Armadillo by William Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

Saturday shoppers, football fans, and those strange souls who chose to take their cars out only on weekends. Up Finborough Road to Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, on to the A40, past Madame Tussauds, Euston, King’s Cross, along Pentonville Road to the Angel. Half way through the journey, as the cab driver gamely tried and abandoned a route north of Euston, he had wondered why he was bothering, but he sorely needed cheering up after his lunch at home (a meal that had cost him, in various loans and donations, some £275, he had calculated) and, furthermore, Stella didn’t want him to come over until after nine. Turning north and then south, accepting the taxi-driver’s baffled apologies for the traffic (‘Nightmare, mate, nightmare’), he realized that, increasingly, his life was composed of these meandering trajectories across this enormous city, these curious peregrinations. Pimlico-Fulham, now Fulham-Islington, and two more awaited him before the journeying could stop: Islington-Pimlico, then Pimlico-Stockwell. Up North of the Park and then South of the River – these were boundaries, frontiers he was crossing, not merely itineraries, names on the map; he was visiting city-states with their different ambiences, different mentalities. This was how a city routinely appeared to its denizens, he considered, rather than to its visitors, its transients and tourists. If you lived in the place it existed for you as a great matrix, an ever-more-complex web of potential routes. This was how you grappled with its size, how you attempted to make it submit to your control. Come to dinner in… There’s a meeting at… Pick me up from… See you outside… It’s not far from… And so on. Each day threw up its set of route conundrums: how to get from A to B, or F, or H, or S, or Q – a sophisticated formula that factored-in local knowledge, public or private transport, traffic conditions, roadworks, time of day or night, priorities of speed or calm, brutal expediency or more relaxed sagacity. We are all navigators, he thought, quite pleased with the romantic associations of the metaphor, millions of us, all finding our individual ways through the laby-rinth. And tomorrow? Stockwell-Pimlico, and then perhaps he should stay put, though he knew that he should really go further east, to Silvertown, and start thinking about the décor and furnishing for the new flat.
    Ivan had spotted him and stuck his death’s head out of his smoked glass door.
    ‘Lorimer, my dear fellow, you’ll freeze.’
    Ivan was wearing a biscuity tweed suit and a floppy, oyster-grey bow-tie (‘You have to dress the part for this job,’ he had said slyly ‘and I think you know exactly what I mean, don’t you, Lorimer?’). The shop was dark, walls covered with chocolate-brown hessian or else darkly varnished exposed brick. It contained very few, hilariously expensive objects – a globe, a samovar, an astrolabe, a mace, a lacquered armoire, a two-handed sword, some icons.
    ‘Sit down, laddie, sit down.’ Ivan lit one of his small cigars and shouted upstairs, ‘Petronella? Coffee, please. Don’t use the Costa Rica.’ He smiled at Lorimer, showing his awful teeth and said, ‘Definitely the time of day for Brazil, I would say’
    Ivan was, to Lorimer, the living, breathing representation of the skull beneath the skin, his head a gaunt assemblage of angles, planes and declivities somehow supporting a pendulous nose, large, bloodshot eyes and a thin-lipped mouth with a partial set of skewed brown teeth that seemed designed for a larger jaw altogether, an ass’s or a mule’s, perhaps. He smoked between twenty and thirty small, malodorous cigarlettes each day, never seemed to eat and drank anything on a whim – whisky at 10 a.m., Dubonnet or gin after lunch, port as an aperitif (‘Très français, Lorimer’) and had a rare, distressing, body-racking cough that seemed to rise from his ankles and made its appearance at roughly two-hourly intervals, after