Craig Russell - Lennox

‘Jonny?’ I said. ‘Can I come over… and can you get me a doctor?’

Jonny Cohen’s home in Newton Mearns was nearer than either of the other Three Kings’, but there was more to it than that. My instinct told me I’d get the help I needed there.

I did, however, feel the need to warn Jonny that I was in a bad way and to suggest that we should maybe meet up somewhere other than his house, but he insisted, saying he’d meet me at the door and get me looked after. He told me that I’d have to accept that the cops would see me arrive: they had him under surveillance, just like the other two Kings and all their chief officers.

It was difficult, but I somehow managed to drive south to Newton Mearns and park the Atlantic three blocks away from Jonny’s, hopefully out of sight of the coppers on watch. It was that three-block walk to Jonny’s house that took the most out of me. I tugged my hat’s brim low over my eyes and pulled the collar of my raincoat up. Two reasons: to hide my face as much as possible, and to conceal the bright red that the collar of my shirt had turned. I walked as straight and purposefully as I could, but now I felt hot and I knew that the sweat I felt in my hatband and trickling down my neck was really blood.

Jonny answered the door and casually invited me in. At least casually from a cop car’s distance away. It didn’t do me much good to see the shock in Jonny’s expression, especially considering his own face was still bruised and swollen under one eye from his encounter with Super-intendent McNab and his boys.

‘For fuck’s sake, Lennox…’ he said after he closed the door. I didn’t answer: I was too busy hurtling towards the Italian tiles of his hallway.

I came to at about lunchtime the following day. There was a fat, middle-aged woman sitting reading a newspaper beside the bed and as soon as she heard me stirring she got up and leaned over me, placing a hand on either shoulder to pin me to the bed.

‘Not now, sweetheart,’ I said weakly. ‘I’ve got a headache.’

‘Aye, very funny,’ she said in a way that told me she didn’t think it. ‘Stay still and don’t move your head. I’ll go and get Mr Cohen.’

I lay still and looked up at the ceiling. I felt as sick as hell and my head still rang with the constant, high-pitched pain. Jonny came in and leaned over me.

‘What the fuck have you been doing, Lennox? I got Doc Banks to look you over. He’s stitched up your head but he was pretty insistent that you go to a hospital as soon as possible. He says your skull could be fractured.’

‘No time, Jonny. Do you know about the meet tonight?’

‘At Shawfields? Aye. I hope you know what the fuck you’re about, Lennox. I have spent the last five years in the middle of Sneddon and Murphy. Trying to keep the bastards apart. Every time they meet Murphy starts the wisecracks about the Queen and Sneddon about the Pope. All of this sectarian shite, it does my head in.’

‘I suppose you’re neutral. Being Jewish, I mean.’

‘Doesn’t always follow,’ he grinned. ‘You can’t just be Jewish in Glasgow. You have to be a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew. Growing up here I was always being asked if I supported Rangers or Celtic.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That I was a Partick Thistle supporter.’

‘Smart move… dodge the sectarian issue and win their sympathy at the same time.’

‘Aye, but I still got stick for being Jewish. I remember kicking the shite out of this kid at school who said that us Jews had all the money. It wasn’t his insults that got to me… I was just so fucking furious that my wealthy Jewish parents were making us live in a tenement slum in Newlands.’

I laughed and somewhere in darkest Haiti a voodoo witch doctor shoved a pin through a dummy of my head. The homely, middle-aged woman tutted loudly and told me to lie still.

‘Give us a minute, Lizzie,’ said Jonny. ‘I’ll make sure he behaves.’

‘I think she fancies me,’ I said after she’d gone.

‘Lizzie Sharp,’ explained Jonny. ‘She used to be a matron at the Western General. She had a sideline in helping out young ladies in a spot of bother. Got three years for it. She’s pretty handy when someone’s banged up. Listen, Lennox, you need to get to a hospital. Doc Banks is worried about you.’

‘If Doc Banks had ever worried about anything other than where his next drink came from, he wouldn’t have been struck off. I’ll be fine.’ I eased up into a sitting position to prove I was right, but another stab from the witch doctor proved I wasn’t.

Jonny shrugged and tossed me a bottle that rattled in my hand when I caught it. ‘The doc says these will kill a lot of the pain. He said they’re really strong stuff. But you’ve to make sure and lay off the booze or they’ll make you nuts.’

I’d been tended by a corrupt nurse, medicated by a corrupt doctor who presumably got supplies like these from a corrupt pharmacist. I spilled a couple of the pills onto the palm of my hand. They were the size of horse-tablets; maybe Doc Banks got them from a corrupt vet instead.

‘Bloody hell, Jonny,’ I said. ‘Last time anybody prescribed tablets this size, Moses carried them down from Mount Sinai. Am I expected to run in the four o’clock at Troon after taking these?’

‘The doc said you’ve to break them in half before taking them. Don’t worry… Doc Banks knows not to cross me.’ He handed me a glass of water. ‘Sleep for a couple of hours, then we can see about losing our cop friends outside before heading up to Shawfields.’

*

The pills Doc Banks had left did the trick all right. The pain faded enough and I didn’t so much fall as plummet asleep. I was plunged into a vivid dreamworld of nauseatingly bright colours and painfully sharp edges. Lillian Andrews, ever the girl of my dreams, was there. She sat in a low-slung Contemporary chair in the middle of a wall-less, infinite room and smoked while all around her men killed each other. The floor beneath her feet was carpeted deep red.

‘It’s very practical,’ she said calmly. ‘The blood doesn’t show at all.’ Her point was illustrated as Hammer Murphy caved in the side of Bobby’s head with a swing of his mallet and a spray of blood, the same shade as the carpet and Lillian’s lips, spattered her cheek.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said to her without anger or malice as I sat down opposite her on a chair that appeared beneath me. Ronnie Smails and Arthur Parks joined us, each sitting in the chairs I’d found them in. Neither spoke. Parks’s lower jaw still jutted at an unnatural angle. I took a glass of red wine from her and we toasted the memory of her husband.

‘Are you going to fuck me first,’ Lillian asked in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘or after?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

She said something in reply but I couldn’t hear it over the screams of the fighting and dying. I sipped the red wine and it was thick and warm and coppery.

I woke up.

The curtains were drawn and the bedroom I lay in suddenly seemed tiny and cramped after the impossible architecture of the room in my dream. I felt sick. I stood up and rushed out of the room. I found the bathroom at the end of the hall just in time. I vomited up all that was in my gut but continued retching for a couple of endless minutes.

I washed my face and looked in the bathroom mirror. The world seemed to still have the hard-edged, harsh hyper-reality of my dream. A pale, drawn face with dark-shad-owed eyes stared back out at me. My hair was plastered to my forehead like black seaweed on a beach. I looked old. I felt old. There was a large gauze bundle taped to the side of my head where Doc Banks had stitched me up. Jonny appeared behind me at the door. I looked at the reflection of his bruised face.