14

Terry Dogue, whose cracked Docs leaked, mumbled into his cellphone. ‘He went down Buchanan Street to the river. Stared into the water. Turned round. Gawked in the window of that shop selling knives, know the one I mean under the bridge? Victor Morris? Now he’s going back up Buchanan Street. He’s turning about a block ahead of me. I bet he’s going back to Bath Street.’

BJ Quick said, ‘Anything else he’s done?’

Terry said, ‘Aye. He went into Queen Street Station earlier and made a phone call.’

BJ Quick said, ‘You get close enough to hear him?’

‘Naw, no chance. It was over and done in a flash. Listen, BJ, my arse is as cold as a witch’s tit. My feet are ice –’

‘You’re getting paid,’ Quick said.

Terry Dogue said, ‘I haven’t seen a penny yet.’

‘You’ll get some scratch tonight, wee man.’

‘That’d be welcome.’

‘Phone me, eight-thirty, nineish.’

Terry Dogue heard the line click dead. He had a mind to phone Quick back and tell him to piss off. Terry Dogue didn’t do dogsbody jobs like this, Terry Dogue may be five feet tall but he had dignity, and Terry Dogue didn’t didn’t didn’t ever work without pay. But he held back. The last thing you did was get on the wrong side of BJ.

Let’s not overlook the Furf.

What a pair: Mr Quick and Mr Razor. Fucking terrorists. Terry Dogue had spent time in Barlinnie and he knew some hard cases. But Furfee and Quick were something else: total fucking nutters, headcases of the first order.

Terry Dogue screwed his Northern Arizona University Lumberjack’s dark-blue baseball cap on to his frozen skull. He’d always had a mysterious thing about Flagstaff, although he’d never visited it in his life. When he’d first heard the name of the town as a kid he’d imagined a stark white flagpole in the middle of nowhere. Magic. Then he’d seen pictures in Arizona Highways, and begun a lifelong yearning for a sight of the San Francisco Peaks or a quiet stroll through the old town on a soft summery night when the air was said to be scented with pine.

Flagstaff, Az, dream destination.

He needed to win the Lottery, buy a plane ticket, piss off into the skies.

But. Here he was. Glasgow. His lot. The only place he knew. He was trapped like a doomed fly in a jar of Dundee marmalade.

The crowds streamed past him down Buchanan Street, walking under Christmas tinsel and bright lights strung between buildings. ‘Good King Wenceslas’ issued from a loudspeaker somewhere. Who the hell was Wenceslas and what was so good about him anyway? Terry Dogue wondered.

Up ahead he saw the Arab moving, and he hurried after him.

Lose the Arab, you lose your credibility. Maybe also something else.

One slice of the Furf’s blade and, whoops, gelded.

Marak entered a cafeteria for soup and a sandwich. But the soup, in which the letters of the alphabet floated, was lukewarm and didn’t heat him. The weather was depressing. He felt blunted by the way the clouds hung low in a dismal sky.

He walked back to Bath Street and stood directly across from the premises of Joseph Lindsay. Light burned in the window. Soon people would be leaving work. He’d already decided on a course of action. It was a risk, certainly, because it meant he’d have to come out into the open – but in the absence of any practical guidance he saw no other way. His father used to say: if you have faith in your heart, the world will one day make sense.

Yes, I have faith in my heart and my father’s blood in my veins and memories that go on and off inside my head like electric signals that have short-circuited. He thought of his mother and the white-walled room where she lay in Haifa, just below HaZiyonut Boulevard, and the nurses who’d been bringing her medication in little plastic cups for years. He saw the ceiling fan going round and round, stirring dust and dead air and desiccated insects snared in webs. He saw his mother’s dry lips and the distance in her eyes and remembered how he’d sit on the edge of the bed and swab her mouth with a damp cloth.

She still screamed now and then in her dreams. Awake, she spoke incoherently of scorpions and ghosts. She recognized nobody. Dr Solomon had said, Lifamen anashim kol kach mitrachakim she aynaynou yecholim yoter limsto et ha derech elayhem le olam …

Sometimes people go away where we can’t reach them …

And if we can’t reach them, we can’t recover them.

Marak thought: They killed my father. They drove my mother to an inaccessible hell. The whole intricate mosaic of family destroyed.

Traffic along Bath Street was ponderous now. The work-day was winding down. Streetlamps were lit. He walked to the corner, stopped, looked this way and that. He saw no sign of the little man in the baseball cap he’d observed hours before, but he was sure he was somewhere nearby.

Ramsay’s spy. He wasn’t very good at spying.

Marak turned, walked back, looked up at Lindsay’s window. The woman would come out, he knew that.

He’d worked out his approach. He’d rehearsed it in his mind.

Yes yes. It would be fine.