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  ‘And I’ll answer at once, Ralph, that above all they prize and practise discretion,’ Enzyme replied. ‘Absolute, wholesome discretion, so crucial in this kind of dealing.’

  ‘Which kind?’

  ‘This.’

  Ralph thought he might be seeing some of the ancient aristo arrogance Enzyme must have inherited a trickle of, despite the overall rubbish ranking he had now. Here was the Gordon Loam lineage on show – that casual, lofty way of ignoring anything inconvenient said to him, and pushing on with his own stuff, like an ice-breaker’s bow, smashing through frozen seas. The two main cops around here, Assistant Chief Constable Iles, and Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur, behaved something like Enzyme. One of them would ask the other a question and either get no answer, or an answer that was another question, or even an answer to a different question that hadn’t been asked and had no relationship to the one that had. This was not caused by subconscious obedience to the uppish family past and genes, though, as with Enzyme, but by a playful, vicious determination in both Iles and Harpur to piss on the other’s peace of mind, confidence and sanity. That’s what policing at the highest levels must be like: conversations which were not; which were sessions of attrition and lively insult.

  Club members began to arrive and made their way to the bar. Ralph kept to the front of his mind the thought that when somebody brought a gun, apparently to hand it over as a goodwill sign, there was one central fact: the somebody had the gun. This was the ‘core’, to take Enzyme’s own term. Strip away the folderols and flimflam: goodwill and symbolism might be there, but the gun was the sole certainty, and he had it and you didn’t. Ralph considered this analysis showed the kind of methodical, unflustered, absolutely unpanicky appraisal he would exercise when the subject and/or the setting of a situation was The Monty. Above all, unpanicky: by contrast, someone deservedly called Panicking Ralph or Panicking Ralphy would be incapable of this cool thinking.

  An obvious question now followed: was the gun fucking-well loaded? If Enzyme had genuinely brought the Smith and Wesson to hand over as a peace and would-be reconciliation gesture, the automatic might have no bullets in the chamber. Its emptiness and, therefore, harmlessness could be regarded as part of the armistice gesture. Enzyme wished to surrender the Smith and Wesson but, not only that, the automatic lacked an obvious essential of effective Smith and Wessons – ammo.

  On the other hand, Ralph thought the gesture would be even more telling if the gun was loaded and not harmless. Enzyme would be depriving himself of something that could kill and, as a matter of fact, was ready to kill now. It needed only a finger on the trigger. And, Ralph had already mentioned Gordon Loam’s fingers. To be giving up this readiness and actuality was surely more meaningful than giving up a weapon that amounted only to a husk, unable to do the slightest damage; a castrated gun. This piece had blazed off at The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. But if, now, it were not loaded, the Smith and Wesson would have little resemblance to the gun that had put two rounds into the portrayed beard, and therefore could not be an adequate emblem of regret and request for forgiveness. Enzyme might have thought like that, and consequently the automatic would have bullets.

  This meant that if Ralph tried physically to silence the slippery sod and his snippets of cliché French, and chuck him out of the club, Gordon Loam might discard the supposed, original wish to say sorry to Ralph and to assure him there’d be no repeat if he, Enzyme, were reinstated. Instead, he’d possibly get the gun out of the holster and splash Ralph over the bar and wall behind, point blank, unmissable. Ember reckoned that here was another instance of how his mind could work rationally, methodically, precisely during a crisis.

  However – and, oh, God, what a ‘however’ – this time his sharp brainwork produced the conclusion that he could get shot now if Enzyme suddenly went for firepower. The faultlessly conducted analysis seemed to do the extreme opposite of what it was supposed to do, and for a couple of filthy seconds Ralph did get the rotten symptoms of a panic, although the surroundings and topic were The Monty. He had a scar high on his face and occasionally when stressed, as now, he would get the impression that the old wound had opened up and was gratuitously shedding something medical and yellow-brown down his cheek and on to the collar of his shirt. Also, sweat formed across his shoulders in a sizeable, rectangular, cold pool.

  A TV history programme lately showed a battery of old field guns, one with an inscribed metal label fixed to its barrel, the words in Latin and English: ‘Ultima ratio regum. The final argument of kings.’ Meaning, stuff argument and logic: time for the simplification of shot and shell. And this was what seemed to happen here now. The prospect of Enzyme blasting him had destroyed Ralph’s usual solidity and steadiness – and his logic. Maybe the Smith and Wesson should have ‘Ultima ratio Enzyme’ inscribed on it. Ralph felt his personality fracture. His cherished, previously unwavering Monty-based resolve left him. Part stammer, part despairing gasp, he said: ‘If you’ve got something serious to discuss, Enz, you’d better come up to the office.’

  ‘How I yearned for that kind of reaction, Ralph.’

  ‘Best not to let antagonisms drag on and fester.’

  ‘Here speaks someone of generous spirit and wise under-standing.’

  EIGHT

  And so it became clear to Ralph that he would have to kill Enzyme – a matter of survival: Ralph’s.

  But no, no, no, he realized the decision hadn’t happened as instantly as this, nor as mechanically. That would have been glib, and glibness he loathed above all. It offered false simplicities. Ralph liked to think that, when people discussed him, somebody would point out, and the others would gladly agree, that if there was one thing Ember wasn’t it was glib. For starters, he couldn’t think of Enzyme as Enzyme, or, even worse, Enz, when considering his death. The man he intended getting rid of was Basil Gordon Loam, and that’s how the name must appear on the funeral Order of Service sheet, and on his gravestone, if he had one: it would need to be nice and broad to accommodate that lot. Ralph didn’t want any doubt about identity of the corpse, like in The Third Man, on video. The name required would be Enz’s official passport and jail name. He was entitled to a satisfactory degree of correctness when dead. Decorum. Ralph regarded himself as hot on that. He saw decorum as one of the foundations of any properly ordered society.

  Obviously, Enz and his carnage pistol didn’t have much to do with decorum while alive. But once dead he’d qualify for a slice. Ralph might permit a post-crem send-off party for him in The Monty; his necessary absence from the celebrations would mark a quality versus impulse victory for The Tyger author, William Blake: Basil, Basil burning bright.

  The nickname should not be used anywhere, full or foreshortened, on paper or sculpted, not even in brackets. A death deserved some dignity, some of that decorum, despite the fact that, in this case, it would be the death of a fucking arrant prat like Enzyme who could open fire on a harmless figure from the great mystical work by Blake and subsequently refer in a totally offhand, brazen style to that scrupulously and lovingly repaired figure as ‘beardy’. True, the figure did have a beard, but this could categorically not excuse Enzyme for calling him ‘beardy’. On the other hand, Enzyme had a mouth and could certainly be called mouthy. Many males in those primitive, pre-razor days had beards, so to call a man beardy would be purposeless, mad. Now, it was a childish insult.

  The way Enz had pointed at the Blake with a jerk of his thumb, rather than more normally using an index finger, Ralph found outrageously casual. Apparently, Enzyme was here now to apologize, but then added to the original offence by suggesting in this type of coarse gesture that nobody could worry much about some old beardy getting shot, anyway. The beardy was taking part in something called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, so he’d better get used to some hellish bits, i.e., .38 bullets. That seemed to be Enz’s heartless thinking, if it could be called thinking.

  As Ralph and Enz talked now in the club office, Ember suspected that Gordon Loam
would never understand why it was vital for Ralph to wipe him out as soon as it could be managed, though not on Monty premises, naturally. Loam lacked that sort of subtle insight. He plainly believed life could be a matter of loud, showy outbursts of monstrous behaviour, such as the Blake atrocity, followed by a flagrant attempt to bargain for forgiveness with grandiose, but so far, undefined, promises to Ralph. Enzyme was hardly somebody who’d recognize that Ralph had been forced into choosing between two options, and only two, owing to exceptional sensitivities:

  (i) He could cave in to Enzyme and the Smith and Wesson now and retract his permanent ban from the club on Enz. This would obviously bring about the virtual destruction of Ralph as he had been – the upstanding, courageous Monty-type Ralph, the worthwhile, aspiring, impressive Ralph. It would be the annihilation of somebody who, until today, had found much of his stature and glow in The Monty. And yet he’d possessed enough of that very stature and glow to want the club to develop into something different and better. His stature and glow would help with this mission and, crucially, be entirely suitable for the eventual splendidly enhanced and, yes, transformed Monty. Victory for Enze would mean all that Ember brilliance was extinguished. Embered.

  Or (ii) – the second option – by seeing off Enzyme he would also see off the kind of degradation and shame that Gordon Loam had created by turning up at the Monty with a gun and scaring Ralph shitless, despite goofy chatter about sincere regret and bygones being bygones. He’d forced Ember to wonder whether he really was Panicking Ralph or Panicking Ralphy, even when in the Monty and on Monty business, such as – in reverse sequence – the ban, the insulting levity of ‘beardy’, the unpardonable – absolutely unpardonable – bullets in the William Blake.

  To sum up: it had become a choice between two lives: Ralph’s or Basil Gordon Loam’s. Only one could continue. Ralph had settled which one that should be, and he’d continue to be vigilant in case Enz had also decided which one it should be – Ralph. By planning to kill Enzyme and doing it, Ember would demonstrate that he remained capable of strong, uncompromising, cleansing action. All right, he’d admittedly had a bad, contemptible, flashback moment or two with the imagined weeping face scar and a cross-shoulder sweat gush, but that was all. Mere physical blips, mere dismal moments from history. He retained still the force and guts to maintain his true, precious selfhood. He would never accept, could never accept, the abjectness of the Panicking Ralph, Panicking Ralphy unwarranted slurs.

  Ralph kept an index card for every member of The Monty. He had looked at Basil Gordon Loam’s recently when putting a large X cancellation mark on it, plus a short note explaining the expulsion and ban: ‘Extreme vandalism re club decor, (MOHAH).’ A partner was named on the card as ‘Irene, aged thirty-three’, and they had three daughters, Dawn, Emily, Jessica. They attended the same private school as Ralph’s children, so he already knew vaguely about them. As far as he could remember, Enz had never brought Irene to the club. Ralph decided he would certainly help her and the children along financially for a decent while following Enz’s removal. Private schooling cost and was so important in these days of sliding educational standards. Enzyme would be the kind who when blasting off the way he did wouldn’t at all have in mind possible retaliation for this foolishness and its effects on his family. The Smith and Wesson was a .38. That thirty-eight figure just about matched his IQ.

  ‘Well, am I really entering the holy of holies?’ Enzyme had said, ladling on the supposed excitement as Ralph showed him into the Monty office. This patronizing smarm-merchant was building a case against himself, though he didn’t know it – was making it even easier for Ralph to think of him as dead meat. Ember felt grateful for the assistance. It was a long while since he last needed to turn violent. (Death of Alf Ivis?)1 To get back to that kind of thorough, purifying activity would take some determination, some renewed dedication. Enzyme’s reference to ‘holy of holies’ came from the same sneer source as ‘beardy’. Satirical. Slimy. Mocking.

  When Enz said ‘holy of holies’ he was suggesting, of course, that Ralph considered he had a superior existence to the general membership of the club and could set himself apart and aloof in this special room, this sort of sanctified lair. That might be true, but Enz had no right to turn it into snide piss-taking. He most probably thought that with his kind of surname and heritage even the most distinguished bits of property owned by someone like Ralph, such as this Monty office, added up to bugger-all, could be grounds for a cheap, ridiculing giggle at a tin god.

  Ralph had gone in for a happy mixture of styles in the furnishing of the office. The computer was up at the far end of the room. They’d wanted him to buy a so-called ‘workstation’ to accommodate the monitor, keyboard and printer, but he’d chosen to use an old, though well polished, Victorian Pembroke table, with a hinged flap to enlarge it if required, and a drawer: real mahogany. Workstations were made of what was proudly called ‘authentic veneer oak’. Authentic veneer! During his Foundation Year at the university he’d been required to read a novel where one of the families was named the Veneerings. That is, they were all surface, nothing much else. Ralph could do without authentic veneer, thank you! His non-stop search in life was for solid quality.

  ‘Stages, Ralph,’ Enz said.

  ‘Stages in which sense?’

  ‘The art business. Things must be allowed to develop in stages.’

  ‘Do you mean the actual work on the painting – not rushing to finish it and getting slapdash with the colours? Some painters do get overexcited, I believe, and wear dungarees and sou’wester hats.’

  ‘Not so much that. The business side. The buying and selling of the finished, framed canvas.’

  ‘So when you say stages, what kind of stages are you thinking of?’

  ‘Opportunities.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Ralph replied.

  ‘Patience.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Ralph thought that many would find it hard to imagine Enz dead because at the moment he seemed so confident and positive. But in the past Ralph had witnessed several instances where someone as assured and full-scale gabby as Enz seemed today had suddenly caught a couple of bullets in the chest or head and lost all bounce. In fact, bounce was the last quality you’d think of when looking at them. A ball full of air could have plenty of jolly bounce, but there was nothing flatter and deader than a ball when all its air had gone. Ralph’s career, on his way to a good and comfortable position now, contained some very rough and bloody episodes.

  Ralph glanced around the office again to bring himself back to the achieved present. He loved the combination of contemporary electronic equipment, such as the computer etcetera, and something antique, traditional and authentically authentic, namely the Pembroke. It intrigued him to think that when the table flap was made all those years ago, the carpenter had no idea what would eventually be resting there – not a candelabrum or fly swat, but a keyboard able to put its owner in touch instantly with the whole world. Simply by typing in ‘Pembroke tables’, Ralph could get a screen description and pictures of exactly the Pembroke table he was typing in ‘Pembroke tables’ at, a piece of furniture that had been passed down through the decades and now provided the flap to Google from in this way. His head swam. Ralph had often noticed how time could bring about very strange results. Changes definitely took place as the years followed the years. Ralph wanted change for The Monty. Change equalled progress. This was another of his main beliefs. It drove him forward. Think of high-speed dental drills or drive-on ferries. Also, he would bring significant change for Gordon Loam, by getting him to swap life for death.

  ‘This is what I mean when I say I know people,’ Enz said.

  ‘Which people?’ Ember wished Gordon Loam had a beard so that when the appropriate moment arrived he could put a pair of shots through it up into his neck and fucking cryptic voice-box, as a neat answer to what had started all this when Enz violated William Blake.

  ‘They understand about the stages, also,�
�� Enz said.

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘The people I know. London. A kind of recognized practice has developed over the years,’ Enz replied.

  ‘Recognized who by?’

  Enzyme paused, as if delighted. ‘You’ve done what you always do in your clear-sighted way, Ralph,’ he said, his grin vast in admiration. ‘You’ve hit the crux.’

  ‘I was brought up to believe that’s what cruxes are for.’

  Ralph had three leather easy chairs in the office. He’d heard that executives of real power didn’t conduct negotiations from behind a desk or at a workstation, but in a more relaxed, comfy style. Not long ago, Ralph had seen a magazine article about the 1960s, illustrated by a photograph of John F. Kennedy nestling sideways in a chair like one of these, legs hanging over the arm, his black lace-ups pricey looking, while he talked on the telephone, perhaps to Khrushchev about Cuba, or to a girl the President intended shagging later. Poise, but without strain. Ralph prized that. There was a scatter of Turkish-type rugs in pastel shades on the strip-board floor of the office. A small chiffonier stood against one wall, and Ralph went to it now and took a bottle of Kressmann Armagnac and two glasses from a cupboard. He poured for both of them. They sat down facing each other. At this point Ralph didn’t take the Kennedy position, sideways on, legs dangling over the arm. Enz still had the gun, and Ralph wanted a proper, direct view of all his movements. Ralph wondered whether Enz had ever experienced Kressmann’s before. Almost certainly he’d never experience it again. The colour of the bottle’s label had a message for him: black.

  ‘Forgive me, Ralph, won’t you, if I describe the fundamentals of art as a commercial commodity? Perhaps I’m telling you what you already know. But I’ll push on. People learn from the media that some painting or sculpture has fetched a record price at one of the famous auction houses – Sotheby’s, Beijing Poly, LA Modern Auctions, Christie’s – and they assume that this, yes, was a spectacular occasion, but also a fairly simple one. They suppose that the previous owner for some reason needs a sizeable bag of cash and has to sell; or the owner has grown tired of the piece and wants to trade it in and get something new; or the owner has died and his or her collection goes to the market so the proceeds can be shared among legatees.’