Jaggy Splinters

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Too late,’ the cop informed him. ‘Somebody hit the Royal Bank at the west end of George St about fifteen minutes ago while we were scratching our arses back here. By the time any of our lot got there it was all in the past tense. We’ve been had.’

  ‘You’re not the only ones.’

  ‘What was that?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Bank robbery, Tommy,’ he told him ‘A proper one. Carried out less than a mile from here while the police Armed Response Unit were holding their dicks outside a post office. Now who do you think could have been behind that? Same guy gave you “the information” maybe?’

  ‘But… but… we…’

  ‘You were right about being hand-picked, Tommy. And you can both take some satisfaction from the fact that you carried out the plan exactly as intended. Unfortunately, you were intended to fuck up. What were the instructions? Grab the mysterious Insurance Bonds, create a hostage situation, keep the polis occupied, then escape via the magical underground railway? And were you given a specific date and time, perhaps?’

  There was confusion in Tommy’s eyes, but on the whole resignation was starting to replace defiance. Jyzer gave a last mournful splutter and passed out.

  ‘Don’t suppose you want to score a few points with the boys in blue by telling them who set you up so they can get on to his tail?’

  ‘Mair than ma life’s worth.’

  ‘Fair enough. But it’s still over, Tommy. Jyzer needs medical attention. The wounds might be superficial, but then again they might not. Come on. Put the gun down.’

  Tommy looked across at the unconscious Jyzer surrounded by bloodstains on the beige carpet, then at the locked door, then back at his hostage.

  ‘Ach, fuck it,’ he rasped angrily, knuckles whitening as he gripped the gun tighter.

  Parlabane took an involuntary breath, his eyes locked on Tommy’s.

  ‘The cunt’s name was McKay,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Erchie McKay. Met him inside. He got oot last month, same as us.’ Tommy put the shotgun down on the floor and slid it across to Parlabane. ‘Just make sure they catch the bastart.’

  At eight-thirty that evening, the nightly performance of ‘Whoops Checkov’ was abandoned after a number of powerful stink-bombs were thrown through the door of the auditorium by an unidentified male. It was, the unidentified male admitted to the woman driving his getaway car, childish and puerile, but then so is much of the Fringe.

  Mellow Doubt

  I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. Or to put it more plainly, I haven’t quite been my usual care-free, smiley, mass-murdering self for a while now, and it’s starting to make me feel… a little lost.

  There are a number of evident and plausible reasons for this.

  When I look in the mirror, I no longer see the face my mind expects. This isn’t any pretentious and self-pitying psychobabble, I should stress: I paid a maxillofacial surgeon a shitload of money to ensure that I no longer see the face my mind expects; and that more importantly, I no longer see the face so very many people in so very many countries would dearly love to get into with a floor-sander and a bucket of hydrogen chlorate. I don’t look radically different. With the bruising and swelling gone, the features and proportions are halfway familiar, but the lines and contours seem softened; blurred almost, so that I resemble what could best be described as a Japanese anime version of myself. I look different enough, though, let me tell you. Walk into the bathroom for a pish in the middle of the night, catch a sideways glimpse of that in the mirror and you’re swapping your cock for a Glock, if you haven’t already jumped backwards into the bath. When it comes to undermining your sense of identity, having your own coupon replaced would do it every time.

  But that’s not it.

  I’m sitting, as I do most days, outside a bar overlooking the beach. Resting on my table are a beer and a book, though again, like most days, I’m too distracted by what’s going on in front of me to read it. Today, however, unlike most days, my attention is enticed by something other than the cornucopia of sun-worshipping females parading between the terrace and the sea. These last have captured my eye but not my mind, a pleasant and picturesque backdrop to my necessarily ugly reflections; soothingly incongruous, disposably irrelevant. I didn’t come here for the reasons everyone else does. I’m not on holiday and I’m not looking for parties, romance or even just sex. I needed to be somewhere fluidly transitory, where people come and go and the locals don’t bother learning your face because you’ll be history in a fortnight. I also needed to be in a place where wearing sunglasses from dawn to dusk does not look suspicious or even affected.

  This is my life: for now, for as long as needs be. Forever, if necessary. Not so bad, you might think, and yes, I can afford it. Money is not an issue. I was always prepared for this possibility, every day, on every job, though I never considered it an eventuality, and certainly not an aspiration. I didn’t do the things I did so that I could afford to loll in the sand for the rest of my days. You lie in the dirt long enough later on; what good’s a headstart? I did what I did because it electrified me every moment I was awake, and I did what I did because I was the best in the whole wide fucking world.

  I have killed more people than I could accurately count: four hundred at a rough guess. I have brought down aeroplanes, sunk cruise liners, even trashed a fully armed military base. I had the police of half the planet trailing in my wake, presidential sphincters tweeting at the mention of my name. So all things considered, it is not my idea of the good life to be just another nobody vegetating here in the sun, my back resting against a pile of cash, like a moron lottery winner or some Cro-Magnon Cockney gangster. This is my life now and it represents, to say the least, a bit of a come-down.

  But that’s not it.

  I am watching a man and a young child, little more than a toddler, play on the sand with a lightweight football. They are using a pushchair and an ice-box as goalposts, the child running up unsteadily to take a shot as his father crouches in the centre of the target. The child connects, giving it a clumsy but firm toe-ender. The ball wobbles in the air as it flies, lending plausibility to the man’s transparent attempt to appear wrong-footed. He collapses to the ground, flailing an arm as the ball bounces past him. The child jumps, hands raised. The man thumps the sand, feigning the anguish of defeat.

  Here in the bar, there is no need to fake it. I have lost all that I have lost because I was – I am – defeated. In my line of work, you don’t lick your wounds then return to the fray with renewed determination; not when defeat means that the world knows your true name and your true visage. In defeat you may live, but not to fight another day. You may live to become faceless, to drink beer in a reassuringly crowded holiday resort, and to contemplate the person you will never again be.

  The sting of humiliation fades with time, but the loss remains, joined soon by a colder, more sober process of recrimination. The apportioning of blame – so often an opportunity for deflection and plain old denial – was simplified for me in that none of my comrades survived. That only left myself and the man who laid me low. As my adversary he was responsible for my defeat but not for my failure, so, much as I detest him and much as I resent what he has done to me, I know it would be foolish and unhelpful to focus my anger upon him. Sitting in this bar, on this beach, I have come to understand that there occasions when the pursuit of vengeance is simply undignified. Yes, I could kill him, but what would that prove? That I am the bigger man? That he was wrong to cross me? No. Because the truth is that I crossed him, and no two ways about it, I got my arse felt. Twelve of us, professionals, armed and prepared, against… well, best not dwell upon the details. When you lose despite such odds in your favour, you have to accept that you humiliated yourself. Seeking vengeance only compounds it. Let’s be honest, there is no retribution for a humiliation of that magnitude. Nor is there possible reparation to those who were counting on you.

  I failed. Me. I was gubbed. I was humiliated. My reputation was effe
ctively erased, as surely as I knew my identity would have to be also. Even my memories have been all but stolen: when I look back upon the things I have done, I can no longer view my victories as anything other than a prelude to my ultimate defeat.

  But believe me, that’s still not it.

  My nemesis, my embarrassingly improbable nemesis, did all of this to me. He destroyed my great scheme, wiped out my crew and even cast me down to what he reasonably assumed would be my death. However, my greatest wound, the strike that has had me reeling ever since, he delivered with mere words.

  There are four teenage males running along the sand, lanky and awkward, suffering that phase nature has the decency to hide inside a cocoon in other species. They bellow guttural laughs as they bear down obliviously upon the man and his child. The child instinctively moves closer to the man as the group approaches, seeking security, protection. The man smiles down, offering reassurance with a ruffling of the hair, but his eyes remain vigilantly upon the teenagers, positioning himself to deflect any accidental contact.

  The man is about my age, I estimate. He looks younger when he smiles, but his true years are revealed as his face sharpens in ready defence. The child resembles him facially; I can see that even from here. Even if he didn’t, there’d be no questioning the relationship: the man is alertly attendant upon the child, but the clincher is that the child looks up at him as though the world is his to command.

  ‘How does it feel to know you’ll never see your son grow up?’ I asked him, Larry, my improbable nemesis, when I thought I still held the power of life and death.

  ‘You tell me.’

  Now, I’ve analysed and deconstructed this little exchange many, many times in order to exhaust every avenue of interpretation, but even as I did so I knew I was merely trying to find an escape-clause in the small print. I had a gun pointed at his head, so he had to say something to buy himself some time, surely? Granted, but it was still a hell of a thing to just pull out of your arse at zero notice. And as he said it, there was a cold sincerity about him, a conviction that couldn’t be entirely accounted for by mere anger or hatred. Under the circumstances you could hardly have described it as smug, but it was definitely the look of one who knew he had something on me; he wasn’t only telling me I had a son I’ve never met – he was telling me he had.

  I have a son.

  Through simple deduction and arithmetic I know who by, I know where and I know when. But I do not know him, not even his name, and there are insurmountable reasons why he will never – let’s face it, must never – know me.

  So how d’you like them apples?

  I didn’t want a child. Like that needs to be said. Hard to imagine fitting much in the way of family life around a busy schedule of assassination and wholesale slaughter. But discovering, knowing he’s out there… oh Larry, you really stuck it to me, didn’t you? He’s loose in my head, toddling around, opening lids and doors and closets, and I seriously don’t want him to see what’s inside any of them.

  That, in case you haven’t guessed, is it. He’s in there, and he’s running the show, whether I like it or not.

  I have in the past transformed myself, or at least attempted to do so: cast off old trappings and emerged as what I imagined to be something new. But whether it was swapping my Queen records for Bauhaus or my Stratocaster for Semtex, the person inside never changed. Larry called that right. This, though, this truly feels like a transformation by some ancient power far beyond my control. This, as Freddie and the boys put it, is a kind of magic.

  I’m forced to see the world through my son’s eyes, as though new to me, my perspective involuntarily transferred. It’s an attempt, if not to feel him, then at least to feel what it’s like to be him. Then I see it once more through my own, and I feel a dread darker than anyone else could know; well, maybe not anyone else, but we’d be talking about a very short list. I feel a dread because I know what kind of men are sharing this world with my son.

  Evil men. Men like me.

  I’m feeling a new, alien emotion. Maybe it’s not alien, maybe it’s not even new. Maybe it’s an instinct that’s always been there, dormant, only recently activated. I feel a drive to protect, an anxious concern for this child of mine whose face I have never seen and whose name I do not even know.

  I sense his vulnerability. That’s something for which I’ve always had a facility: I sought out the undefended, probed for weakness, then gleefully exploited it. This vulnerability instead puts me on edge, compels me to vigilance. I consider the carnage I have strewn about me, and I am appalled to think of him getting caught up in something like that: collateral damage, among the gormless, faceless lemmings who just can’t help but find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is worth more than that, more than them. Far more. He is flesh of my flesh, my son, and the thought of someone harming him does not merely worry me – it offends me.

  Deeply.

  It is for this reason, therefore, as I sit here watching another father tend and protect his offspring, that I feel unexpectedly inclined to act upon certain information that has today become pressingly pertinent, but to which I would previously have been utterly indifferent.

  A four-year-old English boy has gone missing from one of the big villas on the other side of the Old Port. It’s all over the island this morning; everybody knows about it. That’s why that father on the beach, like every other parent here, is staying that bit nearer to his precious child, watching that bit closer, grateful he has not been punished for lacking the same vigilance twenty-four hours ago. The kid’s face is on the front of the local paper, and the police, plus dozens of volunteers, are combing the area. Divers will be brought in too, inevitably, but only if the parents are smart enough not to tell the cops about the ransom demand they are about to receive.

  I know this because I know who has done it.

  All life passes this bar, here in my sun-kissed purgatory, and it doesn’t have to be wearing a bikini to catch my eye. It therefore failed to escape my attention on either of the occasions that Risto Balban and his moron brother, Miko, sauntered conspicuously along the boardwalk, having evidently travelled here in the past month with Club Thug. Risto used to be a big noise in the Kolichni separatist rebel movement, which employed his kidnapping and extortion skills to political and fundraising ends. Some of those funds ended up in my pocket for services rendered, which is why I know his face. But this was before his political convictions waned in the face of his realisation that he could get up to the same hi-jinks independently without having to hand over the resultant cash to any pompous ideologues in balaclavas.

  It’s common knowledge within certain less-than-exalted circles that he and Miko have been busying themselves around southern Europe ever since. They target the most upmarket holiday residences (not much ransom to be got out of the Sun-reading classes) and go for kids of four years and under because they don’t tend to be much cop when it comes to giving the police descriptions. That’s the ones whose parents keep it shut and pay up in time, of course. But despite their industry, you won’t have heard about any of this, because the authorities in tourism-driven economies can bring rather a lot of pressure on the local plods regarding their after-the-fact interpretation of such events. Who’s going to go down to Lunn Poly and book up for ‘that resort where the wean got kidnapped last summer’? So the local kiddy-fiddler gets fitted up for murder, the ‘isolated incident’ is solved, and the Balbans move on. They’ve worked Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, moving from island to island, coast to coast.

  And now they’re here. Risto: the brains of the operation, lithe, sharp-featured, canny, paranoid. Miko: tubby, thick, obedient and loyal, as proven by the metal holding his legs together since a mutually unsatisfactory interrogation at the hands of the Russian military. I knew what they were here for, I knew what they would do, and at the time it didn’t seem to be of any import. I have always considered their activities vulgar, but none of my affair; indeed my principal concern when I saw
them was whether my surgery would pass the eyeball test. However, now that they have actually done it, I find myself experiencing an unaccustomed outrage that I know I will not be able to contain. Besides, as I have said, I’m feeling a little different these days.

  I sit in my car and watch the villa, easily identified by the police cars at the gate. I wait. I will give it an hour, I decide. This particular exercise is to ensure that my good deed goes unpunished, but there are other ways of doing that if an opportunity fails to present itself this morning. After twenty minutes, however, it does. I see the father walking out of the driveway with a push-chair, occupied by a tiny infant. He stops briefly to exchange words with one of the cops, gesticulating towards the buggy. He’s telling them he’s just taking the little one for a walk, but his other hand looks like it’s the only thing holding his head on, so I know differently.

  I get out of the car and pace myself to catch up with him out of sight of the police. He stops at a bench overlooking the water and sits down, offering the infant a bottle of water. The infant smiles at him and he smiles back, trying to hide how he’s really feeling. I don’t know whether the baby’s buying it, but I’m certainly not.

  I sit down next to him and speak facing out to sea.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I tell him. ‘And the answer is no. Don’t tell the cops.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Ransom demand. Phone call. Voice-disguiser, right?’

  He stares at me, standing up. I remain seated, still looking out to sea.

  ‘Who are you? How do you know this?’

  ‘If they even think you’ve told the cops, they’ll kill the boy and move on. To them, it’s not worth the risk; they can start again elsewhere tomorrow. You can’t.’

  ‘Listen, tell me who the hell…’