Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Vasco was thinking the same thing. ‘Good thing we didn’t come in the limo. You leave a limo round here, they’d strip it bare in five minutes.’

Jed followed Vasco into Mitch’s place. He heard the buzzing of the needle-gun. Mitch was working. A Latin kid sat on Mitch’s green chair, his arm braced on a steel table.

Without lifting his eyes, Mitch said, ‘Who’s dead?’

Vasco grinned. ‘Nobody’s dead, Mitch. This is just social.’

Mitch tipped his head to the left. ‘You want a beer, they’re over there, in the corner.’

Vasco opened the fridge and looked inside.

‘How’s the bike?’ Jed asked.

‘It’s fixed.’ Mitch glanced up at Jed. ‘It was nothing. Just a plug.’

Jed stopped his smile before it reached his face. Those few extra words, he knew they were the closest Mitch would ever get to thanking him.

Jed and Vasco cracked open a beer each. They sat on a vinyl bench against the wall while Mitch worked on the Latin kid’s shoulder. Slowly a skull appeared, slowly a blue snake slithered out through one of the empty eyes and coiled, like a turban, on the crown.

‘Haven’t lost your touch,’ Vasco said.

‘Do me a favour, Vasco,’ Mitch said. ‘Just shut up.’

Vasco glanced at Jed and shrugged. ‘Trouble with Mitch is, he works too hard.’

The sun dropped in the sky, gilding the dusty glass of the storefront. The horns of passing cars sounded pinched and distant. Jed opened another beer. He could almost have slept.

‘This place,’ he said, ‘it’s just like your other one.’

Mitch grunted. ‘Except I live here.’

‘Yeah?’ Jed looked round. ‘Where?’

‘Upstairs. Got a yard too. In the back.’

Vasco yawned.

More slow minutes passed.

After Mitch had locked the store for the night, he took Jed and Vasco out the back. They stood on the cracked, tilting concrete, cans of beer in their hands, and let the day go dark. A darkness threaded with the silver of sirens, a darkness heady with alcohol, exhaust fumes, river-silt. Once Jed turned sideways and saw Mitch in profile, the stubborn nose and chippy eyes, the pigtail, like a kind of Chinaman, his fat hand round the can and resting on his belly, he was so firm on his two feet, rooted and content, he had the peacefulness of a tree, the dusty fig tree that splayed above their heads, that rubbed against the windows on the second floor. Then a woman’s voice called out, ‘You down there?’

Mitch didn’t move or speak.

‘The guys’ll be here soon,’ the woman’s voice said.

‘Who’s that?’ Jed asked.

‘It’s his old lady,’ Vasco said. ‘He got married too, didn’t you, Mitch?’

Mitch didn’t say anything.

‘Well,’ Vasco said, ‘I guess we’d better be going.’

Driving through Euclid towards Highway 1 and the north-west suburbs, Vasco settled deeper in the seat, his head against the rest. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand that guy.’

‘What’s to not understand?’

‘All that dirt and grease all over, all that slow time.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t have any choice.’

Vasco rolled his head on the rest so he was facing Jed. ‘You’re doing something, it’s because you’ve chosen it.’

They didn’t speak again until they reached Vasco’s house in Westwood. It was a bungalow, if something that takes up half a block can ever be called a bungalow. Fake chimneys, walls clad in big square slabs of ochre stone. The place looked like it was made of Peanut Brittle. You could’ve snapped a piece off the porch and eaten it. But it was real estate. No question about that.

Jed peered through the windshield. ‘This all yours?’

Vasco sat back with a crooked grin.

‘Christ,’ Jed said. ‘What’s your wife like?’

She was like a woman with black hair that curved up and back from her forehead. She wore black high-heels and her tights hissed, but she walked stiffly, as if her hip joints needed oiling. She accepted a kiss from Vasco, and then she took his coat. She seemed too old to be his wife.

‘You’re Jed?’

‘Mrs Gorelli,’ he said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’

‘Oh no,’ and she waved her hand in the air, backwards and forwards, as if she was polishing it, ‘Vasco, he told me so much about you, when you were kids. You must call me Maria.’

They sat down to eat almost immediately. The dining-room was crowded with dark furniture. Sofas of velvet and leather, high-backed chairs of ornate, carved wood. The walls were hung with textiles, nudes in clumsy gilt frames, hand-painted plates. A colour TV stood on the sideboard. Every now and then Vasco reached out and changed channels with the tip of his knife.

‘There’s a remote,’ Maria said.

‘I don’t like remote.’ Vasco looked at Jed. ‘You like remote?’

‘I haven’t got a TV,’ Jed said.

‘Did you hear that?’ Vasco said to Maria. ‘He hasn’t got a TV.’ And changed channels again with his knife.

They talked about old times. Past facts were much easier, it seemed, than the ambiguities of the present. The past, it was so distant, they’d been different people then, they could point at themselves in astonishment, disbelief almost, they could view it all without becoming too involved, like some TV drama. It was clear that Maria knew next to nothing about Vasco’s activities. Nor had she any desire to know. So long as the money came in, she was happy. As to where that money came from, it was neither here nor there, it was geography, and geography, that was such a boring subject.

‘He was so bad in those days,’ she said at one point, lovingly, ‘so bad, weren’t you?’ her hand sliding across the lace tablecloth, covering his.

‘The things I did,’ and Vasco shook his head. ‘Jed too.’

‘Yeah,’ and Jed, too, shook his head.

After dinner Maria left them alone. Vasco moved to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a tumbler of brandy. He swallowed half of it standing up. Then he sat down in a maroon velvet armchair and began to chew his big square fingernails. He’d been drinking steadily throughout the meal, but he now seemed tenser than ever. Jed waited for Vasco to break out of his silence. He watched as Vasco’s rings threw splinters of rich light against the wall.

‘You wanted to talk to me,’ he said finally.

Vasco almost jumped at the sound of Jed’s voice. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

Jed waited.

‘It’s about the job I got you,’ Vasco said. ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ Jed said. ‘It’s a good job.’

‘I don’t know. I may’ve got you into something.’

‘How do you mean?’

Vasco swirled his brandy around. ‘Creed,’ he said. ‘He’s doing some pretty weird stuff.’

‘That’s nothing new, Vasco. We’ve always done —’

Vasco cut him off impatiendy. ‘I’m not talking about that kind of weird stuff.’

‘What then?’

‘Him and the Skull. They’re in it together.’

‘What kind of weird stuff, Vasco?’

‘It’s pretty sick.’ Vasco stood up. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, I just wanted to warn you, you understand?’

‘Oh sure,’ Jed said, ‘sure. I understand.’

But Vasco wasn’t listening. He’d gone to the window and parted the curtains with one hand, and now he was staring out, out into the darkness of the garden.

Jed drove home that night feeling like a man who’s been told he’s going to die but doesn’t know when.

Nathan had only been living in town for a couple of months when he met India-May, but he’d seen her around and he knew what they said. She smoked too much grass, she slept with black men, she wore a silver chain round her ankle that tinkled like the bell-collars you put on cats to stop them catching birds, but it had never stopped her catching anything, that was what they said. The town was called Tomorrow Bay, which was a strange name for a town that didn’t seem to have a future. But it was also the reason why Nathan was there; he’d seen the name on a map and liked the sound of it. So one afternoon he walked into a bar on the south side, one of those dive bars where the air smells singed and all the stools are painted black and smoke curls through their legs as if a dragon’s just breathed out, and there was India-May with her hand round a double gin and when she lifted the glass to her lips the rim hit her teeth and her bangles spilled down her freckled arm and her pale hair dripped into her eyes. She looked reckless and weary. She looked as if all the stories about her were true.