Butcher by Campbell Armstrong Page A

have strawberry blintzes and cream, you give me notice.’
    Tartakower rose. Perlman stepped out of the flat. Just before Tartakower bolted the door, he said, ‘You’ll know when you see Ace, Perlman.’
    â€˜What’s that supposed to mean?’
    Tartakower didn’t embellish. The door was closed and bolted.
    â€˜Hey,’ Perlman said. He knocked on the door, heard only silence from within. Tartakower wasn’t going to open up again. He’d already be sitting at the table counting his cash, then stashing it here and there inside his room. He probably worried about Perlman changing his mind and wanting the gelt back. He lived in a state of hermetic paranoia, everybody stole from him, everybody had it in for him. Plus he’d been cheated out of his life – so why open the door again to the man who’d sent him to hell in the first place?
    Perlman descended to the street. No kids were around now. He walked to his car. His wing mirrors had been thieved. Fuckety fuck fuck . Pissed off, he did a little dance of rage and kicked his tyres a couple of times ferociously, then he calmed when he realized he’d been let off lightly. His wheels might have been stolen, his windows smashed. The whole car might have been seized and driven off to some yard and stripped down for parts.
    He unlocked the car. When he’d driven as far as Govan Town Hall, he pulled to the side of the road and took his mobile from his pocket. Still irked by the loss of his wing mirrors, and the fact his coat stank of burned timber, he punched in a number he rarely used.
    â€˜Hello.’ A frail voice, cracked a little.
    â€˜Aunt Hilda,’ he said.
    â€˜Louis? The same Louis who used to be my favourite nephew? The same Louis who goes to live in Egypt, forgets family, and phones once in a blue?’
    â€˜OK, I’m ashamed,’ he said. He pictured Hilda’s face, florid from high blood pressure, eyes that were magnified behind thick lenses. She was his mother’s younger sister. At the age of ten she’d followed in the footsteps of Ettie and Ephraim, escaping Germany a year before Hitler’s war, aided by a Jewish action group that smuggled both her and Marlene into Switzerland. How they made the trip from Geneva to Glasgow was a story neither woman ever told.
    â€˜When do we see you?’
    â€˜Soon. I promise.’ Perlman felt guilty.
    What the hell would it cost him to go eat some homebaked biscuits that had the heft of landmines, and swill Hilda’s watery green tea and stay an hour or so? But he hadn’t gone in how long? Not even with all the hours that hung so heavily on him during this ‘sick leave’. It was no great trek to the deep south of the city. He’d been devoured by the job too long, compelled by the need to go out day after day and night after night to check the city’s crime barometer. He’d turned into a meteorologist of the seamy side, cut off from clan, and lived a life of self-imposed exile.
    â€˜I’m a million miles away, Lou? Aunt Marlene also would enjoy seeing you. Your poor mother, you think she’d be happy she knew you never came to visit her own sisters?’
    He pictured the two old women in their somnolent parlour. Clay geese nailed to a wall, a grandfather clock with an inexorable tick that would stop only on doomsday, Marlene’s arthritic china-white hands twisted in her lap.
    â€˜Have you heard anything from Miriam?’
    â€˜ Miriam . So this is the real reason you phone me? I may be old, but nobody’s fool, Louis.’
    He knew he was blushing. ‘I was wondering about her.’
    â€˜She doesn’t write you?’
    â€˜One postcard from Florence, then another from Copenhagen.’
    â€˜Me, I was privileged to get one from Amsterdam I don’t know when. Weeks.’
    â€˜Did she drop a hint when she might come home?’
    â€˜What home? Miriam, a global lady.’
    Perlman