From the greyness behind us, an ursine bruiser whose nose had more than once been reshaped by non-surgical means approached us. An oversized umbrella danced in his nervous paws, twirling like a silken mushroom as he spoke to my sister.
“You, ah, intimate with the deceased?”
His accent was hard to place, but my first guess was Russian with a Glaswegian overlay. His meaning was harder to parse.
“I beg your pardon?” Cecilie was as confused as I.
“You were his girl? Ee kurtizanka? Accept please my condolences. Of me the name is Jimmy. You will be need someone to look after you of now. It appears you are like a nice girl.”
He held out his arm in a way that suggested she should take hold. The gesture came perfectly naturally to him, however insanely presumptuous it might have seemed to us. He so did not look like a Jimmy, and the accent overlay was sounding more like Israeli. It still took us both a while to pull meaning from the elegant oddness of his sentences, but Cecilie recovered first.
“His girl? No, Mr Jimmy. Yes, I am his. . I was his daughter. Daughter. Doch’. Not prostitutka.”
He turned red at the same time I figured out “kurtizanka”. I’m not a violent man, and I have never been the kind of “chivalrous” lout who hits people in protection of anyone’s reputation. It surprised me greatly to discover that I had backhanded Jimmy. It surprised me more to discover that he was still standing. This did not bode well. Even someone twice my mass and a half-metre taller should have the grace to collapse when I whack them that hard. His blush faded, while the left side of his face remained an angry red where my hand had struck. He flexed his own oversized hands, dropping umbrella and overcoat just as twin rugby tackles at waist and ankles spread him flat on the dewy grass.
Christian Hail, captain of 1989’s most feared ball team for miles, was breathing heavily, grass stains on his too-tight grey suit. There was a grim smugness to his expression as he sat on Jimmy’s chest, going slowly through the much larger man’s pockets. Michael and Manny Caruthers each held one massive leg, while Edmond Arrigakar, younger brother of my first steady girlfriend, pinned Jimmy’s head and shoulders.
“He’s got a piece! The fucker’s got a piece! What kind of idiot thug brings a cannon to a blessed funeral?”
“Watch how you pull on the man’s gun.”
Cecilie watched the portly ex-ballplayers tugging a tiny, elegantly chromed weapon from Jimmy’s waistband.
“That’s the safety you just turned off. You’re pointing a loaded, cocked pistol at your mate’s knee, Manny.”
Cecilie took the weapon from Manny’s shaking fingertips. She yanked a lever on the top, tapped a rounded black clip out of the handle and tossed both into her purse.
“What the fuck was Dad doing for these goons, and when did you turn into a pugilist?”
I had no answers. More of the old team was showing up, comfortingly boisterous now that they had a more familiar task. Someone passed me a flask. Fog hid time’s work on the living as we stood among the dead. They let Jimmy stand, resembling cygnets around a limping, lumpy swan as they marched him away.
When I squinted, I could just make out clusters of unfamiliar mourners trying not to stare at us through the fog. My hand hurt.
“Whaddya say we hijack the lawyer’s limo and see if they’ll give us a lift home?”
Mimicking Jimmy’s gesture, I thrust out an arm for Cecilie to hold. She took it gratefully, managing not to lean on me too hard as her heels poked plugs in the graveyard turf. I still held the flask. I wanted to get home and get properly soused so I didn’t have to think about what my dad had been working on, or about my sister absently, happily stroking the pistol in her purse.
She wasn’t going to let me have a quiet drink.
“So while you were defending my honour, had it occurred to you to wonder how I paid for law school?”
It was my turn to blush. I looked up at the roof of the car, wondering how many bugs would be standard issue for a lawyer’s limo.
“You didn’t have to. .”
“No, I probably didn’t have to. I could have done less interesting things for less money. I did have a choice. I still do.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Bollocks. You want to lecture me about being foolish and reckless and mad.”
“Not now I don’t. You’ve taken all the fun out of it. What are you going to do with this hard-earned new law degree, miss?”
Cecilie beamed. “Nothing, probably. I don’t half hate law.”
I thought about getting out and walking home. I thought about her girlfriend’s mouth. I thought about the glimpse of elaborate gartered and stockinged thigh my sister’s gown displayed, and I thought a lot about the Christian notion of hell. If it existed, maybe I’d see my father there.
“Mr Gryn retained us in the early eighties when his clientele began to ask him for jobs that were not entirely, er, within the realm of traditional printing practice. We helped him to find offshore locations for that aspect of his business, and to keep his dealings within the legal frameworks that those nations required. The environments to which he moved proved a phenomenal source of new work for an artist of his abilities, and soon we were handling a few million pounds of business traffic every month. You two (and Ms Gryn’s mother, should we succeed in tracking her down) are the sole heirs of a fortune that far exceeds the GNP of Chile for last year. Do you understand?”
I did not understand. Cecilie seemed to.
“We’re rich, bro. Filthy, stinking rich.”
“Huh?”
Cecilie was already asking the important questions. “What’s the current legal standing of our father’s enterprise?”
“Perfectly legit. We had a visit from two Dutch government agents a couple of years ago over suspicions your father’s enterprise was printing passports, but. .”
“Were they?”
“No, Ms Gryn, the last of that side of the operation was phased out for good in 1991, on our advice. On paper it never actually happened and the only records we retain are those that keep people like Jimmy on their best behaviour.”
“You were there? By the grave today?”
“Our representatives were. They may not know firearms, but they have other skills.”
Out the office window of Hannaford amp; Locke, I watched as two tugs dragged an oversized barge too far starboard in the twisting, narrow waters beneath Burnsey Bridge. The barge hit a piling and the entire bridge tilted alarmingly. A semi on the bridge skidded across two lanes and stopped with the cab dangling over the water. I couldn’t see the driver. As I watched, cranes, ambulances and a flittering black helicopter arrived at the scene. My sister crossed and uncrossed her legs beside me. The stockings were pearl-grey fishnet, with at least six elaborate catchments for garters.
“Mr Gryn? Graham? Are you all right?”
“Just fine, thanks. A little distracted is all.”
“Of course, Mr Gryn. Trying times, and a great deal of information to take in.” Indeed. Cecilie put her hand on mine.
“I think my brother could use a drink. I know I could. Do you people keep any whiskey here?”
My father’s oily solicitors didn’t bat an eye between them. Nor did they offer us a choice of whiskies, as some younger employees of newer firms might have. The heavy crystal goblets they produced brimmed with a liquid that had too much peaty, potent golden musk to have been created by mortal hands.
I signed something that acknowledged our commitment to keep seeking CeeCee’s mom and to set aside a third of the assets in her name, excluding the house but including a property in Scotland we’d never seen or heard of. I signed a dozen more documents, handed the sheaf of paper back across the desk, and looked back out the window. Then they gave me the whiskey.