Doors Open

2

It was a low-ceilinged, windowless basement with mahogany slats on the walls and brown leather furnishings. In the past, Gissing had complained that it felt like being in a well-upholstered coffin.

After private viewings and the auctions themselves, it had become their custom to drop into the Shining Star for what Gissing called ‘post-match analysis’. Tonight, the place was half full – students by the look of it, albeit of the well-heeled variety.

‘Living in daddy’s Stockbridge pied-à-terre,’ Gissing muttered.

‘But still your bread and butter,’ Allan teased him.

They found an empty booth and waited for the staff to take their order – whisky for Gissing and Mike, the house champagne for Allan.

‘Need a glass of the real McCoy to wash away the memory,’ he explained.

‘I mean it, you know,’ Gissing was saying, rubbing his hands together as if soaping them. ‘About all those paintings in purdah… meant every bloody word.’

‘We know,’ Allan told him. ‘But you’re preaching to the converted. ’

Robert Gissing was head of the city’s College of Art, but not for much longer. Retirement was only a month or two away – at the end of the summer term. It seemed, however, that he was determined to argue his various points to the very last.

‘I can’t believe it’s what the artists themselves would have wanted,’ Gissing persisted.

‘In the past,’ Mike felt obliged to ask, ‘didn’t they all crave patrons?’

‘Those same patrons often loaned out important works,’ Gissing shot back, ‘to the national collections and elsewhere.’

‘First Caly does the same,’ Mike argued, looking to Allan for support.

‘That’s true,’ Allan agreed. ‘We send paintings all over the place.’

‘But it’s not the same,’ Gissing growled. ‘It’s all about commerce these days, when it should be about taking pleasure in the works themselves.’ He balled one hand into a fist, thumping the table for effect.

‘Steady there,’ Mike said. ‘Staff’ll think we’re impatient.’ He noticed that Allan’s gaze was fixed on the bar. ‘Good-looking waitress? ’ he guessed, starting to turn his head.

‘Don’t!’ Allan warned, lowering his voice and leaning across the table, as if for a huddle. ‘Three men at the bar, necking a bottle of what looks suspiciously like Roederer Cristal…’

‘Art dealers?’

Allan was shaking his head. ‘I think one of them’s Chib Calloway.’

‘The gangster?’ Gissing’s words coincided with the end of a music track, seeming even louder in the sudden silence, and as he craned his neck to look, the man called Calloway caught the movement and stared back at the trio. His bulbous shaved head rested on huge hunched shoulders. He wore a black leather jacket and a distended black T-shirt. The champagne glass looked like it was being choked by his fist.

Allan had opened his catalogue on the table and was pretending to skim through it. ‘Nice going,’ he muttered.

‘I was at the same school as him,’ Mike added quietly. ‘Not that he’ll remember…’

‘Probably not the time to remind him,’ Allan cautioned as their drinks arrived.

Calloway was a known face in the city: protection, strip bars, maybe drugs, too. Their waitress added a warning look of her own as she moved off, but it was too late: a hulking figure was moving towards the booth. Chib Calloway rested his knuckles against the table and leaned across it, casting a shadow over the three men seated there.

‘Are my ears burning?’ he asked. No one answered, though Mike returned the gangster’s stare. Calloway, only half a year older than Mike, had not worn well. His skin had an oily look to it, and his face was chipped and dented, evidence of past battles fought. ‘Gone all quiet, hasn’t it?’ he went on, lifting the catalogue and examining its cover. He opened it at random, examining an early masterpiece by Bossun. ‘Seventy-five to a hundred? For some wattle and daub?’ He tossed the catalogue back on to the table. ‘Now that, my friends, is what I call daylight robbery. I wouldn’t pay seventy-five pence for it, never mind K.’ He met Mike’s stare for a moment, but, as the silence persisted, decided there was little else to detain him. He was chuckling to himself as he went back to the bar, chuckling as he finished his drink and headed out into the night with his scowling colleagues.

Mike watched as the waiting staff’s shoulders relaxed and they scooped up the ice bucket and glasses. Allan’s eyes were on the door. He waited a further few seconds before speaking.

‘We could’ve taken them.’

But his hand wasn’t at its steadiest as he lifted the champagne to his mouth. ‘Rumour has it,’ he added from above the rim of his glass, ‘our chum Calloway pulled off the First Caly heist back in ninety-seven.’

‘He should be retired then,’ Mike offered.

‘Not every retiree is as canny with their cash as you, Mike.’

Gissing had drained his whisky and was waving towards the bar that a further offering was required. ‘Maybe we could get him to help us,’ he said as he gestured.

‘Help us?’ Allan echoed.

‘Another raid on First Caly,’ the professor explained into his empty glass. ‘We’d be freedom fighters, Allan, fighting for a cause.’

‘And what cause might that be?’ Mike couldn’t help asking. He was working hard at controlling his breathing, bringing his heartbeat back to something like normal. In the years – around twenty of them – since he’d last seen Calloway, the man had changed substantially. These days he glowed with menace and a sense of his own invulnerability.

‘Repatriation of some of those poor imprisoned works of art.’ Gissing was grinning as the whisky arrived. ‘The infidels have held on to them for long enough. Time we took our revenge.’

‘I like your thinking,’ Mike said with a smile.

‘Why pick on First Caly?’ Allan complained. ‘Plenty of other villains out there.’

‘And not all of them as public as Mr Calloway,’ Gissing agreed. ‘You say you were at school with him, Mike?’

‘Same year,’ Mike answered, nodding slowly. ‘He was the kid everyone wanted to know.’

‘To know or to be?’

Mike looked at Allan. ‘Maybe you’re right. Be nice to feel that sense of power.’

‘Power through fear isn’t worth the candle,’ Gissing grumbled. As the waitress swapped his glass for its replacement, he asked her if Calloway was a regular.

‘Now and then,’ she said. She sounded South African to Mike.

‘Big tipper?’ he asked her.

She didn’t like the question. ‘Look, I just work here…’

‘We’re not cops or anything,’ Mike assured her. ‘Just curious.’

‘Pays not to be,’ she confided, turning on her heel.

‘Tidy body,’ Allan said appraisingly, once she was out of earshot.

‘Almost as tidy as our own dear Laura Stanton,’ Gissing added, winking in Mike’s direction. By way of response, Mike said he was heading outside for a cigarette.

‘Can I bum one off you?’ Allan asked as usual.

‘And leave an old man on his own?’ Gissing pretended to complain, opening the catalogue at its first page. ‘Go on then, off with the pair of you – see if I care…’

Mike and Allan pushed open the door and climbed the five steps leading from the basement bar to the pavement. It had only just grown dark, and the roadway was busy with midweek taxis seeking work.

‘Pound to a penny,’ Allan said, ‘when we go back inside he’ll be bending someone’s ear.’

Mike lit both their cigarettes and inhaled deeply. He was down to four or five a day, but couldn’t quite give them up completely. As far as he knew, Allan only smoked when around smokers – obliging smokers. Looking up and down the street, Mike saw no sign of Calloway and his cohorts. Plenty of other bars they could be in. He remembered the bike sheds at school – there really had been bike sheds, though they were only used for improvised kickabouts. Behind them, the smokers gathered at break and lunchtime, Chib – having earned the nickname even at that early stage in his career – chief among them, breaking open a pack of ten or twenty and selling singles at inflated prices, plus another few pence for a light. Mike hadn’t smoked back then. Instead, he would hang around on the periphery, hoping for some sort of welcome into the brotherhood – an invitation that had never come.

‘Town’s quiet tonight,’ Allan said, flicking ash into the air. ‘Tourists must be lying low. I always wonder what they think of the place. I mean, it’s home to us; hard to see it with anyone else’s perspective.’

‘Thing is, Allan, it’s home to the likes of Chib Calloway, too. Two Edinburghs sharing a single nervous system.’

Allan wagged a finger. ‘You’re thinking of that programme on Channel 4 last night… the Siamese twins.’

‘I caught a bit of it.’

‘You’re like me – too much TV. We’ll be in our dotage and wondering why we didn’t do more with our lives.’

‘Thanks for that.’

‘You know what I mean, though – if I had your money I’d be helming a yacht in the Caribbean, landing my helicopter on the roof of that hotel in Dubai…’

‘You’re saying I’m wasting away?’ Mike was thinking of Gerry Pearson, of emails with embedded photos of speedboats and jet skis…

‘I’m saying you should grab what you can with both hands – and that includes the blessed Laura. If you nip back to the auction house, she’ll still be there. Ask her out on a date.’

‘Another date,’ Mike corrected him. ‘And look what happened last time.’

‘You give up too easily.’ Allan was shaking his head slowly. ‘It amazes me you ever made any money in business.’

‘I did, though, didn’t I?’

‘No doubt about it. But…’

‘But what?’

‘I just get the feeling you’re still not comfortable with it.’

‘I don’t like flaunting it, if that’s what you mean. Rubbing my success in other people’s faces.’

Allan looked as though he had more to say, but natural caution won him over and he only nodded. Their attention was distracted by sudden music, pulsing from a car as it cruised towards them. It was a gloss-black BMW, looked like an M5. Thin Lizzy on the hi-fi – ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ – and Chib Calloway in the passenger seat, singing along. The window was down, and his eyes met Mike’s again. He made the shape of a pistol with his fingers, thumb curving itself into a trigger, drawing a bead on the two smokers. And then he was gone. Mike noticed that Allan had been watching.

‘Still reckon we could’ve taken them?’ he asked.

‘No bother,’ Allan replied, flicking the unsmoked half of his cigarette into the road.

That night, Mike ate alone.

Gissing had suggested dinner, but Allan had said there was work waiting at home. Mike, too, made his excuses, then hoped he wouldn’t bump into the professor later on in the restaurant. Thing was, he quite liked eating without company. He’d picked up a paper from a late-opening newsagent’s. Walking towards Haymarket, he’d decided on Indian. Restaurants didn’t much cater for readers – the lights were usually too low – but he was able to find a table with a wall lamp behind it. In the paper, he read that it was crunch time for Indian restaurants – rice shortages leading to price hikes; tighter immigration meaning fewer chefs were entering the country. When he mentioned this to the waiter, the young man just smiled and shrugged.

The restaurant was pretty full, and Mike’s table was too close to a party of five drunks. Their suit jackets were draped over the backs of their chairs. Ties had been loosened or undone altogether. An office night out, Mike guessed, maybe celebrating a satisfactory deal. He knew how those nights could go. People he’d worked with, they’d often commented on how he never seemed to get quite drunk enough, never seemed completely elated whenever a major contract was concluded. He could have told them: I like to stay in control. Could have added a postscript; these days. The men were on to coffee and brandies by the time his food arrived, meaning that they were getting ready to leave as he asked for his bill. Rising to his feet, he saw that one of the men was losing his balance as he shrugged his arms into his coat. With the diner threatening to back into Mike’s table, Mike held a hand out to steady him. The bleary head turned towards him.

‘What you up to then?’ the man slurred.

‘Just stopping you falling over.’

Another of the group had decided to step in. ‘Did you touch him?’ he asked Mike. Then, to his friend: ‘He lay a finger on you, Rab?’

But Rab was concentrating on staying upright, and had nothing further to say on the subject.

‘I was trying to help,’ Mike argued. The men were gathering round him in a semicircle. He knew how easily these things could turn tribal – five against the world.

‘Well, help yourself right now and piss off,’ Rab’s friend snapped.

‘Before you find your face on the wrong end of a bottling,’ one of the others piped up. The waiters were looking on anxiously. One had pushed open the nearby swing door to alert the kitchen.

‘Fine.’ With his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, Mike headed for the street. Once outside, he moved briskly along the pavement, glancing back. If they were going to come after him, he wanted a bit of distance. Distance meant time to think, to assess the situation. Risk versus return. He was fifty yards away before the men emerged. They were arm in arm, pointing across the street towards their next destination: another pub.

Probably forgotten about you already, Mike told himself. He knew that he would remember the encounter in the restaurant. In the next few weeks and months there’d be flashbacks, and he would consider alternative scenarios that would leave him the last man standing, the drunks sprawled at his feet. Aged thirteen, he’d got into a fight with a kid in his class and come off second best. For the rest of his school career, he had plotted elaborate revenge scenarios – without ever carrying them out.

The worlds he moved in these days, there was no need to watch your back. The people were polite and civilised; they had manners and breeding. For all Allan’s bravado at the Shining Star, Mike doubted the banker had been in a punch-up in his whole adult life. Walking in the direction of Murrayfield, he thought about student days. He’d found himself in a few bar brawls. Another time, he’d tangled with a potential suitor over a girlfriend… Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name! Then there was the night he’d been walking back to his digs with friends and some drunks had lobbed a metal rubbish bin at them. He’d never forget the fight afterwards. It had travelled from the street into an adjacent tenement and out of the back door into a garden, until a woman had screamed from her window that she was calling the police. Mike had emerged with bruised knuckles and a black eye. His opponent had gone down and stayed down.

He wondered how Chib Calloway would have reacted to the situation in the restaurant. But then Calloway travelled with back-up – the two men in the bar with him weren’t just there for the conversation. One of Mike’s colleagues had joked once that he should maybe think about a bodyguard, ‘now that you’re so publicly rich’. He’d meant the publication the previous Sunday of a newspaper list placing him in the top five Most Eligible Men in Scotland.

‘Nobody needs a bodyguard in Edinburgh,’ Mike had answered.

And yet, pausing at a cash machine to take out some money, he looked to right and left, assessing the level of threat. A beggar sat against the shop window next to the bank, head bowed. He looked cold and lonely. Allan had accused Mike once of being a loner – Mike couldn’t disagree; didn’t mean he was lonely. Tossing a pound coin into the beggar’s cup, he headed in the direction of home, some late-night music and his collection of paintings. He thought of the professor’s words – those poor imprisoned works of art – and then of Allan’s – grab what you can with both hands… A pub door swung on its hinges, expelling a drinker into the night. Mike dodged the stumbling man and kept on walking.

As one door closes, another one opens…