‘I’ll get onto it.’ I turned towards the door then checked myself. ‘You know everybody who’s got a racket going in the city.’
‘Just about.’ Sneddon leaned back in his green leather and walnut captain’s chair. A pirate captain’s chair, probably.
‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Largo?’ I asked.
He thought for a moment then shook his head.
‘Okay… thanks. I just thought I’d ask.’
Industrial pollution can be a beautiful thing. When I came out of Sneddon’s I stood by my car for a moment, looking out over to the west. Sneddon’s house was elevated in more than a social sense and I could see out across the treetops and past the edge of the city. Glasgow’s air was of the granulated variety and it turned sunsets into vast, diffused splashes of colour, like gold and red paint strained through textured silk. I stood and gazed westward, filled with a sense of contentment.
But that had more to do with the wad of cash weighing down my suit jacket than the sunset. I climbed into the Atlantic and headed back down into the city.
I should have been more on my toes. This time there was a little more subtlety and a lot more brains employed.
I was driving back from Sneddon’s and was passing along the curve in the road where Bearsden notches down the social ladder to become Milngavie, when I saw a blue ’forty-eight Ford Zephyr Six up ahead, pulled into the kerb. The driver had the hood up and he was standing next to it on the road. He was about thirty-five, with dark hair, and from what I could see smartly dressed. I say from what I could see because he was doing what every true man does when his car breaks down: he was standing on the roadway, one hand on his hip, the other scratching his head. And like every true man, he had had to take his jacket off and roll up his sleeves to do the head-scratching. It was a pose of helplessness mitigated by stubbornness: you’ve tried everything and you’re asking for help only as a last resort.
I muttered a curse when I saw he had noticed my approach and was vaguely wafting a hand about to wave me down. It’s a rule: you don’t look too desperate for another man’s help; you’re signalling in another member of the same auto club to provide the assistance that you would provide him, in the same circumstances.
Despite my efforts to the contrary, I am a Canadian. That means, no matter how hard I had tried to cure myself of it, I suffer from the congenital, chronic and truly Canadian ailment of politeness. I may have gotten lippy with gangsters and cops, slapped the odd uppity hooligan, and I may have fornicated, cursed and sworn on occasion, sometimes the same occasion; but I had helped so many little old ladies across the street that the Boy Scouts had taken out a contract on me.
This guy clearly needed help. I had to stop to help him. I was being so Canadian that it didn’t occur to me for a second that this could have been a more discreet and subtle attempt by Jimmy Costello at abduction. There again, discreet and subtle were not traits you associated with Costello.
‘Having trouble?’ I asked as I pulled up next to him and rolled down the window.
He smiled. ‘Thanks for stopping.’ He opened the door of the Atlantic and dropped into the passenger seat before I could say anything. It was then I noticed the small crescent-shaped scar on his head. I was doing a split-second inventory in my head, trying to remember where I’d filed who had mentioned a fiveeight man with dark hair and a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead, when he produced a gun from his trouser pocket. I recognized it as a Webley point-three-two Pocket Hammerless. The youngest it could have been was 1916. It could have dated back to the turn-of-the century.
‘This is some kind of joke, right?’ I said, with a derisive eyebrow raised at the revolver. But at the same time I was assessing my chances of coshing him with the flat, spring-handled blackjack I had in my inside jacket pocket. When people point guns at me, I get tetchy. I decided it was best to go along with my new chum for the moment. There would be time to discuss my attitude towards being held at gunpoint. Later.
‘There’s nothing wrong with this gun, pal.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my eighty-two-year-old great-uncle Frank, but I wouldn’t bring him along on an abduction.’
‘Trust me, Lennox. This Webley fires just fine.’
‘I’m sure it did when Mata Hari used it to scare off the Kaiser when he was chasing her around a banquet table. Where are you taking me? An antiques fair?’
The dark-haired goon sighed. ‘Listen, Lennox, let’s not put it to the test. Mr Costello wants to talk to you and the last time you got an invite you cut up rough.’ He was better spoken than the average Glaswegian. He was also a cool enough customer. My efforts to rile him and stall until another car came along weren’t working. I could see over his shoulder that a second goon had come out of hiding and was dropping the hood on the Zephyr Six.
‘What’s your pal got? A flintlock blunderbuss?’ I said, cracking the joke with a smile to hide the fact that I was weighing up my chances of breaking his neck before he could pull the trigger.
‘He’s going to follow us. You can drive out to the pub to meet Mr Costello. Mr Costello told me to tell you to take it easy. There’s no need to kick up a fuss. You got all heated up and messed up Tony and Joe and it was all unnecessary. This isn’t what you think.’ He gave an angled nod to indicate the road ahead. ‘Let’s go.’
I looked at the gun. It could still do the job, right enough. A bullet is a bullet, even if firing it would probably take off a couple of his fingers. ‘So you’re telling me this isn’t all about Paul Costello?’
‘You’ll have to talk to Mr Costello about that, but no. Or not in the way you think.’
‘Okay,’ I said and sighed. ‘Where to? The Riviera Club?’
‘No…’ My passenger grinned at me; his teeth were nicotine yellow and pitted. ‘We’re to take you out to the Empire. Just for a talk, like. Nothing heavy. So don’t make trouble.’
‘Me?’ I said in an offended tone. ‘I’m like Rab Butler… I’m all for consensus.’
My passenger directed me across the Clyde and we drove into Govan. Black tenements loomed on either side and he told me to park outside a public house emblazoned with a sign that declared this was the Empire Bar. The sun was now hiding behind the tenements and dressed in a winding-sheet of thin grey cloud. But gloom was something you associated with Govan.
‘Oh look,’ I said cheerily as we got out. ‘The sun is setting on the Empire.’ My companion replied by jerking his head towards the bar. The gun was pocketed now but he rested his hand in the same pocket. The Ford Zephyr Six pulled up behind us and the second guy got out. He was about an inch shorter than his colleague, with hair the colour of dirty sand. Both of them were just the way Sheila Gainsborough had described them.
We walked into the bar. It was noisy and it stank. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, stale sweat and whisky fumes. A woman with unnaturally black hair was making shrilly unpleasant sounds in the corner, accompanied by an out-of-tune piano. The Empire Bar was the kind of place you would have described as spit-and-sawdust; if they had bothered with the sawdust. I allowed myself to be guided to a corner table, guessing that Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly wouldn’t be waiting for me there. They weren’t: a short, fattish man in an expensive but ill-fitting suit was at the table, looking at me glumly as I approached with my escort. He had thick Irish-black hair that needed a cut and a pencil-moustache over a slack, ugly mouth.
‘I believe you wanted to speak with me,’ I said without a smile and sat down without being asked. Unlike Sneddon, Cohen or Murphy, Jimmy Costello didn’t warrant a respectful tone. But, there again, it was exactly that kind of attitude that had gotten me into some of my stickier moments over the last couple of years.
‘You want a drink?’ Costello asked, his tone neutral.