The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 4

  Two of them.

  The one on my left aimed a kick at my head but I moved and his boot glanced painfully off my scalp. I should have rolled up into a ball and turtled it out, but the old dark fire that had gotten me into – and out of – so many scrapes kicked in. I rolled sideways, over and over as fast as I could, throwing myself into the legs of my right-side attacker. He staggered a little and I wrapped a bicep around his calf and yanked. He went down hard and his friend ran forward to kick me again. I didn’t let the kick stop me getting up and as I did so I stamped my heel down hard on the mouth of the thug I’d downed.

  When I turned to the second guy, I could see in his face that this was not the kind of playtime nor was I the kind of playmate he and his chum had expected. He was big, broad and prognathous and in the middle of my anger and pain I couldn’t stop a fuck-me-he’s-the-spit-of-Victor-McLaglen thought running through my head. Despite his hard look, he didn’t strike me as a street thug type; he confirmed my suspicion by taking a swing at me that told me he’d done most of his fighting in a boxing ring and not on the street – or in the mud and blood of Anzio, where I’d learned many of my best dance steps.

  I moved forward inside the arc of his punch and slammed my forehead into his face. He staggered back, nose streaming with blood, his eyes dazed and startled at the same time. I startled him again, harder this time, and he dropped.

  I took the time to check out what had happened. I saw that behind us was a doorway set in shadow by a heavy stone lintel – I realized my playmates had been hiding in there. Waiting for me. This was no ordinary street robbery: they had had a reason for picking me out and I was going to find out why.

  The first guy I’d dropped and on whose dental records I’d made a permanent mark was coming round. My ribs hurt like hell and I knew I was going to wake up the next morning stiffer than a Bridgeton bridegroom, so I decided that my new chums would remember the encounter too. I kicked the inside of his thigh to part his legs and followed up by slamming the heel of my wingtip into his groin. He doubled up like a jack-knife and started gagging.

  ‘Victor McLaglen’ was now on his feet and stared disbelievingly at his chum, then me. I took a step towards him and, courageously loyal to his comrade to the end, he turned on his heel and ran for it.

  ‘Lennox!’ I turned and saw Tommy Quaid running towards me, leaving the two girls standing slack-mouthed at the door of the pub. I used the seconds it took Tommy to reach me to land some good, hard kicks on the fallen guy’s back and head. I felt strong hands grab me by the upper arms and pull me back. I spun around, breaking the hold and turning to face Tommy. The fire must have still burned in my face because he held his hands up appeasingly.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Lennox – take it easy.’

  I made a move towards the moaning man on the ground and again Tommy grabbed my arm, this time even more firmly. ‘Enough! For God’s sake calm down or you’re going to kill him.’

  I let him pull me back.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, although every breath was beginning to hurt. ‘Help me get laughing boy here to his feet and I’ll find out what this was all about.’

  Tommy looked down at the guy on the ground who lay on his side moaning, his knees drawn up to his chest. His mouth was a bloody mess and one side of his face was badly split and bleeding, fleshy puffs already closing up the eye.

  ‘Christ, Lennox,’ said Tommy. ‘Did you have to do that to him?’

  ‘There were two of them – the bastards jumped me. I want to know why.’

  Tommy looked back up towards the pub. I turned too and saw that a small knot of drinkers had spilled out and were looking in our direction. The ringing bells of an approaching police car sounded in the distance and I guessed we’d picked one of the few pubs in Glasgow who’d care enough to report a fight within fifty feet of their door.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Tommy. ‘There may’ve been two of them but there’s only one now, and from the look of him you’ve put him in hospital. You’ll be hard pushed to talk your way out of this, Lennox. Where’s your car?’

  ‘Just around the corner.’ I winced, a pain shooting through my right side. ‘I think the bastards have busted a rib.’

  The sound of the police bells drew closer. The girls had melted into the growing crowd at the pub door and out of involvement. No one to tell the police about my charming ‘American’ accent.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ said Tommy, looping an arm around my shoulders and easing me along the street and around the corner to where the Alpine was parked.

  ‘I want to know why they did it,’ I protested when we reached the car, but I was too weak and hurting to push the point.

  ‘Give me your keys, I’ll drive.’ The police bells were louder now and there was a hint of urgency in Tommy’s tone. I handed him the keys and allowed him to slide me gently into the passenger seat.

  Any successful professional thief needs to have a thorough memory for geography, knowing every street and alley in his patch making the difference between an escape route or one straight into the welcoming bosom of the police. Tommy Quaid knew his patch inside-out and, taking the first turning he could off the main road, followed a circuitous but efficient route that took us away from the scene quickly, but without the risk of running into an approaching car full of coppers. I sank back into the leather of the Alpine and closed my eyes. Out of danger and with the adrenalin in my system burned up, a dark, leaden pain and nausea started to wash over me in sluggish waves. My ribs hurt whenever I breathed and my head hurt whenever I moved it.

  And the old self-loathing claimed me too: the sense of shame I always felt whenever I’d gotten so het up that I’d ended up in that same old dark-hot place that the war had taken me. I was also embarrassed that Tommy had seen that side of me; it was like being seen naked and exposed, all of your baser instincts – the type most people keep locked up tight – out there in the open for the world to see.

  That had been the thing about war: there had always been some dark and shadowed place where you found yourself doing things that no one would ever find out about. Things only you saw. Things you didn’t know were inside you. After the war, like so many others, I had done my best to lock the darkness back inside.

  But there was always some bastard, like tonight, who would come along and bang on the door and ask it out to play.

  *

  We crossed the Clyde to the South Side.

  Quaid must have had his own Nibelungen Hoard stashed somewhere because his place was a downstairs flat in a Victorian blond sandstone in Pollockshields. I’d been once before, but that had been after a hard night’s drinking with Tommy and I’d been in a greater – and in that case self-inflicted – state of stupor than I was now. Quaid steered me into a tastefully decorated if a little Spartan lounge and I dropped down onto the red chesterfield. I could see that my handmade Prince of Wales had taken a battering: the worsted at one knee had split and frayed and I was beginning to understand why the Scots had a penchant for industrial-grade tweed.

  Tommy handed me a Scotch, the taste of which made me wince more than my ribs did, but it warmed the right cockles and my nausea lessened a little.

  I eased out of my jacket and opened my shirt. Taking another swallow of whisky, I ran my hands over my ribs; although the pressure on one side sent a jolt through me, I couldn’t feel any deformity.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ asked Tommy.

  ‘As far as I can see there’s nothing broken, but with ribs you can never tell. I think all I’ve got is a crack in a couple.’

  ‘You should maybe go for an X-ray.’ Tommy sipped his whisky. There was something vaguely off about his tone, as if he was talking to someone he didn’t know as well as he thought he had.

  I shook my head. ‘I think I should avoid hospitals and the questions that come with them. I’ll strap up tight when I get home.’

  ‘I’ve got bandages
here, I’ll fix you up . . .’ Tommy put down his glass and went through to the kitchen. While he was gone I looked around the room. Tommy lived here; but it was living without touching, without personal investment. The walls were bare of pictures, mirrors or any other adornment and there wasn’t much in the way of furniture: the deep-red leather chesterfield I sat on, the club chair that matched it, a heavy teak coffee table in between, and a large bookcase against the wall. Everything looked expensive, but there was an incompleteness to the room – a sense of temporariness, as if Tommy had left his personality unpacked in a moving crate.

  There was one thing that promised to give away something about the man who lived there: I gingerly eased myself up from the chesterfield and went across to the stacked-full bookcase. It perhaps didn’t do me much credit that I was surprised by the erudite and eclectic choice of literature of a boy from a Lanarkshire pit village. I had always known Tommy was bright: he would often surprise with a literary allusion or the extent of his general knowledge. But the books in the bookcase were of a different order.

  It was sophisticated stuff, all right: dictionaries, encyclopaedias, political biographies, and various technical manuals on all sorts of disciplines from locksmithing to architecture that I suspected had some bearing on Tommy’s trade. But it was the other books that surprised me. There was some, but not much, of the usual stuff: paperbacks by Nevil Shute, Dennis Wheatley, Nicholas Monsarrat, that kind of thing. But the majority of Tommy’s personal library was totally unexpected: hardbacks of Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati, another three by Albert Camus, and the Roads to Freedom trilogy by Jean-Paul Sartre.

  There was a host of other titles by writers I hadn’t heard of – and I had read a lot and widely. I picked out a hardback copy of The Outsider by Camus and was about to flick through it when I was interrupted by Tommy coming back into the room, carrying a canvas musette bag marked with a faded red cross; I recognized it as a standard first-aid kit from the war. Once more I was a little put off by the expression on Tommy’s face when he saw me looking at his books, almost as if I no longer had the status that afforded that kind of privilege. But again it was a cloud that passed.

  ‘Did you do over a library?’ I asked, indicating his book collection. It was a lame joke made lamer by Tommy’s lack of reaction to it.

  ‘I read a lot,’ he said. ‘I like Sartre and Camus. Have you ever read The Outsider?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s interesting that you should pick that one out. You know, with everything we were talking about earlier, you really should read it. It’s a good book. A great book, probably.’ He gave a strange, small, almost wistful laugh. ‘It’s a book that speaks to me.’

  I was about to ask if I could borrow it when he took the Camus from my hand. He examined it for a moment, then examined me in the same way, as if I too had been something to be read.

  ‘It’s been a very special book for me, Lennox. I want you to remember that. I tell you what – if ever anything happens to me, I’ll leave it to you in my will. Remember that too. I think you’d get an awful lot out of it – maybe, one day, this’ll be a book that will speak to you too. And most important of all, always remember that you can never judge a book by its cover. This book particularly. Or people.’ He put the book back in its place in the bookcase. ‘Anyway, I’ve got the bandages. Sit down and I’ll strap you up.’

  I nodded and eased my way out of my shirt. My ribs, especially on the right, hurt like hell but there was no sense of bone grinding on bone. Tommy told me to take another swallow of whisky, then to raise my arms up, but not too high. I did what he said and he started wrapping the bandages around my torso, sending a loop over one shoulder for extra stability. He wrapped tight and it hurt, but at least I knew I wouldn’t do more damage. It was an expert job.

  ‘I’ll fix you another drink,’ he said when he was finished and I eased back into my shirt and jacket. ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the hall: you look like shite – why don’t you go and clean up?’

  I nodded my thanks and did what he said. The bathroom was fitted out with expensive porcelain furniture and tiling, and was even equipped with a shower, but again the only personal touches were a toothbrush and Tommy’s shaving kit. Once more I had the impression that it was all ready to be scooped up and packed if Tommy had to move on in a hurry.

  I checked my reflection in the mirror. My handmade Prince of Wales check looked pretty much beyond the magic of dry cleaner or tailor. The shoulder seam of my jacket had burst and there was an oily smear on one sleeve where I’d reclined unwillingly on Glasgow Corporation tarmac. My pride-and-joy shirt had lost buttons and was creased and grimy. But what I liked least was the face that looked back out at me: cold, hard, weary. Bad.

  My black hair was mussed up and an ugly bruise was creeping out from below the hairline, from where the boot of one of my playmates had grazed the scalp. I felt another, stronger wave of nausea but fought it back hard: I knew if I vomited the spasms would jangle my ribs. I scooped up some cold water and rinsed my mouth, splashed my face and smoothed back my hair.

  There was a tap on the door and when I opened it Tommy stood holding a suit on a hanger. It was very like the one I had ruined, except the grey check was perhaps a shade or two darker.

  ‘You can borrow this,’ he said. ‘We’re roughly the same size. And here’s a change of shirt.’

  ‘Thanks . . .’

  After he left I changed into the clothes. The suit was a Continental too and very similar in cut to the one I’d ruined. The freshly laundered shirt wasn’t of the same quality as mine, but at least it was clean so I changed into that too.

  Tommy had made some bad coffee – the fake chicory crap that the Scots drank – and handed me a cup when I came back into the living room.

  ‘You don’t think much of the way I handled things tonight, do you?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t like violence, Lennox. I’ve seen too much for one lifetime and don’t have a taste for it any more.’

  ‘Nor do I, Tommy . . .’ I tried to put force behind it but it didn’t even convince me. ‘It’s just that . . . I don’t know. The war. It messed me up. When something like tonight happens and I get into it with someone, I just lose my head. It becomes more than a punch-up. There’s just all this . . . all this rage.’

  ‘I know all that. You’re not the only one who was in the war. I had to do things I never want to talk about. Or think about. But I swore that I’d never do them again, or let anyone force me to do them again. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let all of that shite claim me. I saw your face tonight, Lennox. You didn’t just want to hurt that guy, you wanted to kill him.’

  ‘I just lost the place—’

  ‘There was more to it than that.’ Tommy cut me off. ‘I saw something in you I haven’t seen for a long while. I saw it in the war – men who wouldn’t have hurt a fly in civilian life suddenly finding a part of themselves they didn’t know existed. The part that enjoys killing. You’d see it in their faces – like they were hungry for it. Like they were glad the war had come along and shown them who they really were. I knew someone like that, someone in my unit during the war who called himself my friend too. He had that look.’ He took a sip of chicory coffee. ‘It’s been years since I saw that look but I saw it tonight. You had fucking murder in your eyes, Lennox.’

  ‘That’s not who I am. I know the type you’re talking about, but that isn’t me. It’s just . . .’ I struggled for the best way of putting it, then gave up.

  ‘Forget about it,’ said Tommy.

  But I didn’t want to forget it. For some reason it was important to me that Tommy understood. ‘When I was a kid I used to go to Saturday matinees at the Capitol in Saint John. Westerns or Buck Rogers. Kids whistling and booing and chucking stuff at the screen whenever the bad guys rode into town. It was all so simple: black hats and white hats, heroes and villains, good and evil. I believed it. I believed I had to be one or the other. But
life’s not like that. Christ knows you know that, Tommy. Nothing’s black and white: everything is shades of grey. You, me, everyone – we can be the good guy and the bad guy, depending on what life throws at us. I admit there were lots of things I did during the war that I’m not proud of – but I never, ever enjoyed killing. I hated it. In fact, that’s where that crap comes from: all that anger and fear I had to go through.’ I sipped the chicory coffee; regretting it instantly, I set the cup and saucer down on the table. ‘Sometimes I wear the black hat instead of the white. Because it’s been handed to me.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Tommy. ‘You choose who you are, what you are. Whatever’s happened to you, whatever you’ve been through, whatever shitty deal you’ve been handed – you decide what you make of it. Because if you don’t, then there’s always some other bastard who’ll decide for you – officers, cops, judges, politicians. And you’re wrong about there being shades of grey. There are some bad fucking bastards out there, believe me. And not our kind of bad bastards . . . not some pissed-up hard cunt with a razor, or gangster from the Gorbals. I’m talking about people who have everything, who’ve had everything handed to them and have no reason to do the shite they do. And the shite they do is beyond fucking belief. Real evil.’

  And there it was again, hiding in the shadows behind Tommy’s eyes. In that instant I saw Tommy, just like me, kept something locked up inside. Then it was gone. He smiled and shook his head as if annoyed at his own folly.

  ‘If you think I was – that I am – one of those guys you talked about, then you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘What you saw tonight is my own little demon that I’ve been fighting ever since the war. You wouldn’t have seen it if those guys hadn’t jumped me. What I really want to know is why they jumped me.’

  ‘You have no idea?’

  ‘None. Sometimes when I’m working on a divorce, an irate husband might turn up handy; but I haven’t got anything on remotely like that at the moment.’