bed, under the quilt. One bare arm was flung out across the covers, the other tucked under her face on the pillow. The two cats were on the bed with her, happily curled up close beside her as if this was standard procedure. Together they made a jigsaw puzzle of warm, sleeping bodies.

I lowered myself to sit gingerly on the edge of the bed. Nevada shifted slightly as the mattress moved with my weight.

She turned her face to me and opened one sleepy eye. “Hello,” she murmured. Then she closed the eye and, to all intents and purposes, went back to sleep.