Copacabana: International Crime Noir: Liverpool - Rio de Janeiro

by Jack Rylance

  “You’re calling Pete Murphy a prick?”

  Riley smiled, nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

  John realised that the spell had been broken. It was the first time he could ever remember hearing anyone insult Pete out loud. And it was a shocking development, this rubbishing of his friend’s good name. He had relied on Pete’s reputation for years and it was all that had stood between himself and a fate like this.

  “I haven’t got his number with me,” he said to Riley.

  “Funny that, I thought it would have been the first one in your phone.”

  “Well it’s not.”

  “Yeh, right.”

  Everybody stayed as they were for a number of moments. This silence felt extremely ominous, as if it was building towards some great evil, and John knew he had to break it up any which way. “I’m gonna go for a piss, if that’s alright?”

  “Of course,” answered Riley, “I wouldn’t want you ruining the carpet.” With this he raised a laugh amongst the gathering. John looked round at all six of his so-called mates. He had never been taken in by any of them, and knew that they had always scorned him for the most part, and yet he’d still chosen to stick around this long.

  John left the lounge and climbed the stairs, aware that there were no bridges left for him to burn. It was only a matter of how exactly he would fall and whether he could manage to survive the drop. This is how it felt to him anyway. He was gambling on the fact that his fate was already sealed.

  Arriving on the upstairs landing, he turned right into Riley’s bedroom and made straight for the wardrobe, as quietly as possible, and opened it up with the utmost care. Then he leant down and removed those layers of dirty clothing heaped at its base. This was Riley’s idea of a hiding place. A stupid, clumsy spot which John had first discovered six months earlier when Riley left him alone for an hour and went out to deliver some weed. On that occasion, John had stopped watching TV almost immediately and gone directly to Riley’s bedroom and started indulging his naked curiosity. He had come across the hidden stash almost at once. All he’d needed to do was set aside a couple of items of sportswear in order to locate twenty grammes of speed, eight hundred pounds in cash, a battered gat gun. At that point he’d left those things as he’d found them. This time John had no need to be so delicate. He intended to take whatever was there. He was looking for money above all else. Money that would enable him to flee.

  Grabbing hold of two bundled Kappa tracksuits, John moved them out of the way. Underneath lay a red sports bag. He unzipped it and at once recognised the enormous wealth contained inside. The sight of this money made his heart leap but John forced himself not to reflect on the amount – as it only seemed to confirm how little time he had available – and so he acted without further hesitation by picking the bag up, treading gently to the window, and resting it on the sill as he pushed the window open as far as it would go. Then he leant out and lowered the bag by its handles and dropped it into the high grass of the untended garden where it landed with a small, dull thump. Pulling the window to, he moved lightly into the adjacent bathroom and flushed the toilet before heading back downstairs.

  In the lounge, Riley was stood up now, elated by this newfound ability to flex his contempt. “I want you to get that prick’s phone number and I want you to call him tomorrow. Do you understand? Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

  “Yeh, OK. I will. I promise.” It was easy for John to comply. He would say anything if they only permitted him to leave. He made use of his very real fear, displaying it on his face as openly as possible in order to gratify their menace.

  “I fucking know you will,” Riley said. “Now be a good lad and fuck off home.” John could only be grateful that Riley wanted to stretch out the moment of victory before he got down to the business of revenge. It was this desire which had bought him his freedom.

  John left by the front door as Topper hurled savage insults at his back, insisting that his days were strictly numbered. He then slipped down the side passageway and entered the garden and claimed the bag before leaving by the back gate. On the nearby main road, John flagged down the first hackney cab to come along and the taxi took him directly to his block of flats; a fifteen minute drive. During the journey, his heart pounded fiercely as a result of the theft. He was not at all prepared for what he’d just done. Everything was made new by these actions.

  Back in the apartment, John began throwing his belongings into the one suitcase he owned. As he did so, he ran through his mind, wondering who might possibly be of help now that he’d taken this wild and irrevocable step. Only one name arose. It belonged to the single person John knew he could rely upon despite the distance involved and the time that had passed since they’d last spoken.

  Picking up the phone, he tried Pete’s Brazilian mobile. Fuck the cost, it hardly mattered any more. John knew that his was an uncertain head start. The others might discover the theft at any time. This realisation scared the hell out of him and he started looking out of the window down at the car park below, half expecting some kind of blitz. John was confident that danger was closing in. He knew he needed to leave this place very soon.

  Pete answered John’s call on the third ring and listened briefly to the boy’s rapid-fire panic. Then he interrupted it. “Before you go on, just how bad is this trouble you’re in?” He’d asked.

  “Fucking terrible.”

  “Life threatening?”

  “Yeh. Definitely.”

  “Alright then, you’d better get yourself over here.”

  John hesitated. “How do I go about that?”

  “What’s the time over there? About eleven?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Can you get hold of your passport?”

  “Yeh. I’ve got it here.”

  “Good. Then take it to Manchester airport and call me back.”

  It still soothed John to recall that glorious efficiency. That smoothness, that swiftness. The situation had been taken out of his own incompetent hands. It was a marvellous form of aid. Pete was a friend in a million.

  Chapter Eight

  Pete had broadband in his apartment and spent plenty of time on the internet. The highlight was watching English football matches. He could now view all the games he liked. At least in principle. As of last year he’d worked out how to follow his team from afar, via Asia, on streaming video.

  Today there was a league fixture against Portsmouth and Liverpool were losing 0-1. The game was deep into the second half and his team showed little sign of equalising. To make things worse, the connection was poor this afternoon. The visualised action kept stalling, lagging behind, and was subject to random stoppages. As a result, the player’s images kept blurring and it was often hard to make out exactly who was who, almost as if Pete was watching the match through sheets of torrential rain.

  Typical of new technologies, these internet broadcasts had first struck Pete as an absolute marvel, then later he’d begun to spend more and more time acquainting himself with their limitations. Now he sat there in the cool darkness of his apartment with a bottle of Antarctica to hand, softly cursing these glitches.

  With ten minutes of the game left to go, Pete’s connection broke down completely. There was a message for him in Mandarin, explaining the reason why, which he did not understand. He spent several further minutes trying to recall the action but to no avail. In truth Pete was not all that bothered. This was all something of a show. There was no longer much corresponding joy or pain to be felt at the prospect of Liverpool winning or losing. Football had joined the rank and file of his general interests. The passion had given way. Once upon a time Pete would have followed his team to the ends of the earth, now he watched them from great distance, calmly removed from their plight, eleven miniaturised sportsmen covering fifteen inches of pixillated turf. Exile had done this to him. Perhaps age as well.

  Shortly after he’d resigned himself to missing the rest of the game, there came a knock at the front door. Pete guessed who
it was. He got up from his chair, walked over to the door, looked through the spy-hole and saw that he’d been right. He opened the door and bade John to enter. “You want a coke?” Pete asked.

  “Yeh, I’ll take a coke.”

  “You want to watch the telly?”

  “Could do,” John answered.

  There was no obvious reason for these visits, and yet they were punctual. A day might go by without one, but not two days. It was as though John was clocking-in, answering the terms of his parole. It was clear that he did not want to stray too far from Pete’s thoughts. This was not likely. Every day that Pete woke, he realised that he was holding on to thousands of pounds of stolen money and wondered what would come of the fact and this troubling consideration always led him back to John.

  Pete handed over the can of coke and noted again the colour of John’s skin, completely unchanged from the day of his arrival, a fortnight earlier. “Listen, you’ve got an email account, haven’t you?” Pete said.

  “Yeh. Macca set it up for me, but I never use it.”

  “Maybe you should check it.”

  “What for? Who’s gonna write to me now?”

  “You never know…”

  Pete made the question sound ominous and John looked over at the computer, suddenly suspicious of it. “I’m not sure that I can remember the name it’s under.”

  “I’ve got it written down,” Pete said and went to find the address.

  John kept on staring at the computer. In principle, it was of no interest to him at all. He had an old Nintendo games console back home, but even then he only liked the one game – Mario-Kart.

  Pete returned from his room with a notepad. “Here you go. It’s a Hotmail account. Mullan85. You remember your password?” It was difficult to forget. 1-2-3-4-5-6. John thought about pretending not to know it off by heart. He did not want to open his inbox now – greatly spooked by the suggestion that a message might be waiting for him. Suddenly it felt inevitable.

  John sat down at the computer and clicked open the browser and steered his way towards Hotmail. He reached the correct page, typed in his name and password, and was permitted to enter the account. Eight messages were waiting for him there. Seven of them were spam. The eighth had been posted by an unknown sender and was titled For The Immediate Attention of John Mullan. It was this John opened, fearing the very worst.

  It read as follows:

  Dear John,

  You are absolutely fucked.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Vincent and Totsy

  John took out his pack of cigarettes. He shook one from the box, put it in his mouth and lit it up, transfixed by the words on the screen. Pete was stood behind him, staring over his shoulder, saying nothing. He was considering the date on which the email had been sent. April 18. A week after John had run away, which made it a fortnight old.

  “I never knew it was theirs,” said John. “Honest. I wouldn’t have took it if I’d known.” Still Pete was silent. John twisted round in his chair to look him in the eye. “Look, I’ll go. I’ll get off. I’ll disappear.” He stood up, as if ready to leave that minute. “I’ll travel up the fucking Amazon if I have to.”

  “Is there any way you can think of that they’d know you’re here?”

  “No. I never told anybody I was coming.”

  “But you’d mentioned me to your friends in the past? You’d talked about Brazil before?”

  “I might have mentioned it, yeh. Why? You think they’d suss it out?”

  It was a question of putting two and two together and this was not an equation which would tax either of their minds.

  The truth was that John had talked about Brazil all the time. He’d frequently told the lads that he was getting off once he got some money together and that maybe he would stay there for good. “You wanna know what it’s like out there?” John had said. “Sunshine all year round and you’ve got all these fit birds bouncing round in g-strings.” He had made so much of his friendship with Pete and spoken so readily of his intended trip that they had gleefully started to ridicule both notions.

  “Where’s John?” Bim might ask.

  “He’s in Rio,” Riley would answer. “Gone to see his mate, Pete Murphy. Staying in his penthouse.”

  And when John did turn up in the pub, they would expand on this theme: “Here he is,” said Bim. “We thought you was in Rio.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  Now John closed the window on the computer. “So what are we going to do?” He asked. “Is there no way you can call them?”

  “They’re not going to listen to me, John.”

  “But you used to knock round together. You go back years. Can’t you have a word?”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  John opened his mouth, closed it again. He focused all his energy on denying this assertion. It was his feverish belief that Pete could solve any problem in the world and he was not prepared to let the idea go. Without it, they were doomed.

  Pete turned away and went into the kitchen to get himself another beer, thinking how he’d been right all along. It had first occurred to him – this idea of John checking his email – on the day that John arrived, but he had put it out of his mind and said nothing until now because he’d also wanted to delay this moment. He’d also had a little misplaced faith in the power of neglect.

  Probably John had known whose money it was from the off. At the very least it must have dawned on him since his taking it. And yet Pete also knew that John must have believed in his heart of hearts that Vincent and Totsy might be placated. This was a ludicrous idea and yet Pete realised that he himself had brought it into being through years of steadfast loyalty. He had never once let John down before.

  As a teenager, John had turned into one of those young lads who had to have the last word even though he lacked the strength to back it up. He’d become mouthy, irritating. His original strength, as a child, had lain in silence, forbearance, and then at some point he’d dispensed with this quiet and compensated for the loss by trading on Pete’s reputation.

  Pete knew for a fact that John had used his name frequently, bandying it around town, and yet he’d never sought to put a stop to this sorry routine. He reckoned on owing John that much. Men would approach Pete in the pub, almost apologetically, and ask him, “Do you know a young lad called John Mullan?”

  “Yeh,” Pete would answer. “He’s a good friend of mine.” He could always tell that it came as a surprise to these men and that they were disappointed with the answer. They’d thought John was full of shit when he’d claimed to know Pete well and had looked forward to setting him straight on the matter.

  Despite the inconvenience, Pete had always enjoyed helping John out. Nobody else would ever look up to him in quite the same way, with the same degree of adulation. He didn’t know exactly why he attached such importance to this, but he did. Perhaps it was because he’d gone to such lengths to win John’s affection in the first place; afterwards this required Pete to keep the boy close, otherwise it was nothing except an exercise in vanity, and he wasn’t prepared to accept that as the truth. So he continued to do what he could. It was the most selfless task in Pete’s life and it had never proven more costly.

  As for Vincent and Totsy, they were now big time, truly international, out of most leagues. They had property all over the world, major investment portfolios. No doubt they were bored by all this, with little real interest in enjoying these spoils. It was good for a laugh, if anything: playing up the gap between their origins and this outcome; the distance they had travelled by remaining fundamentally the same.

  Pete imagined that their business was running smoothly. By now they knew all the signs of danger and had ample means to despatch these dangers swiftly. They were probably running out of people to destroy. In this context, it would please them to revisit the past.

  At this point in their careers they’d probably been advised to keep their distance from criminal
proceedings and retire from the front-line. This would not suit them at all. It was not any work ethic which inspired Vincent and Totsy, more a love of action, hands-on cruelty, inflicting great pain.

  It had always pleased them to live in a time of war.

  Chapter Nine

  After John left, Pete took out the red sports bag and moved over to the sofa. In the next fifteen minutes he leant forward again and again to withdraw another block of cash from the hold-all between his legs and stack it upon the coffee table. It was time to find out exactly how much was there. For two weeks it had stayed in his wardrobe as Pete alternated between wondering what to do about it, and denying the money’s very existence, but this vagueness would no longer wash.

  Pete reached the sum of 120,000 pounds and the bag was still far from empty. He found this a laborious calculation. It felt like he was ramifying his own fate.

  The only real chance of avoiding confrontation was to uproot himself and go on the run. Pete could envisage such a life clearly: wandering the planet with a price on his head. Always tensed, with the watchfulness of a fly, ready to respond to any falling shadow, the slightest movement. This would be hard enough on his own, but impossible with John in tow. How long might they spend in any one place before a slip of the tongue on the kid’s part would give them both away?

  Weeks at best.

  Before, Pete had hoped that an opportunity might present itself to hand the money back, and that this might be sufficient to earn John a degree of forgiveness. In all likelihood, he would still not have been able to go home, but nor would he have been actively pursued in future. But now that Pete knew for certain who the owners of the money were he had given up on any such hopes. The situation was beyond repair. There was a case for spending this money now, and spending it quickly.