Cutting Edge

Three

“She’s a lovely woman, that.”

“Jane?”

“Lovely.”

They were in a cab skirting the Lace Market, passing Ritzy’s on their right. The purple sign still shone above the door, although by now it was all locked up and the last dancers had made their way home. My place or yours? Resnick had been there on a few early, bachelor Saturday nights when it had been, simply, the Palais, and there were still couples quickstepping their way between the jivers. He remembered the women standing alone and sad-eyed at the end of the evening; men who prowled with something close to desperation, anxious to pull someone on to the floor before the last number faded.

“How old d’you think she is, Charlie? Tell me that.”

“Around thirty.”

“Too young for me, then, d’you think?”

Resnick looked at Ed Silver, leaning half against the window, half against the cab’s worn upholstery. His gray hair straggled thinly across his scalp and bunched in snagged folds around his ears, like the wool of an old sheep; one lens of his glasses was cracked and the frames bent where they had been trodden on and twisted not quite straight. His eyes were hooded and watery and refused to focus.

“No,” Resnick said. “Not a bit of it.”

Ed Silver eased himself further back and smiled.

When Resnick had talked Silver into handing him the butcher’s cleaver and walking peacefully downstairs, Jane Wesley had been grateful and surprised.

“You know him, don’t you?” she asked, spooning instant coffee into chipped mugs.

Resnick nodded.

“But before you went in there? There’s no way you could have known who he was.”

Resnick shook his head, gestured no to milk.

“I don’t know if I can let him stay. I mean, here, tonight.”

“He can come home with me.”

Her eyes widened; they were pale blue and seemed the wrong color for her face. “Are you sure?”

Resnick sighed. “Just for a bit. While he sorts himself out.” It wasn’t as if he didn’t see the dangers.

Jane Wesley sipped at her coffee thoughtfully. “That might take longer than you think.”

“Well,” said Resnick, “maybe he’s worth a little time.” He glanced over to where Silver was sitting in the near dark, fingering the air as if he could turn it into music. “Runner up in the Melody Maker poll three years running. Alto sax.”

Resnick put down his mug of coffee, almost untouched, and turned away.

“When was that?” said Jane Wesley to his back.

The cab pulled over by a stone wall, a black gate that was in need of fresh paint. Lights showed from one of the upstairs rooms and through the stained glass above the front door, an exercise to deter burglars. Resnick leaned down to the cab window and gave the young Asian driver a five-pound note, waiting for the change. The radio was turned low, an almost endless stream of what the Radio Trent DJ would probably call smooth late-night listening for night-owls.

Ed Silver was steadying himself against the wall, while a large black cat arched its back and fixed him with slanted, yellow eyes.

“This yours?” Silver asked.

“The house or the cat?”

“Either.”

“Both.”

“Huh.” Silver stood away from the wall and offered a hand towards the cat, who hissed and spat.

“Dizzy!” said Resnick reproachfully, opening the gate.

“There’s one thing I can’t stomach,” Ed Silver mumbled, following him along the twist of slabbed path, “it’s cats.”

Great! said Resnick to himself, turning the key in the lock.

Dizzy slid between his legs and raced for the kitchen. Miles came down the stairs from where he had doubtless been sleeping on Resnick’s bed and purred hopefully. Bud, skinny and timid, backed away at the sight of a stranger, until only the white smudge beside his nose could be seen in the furthest corner of the hall.

“Christ, Charlie! You’ve got three of the little buggers!”

“Four,” Resnick corrected. Somewhere, paw blissfully blind-folding his eyes, Pepper would be curled inside something, anything, sleeping.

“If I’d known that, I’d never have left the cleaver.”

He made up a bed in the room at the top of the house. It smelt damp, but no worse, Resnick was sure, than his guest had become used to. Even so, he fetched up a small electric fan beater and set it working in one corner. By the time he got back downstairs, Silver had swung his legs up on to the sofa in the living room and seemed sound asleep. Resnick went back and found a blanket, draping it over him, smelling the rancid, sickly-sweet smell of his clothing. Urine and rough red wine. Carefully, Resnick removed Silver’s glasses and set them down on the carpet, where Miles sniffed at them curiously to see if somehow they might be food.

By now it was past two and Resnick was wondering whether he would get any sleep himself at all. In the kitchen he ground coffee beans, shiny and dark, doled out food into the cats’ four colored bowls, examined the contents of the fridge for the makings of a sandwich.

The last time he had seen Ed Silver he had not long been wearing his sergeant’s stripes. Uniform to CID then back to uniform again: forging a career, following a plan. Silver had been guesting at a short-lived club near the top of Carlton Hill, so far out of the city that few people had found it. When Ed Silver had walked in, instrument cases under both arms, he’d looked around and scowled and called the place a morgue.

The first tune he’d tapped in a tempo that had the house drummer and bassist staring at each other, mouths open. Silver had maneuvered his alto through the changes of “I’ve Got Rhythm” at breakneck speed, but when he realized the locals were capable of keeping up, he’d let his shoulders sag a little, relaxed and enjoyed himself.

Chatting to Resnick afterwards, rolling cubes of ice around inside a tall glass of ginger ale, he’d talked of his first recording contract in seven years, a tour, later that year, of Sweden and Norway.

“See,” he’d said, stretching out both hands. “No shakes.” Then he’d laughed and set the glass on the back of one hand and after a few seconds the ice cubes ceased to chink against the inside.

“See!” he’d boasted. “What’d I tell you?”

Resnick heard nothing more of him for over a year. There was a paragraph in one of the magazines, suggesting that he’d recorded in Oslo with Warne Marsh, but he never saw the album reviewed, or any announcement of its release. What he did read, near the foot of page two on a slow Saturday in the Guardian, was that Ed Silver had fallen face first from the stage at the Nuffield Theater, Southampton, suffering concussion and a nose broken in two places.

Someone had done a good job on the nose, Resnick thought, finishing his sandwich, looking over at Ed Silver, fast out on his sofa. It looked to be the part of his face in the best shape.

He went quietly to the stereo and set Art Pepper on the turn-table. Midway through “Straight Life,” he thought he saw Ed Silver’s sleeping face twist into a smile. As the tune ended, Silver suddenly pushed himself up on to one arm and, eyes still closed tight, said, “Charlie? Didn’t you used to have a wife?” Without waiting for an answer, he lowered himself back down and resumed his sleep.