by Jeff Gulvin
‘You’re not English, are you.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘It might.’
‘Action 2000,’ she said, a hint of mockery in her tone. ‘What exactly is your manifesto?’
‘We’re an army, not a political party. The politics is for others.’
‘Clearly. Although they appear to have disowned you. I can no longer speak to Mr Ingram.’
‘Ingram.’ The word tasted sour on his tongue. ‘Ingram has no stomach for a fight. All I’m asking you is what you’re doing. This is my country. How do I know you’re not just one of those Irish bastards.’
‘Did the Irish claim the Soho incident?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’m not one of those Irish bastards, as you put it, am I.’ She paused then. ‘Listen, we find you useful but we can manage without you. The money appeared to satisfy you before. But perhaps I should just move on to somebody else. I dare say the Irish would help me.’
‘I’m not saying we’re out. I just want to know what you were trying to achieve with Soho?’
‘If you stick around, you’ll see.’
Cairns sighed. ‘A cab then,’ he muttered. ‘Where and when?’
He looked at his brother now. Frank was older than him by four years but not as bright. He was bigger, sallow-faced with pockmarks beneath his eyes. His hair, like Tommy’s, was not cropped, as was the norm with the more overt Nazis among them. Cairns had always thought the skinhead look was too easy for the police. They were brought up in the East End, Frank the hitter, Tommy the thinker. Their dad had been a fan of Oswald Mosley and had been active with Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement in the 1960s.
While they were in prison for robbing a sub-post office in Kent, they met some activists from Combat 18, but Tommy didn’t like the way they operated with other European groups. Another inmate talked to him about James Ingram’s British Freedom Party, and its street-level offshoot Action 2000. When he and Frank got out, they went to an Action 2000 meeting and subsequently joined the BFP. Ingram gave them a job in one of his many building firms. That had been seven years ago. Neither of them had been nicked since and Tommy had risen to foreman in the yard, which comprised Action 2000 soldiers. He had also assumed the leadership.
Frank sat down again, spilling a little of the thin lager as he set the glasses before them. He ran a forefinger through the spillage and sucked it. His brother took two cigarettes from his packet of Embassy Regal and passed one to him. ‘Charlie’s late. Is he bringing Kenny?’
Tommy nodded.
‘A cab.’
‘Wait till they get here. We’re the inner sanctum, Frank. We discuss this between the four of us.’
‘What about the rest of the lads?’
‘The rest are just soldiers. Any army has its officer corps. You’ve watched Sharpe, haven’t you?’
His elder brother grinned and dragged knuckles across his mouth. ‘So I’m an officer now, am I?’
‘Non-commissioned, Frank. Non-commissioned.’
Oxley and Bacon arrived a few minutes later, bought beer and sat down at the table.
‘So what’s happening?’ Oxley said, sipping the froth from his pint. He was tall and lean, three earrings in his left ear and a swastika tattooed under his right wrist. Bacon lit a cigarette, spider’s webs stretching in blue across the backs of his hands.
‘They want us to work again,’ Cairns told them.
‘Great.’ Oxley rubbed his hands together and Cairns squinted at him. ‘Well, it’s better than working, isn’t it.’
‘We don’t know what they’re doing,’ Cairns said. ‘This is our country. This is fucking England and she’s a spic bitch or something.’
Oxley pulled a face. ‘The guy I drove was a nigger, but the pay was fucking good. Who gives a shit, Tom?’
‘We’re a racist organization, Charlie. Action 2000 starts where all the other pricks leave off—Combat 18 and the National Front and all those other wankers who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery. If we’re seen to be taking money from blacks or spics or Jews …’
‘Arabs use Jews all the fucking time.’ Oxley looked right back at him. ‘We got a bucket load of money for hiring a car and picking up a nigger. He was only actually half a nigger anyway. We got another bucket load for buying four sheets of glass and storing it in a lock-up. Somebody’s got money to chuck around, I say we take it.’
Cairns thought for a moment, lit an Embassy Regal and blew smoke rings. ‘Ingram don’t want to play no more,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Bacon twisted his mouth at the corners. ‘Guy’s a sap, anyway.’
‘Just us, then.’
‘Why not?’ Oxley swallowed half his pint in one mouthful. ‘Like you told me, Tom, no sign of the Old Bill, is there.’
‘OK. We’re agreed.’ Cairns sat back. ‘They want us to nick a black cab and make a pick-up.’
‘That’s it?’ Frank said.
‘Yep. Kenny, you can steal it. Who wants to drive?’
‘I will,’ Frank said.
‘Right. Just make sure you wear some fucking gloves.’
Harrison eased himself inside Lisa and she moaned in the back of her throat. ‘How’s that, Miss Lady Mam?’
‘Good.’ She smoothed her hands over the skin of his back.
He stroked once, twice, three times. ‘And that?’
‘Better.’ She dug her nails in hard.
He rolled off her a while later and she curled herself foetally into his body. The sweat poured off him, the dry heat of an Idaho August sapping the air from the room.
‘You’re a great fuck, Harrison.’
‘Well thank you, Miss Lady Mam.’
‘You’re not as old as you thought you were.’
They lay in silence for a moment, then she said, ‘You’ve never told me you love me.’
‘Well, now why would I want to go spoil a thing with all that shit?’
She sat up and slapped his chest. ‘What shit? What shit, Harrison?’
‘There ya go, gal, getting all shitty on me.’ He sat up and reached for his beer. He sucked at it and froth bubbled up the neck. ‘I’m an old man, Guffy. What’d you want with love from an old loser like me.’
Lisa looked at him for a moment, her face bunched up, then she lay down and her fingers wandered between his thighs.
‘I ain’t that young,’ he said.
They laughed and he lay back and stared at the rotating fan on the ceiling.
‘That thing don’t work real well, does it?’
‘Never did.’ She wiped perspiration from her hair. ‘Will you ever take me home, honey?’
‘Home?’
‘Michigan.’
‘You mean Marquette? Marquette isn’t really home, just where I was for a while.’
‘I’d love to go fishing on the lake.’
‘Lake’s best in the wintertime. When it’s all froze over. I’ll take you in the wintertime.’
He looked at her, breasts flattened against her chest, nipples hot and red and easy.
‘You ever dream about ’Nam, Harrison?’
‘Nope.’
‘Not ever? I thought all you vets had dreams.’
‘Not this one.’ He looked at her through the darkness. ‘I ain’t been in a tunnel for thirty years and change. I ain’t going in one again, so why the fuck should I dream about it.’
‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘I know other people who dream.’
He looked at the ceiling once more and eased her further under the crook of his arm.
‘God, you’re so skinny.’ She poked him in the ribs with a finger.
‘Always was, honey.’
‘You don’t eat properly is your problem.’
‘No, but I sure as hell drink properly.’ As if to emphasize the point he sucked again at the beer. ‘How come you stuck to Guffy?’ he asked her. ‘After your divorce and everything?’
‘My kid’s name.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t want a
different name to my kid.’
‘That’s good.’ He kissed her lightly on the forehead. ‘I like that in a woman.’
They were quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘Where d’you go at night?’
The question stung him. ‘What?’
‘Where d’you go at night? You don’t poach. Sometimes I call you up after work and you aren’t there.’
Harrison lay back and stared at the ceiling.
‘You got another woman—that why you don’t say you love me?’
Harrison shook his head. ‘One’s enough for me, Miss Lady Mam.’ He sat up again. ‘I walk, Guffy. Ask the doughnut man. He’s seen me when he’s been baking. Sometimes I stop by for coffee with him. When I can’t sleep, I walk.’ He looked her in the eye then. ‘That way I don’t dream.’
Tal-Salem had the contents of the soft leather briefcase laid out on the bed of his hotel in Hyde Park. The map, the schedule and the guns. Two Beretta 40-calibre pistols complete with silencers. He took the twin magazines and the spare and laid them on the pillow. Lifting one, he flipped out the cartridges, counted them and pressed them back into place. He did the same with the other two clips, then he placed one into the butt of each gun and made sure the safety catches were on. In the ashtray beside the bed a joint sent spirals of smoke to the ceiling.
Ramas came through from the bathroom. ‘The shower is free if you want it.’ He picked up a Beretta and flipped out the magazine. ‘Mine?’
‘If you want. They’re both the same.’
‘They’re never both the same.’
‘I tell you what,’ Salem said. ‘You choose.’ He took one last toke on the joint, inhaled and closed his eyes, letting smoke dribble from his nostrils. He swung his legs off the bed and went into the bathroom. Ramas ejected the cartridges from the magazine and counted them. Then he pressed each one back into place. He aimed the gun at himself in the mirror, flipped off the safety catch and aimed again. He twirled the gun on his forefinger and reset the catch. He put on a pair of jeans, stuffed the Beretta into the waistband and adjusted it. He took it out again, removed the magazine, replaced it, then tried the gun in the other side of the waistband. When he was satisfied he put it under the pillow of the bed where he was sleeping.
He sat in the chair and studied the map. The taxi would wait outside Victoria Station. Tal-Salem would be just inside the entrance. The cab would idle with its For Hire sign turned off. He would be on Victoria Street at three minutes to eleven. The meeting was due to break up at eleven. As soon as he saw them he would call Tal-Salem on the mobile, then he would wait for the cab. He looked at the photograph of the target. Jean-Marie Mace, French economist with Banque Nationale de Paris: forty-three years old, married with fifteen-year-old twin sons. Then he rolled on his back, stared at the ceiling for a few brief moments and went to sleep.
Kenny Bacon and Charlie Oxley sat in Oxley’s Ford Escort on the corner of Lea Conservancy Road. Bacon had just been into the newsagent’s to buy cigarettes, one of which he now rolled as he sat squashed against the window in the passenger seat. Oxley was watching the black taxi cab parked across the road from the recreation ground. The cab was parked outside some newish maisonettes that backed on to the canal, at the bottom end of Hackney Marsh. Bacon shifted in his seat, lit the cigarette and blew smoke. ‘He won’t go out now,’ he said. ‘Let’s go get a pint and come back later on.’
Oxley started the engine. ‘Where we going to get a decent pint round here?’ he moaned. ‘Place is full of spades.’
‘You ever shagged a spade, Charlie?’
‘Once when I was drunk.’
They looked for a suitable pub. ‘What’s it like, then?’ Bacon asked him.
‘What?’
‘Black woman.’
‘Same as white, only you don’t need to turn the lights off.’ Oxley slapped his thigh.
They found a relatively black-free pub on Victoria Park Road and ordered a couple of pints. Still only half past ten. They drank three before wandering back to the car.
‘You can get into this cab, then,’ Oxley said.
Bacon looked sourly at him. ‘You know me, Charlie. What can’t I get into?’
‘You ever been nicked?’
Bacon grinned like a wolf. ‘No. Have you?’
‘Not so far.’
Bacon stole the taxi just after midnight. He left Oxley in the Escort, moved quietly down the road and got in through the driver’s window using a wire coat hanger. The cab was old: he had deliberately chosen an old one, watched the guy for a couple of days, silly fat bastard with his building-site bum hanging out of his trousers. He knew it would not be alarmed. Lying briefly under the car he disconnected the steering lock, then knocked out the ignition with a slide hammer. Seconds later the ancient diesel engine rumbled into life.
At nine-fifteen, the delegates attending the DTI conference on the business implications of a single currency gathered in Victoria Street. Pier-Luigi Ramas watched as he made his way towards the Army & Navy store, where he browsed for half an hour. Tal-Salem waited at the hotel until ten o’clock and then made his way across Hyde Park, where already sun-worshippers were gathering on the banks of the Serpentine. He walked to Kensington Gore where he stood on the corner, briefcase in hand, and waited. Two cabs passed him and then an older one with a sallow-faced driver in his late thirties. He pulled over and wound the window down.
‘Going to Victoria, sir?’
Tal-Salem climbed into the back.
He sat with his legs slightly apart, catching the glances cast in his direction via the rear-view mirror, as he took a pre-rolled joint from his pocket. He straightened out the ends before cupping his hand to the match. ‘You know what to do?’ he asked.
The driver nodded. ‘Drop you at Sloane Square and then go to Victoria.’
Tal-Salem opened the briefcase, glanced inside and closed it again. The cab took him along Kensington Gore and then all the way down Sloane Street. Cairns stopped outside the station.
‘Victoria,’ Tal-Salem said. ‘Wait for me there.’
‘What’re we going to do exactly?’
‘Pick up another fare.’
Jean-Marie Mace sat with a glass of water at his elbow, his jacket draped across the chair behind him. ‘It is important that we reassure businessmen throughout the whole of the Union that the introduction of the euro will be smooth and the transition to a single currency easy,’ he said.
His counterpart from Barclays Bank cleared his throat. ‘We’ve tried to be proactive here,’ he said. ‘But with the previous government’s wait-and-see policy it wasn’t easy. We have published business guidelines on the subject, however.’ He glanced at some of his competitors from the other major clearers. ‘We were the first, I believe, to do so.’
‘Excuse me,’ the man from the Department of Trade and Industry interrupted. ‘We know what we hear on the television and from other parts of Whitehall over here,’ he said. ‘But how do you think having Monsieur Jospin as Prime Minister will affect things as regards the timing. I mean we’re now in the target-testing period. It’s this year that the convergence criteria will be assessed.’
Mace shrugged his shoulders. ‘France is committed to the idea of a single currency. Chirac made some mistakes with his austerity measures, but before him the conservatives had to deal with Mitterrand. Now Jospin and his socialists will have to deal with Chirac. I don’t foresee a problem.’
Pier-Luigi Ramas walked down Victoria Street and stopped at Pret A Manger. He bought a sandwich and cappuccino, and sat in the window looking up and down the road. Fifteen minutes before eleven. The meeting was a preliminary one and scheduled to last just the ninety minutes. He would wait until 10.57. It would take them a while to say their goodbyes and leave. Thirty delegates in all, quite a melee on the pavement. No doubt some of them would have ordered cabs, perhaps a few would have drivers. He took the photograph of the Frenchman from his pocket and studied it.
At five minutes to eleven he left P
ret A Manger and started walking along Victoria Street. Now the thrill began to rise in his veins. Their target would come out of the DTI building diagonally across from the corner of Dacre Street, and on that corner an armed police officer stood guard. Diplomatic Protection Group. He knew them from his previous visits to London, the red police cars with the blue lights on top. Still, the danger was why he did this. If they were careful, nobody would even notice. He called Tal-Salem on the mobile.
Tal-Salem was waiting just inside the main entrance to Victoria Station. He could see Cairns in the cab, window down, smoking a cigarette, waving the other cabbies ahead of him. The phone rang. He pressed SND and lifted it to his ear. Pier-Luigi’s voice.
‘Five minutes. They will break up any time. Wait two minutes, then come.’
Tal-Salem looked outside at the congestion. ‘We’ll come now,’ he said. ‘Traffic.’
‘OK, but do not arrive too early. Remember we have police on every corner.’
‘All the more fun.’ Tal-Salem weighed the briefcase in his hand. ‘Remember the Israeli Embassy? They didn’t fire a shot.’
‘All the same.’
‘I hear you.’
He walked out of the station, hailed Cairns, and got in the back of the cab. ‘Victoria Street,’ he said. ‘Pull over where I tell you.’
Cairns swung round the traffic loop and stopped at the red light. Behind him Tal-Salem had opened the briefcase. He transferred the Beretta to his jacket pocket.
Ramas walked purposefully down the road, past the junction with Dacre Street and the DPG officer. He paused across the road from the DTI Conference Centre—smoked glass, black metallic pillars—and saw the gathering of suits, male and female, in the foyer. Any moment now the doors would open and they would start to file on to the pavement. He looked again across the road; the main doors were open now and the first few people were coming out. Some of them started walking up towards Victoria Station, others crossed the road for St James’s Park tube. Mace stepped on to the pavement: he would hail a taxi; he always travelled by taxi and his next appointment was in the City. Tal-Salem’s cab came along Victoria Street and pulled over to the wrong side of the road. Mace smiled, having not even lifted his arm. From an upstairs window in the DTI building on the other side of the street, a secretary sipped coffee and watched the comings and goings below her.
