Butcher (43 page)

Something troubled Perlman. He couldn't think what. Something about his phone. Those fucking pills make me old. Those fucking painkillers inhibit my reactions. He stared at his phone, then looked at Tartakower. ‘I never gave you my phone number, did I?'

‘You're in the book.'

‘No, this
phone
. I never told you what it was. But you called me on it earlier.'

‘Phoo, a mobie number is easy to get, if you look in the right places. Keep in mind what you see isn't always what you get.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Illusions, Perlman.'

‘You brought me here to—'

‘Ah no. You brought yourself here, Perlman.'

Perlman thought he heard movement from far down the stairs. But then there was only the sound of Tartakower's breathing and the ferret licking its paws and a whine in his own ears. What was this now, tinnitus, a disease that afflicted drummers and people who listened too long to music screaming through earphones? I've been listening to the discordant symphony of this city for too many years: Glasgow-itis.

Tartakower sucked the blood off his fingertips and seemed to smile, although it was hard to tell through the massive beard and the poor light. ‘Blood tastes sweet,' he said. ‘Our families.'

‘Our
families?
'

‘Call me sorcerer, Perlman. Call me necromancer.'

‘You're losing it.'

‘Did Lazarus recover so quick?' Tartakower got to his feet. A bone cracked in his leg, but he moved with no apparent difficulty.

I'm back in bed, this is a weird dream and Tartakower is the bear
, Perlman thought. ‘You apparently don't need help as bad as you claimed. Nobody beat you up, did they? Nobody came here and kicked you around.'

Tartakower, whose shadow on the wall was vast and menacing, ignored the question. ‘Your aunt, St Hilda of the Blessed Virgins, she rebuked me.'

‘You fucking duped me into coming here for an ancient history lesson?'

‘Ancient and
less
ancient. You never knew she rebuffed me?'

‘No, never,' Perlman said. Hilda and Tartakower, what a strange pair, a strange idea.

‘She deemed me unfit. She wants a man who is tidy.
Tidy!
' Tartakower gestured round his room, his pathetic possessions. ‘Even flying high, I was not such a man. So I marry somebody else – a fucking
khazer
– but did this waken jealousy in Hilda's heart?'

There was a wildness about Tartakower suddenly, his eyes bright, his beard glittering, his hands slashing the air.

‘Hilda obviously didn't like your table manners,' Perlman said. ‘You're wasting my fucking time. I'm going back home to sleep.' He started to move toward the door.

‘I spook you into leaving, Perlman?'

‘No, it's been a fuck of a day and I'm not at my best.'

Tartakower tugged on his beard. ‘Maybe I mistakenly thought you'd be sympathetic. We have in common being spurned. Broken hearts.'

‘I don't know about your heart, Tartakower—'

‘Colin's burial.'

‘What about it?'

‘I was present that day.'

‘I don't believe it. I never saw you there.'

‘The reason is you have google-eyes only for the lovely widow, holding her elbow just so at the edge of the grave, I was reaching for my hankie. This is a memory I cherish. Lou Perlman, crazy in love with the widow.'

Perlman stepped away from another effusion of black smoke. He didn't want to imagine Tartakower at Colin's funeral, spying, an uninvited guest. There was a police presence that awful day, keeping away a rabble of vulpine onlookers curious to see the burial of a dead gangster whose misdeeds had been trumpeted in all the local rags. Maybe Tartakower had been kept at a distance by this cordon. Perlman remembered little of the burial, except Miriam's wan expression and the black of her coat and the hole in the ground where they laid his brother down.

‘Broken hearts,' Tartakower said again, and uttered a sigh.

Lou said, ‘Fine. We share a sadness. So what.' He took another couple of steps toward the door.

Tartakower smiled. ‘Didn't I follow her trial in the newspapers and see Lou Perlman put the boot into his own team? An own goal you scored, Perlman. Such a spectacle of yourself. But what does it matter you're a turncoat to your colleagues so long as the untouchable Miriam flies free with the gelt intact?'

‘The money was hers,' Perlman said, slowly rising to an anger for which he had no energy. Hauled from bed, rushing here with a kind of mercy in mind. To look at life through an old man's kaleidoscope of grudges?

‘A lover's eyes see the world different. It's a golden condition.' Tartakower sniffed the air with the expression of a man smelling a very fine wine. ‘Has this sweet love flourished, is she to become Mrs Perlman a second time?'

Heavy sarcasm in Tartakower's question. But more, a mean tone, spite and smugness. ‘You want to taunt me about Miriam? I don't need this. I'm gone.'

‘Miriam tells me her favourite places. She says she likes Florence best in all the world. So artsy, how she speaks. So la-dee-da, a lady. My soul is easy in Florence, Miriam says.'

‘She told you this? When?'

‘On a day we talked.'

‘You talked, you and Miriam? And I came up the Clyde on a water lily.' The paraffin flame stuttered almost to the point of extinction, then flared again in a shroud of black smoke that belched through the top of the lamp.

‘Miriam, so lovely, but alas a heart of ice.' Tartakower bent, stroked the ferret's head. ‘Issy, Issy.' He stretched his hands forward, extending the fingers. ‘See. I don't shake so much. Some days I tremble a little, other days not.'

‘I'm impressed.' Perlman heard a sound once again, a shuffling from afar, movement inside the tenement. He found this room, this building, oppressive. And yet he stayed because Tartakower was guiding him somewhere, there was a story here, and it was unfolding at the old man's pace.

Tartakower was watching him with a look of loathing so strong it existed apart from the man, a malice of such force it became an entity that occupied a space all its own. ‘One day I looked inside myself and saw a truth. The fucking Perlmans have cursed me. One Perlman wrecks my heart, another puts me in jail. Your family is a toxic cloud over my history. The Perlmans are agents of darkness.'

‘This is such fucking nonsense. As for meeting Miriam, I'm not buying—'

‘I put on my good suit. You surprised I have one? We go to the Willow Tea Rooms. Very nice. She has green tea and a tiny sandwich. She nibbles, doesn't eat the crusts, this woman of delicacy, this great love of yours, this
passion
.'

‘How did you get her to meet you? Tell her your life was in danger?'

‘What works for you isn't going to work for her. I phone her, I say I need to see her on a matter of some importance. She demurs. Ladies like Miriam always demur, Perlman. But I know the lure. I say I have information about Colin's money she should know about. Only then is she anxious to meet. And sweet all of a sudden on the phone.'

Miriam and Tartakower at the Willow. A picture Perlman couldn't see. ‘And then what?'

‘You want to hear? Ah, Perlman. I conjure visions until her eyes gleam. This is a venal lady. I say Colin asked me to hide for him considerable sums of money. More than I want to count. I'm uneasy, Miriam, I don't need the responsibility. She doesn't ask why her husband chose me, she doesn't ask a single practical question, not one, avarice has consumed what common sense she might have had. Money – what it does to a greedy person. She glows, Perlman. You may have seen this look. She burns.'

‘I don't remember seeing her look like that,' Perlman said. But maybe he had, and denied it. Love sees what it wants. Tartakower's story was rolling into a stormy place, and he felt the dread of a landlubber on a ship during rough seas.

‘We left the Willow and I took her to a place,' Tartakower said. ‘A place where I kept this cash that was such a burden to me. She's delighted to come along. She floats like light on water.'

‘Where did you take her?'

‘Is not important.' Tartakower opened a cupboard, a door with no knob, and reached inside. He produced a black case, about the size of an attaché case, though deeper, and put it on the table, making space by pushing aside unwashed cups, a bowl that contained relics of a cereal, dirty cutlery. He clicked the case open.

‘Before your eyes the sorcerer's tools.'

Perlman saw a series of velvet slots, each measured for a specific purpose. Tartakower reached in and removed a metal tool that was yellow by lamplight, but silver in ordinary light. ‘My beautiful souvenirs. See.' He turned the blade in his hand. ‘This you will recognize. The common or garden scalpel.'

Perlman forced himself to look closer into the box – scalpels of different sizes, different shapes. Also something else.

Tartakower removed an implement and said, ‘A prince among tools.'

Perlman found himself looking at a handsaw, some twelve inches long, steel blade smooth and wicked. He had an unhealthy urge to touch it, but Tartakower was a little quicker, and held the tool at his side.

‘Justice in steel. Realignment of imbalances. In an unjust world, this saw is the equalizer.'

‘You talk so much shit.' Disturbed by the saw, Perlman heard movement again outside, the shuffle of feet, whispers.

‘Such a sceptic, Perlman. And the postcards, you don't believe either.'

The postcards.

Perlman felt an alteration take place in the atomic structure of his world, a cosmos turning on its axis. He was in an upside-down reality.
A handsaw, justice in steel, postcards Miriam never wrote
.

‘In my one good suit I took some short trips. Planes, if you book them at the right time, are cheap and quick. I had a little money saved. I had a key to her loft, I had her handwriting down to a T. Also her hand off, you should pardon a crude witticism. Don't believe? From this encounter you hope to wake up safe and warm in your bedroom, Perlman? So many old newspapers. What a fire hazard.' Tartakower laughed and chopped the air with the handsaw. ‘Compared to my suffering, she suffered nothing. Is this consolation for you?'

Perlman felt sick, oily smoke in his throat and his stomach, as if he'd drunk the stuff. He listened to the sounds rise through the building, then a boy's low laugh.

‘A sceptic always needs proof.' Tartakower reached down toward the ferret and stroked its neck gently and whispered its name and then, with an unpredictable agility and an expression of utter indifference, drew the blade across the creature's throat.

‘For
Christ's
sake,' Perlman shouted.

The animal howled and tried to move but a second draw of the handsaw cut its windpipe and it bled copiously from the throat and looked at Tartakower with what Perlman thought was a kind of misplaced pity. Perlman was about to grapple the saw away from Tartakower just as they entered the room, fifteen of them, probably more, how could he tell by this nightmarish light? They wore their hoods upraised and they emanated the menace of an unholy monastic order that has strayed from the true church to align itself with an older ally, and as they shuffled through the doorway they saw Tartakower pluck the dying ferret from the cardboard box and hold it up by the scruff of its slit neck. Blood flowed out of the wound and down his hand and arms.

‘
Issy. Jesus fuckin Christ
,' one of the kids said, anguished.

‘What inna name o fuck have you done?' another asked.

Perlman watched Tartakower, whose face changed, exultation yielding to the anxiety of a man who sees a scheme go awry, make an indeterminate gesture to the hoodies. ‘This is the polisman who forced me to kill Issy, boys.'

‘Forced ye? How did he force ye? Held a gun at yer heid, did he? You fuckin old cunt. I saw you. You cut her throat.'

This group seemed to have one voice, one vision. They moved across the room in a rabble, propelled by a rage they were only beginning to feel. The big kid who'd challenged Perlman days before plucked the animal, his talismanic symbol of freedom, from Tartakower's hands, and shoved the old man back against the plywood window with a force that popped out a couple of nails.

‘Boys,
boys
, calm.' Tartakower pointed a finger at Perlman. ‘This man is
polis
, this is Perlman, who forced me to use the saw on poor Issy. This is your
enemy
. The saw is the
weapon
. And this polis, I told you what he did to me—'

The creature bled dying in the boy's arms. Its body spasmed. The boy who huddled over it was moaning
Issy Issy
, while Tartakower rambled on like an orator facing an incredulous crew – the polis Perlman brought about the cruel death of the beloved pet, get
him
, do what you're supposed to do, go,
do it
.

Perlman attempted to get himself between Tartakower and the hoodies. But they were a swarm, and their energy thrust him aside. He lost his balance and slid back, tripping over the TV on the floor. He struck his head against the wall – a tiny explosion of pain – then he returned to the fray, attempting to rescue Tartakower even as the hoodies crowded the old man, pummelling, kicking him, grabbing his beard and twisting it, poking fingers into his eyes – no, not fingers, Perlman realized with shock, but steel knitting-needles with sharpened points. Tartakower screamed and screamed. Perlman tried to claw his way through the hoodies, dreaming he might save Tartakower, who was covering his face from blows, and bleeding from his punctured eyes, and diminishing under the pressure of so much violence. Somebody had kicked the plywood loose and cold blew into the room, and the smell of the river. Tartakower, screaming to Perlman for help, was shoved toward the black space where the plywood had been.