A Case of Noir (Atlantis) Read online

  I took a crushed packet of Marlborough cigarettes from the back pocket of my Levis, fished inside with shaking fingers and plucked out one that thankfully hadn’t been broken in the fight. I was glad that I’d bought real cigarettes from the petrol station, instead of the shitty knock-offs that everyone else was buying from the Ukrainians. The cheap crap that fell to pieces as soon as you lit up. I desperately needed a hit of nicotine. I needed a strong drink too, but that would have to wait.

  I patted myself down, looking for a lighter, but couldn’t find one. With a deep sigh, I went over to the priest.

  A sharp pain shot through my right knee as I knelt — the echo of a football injury from the dim and distant days when I was a teenager and believed myself to be invulnerable. Immortal. More than thirty years later, this and many more of my illusions had crumbled like moth’s wings.

  I turned him over onto his back and avoided looking at the staring, accusing eyes that glared through his shattered spectacles. I took a lighter from his trouser pocket. A sheep’s fleece was engraved on one side. A phrase in Spanish on the other.

  ‘You bastard, Johnny Boy,’ he groaned, glaring at me. ‘You cheating bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘Tell me something I don’t know, Joseph.’

  ‘You were always a shifty little …’

  I turned him back on his side and let him mutter away to himself.

  ‘Birds of a feather, Joseph,’ I said.

  I stood up creakily and lit the cigarette. Took a hit. The taste of freedom, my father used to say when he had his first cigarette after finishing work at the foundry. But today freedom was tasting bitter.

  It was just before seven. My home town was waking up. The windows of the granite tower blocks were starting to light up. Someone was sure to come and investigate the wreckage of the car soon enough. Maybe follow the blood stains up here. I had to get moving.

  Father Black’ shooting would take too much explaining. Dig up a lot of dirt. And I was sure to be buried under the massive amount of grime that would be unearthed. I would have to take him back to my house.

  I lit another cigarette. As I trudged down the hill to where I’d left my Range Rover, lighting flashed, thunder boomed and the heavens spilt their guts.

  The autobús shook and rattled, like a doper in the first stages of withdrawal, invading my dark dreams and dragging me by my lapels into consciousness. We were pulling into Estación de Autobuses de Granada.

  The early morning bus was packed, hot and stuffy. Some of the passengers were standing, stretching, yawning. Keen to get off after an uncomfortable five-hour journey from Madrid.

  A tall, dark-eyed young woman in the seat next to me was attempting to wake a child. The blond boy, around six or seven, was in a deep sleep, dribbling on her shoulder. soaking her black, Coco Chanel dress.

  She said something to me in Spanish. I smiled back, nodded. Not in the mood to attempt to make small talk, especially with my limited linguistic skills.

  My throat was dry, the rest of me clammy. True, I was little worse for wear from my one for the road, which had turned into five or six, but the hangover from the dream was worse.

  I hadn’t thought about Father Joseph for a while, the booze usually washed those blood-stained memories clean, but he had invaded and tainted my dreams more than once recently. I was draped in a cloak of gloom and eager to get off the bus. I picked up my hold-all and got to my feet. Felt my knees crack. Winced.

  The woman pulled at my jacket sleeve, said something I didn’t catch.

  I squinted, scowled at her.

  ‘You dropped something,’ she said and pointed to where I’d been sitting. I flushed red as I picked up my hip flask.

  As I straightened up, pain corkscrewed through my leg. I shuffled towards the door.

  My chest felt tight as I got off the bus. The morning was brimmed with a warm, brandy coloured glow. A sea of bodies rushed toward the few taxis that were lined up outside the bus station. Before I’d left Madrid I’d been told that Granada’s main bus station was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the city centre, and that I’d have to fight for a cab. I hadn’t thought it would be this bad, though.

  I’d spent days trying to convince my employer, Pedro Dominguez, to fork out for a train ticket, or even an airplane, but he’d put me on a mean budget for this trip. Pedro, the owner of The Madrid Review knew I was far from thrifty. English hacks didn’t exactly have a great reputation for financial restraint.

  Within minutes, all but one of the taxis were taken. The woman that I’d sat next to on the bus was struggling to get her luggage into the boot of the remaining cab while holding on to the sleeping child. The taxi driver remained in the driving seat, indifferently reading a copy of National Geographic.

  I rushed forward to help, swept up the woman’s luggage and put it into the boot.

  ‘Gracias’, she said, with a relieved smile, as she eased herself in, revealing impressively long, dark legs.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, looking around for other taxis. There was nothing. A long queue of people waited at bus stops.

  ‘You want to join me?’ said the woman.

  ‘Well yes!’ I said. ‘If you and your son are going to the city center.’

  ‘We are,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Max is not my son.’

  ‘Beaut,’ I said, and I shuffled into the passenger seat. Slammed the door. The acne-scarred taxi driver glared at me as I pulled on my seatbelt. I winked and resisted the urge to blow him a kiss.

  ‘Ready?’ said the woman.

  ‘Ready and willing’, I said.

  The cab stuttered to a start and I held out my hand.

  ‘Luke’, I said.

  ‘Carmen’, she said, and I swear I heard ‘Habanera’ start to play.

  ‘Let me ask you a question Luke. What do you think of, when you think of the classic rock band line-up?’ said Simon Kelly.

  He reclined in one of the nightclub’s gold-coloured sofas. Stretched one of his long arms to pluck a drink from a sparkly, silver table.

  I knocked back my Alhambra Mezquita. It tasted better here in Granada than it did in Madrid. Or maybe I really needed it. But I was uncomfortable in such a glamorously flash-trash joint and feeling more than a bit dingy in my beige chinos and second-hand Ben Sherman.

  Kelly was wearing a simple, black Armani suit and white shirt, with sandals, but he comfortably blended in with the surroundings for some reason. But then, I suspected Simon Kelly was a bit of a Zelig-like figure and blended in wherever he went.

  He looked completely at home in Granada 10, one of the city’s top nightspots which was situated in a converted cinema. It was glittery enough to host a glam rock revival and the loud Spanish pop they played was so cheesy you could use it to top a pizza. But it was certainly driving the beautiful young crowd wild.

  ‘I dunno’, I said. ‘I don’t know much about music, you know? I like listening to music but that’s about it.’

  Kelly leaned closer and nearly suffocated me with his aftershave.

  ‘What do you consider to be the basics tools for any rock band?’ he said. ‘The Stones? The Who? The Clash?’ His perfect, white teeth shone under the lights.

  ‘Well, you need to have a guitarist, a singer, bass player and a drummer. Maybe somebody on keyboards’, I said. I noticed I was miming playing each instrument that I mentioned and felt like an idiot.

  ‘Yeah, the keyboards player is just icing on the cake, though. Same with a sax or whatever. But you need the basic four-piece band, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You need a tight-arse rhythm section that isn’t going to fuck about and start improvising, that sort of cobblers.’

  His East London accent got stronger the more agitated he became. And he really was getting agitated now. Maybe it was the anthill of Columbian marching powder he’d snorted in the loo a little earlier. But I think it was something more deep-rooted than that.

  ‘But you also need … what?’
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  He knocked back his drink and caught the eye of a tall waitress in a spangled miniskirt and a pink wig. Beckoned her over to him. She leaned close to Kelly who whispered in her ear. She giggled and then looked at me. Our eyes met, she winked and Carmen headed off to the bar. I heard ‘Habanera’ start to play once again and this time it was almost loud enough to drown out the disco crap that was being pumped out.

  Kelly turned back to me.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, some songs would come in handy’, I said.

  ‘Exactly! You need a songwriter. And more than that, you need a band leader. Doesn’t matter how shit-hot the band are if they don’t have a head, you know? A driving force. Doesn’t have to be a visionary like Jim Morrison, but too many bloody cooks spoil the broth, and all that.’

  Our fresh drinks were placed in front of us. Carmen leaned close and pushed a slip of paper into my shirt pocket.

  Kelly smirked.

  ‘But I thought some bands worked as a democracy? Like U2,’ I said.

  ‘Case in point, Luke’, said Kelly.

  He popped an ice cube into his mouth. ‘That’s why they’re about as interesting as watching paint dry,’ he said. ‘Democracy drags things down to the level of the lowest common denominator. In music, that’s usually the bass player. Not always, but usually. And it’s the same when you’re pulling a scam.’

  A dark cloud suddenly seemed to pass over Kelly and dampen the glimmering light in his eyes.

  Simon Kelly was in his late fifties, though he looked at least ten years younger. Like Dorian Grey, Kelly was someone who seemed to have been barley scuffed by the wear-and-tear of his erratic lifestyle.

  Since trundling out of the school gates at the age of sixteen, he’d been a fisherman, a barman, a sex-toy salesman, a catalogue model. And more. In the 1980s he had even been the keyboards player in a well-known New Romantic pop band that became a minor hit in the USA after the song was used in a teenage rom-com. The proceeds of their success swiftly went up their noses, though, and soon after the band very quickly fell apart.

  Kelly, ever the opportunist, then moved on to promoting rock gigs. It was the time when World Music was in vogue and Guardian readers and aging student types were gasping for bands from Africa, South America, Cuba. The more impoverished the country, the better.

  And Kelly was more than happy to provide as many acts as he could but he quickly found that the demand was much greater than he could supply. So, he decided to create his own bands using some of the many musicians he’d met over the years. The bands he promoted were apparently from all corners of the globe although in reality all most of them were from Canning Town, Custom House, Plaistow and various other equally as unsavoury parts of London.

  This all went well, until Sleepy Pete, the guitarist in a faux South America band that had topped the charts, turned up stoned out of his face on the Jonathon Ross Show and called the host a handful of colourful expressions that you really wouldn’t expect a Venezuelan farmer to use.

  So, with the music business the cash-cow well and truly minced, and Simon Kelly moved onto other scams. The most successful was ‘The Family Jewels Affair’, as the tabloid newspapers dubbed it, which went like this.

  Kelly would turn up in a limousine at an expensive London jewellery shop along with a tall black guy and his entourage, who Kelly explained was an African prince who had fallen on hard times and was in need of some ready cash. In fact, he was Rickie Williams, a jazz pianist from the wilds of South Croydon.

  Kelly would then show a briefcase of ‘tribal jewels’ to the shop owner, who would examine them and see they were actually genuine. And worth a pretty penny, too.

  Then the group would head off to a few other shops and spin the same yarn. Kelly would return to the shop toward closing time and a price would then be negotiated — the jeweller trying his or her best to rip-off the ‘Prince’ — who would grudgingly agree to sell the jewels for a bargain price. The greedy shopkeeper would hastily hand over the cash and take the jewels but these particular jewels, of course, were fake.

  The gang did this a few times in one afternoon and returned the original jewels to the shop were Kelly’s sister, Beverly, worked. All was well and good until Kelly twisted his ankle one night while he was partying at the Ministry Of Sound. Subsequently, the rest of the group decided to pull the scam without him and it all went horribly wrong.

  A prison stretch ensued but while inside, Kelly hit on the idea of writing his memoirs. Which was why I was here, apparently.

  The drunken night blurred into a hung-over morning. Carmen woke me from a death-black sleep by climbing astride me and pushing my stiff cock inside her. She leaned forward and pushed a hard nipple into my mouth and grinded away until she came. And then it was my turn.

  We lay in silence for a moment and I adjusted my eyes to the wan light. We were in my hotel room. A small, room that seemed like something a sheik would live in. My hotel room. Something out of the Arabian Nights, even. Carmen checked the time on her Smartphone and crawled off me.

  ‘Remember your meeting with Simon Kelly’, she shouted, as she went into the bathroom.

  I didn’t, of course. I got out of bed and looked out of the window. The dawn’s azure mist hovered in the valley.

  ‘When is it?’ I said, my voice like a rusty cheese grater.

  ‘Midday’.

  I heard the toilet flush and the shower start. I finished a glass of white wine that was on the bedside table. Closed my eyes for a moment and let the waves of alcohol wash over me. And decided that I still had time to join Carmen in the shower.

  While I was in Poland, in the seaside town of Sopot, I went to a pretty good bar that had a Klaus Kinski theme. Photographs of him cluttered the walls along with posters from his films. Even the music that played was said to be Kinski’s favourites. The connection with the late, great crazy actor, however, was that he was born there. But what the connection was between El Rincóon de Michael Landon and the late wife-beating star of Little House On the Prairie, I really couldn’t say.

  The design was suitably kitsch and a small stereo was playing Pink Floyd’s ‘Lucifer Sam’ when I walked in and I wondered if there was some sort of foreshadowing thing going on. I ordered a beer from a stumpy barman with ears like a football trophy.

  The music changed to Nancy Sinatra’s version of ‘Bang Bang’ as I sat and sipped my Alhambra Mezquita. I tried to piece together the previous night’s events. And conversations. Kelly had explained his scam idea. Since he was a convicted criminal, he wasn’t legally able to make any money from his crimes. So, if he sold the memoirs that he’d written in prison, he wouldn’t be able to profit from them. His plan was that I would act as his ghostwriter and share the money with him. The split would be 80/20, his way.

  The idea had seemed a perfect peach the night before but now in the cold light of day I could see its flaws. The biggest being me.

  Kelly arrived on time. He was wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt and blue-lense Ray-Bans. Carrying a stainless steel briefcase. He looked like something out of an episode of Miami Vice. He ordered a Tinto de Verano and sat down next to me.

  ‘Heavy duty last night, eh?’ he said, with a wink. There were scratches on his neck and I remembered him leaving the club with a short, blonde girl who had long fingernails.

  He put the briefcase on the green Formica table.

  ‘I feel it today, though,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Kelly. ‘Old age catching up with us.’

  ‘Well, getting older beats the alternative,’ I said.

  ‘Too true.’

  He clicked the briefcase open and took out a wad of papers.

  ‘So, this is it. My masterwork.’

  He flicked through the papers. Put them back in the briefcase. Glared at me.

  ‘The thing is …,’ I said. Fumbling for the right words. ‘There may be a bit of a … hitch … that I didn’t mention last night. A little obstacle.’

  Kelly nodded
. Looked around the room. Cracked his knuckles.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said.

  ‘You … you know?’

  ‘Well, not The Full Monty. But I have sources. Sources who I asked to check you out. Sources that found out there was no record of a journalist called Luke Case before a couple of years ago. No record of Luke Case studying at The London School of Journalism. And no record of Luke Case from your home town. Except a little boy who died in a house fire about the time you were born.’

  I drained my glass.

  ‘Yeah …well ...’

  Kelly held up a hand to silence me.

  ‘Whatever, Luke. Or whatever your real name is. I don’t care who you really are. Don’t give a monkey’s. But this does rather put the kibosh on our business arrangement, doesn’t it?

  I nodded.

  ‘I need a genuine real-life fake. Not a double bluff,’ he said.

  I got up and went to the bar.

  ‘I may have an alternative ghost-writer for you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m all ears,’ said Kelly, as the barman appeared through a door of multi-coloured tassels.

  The view from The Alhambra Palace Hotel’s mosaic terrace was more than impressive. I sat drinking Cruzcampo, gazing off into the distance as the violet twilight sank into the snow-capped mountains. The hotel itself was just as remarkable, with its Moorish design, presumably inspired by the nearby Alhambra Place.

  The fact that I was actually staying at a hotel that swanky came as a bit of a surprise. Pedro may have scrimped on the cost of transport to Granada but he’d booked me into the most expensive hotel in the city. Admittedly, I was in its smallest room, but I wasn’t complaining. I suspected the hotel’s owner was one of Pedro’s many connections.

  Although it seemed that the leathery-skinned, reedy-voiced American woman at the next table wasn’t as impressed by the place as me. She screeched a litany of complaints into her Samsung Galaxy, in between taking sips from a bottle of Pepsi. Apparently the WiFi in her room was ‘cruddy’ and Granada’s cobbled streets had made her ankles swell up. And the music being played in the bar — Kevin Ayres’ ‘May I?’ — was ‘B.S.’ and putting her ‘in a coma’.