The One Safe Place (20 page)

He'd told Susanne he was going to price a collection of books. Deluding her made him feel untrustworthy, almost unworthy of her, more intensely when he recalled how little he'd done during the raid. He might as well not have been there, any more than he had been when Marshall had been bullied into the house. Maybe it was himself rather than the Fancy threat he'd had enough of, and maybe there'd be more to him once he had a gun.

He hadn't felt like much once he'd entered the bar. The bumbling of conversations had faded, hushed perhaps by the sight of a book, and several men whom he'd found himself unwilling to face had burst out laughing. He'd shoved the novel under his arm and smoothed the hair on top of his head while he bought a bottle of Grolsch, only to notice belatedly that everyone else was drinking draft beer. He didn't give a vermiform appendix what they did, he'd told himself, carrying the lager to an empty table past some snooker players who had seemed ready to trap him with their cues and earning himself a chorus of sniggers by drinking from the bottle and opening the book. He might have sat outside except for the rain pummelling the windows. He'd lowered book and bottle so as to stare at everybody who was watching him. He'd prayed that nobody would approach him unless they were here for him, because otherwise he had only the bottle with which to defend himself. No, he had language, but against how many? Nobody had made for him, however—one by one they'd lost interest in him—and so he'd tried to immerse himself in the book until he was approached, rather than speculate how much of the loud blur of talk around him was about him.

He had to look up whenever anyone entered the bar. Here came a small man dressed in leather trousers and peaked leather cap and jacket zipped up to his dripping chin, who had a word with various people as he strolled about the long low room, the walls and ceiling of which appeared to have absorbed much of the smoke from the cigarettes that smoldered in just about every fist, not to mention the butts which had been trodden out on the torn ashen carpet. Next in was a man as broad as the doorway, his muscles threatening to tear the short sleeves of the wool shirt which was decidedly the fashion in the pub and which made Don in his denim feel even more conspicuous. The man stared at him, aggravating Don's awareness of the three hundred pounds he'd distributed among his pockets, and Don caught himself hoping that if the newcomer was the professional wrestler his build suggested he was, he refrained from setting about people while he was away from the ring. A vicious tickle had lodged in Don's throat from all the smoke, and he sucked on the Grolsch to douse a cough. The bulging man turned and dumped his elbows on the bar, and Don was holding another mouthful of lager in his throat to drown even the possibility of a cough when a man with his head done up in yellow plastic backed into the pub.

He undid the hood, baring his cropped skull, and doffed the yellow cape like a superhero to reveal a scrawny torso bagged in yet another short-sleeved wool shirt, and Don was sure this man was his contact as soon as he hung the cape on a drooping rack beside the door and began to glance around the bar. His attention lingered on the book and Don before drifting onward, and Don felt as though the man was continuing to stare at him as he sidled toward him. Don's hand put the bottle down next to a circular pattern of cigarette burns on the small round table, whose surface had at some stage been repeatedly gouged with a knife, and crept from his left-hand hip pocket to his right and up to his breast pocket to reassure him that the wads of notes were there, describing a pattern which felt like an uncompleted religious symbol. He wondered suddenly if the police were aware of the kind of transaction the pub was used for, and at once was sure they must know—must keep watch on the place. Suppose the scrawny man was a plainclothes detective or an informer? What could Don be arrested for? Conspiracy to commit a crime, intent to buy an illegal weapon... Don felt his legs starting to cramp with his struggle not to dodge before the other reached him. Then the man halted between two snooker players and commenced muttering at them, and there came a smell of leather and almost a concert of creaking at Don's back, and a voice in his ear. "Enjoying that, are you?"

The small man had made his way unnoticed to the table behind Don and placed his cap upside down on it as though awaiting a donation. He must be referring to the Grolsch, Don thought, then decided he meant the book, and changed his mind again too late to hold onto his syntax. "What, the this?"

The man's protuberant glossy eyes didn't deign to glance at the bottle Don had hoisted, and Don had had enough of the self he was displaying. "The book," he said shortly. "Yes."

"Enjoying it."

Don had thought he'd answered that question, but the flatness of the man's tone seemed simply to absorb what he'd said. "Sure, in its own terms," he felt compelled to say in Teresa Handley's defence. "It isn't realistic, to put it mildly, but then there's no law that says novels have to be."

"You don't reckon."

"Maybe I don't know all your laws yet, but I'd lay money that isn't one."

The man's expression grew fixed and distant, which Don gathered was meant to indicate he'd given the wrong answer. "Realistic," he said with a laugh at himself. "You mean you think it is."

The man's eyes appeared to be in danger of glazing over. Did he think the laugh had been directed at him? "If you're saying it isn't, I'm agreeing with you," Don said desperately, reflecting that he'd braved the pub only to become involved in an argument—more a forced monologue—about conventions of storytelling. "My point is that it doesn't, well, it matters in some ways, I suppose more to people who feel they're being portrayed or rather not portrayed, but not in purely literary, if that's not stretching it, literary terms."

"Friend of yours, is she."

"Yes, up to a point, yes. More to the, more relevantly, she's a local celebrity just as much as, I don't know, your football team. Support your local writers, that's always my refrain."

"Sent you here."

Don had interposed so much between that and the man's previous comment that it took him some seconds to put them together. "Ah. Yes, she is. Did."

"Told you to bring something."

"Here it is," Don said, and slapped the face of the book. He'd decided at last that there could be no doubt why the man had approached him. "She didn't say hers, you understand, but it seemed like a good sign."

As he lowered his voice the players and the scrawny man moved away along the snooker table, and Don wondered whether everyone in the bar knew why he was there. "Good in the sense of, well, anyway," he said, progressively lower. "And you. I was told you would. Have something. For me."

Each of his pauses was meant to coax out an answer, and each of them emphasised even more of the absence of one as the man's dispirited gaze continued to rest on the book. At last he said, "Hollow, is it?"

"Hollow in the sense of..." For a moment Don thought they'd returned to literary analysis. "Oh, you mean as an object. You mean have I brought, yes, of course," he said, patting his three moneyed pockets to demonstrate.

"How much?"

"How much are we discussing?"

"Three hundred. Pounds, in case you're wondering. Take it or leave it. Just be quick."

"I haven't seen it yet."

"You don't expect me to start waving it around in here, do you, you silly bugger? Pay us under the table and it's yours."

Having provoked such a lengthy and expressive speech made Don feel as though he had gained an advantage. "What exactly am I paying for?"

"Automatic with a spare clip. Real little beauty. It'll fit in your fist like your dick."

"If it's that small," Don heard himself saying, and made himself go on, "surely you can give me a glimpse without anyone seeing."

"They see everything, chum, including some I don't want seeing. Give us the price and it's yours."

"Then what? You fetch it?"

"No need. I'll tell you where to go."

"In that case why don't we both go there and then I'll pay you."

Rain slashed at the windows, which were even greyer than the room, and he thought he heard the glass tremble in the frames. The man stared unblinkingly at him as though the protrusion of his eyes was making it impossible to close the lids. "Cough up and I'll show you where to go, or piss off out of it."

All at once Don felt that far more people, perhaps everyone in the bar, were watching him, but when he glanced away from the leathery man nobody appeared to be looking at him. He dug both hands into his hip pockets and brought the notes together, and passed the doubled wad under the table until it met a bunch of clammy fingers which closed on it like an octopus seizing its prey. "That's more than half," he murmured. "I'll give you the rest when we've gone an appreciable way farther."

The man stared as though he was inserting his gaze into Don's eyes so that they couldn't blink. They were beginning to smart by the time he flipped his cap up from the table and caught his head in it as he rose abruptly to his feet. Don followed, feeling as if everyone's awareness of him was a medium thick as deep water through which he was struggling to walk.

The man pulled the door open and dodged into the only corner of the sodden porch which the downpour was leaving untouched. Rain was pounding the parking lot; wherever it struck, a shard flew up like a fragment of the concrete. All the high-rise blocks which loured over the pub had been turned the color of the clogged sky. The man retreated into the shelter, though not far enough to make room for Don. "This is as far as I go, chum. I can see it from here."

Don's glasses were already growing blurred with rain. He unbuttoned his breast pocket and dug the notes out with his streaming fingers and squeezed the wad in his fist. "Where?"

"I won't take them off you if they're stuck together. You won't even be crossing the road, and I'm saying nowt else."

As Don reached out his fist with rain bouncing off the back, the man's fingers dug under it like some kind of secret handshake. They snatched the wad, and Don immediately felt tricked. He didn't quite believe he'd grabbed the man's wrist, but his fingers immediately began to ache with holding on, and he heard himself saying, "Where?"

"Coming the hard feller, are we?" The man's voice rose to a shout Don could feel on his face. Maybe the rain drowned the shout as it doused Don's scalp and his back, because nobody emerged from the pub to outnumber him. The man wrenched himself out of his grasp and said with what sounded like grudging respect, "Look under your car."

"Which one is that?"

"Don't you know, chum?"

Don was questioning how the man had been able to identify it, but his waterlogged lenses were indeed hampering his own efforts to do so. "The same one you got out of," the man said, and before Don could interrogate him further, shouldered him aside and took refuge in the Hangman.

Don was tempted to follow, if only for shelter, except that the rain was dashing the reality of the situation in his face. The mumble of the pub had acquired a mocking quality, but how could he charge in there unarmed to face however many would be ready for him? He ran almost blindly to the spreading red stain that was his car, the downpour drumming on his back. When he fell to his knees, or at least crouched as low as he could without actually kneeling on the swamped concrete, he felt as though the weight of rain was forcing him to abase himself and admit he'd been conned. The dry pale patch of concrete beneath the Volvo was emitting a reflected glow so faint he wasn't convinced he was seeing it until it showed him a package wrapped in black plastic and taped against the rear axle.

It looked like a bomb. Suppose the Fancy family had planted it? Before this irrationality could prevent him he took three squelching paces to the rear of the vehicle and leaning down as if to examine the tires, grasped the far end of the insulating tape and tore it away from the chassis. A heavier package than he was expecting dropped into his free hand, and he felt metal objects knocking together. Then he had both hands around them, and shoved the package down the front of his drenched jacket, and straightened up as if he had been performing a routine check, and fumbled out his keys with his slippery fingers, and made to let himself into the wrong side of the car. He splashed round to the driver's side and twisted the key in the lock and dumped himself on the seat, the crooks of his elbows and knees growing soaked at once, and slammed the door.

The windows had clouded over the moment he'd climbed in. He switched on the heater and the demister, then he picked the buttons of his jacket out of their saturated holes and gazed at the black package resting in his lap. He lifted it gingerly onto the passenger seat and peeled the tape away from the plastic, which tore as he unfolded it, turning it over and over like a spider with a fly. The wrapping revealed itself as a bin bag almost large enough to contain him. He opened its mouth wide to peer into the shiny blackness, and saw a grey angular handgun resting against a clip of bullets. The next moment lights blazed at him through the windshield.

He saw his hand reach for the gun, and felt as though a part of his mind he hadn't known existed was reacting. The lights went out as the car which had swerved into the parking lot drew up facing him, and each front door released a large blurred man, their broad flat heads butting the rain as they advanced toward both sides of Don's car. They cursed at the tops of their voices as they ran into the pub.

Don took hold of the weapon and the clip through the plastic, which he wrapped around and around them before shoving the package under the passenger seat, where it crackled to itself. As soon as a patch of windshield large enough for him to see through had been cleared of condensation he set the wipers to scything the rain off the glass and drove away from the Hangman.

"Mrs. Travis..."

"Something else I can help you with, Liu?"

"We just wanted to say..."

"Come back in and close the door, Rachel, if it's personal."

"We're speaking for everyone," the student said, but nevertheless closed the door of Susanne's office. "We just wanted to tell you we're sorry, and if we can help..."