Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

wondering why what was in the drawer was so important. Well, not all of it was. Cheers,” he adds, sitting back and taking another minuscule sip.

Nick thinks, the thought appearing in the dark of his mind, (which has no other thought any more) like a small whitish stone: The ivory. It’s the ivory they wanted. And it’s gone…

“The thing was,” says Friendly, leaning forward again in the same sociable disgusting way, “we run a little racket, me and my chums. Nothing you need know about. But sadly, our friend here, the partner of June-in-the-hospital, rather carelessly kept some written notes. On the notebooks and in the paperbacks you confiscated. They were all in code, so none the wiser, eh? And just as well for our friend too, or he might be in the next bed to Junie-kins, even though I don’t approve of mixed wards.”

The drawer-man is speechless. He only watches Friendly with a dog-like absorption. His tail should droop now, or wag propitiatingly.

A wave of nausea seizes Nick, passes.

He says, “I didn’t know.”

“No, of course you didn’t. If you had, you too would be in the hospital, in bed three, and a rare temptation I have no doubt to every person there. I used to fancy nurses. But some of us grow out of that.” He pauses. Another little, little sip. The younger shaven-headed man has gone to the book-case. He is looking at Nick’s books quite couthly, even replacing each one just where he has taken it from.

Friendly says, to Nick, “There’s no great harm done really, after all. You’ve just been a bit of a cunt. It can all be put right and no need for any rough stuff. I expect you’d prefer that, good-looking youngster like you. So all we want from you now…”

It comes out, like vomit, tears, like all the things said where we do not know why we have said them, but there always is a reason…

“I haven’t got it.”

Friendly seems slightly offended. He sits back. “Got what ?”

“The ivory - whatever it is - someone took it…”

Friendly - seems startled. For a second his face looks different. Then it reverts.

“What the fuck is he on about?” Friendly asks the room generally, and maybe God.

Nick says, “In the drawer was a small piece of ivory, or fake ivory - plastic - there was nothing written on it. Is that what you want? I don’t have it. My brother…” He stops.

He stops because Friendly has held up his meaty puffy paw. Friendly squints at the drawer-man. “What is this wanker on about?”

“I don’t know,” says the drawer-man. In horror he gazes at Nick, begging mutely it seems to be saved from Friendly’s unfriendly side.

Nick must save the drawer-man, for both their sakes.

He begins to describe the ivory. A small square. Ivorian ivory, perhaps, from Africa’s Ivory Coast…

The drawer-man is blank.

Friendly blinks from one to the other, as if at an inane theatrical performance by three-year-olds, in which and whom he has no vested interest.

This all goes on until the shaved-head intervenes from the bookcase, standing there with a copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, his finger between the two pages he was reading.

“I know what he means. That yellow square thing. He,” he indicates with Graham Greene the drawer-man, “said it fell off the drawer handle, so he put it in the drawer. It was only stuck on, then it came off. It was never ivory. Ceramic, was it?”

“Oh, yes – yes…” the drawer-man cries in relief to Friendly, “it was just rubbish.”

“It was just rubbish,” translates Friendly to Nick. “It doesn’t mean a fucking thing. So let’s get on shall we? And this time, zip it, till I’m through.”

Friendly then explains that in a day or so, enough time for Nick to get himself ‘sorted’, a man will drop by and make Nick a knock-down offer for the flat. It seems they all like Nick’s flat, especially now they have had a proper chance to look at it. But he will not expect them to give him the going rate, of course. Just enough to make it legal and cover his moving expenses, because no hard feelings. And then, providing they never clap eyes on Nick again, or Nick is never such a pillock as to go to the pigs, he can get on with his life, and they can get on with what they do. ‘Nough said?

“Yes,” Nick answers.

More than anything, at this moment, he simply dreads they will never go. But they are getting up. They are preparing to leave. Drawer-man takes the floodlight and the vodka, but leaves the Orange Dry. Shaved-head peculiarly says, “OK if I keep this?” and pockets the Graham Greene. Friendly lifts nothing, even leaves his mostly full glass. He needs his hands free after all, for as he passes Nick suddenly he leans right over and grabs Nick up and, holding him there, smiling good friendly false teeth about half a foot from Nick’s face, “No hard feelings, right?” he reiterates.

“No.”

“And they say British fair play is dead,” says Friendly, a rogue echo of the cab driver. And then he says, playful as a child, “Although whether you can trust us - who can tell? Maybe we’ll just see to you anyway.” And child no more, he smacks Nick hard across the head so he falls back on to the couch. And from there Nick hears them, through his droning ear, letting themselves quietly out, leaving the door a quarter inch open behind them. A symbol, conceivably, that never was it, or can it be, shut against them.

16

The window had always pleased him. Seeing it first, from outside in the strange, busy little cul-de-sac, had made him want this flat. Like a moon, the window, in some indefinable way, and the moon does often appear in it.

But that moon is down by now. Fallen in the river, drowned. It is nearly 5 a.m.

He has just sat here on the couch,