Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(18)
Ten
For once, there were no small children running full pelt between the tables, mean mouths and shrill little voices. The garden attached to the Brew House restaurant was mercifully devoid of mothers in long, flowing dresses from Monsoon, au pairs from Barcelona or Budapest who shopped at the Gap. Grabianski carried his tray, bearing filter coffee and an encouragingly large chunk of carrot cake, up the short flight of steps and across the flagstones to a table in the shadow of the far wall. With a flap of the hand, he scooted away a trio of blue-gray pigeons feasting on the remains of somebody’s buttered toast. Sparrows jostled hopefully around his feet.
Quarter past the hour: he had no way of knowing whether Eddie Snow would be early or late.
On the low bench seats to Grabianski’s right, two elderly men from Poland or the Ukraine were playing chess; a woman with startling white hair and spectacles that hung from a filigree chain was talking loudly to her companion about a recent visit to Berlin and the depressing legacy of the GDR; farthest from where Grabianski was sitting, a couple in their late thirties, wanly married but not to each other, held hands across the wooden table with the special hopelessness of those for whom happiness was the memory of damp afternoons in Weymouth or Swanage, hotel rooms that smelt of disinfectant and had a meter for the gas.
He was contemplating going for a second cup of coffee when a skinny man with thinning, short-cropped hair pushed through the door into the garden. Shiny leather trousers sheathed thin legs, a hip-length gray leather jacket hung loose over a black T-shirt bonded closely to his ribs. Despite the almost total absence of sun, he was wearing shades.
“Jerry?”
Half-rising, Grabianski reached out a hand.
“Eddie. Eddie Snow. Here, let me put this down.”
His plate was loaded with sausages and bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried bread and scrambled egg that had been sitting too long. “Best meal of the day, right?” Snow used his teeth to tear open two sachets of brown sauce and dribbled the contents across the curling, crispy bread. “Between me and my arteries, eh?” Behind dark glasses, Snow winked. “You want to get something more for yourself, go ahead. I’m going to get stuck into this lot before it gets cold.”
Grabianski nodded, pushed back his chair, and opted to wait.
The first time he had met Eddie Snow, himself and Maria Roy had been snapping at each other in the departure lounge at Orly Airport, a lunge toward romance that had been too calculated and too late. Eddie Snow had been drinking champagne and wolfing down packets of honey-roasted peanuts he had carried off from his last flight. “Couple of days in Cologne,” he told them. “Just two days and I earned so much f*cking money, it’d make your head spin to count it. Here, have some more of this bubbly, eh?”
“What is it you do?” Maria asked, careful to touch his wrist as she offered her glass. Money had always been a great aphrodisiac where Maria was concerned.
“Everything,” Eddie Snow laughed. “Little of this and that. Just about everything. You know how it is.”
He had shaken hands on a deal with a private collector, whose principal acquisitions up to that point had been twentieth-century American; a quarter of a million for a painting, oil on board, of a former hospital for the chronically insane in Dalston. One of the many the artist had sketched on his travels east and west along the North London line. Snow had picked it up cheap from an ailing British rock star, who had once had hits on the label Snow had set up in those heady days of love and commerce when Virgin Records was a warehouse off Portobello and a hole-in-the-wall shop on Sloane Square.
Eddie Snow was not quite as youthful as he looked; sunglasses aside, it showed around the eyes.
Midway through his meal, Snow took a packet of Marlboro from his jacket pocket and lit up. “So, Jerry, what happened to that TV guy’s wife you were screwing? Arse on her like the Pope’s pajamas.”
By way of reply, Grabianski slid an envelope up onto the table and from it eased out two Polaroid photographs. Using middle finger and thumb, he swiveled them round for Snow to see.
“Straight to the business, eh, Jerry. I like that.” The photo on the left showed a landscape painting, a typically rural English scene; sheep grazing under the careless eye of a straw-chewing youth, an avenue of trees angled behind.
The second was as singular as that was conventional. The sun, full and faint, lowered through clouds over an expanse of ground, purple and brown, that could either be moorland or field. Trees stood sparse on the indistinct horizon.
It was this picture that Eddie Snow picked up and angled to the light. After a long moment, his face broke into a smile.
“Had me there for a minute.” He replaced the Polaroid. “Departing Day: study, isn’t it? Not the real thing.”
Grabianski waited.
“Eyesight’d started going by then, poor tosser. Either that or he’d got the DTs.”
A sparrow, perversely brave, dipped its slate-colored head toward a piece of bacon rind and narrowly missed a backhander for its pains.
“So what you saying here, Jerry?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Yeah, so I noticed.” Snow picked up the photographs, first one and then the other, and studied them again. “You’ll want to get shot as a pair?”
From Grabianski a nod.
“Two a penny these,” Snow said, indicating the sheep.