Verismo Bliss Chapter 5

5.

Harry walked to Matthews Yard. He needed to work off the food and the taste of Ramona on his lips. Women always fucked up his thinking.
Matthews Yard was in the Garden, the place was growing dead bodies at the moment, off Shorts Gardens. The police had cordoned off the area and now, besides the usual rubberneckers, there was a knot of journalists with cameras and voice recorders, clamouring for attention.
‘What’s with the jackals?’ Harry asked Carr as he greeted him behind the police do not cross lines.
‘One or two murders in a week in Covent Garden isn’t unusual, but I guess three brutal murders are enough even for them to show interest.’
‘This one like the others?’
Carr paused at the entrance to the yard. ‘I’ll let you know when we find the body.’
Harry frowned. Carr jerked his head and Harry followed him.
Matthews Yard was reached through an alleyway that opened out into a cobbled area little bigger than a tennis court. It was surrounded on all sides by three storey buildings, both modern and Victorian. There was a smell of decay, probably coming from the large steel bins that were overflowing with the detritus of the dispossessed. What was thrown away in Covent Garden really was of no use to man nor beast. On a steel spike of a forlornly leaning, rusty railing a head had been impaled.
‘What makes you think this is related?’
Carr took out a pill and popped it in his mouth. ‘We get a lot of murders in this place, you know that, Harry, but not that many are like this. Most of our murders are the result of drunken or drugged brawls; petty arguments over petty debts; muggings gone wrong; crazed fuckers who snap one day and end up being shot by one of us. This is crazed, I’ll give you that, but crazed with some sort of method.’
Harry stepped closer to the head which was being examined by the white coat crew. It was a male, not very old, just a kid really. One of his blue eyes was open; the other was closed in by puffy skin, clearly the result of a heavy blow. At least it wouldn’t hurt in the morning. His nose had been sliced off. There were knife slashes over his cheeks and forehead. One ear hung limply from the head.
‘Obviously not murdered here,’ Harry said, noting the lack of any blood stains in the yard. ‘Who called it in?’
‘Some woman who lives here,’ Carr said. ‘She was dumping her trash and came across it about an hour ago. Doubt she will sleep much tonight. I’ll pop in and see her sometime, make sure she’s ok.’
‘She young and attractive, Karl?’
‘Can’t say I’d taken much notice.’
‘How’s Fred?’
‘Same as when you asked yesterday.’
Harry turned his focus back to the boy on the spike. ‘You got a name for him?’
‘Nah, nothing yet.’
‘Sir, I think we might have something here,’ one of the forensic guys said. He was gently opening the mouth and inserting a pair of slim tweezers. ‘I think there’s something in here.’ Carefully he pressed the tweezers together and slid out an ID card from the mouth that would never eat or kiss again.
‘Who said the dead don’t speak,’ Carr said.
‘Nice of our killer to ID the deceased for us.’
‘I’ll remember to thank him.’
The ID card was dropped into a sterile bag and passed to Carr.
‘If this ID card belongs to this head, and the picture looks similar enough, then his name was Barry Penny.’

Harry didn’t like coincidence. He was prepared to believe that it could happen, but he didn’t like it. He walked passed the journalists; some of them he knew and they tried to tap him up for a story but he mimed zipping his mouth up and walked on.
It had been a strange evening and he tried to bring back the feeling that Ramona’s kiss had given him, but instead all he got was an image of Barry Penny’s head. Harry guessed he must have been visiting Gwendolyn again – had he just got unlucky or was there a connection? It was funny to think that Falsham’s daughter could be only yards away from him. He began to study the faces of the few people who passed him, as he turned down Neal Street towards the Underground, or who sat begging or oblivious to the world. Harry turned to face forward and stopped as there was a man right in front of him. Or maybe gorilla might be a better description. He was certainly built more for a cage, than human habitation. Harry stepped to the right to avoid him, but the great ape stepped to his left and grinned at him, the way a lion grins at a gimp antelope.
‘In a hurry?’ he asked Harry, with a voice that stank of too many Soho bars.
He was in his forties with a face that was made for war not love, and one only a mother or a battered wife could love.
‘Not until I saw you.’
The man grinned and Harry knew he wasn’t going to talk his way out of this; for whatever reason the big guy wanted to inflict violence upon him. Harry decided his best chance was to strike first, but as he pulled back his fist to let fly he was grabbed from behind and his arms pinned.
Harry could only watch as the great ape pulled back his fist. It was like sitting in the dentist’s chair and seeing the drill coming towards you, without any anaesthetic. The ape’s fist connected with the left side of Harry’s jaw. His head snapped to the right and a feeling like he had been hit by lightening shook his body. Before he could recover from this he felt a pile driver blow to his abdomen that rearranged his insides so that come the autopsy – which Harry was sure wasn’t far away – the doctors would marvel at the new genus of human they had discovered. Then the world turned on its axis and Harry was on the floor longing for sleep but somebody kept hitting him, hitting him, hitting him…

Harry thought he had gone deaf. When he opened his eyes he saw a young Japanese kid speaking to him, but he just saw the mouth moving, no words were reaching his ears. He shook his head and suddenly his head was full of pounding drums; the reason he couldn’t hear the kid was because a band was playing loud enough to drown out Heathrow, but not loud enough to drown out the screaming pain his body was feeling. He coughed, doubling up and wanting to spew, but only thin mucus escaped from his lips.
Somebody pushed a glass in his hand. It was golden. It smelt warm. He drank it and it scorched his throat but fuck it made him feel better. He reached inside his jacket, with fingers that were bloodied and bruised, and was pleased to discover the rolled up notes he carried were still there. He always carried cash for emergencies like this.
‘Kid, get me a bottle of that stuff and keep the change,’ Harry said, passing him a Churchill.
Harry looked around him. Where the fuck was he? It was some sort of club, and not the sort that had velvet rope. It was cramped with just a bar, a stage and doors to toilets that had liquid seeping out of them. The kids were mainly young Asians, and dressed out as neo-punks; mohicans, ripped t-shirts, leather jackets, bondage trousers, that sort of thing. The band on stage wore suits; two Japs and two white kids playing the instruments and a rather attractive young Asian girl screaming the vocals. He recognised the song now. God Save the Queen by the Pistols. No Future. No Future. No Future. The kid returned with the bottle. The band stopped playing and left the stage to cheers and a barrage of glasses.
‘How you feel now?’ asked the kid.
Harry took a long swig from the Famous Grouse and let the alcohol numb the pain a little. ‘I feel surprised to still be alive. Unless I’m dead and this is heaven.’
‘Yeah man, this is heaven. Welcome to the New Roxy. Heaven!’
At least Harry knew where he was now. He was still in the Garden, on Neal Street. The original Roxy was the first punk club to open back in 1976/77 but was closed within a year or two. The neo-punk movement had originated in Japan, originally as an offshoot of the cosplay scene – the Japanese did love to dress up. The attention to detail was immaculate and any original artefacts from the mid-seventies movement were treated like icons in a Russian Orthodox Church. It spread to the West and was an oddly polite version of punk – a lot of the people drawn to it held respectable jobs; in the week they wore suits and traded millions, and at weekends they spiked their hair and ripped their shirts and pogoed the night away.
Harry’s Jap friend was joined by three other neo-punks, two guys (one white, one Asian) and one girl (Asian). They were hyped up about the band that had just been on. Apparently it was the best gig the Iron Lungs had played in a long time.
‘Hey, knocked-out man, how you doing now?’
Harry grunted some sort of reply but his mouth didn’t seem to be working properly.
‘Man those shits were giving you a right going over. I’m Neo – short for Neapolitan, on account of the way I look.’
Harry looked him up and down. White t-shirt, coffee coloured skin, pink mohican, yeah, he got it.
‘These are my friends and your saviours: Bernie, Worm and Navaho.’
‘But don’t be calling me no ho,’ the girl said, smiling. She had the sort of smile and skin that only an eighteen year old girl can have and Harry wished he was twenty years younger and not so fucking beat up.
‘What happened?’
‘You don’t remember, dude?’ Bernie asked. ‘Neo here saved your life.’
‘Nah, the gang all chipped in to save your life.’
‘I gave that big dude a right fucking kick up the arse!’ Navaho said.
‘We’d gone outside for a fag and heard this ruckus,’ Neo explained. ‘So we went to take a gander and there you were, flat out on the floor, and these two goons kicking seven shades of shite out of you.’
‘Not a happy scene, man,’ Worm said, shaking his green coloured head.
Neo continued. ‘Big bastards, as I’m sure you remember, so we ran toward them shouting our heads off and hoping that might scare them away, but it didn’t make them pause. Navaho, as she said, put her size 5 right up one of the guy’s arses.’
‘I think I scrunched his bollocks,’ she laughed.
‘Bernie got in some kicks whilst the guy counted his balls. Worm jumped on the other ones back and bit his ear, whilst I jabbed and punched him from the front. I’m quick on my feet, thank fuck, ‘cos if one of the punches they were throwing had landed I’d be looking like you.’
‘I look bad?’
‘Your face reminds me of a rotten potato,’ Navaho said, leaning in towards him, so that he could smell the cider and tobacco on her breath, and her perfume of vanilla.
‘Anyway,’ Neo said, ‘before they could do any damage to us somebody called them off.’
Harry frowned.
‘Yeah, deffo,’ Worm said, ‘somebody called from up the street and they threw us off and walked away.’
‘Did you see anybody? Was it a man or a woman’s voice?’
They all shrugged and frowned. ‘The adrenalin was pumping, man,’ Neo said. ‘Violence is not pretty when used indiscriminately.’
Harry struggled to his feet and felt a sharp pain in his chest. Had he a broken rib or two? He held out his hand. ‘I owe you my thanks.’ He shook all their hands. Then he checked his pockets – he still had his ID and his smart, and he’d already checked his cash.
‘They take anything?’ Neo asked.
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
Harry was confused. Was it a random mugging, or had he been targeted? He couldn’t remember pissing anybody off recently, but in his profession it was always a danger. He took out a couple of Churchill’s and held them out to the group. ‘Get yourselves some drinks on me.’
They held up their hands.
‘No, please, I owe you one.’
Reluctantly, Neo took the money. ‘So, one day you do us a favour.’
‘Sure,’ he said, taking out his card. ‘The names Harry, Harry Reed, I’m in the private detective business. You ever need anything give me a call.’
Navaho took the card. ‘Cool, a detective, like Philip Marlow in a film noir movie. The Iron Lungs do a real neatneatneat song about it: The Long Sleep. I’ll play it to you one day.’
Harry smiled, even though it hurt his face. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’
‘Your office is close to here,’ she said, scoping his card.
‘Sure. In fact I might just crash there for the night; I really can’t face a journey back to my place.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Navaho said. ‘I need somewhere to crash tonight – I was going to stay at Worms but his feet stink like melted cheese gone wrong…’
‘Fuck you!’ Worm said.
‘…plus he still lives with his mum and she doesn’t approve of me.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oh, all over. I stay with friends or in squats.’
‘There’s only a couch and a fold out bed at the office.’
‘I got sleeping bag stashed behind the bar. Come on, lets get you tucked up. Nurse Navaho will look after you. Catch you kids later!’
She helped him up the stairs and out into the night. There was a slight rain, the drops warm on his skin. He idly wondered how much damage a body could take over the years before it just decided to jack it in.
‘Look,’ Navaho exclaimed, gripping his arm, making him wince ‘Oh, sorry, but see, Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, high above the Seven Dials. Maybe it’s a good omen.’
Harry looked up at the stars, to where she had pointed. He didn’t look up often and knew little about the stars, other than what everybody knew: that they were distant suns and when you looked at them you were gazing into the past. When he lowered his gaze he saw Navaho had scampered off and was crouching down and talking to a down and out, giving him a cigarette. He walked over to her, hoping things didn’t turn nasty, his skin and bones couldn’t be doing with more nastiness.
‘You’re a princess, Nav,’ the tramp was saying, sucking hard on the cigarette.
Navaho looked up at Harry. ‘This is Frank. Frank this is Harry. Harry is a private detective, Frank. Frank used to be a solicitor, but now he sleeps under the stars every night.’
Harry gazed at her. She was beautiful, with her skin of caramel. Her hair was as black as charcoal, but smooth, and cut at the shoulders, with the roots a luminous green, making her hair look like a garden of ravens. Her eyes were a Vandyke brown. Her face was round, with a slim, straight nose, and ears heavily pierced and hung with totems. She wore a t-shirt advertising some band or other and black leggings with monkey boots. On the short journey from Neal Street to Mercer she spoke to four other homeless people who all knew her and who she shared her cigarettes and drugs with. When she wasn’t talking to them her head was facing upwards staring at the stars pointing out constellations as the rain fell gently upon her face.
‘Come, I want to see what a real detective’s office looks like. Do you keep a bottle of Jack Daniels in a filing cabinet, and a .45 in the drawer of your desk?’
‘Glenfiddich, and no gun, just a sharp wit.’
When they entered the building she peeked in through the sweatshop door where some of the workers slept, huddled on the floor beneath threadbare blankets.
‘Poor bastards,’ she muttered. ‘Can’t anything be done for them?’
‘They have a roof and they have food.’
‘Isn’t life more than that?’
‘Not for some people.’
She pouted for a moment and then she was bounding up the stairs to his office. He hobbled up after her, his knees complaining that they just wanted to rest, rest, rest.
‘This is just how I expected it to be,’ she declared, rushing around the poky office. ‘You have your name on the door and a really well worn desk. Wow, what stories this could tell.’
Harry lent against the lintel of the door, exhausted just watching her.
‘There is Glenfiddich in the cabinet! And the drawers…no gun, shame, but gum, a knife, a blackjack, maps, dictionary. A picture of Frisco! You been there, Harry?’
‘Sure. A while back,’ he said, remembering the girl who had drawn him to Frisco - a girl who looked like an older version of Navaho – and had then abandoned him.
‘Shit, I’d love to go. Cal – eee – fooorn – i – a!’ She threw herself upon the torn leather couch and gazed up at the ceiling, but Harry knew she was seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and the California sun. She lit a cigarette which was absolutely illegal in a place of work, indeed in any enclosed place, but Harry didn’t see the point in stopping her. He limped to the cabinet and took out the bottle and two glasses. He poured them both big ones. Neat. She took the glass and placed it on her flat belly. Harry took out the fold up bed from the closet and put it next to the couch. He lay down, his body happy, happy, happy. He took a big gulp of the whisky and felt the warmth ease the pain in his muscles and sting his cut lips.
‘I thought you were going to look after me, Nurse Navaho, and here I am putting myself to bed.’
She reached over and took his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I was drifting. This couch is nice and soft and squeaks when I move.’
It had been a long time since anybody had held his hand. It had been a long time since he had felt whatever it was he was feeling; besides the feeling of being crushed by a ten ton truck.
‘Where you from, Navaho?’
‘Everywhere and nowhere,’ she declared, finishing her drink and pouring them both some more. ‘Here, take your medicine.’
‘I haven’t seen you around the Garden before, but you know so many people.’
‘Oh I haven’t been here long, just a few months. And it’s easy to get to know people; you just talk to them and smile.’
‘You’d be surprised how hard it gets to do that the older you get.’
She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. ‘What’s it like getting old?’
He smiled. ‘Oh it has some plus points, but mostly it’s a slow decay into greyness and cynicism.’
‘Tell me the plus points,’ she asked softly.
‘You don’t have to worry about being cool or hip or trendy. You can listen to whatever music you like. You can buy boring clothes. But the best thing, I guess, is that you can embarrass your teenage kids.’
‘You have kids?’
‘Nope.’
‘Then there is no best thing for you.’
‘I guess not. What about you? What drives a neo-punk?’
‘Well, it’s not what you see. We have a disease that you can’t see. It has nothing to do with the piercings or the tattoos; nothing to do with the hairstyles or bullshit fashion and attitude. It’s that we have the hearts of poets who believe there is more to this fucking shadow life; that behind every mundane act is a poem waiting to blossom like a flower.’ He squeezed her hand. She smiled at him. ‘You don’t look so old. Anyway, it ain’t where you’re going or where you’ve been, it’s where you are that matters.’
He tried to raise himself a little so that he could see her better, but pain shot through his ribs and he sank back down.
‘Here,’ she said, suddenly looming above him and offering him a pill. ‘This will ease the pain and make you sleep.’
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t you trust your Nurse Navaho?’
‘Ok, but if I die in my sleep, scatter my ashes in the Thames.’
He swallowed the pill she gave him, washed it down with Glenfiddich, and then lay back. He felt the numbness begin first in his fingers. It felt good. Navaho was singing, he didn’t know what, he doubted he had heard any new music for a decade, but it sounded mournful, a lament. Maybe for Frisco. Yeah, sure, a lament for Frisco and Carmel by the Sea. Whale song.
Just before he allowed the drugs to take his body to the forgetful hospital he became aware of soft lips gently kissing his and as he opened his eyes for one last time he became aware of her t-shirt. The design was red and black. A crazed face leered out at him, leering gleefully with a bottle in one hand and a black flag in the other. Emblazoned down the side of the top was the slogan, The Revenge of Wat Tyler. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? He tried to reach out to her. He tried to speak. Wat Tyler. But the fog of painless sleep enveloped him.

When he awoke the sunlight was slanting through the window like neon streaks. He was scared to move, because he knew it was going to fucking hurt. It did, but maybe not as bad as he thought it would. He managed to get vertical, even if he did have to steady himself on the desk. He glanced out the window. The street was busy with low life. He must have slept long. He checked his watch which wasn’t on his wrist but on the desk – 12.15. He didn’t remember taking off his watch, he didn’t normally; somebody must have taken it off for him.
Navaho wasn’t there, but there was a faint smell of vanilla in the air. Maybe she hadn’t been gone long. Shit, he suddenly remembered: Wat Tyler. Why hadn’t he seen it and asked her about it?
There was a note on his desk, folded once with a red heart drawn on it. He flipped it open: H, hope you feel good this morning and don’t ache too much. You spoke in your sleep about Frisco and a girl with skin as dark as mine. I think she made you happy and then broke your heart. Your words were like a song of despair in the nite. Will see ya soon. Nav x
It seemed odd to have received a proper note written in proper language, especially from one so young, rather than an email or txt written in the abbreviated breathlessness of youth. He remembered another note and searched through his pockets for it. It had gone. The notelet that Ramona had given him, with the name and contact details of the friend she had seen Balaam and the Devil with. Had the goons taken it? Or maybe, he thought, it had been taken earlier, when he had been distracted with a kiss which distracts much more easily than a fist. There was one other suspect, but she had no motive.
He stared out of the window, but this time he looked up to the sky, to the white clouds that floated like dumplings in an Irish stew.