“Don’t get pious on me, Jacko. I’m a cop, not a very nice guy, which is why we’re here and I’m taking grief from some ugly cunt of a waitress.”
He looked over at her. She’d been about to bring him a menu, but seeing his face, she changed her mind. He said,
“If a piece of filth like Bryson came to my house, put a fright on my woman, I’d put him in the ground.”
He looked rabid. Spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. He continued,
“Last year, we’d a serial rapist in Clapham. The brass used my WPC as a decoy. Hung her out to dry, the reckless bastards. Her back-up got delayed. I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“He had her on the ground, her tights torn off, a knife to her throat, shouting obscenities. I pulled him off, and know what he did?”
“No.”
“He laughed at me, said he’d be out in six months and he’d do her then.”
“Would he…be out?”
“Less time probably.”
“So what did you do?”
“Helped him fall on his knife.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Hadn’t we better make a move?”
I said,
“Take a peek at the corner table by the door.”
He did.
A well-dressed man, obviously distressed, was pouring out a story to a middle-aged couple. They were listening eagerly, hanging on to his every word. Keegan asked,
“What’s going down, a scam?”
“If compassion is a scam, then yes. He’s telling them in broken if well-accented English how he left a small bag in a café corner. But he is upset, so many cafés, they all seem alike. All his valuables are there, ticket, passport, credit cards.”
“The mangy bastard, does he score?”
“He doesn’t want anything, leastways nothing material. He gets off on their compassion, their joint upset at his calamity.”
“You know him?”
“Sure, he used to be a guard.”
“Someone should give him a slap round the earhole.”
“Why? It’s the much lauded ‘victimless crime’ in all its classic glory. All he takes is their time and a drop of their emotions.”
We got outside and I said,
“Bryson has a studio apartment near the docks.”
Keegan wasn’t done with the compassion deal.
“This is one strange country, and you, Jack, might be the strangest in it.”
“Ah, Keegan, come on, don’t tell me you don’t have characters like him on your beat?”
“Dozens. In London, though, he’d get their address, then come some slow Tuesday, he’d nip round, rape the woman, behead the man.”
“That happened?”
“I had a dog once, Meyer Meyer, after a character in Ed McBain, a mongrel. I heard they can be babe magnets.”
“Was he?”
“He got the babes, all right. I got the dogs, still barking some of them.”
I laughed.
“There was a psycho loose then, the papers called him ‘the Torch’. He covered Meyer in petrol, flicked a match.”
“Jesus.”
“I liked old Meyer, he was good company.”
“What did you do to the Torch?”
“Nothing.”
“Ah, come on, Keegan.”
“We never caught him.”
“Oh.”
“Each broken truth I’ve sold, I’ve understated.”
Phyl Kennedy
Christopher McQuarrie, The Usual Suspects screenwriter, turned director with The Way of the Gun, said,
“I was afraid of hiring James Caan because I’d heard stories. Then the first thing he said to me was, ‘You sick fuck.’
“I guess he’d heard stories about me, too.”
I was telling Keegan this as we approached Merchants Road, but a trawler away from the docks. I asked him,
“How do we play this?”
He gave a sardonic smile, said,
“Straight.”
He produced keys and got us through the front door. Up one flight to 107, the apartment. Keegan again with the keys and we were in. The first sensation was smell, reek of incense. Keegan said,
“Our boy likes to smoke dope.”
“He smokes incense?”
“Cop on.”
I tried.
A large living room, looking like a garbage tip. Throw rugs on the floor, items of clothing scattered everywhere. Keegan said,
“Not a tidy lad.”
The kitchen was a mess. Discarded cartons of junk food on every surface. Dishes piled high on the sink. Keegan ordered,
“You do the living room, I’ll toss the bedroom.”
I found a stack of Time Out’s, the gay listings particularly well-thumbed. On the table was Fred Kaplan’s Gore Vidal. I shouted that in to Keegan and added,
“Shit, it’s signed.”
“By Fred or Gore?”
I was impressed by the question. He came out of the bedroom with a stack of mags, said,
“Hard-core S and M, gay, fetish and the perennial favourite, pain.”
“Not proof though, is it?”
“Proof’s overrated.”
“Not in court.”
“That’s what you think. Do you never watch The Practice?”
We rummaged some more but found nothing further. As we left, I put the Vidal book in my pocket. Keegan said,
“He’s going to miss that.”
“I know.”
“And the half weight of grass?”
“You took the dope?”
“Or vice versa.”
That evening, I was stocking the bookshelf. I’d been on another visit to Charlie Byrne’s and come away laden. I wasn’t anal retentive, didn’t need those volumes alphabetically or in neat alignment. No, I liked to stir it. Put Paul Theroux beside St Vida. That was wicked. Line Pellicanos with Jim Thompson, Flann O’Brien with Thomas Merton. Over the past six months, I’d read House of Leaves, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and discovered David Peace.
To hand was Anne Sexton’s poems To Bedlam and Partways Back. Another writer whose suicide and life of derangement threw shadows of dark identification. The doorbell went. Sweeper nearly fell in the door. His eye was blackened, bruising on his face, suit torn and blood on his hair. He limped to a chair, said,
“A whiskey please, Jack Taylor.”
I made it large. He gulped it down and I gave him a cigarette. I said,
“You fought in your suit?”
“This was not a challenge.”
“Something else, was it?”
“Something else, you might say that.”
He fixed those dark eyes on me, asked,
“How do you feel about us tinkers?”
“You have to ask?”
“Today…yes.”
“I’m working with you and glad to do so.”
Those eyes unwavering.
“And if we lived next door, Jack Taylor, how would that be?”
“Lively.”
Gave a short smile.
“Let’s see how true that is.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Come on.”
The van was parked in the alley, huge dents on its surface. I asked,
“Jeez, what happened, people hurl rocks or something?”
“Exactly.”
He put the van in gear, asked,
“You know what a halting site is?”
“Where they place the clans, like a camping ground.”
That amused him. He muttered,
“Camping ground, how ordinary that sounds.”
The stench of condescension leaked from the words. I said,
“Hey, Sweeper, ease up with the tone. Whatever happened, I’m not part of it. I’m with you, remember?”
A bitterness worked its way down from his eyes to his mouth, caused a tic to vibrate above his lips. He scratched at it, said,
“You’re from the settled community. No matter how outlaw you think you are, you’re part of them.”
I let it go but I didn’t fucking like it. Shook out a cig. Sweeper ordered,
“Light two.”
The child in me wanted to roar,
“Buy your own.”
I lit them, handed one over. He said,
“I’ve offended you, Jack Taylor.”
“Don’t sweat it, pal.”
He concentrated on his driving. The nicotine joined the cloud of tension. He pulled up at Dangan Heights and we got out. He nodded towards the valley, said,