Marwick's Reckoning - Gareth Spark

by Near To The Knuckle

  The two men walked into the gloom of the house and headed for the study where Sean sat behind his desk. He fiddled with the photographs before him.

  'Tell me you didn't know,' Marwick said. He leaned on the desk, resting his weight on his fists.

  'Know what?'

  'About the women.'

  'Of course I bloody knew, but those girls, none of them had passports or papers or fuck all and we had to get them cross the border somehow.'

  'Bullshit! Why get me to drive? Fuck Marwick, he can do twenty years, can't he?'

  'It wasn't like that. You know the back roads to the farm, that's all, and that psychopath Radu would go down the flaming motorway without a care in the bastard world, that's all boy, nothing sinister.'

  'We're in the shit now, Sean; we're talking white slavery….'

  'Those girls are willing, so now you're talking shit.'

  '…sex trafficking, whatever you want to call it….'

  'Shut the fuck up,' Sean shouted, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth. He calmed himself by smoothing the hair at the sides of his head, but his eyes had grown small and vicious. 'You're making me lose my temper now, son, that's all you're doing.'

  'I saw them girls,' Marwick said, 'they was hopped up to the fucking eyes, some were even flaming cuffed to each other, don't tell me they came here willing. I don't want any part of it.'

  'Listen,' Sean continued, his voice steady, as though he were talking a jumper back inside from the window ledge, 'it's like I said: no passports, no papers, that's all. Of course they're gonna look rough when they've been in the back of a wagon for a few hours; done it myself once upon a time going into West Germany, when there still was a West Germany. I guarantee you go back there tonight when we're open for business, and they'll be done up, laughing and joking. Here,' he reached into the desk drawer and Marwick stood back and crossed his arms as Sean placed a thick stack of Euros in front of him. He pushed the money across the desk.

  'What's this?'

  'Your share.'

  Marwick stared at the stack of banknotes and there was a catch at the back of his throat, like the ache before a scream. 'I don't want anything to do with it.'

  'Take it,' Sean continued, 'don't grow a conscience now. I know you better than that.'

  Marwick reached forward and plucked the money from the table. He held it loosely, as though the notes were made of lead, pulling at his wrist. 'There's something else.'

  'What?' Sean took a cigar from the desk.

  'There was somebody on the road.'

  Sean paused. He had struck a match and now his hand hovered before his face, the flame reflecting on the wet surface of his eyes. 'Oh?'

  'Dressed up like a cop, only they hadn't bothered to get the transport to go with the shirt, so I suppose they were hoping to blind me with the lights or shock and awe me with the uniform. I saw them before he knew it, tattoos. It was the bloke from the boat.'

  Sean had grown very still. 'What happened?'

  'He won't win any beauty pageants from now on, but he got away.' Marwick pushed the money back across the table. 'They knew I was coming, that's the point. The Stelescus wouldn't know the back roads, so…'

  Sean picked the money up without comment and replaced it in his drawer. 'So, who would?'

  'Somebody who knows the way we come down from the mountains, someone greedy or stupid; someone who doesn't give a fuck.'

  'Roy?'

  'Fucking Roy Quinn.'

  'The boys in London are going to have our balls if we don't get their money back.'

  'I'm on it.'

  'That's good to hear.' He coughed and waved the smoke away from his face. 'I don't like the thought of that fucker out there trying to do to my business what the good people of Sodom used to do to each other every Saturday night, I want this sorting.'

  'It's getting done.'

  A smile split Sean's round, sweat–covered face. 'Revenge for Charlie an' all, God rest him. He was a good bloke, didn't deserve to go the way he did, head blown off like a fucking pheasant.'

  Chapter Eight

  Louise sat in a cane chair pulled up to the patio windows leading out to the balcony, her bare feet resting on the hard, hot plastic of the frame, looking over at the dusky blue buildings and dark patches of trees decorating the headland of the cape. There were white clouds above the rock like torn pieces of wool, and the trail of a jet cut through the air. She had been there for an hour. At first, she didn't hear the phone; it seemed far away, as though ringing in a dream, cutting through several hours of sleep; she reached for it with a tired sweep of her arm and missed. She tutted as she forced herself upright to reach it.

  Jack O'Brian.

  'Fuck,' she said. It was a call she could not ignore, but which she'd hoped wouldn't come until the morning. Her ringtone, some anonymous dance tune supplied by the manufacturer, beat with an overbearing insistence, and the room was hot and the world outside was waiting.

  She answered, 'Hello Jack,' she said, knowing it annoyed him that she used his first name. Most people only ever called him Mister O'Brian.

  His voice was hollow, like the boom of surf in an old, worn–out shell; he sounded tired. 'How's the sun, darlin'?'

  'Sunny.'

  'You don't sound impressed?' He had an odd staccato way of speaking that signified displeasure.

  She chose to get straight to business, and breathing deeply, she said, 'Dad wasn't at the airport when I arrived,' she said, 'I went to his flat, but it's been empty for weeks. I asked Marwick,' she was speaking quickly, trying to answer the questions she anticipated he would ask, 'and all he said was that the old man had gone ... to Marbella, I think.'

  'What did Sean say?'

  'I haven't seen him.'

  'Why not?'

  She sighed. It felt as though there was a belt fastened around her chest that was pulling tighter and tighter. 'I'm trying to build a picture of what's happening first, before I go and have it out with him.'

  'How was Marwick?'

  'Older.'

  She heard stubble scratch against the mouthpiece of his phone and supposed he was holding it very close. She could picture the receiver, squeezed into a vast, bare–knuckle boxer's fist jutting from the sleeve of a very expensive suit. 'He was always trouble that boy. Do you buy all this then about Charlie?'

  'No.'

  'You think he's still alive.'

  'No.'

  'There's a good girl,' she heard the smile in his voice, 'that's why I like ya; you don't shy away from the hard facts. You're going to find out what happened.'

  'What about Sean?'

  She heard the big man sigh heavily. 'Sean fucking Mallon,' he said, 'that pain in my arse; I send him down there with a few simple things to do and he's somehow managed to cause dramas, yet again. Find out if my money is safe, that's the first thing, that and your old man, of course. Keep me informed.' He said with finality, 'and make sure our money's safe, or I'm going to have to come down there myself, tell 'em that.'

  'Will do.'

  She walked down to the beach after the conversation, feeling the need to get some fresh air into her body. The sands were wide and white and she walked close to the water's edge. She had to get hold of Marwick, seriously this time, and hold him to account.

  Chapter Nine

  Marwick stood on the pier, smoking a cigarette as the sun set over the blue curve of the bay. A few of the boats were underway and the men working them swore and bawled at each other above the clang of derricks and plastic fish trays. Marwick tuned them out and thought of a day, years before.

  Marwick's mother and father died in a house fire when he was 11. They never found out who lit the blaze. Marwick's Dad was minor, a hoodlum, loan–sharking on the estate, but something bigger dragged him into its maw and his world ended in flames. Marwick was there, he watched the house burn in the November night. He heard his mother scream, trapped upstairs, and then there was silence. He had carried the weight of that silence for the
rest of his life. He grew up rough; dragged through a succession of grim children's homes and farmed out to foster families who treated him like shit. Army at 16, 10 years in the regiment until a bullet found him on a nameless piece of shit–coloured desert. Invalided out, then nicked several times: for fighting, for vandalism, for carrying a weapon. He was drinking hard when he met Charlie. He saved the old man from a kicking by two estate hard men. Charlie took him in when he learned how the lad was living. He treated Marwick like the son he'd never had, looked after him, showed him how things were done in a hard world, introduced him to the faces on the estate, got him the first real jobs he ever pulled and, in return, Marwick got him killed.

  He flicked the cigarette down into the water. The breeze was dry at the back of his throat and stank of the powdery yellow earth. The mountains were brown against fiery clouds and he glanced at them as he turned, digging for the phone in his jeans pocket. No missed calls.

  It was busy on the Passeig Miramar; camereros in billowing white shirts slammed chairs next to tables lined in rows beneath canvas covers shaking in the wind. The footpath between the restaurants and the covered terraces was narrow and very busy. He stepped around a man pushing a pram and a group of boys in uniform shorts and a woman flicking through the plastic pages of a menu stuck on a small table in front of the terrace of a restaurant.

  An accordion player and his family stood with their backs against the glass front of a closed Santander bank. Sweat bathed the man's dark face as he sang.

  The red tiles on the roofs glowed like polished leather beneath the warm ink of the sky. It felt good for him to be out in the world, even if only for half an hour, an anonymous face.

  The phone rang in his pocket as he turned into a thin side. 'Digame,' he said – talk to me.

  'Marwick?'

  'Where the hell have you been?'

  'Driving non–stop,' Al said. Marwick heard the sound of a car's engine. 'I hear there's a crisis.'

  'Ain't there just.'

  'The old man's been on the blower to me three times today, you know, when will you get here, when will you get here,' Al said, shouting into the phone. 'What's the matter, you need me to hold your hand while I sort this shit out for you or what?'

  'It was too close.' Marwick reached down instinctively and felt the grip of the weapon tucked tightly into his waistband. It had rubbed against his stomach over the previous days and he'd had to cover the sore with three sticking plasters. 'So?'

  'I'm just coming down through Tarragona,' Al said, 'hour and a half.'

  ***

  Al was short and his plump face was ruthlessly clean–shaven. He stank of aftershave and his blond hair had receded into a severe widow's peak that sliced down across his lined forehead like the point of a dagger. His eyes were creased with an amusement that was not always as amiable as his friends believed. A diamond stud glittered in the lobe of his left ear, and he wore a chunky gold chain low across his throat. His white shirt was open at the neck.

  The moon had risen above the square and hung, low and corpse green against the blue sky. Al walked beside Marwick and they crossed the busy Placa, weaving through the Saturday night crowd queuing outside El Posito. There were people seated at the plank–topped tables outside Set Mares and chatting on the corner of the Carrer Pescadors; gangs of kids gathered outside the Gelateria and scoffed ice cream out of card tubs with stubby plastic spoons. The two men barged through them, heading for the marina.

  'Tell me then,' Al said. Light from the boats dappled across the sea.

  'Someone's fucked us over,' Marwick said slowly. 'A million quids worth of coke went walkabout and Charlie was killed. Then a fake cop stopped me bringing a truck down to Sean's farm, but I clocked him, same bloke from the hit, ink on his hands. Someone is stitching us up and Roy Quinn's in on it. Only the little bastard's disappeared.'

  'Hope the coke's still there for us to get.'

  'If it ain't there's a place waiting next to Charlie in the mountains. It's like the old days.'

  'I wouldn't know.'

  The wind was picking up, and the masts of the boats creaked.

  'So this guy you know up in La Indiana, worked at the strip place?'

  'Salvador Rus, he sold pills, ripped off cars.'

  'You've spoken to him?'

  'Much as I could over the phone,' Al rubbed his eyes. It had been a long drive down from the border and it was getting late. 'You want to go see if we can get hold of him now?'

  'Yeah.'

  'There's more to this, ain't there?'

  Marwick sighed and looked down at the battered brown stones of the path. 'Things are changing,' he said, 'Sean's in bed with the Stelescu brothers, but he doesn't seem to know outfits like that go on upwards to the dragon's head and the likes of Sean Mallon are nothing, less than nothing.' He raised his eyebrows. 'Sean thinks it's like the old days, a family thing, but it ain't. These are bad men and the shit they pull, Jesus.' He shook his head. 'You ain't seen the half of what he's getting into.'

  Marwick began to walk back and Al followed. The wind blew cool at the back of his neck.

  'I thought we were getting away from all the shit though, going straight, with the bar and all that.' Marwick said. 'Yeah, maybe sell a little puff, bring a couple of dodgy motors down every other month but they all do that; look after the Firm's money, put it through the bar, but we wouldn't be getting our hands dirty. It wouldn't be 100% kosher, but it wouldn't be proper villainy either. Then these Romanians come in, turn his head, and he's off like a greyhound.'

  'You think they're stitching him up?'

  'He ain't going to listen to me.'

  He turned back to Al and felt heavy inside as though his heart had turned suddenly to rock. The cigarette hung from his lips and he said, 'So let's go.'

  Chapter Ten

  They watched through the dusty side windows of the Audi A4 as three men fought outside a bar named El Cubanito in a rundown district close to the train yards, nicknamed La Indiana. In the hierarchy of drinking bars, whiskerias, beer factories and clubs, El Cubanito was somewhere close to the ground.

  Al said, 'The tall one with the leather waistcoat, that's Salvador Rus.'

  'He looks different.'

  'I don't know, maybe he had a haircut or something, but that's him.'

  'How do you know?'

  'He's got ink of a woman all down his arm. Look, see?'

  Salvador faced off against his opponents. There were two of them, both very dark skinned like himself; the shorter of the two, dressed in jeans and a blue vest, gripped a broken chair leg in his fist; the other, who was much thinner and had a shaved head, circled and shouted wildly in a dialect neither of the Englishmen could follow. Something glittered in his hand as he moved beneath the red lights illuminating a cracked vinyl sign above the bar. Marwick said, 'I don't want him to get killed before we get to talk.'

  'No fear of that.'

  The man wielding the chair leg swung it towards Salvador's face, aiming high, trying to catch his jaw. He missed. Salvador stepped back and swung a left jab, connecting. It had the desired effect and the man fell backwards onto the pavement, hard, clutching his broken nose. Blood covered the bottom half of his face. He began to laugh, and then the other man grinned and placed the small heart–shaped blade he carried back into a holster hidden somewhere on the inside of his arm. 'You got me that time, son of a whore,' the wounded man said in Spanish.

  Salvador shrugged and, taking a comb from his pocket, began to slick back his greasy hair. 'You had it coming.'

  The two men walked away, continuing to mutter in dialect riddled Castilian.

  Marwick opened the car door and stepped out. They watched Salvador Rus walk back into El Cubanito and there were shouts and music as the door opened and then swung closed behind him. The sign above the bar buzzed and flickered as though half alive and Marwick looked up at it and through the tinted windows, one of which was cracked. The break in the glass glittered in the light. There was
a smell of cooking and of gasoline. Somebody argued viciously on a balcony far above them and something, thrown from the third floor hit the street five yards away from the two Englishmen and broke heavily into a thousand and one pieces. It was a small television set. 'A few feet this way and your troubles would have been over.' Al said.

  'If only,' Marwick said. 'You got a smoke?'

  'Here.'

  Marwick lit it and inhaled deeply. The silver cross at his throat burned in the harsh artificial light. 'Are we doing this then?'

  'Just let me talk.'

  Salvador Rus sat alone at a table at the rear of the building, his back turned on the bustling bar with a proud indifference. His hair shone and the leather vest he wore was battered. It creaked as he lifted a glass of brandy to his lips. Guitar music played quietly from a machine in the corner beside him and he moved his head back and forth in time. Marwick looked around, letting the smoke from the cigarette flow up from his lip in front of his sore eyes. A large balding man in what had once been a white shirt stood behind the bar, watching football play on a muted television set high above the side door to the kitchen. The room stank of rancid garlic, tobacco and polished leather. 'Know how to make you welcome,' Marwick said, 'don't they?'

  Marwick stepped across to the bar and asked for a bottle of beer. The barman lifted one from the cooler and took the money without a word, his large eyes rolling over to the television screen as he served the drink. Marwick saw Al sit down with Rus and begin to talk. The latter nodded a few times and Al waved for Marwick to join them.

  He walked across slowly, amused that there was actual sawdust on the wooden floor. The heels of his boots seemed loud suddenly and he stubbed the cigarette into a ceramic ashtray on the bar beside him.

  Salvador turned and studied him with an inscrutable gaze. It was difficult to determine his age; somewhere in his mid–forties, Marwick thought. Acne scars dimpled his face. An earthy scent of old leather and wood smoke came from him and his eyes were deep with creases at the corners. 'Sit down,' he said in a deep voice that was torn and rough, as though he gargled each morning with razor blades and diesel. He spoke English haltingly. 'Blondie says you want to ask me about something.'