Attack and Decay, page 17
“Sorry, Stinky,” I said. “I couldn’t possibly come between you and the wrath of Oregon.”
“It’s something like Oregon,” moaned Stinky. “It is.”
I went up to our room and used the loo, then killed some time gazing out the window at fat snowflakes falling slowly and softly from the night sky. Then I turned down the bed for use later—considerably later, since we would now wait for the quiet hours of the night before we embarked on our campaign of home invasion. Of the home of Bo Lugn, strip club mogul and all-round Creepy Elvis.
During the intervening interval Tinkler and Ida would be making good use of the time, repairing to her apartment no doubt for what Agatha had already disparagingly dubbed “pre-kitchen appliance theft sex”. Agatha seemed, like Nevada, to have accepted that, whatever Ida’s motives, Tinkler really was going to get the full girlfriend experience.
Personally, I thought Ida’s motives were simple. Tinkler made her laugh and she liked him.
Agatha, on the other hand, who’d always been—on some level—very fond of Tinkler, had now cooled on him appreciably. Indeed, I think the fact that she didn’t leave the café with us was less to do with meeting the self-published priest and more to do with her not wanting to accompany Tinkler on his magical winter walk to the fairytale location of the aforementioned pre-kitchen appliance theft sex.
I looked at the spotlighted vattentorn in the distance, snow swirling around it, and wished Tinkler well. And Ida, too.
Then, at my beloved’s behest through the medium of a message on my phone, I went back into the hallway and down the stairs. Stinky was still there and still holding up the trunk. Just about.
But now he was, impressively, also making a phone call, albeit a hands-free call. “Araminta,” he babbled. “What the fuck’s the Vinyl Detective’s girlfriend’s name?” There was a pause as I walked past and nodded to his unseeing gaze. “Are you sure?” He looked down at Nevada. “Nevada?”
“Bingo,” she said.
Nevada and I helped Stinky shove the trunk back to what had become its accustomed place—standing precariously erect on the small oak table on the landing halfway up the staircase to our rooms. Stinky smelled like a very scared man wearing a very expensive aftershave. After we got the trunk sorted—it would be too much to say it was secured—we went up to our individual rooms.
It seemed like Nevada and I had hardly closed our door when we were disturbed by a tentative knocking.
Nevada was in the bathroom so I went to answer it. Of the various scenarios that ran through my mind, none included Ida and Tinkler. But there they were, standing in the doorway of our hotel room—instead of being busy at the top of her fairytale tower having pre-kitchen appliance theft sex. Typical Tinkler result.
Tinkler was trying to silently mouth a word over Ida’s head for my enlightenment. I eventually gleaned that Ida was here to retrieve her beloved thermos. He seemed to feel it was important to make this point, so I wouldn’t think that Ida was really here because she was avoiding having sex with him.
Ida for her part was saying, “Jordon said that you had loads of bags of food that you bought today and you aren’t going to need anymore.”
Tinkler was nodding in rapid agreement here. “No more microwave purgatory, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“And speaking of the microwave…” said Ida, just as Nevada emerged from the bathroom. The women looked at each other. “If you no longer have any use for this new microwave oven,” said Ida, “I was wondering if I might have it?”
Nevada shrugged and looked at me. “Would you mind if we give the microwave to Ida, dear?”
“No,” I said. I certainly didn’t mind. I still felt bad about flushing the coffee. I was reminded to still feel bad because Ida, after being momentarily mesmerised by kitchen swag, suddenly remembered her original objective and said, casually, “Oh, and while I am here, I might as well get my thermos back.” She scooped it up from the table where it was standing and hugged it to her person tightly. If we had any objection to Ida thus reclaiming it, she was clearly going to put up a fight.
And thus they prepared to take their leave, Ida clutching the thermos and Tinkler, in uncharacteristically helpful mode, carrying everything else—sundry bags of food and the now-reboxed microwave. I could see Ida was pleased with all this booty.
“The food will be stored in my refrigerator,” she said. “That’s one reason I’m taking it, because I know you guys don’t have a big refrigerator to store it in.” This was true. Our hotel room just had a small, and mercifully silent, bar fridge. “You will find the food will just be there, in my refrigerator, if you need any of it…”
“No, you use it,” said Nevada.
“And if you want the microwave back…”
“We won’t,” said Nevada. She seemed to be warming to Ida. Or perhaps she was just in a relaxed and benign mood after tormenting Stinky on the staircase.
As the door closed on the happy couple and their loot, I said, “So pre-kitchen appliance theft sex hasn’t started yet.”
“And probably won’t ever,” said Nevada. She went to the window to watch them leave. “Our chum sure can pick them.”
Personally, I held out higher hopes for Tinkler. Ida seemed to me to be a genuinely warm person, and also genuinely quite taken with our chum. But some of my benign view of her might well have been informed by what Agatha would no doubt call post-toilet disposal of coffee guilt.
We still had some hours to kill but it looked like it was going to be a fairly relaxed wait. My beloved was busy singing to herself, a happy little tuneless song. The possibility of imminent mayhem had brightened her outlook considerably.
I wish I could say the same thing. But I was considerably less sanguine about the whole enterprise, and I was wondering how best to fill the time to zero hour when there was another knock on the door. This one considerably less tentative. I opened it, Nevada protectively at my side, to find Patrik Nordenfalk.
Our neighbour was wearing a stock smile but when he saw Nevada his face genuinely lit up and his hand moved quickly across his comb-over. “Ah, hello. We thought we heard your return. My wife and I would like to invite you to join us in the lounge.” He shrugged magnanimously. “Only if you have nothing better to do, of course. A healthy young couple like you, you probably have plenty of better things to do. But I should perhaps add that, besides a device to make soup, we also have one that makes rather a nice cup of coffee.”
Nevada and I exchanged a look. Clearly they had been doing their research.
* * *
The coffee wasn’t bad at all. Only instant, but drinkable. And I was glad of it. We were sitting in the small upstairs lounge with the window firmly shut. Apparently, Hiram wasn’t due to make an appearance, which left me both relieved—however rationally explained he now was, that bird still gave me the creeps—and disappointed. I wanted Nevada to finally see him in the flesh. Or feathers.
Patrik seemed to have invited us to this little soiree with a view to talking about Attack and Decay. If indeed he had been fully briefed by Magnus, then he must have realised that I’d listened to his album. And, rather alarmingly, he now wanted to talk about it.
As soon as we’d sat down in the lounge, our two floral armchairs facing their two floral armchairs, Patrik had announced, “I have to say that we believe that this recording is our personal masterpiece. The band’s personal masterpiece. Wouldn’t you say so, darling?” He looked over at Rut, who sat slumped in her chair with one leg hooked over the arm so her boot was jutting out in mid-air at about the same level as her platinum blonde Minnie Mouse hairdo. The jutting boot was the one with the purple laces. If anything, Rut looked more stoned than she had before.
She nodded and grunted an affirmative and Patrik turned back to me. “So, naturally, we were wondering what you thought of our little record?”
I was searching for a diplomatic way through this minefield when Nevada came to the rescue. She must have done some research online because she said, “I understand that the seven songs on the album are modelled on the seven deadly sins?”
“No,” snapped Rut.
Nevada’s eyebrows went up. “No?”
“No. Some idiot put that out on the internet and now everybody repeats it.”
“It was a simple error, dear,” said Patrik in his most mollifying tone.
“It was not the seven deadly sins,” snarled Rut. “The album was based on The Magnificent Seven.”
There was a moment of silence, during which I watched snow streaming past the window and began to long for an interruption—even if it meant the appearance of a very sinister crow called Hiram.
“The Magnificent Seven?” said Nevada.
“You know,” said Rut, “the John Ford western.”
“John Sturges,” said Nevada automatically.
“In any case,” continued Rut tetchily, “the album is not modelled on the seven deadly sins. It is inspired by that movie.”
Nevada looked at me, perhaps for emotional support or perhaps just to confirm how demented this was. “Okay,” she said. “Inspired how?”
“Well, for example,” said Rut, “one of the songs is bald and dressed in black.”
“One of the songs is bald?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And dressed in black?” said Nevada.
“Yes, like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven. And one is a smiling knife thrower, like James Coburn in that same film.”
“Ah, I see,” said Nevada.
“One is stone-faced and craggy like Charles Bronson. And so on.”
“And so on. I see.” Nevada was looking at me again. It occurred to me to ask exactly which song represented which actor in each case, but I decided that no matter how much time we had to kill, we didn’t have enough time for that.
We made our excuses and got out of there as quickly as possible. Patrik took our departure affably but Rut was glaring at us, her dark eyes lambent with hostility. I suspected that at least part of her that hostility, and her general nuttiness, was attributable to the way her husband couldn’t keep his eyes off Nevada.
Plus the drugs didn’t help. Her perpetual obvious consumption thereof. All in all, it was a relief to get back to our room.
Where we waited until it was time to set off for our rendezvous with Ida and Tinkler, our fellow burglars. Of course, we could have collected said burglars at the vattentorn and walked to Bo Lugn’s together. But we’d decided it would make our little group less conspicuous if we arrived separately. Nevada averred that potential witnesses were not as likely to remember two couples strolling by separately as four people walking together, and I defer to her in such matters.
As we put on our warmest outdoor clothes and switched off the lights one by one in our little hotel room, Nevada wandered to the window. “It’s Agatha,” she said, looking out.
“She’s back?”
“Yes. She’s been gone rather a long time.”
I said, “No doubt Christer’s great personal charm has a lot to do with that.”
Nevada laughed and went to the door and opened it. We waited as Agatha came up the stairs. She was brushing snow off her shoulders. Then she saw us and gave us a wry smile.
“I was stood up,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Yes. Stood up by the self-published priest. How low have I sunk? Where’s Tinkler?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Nevada.
“You mean, him and the stripper…?” said Agatha. At any moment I expected rudimentary explanatory hand gestures.
“Quite possibly,” I said.
“Glorious end to a glorious day,” said Agatha. She said goodnight and headed to her room. As Nevada and I walked down the stairs and out through the lobby, I said, “If she was stood up, why didn’t she come back earlier?”
“I’m sure she found someone to talk to,” said Nevada. She might well have winked at me, but we were outside now, in the darkness and the snow and the welcome cold clean air, and I couldn’t have said for sure.
* * *
Bo Lugn’s house was located not far from Christer Vingqvist’s place. But whereas Christer lived in a small fake Mexican casa, Bo had a large fake Roman villa. It was set in the middle of an extensive garden enclosed by a wall of honey-yellow stone, which extended up to about the height of a person’s head—a fairly tall person’s head—where it was topped with an unwelcoming mix of broken glass and barbed wire.
At the front of the house there was a black iron double gate big enough to admit a car. Or, in fact, a bus. It was set into the wall with faux Roman columns on either side topped with busts of ancient Roman women with fancy hairdos.
Maybe they were ancient Roman strippers.
There was a sophisticated-looking keypad system with a camera and screen set into one of the columns. And the gates appeared solid and formidable. But, as Ida had said, they weren’t locked. Indeed, if you looked closely, they were slightly ajar.
We didn’t go in that way. We walked straight past the gate, around the corner, and then around the next corner, which placed us in the street behind the villa. Here there was a narrower back gate set in the yellow wall for foot traffic. This too had a keypad system and intercom, but it was just audio, with no camera or screen.
And this gate was ajar as well.
We peered through the black steel bars at the distant house. There were lights on inside, and one on above the back door, but it didn’t look particularly occupied.
“Routine anti-burglar lighting?” I said.
“Much good it’s going to do them,” said Nevada. “A pity we don’t have any of the goodies we’ve got back in London. We don’t even have our second-best housebreaking kit.”
“So, you didn’t bring anything with you?” I said. “That was very restrained.”
“Just my birthday Swiss Army knife, which I obediently packed in our checked luggage as the law requires.”
“Have you got it with you now?”
“Always,” said Nevada happily. “It was a very nice present, love. And very generous. We didn’t have much money at the time.”
We were both thinking that our financial situation was now looking a lot more hopeful, but neither of us wanted to jinx it. So we didn’t say anything, but silently enjoyed our good mood.
That good mood began to ebb as the minutes passed. Soon we started checking our phones. Nothing from Tinkler. And he wasn’t taking calls.
“Where is he?” said Nevada.
“Could he be waiting around the other side of the house?” I said. “And not answering his phone?”
“He’s more than capable of that,” said Nevada. “Although I made it very clear to him that we’d be going in at the back. And I know he was listening because he made a predictably prurient remark.”
We walked to the other end of the street and around to the front of the house again. Still no Tinkler and no Ida. “He is not answering,” said Nevada, staring grimly at her phone.
“Of course,” I said, “in true comedy fashion they might have just now arrived around the back where we were a minute ago.”
I saw Nevada considering exploding with rage. No comedy here. She wanted to get started on her little housebreaking jaunt. She was all revved up and ready to go, and now she was being forced to wait by Tinkler and his stripper. But instead of exploding with rage, she calmed down and even laughed. “You know what, they just might,” she said.
So we went back around the corner, then around the next corner, hand in hand, walking in the snow in the night, in a little town in Sweden. A sense of romance began to settle over our endeavours again. It did not, however, survive the discovery that Tinkler and Ida had not, in fact, comically turned up when we’d gone around the other side of the house to look for them.
They weren’t here and there was still no sign of them.
Nevada began tapping her foot impatiently. Never a good sign. “Okay, we’re giving them five minutes and then we’re going in… Fuck it. We’re not going in in five minutes. We’re going in now.” She looked at me and I nodded—we walked up to the back gate of Bo Lugn’s Roman town house.
Nevada stopped just short of it. “Doesn’t look like there’s any cameras.”
“According to Ida, he isn’t big on security.”
“Ida,” said Nevada. She spoke the name with a derisive snort. Nevertheless, we went ahead and went in, pushing open the gate. It was a tall narrow grid of steel bars, black against the white of the snow. It swung open smoothly and silently, indicating that owning a strip club was at least lucrative enough to allow for frequent gate oiling.
Underfoot was a slab of black marble. It formed a semicircle around the gate area on the inside, covered with a shallow layer of slush. We squelched across it and then out onto the first of the smaller individual black slabs of marble that dotted the white snow. They were all stylishly irregular, arranged in a winding pattern, progressing in a leisurely way towards the big white colonnaded house, like the fossilised footprints of some primordial beast.
We walked carefully and exclusively on these paving stones, which allowed us to avoid leaving our own footprints in the snow. “Very bad form leaving footprints in the snow,” said Nevada.
“Rookie error,” I said.
“Precisely.”
Every one of the black stones seemed to be damp to exactly the same degree, slick with a thin sheen of melted snow. And they were warm underfoot.
“They’re heated,” I said.
“Heated crazy paving,” said Nevada.
“You’d have to be crazy to pay the electricity bills,” I said.
“Maybe there’s a windmill somewhere. Tirelessly generating energy.”
“We’ll have to keep an eye open for it,” I said. “Very comfortable underfoot, though. Heated paving stones.”
“Very comfortable underfoot. Or under paw. The cats would love it.”
“The little devils would indeed love it. In the winter they’d never budge off these things.”
The heated paving stones led us in long meandering curves towards the house. One of those curves wove through a stand of trees, all bare and black, naked branches hard to make out against the night sky. To our left, the ground fell away in a shallow oblong canyon. A swimming pool. Drained, empty and now containing snow.
