Free Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon by Ted Lewis Page B

here in the first place.”
    “But you work for them,” D’Antoni says.
    I put my luggage down again and grasp the balcony rail.
    “Oh yes,” I tell him, “I work for them all right. Just an employee, I am. I mean, all I do is sort the jobs for them, engineer the jobs, go out tooled up on the jobs to make sure they work in spite of the chancers around these days and then after the job’s over I take the money home and put it on the desk in front of them so they can have the fun of divvying it all up and holding it and all that kind of nice fun, before the other kind of fun which is where they put on their mohairs and go out and spend it. I’m just a cog in the wheel, that’s all. Like Dagenham. They don’t need me at all. They especially don’t need me when people in a similar line of business put it about that they might feel like slapping Gerald and Les’s hands for them. That’s the last time they need me. They’d be quite capable of sorting out a non-event like that, those brave fellows. They wouldn’t need me, would they, Wally? I’m just one of the works. Isn’t that right, Wally?”
    Wally shuffles back a bit round the corner but not far enough to obscure my view of his usual expression, that is to say, looking down his nose from one slipper to the other. D’Antoni just stays where he is on the steps, looking up at me, silent. After a little while he begins to grin.
    “What you laughing at,” I say to him.
    D’Antoni shakes his head.
    “Maybe there’s method in their madness,” he says.
    “What are you talking about?” I ask him.
    D’Antoni slips the shooter back in the shoulder holster and folds his arms.
    “The Fletchers,” he says. “Maybe they knew what they were doing.”
    “Fuck off,” I tell him. I pick up my luggage and walk towards the bedroom. The bedroom, predictably, is very big. There are a lot of carpets hanging on the walls. Nice, I think, if you wake up with a hangover. When you get out of bed you try and walk on the bleeding wall insteadof the floor. In fact the amount of Spanish Wilton on the walls far outnumbers the stuff on the floor. Just a few rugs tastefully scattered on the shiny done-up stonework. In fact the whole bedroom is tastefully empty as possible. There’s a bed, sure, and it’s beautifully covered in some golden brown silk smutter, but next to it there’s just a small square bedside cupboard made out of marble, would you believe—a cupboard made out of marble. And apart from the soft metallic glow of the single wall light and the plain thick gold-coloured curtains and the fitted wardrobes running the length of one wall, that’s all there is to it. Very Gerald and Les. I slide open one of the doors to the fitted wardrobes. Nothing, but half a dozen hangers, which mercifully are neither marble nor examples of local peasant handicrafts. But even so the wardrobe has a warmth, is a fucking sight cosier than the rest of the bedroom.
    It occurs to me that I might just skin a passing mountain goat, make a sleeping bag, slide the doors behind me, and camp out in the wardrobe for the rest of the fortnight. Some fucking hope.
    I slide closed the wardrobe door. I traverse the horizontal masonry and make it to the drawn curtains that echo the colour of the stonework. I part the curtains and there’s more sliding glasswork, opened to allow the perfumed mountain air in as far as the heavy material. Beyond the glasswork there’s what appears to be a balcony, its confines stretching much farther than the usual kind of arrangement, floored with similar stonework to that in the bedroom. I walk out into the evening air and I have to admit it does me a lot of good, provides enough balm to give a brochure writer Wanker’s Cramp.
    Where the balcony ends, there’s a low, white-painted, wrought iron fence. I wander over to this retaining structure and have a look over the edge and the impression I get is that it’s like looking out of the aeroplane port-hole again;