Communion Town Read online

  My appearance. I’d give a wide berth to that ugly character. Now and then people tell me I have a resemblance to someone, a rasping musician who had a bit of success in the last century with deconstructed gothic blues and macabre chanson. I saw a picture of him once in a magazine. A gargoyle in a hunch hat and a postmortem suit, dustbowl stubble, set of teeth you’d find on a bar room floor. Is that what you saw when we met for the first time? You never said. I don’t know.

  I tipped the spirit into the back of my throat and choked appreciatively as it burned all the way down. The swell at the other end of the bar was taking a sidelong interest in me. He was a skinny kid, his oiled hair and snakeskin boots winking out of the shadow. The chalkstripe suit was cut boxy and expensive and his fedora lay upend on the bartop.

  ‘Run into some trouble, Hal?’

  The kind of question that recommends silence. The wise guy slid closer, put his elbows on the bar and revealed his face in the mirror. Fine down glowed on his cheek where it caught the light. I noticed the slenderness of the throat extending from the snowy-crisp collar, the rounding of the chin and the moulding of the mouth. My upper lip curled of its own accord and my fingernails scraped the bartop.

  ‘This was a decent joint,’ I muttered.

  The person beside me grinned and fitted a boot to the footrail.

  ‘What’s the matter, Hal?’ she asked, in a contralto I couldn’t mistake. ‘You ain’t pleased to see me?’

  ‘I’m not in the mood, Moll.’

  ‘Ouch, let me guess. You ran into the Cherubs.’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  She drew back, mock-offended, then unbuttoned her jacket and stuck her hands in her pockets, flashing the points of her braces. Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl of the Liberties. I’d heard it said she’d been twice engaged to be married: once to a man who owned three factories out in Kinsayder Fields, once to an inexperienced heiress from Rosamunda. She booked both weddings for the same day, then left them standing at their respective altars and fenced the gifts for a tidy profit.

  I made to leave but she stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ she said. ‘I got something to tell you. As a favour, like. Some frail’s looking for you, you know that? Sparky little baggage. She’s asking for you up and down the waterfront, spreading your name around. That’d make me uneasy. If it was my situation, I’d want to know why. But that’s me. Maybe you’re different.’

  She caught her laughter at the corner of her mouth. I gathered the bitter stuff that had collected in my gullet and gave a little something back to the joint’s sticky floor. Then I shoved past, swinging the Roaring Girl on her heel. I heard her throaty chuckle as I climbed back into the heat, and she called up after me: ‘Quite the looker, too – quite the little looker, Hal!’

  4. Fate Carries a Blackjack

  My office was embedded high up in one of those great decaying blocks that lean out over the quays, ready any day to topple into the water. Black brick and flaked green paint outside, and, inside, a gentle purgatory of stairwell gloom, dead lift shafts and brown corridors with one electric light fluttering off and on. In my particular closet the filing cabinets held each other up like it had been a heavy night. The slatted blind hung splayed across the window. A defunct air conditioning unit lay in the corner, waiting for the end of the world.

  When I first took the room I’d had my name stencilled on the frosted glass panel in the door, together with the two initial letters that stood for my profession. Seeing it, ghosted and inverted, used to hit me like hot coffee when I was working into the night amid stacks of case notes and coarse-grained photographs. These days I used the desk drawers for my collection of empty bottles. The city noises didn’t get in here much. You could spend all afternoon watching the parallel lines of daylight creep across the cabinets and disappear before hitting the far corner. If I ever got around to making a will, this was where I wanted to be buried.

  I toiled up six storeys and arrived breathing hard and in need of a restorative, but when I turned the corner of the landing something brought me to a stop. The corridor was still and silent, but was the dust stirring through the half-light? At the far end, was the door standing open just an inch?

  The sweat had gone cold down my back. Automatically I patted the pockets of my suit but my hands found nothing to reassure them. I settled my hat and moved noiselessly along the corridor, took the last few feet at the pace of a paranoid gastropod and flattened myself beside the door. Yes: it was open a fraction. I’d shut it when I left, hadn’t I? I’d locked it, too, I never forget, but there were no signs of forced entry. Through the crack all I could see was a dark slice of wall. There was no sound.

  Then I caught the faintest creak, a creak I knew by heart. Someone shifting in my chair.

  My jaw tightened till my fillings hurt. This joker planned to get the drop on me in my own office? Nothing doing. I knew the angles here. The window at the end of the corridor looked on the fire escape. So I’m no gymnast, but was I such a sack that I couldn’t climb out, slip along the walkway and slap a nasty surprise on whoever was sitting in my damn chair taking aim at my door, waiting for the hapless silhouette to appear in the frosted panel? My office window swung open in just the right way to connect clean smack with the back of a complacent skull, I reckoned.

  I sank into a crouch and began to creep past the office door. You should see me creep when I want to. If I’d dropped a pin you’d have heard it.

  Then I wasn’t creeping any more. I’d caught the tip of my shoe in the hem of my trousers; the turn-up was trailing since my run-in with the Cherub brothers. Somehow I was flailing into a big stride and flinging my whole weight against the door. It flew all the way open, clattering against the cabinets. I just about bounded into the room and sprawled across the desk.

  I’d have liked an hour or so to myself to come up with some really appropriate profanities for how I felt about this situation, but it wasn’t to be. Because we were face to face.

  5. Stick ’em Up, My Lovely

  You know I’m not good at this kind of thing. What was odd, you seemed equally surprised. You sprang out of the chair like you’d been found out taking a liberty, then caught your poise like you calculated you could get away with it.

  As I blinked up at you from a drift of the junk I hadn’t got around to filing on a refuse heap, I knew there was only one way this scene was going to go and that was however you wanted. Not that I planned to make it easy on myself. I straightened up, screwed my hat into a ball and threw it at the hatstand. I bared my teeth like I thought the orangutans at the city zoo had perfected the art of conversation. Give me a break, I’d been punched in the jaw by my own desk.

  You simply smiled. Anyone would have sworn you were pleased to see me. Then you looked shocked. Something I’d noticed about you already, expressions cross your face like ripples on water. Your thoughts astonish you all by themselves. It’s a charming turn, I’ll allow that. You do it so neat I could nearly buy it.

  ‘I didn’t know how else to find you,’ you said. ‘You never pick up the phone.’

  My scowl sank deeper. I should have told you to get the hell out of my office but I said nothing. You were incongruous in the sedimented dinge of the room, reaching into your valise.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  I grunted and lit up one of my own.

  You raised your chin to me with the unlit cigarette balanced between your lips. Glowering, I tossed my matchbook into the desk debris between us. You wore a private face as you tore a match out and struck it.

  ‘You don’t change, do you … Hal.’

  With your eyes slitted against the smoke, you dropped the matchbook into your valise. That valise, that brand of cigarettes, that gesture, that curl, I couldn’t shake the sense I’d seen them before, and often. But not in this town. I gave up on my glower and tried stringing a sentence together instead.

  ‘You don’t know me, lady.’

 
; You considered this.

  ‘Maybe not. But I can imagine you.’

  And with that, all at once, I was too tired. I was a body map of insults that no one needed to see.

  ‘Look, miss. I don’t know you and I got no interest in what you have to say about me. Now either you’re here on business or you were just leaving.’

  Against the window you were in silhouette, the daylight eating into your edges. You turned your head to me and smoke bloomed.

  ‘I have a job for you, Hal Moody.’ You reached without hesitation, without even looking, into the heaped desktop, and stubbed your half-smoked cigarette out in the chipped coffee cup that served me for an ashtray. ‘I need you to search for a missing person.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ I said. ‘Take a seat.’

  Before I knew it, I’d gestured for you to sit back down in my chair, the big old bucket-seat creaker behind the desk. For all the world as if I was going to line myself up on the straight-backed broken-legged number I keep so clients won’t stay any longer than they have to. But you didn’t sit. You stayed dark against the bright pane and chuckled softly to yourself.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’ I blurted.

  ‘I’m not the one searching, Mr Moody.’

  You picked your way around the desk and looked up at me. You inspected my necktie, a no-nonsense job in navy silk with dark red diamonds. Then you turned your attention to my shoes, which, I was suddenly aware, needed to be polished, or possibly thrown in a skip. One of them had hairy brown parcel string instead of a lace.

  Your finger traced my lapel, absent-minded. It was well done. It was as if you recognised my jacket from long ago, like maybe you’d known it well in your childhood, and it seemed for a moment this was the only reason you were here.

  ‘Time is strange,’ you said, almost too soft for me to catch. Then you came back to yourself, or you seemed to, and you twitched my lapels straight.

  ‘You’re not going to like it,’ you said, ‘but this is the story, so you’d better listen. The missing person – I can’t tell you anything about her, nothing, no back story. I can’t tell you where to start looking. All I can tell you is this. First, she isn’t missing, not yet. And second, there’s no way you’re ever going to find her. But, Hal, I need you to search.’

  This wasn’t much better than talking to the Cherubs. ‘Give me the facts,’ I growled. ‘Who is this frill?’

  Your hand wavered. You hesitated like you weren’t sure which answer you wanted to give. Then you said:

  ‘It’s me.’

  6. Blue Eyes and Greenbacks

  With that the whole thing became clear to me. Became quite routine. It’s not like I get many clients, but when I get them, that’s how it goes, these days, nine times in ten, more when it’s a dame we’re talking about. It’s no mystery, nothing you could call a case. It’s some private investigation of her own, a tale or fantasy with herself at the centre and who knows what shadows and worries webbing out in all directions to make up the rest of the thing. Not that it could make sense to anyone else, not that it’s the expression of anything rational, but at some point the moist finds what she really needs is a schlub to join in and play along. So she comes to me and I charge her eighty a day plus expenses. I ask the right questions and look like I’m listening to the answers, she gets what she needs, I get what I need, everybody’s happy.

  So with zero surprise I heard out what you had to say. You yourself were the missing person in your story, it was you I was supposed to find. I gave a practised professional nod. Sure, sure, you were here now, but there was no doubt you’d soon be spirited away. No, you couldn’t tell me why or how you expected to vanish, who it was you were afraid of. My job was simple: meet you first thing tomorrow morning. You picked a scrap of paper off my desk, scribbled an address, folded it and passed it over between two fingertips.

  ‘Seven a.m. sharp,’ you said.

  ‘And what am I doing at seven a.m. at –’ I glanced at the paper ‘– eleven-seventy-four Lorenz? I gotta know if I’m walking into something here.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Just be there. I need you watching closely.’

  The way you made it sound, you were liable to evaporate right into the overbaked air. Not that you seemed too concerned.

  ‘Once I’m gone, Hal, you have to keep looking for me. Promise.’

  You dropped your chin and gazed up at me so your eyes were a pair of wells sunk into limpid darkness. I teetered over them, heels on the brink.

  ‘Wait just a minute,’ I said. And I said the word Don Cherub had spoken in Meaney’s – said it as a question. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’

  You said nothing, kept your eyes raised to me.

  ‘I thought so,’ I said. I shook my head and strode the length of the office, by which I mean I took a single reckless step before barking my shin. ‘You’ve already given me plenty of grief today. You’re the kind makes as much trouble as the nearest sucker lets her. And I can’t think of one good reason why I should get involved.’

  You raised an eyebrow. Then the other.

  ‘Yeah, okay, I got a reason,’ I said. ‘Ninety a day plus expenses, that’s what. Call it a hundred if I’m getting up in the middle of the goddamn night. First week’s payable in advance.’

  You shrugged. Then, casually, you swept half the junk off my desk to the floor. From your valise you brought out a fistful of something like specie, but it was no currency I recognised: they looked like small gold coins from two thousand years ago, rubbed into smooth soft-edged ovals, worn as thin as seashell shards in the bed of a river. You heaped a handful on the desk, then another, then more. I lifted one of the discs; it had a buttery gleam, and a density to it in spite of being so delicate.

  ‘I take cash,’ I said.

  ‘This is better, the way things are.’

  I couldn’t disagree. I held the disc up to the light. No markings were legible. The fine-veined tracery across the surface had no pattern or direction I could make out. I tried it between my teeth. I looked at the pile on the desk. There was a lot.

  ‘Do we have an agreement, Mr Moody?’

  I’d have liked to pause for an internal struggle, but what was the use? It wasn’t much to do with the gold. The answer to the question had been out of doubt since the moment you walked through the door of my office and set yourself to wait in my chair.

  You smiled like you knew that too. But along with the triumph you looked to be genuinely pleased for me. You came close again and your hand strayed up to brush something off my lapel. You leaned in, your lips not quite touching my ear.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ you murmured, as if you were passing on a secret. You walked out of my office, and, just before you shut the door, I’d swear you granted a slow glimpse of one marble-smooth, masterly turned ankle, bound in its narrow black strap. And then you were gone.

  I stood in the centre of the stifling box for a minute, then two, then five. Every scrap of the precious metal you’d given me I loaded into my pockets, and the weight settled into me like something of my own, some burden I’d been missing. Then I wrenched the old nine-iron from where it was holding up one end of the window blind, and beat up my chair and my clients’ chair. I smashed my desk lamp, hacked divots from the plaster, slashed the fins off the ceiling fan and bludgeoned in the fronts of the filing cabinets. I cleared the glass out of the window frame and the frosted pane out of the door, and I didn’t stop until there was nothing unbroken and the muscles across my shoulders ached with heat like the tarmac in the streets outside.

  7. The Heart is a Crime Scene

  Eleven-seventy-four Lorenz Drive was out in the hills beyond the city limits, one of the winding high-banked avenues that ran for miles with now and then a big villa set far back above the road. The final scrap of dawn-time cool was cooking out of the air as I steered my coughing, bucking jalopy round the curves. Most of the gates were chained and padlocked. In spite of the splendid seclusion, the folks who lived out here foun
d it too close to the sickness stewing down in the city. Same as always they’d cleared out to their country retreats until the heat was off.

  The last of the dawn evaporated, the sun flicked itself clear of the hills and got straight into burning, and the curves went rolling past, the gatepost numbers rising at a crawl. The aspect began to change. Soon the gates were rusted and broken in, and the paths beyond them choked with dark greenery. Then nothing for a stretch. I drove on.

  When I found it, the place turned out to be only half there. Some time back they’d begun construction of the last in the necklace of hillside villas, but work had stopped at the bare structure, leaving an abstraction of a house in concrete and brick, which had since been crumbling. The doors and windows were bare rectangular gaps.

  I zigzagged up the steep driveway and braked to a stop in the dish of dust out front of the house. What did you want to bring me here for? I clumped the jalopy’s door shut, settled my hat on my head and shot my cuffs. I didn’t like it. It was seven-oh-two a.m. precisely. Why had I agreed to come? There was no sign of you. There were no other vehicles. I squatted and eyed the dust fruitlessly.

  Inside, the house was an undivided space, still wide open at the back. A stack of breeze blocks had partly fallen over in the uncompleted aperture. An approximation of a staircase led nowhere. All at once I was on the point of calling your name out loud.

  Then I heard an engine snarl and tyres in grit.

  Anyone could tell it was time to disappear out the back and wait to see how things unfolded. But I paused an unforgivable moment, there in the open of the half-made house. Doesn’t that tell you everything, kid? Doesn’t that tell you how much trouble I was in? More than anything else, what I wanted was to see a certain shape outlined in that doorless doorway, so I bought into the sudden lift of excitement in my chest, and I paused.

  And the light was blocked out. Don Cherub shouldered into the room, followed by his brother.