Written in Dead Wax (20 page)

“What kind of kit?”

“He didn’t see. He didn’t have time. He didn’t want to attract attention.”

“What sort of a shop was it?” said Nevada.

“Shop?” said Clean Head.

“You said they’d parked outside a shop. Did your friend say what kind of shop it was?”

“Health food.”

“It figures,” said Nevada.

“It’s the Aryan fitness programme,” I said, and she giggled.

* * *

We got home and unloaded the bags from the Spook Store, where Nevada had spent many more thousands of pounds. Mr Five O’Clock Shadow Maori Tattoo had been very pleased. I said, “Do we really need all this stuff?”

Nevada shook her head. “We can’t cut corners. We don’t want to end up behind bars.”

“Good point.”

She put the bags on the table in the living room and the cats jumped up and prowled around them in fascination. “Here you go,” said Nevada and handed me a particularly heavy bag. It turned out that it contained all the manuals, a little library unto itself.

“These are for me to read?”

“Yes, and you better make a start.” She checked her watch. “We want to arrive late enough so there’s not too much activity in the neighbourhood, but not so late as to be conspicuous.”

“Tonight?” I said.

She looked at me. “Of course tonight. We have to get in there before the Aryan Twins think of it.”

I weighed the bag of manuals. “You have great faith in my abilities.”

She kissed me. “You built those amplifiers, didn’t you?” She nodded at the monoblocks, crouching on either side of my record player. “Your old thermionic valve amplifiers.” She had me there. “You’re my electronics wizard,” she said.

I dropped the bag onto the sofa. It made enough noise to cause the cats to jump. “And it looks like I’ve got a lot of fucking new spells to learn.”

“Look on the positive side,” she said. “You’ll acquire a new skill set.”

“Breaking and entering.”

She smiled at me. “You never know when it will come in handy.”

“I think we should go in through the garage.”

“At the house in Richmond?”

“Yes.”

“Go in through the garage? Why?”

“Because it will be easier to break into. And once we’re in the garage we’ll be out of sight and we can then disable the house security system at our leisure.”

“Well, I wouldn’t use the word ‘leisure’,” said Nevada, “but I know what you mean.” She thought for a moment, then said, “How do you know the security on the garage won’t be even more formidable than it is for the house?”

“Why would it be?”

“Maybe he was a vintage car nut and has valuable antique automobiles parked in there.”

“He wasn’t a vintage car nut,” I said. “He was a vintage vinyl nut.”

“Well, maybe you should ask your friend,” she said.

“My friend?”

“The girl who gets cement out of the gutters. The simple barefoot roof worker.”

“Yes,” I said. “And while I’m at it I might as well ask about the alarm system for the house. That wouldn’t be at all suspicious.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Nevada. “We’ll go in through the garage.”

* * *

By late afternoon I had as deep an understanding of the manuals as I was going to get with my current brain. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” said Nevada.

“We need to go out to the shops.”

She studied me. “I thought we agreed we’d keep a low profile until it was time to head into Richmond tonight for the job.”

“I love the way you call it a job,” I said.

“I’ve even got us some black ski masks,” she said.

“We still need to go to the shops.”

She was sitting at the table examining all the kit she’d bought, which was spread out in front of her. Now she looked up at me sceptically. “What could we possibly still need? I bought up half the shop. Everything required for detecting, accessing and neutralising alarms.” I could discern the echo of old Five O’Clock Shadow’s sales pitch.

“That’s right,” I said. “You have. And what’s more, once we drill into the system, I actually now believe we have a pretty good chance of deactivating whatever kind of alarm they have.”

She looked up at me blankly. “So what do we need?”

“We need the drill. For drilling in.”

“Oh shit. That’s right. The bloke said we could buy one at any hardware store.”

“And we can. But we need to get moving before our friendly neighbourhood hardware stores start to close.”

“I’m right with you,” said Nevada.

The cats came out to see us off, following through the estate for a while then fading into the shadows as we walked towards the main road. Here we turned left and headed for the local high street. It was only a short walk away but I had my travel card and Nevada had the financial might of some enigmatic industrial titan behind her, so we caught the bus.

We got off by a little DIY store I knew. There I went through the various drills available and chose a heavy-duty one with several rechargeable battery packs. It made me think of the woman up the ladder. I wondered if she would guess who it was when she found out about the break-in. Perhaps, if we were sufficiently careful, she’d never find out about it.

I stopped beside Nevada, who was looking up and down the high street. “Do you want to go home yet?”

“Not particularly. I’ve prepared as much as I can and I’ll just start climbing the walls with tension as zero hour approaches.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said.

“Thanks.” She touched my arm.

“Let’s get a coffee.”

“Do you know somewhere? What am I talking about? Of course you do, this is your neighbourhood.”

In fact, there was a little coffee shop I liked near the railway crossing at Mortlake Station. On the way there were four charity shops and, out of sheer force of habit, I hit them all.

Out of sheer force of habit, Nevada went through the clothes racks.

In the third shop we went to, in the first box I looked through, I found it.

Easy Come, Easy Go
.

I lifted it up and as soon as I did so, I knew it was the real thing. It had a heavy old-fashioned sleeve, slightly yellowed with age. I flipped it over and checked the fine print on the back to make sure it wasn’t a Japanese reissue, but I knew it wasn’t. Nevada was looking at me now. She was standing beside a spinner of tank tops, her hand arrested in the act of reaching for a clothes hanger from which dangled a shapeless golden garment.

I stood up, as though moving in slow motion. I thought my hands would shake as I slipped the record out of the sleeve. But I was perfectly steady. Nevada was standing beside me now. The inner sleeve was of heavy polythene, the kind they used in the 1950s. You could see the record label through it.

It was the wrong label. Instead of being a Hathor LP from the fifties it was an Arista LP from the eighties. Nevada was looking at my face. She could see something was wrong. “Is it a reissue?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the wrong record.” I read the label. Instead of
Easy Come, Easy Go
by Easy Geary it was something called
2:00 AM Paradise Café
by Barry Manilow. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I went to the counter and paid, on autopilot. I walked out the door, holding it open for Nevada. She was staring at me worriedly, as well she might.

“For a moment I thought we’d found it,” she said. I said nothing. “So I suppose we just have to continue with our plan for tonight.”

“No,” I said. My voice sounded dry and strange.

“No?”

“It’s all over,” I said.

* * *

We didn’t say a word on the bus. Nevada didn’t take my hand as we walked from the bus stop to the house. She seemed almost frightened of me, or perhaps of the total defeat that had settled over me. Finally, as we opened the front door, and the cats came rushing to join us, she said, “I don’t understand.”

I held up my purchase from the charity shop. “It’s the right sleeve,” I said.

“So what?”

“With the wrong record in it.”

Nevada sat down on the sofa and Turk promptly jumped up to join her. “I understand that.”

I sighed and sank down beside her. “No, you don’t understand.”

She twisted around to look at me. “Then explain to me.”

I held up the album. “This is it. This is the record we’re looking for. Or at least the cover. It’s authentic. It’s American. It’s from the fifties. There’s no question that it’s the cover of the record we want. But the record is gone. Somebody swapped it.” I looked at the Manilow album. “And I don’t think it was Tomas Helmer. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who’d misfile an LP.”

Nevada was staring at me with concern. “So…”

“So record and sleeve were united when they were in his collection. But at some point since then they’ve been separated.” I looked at her. “Without the record the sleeve is no good to us. And the record could be anywhere, literally anywhere. At least when it had the cover on it, it was easy to spot. But now our problem has been increased by an order of magnitude. The record could be anywhere. In any sleeve. Or in none. If it was in the wrong cover, it could have been one of the thousands of records we’ve already looked through and discarded.” I couldn’t look her in the eye anymore. I couldn’t see the disappointment and defeat come swimming up into her gaze.

I looked down at the coffee table and for some reason a pile of CDs caught my attention. They were the CDs Stinky had been playing that day when he let himself in and waited for us to come back from the record fair. Fucking Stinky, I thought…

I shot to my feet.

The two cats and Nevada all flinched at the suddenness of my movement. But I was already running for the door. Behind me I could hear her calling, “Where are you going?” but I couldn’t stop. I headed out onto the main road and then to the bus stop. There was no bus in sight, and anyway the road was solid with rush-hour traffic. I checked the time, cursed and starting running.

I reached the charity shop in ten minutes of alternately walking and running. It was twenty-five past five and the sign on the door said they were open until five thirty, but the lights were already off inside, except for one shining dimly through a doorway at the very back of the shop. I knocked on the door. I knocked long and loud and with what I hoped was restrained politeness and finally the guy who ran the shop appeared. He was plump with thick spectacles and wiry hair. He wore a loose purple jumper and jeans over a bulging paunch.

He wiped his hands in the air and mouthed, “We’re closed.” I stared at him helplessly. I could see by his face that there was nothing I could do. Here was a man who was through for the day.

I heard footsteps beside me. I turned to see Nevada standing there.

She had pressed her hands together in a gesture of prayer and was gazing soulfully at the guy in the purple sweater. She fluttered her eyelashes. He stared at her for a moment, with a fixed, surly expression. Then the expression, and everything else about him, sort of melted. He sighed and shrugged and I knew we had him.

He unlocked the door and opened it for us with a jingling of keys. Then he went to the wall switch behind the till and flicked the lights on. He looked at me.

“She’s like that bloody cat in
Shrek
,” he said.

I was at the records in about half a second while Nevada waited, apparently keeping the proprietor sweet behind my back. They were talking, but I was concentrating so hard I couldn’t make out their words.

There were three boxes of records. Four including the one where I’d found the cover. I’d already looked through that one thoroughly—but not knowing what I knew now.

I started with the first box again, going through every record.

I was halfway through the third box and starting to get seriously worried when I found it:
2:00 AM Paradise Café
by Barry Manilow. As soon as I picked it up, I knew I was on to something. It was way too heavy. I slipped the record out. It was in a white paper inner sleeve with a hole in the middle. Through the hole I could see the red and white Hathor label.

Easy Come, Easy Go.

I slid it out of the sleeve and flipped it over. There they were, the autographs of Easy Geary and Rita Mae Pollini in the dead wax, slightly contorted to fit the curvature of the record. Nevada was looking at me and smiling quietly. She knew.

I paid the guy. Now my hands
were
trembling. He glanced at the record as he put it into a bag for me. “I have a lot of respect for Barry Manilow,” he said.

I walked out the door with Nevada at my side.

We had it. In our hands.

Back at my house we reunited the record with its cover and then we put it triumphantly on display on top of my wardrobe in the bedroom. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but it was a big turn-on, seeing it there. The visible essence of our victory. We spent most of that night alternately making love and lying exhausted together on the bed staring up at the LP.

We only took it down in the early dawn when it looked like the cats might knock it over.

We woke up late, ferociously hungry, and while Nevada was taking one of her marathon baths—which were sheer pleasure for the cats—I cooked breakfast. Cheese omelette. I was still working my way through the Cornish cheddar.

Nevada came out of the bathroom drying her hair. She hung the towel on the back of the orange plastic chair. I remembered when she’d sat in that same chair on her first visit. She smiled and came over and hugged me, arms encircling me from behind as I worked at the stove top. She smelled good.

“Let’s play it,” she said.

“What?”

“The record.
Easy Come, Easy Go
.”

“We can’t,” I said. “It’s unplayable.”

I added the grated cheese to the omelette. There was a lengthening silence as Nevada gradually came to realise I wasn’t joking. Then her arms loosened around me. She went over and stood with her back to the sink, so she could see my face.

“Unplayable?” she said. Authentic alarm had flared in her eyes. “That can’t be right. That’s no good. My boss isn’t going to accept that.”

She seemed genuinely worried, so I immediately turned down the heat under the omelette then took her by the hand and led her into the living room. Here I opened the curtains and fetched the record and put it on the turntable. In the daylight she could see that the playing surface was thick with dust and also tiny white star-shaped patches here and there of what looked like some kind of tenacious mould.