Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon Read Online Free PDF Page B

it. The rest of the picture had been in flashback, showing why he’d reached that stage, how Ava Gardner had helped him reach it.
    I shake my head. Funny, I should think of that right now. I look at my watch and fuck Gerald and Les from Bow to Bromley.
    It’s only an hour, an hour and a quarter later, that something actually happens. And, as begins to seem usual round here, the happening is encased in a cloud of dust.
    A car rounds the corner of the terminal building and draws up opposite me. The dust falls away like midges at sunset and a door opens and a Spaniard approaches. I remain seated. He smiles and stretches out his hand. He’s dumpy without being fat, he’s fortyish, and he’s got a very nice haircut.
    “Mr. Carter?” he says.
    I nod. The hand stays outstretched. I shake it. His grin widens. Then he goes into his act. I gather it’s all about why he’s here instead of Wally, why he’s late, and what’s wrong with the car. Only most of it’s in Spanish, but I don’thave to speak Spanish to gather there’s got to be something wrong with the car. Faulty plugs sound the same in any language.
    So I get up and he takes my case and carries on with his soliloquy while I get in the back of the car, making my first mistake: there’s about enough knee room for one of Billy Smart’s midgets. I begin to try and signify that I’d rather sit in the front but it’s too late, the driver’s scraped in gear and off, u-turning across the forecourt, and a minute or two later we’re hammering along a stretch of motorway at thirty-five miles an hour. As I look around at the flanking scenery, I think to myself: they could have left Ealing Broadway out of it. Because that’s the impression I get: the architecture’s different, the climate’s different, but there’s the same anonymous scruffiness, the same feeling of characterless uniformity re-enforced by the office blocks that passed for hotels squeezing yards away on my right. But we’re only on the motorway for about ten minutes and then the driver turns off.
    It may be just the angle I’m sitting at, or the vague positioning of the driver’s pointing arm, but I get the impression he’s aiming his finger not at any of the lower reaches of the range, but at the highest peaks, the ones reflecting most brilliantly the disappearing sunlight, and, if I’m right, that the villa’s as high as is possible. Knowing Gerald and Les it’s probably balanced on a peak like something out of Road Runner, liable to tip over the edge if you flush the lavatory a bit fierce.
    About ten minutes later we get to a small town, the main road going straight through the middle, and this place has a completely different atmosphere to the sprawl we left half an hour ago: a real Spanish village, as Spanish as an English market town is English. The only thing about this place, set out to catch the passing tourists, is a leather-work shop with a lot of hide skins tacked up on the outside wall. I tap the driver on the shoulder and manage to get over that I want him to stop, which he does, and gets outof the car and runs round the back and opens the door for me, beaming all over his face. I struggle out, and when I’m out I stretch and try and de-crease my clothes and while I’m doing that he’s already half way across the road, making for the leather shop.
    “Here,” I call after him.
    He stops and looks at me. I shake my head and point to a bar on my side of the road.
    “There,” I say to him.
    His face falls a bit. No taxi-drop commission tonight. I walk across the broad pavement with the driver padding along behind me and we go into the bar.
    The bar has a modern aluminium and glass frontage inset in the old shuttered structure of the building, a miniature version of the airport facade, and inside there are resonances of the airport, leatherette stools and booths, formica topping on the bar. Formica in Spain. I wonder how they pronounce it.
    Some of the town’s top guys are