‘What? You mean that was the same afternoon?’
Elliot nodded.
‘No wonder you were in such a foul mood,’ Moses grinned. ‘I suppose you could say it was shit that brought us together.’
Elliot winced. ‘Hey Moses, I don’t want to think about it, OK?’
Moses apologised, but his grin lingered.
He stayed at The Bunker until four in the morning. Partly because he liked Elliot’s company, and partly because he didn’t want to risk running into the German actress who hadn’t noticed him smiling at her. Especially as she was with Eddie, who had.
*
Then it happened again.
One evening at the end of February Moses turned up outside The Bunker to find Elliot prowling up and down the pavement as if held by an invisible cage. His face twitched with rage. His lips were forced back over his gums.
‘What’s wrong, Elliot?’
‘Fuck,’ Elliot snarled. ‘Fuck Jesus fucking fuck.’ He pointed at the pavement just to the left of where Moses was standing. Somebody had painted a big white arrow on the ground. It was aimed at the entrance of the club.
Elliot jerked his head, and disappeared through the double-doors. Moses followed him inside. A trail of similar arrows led across the foyer, up the stairs, along the corridor, leading, inevitably, to Elliot’s office. Elliot pushed the door open, then stepped aside to let Moses in first.
It was a scene of such violence that Moses found the stillness unnerving. As he gazed into the room, he kept expecting something to spring out at him from a hiding-place in the debris. It was the kind of stillness that had recently been havoc and had only just returned to being stillness again. Moses took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly through his mouth. The entire office had been systematically and viciously destroyed. Torn paper, broken glass and long splinters of wood buried the carpet ankle-deep. The red drapes lay on top, cut into sinister neat pieces. The red lamps had been ripped loose and smashed. Wires trailed from the empty sockets like torn ligaments. The two black holes in the wall made the room look blinded somehow. The desk, the sofa and the executive chair, dismembered, hacked almost beyond recognition, reared up from the chaos as if trying to break free. Blood inched down the window-panes. The bitter smell of urine trickled into Moses’s nostrils. But worst of all — and Moses groaned when he noticed it — was what they had done to the pool-table, Elliot’s pride and joy. They had sawn the legs off, all four of them, and slashed the green baize into strips, with a razor-blade by the look of it, and then peeled it back to reveal the slab of grey slate, showing like bone through flesh, beneath.
‘The same people?’ Moses asked.
Elliot shrugged.
It couldn’t be kids, that much was clear. And remembering what Elliot had told him about the previous break-in, Moses thought he recognised the style. The blood, the shit, the piss. The same sadistic premeditated violence. It had the feel of a vendetta, a psychotic vendetta, and, once again, Moses wondered exactly what truth lay beneath the rumours he had heard about Elliot. This kind of thing didn’t happen to just anyone.
‘I suppose it’s no good getting the police in,’ he said.
Elliot didn’t even hear. His face had clenched like a fist. He was, Moses saw, one of those people who feel fury rather than fear.
He took Elliot by the arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go and get a drink somewhere.’
He drove Elliot to a pub in Bermondsey. The jukebox was playing early Sinatra to an interior of dark wood. They drank in near silence. An idea occurred to Moses — or, rather, recurred, because it had first begun to hatch when Elliot told him what had happened in October. The idea now grew, spread wings, though, even as it did so, Moses realised that he would have to save it for a more propitious moment.
*
Winter eased. Spring became a possibility.
When the vital conversation took place, Moses had been waiting almost a month. Insurance had restored the office to its former sleek condition. The windows were wide open. The roar of rush-hour traffic competed with the squeak of the blue chalk cube on the end of Elliot’s cue. The pool-table was playing as beautifully as ever, though Elliot still winced sometimes when he looked down at the green baize and remembered. Moses sat on the arm of the sofa, cue in one hand, a brandy in the other. A typical evening on the second floor of The Bunker.
Elliot was telling Moses about a trip he had made to West Germany. ‘I was in this town, right?’ he was saying.
Elliot in West Germany? ‘What were you doing there?’ Moses asked.
‘Business.’
‘Ah,’ Moses said.
‘Anyway,’ Elliot went on, ‘there was this bloke going on about a dome — ’
‘The cathedral?’ Moses suggested.
‘Yeah, probably, but he called it a dome. Anyway, this bloke, he’s sort of a guide, right? He points at this dome and he says, “You see that?”, and I go, “Yeah”. “You see that?” he says, second time, OK? and I’m thinking What is this? but I go, “Yeah,” anyway. Then he says, “Ugly,” he says. “Ugly ugly ugly”. And I’m cracking up but he hasn’t finished yet. “In the war,” he says, “boo boo boo, everything falls down, but that,” and he points at the fucking dome again, “that no bombs touch.” I’m thinking Yeah, OK, so? And then he says, “You know why no bombs touch?”, and I go, “No,” and he says, “Why God inside”.’
Elliot shook his head. ‘God inside. Jesus?’
‘You shouldn’t mock,’ Moses said, with the air of somebody who has just thought of something. ‘There’s a moral in that story.’
‘Moral?’ Elliot said. ‘What moral?’ But he wasn’t really listening. He was loping round the table, running his cue back and forwards through his left hand, intent on victory.
Moses smiled. His moment had come. ‘I mean, maybe you need God in here, Elliot.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Well, if you had God in here, maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more.’
Elliot paused in mid-shot and straightened up. There was a shrewdness in his gaze that Moses recognised as confusion in disguise. He stepped forwards out of the shadows. He couldn’t risk obscurity. Not when he was this close.
‘I was thinking,’ Moses said, ‘that maybe I could be God, you see.’
Elliot rushed his shot, and missed for once.
‘You going to talk English or what?’ he snapped.
He hated missing.
The setting sun reached through the window, showed Moses standing in the centre of the room, his cue upright in his hand like a shepherd’s crook. I could be God, he was thinking. Just a couple more sentences, that should clinch it.
He took a deep breath, became precise, factual. ‘Listen, the top floor’s empty, right? You’re not using it for anything, so what I thought is, suppose I live up there. Sort of keep an eye on the place when you’re not here. I mean, you can’t be here all the time, can you? Not a man with your interests. And if somebody was actually living here all the time, then maybe you wouldn’t get broken into any more — ’
Moses bent over the table. He lined up a spot and knocked it into the left-hand side pocket. Like a sort of full stop.
Elliot stared at the place where the spot had disappeared. ‘Maybe you have something there,’ he said.
They carried on playing in silence. A siren cut through the quiet of the street below like a reminder of violence. It was more than five minutes before Elliot spoke.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘If you were normal size, like me, for instance, I’d say no way.’ He paused. ‘But since you’re so fucking big — ’