by James Craig
Silver smiled apologetically. ‘I’m afraid not. You know what it’s like in England, we’re all useless at languages.’
‘It’s understandable,’ the man sighed. ‘English is the international business language, after all. If everyone else has to learn your language, why should you bother learning theirs?’
Dom shrugged. ‘People are lazy.’
‘I suppose they are.’ Squeezing the trigger, the man shot the middle hoodie in the face, before dispatching his squealing comrades in similar fashion with a minimum of fuss.
Whoa! Dom held his ground as a pool of blood began moving steadily towards him.
Carefully putting the safety back on, the man tossed the semi-automatic to one of his henchmen.
‘Un deuxième tour pour chacun,’ he growled, ‘juste pour être sûr. Then ‘Get rid of them,’ he snapped. Then, placing a hand on Dominic’s arm, he steered him towards the exit. ‘Now that little problem has been dealt with,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time for some lunch.’
‘What the hell is that?’ Carlyle picked up the A4-sized transparent plastic evidence bag from Angie Middleton’s desk and lifted it up to the light. Inside was a slim white cylinder, maybe seven inches long and a couple of inches in girth, rounded at one end. It looked like a quarter-sized light sabre, except that it had a wind-up mechanism at one end and was attached to a nylon harness.
‘It’s called the Earth Angel,’ the desk sergeant smirked.
Carlyle made a face that suggested he was none the wiser.
‘It’s the world’s first green vibrator.’
Blushing slightly, Carlyle looked swiftly over his shoulder to check that no one was eavesdropping on their conversation. He needn’t have worried. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning and the place was deserted. ‘Is the colour relevant?’
‘Green as in “environmentally friendly”, Inspector.’
‘Oh, right. And what exactly is a “green” vibrator?’
Middleton pointed at the wind-up mechanism. ‘It doesn’t use batteries; you crank it up by hand. The guy who invented it said he was worried about climate change.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ nodded Carlyle. Personally, he couldn’t really give a toss about global warming. Given his experience of dealing with the human race, he assumed that whatever was being done about it was bound to be too little, too late. If we all ended up drowning, it would be our own stupid fault. He handed the bag back to the sergeant. ‘Is it any good?’
Middleton gave him a bemused look. ‘How would I know? It’s not mine.’
‘No?’ Carlyle teased.
‘No.’ Middleton’s face broke into a sly grin. ‘I’m more of a Rampant Rabbit girl myself.’
Now Carlyle felt himself go properly red. ‘That’s good to know,’ he coughed.
‘That,’ Middleton explained, gesturing at the device again, ‘is evidence. It was what that stripper used to bash Lea over the head with.’ She picked a sheet of paper from the desk and scanned it carefully. ‘Or, as Sergeant Bishop has so beautifully described it in his report: the assailant brandished the rigid feminine pleasure device above her head and advanced on the officer in a threatening manner, proceeding to strike him about the head on multiple occasions.’
Carlyle laughed heartily. ‘Was it wound up at the time?’
‘That,’ Middleton chuckled, ‘is not recorded for posterity.’
‘Anyway,’ said Carlyle, feeling his eyes welling up with mirth, ‘I thought that a “rigid feminine pleasure device” was a name for a credit card, not a sex toy.’
‘Very good, Inspector,’ Middleton guffawed, ‘very good. We are on form today, aren’t we?’
‘Thank you, thank you.’
‘For once.’
‘Hey, hey,’ Carlyle protested, ‘less of that. I get stereotyped enough as it is round here.’
Middleton reached over and squeezed him on the arm. ‘You’re not stereotyped, Inspector,’ she crooned. ‘You’re just a grumpy old sod, who manages to come out with the occasional funny one-liner.’
Carlyle shook his head. ‘So young, yet so insightful.’
‘Thank you, sir!’ Middleton gave him a fake salute. ‘It’s all the training they give us these days.’
‘How is Constable Lea, by the way?’ Carlyle asked, once they had finished laughing, trying to fake some concern for his injured colleague.
‘They took him up to A&E at UCH to get a couple of stitches. He’ll be fine.’
Carlyle nodded. The wound would be healed in a week; being clobbered by a naked lap dancer wielding a dildo would take considerably longer to live down. ‘And the stripper?’
Middleton jerked a thumb towards the cells. ‘She’s downstairs.’
‘Got some clothes on?’
‘Yeah.’
Shame, thought Carlyle. ‘What about the video guy?’
Middleton looked at her worksheet. ‘Mr . . . Craven? Bishop let him go without charge.’
Fuck, thought Carlyle.
‘He wasn’t very happy, all the same. Shouting about police brutality, infringement of his civil liberties. All the usual stuff.’
‘Did we give him his camera back?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jolly good.’
‘Apparently he left at three a.m., promising to give you a starring role in his film. Everyone’s desperate to check out the internet.’
‘I bet they are,’ Carlyle said bitterly.
‘You might be on the Mayor’s website already.’
‘I’ll go and have a look,’ Carlyle replied, heading for the lifts.
ELEVEN
Adrian Gasparino was shaken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire, heavy calibre. It was close. Very fucking close. Then the wall above his head exploded and shards of baked mud landed on his head as his brain tried to engage.
It took him another moment to realize the firing was coming from inside the compound. Clutching his SA80, he threw out a hand to grab the American, Withers. ‘C’mon!’ he hissed. ‘Move!’ There was no response. Turning towards the American, he realized that the sergeant had taken a round in the chest. He wouldn’t be going anywhere.
‘Bollocks!’ As the ground started exploding at his feet, Gasparino’s survival instinct finally kicked in. Snaking to the left, he threw himself through the doorway of the hut. Inside, in the sweaty gloom, he kept his head firmly on the ground, his eyes equally firmly shut, listening to his heart beating so fast that he thought it would have to burst right out of his chest. The shots kept coming but none of them seemed aimed at him. Gasparino could hear a range of different weapons now as the coalition troops engaged in the firefight.
How long he stayed like that, he couldn’t say. Finally, he lifted his head half an inch off the ground, opened his eyes and peered out, just in time to see the ANA guy with the M240 take two shots to the head and crumple to the ground. From the four corners of the compound, coalition soldiers swarmed over their erstwhile allies, disarming them and pushing them to the ground, screaming at them to get their hands over their heads. Quickly, with a minimum of fuss, the boys did what they were told. Following them down, Gasparino’s gaze fell on the three ANA soldiers who had been caught in the crossfire. Then he saw the body of Sergeant Spencer Spanner, lying at a crazy angle, his head stuck under his right arm, a pool of blood already drying in the dirt. The medics weren’t making any effort to revive him.
‘Oh, fuck!’
Stifling a sob, Gasparino struggled to his feet. As he did so, he felt a searing pain in his left leg. Looking down, he saw the blood dripping onto his boot and realized that his war would be finishing even earlier than expected.
Sitting at his desk on the third floor of the police station, Carlyle surreptitiously Googled ‘Mayor of London’. Christian Holyrod’s official site came top of the list of searches and he clicked on it. The front page was full of the usual politician’s guff about how the Mayor was probably solely responsible for improving everything to do with the capital, for London�
��s inhabitants and visitors to the city.
‘Oh yeah?’ Carlyle looked at the photo of Holyrod, in thoughtful repose, above a list of his aims to deliver a cleaner city, safer streets, better transport and good quality affordable housing.
Nothing about closing down strip clubs then. Carlyle clicked on the link that said Mayoral Webcasts and was confronted by a menu of videos with appealing titles such as GLA Intelligence Seminar: Visualizing London; London Waste and Recycling Board Meeting and Representation Hearing on Southall Gas Works Site. Resisting the temptation to peek at any of those, Carlyle chose the video at the top of the list. Entitled Cleaning Up London: Working with the Police, it had been added to the site earlier that morning. With a heavy heart, he opened up Windows Media Player, sat back in his chair and waited for the 3:12 video to start. Over a breathless commentary explaining ‘the Mayor’s plan’ to crack down on illegals working in London, he watched some shots of Sergeant Bishop leading the other uniforms into Everton’s. Once the action moved inside, so many of the shots had to be heavily pixilated that it was impossible to work out what precisely was going on.
Carlyle let the video run for another minute or so but it was just about unwatchable. ‘Your tax money at work,’ he mumbled angrily to himself. Relieved, he was just about to close it down, when the video cut to a familiar face – a very familiar face. The bastard film-maker had indeed given him a starring role in the Mayor’s poxy video. Worse, the bloody thing had been cut to show him running around like Inspector sodding Clouseau.
‘Oh, fuck!’ Carlyle groaned. Never mind PC bloody Lea, he was never going to live this down. The inspector pulled the video-maker’s card out of his pocket and stared at it for ten seconds. ‘Well, Mr Danny Craven of Scattered Flowers Productions,’ he growled, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
Sitting in an otherwise deserted pizza restaurant on Allée de Coubron, Dominic Silver picked at his salad. Seeing three boys shot in the face had done nothing for his appetite, but business etiquette demanded that he had to make the effort. Taking a long drink of San Pellegrino, he politely declined a refill from the two-thirds full bottle of Domaine d’Aussières 2008 sitting on the table.
‘What?’ the old man frowned. ‘You don’t drink?’ At the table he looked tired and fragile. With the gun in his hand, he had looked ten years younger – twenty when he was pulling the trigger.
Dominic said politely, ‘As a rule, not during the day. And rarely when I’m conducting business.’
‘I can respect that,’ the man nodded, tucking in to his plate of cavatappi pasta with hot-spiced beef.
Dominic dropped his fork onto his plate. ‘What did you say to those boys?’
Chewing thoughtfully, Tuco Martinez gave the impression of having to dig deep into his memory in order to recall the morning’s events, even though they were barely an hour old. ‘Ah yes,’ he said finally, waving his wine glass as if he was about to make a toast. ‘I told them that when you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.’ He let out a harsh laugh. ‘Good advice for them to take to the grave.’
Dominic looked at him blankly.
‘You like Westerns?’ Martinez enquired.
‘Cowboy movies? John Wayne?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They don’t really make them any more, do they?’
‘No, they don’t. Not like the old days.’
Dom smiled. ‘It’s all gangster movies these days.’
‘Ha! We’re just too popular for our own good,’ Tuco joked.
‘So,’ Dom tried to pull the old fella back on to some kind of track, ‘when you have to shoot . . .’
‘It’s a line from the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ the man explained, taking a mouthful of wine. ‘From my namesake, the Eli Wallach character.’
Dominic thought about it for a moment. He liked spaghetti westerns well enough, but he couldn’t remember anything about that one other than the title and the fact that Clint Eastwood was in it. Mind you, if he remembered rightly, Clint Eastwood was in most of them. ‘It’s a great line,’ he said limply.
‘Damn right!’ His host nodded vehemently. ‘Excellent advice. If only those useless bastards in Hollywood would pay attention now and again.’
Dom frowned. How did they get on to a rant about the movie business?
‘I always hate it,’ the old guy continued, ‘at the end of a film when the bad guy keeps talking away, unravelling the plot, and gives the good guy time to wriggle off the hook and save the fucking day. Just shoot the bastard, I say. You can explain everything to his corpse. Let the bad guy win for once – everyone would be cheering in the cinema!’
Everyone’s a critic, Dom thought sadly. ‘This guy, he had your name?’
‘Tuco Ramirez,’ the man laughed. ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was my dad’s favourite film, and Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, was his favourite character. We used to watch it all the time. That’s how I got my name. I was his little Tuco.’
‘I see,’ said Dominic, smiling weakly. Fucking hell, he thought, I’m going into business with a psycho granddad named after a crazy character in a cowboy flick. He felt a bitter pang of regret seep through his stomach, and gave himself a silent warning: Better keep your wits about you on this one, old chum.
‘It’s not my real family name, obviously,’ the old man explained.
‘No.’
‘I think of it more as my stage name, if you like.’
Dom took a deep breath and forced a smile on to his face. ‘Yes.’
‘Then there’s my nickname, the Samurai,’ Tuco said cheerily. ‘That comes from another movie entirely.’
‘Oh, really?’ Inside, Dom groaned as Tuco talked him through his other moniker.
Finishing his little spiel, Tuco took another mouthful of wine. ‘Good idea, don’t you think?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Don’t you have one? You could be, I dunno – The Professor.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘You should try it,’ Tuco insisted.
Dom made a show of thinking about the stupid idea for a few seconds. ‘I think it might be a bit late for me,’ he replied finally. ‘I reckon I would find it difficult to have more than one name. It might make me a bit schiz . . . confused.’
Tuco Martinez looked him carefully up and down. ‘You are wondering about my little show this morning?’
‘I try never to pry into other people’s business,’ Silver murmured, not meeting the older man’s gaze.
Placing his wine glass on the table, Tuco patted the corners of his mouth with a napkin. ‘That’s a very sensible attitude,’ he said. ‘But maybe not one that can be sustained when you are standing in the basement of a parking garage in Clichy-sous-Bois, trying not to get the diseased blood of some cretin on your shoes.’
Dominic lifted the glass of sparkling water to his lips. Looking over the rim he thought that maybe his dining companion did look a bit like Eli Wallach. You could see a similarity if you wanted to, rather like people who saw the image of the Madonna in a potato or a weeping Jesus in a pool of oil on the road. ‘You were making a point,’ he said evenly. ‘I understand that.’
Martinez raised a salt and pepper eyebrow. His eyes were hazelnut brown, hard and threatening. ‘Oh? And what was the point that I was making?’
Dominic smiled wanly. Tuco Martinez, all bollocks and bluster, was exactly the kind of business partner he thought that he’d successfully left behind. Sipping his wine, Martinez waited patiently for an answer.
‘You were demonstrating to me that no one fucks you over,’ Dominic said quietly.
‘That’s right!’ Martinez banged a fist down on the white table-cloth. ‘Those idiots,’ he gestured outside, ‘they thought they could steal from me. Well, now they know differently.’
‘I have never—’
‘I know, I know,’ Tuco waved away Dominic’s protest with an impatient flick of the hand. ‘But it is always best to have clarity at the beginning of a relationship, don’
t you think?’
Dominic nodded. Glancing at his watch, he still harboured hopes of catching the Eurostar early enough to be home in time for dinner. ‘I would agree with that one hundred per cent.’
‘In London,’ Tuco continued, ‘they say that you are not the biggest but you are one of the best.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Or were one of the best,’ Tuco chortled. ‘You are in semi-retirement.’
Suddenly feeling the need for a drink, Dominic reached across the table and grasped the bottle of red wine before filling his glass. ‘You can’t retire in our game, can you?’ He took a long drink and immediately poured some more wine into his glass.
‘No, that’s very true.’ Raising his own glass, Martinez gave a toast. ‘Here’s to our new business partnership and to no more lessons in car parks!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Dominic agreed over the clinking of glasses.
Tuco lifted his glass to his lips. ‘They were stupid. You would have done the same.’
Dominic raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s not really my style.’
‘Something similar,’ Tuco grinned. ‘I am sure we have similar instincts.’
What was the use of arguing with the fellow? Dom conceded the point. ‘True.’
Finally, it was time for something to eat. With the demise of his regular haunt, Il Buffone, Carlyle had found a new home from home at the Box Café on Henrietta Street. Barely a minute from the police station, just down from the piazza, it was cheap and, more often than not, relatively free of tourists. By now, the Ukrainian owner, Myron Sabo, knew Carlyle well enough to make his coffee scalding hot and not to bother him with too much chitchat. Since Myron was not known for his love of conversation, that was not too much of a problem. His pastries fell considerably short of the standard set by Marcello at Il Buffone but Carlyle was not the kind of man who wasted his time striving for perfection, not even when it came to cakes, so Myron’s establishment was more than good enough. Given that it was as near as dammit lunchtime, he ordered a latte and a large slice of apple strudel and, plucking a dog-eared copy of The Times from the rack by the till, he took a seat at the back. After a quick check to reassure himself that the raid on Everton’s hadn’t made it into the home news section, he flipped to the back pages to scan the all-important sports news. Inside, a full two pages had been devoted to the latest contract wrangle involving bad boy superstar Gavin Swann.
