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Paddy Bostock's Page
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Wings ePress
ISBN-10: 1613097522
Type: Fiction
Pages: 370
Copyright: February 2016
ISBN-13: 9781613097526
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Of heads found ... and lost!
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK ON CREATESPACE.
Following the accidental discovery of a “head” afloat on the Regent Canal, London, PI Dr Jake Flintlock is seduced into taking on a case which draws him to Northern Spain and its darker history. There, in the company of his sidekick Dr Bum Park, Jake faces a mystery wherein an ancient Basque legacy of vengeance and strife intersects with a private vendetta — one with Jake himself as its unwitting target.
Excerpt
Poory told us she was descended from a long line of Basque fishermen and sailors, the founders of the various companies her family had for centuries administered in the region, and all had gone more or less swimmingly until Franco took power after the 1936 civil war, when things had gone arse end up and her father became a leading member of the resistance to fascism, swearing he would die rather than yield his independence to what he termed, “the death of the Basqueland and with it Spain.”
And, for this troubles, died he had. At the hands of a firing squad in the late nineteen fifties. Poory was never to know him. Although, when Eta was formed in 1959, the baby girl and her older brothers had become icons for the new movement, with which they had later sympathised if only in honour of their father’s name.
By 1968 and the killing of the secret police officer Meliton Manzanas, however, the de Osnaolas had begun to see an organisation built by intellectuals turning into one run by terrorists. The Manzanas killing was only the first of eight hundred that would take place over the next thirty years, during which time her brothers had drifted away from not only local politics but Bilbao itself. To America, which left Poory to handle the estate and Eta as best she could.
“Was never easy,” she told us. “They worshipped my father. For them he was the martyr and so to begin with I played along, contributed to the funds even though I no longer believed. And when I said no more do I want to be part because I am sick of the killing and look to the future, still there was a price I must pay.”
“Protection money?” Bum said.
“You could put it that way. I gave the money and I was left in peace. Was a compromise, no? Sometimes also I went to the meetings. And always I encouraged. Please will you put down your weapons, I said. No longer do they serve the purpose of freedom. But until the bombs in Madrid they did not listen and you may say even I have blood on my hands. About this I try not to think. And then, little by little, after Madrid, we move to more sense and then another ceasefire, this time they say permanent. I hope, gentlemen, I hope so much. An’ these recent murders are the last thing I need when finally it looks as though the talking starts and the killing stops. So this is my story,” she said, lowering her eyes as she reached for the decanter.
“Of it I am not proud. Of my father, yes! But...”
I nodded while my partner bravely drank down his sherry, cleared his throat, blinked and then whispered, “Why you got us over here, huh, ma’am? To set the record straight. Find the real killer.”
“Why I ask Hake to come, sí. So far, Doctor Bum, all you cause is trouble,” Poory said, but she was smiling. “What I know is I am tired of so much fighting and now must be the end to it.”
She then palm-dinged a copper bell on the arm of her chesterfield, which caused Jesús and the maids to glide into the room with a trolley bearing tureens of a fish soup called ttoro, which was when we moved from the couches to the table settings.
~*~
After the soup came chiperones--squid in its own ink and reputedly the only one that’s black. Then there was txangurro--spider crab in a secret Basque sauce--with risotto. All accompanied by several bottles of txakoli, a white wine a bit like Rioja only spicier. The whole event lasted the better part of two hours, during which we spoke of many things, some serious, some less so.
Given Poory had told her story, Bum felt free to tell his, for example. And so we heard about Bum the sharpest kid in his school; Bum the potential quarterback for the Oakland Raiders; Bum the meanest break dancer on the street even before break dancing was invented; and Bum the within-a-whisker star of several Hollywood blockbusters. Not at lot about Bum the gangsta turned faux-dog entrepreneur, and nothing at all about Marthe, but Poory nodded and smiled politely anyway.
Then I told my story too, while Bum stared at the ceiling, puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. How Paul McCartney had wanted me to form a new band with him after The Beatles broke up, but I’d been too busy teaching Postmodernism at the university. And how, prior to that, as a teenager, I’d been all ready to sign for Liverpool FC, only I twisted my ankle at the last moment and couldn’t attend the trials...
Poory smiled politely at that too, but, our jolly tales notwithstanding, the elephant was still in the room, and it couldn’t be ignored forever.
“So, where do we go from here?’ I asked as we chewed our way through a dessert of figs in some kind of marmalade sauce.
“We find the truth, gentlemen. If it is some New Eta gang, then I have to know. It will be hard,” Poory sighed, “but I must accept. Of course different answer will make me happier. But either way the truth must come.”
“Now, shall we make ourselves comfortable?” she added, gesturing at the chesterfields and the table between them onto which had been placed, I assumed by the silent Jesús on his Noh-theatre legs, a bottle of fifteen-star, two-hundred-year-old Fundador, coffees, a wooden box of panatellas with a Cuban label, and a silver stand bearing a delicate white clay pipe.
“You think the papier mâché head idea is still a runner?” I asked once Bum and I had sipped at our brandies, lit up our cigars, and sunk back onto our couches--me alone on mine and Bum annoyingly close to Poory on hers.
“I do not know. You are the experts,” she said, tamping black tobacco into the bowl of the pipe.
“You got that right, darlin,” Bum said. “An’ seems to me like a smart move. What it says to the killer is, “Hey, dude, we got yo’ number. Any game you can play, we can play better. Kindeva heads-we-win, heads-you-lose kinda deal.”
“Tails,” I said, expelling fragrant smoke through pursed lips.
“Huh?”
“It’s tails. Heads I win, tails you lose. That’s the expression.”
“Tails, pales,” Bum said. “My vote is we go with the plan. ’Less anybody got any better ideas,” he added huffily. “You got any better ideas, Jake?”
“No.”
“So...”
“You asked the Rowbottom person about making the head, Poory?” I therefore asked.
“Sí,” she replied, her cheeks imploding into hollows as she plunged the gold Zippo’s flame into the bowl of her lady-pipe and sucked.
“And?”
“An’ is not Rowbottom...is Ramsbottom,” she muttered between superhuman sucks.
I waited patiently until encouraging little blue clouds began to puff from her mouth.
“And what’d he say?” I asked.
“She,” Poory corrected through a huge exhalation of what didn’t smell to me a lot like ordinary tobacco. “I told you she was a woman, did I not? Hoolie.”
“Might have done,” I conceded. “Anyway, she will make this head for us?”
“Sí, I hope,” Poory smiled, her green eyes misting over a little.
“Hope?”
“Yes. I tell her to call tonight when our meal is finished. Right around now,” she said, consulting the diamond-studded watchface draped on another white gold bracelet around her wrist.
~*~
And, sure enough within two minutes Poory’s cell phone started playing its tunes.
“Dígame,” she said, taking it from the table and hitting the speak-to-me button. “Ah, Hoolie. Hola. ¿Qué tal estás?”
But that was as much as I was able to understand because the following, albeit short, conversation was conducted in hundred-miles-an-hour Spanish inmixed with Basque. Not that our hostess contributed a great deal to it seeing as Hoolie pretty much ran the show. And loudly to judge by the way Poory kept holding the phone away from her ear, nodding, and saying from a safe distance, “Sí, Hoolie, bueno, entiendo” before the barking at the other end ceased and she clicked off.
“That was her?” I asked.
“Her,” Poory confirmed.
“Feisty lady, huh?” Bum said.
“And she’s up for it?” I said, pulling on the panatella and trying but failing to blow smoke rings at the ceiling.
“Sí, she will do the job.”
“Great. Fabulous,” I said, reaching over for my glass and then leaning back into the chesterfield to relish the twin pleasures of a fine brandy and a fine cigar.
“Looks like we’re on our way then. How soon can she finish it?”
“Tonight.”
“Mmm, fast worker.”
“She is the expert, Hake, like I say...Only there is one condition.”
“Money? How much does she want?”
“Not money, Hake...you.”
“Me?”
“You,” Poory said, sucking at her dying pipe. That’s the pisser with pipes. The moment you stop sucking at them, they go out.
“Me in what sense? My body?” I grinned, the ancient Fundador tickling the wittier parts of the Flintlock brain. “Or my mind?”
“Both. She requires you to be present while she makes the head so you can comment. You an’ you alone. And this is not an easy woman, Hake. In these parts, they call her the Bitch of Boxto.”
“Bit of a reputation, eh?” I continued to grin as Poory prodded at the bowl of her pipe with a special silver pipe-prodder.
“You could say so. You must be very careful, Hake.”
“With the ladies I am always careful,” I said, winking Bondishly and puffing at my cigar, which caused Bum to fiddle with his eyebrows and stifle a snort.
~*~
Mind you, by the time Poory finished explaining why it was I needed to be careful, I was feeling a lot less Bondish. No doubt, she told us, Hoolie was the best Body Artist in town, only her creativity--as with many artists of genius--came with its downside, which she knew from both town rumours and José Ramon, who had for a time been her lover and maybe still was. She lived down by the Abandiobarra Flats close to the river, kept savage dogs, and indulged in what were locally believed to be satanic rituals.
“You know what is Body Art, Hake?”
“Tattoos?” I ventured, stubbing out the cigar while massaging a tic that had developed in my left eyelid.
“I wish,” Poory said. “Is the art of making casts of human bodies, sometimes whole, sometimes separate parts--heads, arms, sexual organs, especially the sexual organs--an’ fill them with silicon to make them look like they are alive. Hoolie prefer the bodies of men, because she hate them so much. For this you have to be careful.”
“Um,” I said.
“Also she experiment with the mutilating of these bodies and rolling them over on the canvas to make a blood design.”
“Ouch,” Bum said, pulling at an earlobe.
“And her name again?” I asked. “Hoolie, you say?”
“Sí, Hoolie.”
“Right. So, Hoolie Ramsbottom?”
“Ramsbottom.”
That’s when I had this momentary flash of insight--an epiphany, if you will. When it dawned on me Hoolie wasn’t really Hoolie at all. She was Julie. In Poory’s pronunciation Jake was “Hake,” and Julie was “Hoolie,” right? How could I have missed something so obvious? And her initials would be? Yup, you’ve got it--J.R.
What was even worse was the name rang a faint bell in my geriatric memory. I’ve never been good with students’ names, but this one came with half-remembered baggage. What it was, I had no idea, except that distantly--darkly--it spelt danger; some concatenation of awful, yet vague, memories with Julie’s fearsome current reputation that caused a nasty tingling up the Flintlock spine, however hard I fought to control it. Could it really be that Julie Ramsbottom?
“And wuh-where does she get the b-bodies for these works?” I asked.
“Silly fool men she lure to her for sex,” Poory said. “The Guggenheim was interested in the work because it is the best, but when they found out about the background, they said no, is too risky for their shows. Hoolie is very angry at this decision. Said her private life was none of their concern. Was the art that mattered.”
“And the police know about her...private life?” I whispered.
“Sí, but they turn the blind eye. Said it was the fault of the men for being so stupid to go with some crazy woman from England when there are plenty of local whores. An’ the museum agreed. All too complicated an’ bad for business. Other hand, José Ramon has shown me pictures of the bodies she makes an’ you would not know they were not genuine humans. Like I say, she is the best.”
“Mmm,” I said. “You know what? I think in the circumstances it might be wiser to send Bum on this mission. Bum is good with women, especially wild ones. Also, he would make an excellent model, and...”
“But she ask for you and you only. Otherwise no head,” Poory said.
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