Men from Boys Page 14

  ‘Meat and drink,’ Wayne said.

  ‘Don’t you find Lamartine’s plea an inspiration, Fay-Alice?’ Iles asked. ‘Savour. A word I thrill to. The sensuousness of it, together with the tragic hint of enjoying something wonderful, yet elusive.’ He began to tremble slightly and reached out a hand, as if to touch Fay-Alice’s long back or some conjoint region. But moving quickly towards the plate of sandwiches on a garden table, Harpur put himself between the A.C.C. and her. He took Iles’s pleaful, savour-seeking fingers on the lapel of his jacket. In any case, Fay-Alice had stepped back immediately she saw the A.C.C.’s hand approach and for a moment looked as if she was about to grab his arm and possibly break it in some kind of anti-rape drill.

  ‘Or the history of art,’ Wayne said. ‘That’s another terrific realm. This could overlap with French literature because while the poets were writing their verses in France there would be neighbours, in the same street most probably, painting and making sculptures in their attics. The French are known for it – easels, smocks, everything. It’s the light in those parts – great for art but also useful when people wanted to write a poem outside. In a way it all ties up. That’s the thing about culture, especially French. A lot of strands.’

  ‘And you’ll be coming home to live with Mother and Father until Oxford now, and in the nice long vacations, will you, Fay-Alice?’ Iles asked.

  ‘Why?’ she replied.

  Iles said, ‘It’s just that –’

  ‘I don’t understand how you know my father,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, Mr Iles and I – this is a real far-back association,’ Wayne said.

  ‘But how exactly?’ she asked. ‘He’s never been to our house, has he? I’ve never heard you speak of him, Dad.’

  ‘This is like an arrangement, Fay-Alice,’ Nora Ridout replied.

  ‘What kind of arrangement?’ Fay-Alice asked.

  ‘Yes, like an arrangement,’ Nora Ridout replied.

  ‘A business arrangement?’ Fay-Alice asked.

  ‘You can see how such a go-ahead school makes them put all the damn sharp queries, Mr Iles,’ Wayne said. ‘I love it. This is what I believe they call intellectual curiosity, used by many of the country’s topmost on their way to discoveries such as medical and DVDs. What they will not do, girls at this school – and especially girls who do really well, such as Fay-Alice – what they will not do is take something as right just because they’re told it. Oh, no. Rigour’s another word for this attitude, I believe. Not like rigor mortis but rigour in their thoughts and decisions. It’s a school that teaches them how to sort out the men from the boys re brain power.’

  ‘So, does the school come into it somehow?’ Fay-Alice asked. ‘Does it? Does it? How are these two linked with the school, Dad, Mum?’ She hammered at the question, yet Harpur thought she feared an answer.

  ‘Linked?’ Iles said. ‘Linked? Oh, just a pleasant excursion for Mr Harpur and myself, thanks to the thoughtfulness of your father, Fay-Alice.’

  ‘A business or social arrangement?’ Fay-Alice asked.

  ‘No, no, not a business arrangement. How could it be a business arrangement?’ Wayne replied, laughing.

  ‘Social?’ Fay-Alice asked.

  ‘It’s sort of social,’ Wayne said.

  ‘So, if it’s friendship why do you call him Mr Iles, not Desmond, his first name?’ Fay-Alice asked.

  ‘See what I mean about the queries, Mr Iles? I heard the motto of this school is “Seek ever the truth”, but in a classical tongue which provides many a motto around the country on account of tradition. You can’t beat the classics if you want to hit the right note.’

  The A.C.C. said, ‘And I understand swimming has become a pursuit of yours, Fay-Alice. Excellent for the body. You must get along to the municipal pool at home. I should go there more often myself. Certainly I shall. This will be an experience – to see you active in the water, your arms and legs really working, wake a-glisten.’ Beautifully symmetric circles of sweat appeared on each of his temples, each the size of a two-penny piece, although the group were still outside on the lawn and under the shade of a eucalyptus. ‘The butterfly stroke – strenuous upper torso exercise, but useful for toning everything, don’t you agree, Fay-Alice? Toning everything. Oh, I look forward to that. Wayne, it will be a treat to have Fay-Alice around in the breaks from Oxford.’

  ‘Aren’t you a bit old for the butterfly?’ she said. ‘I hate watching a heart attack in the fast lane, all those desperate bubbles and the sudden incontinence.’

  Iles chuckled, obviously in tribute to her aggression and jauntiness. ‘Oh, look, Fay-Alice –’

  ‘We don’t really need flics here, thank you,’ she replied. ‘So why don’t you just piss off back to your interrogation suite alone and play with yourself, Iles?’ Harpur decided that, even without pre-knowledge from its brochure, anyone could have recognised this as an outstandingly select school where articulateness was prized and deftly inculcated.

  In the fine wide assembly hall, he appreciatively watched Fay-Alice on the platform stride out with her long back et cetera to receive prizes from the Lord Lieutenant. He seemed to do quite an amount of congratulatory talking to and hand shaking with Fay-Alice before conferring her trophies. All at once, then, Harpur realised that Iles had gone from the seat alongside him. For a moment, Harpur wondered whether the A.C.C. intended attacking the Lord Lieutenant for infringing on Fay-Alice and half stood in case he had to move forward and try to throw Iles to the ground and suppress him.

  They had been placed at the end of a row, Iles to Harpur’s right next to the gangway, Wayne and Nora on his left. To help keep the hall cool, all doors were open. Glancing away from the platform now, Harpur saw Iles run out through the nearest door, as if chasing someone, fine black lace-ups flashing richly in the sunshine. He disappeared. On stage, the presentations continued. Harpur sat down properly again. The A.C.C.’s objective was not the Lord Lieutenant.

  After about a minute, Harpur heard noises from the back of the hall and, turning, saw a man wearing a yellow and magenta crash helmet and face-guard enter via another open door and dash between some empty rows of seats. At an elegant sprint Iles appeared through the same door shortly afterwards. The man in the helmet stopped, spun and, pulling an automatic pistol from his waistband, pointed it at Iles, perhaps a Browning 140 DA. The A.C.C. swung himself hard to one side and crouched as the gun fired. Then he leaned far forward and used a fierce sweep of his left fist to knock the automatic from the man’s hand. With his clenched right, Iles struck him two short, rapid blows in the neck, just below the helmet. At once, he fell. Iles had been in the row behind, but now clambered over the chair backs to reach him. Harpur could not make out the man on the floor but saw Iles provide a brilliant kicking, though without thuggish shouts, so as not to disturb the prize-giving. Often Iles was damn fussy about decorum. He had mentioned his own quality schooling and this intermittent respect for protocol might date from then.

  But because of the gunfire and activity at the rear of the hall, the ceremony had already faltered. Iles bent down and came up with the automatic. ‘Please, do continue,’ he called out to the Lord Lieutenant and other folk on the stage, waving the weapon in a slow, soothing arc, to demonstrate its harmlessness now. ‘Things are all right here, oh, yes.’ Iles was not big yet looked unusually tall among the chairs and might be standing on the gunman’s face. A beam of sunlight reached in through a window and gave his neat features a good yet unmanic gleam.

  Afterwards, when the local police and ambulance people had taken the intruder away, Harpur and Iles waited at the end of the hall while the guests, school staff and platform dignitaries dispersed. Wayne, Nora and Fay-Alice approached, Wayne carrying Fay-Alice’s award volumes. ‘Had that man come for me?’ he asked. ‘For me? Why?’ He looked terrified.

  ‘My God,’ Nora said.

  ‘Someone hired for a hit?’ Wayne asked.

  ‘I’d think so,’ Iles said.

  ‘All sorts would
want to commission him, Wayne,’ Harpur said. ‘You’re a target.’

  ‘My God,’ Nora said.

  ‘Someone had you marked, Wayne,’ Harpur said.

  ‘He’d have gone for you in the mêlée as the crowd departed at the end of the do, I should think,’ Iles said.

  ‘But how did you spot him, Mr Iles?’ Nora asked.

  ‘I’m trained always to wonder about people at girls’ school prize-givings with their face obscured by a crash helmet and obviously tooled up,’ Iles said. ‘There was a whole lecture course on it at Staff College.’

  ‘Why on earth did he come back into the hall?’ Nora asked.

  ‘He would still have had a shot at Wayne, as long as he could knock me out of the way,’ Iles said. ‘He had orders. He’s taken a fee, I expect. He’d be scared to fail.’

  ‘Oh, you saved Daddy, Mr Iles,’ Fay-Alice replied, riotously clapping her slim hands. ‘An Assistant Chief Constable accepting such nitty-gritty, perilous work on our behalf, and when so brilliantly dressed, too! It was wonderful – so brave, so skilful, so selfless. I watched mesmerised, but mesmerised, absolutely. A privilege, I mean it. Thank you, Mr Iles. You so deserve our trust.’ She inclined herself towards him, the long back stretching longer, and would have touched the A.C.C.’s arm. He skipped out of reach. ‘We shall have so much to talk about at the swimming pool back home,’ she said. ‘I do look forward to it.’

  ‘Let’s get away now, Harpur,’ Iles snarled.

  ‘Yes, I must show you my butterfly, Mr Iles,’ Fay-Alice said. ‘Desmond.’

  ‘Let’s get away now, Harpur,’ Iles replied.

  UNTIL GWEN

  Dennis Lehane

  Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight-ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rear-view, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar two Sundays a month at the local VFW. But she feels her calling – her true calling in life – is to write.

  You go, ‘Books?’

  ‘Books.’ She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line off your fist and up her left nostril. ‘Screenplays!’ She shouts it at the dome light for some reason. ‘You know – movies.’

  ‘Tell him the one about the psycho saint guy,’ your father says. ‘That would put my ass in the seat.’ Your father winks at you in the rear-view, like he’s driving the two of you to the prom. ‘Go ahead. Tell him.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She turns on the seat to face you and your knees touch, and you think of Gwen, a look she gave you once, nothing special, just looking back at you as she stood at the front door, asking if you’d seen her keys. A forgettable moment if ever there was one but you spent four years in prison remembering it.

  ‘. . . so at his canonisation,’ Mandy is saying, ‘something, like, happens? And his spirit comes back and goes into the body of this priest. But, like, the priest? He has a brain tumor. He doesn’t know it or nothing but he does, and it’s fucking up his, um –’

  ‘Brain?’ you try.

  ‘Thoughts,’ Mandy says. ‘So he gets this saint in him and that does it, because like even though the guy was a saint, his spirit has become evil because his soul is gone. So this priest? He spends the rest of the movie trying to kill the Pope.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just listen,’ your father says. ‘It gets good.’

  You look out the window. A car sits empty along the shoulder. It’s beige and someone has painted gold wings on the sides, fanning out from the front bumper and across the doors, and a sign is affixed to the roof with some words on it, but you’ve passed it by the time you think to wonder what it says.

  ‘See, there’s this secret group that works for the Vatican? They’re like a, like a . . .’

  ‘A hit squad,’ your father says.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mandy says and presses her finger to your nose. ‘And the lead guy, the, like, head agent? He’s the hero. He lost his wife and daughter in a terrorist attack on the Vatican a few years back, so he’s a little fucked up, but –’

  You say, ‘Terrorists attacked the Vatican?’

  ‘Huh?’

  You look at her, waiting. She has a small face, eyes too close to her nose.

  ‘In the movie,’ Mandy says. ‘Not in real life.’

  ‘Oh. I just, you know, four years inside, you assume you miss a couple of headlines, but . . .’

  ‘Right.’ Her face dark and squally now. ‘Can I finish?’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ you say and snort another line off your fist, ‘even the guys on Death Row would have heard about that one.’

  ‘Just go with it,’ your father says. ‘It’s not like real life.’

  You look out the window, see a guy in a chicken suit carrying a can of gas in the breakdown lane, think how real life isn’t like real life. Probably more like this poor dumb bastard running out of gas in a car with wings painted on it. Wondering how the hell he ever got here. Wondering who he’d pissed off in that previous real life.

  Your father has rented two rooms at an EconoLodge so you and Mandy can have some privacy, but you send Mandy home after she twice interrupts the blowjob she’s giving you to pontificate on the merits of Michael Bay films.

  You sit in the blue-wash flicker of ESPN and eat peanuts from a plastic sleeve you got out of a vending machine and drink plastic cupfuls of Jim Beam from a bottle your father presented when you reached the parking lot. You think of the time you’ve lost and how nice it is to sit alone on a double bed and watch TV, and you think of Gwen, can taste her tongue for just a moment, and you think about the road that’s led you here to this motel room on this night after forty-seven months in prison and how a lot of people would say it was a twisted road, a weird one, filled with curves, but you just think of it as a road like any other. You drive down it on faith or because you have no other choice and you find out what it’s like by the driving of it, find out what the end looks like only by reaching it.

  Late the next morning, your father wakes you, tells you he drove Mandy home and you’ve got things to do, people to see.

  Here’s what you know about your father above all else – people have a way of vanishing in his company.

  He’s a professional thief, consummate con man, expert in his field, and yet there’s something far beyond professionalism at his core, something unreasonably arbitrary. Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once, laughed at maybe, yet swore never to repeat.

  ‘She was with you last night?’ you say.

  ‘You didn’t want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up. Poor girl like that.’

  ‘But you drove her home,’ you say.

  ‘I’m speaking Czech?’

  You hold his eyes for a bit. They’re big and bland, with the heartless innocence of a newborn’s. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a while, you say, ‘Let me take a shower.’

  ‘Fuck the shower,’ he says. ‘Throw on a baseball cap and let’s get.’

  You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those things you would have realised you’d miss if you’d given it any thought ahead of time, standing under the spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as you want it, shampoo that doesn’t smell like factory smoke.

  Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old man flicking through channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds: Home Shopping network – zap. Springer – zap. Oprah – zap. Soap opera voices; soap opera music – zap. Monster truck show – pause. Commercial – zap, zap, zap.

  You come back into the room, steam trailing you, and pick your jeans up off the bed, put them on.

  The old man says, ‘Afraid you’d drowned. Worried I’d have to take a plunger to the drain, suck you back up.’

  You say, ‘Where we going?’

  ‘Take a d
rive,’ your father says with a small shrug, flicks past a cartoon.

  ‘Last time you said that, I got shot twice.’

  Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and soft like a six-year-old’s. ‘Wasn’t the car that shot you, was it?’

  You go out to Gwen’s place but she isn’t there any more, a couple of black kids playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch to look at the strange car idling in front of her house.

  ‘You didn’t leave it here?’ your father says.

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘Think.’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘So you didn’t?’

  ‘I told you – not that I recall.’

  ‘So you’re sure.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You had a bullet in your head.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘I thought one glanced off.’

  You say, ‘Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don’t get hung up on the particulars.’

  ‘That how it works?’ Your father pulls away from the curb as the woman comes down the steps.

  The first shot came through the back window, and Gentleman Pete flinched big-time, jammed the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the highway exit barrier, air bags exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of your head exploding, glass pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, ‘What happened? Jesus. What happened?’

  You pulled her with you out the back door – Gwen, your Gwen – and you crossed the exit ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there but you kept going, not sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your head on fire, burning so bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.

  ‘And you don’t remember nothing else?’ your father says. You’ve driven all over town, every street, every dirt road, every hollow there is to stumble across in Stuckley, West Virginia.

  ‘Not till she dropped me off at the hospital.’

  ‘Dumb fucking move if ever there was one.’