The Bad Fire (25 page)

Back into the hall.

‘Hello? TV man, where are you?'

The flat was silent.

Larry opened the front door and went out to the landing and stood looking down the flight of stairs that led to the street. Maybe the telly man was having trouble getting the box out of his van. Could be. Needs a hand. Larry descended a little shakily. He clutched the banister rail. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped and peered at the front door, a rectangle of dimming light. He stood motionless for a time.

Who was he fooling? He couldn't help the fellah lift the TV box if it was heavy. He wasn't young any more. He didn't have –

Then blank. He couldn't remember why he'd left the flat.

Bloody hell.

You get old. The brain. You don't. Things slip. Tilt. You used to play bingo every Wednesday night. You remember when the lamps in the street were lit by gas flame and coal was delivered in a horse-drawn cart and you needed a ration book for sugar and that time the Queen visited Glasgow after her Coronation and the population lined the streets and waved their little flags, that was when people had respect for royalty –

He was outside now and the royal-blue sky was very very high and he felt a wee bit dizzy between the tall red tenements and sun glancing off windows and he thought, if I sit down on a wall I'll be fine, and his heart was awful fast and when he reached for a wall he found it wasn't solid, it was shrubbery, and it parted under the weight of his hand and he fell through it and landed arse over elbow in somebody's garden where there was crusty dogshite and some old fast-food boxes containing onion rings from a prehistoric age and a burger covered with blue fuzz oh Christ and I can't get up.

‘Billy,' he said quietly. ‘Come and help me. Help your dad.'

His mouth was dry as cinders. He felt weak.

I am lying here because because …

He rolled on to his back and looked up. The sky had an inky quality. His left foot had become twisted in a tangle of shrubbery and the slipper was gone.

O Billy, help me.

Or that nurse Thelma, where was she, where was she?

Then somebody was speaking to him. ‘Let me give you a hand up, mister.'

Larry had big spots in front of his eyes, like raindrops. The face that loomed down was young and friendly. Sideburns and short hair a funny orange colour and an unlit cigarette end between the lips.

‘Come on, let me get you up. I'll just grab you under the shoulders and you hang on to me, right?'

‘Aye, right,' Larry said.

‘I saw you come out of the close,' the young man said. ‘I'll take you back inside.'

‘Aye,' Larry said. ‘I need my bed.'

‘Where did you think you were going dressed only in your pyjamas, for God's sake?'

‘I was …' Larry's head emptied like a cistern flushed.

‘Never mind. Just hang on.'

Larry leaned against the young man. They went inside the tenement, then up the stairs. Ascending, Larry had a sense of having discarded his body.

Inside the flat the young man said, ‘You live here on your own?'

‘My son sometimes,' Larry said.

‘Where is your son?'

Larry sat on the sofa and shook his head.

‘You don't know where he is, eh?'

Larry said, ‘He moves here and there. I need my nurse. That's who I need.'

‘I'll give her a bell. What's her number?'

‘In the kitchen by the phone, Thelma's her name.'

‘Leave it to me,' the young man said.

Larry said, ‘What's your name, sonny?'

‘Giovanni. Gio.'

‘That's a foreign name.'

‘I was born right here in Glasgow. Nitshill to be exact.'

‘I'm McQueen,' Larry said.

‘Aye, I know, I saw the nameplate on the door.'

Larry listened to the young man go inside the kitchen, then the low rumble of his voice. Giovanni returned. ‘Stale in here,' he said, and blew his nose into a big handkerchief. ‘Your nurse is on her way.'

‘You're a right Samaritan, lad,' Larry said.

‘She also said she'd contact your son.' The young man looked round the room. ‘I'll be off then.'

‘Can you not stay?'

The living room was already empty. Open-mouthed, Larry wondered about dreams and that fuzzy borderline where what was real and what was not just melted into one incomprehensible experience. He wiped drool from the corner of his mouth.

32

The driver sat on the kerb and rubbed his elbow and made a moaning sound.

‘How long have you been tracking me?' Eddie asked.

‘Tracking you? What do I look like? A bloodhound? This is an outrage –'

Eddie said, ‘First thing this morning I had the feeling somebody was scoping me out. I'm betting it was you. You were driving along Duke Street early this morning. I heard your car. That same goddam sound.'

‘My blazer's filthy,' the man said. His car was still idling, still ticking.

‘Nice jacket, too bad,' Eddie said. ‘Who's paying you?'

The man rubbed dust streaks from his sleeve. ‘
Paying
me? Ah, yes, to keep you under observation, of course. I'm being reimbursed for that, I suppose.'

Why didn't the guy get up and launch a few punches? He was at least ten years younger than Eddie, and he looked fit and strong enough to retaliate instead of just sitting limply near his car and fingering his funny bone or dusting his blazer. Was he a coward? Gutless? It's not that, Eddie thought. The guy looked stressed; his indignation was only a front.

Eddie said, ‘Unless I'm way off target, you've spent most of the goddam day hound-dogging me, and nobody works for nothing. So who's your paymaster? Simple question.'

‘There's no such beast as the simple question.'

‘It's been a long day. Talk straight.'

The guy stretched his arm out slowly, as if checking the integrity of his elbow joint. He held the arm level for twenty seconds, then lowered it. Eddie gazed at him impatiently.
Fuck this
. His mood had darkened. Reaching down, he gripped the lapels of the blazer and dragged the man to his feet and pushed him back against iron railings that surrounded a scrag of garden at the front of a tenement.

‘Talk to me,' he said.

‘I'm not tracking you. You're out of your skull –'

‘Who's paying you?'

‘I'm tired and my temper's frayed, friend –'

‘My temper's not altogether unruffled either,
friend.
'

The man pulled himself free of Eddie's hold and took a step towards his car. ‘If your fit of madness has passed, do you mind if I get in my car and bugger off?'

Eddie saw the man move purposefully to his vehicle, and he went after him at once, caught him by the shoulder, spun him round. Face to face. He smelled something sweet on the guy's breath.

‘Show me some identification,' Eddie said. ‘I want to know who the fuck you are –'

‘I'm a motorist assailed by a deranged pedestrian,' the guy said.

Eddie shoved him against the body of the car. ‘Your name, fucker. Your name, your
name.
' And he thrust his hand inside the guy's blazer and hauled out a slimline, wallet of soft kidskin. The guy panicked and made a frantic effort to grab it back, but Eddie turned to one side and flipped the wallet open just as the man threw a punch that was partly blocked by Eddie's shoulder, but forceful just the same, sending a stab of serious pain like a corkscrew into the side of his neck. Bullseye. Starry nights and bright sunsets. Tenement buildings collapsing. The scream of motorways. Disoriented, he had an image of gridlocked traffic in the Holland Tunnel.

He went down on one knee, still holding the wallet, and he thought: I'm fucked. The guy made another swift lunge and Eddie held the wallet against his chest, covering it as if this were a game of football and he was shielding the ball. The guy launched a kick that hurt Eddie just under the ribs, but he didn't fumble the wallet in spite of the pain. Dear Christ, there had to have been a smarter way to control this from the first exchange, Eddie thought. I'm hurt and I'm really goddam
losing
it, down on one knee in a darkening Glasgow street, clutching the wallet of a man you've never seen before, one you think has been following you all day – is this squalid escapade why you came three thousand lousy miles through space and time in a
motherfucking aircraft?
Where's the dignity in this?

He made it on all fours to the railings, grasped one, hauled himself up. The guy grunted and stuck his knee sharply into the base of Eddie's spine and all air was expelled, and Eddie had the sense that his lungs were about as useful in the oxygen-processing function as two sun-dried apricots. He gasped and coughed and felt his stomach rise into his throat. But he still had the wallet, oh yeah,
the wallet is mine
. He collected his strength and, in the manner of an out-of-condition prizefighter, swung his arm round in a direct line, hard and fast, fist a ball of lead, and he made contact with the guy's face, and the guy went down like an empty set of clothes in a conjuror's illusion.

Eddie turned, leaning against the railings, and looked down at the man motionless on the pavement. He heard the rattle of his own hurried breathing. You used to be in great shape. American life has wasted all the muscle in you, endless bad coffee in waxy cardboard cups, donuts in sickly sugar-pink all-night joints, burgers dying in grease and hot dogs simmering in water that might have come unfiltered out of the Hudson, white bread and ketchup, the Beginner's Basic Cardiac Arrest Kit. Claire kept telling him,
Wholemeal bread only, Eddie. Nothing fried. Fresh fruit. Chew on a raw carrot if you have the munchies
.

Carrots were terrific if you were Bugs Bunny, he told her.

He opened the wallet with a hand that shook from exertion. He saw the ID.
Detective-Sergeant McWhinnie, Charles. Strathclyde Police
.

He stared at it.

A cop.

He raised McWhinnie to a sitting position and propped him against the side of the car, which was still pumping out exhaust fumes, and ticking. Eddie reached into the car and switched off the engine and then went down on his knees beside the glazed McWhinnie. You never forget a name. The guy who'd driven Joyce home from the identification of Jackie's corpse had been called Charles McWhinnie. This had to be the same one. He was young and good-looking enough to cause Joyce a flutter.

‘I think my jaw's broken,' McWhinnie said in the thickened voice of a novocained man.

‘Let me get you inside the car.'

‘Why? I'm comfortable here,' McWhinnie said.

Eddie said, ‘We've attracted some attention. Just get in the car.'

A few faces in ground-floor windows. Lovers of street violence. Not so gory as telly, but more authentic. A pot-bellied man in a white undershirt stood at the mouth of a close. ‘Feeble,' he said, and he slow handclapped. ‘If you have to resort to fisticuffs, you might at least put on a proper show.'

Eddie said, ‘Quit whining. It was free.'

‘Free or not isn't the bloody point. That encounter was pure crap. You both need some time in the gym.'

‘Fuck off, fatso.' Eddie raised McWhinnie and manoeuvred him into the passenger seat.

The man in the white T-shirt shouted, ‘Pair of diddies. Big girl's blouses.' He turned and vanished inside the close.

Eddie got behind the wheel and slammed the door and drove away. His ribcage throbbed. His neck was filled with forks of pain.

‘We drive on the left in this country,' McWhinnie said. He rubbed the side of his face where Eddie had connected. ‘By morning I'll look like the bloody Hindenburg. After the crash.'

‘I'm not going to be bruise-free myself,' Eddie said. He aimed the car directly ahead, then somehow found himself on a motorway where the traffic that whizzed past him was disconcerting. He took an exit and steered carefully into the car park of the Hilton. He killed the engine and sighed and tried to ignore his aches and pains.

‘It's a crime to assault a police officer,' McWhinnie said.

‘So you'll report me.'

McWhinnie shrugged. He held one hand, palm flattened, to the side of his face. ‘I don't know how much I feel like a police officer.' The tone in McWhinnie's voice was that of a man to whom promises made had been violated. Oaths had been empty words. He squeezed out a kind of smile. His face was already beginning to swell.

Eddie said, ‘Talk to me some more.'

McWhinnie looked in the direction of the hotel. Taxis came and went. Porters hauled baggage. Beyond the glare of the hotel darkness was total. The sun was done with the day.

‘I don't have to tell you a damn thing. I have no obligations to you. In fact, I should be cuffing you and asking you to accompany me to the station.'

‘What's stopping you?' Eddie asked.

‘Ha bloody ha, I don't have the strength for it,' he said. ‘Damn, this fucking
jaw!
Christ, did you have a lead pipe hidden in your fist?'

‘Pure bone,' Eddie said. ‘You were saying?'

‘Do you want to hear about the cop movie I saw at a Saturday afternoon matinée and it made me think I'd like to be a detective when I grew up?'

‘You don't have to go that far back, Charlie,' Eddie said.

‘You Americans always want to cut to the chase.'

You Americans, Eddie thought. He wanted to correct McWhinnie,
this is the city of my birth, my country
, but why bother? ‘Hurry's our style. Rush rush. Go go.'

‘You were right about one thing. I've been following you.' He touched his jaw again. Blood leaked from between his lips. ‘You've dislodged one of my back teeth. Do I look like a balloon yet?'

‘You're heading that way. Who gave the command?'

‘Ah, the command. Follow the American.'