Written in Dead Wax (18 page)

One of the tables was an elegant old walnut antique that had at an earlier time enjoyed the loving attentions of a French polisher. God knows how it had fallen into Lenny’s hands. Now it was chipped and battle-scarred and served as his shop counter. He sat behind it and watched me go through his
NEW ARRIVALS, JAZZ
bins.

There was a small white portable refrigerator grumbling away beside Lenny’s table, and he sat in front of it sipping from a glass of pale pinkish-purple fluid. No one knew what was in the fridge and Lenny, who was notoriously unfriendly, wouldn’t tell anyone. No one knew what he was drinking, either, although guesses ranged from Ribena to the blood of newborn infants.

Now Nevada was standing in front of his table with a doubtful expression on her face. She could be outside, sitting in a nice, warm, comfortable cab. “I understand you want to see me,” she said.

“He wants to see your platinum card,” I said, glancing up from the table where I was flipping through the records.

“Doesn’t he trust you?” Nevada was looking over her shoulder at me.

“He trusts me but not necessarily my buying power.” I resumed my search through the bins. My nose was twitching with the spicy smell of some exotic fungus that was attacking the grubby heaps of vinyl.

I heard Nevada say, “What on earth is that you’re drinking?” The muscles of my shoulders tightened as I prepared myself for one of Lenny’s rudest put-downs. But, to my astonishment, he said, “Mineral water with a little Crème de Cassis.”

“Cassis?” said Nevada. “That’s lovely. Have you tried it with champagne? Lovely with champagne.”

“Sadly, I don’t have any champagne here,” said Lenny.

“Disgraceful,” said Nevada, and for the first time in living memory I heard Lenny chuckle. “Have you tried Crème de
Framboise
?” she said. “That’s very tasty too.”

“Yes, I sometimes drink the Framboise. It depends how I’m feeling.”

“It depends on how
fruity
you’re feeling.”

“That’s right!” Now they both laughed, him sounding like a rusty hinge on a seldom-opened door, her gurgling with merriment. I couldn’t believe it. I drifted over to the table where they were talking, under the guise of looking through some boxes of appalling Euro disco junk. I had never seen Lenny like this. She totally had him where she wanted him. If he’d been a cat he would have purred.

“I don’t have any champagne,” said Lenny. “But I do have this.” He spun around on his chair and opened the refrigerator. He took out a tall green wine bottle with a white label and set it on the table. Nevada let out a meretricious squeal of delight and Lenny said, modestly, “It’s a Chablis.”

“It’s a very good Chablis,” said Nevada. “My god, the Valmur.”

Lenny nodded and took two glasses out of the fridge. Unlike the tumbler he’d been drinking from before, these were proper wine glasses made of slender, shapely crystal. The neck of the bottle chinked against them musically as he poured the white wine. “It’s the Grand Cru, isn’t it?” said Nevada.

“Yes, the Moreau-Naudet,” said Lenny happily as the wine glugged.

“The 2007?”

“Yes, the 2007.” He filled two glasses carefully. I felt left out, like the hired bumpkin flipping through my smelly vinyl on the other side of the room. But I knew what response a request for a glass of my own would get.

“You can taste the limestone!” cried Nevada.

I looked on the bright side. If she couldn’t cater to her clothes fetish here, at least she could indulge her wine obsession. And that would keep her out of my hair while I looked.

“I generally save the wine,” said Lenny. “Until the end of the working day, or for a special occasion.”

“The end of the working day
is
a special occasion, I always say,” said Nevada. They drained their glasses and were working on a refill by the time I finished looking through the bins. I strode over purposefully and joined them.

“It isn’t here,” I said.

“Are you sure?” said Nevada.

“Yes,” I said. “And nobody resembling Helmer’s ex-wife, or indeed anyone else, has brought any interesting jazz records here for months, if not years.”

“That’s right,” agreed Lenny happily, sipping his wine.

I looked at Nevada.

“It’s just perfect.”

* * *

As we drove away in the taxi Nevada said, “All right, explain to me what we just achieved.”

“Apart from you drinking Grand Cru Chablis?”

“And spending a huge fortune in my funds, yes.”

“It isn’t a huge fortune,” I said. “It’s less than you spent on the Stone Circle 10 bug buster.”

“But at least I saw some return for that. Some value. I don’t see any value in buying a huge quantity of rubbish vinyl that you yourself assure me does not contain the record we’re looking for.”

“You haven’t bought it yet,” I said.

“I’ve agreed to buy it, in principle,” said Nevada. “And he’s seen my platinum card as a token of our earnest.”

I gave her my best confident smile. “If things pan out, you won’t have to buy anything.”

“And just how likely are things to ‘pan out’?”

“Ask Clean Head,” I said.

“Clean Head? Why? Ask her what?”

“If she’s sure she didn’t shake off our tail completely.”

“I’m not going to ask her that,” said Nevada. “She’ll bite my head off. You only reminded her about twenty times on our way here.” She didn’t look convinced and I could feel my best confident smile beginning to slip a bit. Just then my phone rang. I answered it.

It was Lenny. “I tried your friend’s number, but there was something wrong with her phone, so I’m phoning you instead, to tell you.”

“Okay,” I said, repressing the urge to tell him to get on with it.

“Well,” he said, “it went down exactly like you said.” And he told me all about it. When he finished talking I hung up and looked at Nevada. She was smiling at me.

“It worked, did it?” she said. “Whatever this evil scheme of yours was?”

“Yes,” I said. “It worked. How did you know?”

She shook her head. “It’s written all over your face. Well, go on. Tell me what happened.”

I leaned back in my seat and sighed. We were speeding through Belsize Park, on the way home. I said, “About ten minutes after we left, they turned up.”

“Who did? The Aryan Twins?”

“Yes. Apparently they were very friendly and charming.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Or at least she was,” I said.

“Heidi.”

“Yes. Heidi wanted to buy up his entire stock of jazz albums. Lenny regretfully explained he’d just sold, or promised to sell, the whole lot, including all the dire rubbish in the basement—he didn’t say dire rubbish, you understand—to us.”

Nevada was watching me. “And they made a counter offer.”

I nodded. “That’s right. And Lenny said he couldn’t do that to a friend. So they doubled the offer.”

Nevada squealed and I smiled. “But Lenny stood fast. And they kept raising the ante. In the end they paid him five times what we’d agreed.”

“Five times!”

“That’s right. Now apparently they’ve gone off to rent a truck big enough to haul the records away.”

“A truck!” Nevada exploded in laughter. She laughed until she cried. She laughed so hard that Clean Head looked over her shoulder at us, a little surprised and anxious, and then returned to watching the road. Nevada gradually subsided and wiped her eyes. “Five times,” she said. “So that’s the going rate for selling out a friend these days.”

“That’s the going rate.”

She sighed and rubbed her face. “All right. But what have we actually achieved, besides making Heinz and Heidi waste their morning doing this transaction?”

I counted on my fingers. “We’ve also wasted their money. A great deal of their money.”

Nevada nodded in agreement. “A shit load of their money.”

“And we’ve given Lenny a significant boost to his income.”

“He’s such a nice chap. He can buy some more excellent Chablis.”

“And,” I said, “we’ve helped him get rid of one of the largest collections of dodgy jazz records in the world.”

“All very well, but…”

“But we’ve also lumbered the Aryan Twins with the task of picking up and then looking through every single fucking one of those records.” I looked at her. “That should keep them out of our hair for a while.”

Nevada chuckled. “You really do have a twisted mind, don’t you?” She peered contentedly out the window at Fulham rolling past. We were heading for Putney Bridge. A thought struck me. I took out my phone and dialled a number. “Who are you calling?” she said.

“Lenny again. I just thought of something.” Lenny answered and I said, “Listen, as soon as they’ve collected the records I think this would be a good time for you to take a holiday.”

He wasn’t slow. “You think there might be repercussions?”

“I think it would be a good idea if you were out of the country and unable to be found for a few weeks.” There was a long pause at the other end. I said, “You’ve got plenty of money for a holiday now, haven’t you?”

Lenny seemed to gradually warm to the notion. “Yeah, maybe Greece, eh? Mykonos will be nice this time of year.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Lenny’s tone grew jubilant. “Would you ask your friend if she’s ever been to Mykonos? And if she hasn’t, would she like to go? And even if she has, would she like to go again? Would you ask her that? If she’d like to go with me?”

“You know what, actually, Lenny? I won’t.”

“Okay, fair enough, I quite understand.”

When we got to my house Nevada asked if she could come in. “I’m expecting a call and my phone’s packed up. So I gave them your landline number.” She walked through the front door with me and the cats rose lazily to greet us. Nevada settled comfortably on the sofa and the cats went to join her. “They should call about five o’clock,” she said, glancing at the phone beside the sofa. It was now five to five.

“Who?” I said.

“My office.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t visualise Nevada having an office, or working in one. I perched on an arm of the sofa and watched her caress the cats. “Would you like some coffee?” I wondered if I had the energy to make the good stuff. The phone suddenly rang, causing the cats to jump off the sofa. I looked at the clock. The office was a little early.

Nevada scooped up the receiver, listened for a moment, then covered it up and looked at me. “Would you mind?” she hissed. “I know it’s terribly rude, but I’m supposed to make a confidential report.”

“No problem,” I said, although in fact I was little stung to be turfed out of my own house. I went out the back door into the garden. The sky was dark and heavy with the early evening of winter. The air smelled cold and clean and distantly of burning leaves. I remembered Tomas Helmer standing here and the smell of his cigar. The cat flap rattled behind me and Fanny came gliding out to keep me company. Turk, the traitor, stayed indoors. Through the window I could see Nevada playing with her absent-mindedly while she spoke on the phone. Then she hung up and waved to me.

I went back in. Fanny stayed out in the garden, crouched on one of the flat stones that formed a footpath leading to the back gate.

In the sitting room Nevada rose from the sofa, stretching. “Sorry about that. Thank you for being so understanding.”

“No problem. How are things back at the office?”

“Ticking over.” She sat back down on the sofa, looking up at me. “Listen would you mind if I used your bathroom? I mean, to take a bath. I feel filthy after grubbing around in that dreadful warehouse place.”

I was startled by the request. “No, of course. Help yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Nevada. She wasted no time, scooping up her shoulder bag and carrying it into the bathroom with her. I heard the door click shut and then the squeak of the taps being turned and the thunder of water. I stood in the sitting room staring down at the phone.

I picked it up and dialled 1471. I fumbled to find a pen and a scrap of paper. The recorded voice gave me the last incoming number and I wrote it down. Then I switched on my laptop and typed the number into a search engine.

The country and area code were 0081 956.

The city of Sasebo in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan.

* * *

The sound of running water had stopped some time ago and was replaced now by some quiet, desultory splashing. Fanny wandered up to the bathroom door and stared at it curiously. She wasn’t accustomed to seeing it closed. She reached up and began to scratch at it. She scratched vigorously and continuously and showed no signs of quitting. I was about to get up and try and get her to stop when the door popped open a cautious couple of inches and Fanny promptly insinuated herself into the opening and disappeared inside. The door closed behind her.

Turk, having watched this, now walked over to the door and began to scratch on it herself. It opened again and she darted inside. The door closed and I heard the low, indistinct cooing sound of Nevada’s voice as she addressed the cats.

I stared at the closed door and felt left out.

About ten minutes later the door opened and released a warm waft of moist, fragrant air and the cats ambled out, followed by Nevada. She had covered her hair in a towel and I was surprised to see she was wearing my bathrobe. She must have found it hanging on the back of the door. Her shoulder bag was dangling from one hand and she put it down in the only armchair that wasn’t covered with records.

“That’s better,” she said, settling down on the sofa. She took the towel off her hair and draped it over the arm of the sofa, swivelling around so she could turn and look at me. “The girls kept me company,” she said.

“So I see.”

“Turk perched on the edge of the tub and Fanny lay down in the sink, all curled up. She was ever so sweet.”

“They like the steam.”

“So do I.” Nevada yawned and stretched. Not looking at her long bare legs was one of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Her skin was very pale and startlingly smooth. I cleared my throat.

“We have to talk,” I said.

She looked up at me, her eyes innocent and without guile. “Of course,” she said. “About what?”

“About this, the whole situation. The Aryan Twins and Jerry and Tinkler and everything.”