Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(53)

Not so many months later, after numerous makeovers, a spot of minor surgery, and a name change, there she was in grainy black and white and bleached-out color, wearing price-on-application designer clothing in some industrial wasteland, staring empty eyes and legs akimbo. Since when, affairs with movie stars of both sexes, private clinics, smoked-glass limousines; rumor was she’d turned down a cameo part in the new Mike Leigh—or was that Spike?—and recorded a song for which Tricky did the final mix, but which had yet to be released. Rumor, juiced with money, will say almost anything.

Grabianski wondered if she were yet nineteen.

“What d’you do, then?” she asked.

“I’m a burglar,” Grabianski said.

“Go on, you’re winding me up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yeah? What you burgle then?”

“Houses, apartments, the usual thing.”

She laughed, a giggle, brittle and fast. “You burgle Eddie, then?”

“Not yet.”

She leaned a little away from him, uncertain. “Great security, Eddie, alarms and that, all over. Well, he has to. Paintings and that. Worth a fortune. It’s what he’s interested in, art.” For a moment, she glanced round. “That bloke with him, Sloane, he’s an artist. Painter. You know him? He’s good. Galleries and that. I’ve never been, museums, they’re boring. Well, I’m a liar, not since I was a kid. School trip, down the Horniman. Lost my knickers, coming back.”

Grabianski was looking past her, past those famous eyes and over her shoulder at the man she’d identified as Sloane. His head in profile now and Grabianski could see he was nowhere near as young as he’d first thought. The build, style of the hair had deceived. The nose was full, patrician, etched here and there with tiny broken violet lines. The hair, full at the front too, had grown white above the temples; the lips, narrow and wide, were cracked. Sixty, Grabianski thought, sixty if he’s a day.

“I’ll tell you how good he is,” Faron said. “We was round his place one day, his studio, you know, and I made some joke about Van Gogh, about him slicing off his ear, and Sloane, he got this painting off the wall, turned it round right where he was and done these sunflowers on the back. You never seen nothing like it. They was just like the real thing. Better. But then that’s me, I wouldn’t really know.”

Grabianski nodded and filed it all away.

When Sloane walked past them and around the angle of the bar, Grabianski saw that he’d been right about the age. Sixty-two or sixty-three, he wouldn’t have minded betting. Wearing nothing, nothing Grabianski could see, beneath a pair of paint-patched denim dungarees. Clear blue eyes that saw Grabianski even as they saw right through him. The same eyes that fixed on him now in the fly-specked mirror over the urinal. Sloane’s voice, a stony South London shot through with a brace of New York American, saying, “This isn’t going to be one of those pick-up scenes, is it? You show me yours if I show you mine.”

Grabianski assured him it was not.

“Thank Christ,” Sloane breathed, piss continuing to stream between his fingers, bouncing back from the shiny enamel. “I’m too old for that will-he, won’t-he, kind of shit.”

“You a friend of Eddie Snow?” Grabianski asked.

“Eddie doesn’t have friends,” Sloane said, buttoning up, “just mates he uses whenever there’s a need.”

Rinsing his hands beneath the tap, ignoring the hot-air drier in favor of wiping them on his dungarees, Sloane walked back out into the pub and when Grabianski followed, not so many necessary moments later, he had gone. Faron was sitting alongside Snow and she had taken what remained of Grabianski’s pint with her, placing it across from them, by the place Sloane had vacated.

“Interesting fellow,” Grabianski said, sliding into the empty seat.

“I don’t like it,” Eddie Snow said, “when people come sniffing round after me like dogs after a bone.”

“You were supposed to be getting in touch with me.”

“And I am.”

“A couple of days ago.”

“Ah, well,” Snow said, “like the man said, all relative, time.”

Faron looked at him suspiciously, in case he might have said something clever. Eddie Snow dressed today in his trademark leather, white tight trousers and a black waistcoat over a gray ribbed T-shirt, silver Indian bangles in the appropriate places.

“I just want to know,” Grabianski said, “if you’re still interested in the Dalzeils or not.”

“Shout it from the housetops, why don’t you?”

Swiveling as he rose, Grabianski cupped one hand to his mouth. “I just want to know …”

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” said Snow tugging at the sleeve of Grabianski’s coat, “sit your bloody self back down.”

Faron was giggling, pretending not to, and when Snow shot her a glance, she transmuted it into a cough.

“Run along,” Snow told her affably enough.

She ran all the way to the bar.

“As it happens,” Snow said, stretching an arm, “there is a fair bit of potential interest. Qatar. Arab Emirates. Monaco.”

“What are the chances,” Grabianski asked, “of translating this potential into something approaching cash?”