CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It is raining. The entire world beyond the grime-smeared window is as grey and heavy as wet lead. The snappy wind grabs handfuls of rain and throws them like pebbles against the glass, as if trying to draw my attention to just how crap everything outside is. The dull sound of some massive industrial blunt instrument rhythmically hitting metal stretches through the rain, sometimes loud, sometimes muffled, depending on the whim of the wind.
But my attention is pretty much focused on this room. In my life, I have had to explain my way out of a lot of tight corners, but this tops them all.
I am leaning against the wall of an upper-storey room in an empty dockside warehouse. I am leaning against the wall because I doubt if I can stand up without support. I am trying to work out if there are any vital organs in the lower left of my abdomen, just above the hip. I try to remember anatomy diagrams from every encyclopaedia I ever opened as a kid, because, if there are vital organs down there, I am pretty much fucked.
I am leaning against a wall in an empty dockside warehouse trying to remember anatomy diagrams and there is a woman on the floor, about three yards in front of me. I don’t need to remember childhood encyclopaedias to know that there is a pretty vital organ in your skull, not that I seem to have made much use of it over the last four weeks. Anyway, the woman on the floor is Helena Gersons and she hasn’t got much of a skull left, and no face at all. Which is a shame, because it was a beautiful face. A truly beautiful face. Next to her is a large canvas bag that has been dropped onto the grubby floor, spilling half of its contents, which comprise a ridiculously large quantity of used, large-denomination banknotes.
I am leaning against a wall in an empty dockside warehouse with a hole in my side trying to remember anatomy diagrams, while Helena Gersons without her beautiful face and a large bag of cash lie on the floor. That should be enough of a pickle to be in, but there is also the Fat Dutchman looking down at the girl, the three dead men, the bag and now, at me. And he is holding a shotgun: the same one that took Helena’s pretty face off. De Jong walks across the floor, swings the shotgun up and aims it at my head. He pulls both hammers back and squeezes the triggers. There are two almost simultaneous hollow clicks.
‘Bad luck,’ I say. ‘Lillian was in too much of a hurry to reload.’ I aim the automatic at his face. He drops the shotgun with a clatter and puts his hands up. ‘That’s a good Dutchman,’ I say with a smile, but I am finding it difficult to breathe. ‘Now take two steps back.’
He does what I ask.
‘I’m afraid there’s more bad luck for you,’ I say apologetically.
‘What?’
I answer his question by firing the last three rounds from the automatic into his face. One round pops an eye and he’s dead before he hits the ground.
I look around me. Five dead bodies lying in big sticky pools of blood.
‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll join you,’ I say to the rest with a weak smile. I slide down the wall until I’m in a sitting position. I think about Jackie Gillespie and how I’d talked to him until he died. I would have liked that. At least I got McGahern. And I have stopped the guns getting out. I look at Helena’s body and feel like crying. The thing that burns me is that that bitch Lillian has gotten away. She was the brains after all. Truth is, I don’t think I really did get all of the answers. The one thing that sticks with me is that Tam McGahern was smart. And he fought alongside Palestinian Jews. He knew how tough they were. That they would never give up. It doesn’t fit that he would get involved in smuggling arms to the Arabs. He knew where it would lead. And then there was the way he looked to Lillian for guidance. Yes, she was the brains of the outfit. I looked across at McGahern’s body.
‘You’re not Tam at all, are you?’
He doesn’t answer.
‘Doesn’t matter, Frankie.’
I feel cold. And sleepy. It’s not too bad, Lennox, I think. I close my eyes and wait to die.
I am annoyed because someone is trying to wake me. Slapping my face. Someone else is tugging at my clothes where I’ve been shot. Fuck off and let me sleep. More slaps and someone pulls at my eyelids. I open them.
‘Jonny?’ I say weakly to the big handsome face pushed into mine. It can’t be Jonny Cohen. I think I’m hallucinating. Someone’s cutting my clothes. I feel a faint sting as a needle is pushed into my arm.
I look over Jonny’s shoulder and see someone else standing there. I decide I definitely am hallucinating: what would Hollywood actor Fred MacMurray be doing in a Glasgow warehouse?
EPILOGUE
I’m standing looking down at a grave. The weather is standing-looking-down-at-a-grave weather: a steel- grey Scottish sky above and a haar — as the lyrical Scots call a thick mist — lurking down in the valley. Up here the rain is thin and measly and soaks maliciously into every square inch of clothing it can find.
The summer of nineteen fifty-three turned out to be a record year for sunshine in Scotland, but it still doesn’t explain the deep brown tan I’ve picked up. Three months ago I sat under a sun that had never shone on Glasgow. It had taken a couple of months for me to heal reasonably fully and in that time I had sat, first in a wheelchair, then a hospital deckchair, shaded by palms. The shade didn’t prevent me developing this dark tan that makes me stand out even more now that I’m back.
It was Jonny who had fixed it all, but I guess it was his pals in Mossad who had spirited me there and had arranged for my care. I had a visitor while I was there. Actually, there had been a few, including, surprisingly, Jonny who was visiting his parents, ‘and dealing with some business’ as he put it. But it was Wilma Marshall who surprised me. She was tanned and TB clear. They had fixed her up too, mainly because she had provided so much information about the McGaherns and the operation Lillian Andrews had been running. The funny thing was she had no intention of going home. She had a boyfriend there and a good job and was sending money back to her folks in Glasgow. For once I was glad to see someone change to become someone else.
But it hadn’t been all sunshine and happy reunions as I had recuperated. Whenever I thought about all that carnage in Glasgow it made me misty-eyed for the beaches of Anzio. So what happened to everyone?
Well, the police recovered the guns and the cash and decided that it all pointed to a gang fighting amongst themselves. ‘ When thieves fall out… ’ Glasgow policemen are fond of saying elliptically, as if it explains all things.
Obviously, they took an interest in me as soon as I surfaced again, seeing as I seemed to have dropped out of sight at precisely the same time as the shoot-out at the warehouse. However, my tan backed up my story that I’d been abroad for six months. I now even had official paperwork to explain my absence. It was all just a coincidence, I said. But even I had to admit that it stretched coincidence pretty far that everyone involved seemed to have had some connection to me.
Funnily enough the police didn’t push me that far. My conversation with McNab was afternoon tea compared to my previous painful encounter. I got the feeling that he knew more than he was letting on: that word had come down from above not to dig around in my involvement too far. Whatever the reason, I found myself back doing what I had been doing before. I’ve even been making an effort to increase the number of legitimate clients I work for.
I never did find out for sure who the copper was that Lillian had in her pocket. Maybe it was McNab. Maybe not. There were things, or people, I tried not to think too much about. Particularly Jock Ferguson, the one straight copper I felt I could talk to. I had told Ferguson a fair bit about what was going on as I had stumbled along. Or as much as I could tell any copper. And, like I said, I had always had the feeling that Lillian was constantly a step ahead of me. Funny thing, coincidences. I asked a few casual questions about Ferguson. I always did have the feeling he’d had a tough war. Turns out he had been a Desert Rat.
On the romantic front, I never saw my little nurse again, nor did I ever come across Jeannie, the waitress: although I’m sure it was her I saw terrorizing a hotel owner in the film Key Largo. Twinkletoes gave up being a professional heavy and studied chiropody; he now has a peripatetic practice on the Isle of Lewis. Tiny Semple got his big break when Howard Hawks cast him as the ‘Thing’ in a sequel to The Thing From Another World. Hammer
