I nodded. Took out my old calfskin wallet from my jacket pocket, and pulled out a slip of brightly colored card. “Here you go.”
We were coming up to Blackfriars Bridge. “It’s real?”
“Sure. New York State Lottery. You bought it on a whim, in the airport, on your way to England. The numbers’ll be picked on Saturday night. Should be a pretty good week, too. It’s over twenty million dollars already.”
He put the lottery ticket in his own wallet, black and shiny and bulging with plastic, and he put the wallet into the inside pocket of his suit. His hands kept straying to it, brushing it, absently making sure it was still there. He’d have been the perfect mark for any dip who wanted to know where he kept his valuables.
“This calls for a drink,” he said. I agreed that it did but, as I pointed out to him, a day like today, with the sun shining and a fresh breeze coming in from the sea, was too good to waste in a pub. So we went into an off-licence. I bought him a bottle of Stoli, a carton of orange juice, and a plastic cup, and I got myself a couple of cans of Guinness.
“It’s the men, you see,” said the professor. We were sitting on a wooden bench looking at the South Bank across the Thames. “Apparently there aren’t many of them. One or two in a generation. The Treasure of the Shahinai. The women are the guardians of the men. They nurture them and keep them safe.
“Alexander the Great is said to have bought a lover from the Shahinai. So did Tiberius, and at least two popes. Catherine the Great was rumored to have had one, but I think that’s just a rumor.”
I told him I thought it was like something in a storybook. “I mean, think about it. A race of people whose only asset is the beauty of their men. So every century they sell one of their men for enough money to keep the tribe going for another hundred years.” I took a swig of the Guinness. “Do you think that was all of the tribe, the women in that house?”
“I rather doubt it.”
He poured another slug of vodka into the plastic cup, splashed some orange juice into it, raised his glass to me. “Mr. Alice,” he said. “He must be very rich.”
“He does all right.”
“I’m straight,” said Macleod, drunker than he thought he was, his forehead prickling with sweat, “but I’d fuck that boy like a shot. He was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“He was all right, I suppose.”
“You wouldn’t fuck him?”
“Not my cup of tea,” I told him.
A black cab went down the road behind us. Its orange “For Hire” light was turned off, although there was nobody sitting in the back.
“So what is your cup of tea, then?” asked Professor Macleod.
“Little girls,” I told him.
He swallowed. “How little?”
“Nine. Ten. Eleven or twelve, maybe. Once they’ve got real tits and pubes I can’t get it up anymore. Just doesn’t do it for me.”
He looked at me as if I’d told him I liked to fuck dead dogs, and he didn’t say anything for a bit. He drank his Stoli. “You know,” he said, “back where I come from, that sort of thing would be illegal.”
“Well, they aren’t too keen on it over here.”
“I think maybe I ought to be getting back to the hotel,” he said.
A black cab came around the corner, its light on this time. I waved it down, and helped Professor Macleod into the back. It was one of our Particular Cabs. The kind you get into and you don’t get out of.
“The Savoy, please,” I told the cabbie.
“Righto, governor,” he said, and took Professor Macleod away.
Mr. Alice took good care of the Shahinai boy. Whenever I went over for meetings or briefings the boy would be sitting at Mr. Alice’s feet, and Mr. Alice would be twining and stroking and fiddling with his black-black hair. They doted on each other, you could tell. It was soppy and, I have to admit, even for a cold-hearted bastard like myself, it was touching.
Sometimes, at night, I’d have dreams about the Shahinai women—these ghastly, batlike, hag things, fluttering and roosting through this huge rotting old house, which was, at the same time, both human history and St. Andrews Asylum. Some of them were carrying men between them, as they flapped and flew. The men shone like the sun, and their faces were too beautiful to look upon.
I hated those dreams. One of them, and the next day was a write-off, and you can take that to the fucking bank.
The most beautiful man in the world, the Treasure of the Shahinai, lasted for eight months. Then he caught the flu.
His temperature went up to 106 degrees, his lungs filled with water and he was drowning on dry land. Mr. Alice brought in some of the best doctors in the world, but the lad flickered and went out like an old lightbulb, and that was that.
I suppose they just aren’t very strong. Bred for something else, after all, not strength.
Mr. Alice took it really hard. He was inconsolable—wept like a baby all the way through the funeral, tears running down his face, like a mother who had just lost her only son. It was pissing with rain, so if you weren’t standing next to him, you’d not have known. I ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes in that graveyard, and it put me in a rotten mood.
I sat around in the Barbican flat, practiced knife-throwing, cooked a spaghetti Bolognese, watched some football on the telly.
That night I had Alison. It wasn’t pleasant.
The next day I took a few good men and we went down to the house in Earls Court, to see if any of the Shahinai were still about. There had to be more Shahinai young men somewhere. It stood to reason.
But the plaster on the rotting walls had been covered up with stolen rock posters, and the place smelled of dope, not spice.
The warren of rooms was filled with Australians and New Zealanders. Squatters, at a guess. We surprised a dozen of them in the kitchen, sucking narcotic smoke from the mouth of a broken R. White’s Lemonade bottle.
We searched the house from cellar to attic, looking for some trace of the Shahinai women, something that they had left behind, some kind of clue, anything that would make Mr. Alice happy.
We found nothing at all.
And all I took away from the house in Earl’s Court was the memory of the breast of a girl, stoned and oblivious, sleeping naked in an upper room. There were no curtains on the window.
I stood in the doorway, and I looked at her for too long, and it painted itself on my mind: a full, black-nippled breast, which curved disturbingly in the sodium yellow light of the street.
GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS
My own children delight in hearing true tales from my childhood: The Time My Father Threatened to Arrest the Traffic Cop, How I Broke My Sister’s Front Teeth Twice, When I Pretended to Be Twins, and even The Day I Accidentally Killed the Gerbil.
I have never told them this story. I would be hard put to tell you quite why not.
When I was nine the school told us that we could pick any musical instrument we wanted. Some boys chose the violin, the clarinet, the oboe. Some chose the timpani, the pianoforte, the viola.
I was not big for my age, and I, alone in the Junior School, elected to play the double bass, chiefly because I loved the incongruity of the idea. I loved the idea of being a small boy, playing, delighting in, carrying around an instrument much taller than I was.