19

At the end of Renfrew Street Miriam said, ‘I like this street.’

Perlman shivered, tried to hide his discomfort. ‘Me too.’

‘In summer especially.’

They’d walked as far as the Garnethill synagogue. Lou had forgotten the last time he’d been at shul. Years. He’d drifted. What was it – lack of faith or laziness? Or just too little time? Feeling guilty, he glanced at the gate, which was padlocked.

Miriam said, ‘Up here on a summer day you can see for miles. So many spires. The university. Churches. The old Trinity College.’ And for a moment she was lost in contemplation of the lights of the western reaches of the city. He wished he was inside her head, caressing her thoughts: the ultimate intimacy.

The wind whipped at her coat. ‘It’s cold. You want to get a drink somewhere?’

‘Why not?’

They went down the hill to Sauchiehall Street to a bar which had a kind of Latino ambience. It was exactly the sort of place – trendy, patrons who talked about themselves in very loud voices – Lou Perlman would never have entered in his life. But here he was, arm in arm with Miriam: I’ll go anywhere.

‘Let’s have margaritas,’ Miriam suggested. Her face was bright from the cold air, and there was something childlike about her, a little girl who’d come indoors after building a snowman.

‘Fine by me.’ He’d never had a margarita.

‘Are you on duty, Lou?’

‘In a way,’ he said.

‘You’re always on duty, aren’t you?’

‘I have free time. Sometimes.’

She touched his arm. ‘You hate this place, don’t you?’

‘Does it show,’ he said.

‘You’re gritting your teeth. It’s too ritzy-phony. It’s trying to be enchanting, only it isn’t working. It’s just not your style.’

Lou smiled. ‘Do I have a style?’

‘You like grubby little dives. You like bars where all you can get is bad blended whisky and beer, and the conversation is more football than Kafka.’

‘Is he that midfielder Celtic tried to sign last year from Sparta Prague, only he couldn’t get a work permit?’

‘Come on, Lou. I think you’re a wee bit ashamed of admitting you know something about books and paintings and classical music. It doesn’t go with your gritty image.’

‘Me? I have an image?’

‘You’re this long-serving city cop who lives his life in the streets. You’re crumpled and dented. Glasgow bruises you and the work devours you and you mix with some bad people. But you still see a little light of goodness at the end of the tunnel. Justice will always prevail in Lou’s world.’

‘You wouldn’t be suggesting I have a wee streak of optimism, would you?’

‘You’re a decent man, and you know it.’

Would you think me so decent, Miriam, if you knew the feelings in my heart for you? He watched the barman make the margaritas in a blender. He suddenly thought of cocaine fusing with Lindsay’s blood. Neural meltdown. Pharmaceutical cocaine, McLaren had remarked. Pure.

‘Hello?’ Miriam said.

He turned his face away from the liquid churning in the blender. He’d drifted. Always on duty, right. It didn’t stop. The brain kept processing. You didn’t have to be at the scene of the crime. In fact, it was sometimes better if you were elsewhere, free of place, of specific things. Your mind could roam then.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s okay. Work and sleep, sleep and work. Lou Perlman’s life.’ She removed her beret and tossed her head, freeing hair to tumble, and it did, it tumbled in great strands on her shoulders. Oy: he ached to wind them round his fingers.

Their drinks came. Lou looked at the frothing yellow-green liquid. He sipped. He thought he was swallowing neon. Miriam was watching him over the rim of her glass, waiting for a reaction.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Sharpish. Tangy.’

‘Hot when it gets down,’ she said.

‘Aye, I’m feeling it now.’

‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘You know the last time you came to our place for dinner?’

‘Last year, I think.’

‘More like three years ago, Lou. You avoid us.’

Yes, true, he avoided the whole domestic situation, Colin and Miriam, Miriam and Colin, the little touches between them, the common references they were so used to sharing they failed to realize they excluded other people from their world. The perfect couple in the perfect reality. Nothing could be that perfect, he thought. Why didn’t he ever catch some hint of stress in their marriage? Some sense that they ever disagreed about things? Their world was like smooth glass.

‘I’m busy more than I want to be,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget bachelors get the short straw when it comes to working the worst shifts, Miriam.’

‘I suspect you just don’t like seeing married people because it reminds you that you live all alone in a damp old house.’

‘I’m that transparent?’

‘Is there never going to be a woman, Lou?’

‘I got out of the swami business. The future’s impenetrable.’

‘You have a lot to offer,’ she said.

‘So my aunts keep telling me,’ he said, thinking of those Southside crones, Aunties Hilda and Marlene and Susan and all the others who got together and concocted marital schemes. ‘They sit over a cauldron in Giffnock and brew up love-potions.’

‘Because they care about you,’ she said. ‘You ever hear anything from Nina?’

‘Nina? A blast from the past. Not a word in … must be ten years. Probably more.’

‘Ever think you’d like to hear from her?’

‘We don’t have anything to say to one another. So no, I don’t want to hear from her. Everybody should have at least one failed marriage just for the experience. Mine was mercifully short.’

‘Somebody told me she was in New Zealand.’

‘That’s pleasantly far away,’ he said. He picked up his drink, tasted it. Funny how you could be married to somebody, how you could achieve a certain depth of intimacy, and then it disappeared as if it had never taken place. He could hardly remember Nina’s face, her body. Their lovemaking was a blank. She left no scent. He had no photographs of her, no reminders. He was thirty when he’d fancied he could find love with her, and so they’d married, and the union had lasted one year before she bolted in pursuit of her own distant star. I have it in me to be a great writer, Lou. But you cramp me. Glasgow cramps me, I’m suffocating here.

A writer, he thought. All of a sudden I’m married to Virginia fucking Woolf. She took to sitting up nights composing stories in a big yellow-paged ledger. She never asked him to read what she’d written. And then one day – bye-bye, baby – she was gone. London, he heard. Then Paris. After that nothing. Down the Chute of Creativity, he guessed. He hadn’t pursued her. What was the point? He’d known he hadn’t loved her, the marriage was a hollow undertaking, an act of self-delusion. It was history now, and withered, a shrub in winter.

Miriam had fallen silent. She set down her glass and played with her beret on the bar. Her expression darkened. She shut her eyes and inclined her face forward. He risked touching her, laying the palm of his hand over the back of her wrist. Her skin was cold. In this one connection of flesh, Lou Perlman felt more of a charge than he’d felt in a whole year’s marriage to Nina.

‘What can I do to help?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think you can, Lou.’

‘You wanted to see me. You have something to say.’

‘Right. It’s … Rifkind tells me …’ She turned, faced him. ‘Rifkind says Colin has to have this bloody bypass surgery as soon as possible,’ and she made her lovely hands into tight white fists. ‘And I wish that wasn’t the case, because I keep thinking of them cutting Colin open, and people doing things to his heart. And I’m afraid. What if he dies on the table? What if he dies?’

‘He’s not going to die, Miriam.’

‘Heart surgery is risky, Lou.’

‘Rifkind’s good. Anyway, people have these operations every day, they’re commonplace.’

‘But still risky, Lou.’

‘They’ve got sophisticated new techniques. I understand they don’t work by gaslight any more.’

‘Seriously. I read these stories about people who don’t come round from the anaesthetic. What if that happens …’

‘Colin will come through it. He’s strong.’ He thought of his brother, chest cut, skin clamped back, beating heart exposed, merciless lights shining down into the cavity of his body.

‘He’s not as strong as we all thought,’ she said.

‘Strong up here,’ and he tapped his head. ‘Where it counts.’

‘The op’s scheduled for tomorrow at noon.’

She finished her drink. She studied the dregs in her glass a little wistfully – the expression, Perlman thought, of a young girl clutching a bittersweet farewell letter from her lover – then glanced at her watch. ‘I have an evening class to teach,’ she said. ‘It helps take my mind off things.’

‘Call me any time,’ he said.

‘You’re a sweetheart, Lou.’

Yeah, I’m a saint, he thought. A St Bernard more like. You need me, Miriam, I’ll come running, small barrel of brandy attached to my neck. ‘You want me to walk back with you?’

She reached for her beret. ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks for coming to meet me.’

He kissed her quickly on the cheek, a sparrow’s peck, and she began to move away.

‘Oh, Miriam, wait – one last thing. Do you know if Colin’s acquainted with somebody called Joseph Lindsay?’

‘Lindsay? A lawyer?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘He came to the house a couple of times for dinner a while ago.’

‘What did you make of him?’

‘Oh, a quiet wee man. Pleasant in his own way. Why do you ask?’

‘Curious.’

‘You’re working on something, aren’t you?’

‘I can’t tell where work stops and life begins, lassie,’ he said, and watched her go outside. His eyes followed her as she passed the window, her face sad and her hair tugged by the wind and flopping against her shoulders. When she’d gone he felt lonely. He wished he could do something, perform an act of magic, that would make her worries vanish.

He lit the cigarette he’d been gasping for, dragged smoke into his lungs with a satisfying feeling. He studied the comforting red glowing tip.

Connections then. Wexler knew Lindsay. Colin knew Wexler. And Joseph Lindsay had come to dinner. There was really no great surprise in this, was there? Glasgow social circles were small; and Jewish ones incestuously so.

Had Miriam served lamb chops with caramelized onions? Or her beef and paprika ensemble? She did both those dishes well. The wine, he knew, would be good; it was always good at Colin and Miriam’s table. They favoured a certain Nuits St George Colin imported by the case. The conversation: how had that gone? What had they discussed? Miriam would be up and down between dining table and kitchen, playing hostess, leaving the small-time solicitor and the hotshot financial adviser to carry the talk on their own much of the time. It was probably business, Perlman thought. Simple dull business.

Money and the law, those twisted partners. Yack yack yack. He left the bar and shivered on Sauchiehall Street. He flicked his cigarette away and looked in the direction Miriam had taken, but there was no sign of her now. He imagined her climbing up into Garnethill, and he thought of her slim form passing under streetlamps.

Beautiful Miriam, a flash of loveliness in a city where the charred bones of an unknown man had been found stuffed inside an old sewage-pipe, and an alcoholic kid had been battered to death in Sighthill, and Joseph Lindsay, solicitor, had perished in a cocaine explosion.