by Connor, Alex
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Quercus
Quercus
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Copyright © 2012 by Alex Connor
The moral right of Alex Connor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 78206 626 2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
One
Mama Gala’s, London
She hit him with the flat of her hand as he walked in the side door. The blow was strong enough to send him backwards into the counter, her massive head jutting towards him. Shaken, he stared at her, at the pale eyes in the dark face, the force of her malice unexpected and terrifying.
‘Don’t,’ she said warningly.
He was trying not to wet himself, trying to remember that he was eighteen years old. Not a child any more. And yet a child now. Oh yes, back to a child now. He had pushed his luck and knew it. Shouldn’t have mocked her son. Shouldn’t have taunted Emile Dwappa. No one did that. No one with any sense.
‘Don’t,’ she repeated.
A mammoth in a print dress. Nigerian by birth, Londoner by choice. Proprietor of Mama Gala’s Health Shop. Babysitter for the local children, crooning to them as she nursed them in the barley-sugar-coloured rocking chair.
But now he remembered all the rumours he’d heard about Mama Gala and her son. Wondered if, perhaps, they weren’t rumours after all. And the chair in the corner by the window seems suddenly skeletal, malignant, a corpse on rockers.
It’ll do you no good to say sorry, Hiller thought. She’s not having it.
One of Mama Gala’s hands was resting on the counter beside him, her bulk blocking any escape. And now he could see the rumour coming alive, a vision of evil taking shape in front of him. Her face was waxy, like bruised fruit a day before rotting, her skin giving off an odour of sweat and dead meat.
Hadn’t his uncle warned him? Said, ‘Don’t go to work at Mama Gala’s. She’s not what you think. She’s Emile Dwappa’s mother. If he’s afraid, so should you be.’
But he’d been cocky, sucked in by the promise of easy money and an association – however remote – with the most notorious man in London. Even if he were just an errand boy, humping sacks of meal around and sweeping up the remnants of the herbs Mama Gala sliced on her great chopping board. A board notched with a thousand knife cuts, indented with the numerous blows she had delivered over the years. A board scourged like the back of a flagellant.
She was staring at him now, and his body was pressing against the counter. He didn’t think, just said it. No, he’d been saying brainless things for weeks. Ignoring her warning looks, trying to laugh off the remarks he’d made. And then Hiller, because he was stupid and young, pushed it. Mentioned something said by his uncle – Was it his uncle? Jesus, he couldn’t remember anything while she was staring at him like that – something about Emile Dwappa being gay.
And he had repeated it. Like it was a joke. But as the words touched the air, Mama Gala had moved. She left the rocking chair, crossed the wooden floor and, all in an instant, had hit him. The blow, with all her weight behind it, had cracked against his head, his ear deafened.
But it wasn’t the attack that had him wet with fear now. It was Mama Gala herself, huge and threatening, shape-shifting into the rumours he should have listened to but had ignored. When she struck him again he fell down, limp-legged, and, lying on the wooden floor, saw one of her gnarled feet – dusty in sandals – aiming straight at his face.
And then he remembered what Mama Gala had done just before she attacked him. Before the first strike, she had gone to the door and turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED.
Two
It was raining, the kind of rain that bores through clothes in an instant, as Jimmy Shaw took a left turn and drove into the supermarket forecourt. He was thinking about his stomach. Thinking that what he needed were some Snickers and a bag of Kettle Chips. He should, he thought, always make sure there was food in the car. In the glove compartment, because what the fuck else was it for? Not gloves. Who wore gloves any more?
Choosing a space close to the entrance, Shaw parked. Heaving himself out of the car, he fastened his jacket and noticed that he had grease marks on his trousers. He knew that to onlookers he personified the worst kind of travelling rep. Some deadbeat selling life insurance. But for all his sloppy appearance and Peckham vowels, Shaw was one of the smartest handlers in London.
His speciality was objets d’art, which covered a huge remit. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, antiques of any kind, books, medical equipment – and that Holy of Holies – relics. And the word ‘handler’ meant that Shaw literally handled pieces for collectors, crooked dealers, private connoisseurs and the criminal fraternity. For handler read thief.
Not that Shaw did his own thieving. He had others for that. Spent lags down on their luck, eking out a living as runners and dossing down in the Salvation Army hostels at night. Ex-convicts he would greet – bottle in hand – as the doors of Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways unlocked, beating relatives, lovers, certainly the clergy, to the post. Scuppering any chance of the ex-prisoner going straight, Shaw was a walking advert for recidivism, catching the vulnerable at the point between prison and the outside world. The latter usually looked infinitely more threatening than the offer Shaw was making.
Men who had become nervous about re-entering normal life found themselves lured in. Once in, they became part of Shaw’s team. A numbering dozens team that stretched across London. And each was a specialist in their field. Shaw was an equal opportunities employer too. A woman could often prove more useful than a man, seducing secrets out of people who usually betrayed nothing, even to themselves.
But by keeping himself remote from the actual handling – and by using an intermediary to negotiate for him – Jimmy Shaw was never caught. The runners were caught and served time for him, their sentences made bearable by a healthy retainer or the promise of future work. People might have heard of Jimmy Shaw, but they didn’t deal directly with him.
Except that now there was something in the offing which was too valuable, too precious, to entrust to any of his employees. Something too tempting for any crook to resist. Something Shaw would have to handle himself. A sticky secret, a whisper from Spain. And with it, the promise of enough wealth to satisfy even his greed.
Tripping over the step as he entered the supermarket, Shaw moved to the sweet counter and grabbed a handful of chocolate bars before snatching up a family-sized bag of crisps and taking his place behind the long queue at the checkout.
*
He could see from the sneering gaze of the woman in front of him that he repelled her, and the thought made him smile. Oh, she’d be singing a different tune if she knew what he was going to be worth soon. He was already a rich man, but this new piece of bounty would put him in a different league. No snotty looks then.
Just a queue of women willing to lift their skirts.
‘I can’t put that through the till.’ At the sight of him, the girl had decided to be difficult.
Surprised, Shaw looked at the checkout girl. ‘What?’
‘You’ve opened the crisp packet.’
‘I’m eating the crisps. You know a way of doing that without opening the pack?’
She pulled a face and the woman behind Shaw joined in. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t come in and start eating things—’
‘Who invited you to the party?’ Shaw retorted, turning back to the checkout girl. ‘What’s the problem? I’m buying the crisps—’
‘A full bag.’
‘I’m paying for the full fucking bag!’ he snapped as the checkout girl pointed to the sign over her till. It read:
WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ANY OF OUR STAFF BEING ABUSED BY CUSTOMERS.
‘I can’t put them through the till,’ she persisted. ‘Not half eaten.’
Nodding, Shaw glanced at the woman behind him. Then, greedily, noisily and very slowly he began to eat the crisps, the whole queue watching him, until finally he put back his head and emptied the last crumbs down his throat. Then he put down the empty bag, smoothed it out, and passed it – with the bar code uppermost – back to the checkout girl.
Red-faced, she ran the scanner over the bag. Shaw picked up his shopping and walked back to his car. Bitch, he thought, sliding into the driver’s seat. He could see the checkout girl through the window of the supermarket and waved, smirking as she gave him the finger.
But then Shaw’s attention was diverted by a note stuck under one of his windscreen wipers. The writing was facing towards him, so he could read the words through the window:
Art relic up for grabs.
Historian has it in Madrid.
Interested?
Getting out of the car, Shaw looked around. But whoever had left the message had long gone. Irritated, he reread the note and then screwed it up in his fist.
For once Jimmy Shaw wasn’t the only person to hear of a find – a notorious, infamous, priceless find. He had thought he was ahead of the pack and would secure the relic before anyone else. He had even made a discreet – anonymous – call to an unscrupulous dealer in Paris and a connoisseur in Turin. With pleasure he had sensed their longing and his hands itched with the whisper of coming money.
But now he had a rival. Someone who was taunting him. Asking if Jimmy Shaw was interested … Shaw wiped his fleshy mouth with his handkerchief and wondered at the daring of the note. Who was fool enough to challenge him? Obviously someone who didn’t know his reputation. Someone who didn’t know that among Shaw’s runners and thieves were men who would do anything for enough money.
Irritated by what he took as a show of false bravado, Shaw drove out into the London traffic. Preoccupied, he never saw the van following him three vehicles behind, and his instincts – usually so nimble – cheated him.
It was a fatal miscalculation. One that would lead to humiliation, failure, and enough suffering to turn him mad.
Three
On the sofa in the room above the shop, Emile Dwappa dozed. In the chair beside him a woman was reading a magazine, a child at her feet. And in a small space beyond, hardly big enough to be a room, an ancient woman divided herbs and potions into equal measures. Her hands were thin, her fingers like twigs, brown as sugar cane, long years of practice making an alchemist of her. She never spoke – hadn’t done so for many years – just made up the potions for Mama Gala to sell in the shop below. Potions desperate women bought to make their men fall in love with them. Potions to help them fall pregnant or get rid of a baby. Potions and remedies and spells for the vulnerable who believed the daytime Mama Gala, who wanted to help. Because she was old school, with tricks from the Old Country.
This was the Mama Gala who had wheedled her way into the community; the woman who had proved herself a good friend, a gentle neighbour; a woman so loved it took a while for people to begin to whisper against her and longer for the rumours to start. Even more time for people to hurry past the shop to escape her gaze following them from the window.
Because she did have tricks from the Old Country. Mama Gala had tricks from hell. Some she inherited, some she stole, some worked like worms in the pus of her mind. Potions from the night-time Mama Gala, the ones she sold under the counter when the shop was closed. When the neighbourhood children no longer needed babysitting, and the health-food customers had all gone home. When the iron shutters came down on the windows, the doors were barred and the shop alarm went on. As though there were something in a health shop other than the meagre takings worth stealing.
But there had been no rumours fifteen years ago. Not when Mama Gala first opened the shop and Emile Dwappa was a teenage boy. She rolled down the street smiling, rocking her girth through the market and joking like a jester. She collected friends like fresh eggs, drawing them out of the nest of their families. Children too – all came to Mama Gala’s when the shop sign turned to OPEN.
But when more than a year had passed, another kind of person visited after the sign turned to CLOSED. They weren’t children or shoppers. They were furtive, coming in at the back door, skirting the shop that smelt of spices and herbs, making instead for the cordoned-off area. Separated behind a locked door, any sounds muffled behind thick drapes suspended from a metal rod.
To the left of this unwelcoming space stood a massive fish tank, the water milky, an ailing turtle banging wretchedly against its glass confines. Opposite the tank were cages in which monkeys crouched disconsolately, the ammonia smell of their urine catching at the throat. And under the arch of the stairs, glass tanks writhed with snakes, the artificial sunshine of the lighting casting gloomy shadows on the wall behind.
As Mama Gala’s son grew into a vicious and determined thug, many people began to avoid the shop altogether. Others asked how Emile Dwappa, who had been a sickly child, had developed a cruelty which was fast becoming notorious. What had happened to change a nervous boy into a man who tortured men and women alike?
Among the underworld, rumours began to circulate. Dwappa had knocked over a man who owed him money, and then reversed the car over his legs. Dwappa had poisoned a rival, the man suffering a lingering death, the skin of his scrotum peeling away with an infection resistant to anything a hospital could prescribe. Soon Dwappa had a reputation: he was dangerous, he was ungovernable, he was fearless.
Only one person controlled Emile Dwappa: his mother.
The worst of his excesses were as nothing to her cruelties. The widow Gala had raised her poisonous offspring single-handedly. As an only child, Dwappa had had her full attention, which had proved to be his downfall. To outsiders they seemed a unit, but inside the hermetically sealed confines of the shop, their hatred festered. She despised him for being handsome, slight of build and a homosexual – a fact hidden from the world, a fact with which she taunted her son and blackmailed him. Her suffocating attention and demands had stunted his emotions, his resentment had made a killer of him, and yet – for all this – Emile Dwappa could not break free from her. And, God forbid, he needed her.
Mama Gala didn’t care for her son, she owned him.
She owned him with her potions and her threats. And as he grew older, Dwappa was hired out to relatives to toughen him up. There were dozens in the Dwappa clan who had him inflict petty tortures on slow payers. And as he hardened up, Dwappa began to flex his own muscles and challenge his uncles, to the point that one left London after his betting shop was torched. Then gradually the crude dealings in racing and dogfighting gave way to Dwappa’s personal preferences, and as he cultivated his appearance he drifted towards two dissimilar – but very lucrative – worlds: child trafficking and art theft.
Which was why Emile Dwappa was now lying on the sofa with one arm over his eyes, plotting. He could never escape his mother; she had an emotional stranglehold on him. He had even considered killing her, but was afraid that she would have yet more
power when dead. A vengeful, sinister ghost bent on retribution. His only option was to make money, so much money that he could buy her a house big enough to keep her at one end and him at the other. A house with space to divide their festering hatred. The house Mama Gala had always wanted.
‘You’re useless! My useless, pretty boy,’ she had sneered earlier. ‘Queer baby, no good at nothing.’
‘I’m working on something—’
‘You’re always working on something,’ she replied, her head on one side, picking at the matter in the corner of her left eye. ‘Working on something that never comes to nothing. Working on something big, that just gets smaller.’ She laughed, the sound hateful.
‘This time I’m going to make a fortune.’
She spun round, fast for such a heavy woman.
‘A fucking fortune! Well, you make it, boy, You make it. ’Cos I want it. I want that house you promised me. I want out of here. Remember, you owe me. You owe me for raising you, for looking after you. It’s your turn now. Now you look after me.’
She could see the flicker in his eyes and leaned towards him, her tone threatening.
‘Mama Gala protects her baby. Always has, always will. Just think of what would happen if people knew about you and your tastes.’ She flicked his crotch with her fingers, laughing, and then gripping his arm. ‘You pay me back, you hear? You pay me back good.’
And he intended to.
Because Emile Dwappa had heard about something so extraordinary, so valuable, that people would go to any lengths to own it. All he had to do was to get hold of it first. Beat his rivals to the chase. Make sure he was the one – the only one – to triumph.
There was no limit to his longing for the relic – and no limit to the depths he would sink to to get hold of it.
Four
Madrid, Spain
Diego Martinez could remember everything, every detail, with absolute accuracy. The sweating heat of the afternoon, the scent of dry earth and the judder of his spade as it hit something unexpected, hard. Surprised, he had stared at the exposed ground, the concrete floor broken up and put to one side, the centuries-blackened soil exposed – and something else. Something white and rounded peeking out from the dark.
