The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (17 page)

Leaning forward with my elbows on fresh-wiped Formica and dropping my voice under the café’s buzz so that only he could hear me, I told Tony more than I had told anyone else, which wasn’t difficult. I didn’t tell him everything, of course, leaving out the pretty essential facts that I had hired Tommy, that I had been riding shotgun on the job the night he died, and that a spook with a lopsided face called Mr McNaught had orchestrated the whole thing and had since dropped off the planet.

But I did tell Tony that I was sure Tommy’s death was no accident. I told him about Tommy’s sister and what she had said about his wartime service and his post-war avoidance of his commando buddies; about the night I had been jumped in the street for no reason and had started to suspect it was because I had been mistaken for Tommy; I told him about the blue van following us on the bank run and that I’d swapped my car for the Wyvern because of the Ford Consul persistently in my rear-view mirror.

The good humour fell from his face and Tony listened solemnly as I spoke. We paused when Senga, the waitress, brought over our coffees, squinting against the smoke from the cigarette angled between her thin, bright crimsoned lips. Senga was stick-thin and aged somewhere between fifty and a thousand, with a wrinkled complexion a vampire would have described as ‘pasty’: a pallor accentuated by her artificially red hair. She obviously shopped for hair dye in the same place as ’Pherson the barber. As she placed my coffee on the table, I could have sworn she winked at me, but it was maybe just the smoke in her eyes.

‘Bad bizzinezz.’ Tony shook his head. ‘Quiet Tommy waz good boy. Good boy. Zo vaht you vant from me? I do anyzing to help.’

‘Listen, Tony, I know you keep your cards close to your chest and you’ve never talked about the jobs you did. But I’m lost here. I believe Quiet Tommy Quaid was killed on that rooftop and pushed off to make it look like an accident, but I’ve got nothing to back that up. I’ve been asked to make sure the right thing is done by him, but I’m struggling. You were the best peterman in Scotland and Tommy was one of the best planners and roofmen. I’m guessing that you probably worked together on more than one occasion. If there’s anything –
anything
– you can tell me that would help, then I’d owe you a huge favour. I’m also guessing that there’s a chance you were offered the same kind of deal as Tommy during the war and you can maybe give me something more to go on. And I know you know Jimmy Wilson, who I’ve heard worked with Tommy sometimes and I guess worked with you. Jimmy has disappeared off the face of the earth and I think it’s got something to do with Tommy’s death – or at least his disappearance coincided exactly with it. Anything you can tell me to point me in Jimmy’s direction would be a huge help.’ I stopped, leaving it all laid out on the table between us, waiting for Tony to respond. He sat quietly for a moment, his lips pursed while he thought through what I had said.

‘Okay – let’s take ze zing viz Jimmy virst. Ze problem iz zat you zay you’zz bein’ followed. You could lead whoever’z following you right to Jimmy.’

‘So you know where he is? And why he’s hiding?’

‘Naw – I didnae zay dat. But I could maybe tell you who does.’

I made an open-handed gesture. There were no guarantees I could make, but Tony knew me well enough, I hoped, to trust me to be as discreet as possible. He took a small notepad from his pocket and scribbled something into it, tearing out the page and handing it to me.

‘Zat Jimmy’s brudder. He runs garage in ze Gallowgate. Ozzer name iz Jimmy’s bezd pal. Bit of a pizz-hied, if you ken vaht I mean. But I don’t know how much zey be of uze to you. If Jimmy vahnt to ztay hidden, he ztay hidden.’

I thanked Tony, but made another gesture, inviting more. He sighed, then started to answer my questions. As he spoke, I noticed he toned down a little both the Glaswegian patois and the East European accent. It was still thick, but I started to suspect that Tony played a part – adopted a character. The strategy of the immigrant wanting to be liked, to find acceptance.

Tony explained that he had never been approached to do the same kind of war service. He had never been convicted of an offence, so there was no evidence of illicit skills. In any case, he’d already been in the Polish Free Army when he arrived in Scotland in August nineteen-forty, one of thirty thousand Poles who, after their own homeland had fallen, had come to Scotland to protect it with their lives from an expected German invasion launched from Norway. The relationship had been so close that many of the Polish Army units had adopted Scottish motifs into their insignia. After the war, many – like Tony – had stayed on in Scotland. Now, the Polish-Scot, like the Italian-Scot, was an accepted part of Scotland’s culture. It seemed that the Irish – their closest cousins – were the only immigrant group the native Scots struggled with.

‘But I did know of zuch units,’ Tony explained. ‘Laycock vent about recruiting zafecrackers and burglars vor his new commando zervice. I knew Tommy vaz in von, but you knew Tommy, he not talk much about zuch zings.’

And I had known Tommy. I guessed Tony was telling the truth and that Tommy had confided in him no more than he had in me.

‘But you did do jobs with him?’ I asked.

‘And you know zat
I
don’t talk about zuch zings.’

There was a silence and I let it ride.

Eventually Tony gave another sigh and said, ‘I’m no’ zaying vee did, I’m no’ zaying vee didnae. But Tommy vaz good, really good. Ze best at vaht he did. Naebody dezerved the name “cat burglar” like Tommy – zat vaz vaht he vaz like on a roof – like a cat. Zere’s no’ vugging way he vell ovv that foundry roof. Tommy vaz too careful.’

‘Did he ever talk about other people he was involved with? Or even his wartime buddies?’

‘Not him, no. But I know he do lot of vork for Hanzome Jonny Cohen. More than for ozzer Kings. I did hear zomezink else vonce,’ he said, ‘a rumour about Tommy . . .’

‘What kind of rumour?’

‘You know ze vay it goes viz crooks, Lennoggs – zay have zere own legends and myths. Zere vaz a rumour about Tommy: zat he had a pile of treasure zomewheres – zat venn he vaz commando hiz unit steal big pile of Nazi loot.’

I remembered what Jennifer had said about Tommy’s ‘special’ unit, and suddenly the memory came to mind of the small, wiry mourner with the rat-like movements at Tommy’s funeral.

‘Was the rumour that Tommy had this Nazi loot stashed?’

‘Zome zaid he had it buried zomewhere. But you know zeze zings – stories crooks tell each ozzer to pass time in prison. All just pile of shide.’

‘Thanks, Tony. Could you ask around? At least keep an ear to the ground and let me know if you hear anything about Tommy or of Jimmy Wilson’s whereabouts?’

He nodded. Then the seriousness left his face and he beamed a smile at me, held his arms out to indicate our surroundings.

‘Zo, Lennoggs – vaht do you zink of my new plaze?’ The accent and the volume were fully restored. It was a signal that our exchange of confidences was over.

‘It’s fine, Tony. It’s really fine.’

The Scottish summer frustrates larceny and generally any shenanigans that demand the cover of dark: the night comes late – in August, daylight lasts nearly seventeen hours – and when night does come its presence is half-hearted.

I was hoping for a blanket of cloud, but the still-bright afternoon sky remained clear of cover and I could see I was going to have to wait until near midnight before doing any serious skulking.

In the meantime, the imagined urgent weight of the two Yale keys in my pocket – one to Tommy’s apartment, the other to the lock-up – nagged at me. But I knew I had to be patient: if my tail was waiting to pick me up again, then it would either be at one of those locations or outside my office.

Even though I was driving the Wyvern, I kept checking my mirrors for the Ford Consul or any other persistent presence behind me. There was none that I could see, but I still kept my guard up.

*

Burdened as I was with the curse of the migrant or displaced person, there were the odd fleeting times where I lost my bearings. Sometimes the weather, the light, would play tricks on me, mixing moment and memory and taking me back to a different place, a different time, a different me.

Because of the length of summer days in Scotland, sunsets were often gradual, lengthy affairs. That evening, the gold-tinged sky was mimicking a different season and a different continent. I found myself remembering fall sunset evenings before the war, growing up on the shores of the Kennebecasis River.

Unlike here in Glasgow, where the distinction between the times of year was fudged, I’d grown up in a markedly four seasons climate: New Brunswick winters were long, lasting through March, and were perpetually snow-muffled, but punctuated with blue-sky days of snow-reflected brilliance; springs came late and were short, the ground burnt brown once the snow finally disappeared. For me, the only enduring memory of Canadian springs was the relief from snow and the taste of fiddleheads and maple syrup. The summers were intense: a heat stretching into September, far hotter than anything in Scotland. But above all it was the falls I missed: fall in New Brunswick was bright and mellow with the forests around Saint John exploding with colour. But it was nature aided by industry: the high-altitude drift of pollution from the Rust Belt – the US industrial heartland of Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana – was swept up by the jet stream and scattered across the New Brunswick sky, invisible except at sundown. The result was the most spectacular sunsets.

And sometimes, like now as I stood staring dumbly at the sky when the evening sun shone in the middle of a Glasgow summer, the light and the air reminded me of autumnal evenings back home and tended to provoke a dull melancholy in me. But this time, the vague homesickness and gloominess were tinged with something else.

Maybe it was thinking about the pre-war me that did it, the bright-eyed Kennebecasis Kid who was yet to be fucked up by a war on another continent. If I were honest, I had felt pretty sorry for myself during and after the war, blaming all my subsequent wrongs and woes on being dragged into a conflict where I would see all that was bad in men and all that was worse in me. Everything I had done wrong since, I blamed on the world, not me.

But the truth was that I’d had it pretty good before the war: I had been brought up in comparative wealth, in a big century home, and educated at the Collegiate in Rothesay, which was as upper as the crust came in Maritime Canada. I’d had a happy childhood and youth, had had a promising future. A lot of men had started with less than me, had gone through the same as I had, and had come back from it to fulfil the promise of their futures.

And whenever I thought about Quiet Tommy Quaid, my excuses to myself just didn’t fly. He had had a tough war too. But Tommy had had a tough peacetime before it; an unjust background of deprivation and want. He had forged his way in a world much more challenging than the one I had known.

The simple fact was that Tommy was a better man than me.

Only one of us beat men half to death when his anger was sparked; only one of us treated women as disposable assets. Sure, Tommy had been every bit the bedroom swordsman I was, but his attitude to women had been different. One evening out on the tiles, when we were perhaps only halfway into our cups, Tommy had explained his attitude to women. He liked them. Not just in the usual way – not just in the way I liked women, and I had done a lot of liking. I was yet to see his book collection, but there had been a hint of Tommy’s erudition that night. He had asked me if I knew the works of Stendhal, and told me that the French author was famed for both the extent of his womanizing and the strength and depth of the female characters in his writing.

‘Stendhal
liked
women,’ Tommy had explained. ‘They interested him, he valued them. He listened to them. In many ways he thought them superior to men. A true ladies’ man, in every sense. I sometimes think I’ve got a bit of that going. I enjoy being with women. Spending time with them.’

‘So you go out with women because of their minds?’ I had laughed, knowing Tommy’s reputation.

‘I go for the whole package. The works. Not always, of course, but life’s too short to spend with people who don’t interest you. And as for brains . . . I’m telling you, Lennox, there’s nothing sexier than an intelligent woman.’

Something fell into place.

The memory of that conversation with Tommy made me scrabble about in the glove box of the Wyvern, where I’d put his diary to stop its weight ruining the line of my jacket.

Having only given it a cursory glance while I had been waiting for Tony the Pole, I now took the time to go through the diary more thoroughly. There were a couple of names in the address section that I didn’t recognize, but most were female acquaintances of Tommy’s – including a barmaid I had acquaintanced myself on more than one occasion. I considered contacting her to see if it yielded anything useful about Tommy, but I guessed it wouldn’t, nor would most of the other women in the book. Gynophile or not, I didn’t see Tommy confiding anything of value to a barmaid or cinema usherette.

I found what I was looking for in the back of the diary: the address entry brought to mind by my memory of what Tommy had said that night. It was headed ‘Nancy’, without a surname, and was in the west end of town, near the university. This was the
N
Tommy had visited every week. I decided not to 'phone the number listed, but instead to call in person: it was always easier for someone to hang up on you than to close the door in your face.

I fired up the Wyvern and lumbered along Great Western Road, still checking my rear-view.

*

The address was that of a ground-floor flat, midway along a four-storey-plus-basements blond sandstone terrace in Cecil Street. There was only a handful of cars parked along its length and I guessed most of the occupants were either staff or students who mostly walked or cycled between home and the nearby university.

I recognized her as soon as she opened the door. She was the woman of tearless grief I’d seen at Tommy’s graveside. In her early forties and tired, her eyes were shadowed and her face pale. It was difficult to tell if she was simply weary from the labours of the day or from the travails of life in general, but I guessed that the sudden absence from her life of a quiet, handsome man had something to do with it.