He watched as the hawk rode the air with the smallest movement of wings and then dropped, almost faster than he could follow, down into the grass and away, a vole or some such fast in its grasp.
Marvellous, Grabianski thought, as the bird was lost to sight between the branches of the farthest tree, how life did that, offered up those little scraps, parables for you to snack on, inwardly digest.
The lower reaches of Portobello were lined by barrows selling fruit and vegetables at knockdown prices, stripy watermelons sliced open, lemons tumbling yellow inside blue tissue. The same black guy, wearing a wide white shirt with a gathered yoke, winked at Grabianski from the doorway of the Market Bar and stepped aside to let him through.
Moving slowly toward the bar, letting his eyes become adjusted to the filtered light, Grabianski saw Eddie Snow seated in the far corner, talking earnestly to a youngish man with shoulder-length hair. The woman Grabianski had seen him with before, the model, was perched on a stool close by, flawless, bored.
Grabianski ordered his pint of beer and waited, certain Snow would have seen him; now it was a matter of form, of etiquette, waiting to see when and how that recognition would be acknowledged.
What happened was that the young woman leaned forward at a sign from Snow’s beckoning finger and after a brief discussion, got down from her stool and came to where Grabianski was standing, one arm against the surface of the bar.
“I’m Faron,” she said, and Grabianski nodded pleasantly, wondering if some of the things he’d read about her were true. He hadn’t recognized her before, not really, a face, thin and feral, like so many that stared out at him, big-eyed, from the fronts of glossy magazines. She was wearing shiny silver tights, clumpy thick-heeled shoes, and either a dress that was really a petticoat or a petticoat that was really a dress.
“Eddie says he’s busy.”
“I can see.”
“It’s important he says, like business. Is it okay for you to wait?”
Grabianski assured her that was fine; she made no move to walk away and when he offered her a drink she asked for an Absolut with ice and tonic and a slice of lemon not lime. According to her press releases she had been born and brought up in Hoxton, East London, one of five children, none of them named Faron nor anything like; the fashion editor for British Vogue had noticed her behind the till at a garage in Lea Bridge Road when she called in for petrol on her way back from a photo shoot in Epping Forest. Wearing one of those awful pink overalls, of course, oil and the Lord knows what underneath her fingernails, but those eyes, those tremendous waiflike eyes.
Not so many months later, after numerous makeovers, a spot of minor surgery, and a name change, there she was in grainy black and white and bleached-out color, wearing price-on-application designer clothing in some industrial wasteland, staring empty eyes and legs akimbo. Since when, affairs with movie stars of both sexes, private clinics, smoked-glass limousines; rumor was she’d turned down a cameo part in the new Mike Leigh-or was that Spike? — and recorded a song for which Tricky did the final mix, but which had yet to be released. Rumor, juiced with money, will say almost anything.
Grabianski wondered if she were yet nineteen.
“What d’you do, then?” she asked.
“I’m a burglar,” Grabianski said.
“Go on, you’re winding me up.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah? What you burgle then?”
“Houses, apartments, the usual thing.”
She laughed, a giggle, brittle and fast. “You burgle Eddie, then?”
“Not yet.”
She leaned a little away from him, uncertain. “Great security, Eddie, alarms and that, all over. Well, he has to. Paintings and that. Worth a fortune. It’s what he’s interested in, art.” For a moment, she glanced round. “That bloke with him, Sloane, he’s an artist. Painter. You know him? He’s good. Galleries and that. I’ve never been, museums, they’re boring. Well, I’m a liar, not since I was a kid. School trip, down the Horniman. Lost my knickers, coming back.”
Grabianski was looking past her, past those famous eyes and over her shoulder at the man she’d identified as Sloane. His head in profile now and Grabianski could see he was nowhere near as young as he’d first thought. The build, style of the hair had deceived. The nose was full, patrician, etched here and there with tiny broken violet lines. The hair, full at the front too, had grown white above the temples; the lips, narrow and wide, were cracked. Sixty, Grabianski thought, sixty if he’s a day.
“I’ll tell you how good he is,” Faron said. “We was round his place one day, his studio, you know, and I made some joke about Van Gogh, about him slicing off his ear, and Sloane, he got this painting off the wall, turned it round right where he was and done these sunflowers on the back. You never seen nothing like it. They was just like the real thing. Better. But then that’s me, I wouldn’t really know.”
Grabianski nodded and filed it all away.
When Sloane walked past them and around the angle of the bar, Grabianski saw that he’d been right about the age. Sixty-two or sixty-three, he wouldn’t have minded betting. Wearing nothing, nothing Grabianski could see, beneath a pair of paint-patched denim dungarees. Clear blue eyes that saw Grabianski even as they saw right through him. The same eyes that fixed on him now in the fly-specked mirror over the urinal. Sloane’s voice, a stony South London shot through with a brace of New York American, saying, “This isn’t going to be one of those pick-up scenes, is it? You show me yours if I show you mine.”
Grabianski assured him it was not.
“Thank Christ,” Sloane breathed, piss continuing to stream between his fingers, bouncing back from the shiny enamel. “I’m too old for that will-he, won’t-he, kind of shit.”
“You a friend of Eddie Snow?” Grabianski asked.
“Eddie doesn’t have friends,” Sloane said, buttoning up, “just mates he uses whenever there’s a need.”
Rinsing his hands beneath the tap, ignoring the hot-air drier in favor of wiping them on his dungarees, Sloane walked back out into the pub and when Grabianski followed, not so many necessary moments later, he had gone. Faron was sitting alongside Snow and she had taken what remained of Grabianski’s pint with her, placing it across from them, by the place Sloane had vacated.
“Interesting fellow,” Grabianski said, sliding into the empty seat.
“I don’t like it,” Eddie Snow said, “when people come sniffing round after me like dogs after a bone.”
“You were supposed to be getting in touch with me.”
“And I am.”
“A couple of days ago.”
“Ah, well,” Snow said, “like the man said, all relative, time.”
Faron looked at him suspiciously, in case he might have said something clever. Eddie Snow dressed today in his trademark leather, white tight trousers and a black waistcoat over a gray ribbed T-shirt, silver Indian bangles in the appropriate places.
“I just want to know,” Grabianski said, “if you’re still interested in the Dalzeils or not.”
“Shout it from the housetops, why don’t you?”
Swiveling as he rose, Grabianski cupped one hand to his mouth. “I just want to know …”
“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” said Snow tugging at the sleeve of Grabianski’s coat, “sit your bloody self back down.”
Faron was giggling, pretending not to, and when Snow shot her a glance, she transmuted it into a cough.
“Run along,” Snow told her affably enough.
She ran all the way to the bar.
“As it happens,” Snow said, stretching an arm, “there is a fair bit of potential interest. Qatar. Arab Emirates. Monaco.”