Sleight of Hand
Authors: Nick Alexander
Nick Alexander was born in Margate, and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France. When he isn't writing, he is the editor of the gay literature site BIGfib.com. His latest novel, The Case of the Missing Boyfriend, was an eBook bestseller in early 2011, netting sixty thousand downloads and reaching number 1 on Amazon. Nick lives in the southern French Alps with two mogs, a couple of goldfish and a complete set of Pedro Almodovar films. Visit his website at
www.nick-alexander.com
THE FIFTY REASONS SERIES
Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
SHORT STORIES
13.55 Eastern Standard Time
FICTION
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
Sleight of Hand
Nick Alexander
by BIGfib Books.
This edition first published in Great Britain in
2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Nick Alexander, 2011
The moral right of Nick Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-85789-640-7 (eBook)
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
Table of Contents
Ricardo: A Potentially Bad Move
The Case Of The Missing Daughter
Ricardo: One Grief To Replace Another
Thanks to Fay Weldon for encouraging me when it most counted. Thanks to Rosemary, Jerôme and Giovanni for their help with the final manuscript. Thanks to Apple computer for making such wonderful reliable work tools, and to BIGfib Books for making this book a reality.
fight to stick around
Paradise Lost
It was the incident with the dog that did it. We were sitting having a drink at Max's â a scruffy wooden bar at the edge of the national park. It had become a ritual of ours, a Friday night mojito, sometimes two â our attempt at marking the beginning of the weekend â at marking the passage of time. Neither Ricardo's random callouts as a doctor, nor my occasional translation work, nor the weird, season-less weather of Colombia provided much clue as to where you might be in the week, the year, in life. Our stay here so far felt, somehow, out-of-time â as if contained within brackets.
Max's was a perfect beach-bar and (in season) a sometimes-restaurant: a wooden shack built on stilts with the dense forest of the national park to the west, the occasionally raging Caribbean to the north, and a dusty/muddy car park everywhere else.
It was a twenty minute walk along the coast from our house and often, outside the tourist season, we, along with the effervescent, whistling Max, were the only people there. Occasionally there would be a couple of gamekeepers playing draughts in a corner, and of course for those few months of the year when Europeans and Americans take their brief holidays, the place would look more like Club Med than a lost corner of the Caribbean. But generally the only noise was the endless salsa drifting from Max's thankfully weedy transistor radio, and, depending on the direction of the wind, the sound of the waves.
Before the
corronchos
arrived it had all felt pretty perfect. The late afternoon sun was warm, the mojitos were cool enough for condensation to be trickling down the outside of the glass, and Max's radio had, rather superbly, run out of batteries. Not only had I finally finished and emailed my fifty-thousand word drudgery on EEC agricultural policy, but Ricardo's so often absent colleague was, for once, on-call: a whole weekend to ourselves.
Ricardo drew a circle in the dew on the side of his glass, looked up and smiled at me. “You know, Chupa Chups, there are moments when this place really is pa ⦔ he said, and then paused, distracted by the sound of a car.
Like all nick-names
Chupa Chups
came about by accident. I had asked him what the lollypop brand name meant, and Ricardo had translated it as,
“Sucky Suck.”
For weeks, I had been unable to see or hear those words without cracking up laughing, and the name had stuck. It still made me grin, even though I was mortified when from time to time, he accidentally used it in public.
We both turned to watch as a Porsche Cayenne appeared from the forest track. It stopped at the edge of the car park in a cloud of dust, and four young men in Miami-Vice suits got out â one of the guys actually had his jacket sleeves pushed up.
Ricardo sighed and looked back out to sea, and I copied him and did likewise, for there are men that you don't watch in Colombia â men, often enough, with Porsche Cayennes.
The four men lingered by the car talking energetically or maybe arguing. With the distance and their accents, and over the salsa music drifting from the car, I couldn't understand a word. Their over-loud voices sounded, though, like a challenge.
The main thing they seemed to be saying, was,
“Look at us. Look over here. Aren't we something?”
And that was when the dog appeared.
It was irritating, it's true â a mangy, skinny half-breed sniffing around the edges of the terrace, pissing in a corner, pushing under tables and around chairs in its hunt for crumbs, and then around our feet, and finally out into the car park, and over towards the Porsche.
It snuffled its way around the rear of the car, and then fatally, and I mean,
fatally
, pissed on one of the tyres. One of the Porsche boys â the fat one with pocked skin, gave it an ineffectual kick and it yelped before starting somewhat lazily, to bark.
I became aware that my stress levels were rising. My skin was prickling and my throat felt suddenly dry, and I wondered briefly if I was being paranoid, or if I was channeling some future catastrophe, or if Ricardo, so calmly looking out to sea, was, as often, radiating his own specifically Colombian understanding of the situation.
One of the guys shouted over and asked, “¿Es éste tu perro?” â
is it your dog?
and Ricardo glanced over and simply shook his head in reply. To me, as an aside, he murmured, “No contestes.” â
don't reply
. From the fact that he had chosen to speak in Spanish I knew I wasn't imagining
anything:
the only reason Ricardo ever used Spanish with me, was to avoid drawing attention to my status as a non-Colombian. I held my breath, and we both turned and looked back out to sea.
Nothing happened for a minute or so and despite the tension provoked by
not
-looking, I managed to start to breath again.
And then I heard the boot open and one of the guys laughed, and another cheered, and as cover, I
raised my glass for a sip and glanced over just in time to see the fat guy pull an AK47 from the boot of the car and raise it to his hip. I opened my mouth to warn Ricardo but he kicked me hard, so I turned back out to sea and remained, like he, stoic, merely imagining the dog's dancing body as the rounds of gunfire let rip and hoping that there, that day, the dog would be the only one to die.
In the year since we had been living here, there had been other events of course: the disappearance of the Swedish girl last summer, the stabbing at a party we attended, the minicab murders ⦠And even if Ricardo found reassurance variously in the fact that the Swedish girl had been found (with apparent amnesia) and the stab victim had survived (with a scar), and the minicab murders had all happened more than two-hundred kilometres away, for me these were all straws on a camel's back, drops of water in a proverbial French vase.
But the tipping point, the moment I specifically thought,
“No, I don't want to live here. I want to go home,”
was when they shot that dog. Because that's when I realised that these guys in suits in Porsche Cayennes have machine guns stored next to the wheel-jack. And that's when I saw that Ricardo sighed. As my own body jerked at each fired round, Ricardo
sighed
â he had become used to this. And I didn't
want
to get used to it.
I had assumed that the guys would now come to the bar, but once no more amusement was to be found in filling the dog with bullets, the gun was put back in the trunk, and the four guys simply climbed back into their 4x4 and accelerated off in a cloud of dust and fading salsa rhythms.
With a
whachagonnado
shrug and a raised eyebrow Max descended leisurely to the car park, and scooped the corpse of the dog into a bin-bag. When he had done this, his hands still bloodied, he leant against the fence and rolled himself a cigarette.