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  Not with this guy. He deserved less than that.

  I watched him covertly as I approached his position. He appeared relaxed, at ease, as if savoring his own few private moments of peace before tackling some great enterprise. I knew what he thought that was going to be. I also knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  There was an empty chair on the other side of his table. I sat down in it.

  He ignored me for a couple minutes, peering in a vaguely benign way at the skeletal branches of the tall trees which stand all around the park’s central area: at them, or perhaps at all the buildings around the square revealed by the season’s dearth of leaves. Being able to see these monoliths makes the park seem both bigger and yet more intimate, stripped.

  Defenseless.

  ‘Hello, Kane,’ he said, finally.

  I’d never actually seen him before — not in the flesh at least, I’d only pictures — so I have no idea how he’d managed to make me straight away. I guess it’s his job to know things about people.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ I said.

  He glanced at me, finally, then away again, seemingly to watch a young couple perched at a table twenty yards away. They were bundled up in thick coats and scarves and necking with cautious optimism. After a few minutes they separated, tentatively smiling, still with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and turned to look at the lights strung in the trees, to listen to the sound of cars honking, to savour being where they were. A recent liaison, the legacy of an office party, perhaps, destined to be a source of embarrassed silences in the office by Valentine’s Day. Either that or pregnancy and marriage and all the far longer silences afterward.

  ‘I knew it could happen,’ the man said, taking the lid off his coffee and peering inside, as if gauging how long he had left. ‘I’m not surprised that it’s you sitting there.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Accepting a job for this evening? That’s cold. Takes a certain kind of person. Who else they going to call?’

  ‘That supposed to be a compliment? You think if you butter me up then I won’t do it?’

  The man looked calmly at me through the steam of what smelled like a gingerbread latte. ‘Oh, you’ll do it. I have no doubt of that.’

  I didn’t like his tone, and I felt the thing start to uncurl inside me. If you’ve ever tried to give up smoking you’ll have felt something like it — the sudden, lurid desire to lay waste to the world and everything in it, starting right here, right now, and with the person physically closest to you.

  I don’t know what this thing is. It doesn’t have a name. I just know it’s there, and I feel when it wakes. It has always been a very light sleeper.

  ‘No, really,’ I said. ‘Just because I live in a big house these days and I got a wife and a child, you think I can’t do what I do?’

  ‘You’ve still got it. You’ll always have it.’

  ‘Fucking right I will.’

  ‘And that’s something to be proud of?’ He shook his head. ‘Shame of it is, you were a good kid.’

  ‘Isn’t everyone?’

  ‘No. Some people come out of the womb broken. You can nurture all you want, but sooner or later they’re going to pass the damage on. With you it could have been different. That makes it worse, somehow.’

  ‘I am who I chose to be.’

  ‘Really? Everyone in the neighbourhood knows the kind of person your father was.’

  My hands twitched, involuntarily.

  ‘He had no faith in anything,’ the man said. ‘He was a hater. And a hurter. I remember watching him when he was young, too, knowing how he’d grow up to be. Either dead inside or affectionate in inappropriate ways. Maybe both. Am I right?’

  ‘If you’d like this to play out in a civilized fashion,’ I said, my voice tight, ‘you would do well to drop this line of discussion.’

  ‘Forgive me. But you’ve come here to kill me, Kane. That’s pretty personal too, wouldn’t you say?’

  I knew I should get on with it. But I was also aware this was the biggest job of my career, and when it was done, it would be over. I was also simply curious.

  ‘What the fuck makes you think you’re better than me?’ I said. ‘What you do isn’t so different.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘You put yourself in a position of power, you made it so you get to choose who gets what. Who prospers, who gets nothing. And then you point the finger and lives get fucked up forever. Same as me.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’ He looked into his cup again. The habit was beginning to get on my nerves.

  ‘Yeah, drink up,’ I said. ‘Time’s running out.’

  ‘One question.’

  ‘How’d I find you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘People talk.’

  ‘My people?’

  I shook my head, irritably. The truth was his own soldiers had held the line. I’d tracked down a couple of them (one slurping pho in a noodle bar under a bridge in Queens, the other sleeping in a tree in Central Park) and leaned on them hard — to the point where one of them would not be working for him, or anyone else, ever again. Both had merely looked up at me with their cold, strange eyes and waited for whatever I was going to do. It was not them who’d told me to go and stand in Times Square at the end of any December afternoon, and wait there until this man appeared, arriving there from directions unknown.

  ‘So, who, then?’

  ‘It’s too late for you to be taking names,’ I said, with some satisfaction. ‘That’s all over now.’

  He smiled again, but coldly, and I saw something in his face that had not been there before — not on the surface, at least. I saw the steady calm of a man who was used to making judgment calls, decisions upon which the lives of others had hung. A man who had measured, assayed, and who was now about to pay the price, at the behest of people who had fallen on the wrong side of the line he had believed it was his God-given right to draw.

  ‘You think you’re this big, bountiful guy,’ I said. ‘Everybody’s old man. But some understand the real truth. They realise it’s all bullshit.’

  ‘Have I not made my rules clear? Have I not looked out for the people who deserved it?

  ‘Only to make them do what you want.’

  ‘And what do you want? Why are you really here tonight, Kane?’

  ‘Someone paid me to be. More than one, in fact. A syndicate. People saying that enough is enough. Getting back for what you did to them.’

  ‘I know about that,’ he interrupted, as if bored. ‘I can even guess who these people are. But I asked why you’re here.’

  ‘For the money.’

  ‘No. Otherwise you’d have done it from ten yards away and be on your way home by now.’

  ‘So you tell me why, if you’re so fucking wise.’

  ‘It’s personal,’ he said. ‘And that’s a mistake. You’ve made a good living out of what you do, and have something of a life. In your terms. That’s because you’ve merely been for hire. But you want this one for yourself. Admit it. You hate me on your own account.’

  This man was smart enough to tell a lie when he heard it, so I said nothing.

  ‘Why, Kane? Did something happen, some night, when there was snow on the ground outside and everything should have been carols and fairy lights? Did your Christmas presents come with conditions, or costs? Payments that came due in the middle of the night, when mom was asleep?’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘How may people have you killed, Kane? Can you even remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said, though I could not.

  ‘When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?’

  ‘I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.’

  ‘Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.’

  ‘You’re out of time,’ I said.

  He sighed. Then h
e tipped the cup, drained the last of his coffee, and set it down on the table between us.

  ‘I’m done,’ he said.

  In the fifteen minutes we’d been talking, nearly half the people had left the park. The necking couple had been amongst them, departing hand in hand. The nearest person was now sixty yards away. I stood up, reached in my jacket.

  ‘Anything you want to say?’ I asked, looking down at his mild, rosy face. ‘People do, sometimes.’

  ‘Not to you,’ he said.

  I pulled out the gun and placed the silenced end in the middle of his forehead. He didn’t try to move. I took hold of his right shoulder with my other hand, and pulled the trigger once.

  With all the traffic around the square, I barely even heard the sound. His head jerked back.

  I let go of his shoulder and he sagged slowly around the waist, until the weight of his big, barrel chest pulled his body down off the chair to slump heavily onto the path, nearly face-first.

  A portion of the back of his head was gone, but his eyes were still open. His beard scratched against the pavement as he tried to say something. After a couple of times I realized it was not words he was forcing out, but a series of sounds. I put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger again. A portion of the opposite temple splatted out onto the stones.

  Yet still he was trying to push out those three short syllables, each the same.

  I pulled the trigger a final time, and he was quiet. I bent down close to make sure, and to whisper in the remains of his ear.

  ‘Check it twice, right, asshole?’

  I walked out of the park. A few blocks away I found a cab, and started the long, slow journey home to New Jersey.

  I woke early the next morning, like most fathers, to the sound of my son hurrying past our bedroom and down the stairs. On his way to the fireplace, no doubt.

  Good luck with that, I thought, though I knew his stocking would be full nonetheless.

  A few minutes later Lauren levered herself into a sitting position. She pulled on her robe and went to the window, yanking aside the drapes.

  She smiled at something she saw out there, then turned and quickly left the room.

  By the time I’d got my own robe on and headed down to the kitchen to make coffee, I knew what she’d seen through the window. It had snowed heavily overnight, covering the yard and hanging off the trees. The whole nine yards of Winter Wonderland set-dressing. Probably I would have to help build a snowman later, whether I felt like it or not.

  In the living room my wife and child were sitting together Indian-style in the middle of the floor, cooing over the stockings they’d already taken down from the fireplace. Candy, little gifts, pieces of junk that were supposed to mean something just because they’d been found in a sock. I noticed that the cookie left on the table near the hearth had a large bite taken out of it. Lauren has always been good with detail.

  ‘Happy Christmas, guys,’ I said, but neither of them seemed to hear.

  I stepped around them and went to the fireplace. I took down the remaining stocking. I knew something was different before it was even in my hand.

  It was empty.

  ‘Lauren?’

  She looked up at me. ‘Ho ho, ho,’ she said.

  Three short syllables, each the same.

  There was nothing in her face.

  Then she smiled, briefly, before going back to chattering with our son, watching for the third or fifth time as he excitably re-packed and then unpacked his stocking. Her smile went straight through me, but then they always have. I left the stocking on the arm of one of the chairs and walked out into the kitchen.

  I opened the back door and went to stand outside in the snow.

  It was very quiet, and it was nothing but cold.

  Walking Wounded

  When after two days the discomfort in his side had not lessened, merely mutated, Richard finally began to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering epic discomfort, but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

  Christine’s solution to the problem was straightforward in its logic and strident in delivery. He should go to the casualty department of the nearest hospital, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery just down the street from their new flat in Kingsley Road.

  Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free Hospital and sitting amongst stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again — together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting room bench — and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing was the prospect of going down the road to the nearest GP and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived nearby, and wished both to register with the surgery and have the doctor’s apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

  He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had returned to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

  The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t been a hundred percent behind the move in the first place. He had wanted to, kind of; or at least he’d believed they should do. It had come to him one night while lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half-remembered a poem by someone long dead — Herrick, possibly? — the gist of which had been that though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. Well, it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

  Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting room. In the half-light it looked the same as always. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

  But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine. As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts as horticulture still struggled for life in the face of his indifference, Richard finally realised that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores, and tube station, but also Belsize ‘village’ just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with patés, wine, videos, and magazines that you hardly ever needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ stroll. The view from the front of the flat was onto the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was onto a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm, the overall effect remained pleasing.

  The view through Christine’s eyes was probably different. however. She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of
happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled Mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of the country house which had originally stood there.

  She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they’d come back from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Christine’s friends, drunk themselves, but irritably drunk. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to her question, and the matter had been dropped.

  Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a full-blown row. For a moment he saw the flat as she did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.

  The next morning, over cappuccinos on Haverstock Hill, he’d suggested they move. At the eagerness of her response he felt a band loosen in his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there, and the rest of the day was wonderful.

  Not so the move.

  Three years’ worth of flotsam, fifty boxes full of stuff. Possessions and belongings which he’d believed to be individual objects somehow metamorphosed into a mass of generic crap to be manhandled and sorted through. The flat they’d finally found was tiny. Well, not tiny; the living room and kitchen were big enough, and there was a roof garden — but a good deal smaller than Belsize Avenue, and nearly twenty boxes of Richard’s stuff had to go into storage. Books which he seldom looked at but would have preferred to have around; DVDs which he didn’t want to watch next week, but might in a couple of months; old clothes which he never wore but which had too much sentimental value to be thrown away.

  And, of course, The Susan Collection. Objects in boxes, rounded up and buried deeper by putting in further boxes, then sent off to be hidden in some warehouse in Kings Cross.