Django continued to contemplate his glass. He spoke without looking at her.
‘You’re not a debt collector, are you, Princess?’
His neighbour laughed. ‘Get even, die in debt.’
Django said, ‘Shut up, Tony,’ in the same calm voice he had used when he had invited Stevie to help herself to a drink. ‘What do you want him for?’
‘I want to ask Mr Summers about the doctors who treated his daughter prior to her death.’
Django asked, ‘What are you then? A private eye?’
‘A private dick,’ crowed Tony.
Django said, ‘You’re a prat, Tony.’
The other man grinned, as if he had just been given a compliment.
Stevie said, ‘I lost someone too. I need to find out why, while I still can.’ She was surprised to find her eyes welling up.
Django looked at the beer glass in front of him with distaste, and then took a long, deep swallow from it.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Princess, but people are dropping like flies. I’m all for justice, always have been, a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, fair enough. But there doesn’t seem much point in chasing after the death of one poor sod any more.’
‘If we stop caring about the death of “one poor sod” we might as well give up.’ Stevie saw a lazy smirk spreading across Tony’s drink-dulled face and felt the futility of it all. ‘There’s no sense in talking to you. You’ve already given in.’
She turned to walk away, but Django caught her by the arm.
‘Hold on a minute, Princess.’
Stevie tried to shrug him off, but his grip held her, hard enough to bruise. The last time anyone had grabbed her had been in the TV station car park. Stevie kicked Django’s shin and gave a swift uppercut to his chin that hurt her knuckles.
‘Hey, hey, hey.’ Django caught her free wrist. Stevie tried to break away, but he was stronger. He brought his mouth close to her ear and whispered, ‘You shouldn’t hit people, unless you’re sure you can beat them,’ his breath warm and beery against her face.
Stevie pulled her foot into a kick, but Django let go before she had a chance to deliver.
‘Leave her alone, Djang.’ Anxiety narrowed Tony’s voice to a whine. ‘She looks like she’s already taken a beating.’
‘Fuck off, Anthony.’
Django’s voice was barely more than a whisper. He rubbed the stubble on his chin where Stevie’s fist had made contact.
Stevie said, ‘Touch me again and I’ll show you just how capable I am of fucking you up.’
To her surprise Django started to laugh, a dry, unhappy sound, barely audible over the noise of the bar.
‘What is this? Christ, I’m your mild-mannered janitor type, but suddenly everybody thinks I’m going to go postal.’ He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and placed a beer mat on top of his pint. ‘Keep your eye on that for me, would you, Tone?’ He nodded to Stevie to follow him and walked towards a door labelled Lounge Bar. ‘Melvin’s through here. But you’ll be lucky to get any sense out of him. I’m guessing if you know enough to look for Melv, you already know what happened to his wife?’
It was as if the altercation had made them allies. Stevie said, ‘I read about it.’
A cheer gusted from the gents’ toilets where a small huddle was spilling out of the door. Django put a hand on Stevie’s elbow and guided her past the rabble, towards the lounge, but not before she had glimpsed a blur of white flesh in the centre of the knot of men, moving to a familiar rhythm.
‘It’s like Hitler’s bunker in here,’ Django said. ‘I’d kick the lot out, except there’s too many of them. They’ll vanish when the drink does.’ He tapped the pocket of his denim jacket, somewhere near his heart. ‘I’ve got the key to John’s secret supply. Once this lot are gone I’ll lock the door, dig out the special stuff, go up to John and Doris’s flat and wait for things to improve.’
‘Do you think they will?’
‘What?’
‘Improve?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Depends what you mean by improve. I reckon there’ll be a lot more jobs to go round. Some people might think that’s a good thing. On the other hand, there are jobs your average bloke can’t do. Like being a brain surgeon or operating a nuclear power station, so life might get a bit less sophisticated. I can guarantee you one thing though.’
‘What?’
‘If I survive, I’ll be spending less time in the local.’
Stevie said, ‘I heard this place has become a refuge for Mr Summers.’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that when he got tired of getting rat-arsed at home, he got rat-arsed here instead.’ Django paused in the centre of the busy room and looked at her. ‘Funny, Melv came in here a lot, but it was always a shock to see him, know what I mean? Like seeing a dead man step through the door. We’re all on borrowed time, but no one really thinks about it until something like this happens, then getting rat-arsed seems like the best thing to do. I guess Melv was just a step or two in front of the rest of us. He’s been a dead man walking since he found his wife.’
A dishevelled man in a no-longer-smart business suit staggered over and put an arm around Stevie’s waist. He leant his head against her chest and slurred, ‘Why don’t you and me go somewhere where we can be kind to each other?’
Django gripped the stranger’s shoulders and turned him in the opposite direction. ‘Piss off, mate, she doesn’t want to know.’ He gave the man a gentle shove that sent him staggering towards the bar, in the broken mechanical walk of the soon-to-crash drunk.
Stevie said, ‘Thanks, but there was no need. I could handle him myself.’
‘Is that how you got those bruises? Handling things yourself?’
Django stretched a hand towards her face, but Stevie stepped beyond his reach.
She said, ‘I saw Melvin’s website. He blames his daughter’s doctors for her death.’
‘Not just her death, his wife’s too. He wanted them struck off.’
‘Did you ever get the impression that he might go further than that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Go outside the law.’
Django’s face was furred with stubble, his jowls soft and puffy from drink and late nights, but his expression hardened.
‘Why would you want to know that?’
Stevie forced a smile. ‘I’m not the police.’
‘Sorry.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘I forgot you lost someone too. Was it your kid?’
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
Django gave a small nod. ‘It looks like we’re all going to learn a lot more about losing people.’
‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘Have you lost somebody?’
Django looked away. Someone had decided it was too dark and set tea lights on the tables. The scruff of stubble on his chin glinted against the candlelight, grey speckling sandy red, an intimation of old age.
‘I guess it says something about my life that the people I’m missing most are John and Doris.’ He gave her a sad smile. ‘Up until now, the only thing I ever lost was chances.’
Twenty-Six
The tables in the lounge were cluttered with a Manhattan skyline of wine goblets, tankards, tumblers and shot glasses. It was obvious that some time earlier it had been the scene of heavy drinking. Now it had become a chill-out room, where people could escape the chaos of the main bar and marshal their resources for their next bout. A couple of sleeping drunks were curled on the banquette, using their jackets as pillows. Another lay beached on the floor, next to the empty fireplace, his breaths raw and laboured, his brow slick with perspiration.
Django nodded towards the other side of the lounge where a man was slumped in a corner seat, his shaggy head resting on the table in front of him. ‘That’s Melvin. Come the future, he might be your only chance of root canal treatment.’ Django crossed the room, put a hand on the sleeper’s shoulder and gave it a rough shake. ‘Melvin . . . Melv . . .’