‘Dandy’s saying yees’ve get tae t’club.’
Shifty never looks you in the eye when he speaks. His diction is poor, as if his teeth are all smashed up or his jaw is wrong, but it isn’t. He chooses words that jangle, inelegant rhythms that grate, so that his next word can never be anticipated by someone earwigging nearby. People usually have to ask him to repeat what he has just said but Watt and Manuel have both heard him. They don’t know who he is talking to though.
‘Might one enquire, Shifty: of the two of us, whom are you addressing?’
Shifty sucks his cheeks in. ‘M’nel.’ He looks at the ceiling. ‘Dandy’s at Gordon. You’ve tae up there. Pronto.’
Shifty reels away abruptly, falling back from the tight trio like a side peeling off an upright banana. Three big strides and he’s at the door. And then he’s gone.
Manuel sucks violently on his cigarette, empties his whisky into his mouth, swallows and only then breathes out a long stream of smoke through his nostrils. As he exhales Watt sees his eyes dart this way, that way, looking for the angles, for a way out.
‘You going?’
Manuel shakes his head but they both know he has to go. Dandy McKay ordered it. The Gordon Club is just a few blocks away.
Watt looks at the barman who flinches.
‘Did you call the Gordon?’
The barman shrugs and whispers, ‘We wiz told we had to.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Word went out. Everb’dy’s been told.’
Watt can’t quite believe it. ‘Everybody?’
The barman shrugs helplessly.
Watt knows how powerful Dandy McKay is. He knows the weaselly barman had no choice, but still, Watt is frightened, and he takes it out on him.
‘It stinks in here,’ he announces to the room. ‘Let’s go.’
He throws money onto the bar. A shilling rolls off, dropping noisily onto the metal trap into the cellar. It makes the stoolie barman jump. They walk out, banging the door as they go.
In the street, struck by the cold once again, they stop and Manuel lifts his jacket collar. He is in a lot of trouble. Watt looks down at him. He knows Manuel is no innocent, but he also knows that trouble is a bad thing to be in a lot of.
He glances across the road and sees the Trades Hall door open. A gold-braided doorman hails a taxi for a prosperous couple. The man helps his mink stole’d wife into the cab before getting in himself, palming a tip to the doorman. The doorman watches the taxi drive away, adjusts his white gloves. The lights from inside the Hall are warm and clean and Protestant. They go back fifteen generations.
Watt prides himself on knowing all the different grades of society in Glasgow. He moves among them seamlessly. They all mistake him for their own, except the Merchants’ Guild. They know he is not one of them. Especially now, since the Burnside Affair and the publicity. But Watt is convinced he can make up the ground. He can do it because he is certain that the way in is not respectability or staying out of the papers. The way in is money. You might be washed in the blood of the lamb, but the real cleanser of souls is money, and he’s going to have a lot of money soon. If he can just sort this out.
‘What’s it going to take for me to get the gun?’
‘I’ve got a joe. Take him, then I’ll give you the gun.’
‘But the police won’t look at anyone but me.’
‘Buzzies’ll want him for it,’ says Manuel. ‘Bastard called Charles Tallis. Record as long as your arm.’
Manuel’s eyes narrow, his mouth curls down. Watt has never heard of anyone called Tallis but he can see Manuel hates the man, wants bad things to happen to him. Manuel doesn’t want to go down for it, Watt can see that, but he’s struggling to find the connection between the gun and money and doing harm to a man called Tallis with a record as long as your arm. William Watt is good at long-term planning. Even where he can’t see clear connections, he can usually imagine what they might be like. He can’t here and grunts, shaking his head. It’s not believable, not even to someone who wants to believe it.
Manuel sneers at the pavement. ‘Tallis told me the whole thing was a mistake. He was after the Valentes next door.’
Watt is instantly sober. For a moment he forgets to breathe. The story could work. It may be more believable than the truth and really what difference does it make if it’s Manuel or someone else? Watt isn’t looking for justice but an ending to this story. He’s a conversation away from the whole bloody mess being over. But Dandy McKay is after Manuel, seriously after him, this vessel of the potential solution. Watt needs to get this story resolved before Dandy gets him.
‘Let’s go and see my brother John.’
6
Monday 6 January 1958
THE THREE BOYS ARE all eight years old or thereabouts. They should be in school but aren’t. They have been kicking around for an hour this morning looking for trouble and now they’ve found it.
A car, an Austin A35. It is parked in Florence Street in the Gorbals. A long, wide street of black-scalded four-storey tenements. Cars are rarely parked here and never left unattended. But this car is empty. It has dew on it so it has been here for a while. It is small and as cute as a button. It looks like a cartoon. Every edge is rounded, every contrasting line exaggerated. The grate is chrome, long and pinched, a prissy kiss of a grate.
The boys cross the road and sidle up to it. They try the driver’s door and it opens. They can’t believe their luck. They giggle, look around, waiting for a mother at a window to shout them away or a driver to run at them, but nobody does. Omniscient Gorbals mothers are watching from windows and doorways, but they don’t care. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. The boys get into an actual car.
They pretend to drive, take turns sitting in the driver’s seat, waving their hands around the steering wheel like actors driving in the movies. One of them makes the passable sound of an engine by burring his lips and the others compliment him on it.