‘What unit were you in?’ Pattison asked. I noticed that the right side of his body was limp. Paralysed, I guessed.
‘First Canadian. Italy, Holland and Germany.’
‘How did you know Tam then?’ There seemed to be no suspicion in Pattison’s voice. But there again inflection was difficult when you were half a tongue and sixteen teeth down on the deal.
‘Long story. You were with him in Gideon?’
‘And before. Tam was my sergeant. He saved my skin more times than I can remember.’
‘What about…’ I clumsily indicated the wheelchair.
‘Oh… that was after Tam was shipped home. My own stupid fault. Acting the big bollocks. I didn’t take cover quick enough.’
‘What kind of guy was Tam? I mean back then? To be honest, I only really caught up with him towards the end of the war.’
‘The best. The absolute best. Our unit had this officer – really good as officers go, and you had to be hard to be part of Gideon, even if you was an officer. But he was all theory. Tam was the bloke you wanted running things when shite started to fly. Was you an NCO yourself?’
‘No. Officer. Captain.’
‘Oh, sorry sir. Didn’t mean no disrespect. About officers, I mean.’
‘None taken, Billy. I came across my fair share of wankers with pips on their shoulders myself. Anyway I’m not an officer now.’ I pulled a chair up opposite his wheelchair and sat down. ‘You and Tam saw a lot of action with Gideon, I take it?’
‘Oh aye. We was in the thick of it. Our unit was mainly Jews and a couple of Sudanese. Won’t hear anything against them. I learned a lot when I was out there. Tough bastards, particularly them Jewish blokes. They had been fighting the Arabs for years. If you needed them to kick arses then they didn’t need a second telling. Got their own country now, of course. God help any poor bastard that tries to take it from them.’
‘The Jewish men in your unit… Tam told me some of them were ex-members of the Special Night Squads.’
‘Aye. That’s right. Most of them if not all. That’s what I meant. They had seen a lot of action before the war. Taking out Arab resistance units. Protecting the Iraqi petroleum pipeline, that kind of stuff. Real hard bastards. And they really hated the Germans. Not many prisoners were taken, if you catch my drift. But them Jewish lads were a great laugh. Tam really got on with them. He was interested in that kind of thing. You know, the history and stuff about the Middle East. That’s why he got on so well with our officer. He’d been a journalist or something before the war. Correspondent I think you call them. Middle East was his special thing.’
‘Do you know if Tam kept in touch with any of the other members of your unit?’
‘I would think so. He looked me up all right. Don’t you know that it was Tam who got my face fixed up?’
I was confused for a moment. I did my best to sweep the that’s it fixed up? expression that must have flashed across my face. ‘You’ve heard from Tam since the end of the war?’
‘Oh aye. He visited me four, maybe five times. To start with I had to have a dressing on my face. For months. The wound just wouldn’t heal and there was always a danger of me getting infected. They was trying to sort me out with a surgeon who could fix it, but the main man was always booked up. Tam sorted it all out for me. He paid for me to have it done private. The best plastic surgeon in the business. Mr Alexander Knox. I don’t know how Tam managed to get him, even paying. But it was Mr Knox who fixed me up. I’m really pleased with the result.’
‘He did a great job,’ I said and smiled. But don’t ’phone Sam Goldwyn and ask if he’s looking for a new leading man, I thought. ‘When was the last time you saw Tam?’
‘About a year ago,’ Pattison said and some saliva bubbled at the corner of his slit mouth. Lips must have cost extra. ‘He was looking very flash. He’s in business now. Doing really well for himself.’
‘Did you know Tam’s brother at all?’
‘No. Never met him, but heard all about him. They was identical twins, you know, but Tam hated his brother. Tam said he could never work out how two brothers could be so alike on the outside but so different on the inside. He said his brother was rotten. Yellow. And a rat.’
‘Did Tam talk about him much?’
‘Tam didn’t talk about anything much. He listened. But when he did say something it was worth hearing. But aye… he did talk about his brother a bit. He said his brother was a shirker who’d dodged his call-up. Tam seemed worried that he’d left his brother in charge of the family business, whatever it was they did.’
There was a pause. I looked out of the bay windows again and commented on how nice the gardens were. Truth was I was taking a break from looking at Pattison’s face.
‘Did you ever come across a Jimmy Wallace in the army?’ I asked eventually.
‘Not Jimmy Wallace… Jamie Wallace. You know how toffs are with names. That’s who I was talking about earlier, when I said about our officer. That was him. Captain Jamie Wallace, the guy who had been a journalist before the war. The Middle East expert. He led our unit and did a pretty good job of it, but like I said it was Tam who was in charge when it came to fighting.’
I thought about what he had said. An officer. Why would an ex-army officer end up as a hanger-on to a thug gangster? ‘How did Tam get on with Wallace?’
‘They got on all right. Captain Wallace relied on Tam and Tam was always interested in what the Captain had to say. They was different types, but they seemed to really get on.’
After they wheeled Pattison away I desperately needed to get out of the care home. I stood outside the front door and took a few deep breaths of non-Glasgow air. There was no sign of the Austin 16HP and I guessed it was parked outside the grounds. When I got into my car I sat without starting it for a few moments. I tilted the rear-view mirror so I could see the faint web of scars on my left cheek. Someone like Pattison’s doctor had once fixed me up. But that was the difference that being a few feet further away from an exploding grenade meant. I could have ended up like Pattison. Easy. I sat for a moment and thought up a few more gags about his badly rebuilt face, laughing quietly to myself. That way I could maybe kill the ache in my gut and the sting in my eyes every time I thought of the poor bastard.
When you’d had the kind of war I’d had, you learned to laugh at suffering. So long as it wasn’t yours. If you laughed at it, then maybe it wouldn’t reach you. Get you. And if you believed that, then that was the biggest joke of all.
The Austin 16HP picked me up again and followed me back into town. It stayed about three cars back in an attempt at discretion. I had no doubt that Sneddon’s men were handy with a pair of bolt-cutters or cracking open kneecaps with a claw hammer, but surveillance wasn’t their strong suit. It didn’t matter; I was glad to feel that there was someone looking over my shoulder.
I had a date for that night. I took Jeannie, a small, dark and curvy waitress I had picked up, to see Sudden Fear with Jack Palance and Joan Crawford at the Regal in Sauchiehall Street. Jeannie insisted on the Glaswegian propriety of not sitting in the back row: a public indication of her respectability. The truth was that I was more interested in seeing the film than moist fumblings in her underwear, and we both knew that that would follow anyway in the sweaty, steamed-up confines of my Austin Atlantic.
In Glasgow having a push-bike you paid for yourself rather than nicking it made you flash. Having a car elevated you to Hollywood-level glamour. The fact that my car was a stylish Austin A90 Atlantic Coupe had been more instrumental in winning me pussy than my gentle demeanour, debonair wit and good looks.
‘You look a bit like him,’ Jeannie commented as we came out of the cinema into night air that was too cold for the time of year.
‘Who?’
‘Jack Palance. You’re better looking, but you do look a bit like him.’
‘You think?’ I smiled. I looked at Jeannie. I certainly couldn’t have compared her to Joan Crawford, or even Gloria Grahame who had, as always, played the cheap good-time girl. When I had first seen Jeannie there had been something about her reminded me of Carmen Miranda: dark hair and eyes, olive skin, full sensual lips. But when I’d picked her up that night I realized that the something about her had probably been the half bottle of rye whiskey I’d drunk and the dim smoky light. As I looked at my little waitress and reappraised the dark eyes, olive skin and full, sensuous lips, the closest comparison I could come up with was Edward G. Robinson with a permanent wave. Suddenly my ardour diminished. ‘Yeah, I’ve been told that before,’ I said in response to her Jack Palance remark. ‘There’s a reason for it.’