Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (6 page)

My Christ, I reflect, the track’s going to be a roller coaster, a Gerald and Les switchback, designed for the tourist in search of the unusual, a mystery tour for those with a taste for the out of the ordinary, horizons unlimited, who knows, beyond one of the humps you might find a fucking villa.

I trudge on.

I have to admit, the night smells are not unpleasant. They’re not Gerrard Street, or Frith or Greek, there’s no sourness, no close atmosphere of animal, vegetable and mineral decay, no rising around of spit-slick late Saturday night pavements, but they have a certain Spanish
je ne sais quoi
. Not that there’s any way they’re going to alter the thoughts that are lodged in my mind.

I reach the brow of the first hill. The first small horizon reveals the aspect of a second, further horizon. I look down into the depths of the intermediate depression. No villa. How you say: Fuck all Hacienda. Just quiet mountain gloom,
lying undiscovered at the bottom of the depression. I put my luggage down and take my cigarettes out and light up and think about vodka and tonic, slices of lemon, cubes of ice. And eggs, two eggs; Gerald and Les by name. I finish my cigarette but I don’t finish thinking about those two. I pick up my luggage and set off again.

The second horizon, another depression. More gloom at its base. But this time I can pick out an even deeper darkness crouching in the shadows. A slight rise, and from my viewpoint, on top of this rise, an oblong the scale of a cigarette packet. I concentrate hard and after a moment or so’s concentration I come to the conclusion that this must be the villa. Unless of course it’s a Spanish Public Karsi for nightwalkers that get caught short. But even a Public Karsi has lights. This place, no lights. Of course, it could be the wrong place. It needn’t be Gerald and Les’s at all. But that would be too easy. It’s got to be theirs. It’s got to be, because if it was anybody else’s and I was staying there, it would be all lit up and there’d be a welcoming party and everything on ice, not to mention being met at the airport and dropped straight on the doorstep. Oh no. This belongs to Gerald and Les. Wally’s probably in his pit snoring holes in the mosquito net. No fucking idea I’m ten minutes away from him. Likely he doesn’t even know I’m meant to be coming. Well, he soon will. No danger. He’ll be the one who’ll get the surprise party when I interrupt his fucking snoring.

I start down the slope. The closer I get to the villa set-up the more details I can make out. The first thing I notice is the high surrounding wall and the thought occurs to me that it’s lucky for Gerald and Les I’ve been around for the last five years or they’d have a bigger and better wall to look at when they’re on their holidays. I can make out quite a few arched gateways, their vacuums filled with wrought iron—the kind of arrangements you find in Hendon or Bromley, separating the houses from the garages. But high as the wall is, one angle of the gradient enables me to see
the villa. As far as I can make out it’s set on a kind of man-made plateau and the building’s got more split levels than a cracked mirror, a suitable reflection of the collective personalities of Gerald and Les, so many split levels it ought to be called the Villa Schizophrenia. But it’s not called that, because when I get to what I imagine are the main gates, the name I’ve been led to expect is there on the wall, inlaid in a different stone. So at least I’m at the right place.

I put my luggage down and try the handles. Nothing. I don’t really believe it. So I try them again. It’s quite true, the bastards are locked. My first reaction is to scream Wally’s name and give the gates a good kicking, but that would be stupid. That would spoil the kicking I’m going to surprise Wally with in a few minutes’ time. I don’t want anything to spoil that. So what I do is leave my luggage where it is, and do a tour of the walls and their assorted gates. When I get back to where I started from I have the knowledge that all the other gates are locked and shuttered just like the main one. That knowledge makes everything nice and neat and engenders all kinds of lovely thoughts in my mind. Saying Boo to Wally is being sweetened up by all these lovely thoughts I am having.

I climb up the main wrought iron and sit on top of the wall and look at the villa. Dim, night-reflecting light from the motionless swimming pool is mirrored in acres of plate glass splashed right across the front of the villa but beyond this pale phosphorescence there is still no internal illumination (illumination that is other than ephemeral). So I turn about and go down the other side of the wrought iron. The track I’ve walked from the mountain road continues this side of the wrought iron, a little better made up than the other side, curving away from the main bulk of the villa, ending up at what I take to be the garage, set much lower than the rest of the building, so that its flat roof is on a level with the footings of the villa itself. Rising up on my right to the level of the villa itself is a sort of scrubby
shrub-cum-rock garden and winding their way up this slope are some irregular slabs of stone serving as steps that are meant to get you to the upper level, or to help you break an ankle, whichever. I negotiate these steps and now I’m faced with half an acre or so of flagstones surrounding the still swimming pool. I walk across the flagstones towards the villa. Occasionally the flagstones break to allow squares of soil to support bushes and small trees. There’s also landscape furniture, tables and chairs and benches over by the pool. When I get to the villa itself I can see that the cloistered arches are resting on a three-foot-high stone platform that runs the whole length of the front of the villa, mosaic and glowing from the reflected light in the plate glass. In the plate glass a figure moves but it’s only the ghost of myself. I stare at the apparition and reflect on its presence. Then I reflect on the presence of Wally beyond the glass and I walk up the steps and inspect the shiny blackness for signs of a way in. In the darkness I work out that one of the plate glass panels is meant to glide open and give entrance to the villa’s interior. I almost don’t try to shift it; I don’t want to do one other thing that will confirm the pattern, that will cause me to place myself head first through the plate glass. But I overcome my distaste at being proved right and give the slider a go, and on Mrs. Fletcher’s life, it moves. The fucker moves. It’s open. There’s a way in. No need for any over-emotional forehead work. It moves. There’s a way in. I step forward.

I’m in a hall. Rectangular, echoing the face of the villa. But it’s not as quiet as it was outside. There’s the sound of running water, like someone pissing against porcelain but it’s more constant than the noise of ten Saturday night drunks. I locate the noise and it’s coming from an odd shaped lump in the centre of the hall, thrown into relief by the night-whiteness of the far wall. I walk over to the lump and discover it’s a small fountain, the stone carved
in the shape of some curlicued, non-existent fish. The water is spewing out from between the fish’s thick lips and I wonder how long Gerald had to sit still so that the stone carver could make such an exact likeness.

I start to move slowly down the broad steps and when I’m three down the whole place is suddenly flooded out with light. I blink my eyes and when they’re open again the first thing I focus on is an antique wooden straight-backed chair about halfway across the room from me, just before another drop to another level that flows onwards to the panavision proportions of the windows opposite. The interesting thing about this chair, the reason it’s much more interesting than all the other various items of furniture and objects that run the whole length of the front of the villa, mosaic’d and glowing from the reflected light in the plate glass, is its contents. Wally. Good old Wally, wide awake and pointing a shooter at me.

For Wally, his expression isn’t too full of the usual self-doubt and anxiety mixed in with that natural expression of his apology for being alive. In other words, he looks as though his Grannie’s just caught him giving a labrador a hand-job.

“Hello, Wally,” I say to him, my words effectively jamming all the alternatives that are racing in my mind about the manner of our meeting, but in spite of that a part of my brain fixes on the fact that Wally is sweating somewhat in the class of Pancho Gonzales. “Warm for the time of year.”

The entire lower part of Wally’s face begins to move and I realise from all this muscular activity that Wally’s trying to get his laughing tackle into training in order to say something to me. Finally he manages to make the tape.

“Jack,” Wally says to me, “it ain’t like what it appears to be. Know what I mean?”

I shake my head.

“Oh yes,” I say to Wally. “Now I feel really at ease. What it appears to be, a shooter shaking in your sweaty little palm, that isn’t what it really is at all. The million reasons
for the shooter and your sweat, they’re all beside the point. I can relax about them. I can leave all that out. Thanks a bunch for setting my mind at rest, Wally. Just allow me to thank you for your warm and wonderful welcome.”

Wally does a bit more lip trembling and the shooter drops its angle slightly in deference to Wally’s embarrassment. I fold my arms.

“Well then,” I say to Wally.

“Look,” Wally begins to say, but I interrupt him and describe, in detail as graphic as I can muster, what I think of it all so far, since I stepped onto the fucking aeroplane. Wally’s shooter trembles at each new twist in my story, and when the shooter’s twitching enough to shoot holes in himself let alone in myself, I say to him:

“All right, Wally. What is it? Are you piss-green about night-walkers or did Gerald and Les tell you that I might not be in too good a mood by the time I got here, seeing as there was nobody there to meet me at the airport? Or is there something else, some message Gerald and Les wanted you to deliver when I got here, some message they’d rather have you impart?”

“Jack—” Wally says to me.

I begin to walk towards him.

“Fuck the shooter,” I say to him. “On you a shooter is just decoration. An embellishment. As dangerous as a bunch of flowers. You’re not even a creep, Wally. A creep finds the ability from deep down inside him, in this kind of situation, to smile, he can galvanise his mouth even though his guts are somewhat less than iron. A creep has guts of a sort, Wally, but you have none. None whatsoever.”

Wally moves his lips like a bad ventriloquist and shakes his head like a poorly-made ventriloquist’s dummy.

I continue my advance.

“Tell me what you have to tell me, Wally,” I say to him. “Before I get to you.”

But I don’t get to him. Because a voice behind me says something and that causes me to stop walking.

“Well,” the voice says, “it’s Jack Carter, I guess.”

The voice is American. I don’t turn around to see what sort of American. I don’t do anything. It’s a situation in which you wait to be told what to do, and then it’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re going to do it.

“It’s O.K.,” the voice says. “You can relax. You can turn around if you want to. Only remember, your man there ain’t the only guy in this room that’s carrying.”

I look at Wally a little bit longer until finally Wally averts his eyes and then I turn round and look at the man who’s spoken to me. He’s wearing a white oatmeal short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, coat style, not tucked in to the waistband of his slacks, which are white and very sharply pressed. He is wearing canvas moccasins and it strikes me how sensible it is of him to be wearing dark glasses so that the lights wouldn’t disorient him for what might have been a crucial second when he switched them on. But the most striking objects of his apparel are the two holsters he’s wearing. One is a standard shoulder holster built to house an automatic. The other one is to carry a .38, and is fixed on the belt of his slacks, only partially visible because of the way his shirt’s hanging. Only this holster hasn’t anything in it. The occupier of the shoulder holster is pointing straight at me, and it’s not being held the way Wally’s holding his companion piece.

The man isn’t tall, isn’t short. His muscular arms are black with hair, and what’s left of the hair on the top of his head is extremely well barbered. His face is broad without running to fat, his shoulders are broad too, but the flow of his shirt doesn’t quite conceal the slightest of paunches that blemishes his otherwise well cared for body. Twin lights dance in his dark glasses.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess this is Jack Carter.”

“I bleeding told you it would be,” Wally says.

There is a silence.

“Well,” I say. “Now we know. I’m Jack Carter. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.”

With his free hand the man takes off his dark glasses and allows himself a small quick smile, then his face is impassive again. His eyes flick up and down from my head to my feet, judging. Then he puts the automatic back in the holster and un-sticks himself from the wall and walks over to a low glass table. On this table there is an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne in it. Next to the bucket is a glass jug filled almost to the top with squeezed orange juice and slices of orange and lumps of ice. There are also some glasses on the table.

The American takes the champagne bottle out of the ice-bucket. “Wally, see to the drapes, will you?”

I hear Wally get up from the chair behind me and walk somewhere and press a button and there’s a whirring sound as the curtains draw together, but I’m not interested in Wally’s execution of this operation. All my attention is fixed on the man with the champagne bottle. He pours some of the champagne into a tall glass and then fills the other half of the glass with orange juice from the jug.

He looks at me.

“Want some?” he says.

I don’t say anything. He pours another one anyway. Wally shifts past me and makes for the entrance hall. The American picks up one of the glasses and offers it towards me. I walk a few steps forward and take the glass. I notice the American doesn’t pick up his own glass until I’ve taken hold of mine, and that he stays on his side of the table. There is some more whirring and swishing out in the hallway and Wally re-appears and begins to walk down the steps back to our level, but when he sees the look I’m giving him he stops in mid-step looking something like the character in the old joke who’s walking in backwards pretending he’s going out.