Crossing the Line

by Solomon Carter

  “No way, Dan.”

  “Not even for old time’s sake?”

  “Especially for that. The game has changed.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting it hasn’t. You look like the better sequel to a really great movie.”

  “You’ll sit by yourself, Dan. Set the alarm. Two hours is wasting.” She lay down on the sofa and pulled her legs in and turned away from him. Eva was quietly sorry she had to be so frosty, but it was all in the name of sanity and sleep. And in the name of remembering life wasn’t supposed to be ruled by Dan’s craziness anymore… because if she let happen what Dan wanted to happen, crazy would just be the start of it.

  “How about just a hug?”

  “Go to sleep, Dan.”

  Ten minutes of discomfort passed very slowly. The sofa was impossible, her hips aching and her back arched so her head and her feet pressed hard against the red sofa. She was wearing underclothes and her blouse beneath the blankets from the wardrobe, but as tired as she was, there was no comfort to be had. It was a day sofa, not a night bed. Defiant as she was in resisting Dan, in the silent darkness she changed her mind.

  When the alarm went off, Eva found herself lying close beside Dan with his arm draped over her body in the same old way, curled around her hips, his hand splayed palm down on the mattress. She woke slowly at first, and then with a jolt. The familiar felt good for such a short time. She could feel his firm hard body against her own, and then she realised just how much of her naked skin was against his, and how little clothing there was between her and a heated moment she felt she would soon regret. He was asleep. She pulled her back away from him, and got out of the bed, hurling the duvet back and away. Suddenly alert, and newly modest, she made a grab for the garments she left on the sofa as Dan yawned and woke up. She turned to face him. He yawned, gazed at her and smiled, his eyes rolling down her blouse to her belly and long shapely legs. She felt naked under that kind of gaze, so she shifted, half turned and blushed. Her hip eclipsed the view he would have preferred, but Dan didn’t mind that view too much either, so he rested and watched her a moment more.

  “You don’t need to hide from me, Eva. What’s the point?”

  “There’s every point, and you know it. That’s very old ground, Dan. Let’s not go there.”

  She looked at him with what was meant to be a hard glare as she finished putting on the armour of her skirt, but he sensed the secret playfulness in her eyes. Not offended, he smiled back, encouraged. Eva rolled her eyes at him in disbelief and disdain, but also at herself. She was falling back into old habits too easily. The truth was, unconsciously she was worried that if they’d had more time, she would have relented. Where was her backbone, her commitment to the promise she made herself about never going back? In that moment, she hated herself. But it was ridiculous; she had no intention of returning to her past, to her old flame, or to anything else. Eva liked being a person who stuck to her guns, meaning what she said. With heat in her cheeks and fire in her belly, she was annoyed at her own inconsistency. Dan’s smug flirting was damned annoying, condescending, sexist and inappropriate right now, given the situation. But, the bastard, it was working just the slightest bit. No way, she said silently, no way. He would take it as a victory, and remembering the old Dan, she didn’t want to give him any kind of victory whatsoever. As she combed her hair in the mirror and made it as neat and flat as she could, Dan dragged on his old trousers, and the German’s jacket. They would have to replace those terrible clothes in the morning. He looked like a refugee in need of a hospital visit. Then Eva’s phone vibrated with a text.

  “What does it say?” asked, Dan, holding the pistol and putting it in his inside jacket pocket. The pistol gave Eva a chill as she remembered what she had done to those men. At least one was dead, probably another too. What moral high ground did she have over Dan, or Gillespie, or even Marka? What did it matter whether she slept with Dan or not? There was a good chance the police would be involved in this thing, tracing the killing to her… if she didn’t hand herself in first. It all swirled crazily round her mind.

  “Well?” said Dan.

  She didn’t look at him, but read the text in a flat unreadable voice which couldn’t betray her confusion.

  Cold Harbour Lane. Brixton. 45 mins. then await further instructions.

  “Cold Harbour Lane. That doesn’t make sense at all.”

  “They can do what they like, Dan. They’re in the driving seat, and like you said, they know we have the lie of the land at The Daily. They want us back to square one.”

  “No, Eva. We’re back in the game. The team is back together.”

  She looked at him with a serious sideward glance which was intentionally hard.

  “You’ve been through the ringer, Dan… and I respect you about a hundred times more than I ever did last week. But…”

  He smiled at her, and laid a hand on her arm, and began to pull her towards him, but she stayed her ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes. His hand fell away and so did his smile.

  “They made you out to be a liar and a nutcase, Dan, and I’m sorry that some of it worked. I admit I believed it.”

  “I know you did.”

  “But even though I don’t believe it any more, we’ve been through too much rubbish to get back to where we were. And besides, you did still do the worst thing.”

  “Refresh my memory. My amnesia’s kicking in again.”

  “You lied - to me. You risked our whole business, including my livelihood and reputation for your wild dream, on a whim.”

  “For justice, Eva. For justice. I know you do believe in that, even if you don’t believe in me.”

  “Let’s not rake over this now, Dan. Not now.”

  Why did she have to start an argument now? He frustrated her so much, it felt cleansing to be able to tell him how he had wronged her. Even though at the same time, she wanted to hug him and apologise for how wrong she had been. But that couldn’t happen, it just couldn’t happen at all. So she said, “Come on Dan. Let’s just see if we still work well together.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  And as they closed the door on the hotel room where it almost started again, Eva heard herself say, “I need a drink.”

  Avoiding her eyes, Dan breezed past her towards the lift and said, “Nobody’s perfect. Not even you.” Her face flushed again. It was the only weakness in her he had ever been able to attack, but it was a real enough weakness that she stayed silent. They travelled down to reception, the sounds of the lift shaft their only soundtrack, the mirrored walls in the lift full of eyes trying to avoid each other.

  They made it through the melee of Brixton’s buzzing night streets just in time to receive the next text. Unlike in London’s centre, there was a virtue in having a car in South London. Central London and the city rendered cars annoyingly useless with their monumental traffic jams and snarled up roads competing with an underground network which studded the whole inner London map with stations every few hundred yards. But back out of the city centre, just outside of zone 1 on the tube map, the tube stations disappeared and roads became vital again. Brixton’s inhabitants reluctantly allowed the cars to have supremacy. Everywhere here people invaded the cars’ space before the green man lights invited them to cross, and some just walked whatever the traffic did, taking life and limb in hand as cars raced from the Streatham side of town towards the rail bridge and the frenetic market area. Cars boomed with heavy drum and bass, and bad-attitude hip-hop. White guys and black guys walked in gangs all talking the same gangsta patois, wearing their hats on sideways, backwards and daringly, retro-style peak forwards. These gangs moved past separate tides of middle-class white and black people who dressed with smart office suits, horn-rimmed spectacles with deliberately artistic affectation. Brixton, it seemed, did not quite fit its stereotype, but it did not wholly reject it either. But when they turned into Cold Harbour Lane, driving past a string of classic slum pubs and more promising wine bars, Brix
ton became everything the stereotype of urban decay, black ghetto, and criminal hotspot had promised.

  Eva read the message on her phone.Cold Harbour Lane, Elmo’s Minicabs, 15 mins. Dan had claimed he knew the lay of the land here, so she had let him drive. He was enjoying the Alfa, excessively stabbing the gas pedal at every opportunity.

  “Where in hell is that? Cab offices are ten a penny round South London. What’s Marka got to do with minicabs?”

  He said what she was already thinking. This was becoming less like Marka with every minute, unless he had some other kind of outsourcing going on in the area. Not impossible. His outsourcing guys could have been based anywhere… yet based on the international flavour of the ones she had dealt with, the possibility that Marka had some domestic heavies interested in minicabs on his payroll seemed pretty remote. Even so, Eva didn’t voice this. She was still thinking.

  “Minicabs! There!”

  They passed a doorway which said Minicabs in black on a neon yellow sign that was all lit up. It sat beside a red-lit Morley’s chicken house, but as they passed, the trade name became clear. Metro Mini Cabs, not Elmo’s. They sped up again, past a clutch of bars and places that looked like houses of ill repute. Boys, men and women roved in twos and threes with an aggressive swagger. Some of them looked high, some drunk, and some just getting around, but there was something vibrant, something fun, something dangerous in the air around here, as if it was charged up and ready to electrocute someone soon.

  “There.” They were almost at Herne Hill, the end of Brixton proper, and the properties were just beginning to mix into a patchwork of well-maintained housing and shops. Here on one corner Elmo’s shouted its name in a tall red emblem on a shining white background. “Are we on time?” said Dan.

  “We’ve got five minutes. Park nearby, but not too near.”

  “Sure.” He took the left on the opposite corner and tucked the car into a residential space just out of the streetlights and brightness of the main drag. People milled past them as they got out, but no one paid any attention. The area was a good pick if you wanted to blend in just after your face had been mashed up and your clothes belonged to a giant.

  “The plan?” he asked.

  “Play it straight. What choice do we have?”

  “Look at this set up. This isn’t Marka.”

  “Two possibilities. Outsourcing again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which makes this a serious trap.”

  “It can’t be anything else.”

  “Or it’s not Marka at all. Which means it’s Brian Gillespie.”

  “Which isn’t much better. My plan is like yours, Eva. Except when playing it straight starts to get us in trouble, I’m going to smash it back down their throats.”

  “I’ll be there before you, Dan.”

  Dan smiled. “You’ve still got class,” he said, and they crossed the road heading straight for the cab office.

  From the outside Elmo’s Minicabs was nothing more than a hole in the wall, no more substantial than an Oxford Street Bureau de Change office. It was the kind with windows and a grill protecting the people behind it. There was a list of prices and destinations on the back wall, all local London districts. The prices seemed pretty good to Eva, mostly less than ten pounds, comparing favourably to the days when she and Dan had lived up here in their youth. The light inside the minicab office was blue and there were a couple of uncomfortable looking steel framed chairs to sit on while waiting for your cab, and a hot drinks vending machine next to a high service desk, which took up most of the claustrophobic space. Two men were behind the counter. One looked like a middle-aged Israeli, or something vaguely tanned and Semitic. He looked tired and chewed gum. The man beside him was of African origin, clear eyed and smart looking. The African guy looked them over. “Where you going?” said the black man in a full London accent.

  “Nowhere,” said Dan. Both of the men behind the desk looked at them now, and waited. Eva spoke next.

  “We had a text message telling us to come here. Our friend is here somewhere.”

  “Right, it’s you. Over there. Through the door and down the stairs.”

  The Israeli-looking man pressed a button, making a long ugly buzz, and then the door lock clicked. Dan pushed the door, and there were two immediate changes in the atmosphere. One, was the sound old Motown music pouring up the stairs, and the other was the sweet pungent smell of ganja rising with the music.

  Dan and Eva walked down the stairs into a haze of low hanging smoke. The floor was a checkered-tile black and white affair, and along with the smell of marijuana came the smell of sweet hard liquor. Most of the people in this basement room seemed high on life or a substitute, and most likely a mix of the two. Immediately before Dan and Eva was a small square table where five men, Africans, whites and Asians in ages between thirty and sixty were playing a card game with cash layered in small stacks all over the table surface. One of the men looked up at Eva and Dan, eyes happy and glazed. Then he looked at Eva’s legs. A look at Dan’s face helped Mr Roving Eyes to turn back to his cards with relish. In another corner, a group of young guys were acting rock hard and worldly wise, not knowing their act made them every bit as stupid and immature. The gang passed a thick smoking blunt between them, nodding at each other with half-closed eyes. A red-haired girl who reminded Eva of her younger self was stuck under the arm of a possessive white youth in a baseball cap, the girl carrying a bottle of Hennessy in her hand. She looked totally passive, all emotion smothered by drink and drugs. Eva looked at her with pity; the girl caught on and broke out of her trance, puckering her lips at Eva with disdain. Eva noticed the men at the table properly. Something sparked and died in her foggy brain. One man looked at her, and abruptly looked down at his cards. He had something to hide apparently, but most of the people here didn’t think so. She studied the odd man for a moment and looked away; she could only now see his shoulders and his crown, and there were more important things to worry about. Again something sparked and went cold in her head. The sight stirred anxiety in her like electricity. The man was focussed on his cards and refused to look back. Eva let it go. This room was a mess, a weird place, a twilight zone. It was another dimension where drink, drugs and obvious criminal behaviour were virtuous and wholesome activities. The world underneath Elmo’s Minicabs was through the looking glass. Eva made a face at Dan that needed no words. This place was absolutely FUBAR. Dan shrugged. He looked tense, looking like a featherweight fighter who had lost a tag team bout with both Klitschkos; he was the most out of place person around down here. Dan saw one of the young men was eyeing up Eva, making a big deal out of it to his friends, wanting to be noticed doing so by Eva as well. Dan looked at him hard, but even his best prize fighter glare wasn’t going to cut it.

  There was a door with a grey glass window with a slatted blind behind it. Dan wanted the door to open so whatever was going to happen next would happen quickly, otherwise he would have to embarrass the young punk. Embarrassment would involve violence. This place was a kind of hell. This was limbo. The door opened. A muscular black man with walnut coloured skin came out into the haze. He looked at Eva and Dan, and they looked back. His face was an ordnance survey map of scars, mostly old and faded. The man had been a warrior in days past, but now he looked like the guvnor, a man not to be messed with.

  “Then you made it.”

  “Yes,” said Eva, and before Dan could speak. “Where’s Jess?”

  “Come through. Empty your pockets. Then you can see her.”

  The man backed away as they came through the door, walking into the middle distance as another big black man in a sharp suit came forward, greeting them with an unreadable hard eye.

  “Take off your jackets. Empty your pockets.” His voice was deep. Dan and Eva obeyed, and as quick as they had got them, they had to say goodbye to their new SIG and Glock. The big man wasn’t interested in their wallets or purse, only the guns. He gave them back their jackets and walked away holding a
gun in each hand loose and tentatively, like they carried some germs. He laid them on a far off desk. No one in the room paid much attention to the two firearms now on show. No one except Eva and Dan. This room was like the first, only the floor was black, not checkered. The light was pouring from a lampshade over a long banquet style dining table. Men were seated all around it, cash splayed out before them in loose piles, cards laid out, cigars ready, and near the centre of the table was an open tin full of white powder – a communal trough inviting a little pinch and snort. Dan grinned. This was the sort of dive to make Eva faint. Booze, Eva knew that vice all too well, but this kind of set up would be a brand new horror story to her. When she was a young green student, drugs took on a mythical level of evil to her. Dan glanced at her, and double took her face. Wrong. She was more blasé than he could ever have expected. She was chilled. He traced her gaze away from the main table, framed by an arc of light, towards a darker scene at the back. There with an old green desk lamp was a big desk with three chairs. The scarred man moved over there. He picked up a chair and sat down, folding his arms across the back of it, posing like he’d seen in the movies. Another man Dan instantly recognised as a Traveller goon with a neck as thick as a tree trunk was sitting at the edge of the desk, and he was grinning like he really, really wanted his own nose broken; and finally, there was big ugly old leather face himself, Bad Boy Brian Gillespie, sitting behind the desk with a content smile on his Bagpuss chops, dead eyes hanging onto the light from beneath those saggy eyelids.

  “Where’s Jess?” said Eva without a trace of fear. She was surprising Dan second by second, coming out all Bruce Willis like this.

  “You made it, so she’ll be okay,” said the old man, and the walnut black man laughed. Dan looked back at the big table once more. A couple more of Gillespie’s goons were engaged in the game, their fat oversized hands pinching at the white powder and moving paper money around as if it was too fiddly for their ogrish mitts.