DOWNSTAIRS IN THE LOUNGE, D’Antoni is peering out through the still-drawn curtains, poised shiftily like Grigsby in The Lady from Shanghai.
“Has the milk been delivered yet?” I say to him.
D’Antoni whirls round and almost fetches the curtains with him.
“What’s happening?” he says. “Where’d you go?”
“Nothing’s happening, and you know where I went. I went upstairs, didn’t I?”
“What for?”
“I went to the karsi, didn’t I?”
“There’s one down here.”
“Is there really? Silly of me.”
I walk over to the button that operates the curtains and they swish apart. D’Antoni retreats from the light with the madness of a moth in reverse.
“Bang, bang,” I say.
“Listen,” he says. “You’d be the same. You don’t know the score. You’re from nowhere. You don’t know what kind of guys these are.”
I smile to myself and open the windows and walk back to the drinks and pour myself another one.
“For Christ’s sake pour yourself a drink and calm down,” I tell him. “You got nothing to worry about.”
I walk past him and out onto the patio. The pool is as flat as formica and the day’s heat is already building up. By the pool there’s a lounger with the back raised, under the shade of a parasol. I walk over and get on the lounger and stretch out my legs and prop my back up and survey the mountains. They’re still the same colour and they’re still as boring. I take a sip of my drink. D’Antoni’s voice drifts across from the open windows.
“Get back in here.”
I take a sip of my drink.
“Those calls,” he says. “I know what they were.”
“Don’t be silly. Who would they be intended for?”
D’Antoni doesn’t answer.
“Well, there you are then.”
“It smells, that’s all I know,” D’Antoni says.
From further back in the lounge comes another voice.
“What smells?”
“Nothing.”
There’s a clink of glasses and Audrey says: “I thought the drains might be acting up again.”
D’Antoni goes back into the lounge and for a while there’s the sound of the two of them talking together and from the tone of their voices Audrey is swinging the conversation the way she’s supposed to. I sip my drink and continue to watch the mountains. Nothing happens to them but inside the villa the talking eventually stops. I give it another five minutes and then I get off the lounger and walk back into the villa. The lounge is empty except for the aroma of Audrey’s perfume. I cross the lounge and walk upstairs. The door to Audrey’s room is closed. I keep going until I get to my room. This time Tina is lying on her stomach, but although the position is different, the snoring is the same. Without waking her, I dig out D’Antoni’s shooters from their hiding place and then I go back downstairs and look for Wally. I try all the usual places but I finally find him in the garage, sitting on a petrol can and staring out at the brilliant square of white sunlight beyond the open garage door.
“What you doing sitting in here on your tod, Wal?” I ask him.
“As a rule, nobody comes in here, that’s why,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, perching my backside on the edge of tire. “It must be a piss-off, you having the run of the place all year round and then suddenly everywhere you turn there’s characters in every room.”
Wally doesn’t answer. I look out into the sunlight.
“That Merc’s going to get warmish if you leave it out there much longer,” I say.
“Fuck the Merc,” Wally says.
I take out my cigarettes and light up.
“Anyway,” I say, “there’ll be a couple more for you to fall over shortly.”
Wally looks at me.
“What?” he says.
“A couple more. Coming up the villa.”
“Who?”
“Con McCarty and Peter the Dutchman.”
Even in the garage gloom, Wally’s change of colour is noticeable.
“Con and Peter?” he says.
I nod my head. Wally gets up off the petrol can and walks over to me.
“Jack,” he says, “what the fuck’s going on, eh?”
“Nothing you need worry about,” I tell him. “Only when they get here, if you’re around when they first arrive, don’t get the megaphone out, will you? Just let them come in and do what they want and keep your mouth shut, eh?”
“Jack, listen—”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve told you. There’s nothing to worry about.”
I get off the tire and walk out into the sunlight and go over to the Merc. I put my hand on the bonnet and it’s like touching a kitchen range.
Compared to the rest of the day, stretched out under the bushes, it’s relatively cool, but that is only relatively. From time to time I make myself feel better by looking between the leaves at the path that leads to the road, and imagining what it would be like lying out on that hot earth. I look at my watch. Any time now, they should be here.
An hour later, and I’m still looking at my watch, and there’s still nothing. I swear to myself. The only way they can get to the villa is along this path. But even if there was another way, there’s been no sound of a motor up on the road, and even if they’d parked miles away, I’d still have heard it, up in this silence. I swear again and get to my feet. I look towards the road. Nothing. The path’s just the same as when I came down it the other night, only sunlit. I turn and look towards the villa. That’s still the same too. Except from beyond it, from the side where the swimming pool is, black smoke is billowing up into the clear blue sky.
I make my way out of the bushes and start hurrying back down to the villa. I round the corner of the building. The pool is still as flat as before. There’s nobody on the patio, but there is an oil drum, and the oil drum is where the smoke is gushing from, and a few feet away from the oil drum is, if I’m not mistaken, the petrol can that Wally was sitting on when he was in the garage.
I walk a little closer to the oil drum and while I’m doing that Wally emerges from the lounge windows carrying a stack of boxed films, which he starts throwing, one by one, into the drum.
“What the Christ are you playing at?” I ask him.
Wally continues throwing the films into the fire.
“They already got Geronimo, you know. It’s too late to warn him now.”
Wally throws the last box into the drum.
“I’m getting rid of that lot, aren’t I?”
“Those ones. You know the ones I mean.”
He looks at the smoke for a moment, then he goes back inside the villa. A few minutes later, Audrey appears framed in the sliding glass.
“What the fuck’s going on?” she asks.
“Wally’s getting rid of the family album.”
Audrey looks at the smoke.
“The films?”
I nod.
“They’ll dock that lot out of his wages,” she says, then she goes back inside and pours a drink and re-appears.
“They’re late,” she says.
“ ’Course they’re fucking late.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Keep following instructions. That shouldn’t be no hardship.”
“He just sent me down for some more booze. He hasn’t even started yet.”
“Like I say, shouldn’t be no hardship. In fact, I thought the smoke was coming out the bedroom window.”
“Piss off.”
“What’s he doing now, chalking on the wall? Must be like the old days, waiting for the Saturday nighters.”
This time Audrey waits a minute or two before saying anything.
“If you climbed the wooden hill right now, we could be getting the champagne iced up ready for Peter and Con’s arrival.”
I just look at her. She shrugs.
“Suit yourself.”
She plucks a bottle off the drinks cabinet and turns away, swishing off in a slipstream of perfume.
“ ‘I did it my way,’ ” she sings, as she rounds the corner.
I grit my teeth and pour myself another drink and while I’m doing that Wally re-appears with another batch of boxes and walks past me out onto the patio. I follow him out and I’m in time to see the flames shoot up and the smoke billow out and it reminds me of the time I witnessed the last of William Dugdale’s mortal remains prior to the scattering of his ashes in Epping Forest. Wally watches the smoke for a while. Then he picks up his cigarettes and matches that are lying on the stonework and lights himself up and at the moment he’s setting fire to the end of his cigarette he catches the petrol can with his left foot and topples it over on the edge of the pool so that the can see-saws on the edge and chug-a-lugs petrol onto the surface of the water. Wally shakes the match out and bends over and rights the can but his movement is so quick that petrol spills upwards out of the mouth of the can and lands on his forearm and on his slacks and Wally begins to fuck and blind but the fucking and blinding is short-lived because immediately the noise Wally is making becomes different, a scream, because the match he threw away didn’t go out, and the splashing petrol is adding fuel to its flame, rippling across the stonework to the bottom of Wally’s slacks which start to take light, causing him to start leaping about like Mick Jagger, again knocking over the petrol can. More petrol spills out and the flames join the fresh lot and race across the stonework to the oil drum to augment the celluloid heat. Wally engages himself in a battle with the belt that’s holding up his trousers, but he’s never going to finish first. So I walk over to him and give him a shoulder which sends him flying off the stonework and out into the pool. The splash Wally makes is like a small explosion, throwing water up to sizzle onto the lighted petrol. Wally surfaces and spits out water as if he’s in competition with Gerald’s fish.
“One of these days, Wally,” I tell him, “you’ll do something without doing it arse about face.”
Wally continues splashing about in the water.
“Jack,” he says, between mouthfulls.
“I expect you never learnt to swim before you learnt to set fire to yourself.”
“You really are a prize cunt, Wal,” I tell him. “No wonder they put you out here, all on your own.”
“Jack—”
I shake my head and I’m just about to turn away when I notice a curious thing. Instead of just the large billowing shadow of the smoke reflecting in the pool, there are two new reflections, gliding softly into view like a couple of water snakes striking out from a canal bank.
“Jack—” Wally says again.
“It’s all right, Wally,” I say, turning round. “I realise what you were trying to spit out.”
It’s funny, looking at Con McCarty and Peter the Dutchman in the Spanish sunshine. They don’t look real. They look like something out of Madame Tussaud’s except the wax is beginning to melt. Con is wearing his eternal leather hat and his leather coat, but Peter, of course, is wearing something more appropriate to the climate, the latest in Mediterranean casual wear, offset by the purple tints of his sunglasses and his bleached hair that’s roughly the same colour as the sunshine. He looks like a bent barman trying to pull them in Piccadilly. The one thing they do have in common, though, are the shooters they’re carrying in their hands.
“Well, well,” Peter says. “You shouldn’t have bothered.”
Wally splashes towards the edge of the pool and I don’t say anything so Peter continues.
“I mean,” he says, “the Son et lumière display. Wally doing his Esther Williams bit. All it needs is Busby Berkeley wielding his megaphone.”
Con looks at the mountains.
“Leave it out, Peter,” he says. “It’s too fucking warm.”
“Is it just the heat, or do you feel embarrassed?” I ask him.
“You not going to give us any trouble, are you Jack?” Peter says.
“ ’Course not. I’m on my holidays, aren’t I?”
“In that case,” Peter says, “you won’t need what you got stuffed up your shirt, will you?”
Peter walks over to me and holds his hand out. I give him D’Antoni’s automatic. Behind me the fire is still sending heat waves up and down my back.
Wally gets to the edge of the pool.
“Give us a hand, Jack,” he says.
“What, after the one you just gave me? Fuck off.”
Peter grins.
“Poor old Wally,” he says. “Never could make it on his own.”
“Come on,” Con says to Peter. “Let’s be getting on with it.”
“Just enjoying the sunshine a minute, sweetheart,” Peter says, taking a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket.
“We enjoyed the bleeding sunshine all the way up the bleeding road, when the taxi blew out, didn’t we?” Con says.
“Philistines,” Peter says. “All I get is Philistines to work with.”
“You should start walking a different way then, shouldn’t you?” Con says.
Peter ignores him and unfolds the piece of paper, studies it, then looks at the villa. In the meantime Wally makes it out of the pool and sits on the pool’s edge, coughing and heaving as if he’s just done a lap round White City.
“Yes,” Peter says, agreeing with whatever he’s been turning over in his mind. “Right.”
“You’re sure?” Con asks him.
“There’s no need for you to come,” Peter says.
“What you talking about?”
Peter gives him a look and the look doesn’t have to take me in for Con to get his meaning.
‘Well, all right,” Con says.
“That’s right,” Peter says.
Peter keeps the look on Con for a minute longer then he turns away and walks towards the sliding windows, leaving Con looking even more embarrassed than before.
“You’ll get over it,” I tell him.
“You what?”
I grin at him.
“Never mind. Come and have a drink.”
I start to walk towards the villa.
“Hang about, Jack,” Con says.
I stop walking and face him again.
“Leave it out, Con. You’re not going to do it that way. You’ll probably leave it to Peter, anyway.”
“Jack, this ain’t my idea, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. So come and have a drink.”
I turn away and start walking again and apart from dropping me there and then Con has no choice but to follow on the principle that he can’t risk letting me out of his sight. He’s right with me when I reach the plate glass and he’s still by my side when I reach the drinks. Peter, by that time, has traversed the lounge and is now, I imagine, half way up the stairs.
“What you like, Con?”
“Some kind of beer,” Con says. “Lager, if you got any.”
I bend down and open the refrigerated cabinet and while I’m doing that Con takes a moment out to look round the room and inwardly digest its splendours and so it’s no problem for me to take D’Antoni’s other shooter from behind the lagers where I stacked it earlier, and stand up and put the snub barrel against Con’s lips and get a grip on his own shooter. Con goes rigid. I press the barrel tighter against his mouth and shake my head and Con stays rigid. Then, after a little while, Con relaxes and smiles and with his free hand pushes my shooter away from his face.
“Christ, I don’t mind,” he says. “So you overpowered me. Not a lot Gerald and Les can do about that, is there?” We look at each other and then I smile back at him.
“You got lager in there, or just shooters?” Con says.
“Help yourself,” I tell him. “I got something to do. Only, I will take your shooter, just in case the lager goes to your head.”
Con shrugs and hands me his shooter and is about to turn his attention to the refrigerated cabinet when from upstairs comes the sound of a shot. Fuck it, I think to myself, Peter moved quicker than I thought he would. I run across the lounge and then there’s two more shots and I’m in the hall and I’m more than somewhat surprised to see that Peter has only made it as far as the top of the steps and it’s for sure that he hasn’t fired his one because he’s standing there like a rabbit at the arrival of a ferret. I begin to run up the stairs and Peter whirls round and sees the two shooters I’m carrying and hauls a couple off at me but luckily they’re wild because while he’s hauling them off he’s also throwing himself to the landing floor which affects his aim more than a little bit. But at the same time they’re not wild enough to make me feel inclined to continue to the top of the steps so I about-face and scamper to the bottom of the steps and round the corner of the lounge, colliding with Con in the process. At the same time a door upstairs slams and Peter hauls off another shot in the direction of the slamming door and the next thing I hear is Audrey screaming meaningless odds along the passage, and Peter, more intelligible, shouting:
“You fucking bitch, you and your ponce, you set us up.”
It’s my turn to shout now so I stick my head round the lounge corner.
“Peter, you bleedin’ egg, it ain’t a set up. Leave it out and get Audrey out of it. He ain’t supposed to have a shooter.”
“I know he bleedin’ ain’t, don’t I? Oh, yes, I know that.”
Audrey’s screeching stops and farther down the landing there’s the sound of a different door slamming and I guess that Audrey’s made it to my room, where Tina’s still laying her lonely locks.
“I shouldn’t stay there if I was you,” I call to Peter. “He knows you’re there now.”
I must admit I enjoyed that one.
“Yeah, and so do you, don’t you?”
“Suit yourself,” I call back.
“What’s going on, for Christ’s sake?” Con says.
“I’ve no fucking idea. I’d copped for both the bastard’s shooters.”
“So what’s happening?”
“I’ve told you. I’ve no fucking idea.”
As I’m saying that there’s a blur of movement out in the hall and I swing round just in time to see Peter legging it from the bottom of the stairs to the other side of the ornamental fish. He crouches down and rests his gun arm on the fish’s tail. Con and I retreat fully round the corner.
“Leave it out, Peter,” Con calls to him. “Jack’s in the bleedin’ dark like we are.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, so stop buggering about.”
I leave them to their little argument and walk over to the plate glass and out onto the patio. The flames are much lower now, and Wally is no longer sitting on the edge of the pool, which is not an altogether surprising fact. I look up at the balcony that runs along the face of the villa. Then I pick up one of the recliners and walk over to the wall. I turn the recliner arse about face and prop it up longways against the wall and use the tubular steel cross pieces as a ladder until I can get a handhold on the balcony’s wrought iron work and pull myself up. When I’ve done that I swing my leg over and walk over to the plate glass of my window. The curtains are still drawn but the window is open. So in I go.
Audrey is crouched by the door, listening. She is naked except for my jacket which she’s draped round her shoulders. Tina is sitting on the bed, and she, of course, is just plain naked. Neither of them notice me slide through the curtains.
“I done the downstairs windows,” I say. “Shall I do these ones now?”
They both swing round like you’ve never seen and Audrey’s like the colour of heart failure. Her movement causes her to sit on the floor and I wouldn’t lay odds on her ever getting up again.
“Jesus,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”
“What’s happening?” Tina says.
I ignore her and say to Audrey:
“What you been playing at, then?”
Audrey doesn’t answer. She just stays where she is on the floor, propping her back up against the door. So I put the shooters on the bed, walk over to her and lift her up and give her a couple and ask her again. She shakes free and starts screaming the odds again.
“I was trying to row you out of your bother, wasn’t I? Seeing as you lost your bottle I was stopping you from being topped, wasn’t I?”
“What do you mean? What was all the shooting?”
“Some of it was me and some of it was him.”
“Audrey—”
“Listen, you berk. In the bedroom, in the dressing table drawer, Gerald always keeps a little shooter, don’t he? So when it turns out that Con and Peter’s late, I reckon that if when they arrive D’Antoni’s already topped, you’re not going to get topped yourself, especially if I say you done the topping. Then everything’s the same as it was, ain’t it?”
I look at her and overcome the temptation of telling her how little I appreciate people taking a hand in my destiny. Instead I say:
“So what happened?”
“After the last session, I go to the bathroom, don’t I, and on my way back I sit down at the dressing table like I’m going to fix myself up and I open the drawer where the shooter is, only I don’t exactly have anywhere on my person I can hide it, if you get my meaning. So I look in the mirror and weigh up the odds of managing it from the dressing table but because of the way he is on the bed he’s only going to get one up his arse. That being the case, I ask him to fetch me a drink and he swings his legs over the side of the bed and starts busying himself at the bedside table. So while he’s thus occupied I take the shooter out of the drawer but I’m snookered by Gerald’s Hall of Mirrors set-up, via which D’Antoni susses out what I’m up to. I’ve not even got the safety catch off before he’s up off the edge of the bed, and coming at me throwing bottles and God knows what in my direction. Anyway somehow the shooter goes off before he gets to me and although I’m not aiming I get him in the top of the leg and although he screams like a tart it doesn’t stop him throwing himself at me and the two of us finish up on the floor. What with him slowed down a bit I manage to get away from him but not before he’s collared the shooter and hauled a couple off that are not too wide of the mark, I can tell you, and I’m pleased to get out the door, at least, until Peter starts hauling them off in all directions.”
“So he’s still in there now.”
“That’s right.”
“And he’s all tooled up.”
“I just told you.”
I shake my head.
“You done well, Audrey. It’s almost as good as how well you done that time in Wembley when your helpful efforts meant a lot of talking to the Filth before everything was back to normal again.”
Audrey throws one at me but I’ve seen that one coming a mile off, but that doesn’t prevent her launching into a jawbone solo.
“You ponce, I could be topped by now on your account.”
“Not on my account, darlin’. Anything you get in this life’s down to you.”
“Yeah, like Con and Peter seeing to you when they done D’Antoni.”
“Yeah, about that,” I say to her. “You done very well in that department. Now you’ve made sure D’Antoni’s fixed up with a shooter that makes it nice for everybody, doesn’t it?”
“I thought you liked things the hard way.”
I grab hold of her again.
“Listen, between you and Wally, you really fucked things up.”
“I know I’m only here on me holidays, but what’s happening? What’s all the shooters going off for?”
I don’t have to tell her to shut up because another voice does that for me and that voice belongs to D’Antoni.
Of course I don’t move until he tells me to, and when he does it’s for me to turn round with my arms raised. Which, of course, I do.
D’Antoni’s leaning against the jamb of the open bathroom door. Apart from the shooter he’s pointing at me, he’s naked except for Audrey’s negligee, which he’s wearing round his thigh like a tourniquet, the blood making the pale pink purple. So there we all are, a trio of nudes and me, only because the way D’Antoni’s looking at me I’m feeling more naked than the lot of them put together.
“You bastard,” D’Antoni says to me. “I knew it all the time. It stank all along. You came here to set me up, you mother.”
“Well,” I say. “About that. It’s not really what you think.”
“Don’t try,” D’Antoni says. “It’ll make no difference. You know that.”
I shrug in agreement and consider the irony of the situation. I feel rather like Bobby Charlton would if the ref accused him of diving in the area.
“But I want to watch you wait for it,” he says. “That’s going to be some fun.”
He slips a little on his injured leg and while that’s happening I flick a glance at the bed ostensibly to check if it’s possible for D’Antoni to see beyond Tina and suss out the shooters, but what in fact I do see is Tina’s hand, out of sight of D’Antoni’s vision, very slowly and cooly working its way towards the nearest of the pair, set off so elegantly as they are against the silk of the sheets. I try to catch Tina’s eye so’s to tell her not to, but she has her gaze, quite rightly in the event of what she’s doing, fixed on D’Antoni.
“There is this,” I say to D’Antoni, “and whatever you think, you ought to hear me out; those characters down there, they want me too. So if you choose to believe me, I could do you a favour while doing myself one, I mean, help you get out.”
“He’s right,” Audrey says. “Jack’s right. He really is.”
D’Antoni smiles at us.
“Sure—” he begins, but Tina interrupts him.
She interrupts him by calling my name and snatching up the shooter from the bed and attempting to throw the shooter in my direction but there’s no point in my attempting to catch it because D’Antoni, as I knew he would, has fired automatically in the direction of the disturbance, and he’s good, because the bullet enters Tina’s flesh at her throat, causing a very neat thin arc of blood to surge out onto the parquet flooring, and not such a neat sound to rattle around in the bubbles on the inside of her throat. The shooter she was holding echoes the rattle in her throat as it hits the floor, then Tina falls slowly sideways and snuggles down against the silk sheets, her body covering the second shooter, the jet of blood still pouring out of her with a perfect regularity, like the water from the mouth of Gerald’s fish.
I, myself, don’t bother to move because, of course, D’Antoni’s shooter is now back covering me. The sound in Tina’s throat begins to die down and from downstairs there is nothing but silence. After a while D’Antoni speaks.
“All right,” he says. “O.K. Now you, Audrey, you walk across to the bed and you kick the shooter towards me.”
Audrey, who has been as stone as the downstairs sculpture ever since the bullet hit Tina, does as she’s told, but in the process Audrey slips in Tina’s blood and goes arse over elbow between me and D’Antoni and I use this distraction to simply open the door and nick out and close it with a little help from a couple of shots in the woodwork from D’Antoni; my departure is also orchestrated by a few descriptive screams from Audrey, something to do with me leaving her in it, but I reflect that it’s time for her to be a little more philosophical regarding the ways of the world. I mean, how am I to get her out of it if I’m still in there with her?
I leg it down the landing and take temporary cover in the doorway of Audrey’s room, but it’s like I thought, D’Antoni doesn’t come blasting down the hall after me. I wait a minute or two and then call downstairs.
“Peter, it’s me. You going to play silly buggers or are you going to let me down?”
“What’s going on up there?”
“You could always come up and see.”
“You didn’t top him, then?”
I don’t answer that one.
“Only Wally’s down here and he’s getting a bit concerned about the state of his offspring.”
Wally’s voice drifts up from the stairwell.
“Yeah, Jack, what’s going off?”
“Nothing.”
“Where’s Tina?”
“She’s on the bed.”
“D’Antoni in there with her?”
“Yeah. And Audrey.”
“What they doing?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I? They’re in there and I’m out here.”
There’s silence from downstairs.
“Am I coming down or aren’t I?” I call down again.
“Yeah, all right,” Peter says.
I leave the doorway and go to the balcony and look down. Peter’s still by the fish but now he’s no longer crouching, he’s leaning against the fish as though he’s waiting for a beach photographer to take a snap of him. Con’s standing by the lounge corner, a drink in his hand, still with his leather hat on. The odd man out is Wally, who is halfway up the stairs and still climbing.
“Where you going, Wal?” I ask him.
“Something’s up,” he says.
Now he’s at the top of the steps.
“Nothing’s up, Wal.”
He keeps on walking. I put a hand against his chest.
“I got to see what’s going off.”
“You go in there and you’ll get topped.”
Wally’s about to give me an answer to that when from down the corridor there’s the faint sound of a door handle being turned and with the instincts of a stoat Wally darts into Audrey’s bedroom, out of sight. Myself, I’m a little slower, and for the second time today I find myself looking at D’Antoni and his shooter, only this time it’s pointing into Audrey’s neck. Audrey is still naked but D’Antoni has got himself into his sports shirt and slacks, and he says to me: “I don’t have to explain the situation to you.”
I express my understanding by not moving. D’Antoni jabs the shooter further into Audrey’s neck and she starts moving down the corridor. They progress a little way and then from downstairs comes Peter’s voice.
“You coming down or what?”
D’Antoni and Audrey stop. D’Antoni says:
“How many of them?”
“Two.”
“Tell them I’m coming down and tell them how I’m coming.”
I clear my throat.
“Peter, he’s coming down, only with Mrs. Fletcher, if you get my meaning, so don’t boil it over, all right?”
Silence.
“You heard me?”
“Yeah, he heard you,” says Con. “Didn’t you, Peter?”
Eventually Peter says: “Yeah, I heard.”
“Tell him you’re going down first,” D’Antoni says.
“I’m coming down first,” I tell Peter.
There’s no answer.
“Peter!”
“Right.”
I hope various thoughts apropos of Peter’s brief aren’t going through his mind in terms of capitalising on the present situation, but I don’t, at the moment, have a great many alternatives at hand. I look at D’Antoni and Audrey and Audrey looks back at me and says: “You couldn’t just do as you were told, could you?”
I don’t answer her. D’Antoni says: “All right. Move.”
I turn round and start to move to the top of the steps. Down in the hall, the tableau is as before, except that by the fish Peter is a little less relaxed.
“Start down,” D’Antoni says.
I turn back to D’Antoni.
“Where do I go when I get to the bottom?”
“Just start down,” D’Antoni says, and while he’s saying that, beyond his shoulder I see Wally nick silently out of Audrey’s room and start off down the corridor towards the bedroom where Tina is. Christ, I think to myself, that’s all we need to elevate the balloon. But, like I say, I’ve no choice; at present I have to do what D’Antoni tells me to, so I start down the stairs, not quickly at all. I’m half-way down before I sense that D’Antoni and Audrey are standing at the top of the staircase, watching my progress.
“Stop there,” D’Antoni says.
I do as I’m told.
“You by the fountain. Throw your piece as far as you can throw it.”
“Fuck off,” Peter says.
“You better tell him that isn’t the way to talk, Mrs. Fletcher,” D’Antoni says to Audrey.
“Do it, Peter,” Audrey says to him.
Peter doesn’t answer and also he doesn’t look as if he’s inclined to follow D’Antoni’s instructions.
“Peter,” I say to him. “Don’t be a cunt. Gerald won’t thank you for getting Audrey topped.”
Peter looks disgusted.
“Oh, fuck it,” Peter says, and throws the shooter listlessly in the direction of the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s fine,” D’Antoni says. “Now the other guy.”
Con spreads his hands.
“You came too late,” he says. “I already had mine cleaned out.”
D’Antoni weighs that up for a moment.
“Just move over to your partner,” he says.
Con downs his drink and puts his glass on the floor and straightens up and walks over to the fish and stands next to it and clasps his hands in front of him like he’s on an I.D. parade.
“Fine,” D’Antoni says. “That’s fine.”
Which leaves me, standing on the steps, like an employee of the Grand Old Duke of York.
“Now,” D’Antoni says. “I been waiting for this. I figure this is a good time as any to pay you off for the good job you done on looking after me. It’s bonus time, Carter.”
For the moment, I don’t move.
“You’re not going to beg?” D’Antoni says. “You’re not going to ask for help from your dear old mother who’s been dead all these past years?”
I don’t say anything.
“Pity,” D’Antoni says. “I would’ve liked that.”
If, I’m thinking to myself, I dive now, off the stairs, I’ll probably break my fucking neck, but at the same time, there’s no percentage in staying on the stairs, so I get myself mentally set up for the move, but before I can make it the stairwell is as full of sound as the noise of a shooter rattles round the plate glass and the plasterwork. But the odd thing is, I don’t feel any pain, and the scream isn’t mine, so I twist round and look in the direction of the noise and it’s not come from D’Antoni’s shooter at all because his shooter is spinning away from him, closely followed by a piece of shoulder, and he’s clawing at where it used to be. At the same time, Audrey is augmenting the noise D’Antoni’s making, but unlike D’Antoni, she’s no longer upright, she’s thrown herself to the balcony floor, and because of her position I can see the top half of Wally, holding the shooter that Tina buried beneath her, holding it two-handed, all set to let D’Antoni have another one, which of course D’Antoni is more than aware of, but being without his shooter, there’s not a lot he can do about it, and by now he’s beyond rational thought and so he starts moving towards Wally, as if that will help, like a goalkeeper trying to narrow the angle. I also notice that Peter, always the opportunist, has raced across to where his shooter lies, and Con, he’s placed himself in a position to get better cover from the fish, adjusting his leather hat as he does that thing.
At the same time, Wally lets go two more shots.
They’re both wild, naturally. But at Wally’s range, it doesn’t matter. The first one doesn’t make an awful lot of difference to D’Antoni’s present condition, it hits him in the left wrist, causing a minor explosion of flesh and bone to shatter down over the edge of the balcony. Normally, of course, the effect would have D’Antoni on his knees, screaming the way he wanted me to scream, but the situation being what it is, a matter of life and death, it doesn’t even slow D’Antoni down, he keeps going forward, and it’s the second shot that counts, because that one catches him in the stomach, dead centre. The power of the shot flips him round, like a dealer flipping over a card, so that he’s facing the opposite way to where he was going, and as he’s still moving, that means he’s going towards the top of the stairs, but between him and that destination is Audrey’s quivering body, which he’s no longer aware of, because he trips over it, sending him headlong to the top of the steps—but he prevents his ultimate demise by hanging on to the end of the balustrade; he tries to pull himself to his feet, but a great internal shudder causes him to slip a little bit, cough, and expel a great gout of blood in the general curving direction of myself. And that, basically, is the last conscious act his body performs, because three, sharp, sweetly measured shots ring out from the floor below and form a three-leaf clover around D’Antoni’s heart and then D’Antoni very slowly lets go of his grip on the balustrade and comes to rest with his torso lying head first down the first three steps, his legs still on the balcony.
Down below, Peter cries out in triumph.
“How about that?” he says. “Who wins the glass ash-tray, then?”
But his self-congratulation is short lived because Wally appears at the balustrade and, still two handed, points the shooter in the direction of Peter’s voice; and if D’Antoni had lost his grip on rational thought, Wally’s present state of mind makes D’Antoni seem as lucid as Norman Vincent Peale. He looks like Karloff’s stand-in as he hangs over the balustrade, homing in on Peter.
“You cunts,” Wally screams. “Look what you done.”
“Leave it out, Wally,” Peter says. “What you on about?”
Wally answers by pulling the trigger. The bullet screams off the floor and up over Peter’s head. Peter dances backwards like Jagger in reverse. From behind the fish, Con says to Peter:
“Dodge out of it in a different direction, will you?”
Peter ignores Con and joins him behind the tail fin.
“Fuck off,” Con says. “There ain’t enough room.”
“All of you,” Wally screams. “You all done it, you cunts.”
Wally hauls three or four off in the direction of the fish. Shrapnel-like scales ripple off the plate glass.
“For fuck’s sake, Peter,” Con says, holding down his hat.
“All of you,” Wally screams, twisting round in my direction. “All of you.”
He lets one go at me, but again, I’ve seen it coming, and by the time the bullet’s in the plaster, I’ve made it to the bottom of the stairs and am well on my way to joining Peter and Con where they are, which is approximately half way up the fish’s arse. This must be the perfect end to a perfect holiday.
“Here,” Con says. “Find your own fucking hole.”
Wally steps over Audrey, negotiates D’Antoni’s body, and starts down the stairs, his steps as measured as Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Boulevard only he doesn’t have Von Stroheim to tell him what to do. The only thing that’s straight about Wally is the direction of his shooter, which is pointing directly at the fish. He hauls off another shot, and more fish scatters to the four corners of the hall.
“Peter,” Con says. “For fuck’s sake. You got the shooter.”
“You what?” Peter says, like he’s a mesmerised gay at Judy Garland’s Palladium performance.
“You,” Wally screams. “All of you. All of my life!”
Another shot. More shrapnel. Peter rises up from behind the fin.
“Wally,” he says. “You got to leave this out.”
Wally says: “You, you fucking poof. Yeah, you first.”
Wally takes aim, but Peter, looking more sorrowful than angry, fires his shooter twice. One in the neck, one in the eye. For a second or two, Wally remains upright, then he just crumbles, like a demolished chimney.
For a while after that, the hall is silent, the whole villa is silent, except for the dribbling of the ornamental fish.