When I got to Zroszak’s flat I buzzed his intercom but no one answered, so I waited in the cold until a girl in a grey dress came out and I grabbed the outer door as it swung shut behind her. She wrinkled her nose as she went past. Upstairs, the door of 3B was slightly ajar. The lock was broken. I knocked, but again there was no answer, so I said ‘Mr Zroszak?’ and pushed the door open.
Inside the small, sparse flat I saw Zroszak kneeling behind a desk as if he were praying, with his head slumped forward so that his face was hidden. There was dried blood on the edge of the desk and a dark stain where it had dripped on to the carpet. As I moved closer I could see the greenish black veins bulging on his forehead, and smell the rot already coming on like an old dull blade being slowly sharpened. All this was quite familiar from the many television dramas I watch about glamorous forensic investigators – the ones which almost make one want to be murdered just to have such a sexy woman hold your lungs in her soft hands, the ones where they primp the crime scene like an ageing film actress, with powders and tweezers and respectful murmurs – but I wasn’t a detective and I just wanted to turn around and run away.
Shaking, I dialled Grublock.
‘Fishy.’
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
‘Oh, fucking hell. How?’
‘Shot, I think. With a gun.’
‘Fucking hell. Bloody Japanese, I bet. One of those awful little consortiums. They get up to vulgar nonsense like this all the time. Well, thank you, Fishy. Go home. I’ll send someone over who knows what they’re doing.’
I hung up. Looking around, I realised that the place had been ransacked. The drawers of Zroszak’s filing cabinet were open but empty, and there were no books on any of the shelves. On the desk, next to the murdered man’s head, were a sketchpad, a pencil, a rubber and a book called
How to Draw Dogs and Cats
. Apart from that, if there had ever been even the slightest trace of Zroszak’s personality in his comfortless flat, it was missing now, like the moral of a story forgetfully told.
If I could find out anything important, I thought, Grublock would probably buy me a Panzer tank for Christmas. But even if Zroszak’s killer or killers had missed anything, there was no way I could search for clues with Zroszak’s body there. Just the thought had me running to the tiny kitchen for an ice cube to suck on – my late mother’s trusted remedy for anxiety.
The light in Zroszak’s freezer was broken, and the ice tray was stuck to the bottom surface. I pulled on it hard, and it came away with a little cough of frost. As it did so, something dropped to the tiled floor.
I bent down and picked it up. It was a sealed foil packet, like an astronaut might have for his tomato soup. I cut it open with my Swiss Army knife. Inside was a yellowed sheet of paper, folded in quarters. I smoothed it out on the kitchen table and glanced over the typewritten text. The letter was headed with the address of the Führerbau on Arcisstrasse in Munich, dated 4 October, 1936, and directed to somebody called Philip Erskine at a street in Clerkenwell. When I saw the signature of the sender, I scrabbled desperately for an ice cube.
Dear Doctor Erskine
,
I have received gifts from popes, tycoons, and heads of state, but none have ever been so singular or unexpected as your kind tribute. It is a reminder that the conquests of the scientist are every bit as important to our future as the conquests of the soldier. I hope you will keep me informed of the progress of your work – perhaps one day the Third Reich will have a position for you. How is your German?
Fond regards
,
Adolf Hitler
Reichschancellor
I spent the next half hour searching every inch of Zroszak’s flat. His body didn’t matter any more. But I found nothing.
Pock wasn’t just losing to Sinner – he was being skinned, diced, erased. It seemed to Pock that this hairless runt could see inside him – could see Pock’s memory of his first kiss, or his trick of wiggling his ears in time to a song, or his hatred of cats – could see it, take careful aim, and knock it out of his head like a loose tooth. Soon there would be nothing left of Pock but meat. Never had he felt punches so precise and impatient and cruel. And the other boy was impossibly clean – not a speck of blood on him – and although his bony chest did shine with sweat under the lights, it was a thin, efficient, cooling sweat, not the sour chicken soup that gushed into Pock’s eyes and dripped from his chin and gathered in his shorts to make his cock feel heavier than his fists.
Premierland had once been a warehouse for Fairclough’s, the butcher’s, and if Pock felt like meat then so did many of the thousand people watching him, who were not just packed in together like meat but smoked like meat too, squinting through a blue cigarette fog so dense you could hardly see the steel girders that held up the roof. And if this tiny demon Yid hadn’t decided to give the sell-out crowd a show then Pock wouldn’t have lasted a round, he knew that. But Pock had never, ever been knocked out in the ring, and it wasn’t going to happen tonight, with his husky-squeaky Myrna down there watching – he could never fuck her again if she saw him helpless on his back, fucked. So when the bell rang and Pock staggered back to his corner he didn’t listen to his trainer’s yammering, didn’t take a gulp of water, didn’t even knock his left fist on his right boot like he usually did for
luck, he just swore under his breath and stared across the ring at Sinner, who stared back from his stool, expressionless, one arm draped over the ropes, as Max Frink, Sinner’s trainer and manager, splashed him with ice water. Then the bell rang again, and Sinner spat twice and jumped up and skipped forward, already moving (as the young reporter from
Boxing
would put it) ‘like a dozen kind admirers were trying to present him with a garland of poison ivy’. Pock was trudging along with his heels down on the canvas, while Sinner was still bouncing up almost on his toes. They circled each other, and Pock made a few tired jabs that he knew Sinner would dodge, then got a hard right hook to his kidneys in return – he’d dribble blood in his sleep tonight, wake up with stained underwear like a girl – feinted, blocked, feinted, and finally reached way down to thump Sinner in the balls.
(This, anyway, is how I’m almost sure it must have happened.)
Even Frink, veteran of a hundred Spitalfields street brawls, winced and clenched his teeth then, but Sinner, who’d actually taken the punch, merely grunted. Rage did come to his eyes, but that was nothing to do with pain: Sinner and pain were long estranged. Instead, Frink thought to himself, it was Sinner’s realisation that he might be about to be cheated out of his knock-out. As the crowd jeered, delighted with this bit of slapstick, Frink looked down at the referee (who in those days stood outside the ring, surrounded by a mob of gamblers determined to make his decisions for him), hoping Mottle would have that brittle squint of a referee who knows he’s missed something important but is too stubborn to admit his error – two times out of three you could stick a thumb in the other man’s eye and not get caught – but to Frink’s dismay Mottle was barking, ‘Foul! Foul!’
‘Nah, piss off,’ said Sinner. ‘That weren’t a foul. It didn’t hurt. Fight’s still on.’
‘Below the belt,’ insisted Mottle. There was already a
scuffle starting among the gamblers behind him. Pock flung his hands in the air and shook his head as if to protest his innocence.
‘It didn’t even hurt,’ said Sinner, glaring down at Mottle. ‘Prick couldn’t hurt me. Put a cobblestone in his glove and he couldn’t hurt me.’
‘We won’t have any cheating here.’ Mottle looked over to the judges’ table for confirmation.
‘I want to fucking fight. They all want me to fight.’ Sinner turned to shout at his trainer. ‘Frink, tell him! This is a piss-take!’
‘You’ve won, son. Rules is rules.’
‘Bollocks to this.’
Mottle nodded to the announcer. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Seth “Sinner” Roach!’ There was a sarcastic, resentful cheer from a few of the crowd, and then they went back to hooting and booing, even louder now, no longer in mockery but in anger. They’d been cheated, just like Sinner, and before long an itchy discordant drone would start to rise up to the ceiling of Premierland, a threat you didn’t hear with your ears but with your stomach and fists. Tonight there would be knives out all the way down Commercial Road, Pock thought, not just the gamblers but everyone who’d lost out on what they’d paid for. It didn’t matter how good the first three fights were if someone spoiled the fourth – even worse than when you let a girl change her mind before you finished with her. He began to wonder if he’d made a mistake, but then he spotted Myrna in the third row, putting on lipstick with a compact mirror. He’d tell her that he’d been winning, that he’d been unlucky. Barnaby Pock, still technically unbeaten after nineteen matches, he thought. His head hurt.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ said Frink, hurrying over to where Mottle stood, pulling along with him a gangly fellow with a moustache who tonight was Premierland’s house physician (a modest improvement over the days when the best you could
hope for was a sticking plaster in the pocket of the referee). ‘Let the doctor look at him. If the doctor says he’s all right, then you have to let him fight.’
‘I do not,’ said Mottle.
‘He wants to fight.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t possibly conduct a proper examination out here,’ said the doctor.
‘Have a feel!’ shouted one of the gamblers.
‘Are you wearing any sort of protective apparatus, Mr Roach?’ said the doctor.
‘He wears a strap,’ said Frink.
‘Only a strap! Perhaps you or your trainer are acquainted with my own line of Fistic Armatures? No? Because I assure you, gentlemen, if all pugilists were to be supplied with this inexpensive invention, there would be no question of halting a match simply because a blow had gone astray. They are impregnable.’
‘Just have a look at the boy,’ said Frink.
‘It won’t make any difference, Mel,’ said Mottle.
‘Quite comfortable, too,’ said the doctor. ‘Mr Roach, I dare say you would take a – my goodness – well, I dare say a size ten. And you, Mr Pock … I estimate a size four. Or perhaps a three.’
‘Do you want a fucking knock?’ said Pock.
‘That is a very felicitous offer, sir, since I happen to be wearing one of my Fistic Armatures at this very moment. In fact, I challenge any one of you gentlemen to strike me in that region. Like St Stephen, I shall feel no pain.’
‘I want to fight,’ said Sinner in a voice like steel handcuffs. ‘They’re waiting. They didn’t come to see a fucking pantomime.’
‘Anyone?’ said the doctor.
‘Come on, mate, you’ve won,’ said Pock.
‘Surely you will be good enough to test out my invention, sir?’ the doctor said, gesturing to the boy from
Boxing
, who
had pushed his way through the gamblers with his notebook held over his head like a lantern.
Frink studied Sinner’s face, hoping the boy’s rage might scuttle back into the gloom behind his eyes. But Sinner was still angry – he hadn’t given up yet.
‘Do you think Mr Roach was winning, Mr Pock?’ stuttered the reporter.
‘I beseech you,’ said the doctor.
‘Come on, now, Seth,’ said Frink. ‘Next time.’
‘What do you say, Mr Roach?’ said the reporter.
‘Let’s all go home,’ said Pock.
‘Will no man here assault my testicles?’ shouted the doctor. And that was when Sinner turned and smacked Pock in the face so hard that he tumbled backwards over the ropes and crashed into the gamblers like a bad idea into a hungry nation.
Frink had never seen such a punch, or heard such a cheer. As the boy from
Boxing
wiped a spray of blood from his glasses and his notebook, the crowd squealed and cackled and howled Sinner’s name like a lover’s, smashing beer bottles and flinging their hats in the air.
‘You ought to be locked up!’ said Mottle to Sinner, hardly able to make himself heard. He turned to Frink. ‘Are you going to let him walk out of here after that?’ Frink shrugged, and handed Sinner his robe as he climbed down from the ring. The doctor was trying to persuade some of the gamblers to help him carry Pock outside.
‘Mr Roach, did he get what was coming to him?’ said the reporter.
‘We all get what’s coming to us, son,’ said Frink.
Dozens of men and women and children got up from their seats as Sinner pushed through towards the corridor that led to the dressing rooms, hoping to shake his hand or kiss his cheek or pat his back or pass him a cigar, but he just looked straight ahead, swearing under his breath. Although he would never have admitted it, even to himself, he liked having fans,
and he really liked ignoring his fans, and he’d learnt that ignoring them just made them even more loyal, especially the women. Tonight, most of them were content to pay tribute to Frink instead. The only concession Sinner made was to put his fists up quickly for a photographer.
‘You could have done him afterwards, Seth, if you had to do that,’ muttered Frink.
‘He hit me in the eggs.’
‘Yeah, but you said it didn’t hurt.’
No one remembered how a huge green leather armchair had found its way into the biggest of Premierland’s dressing rooms, but by now it stank of sweat and resin and was vomiting stuffing from its cracks. Sinner sat down and picked up a bottle of gin. ‘You can fuck off, I think, if you’re going to moan like you always do.’
‘You know I am,’ said Frink. He tried to remember a time when the boy wouldn’t have talked to his trainer like that. He could, but only if he remembered so selectively that it became a sort of fantasy. For a while, he’d worried that Sinner’s growing local celebrity might make him harder to control, but in fact Sinner seemed to be almost immune to fame. Not, of course, because of any inner humility – exactly the opposite. The boy had an arrogance so unshakeable that any outside stimulation was basically redundant, a kick up the arse of a speeding train. If Sinner slipped further out of his grasp it wouldn’t be because of fame, but because of a much more banal intoxicant. ‘I need to talk to Pock’s man anyway,’ Frink added as he bent down to tidy away a skipping rope. His forehead and eyelids and the tip of his nose were always very pink, as if he’d once fallen asleep on a stove.