Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  ‘She said you were very thorough and reliable, totally unorthodox and above all, you got results. That you were totally discreet and tenacious. The tenacity of a particularly assiduous truffle-hound, were her words.’

  Yeah. That’s the way Sally spoke, it probably went down big in the shires. I wondered what else she’d told Jay. Like our long weekend trip to Venice, for instance. Or the couple of nights at that Michelin-starred spa resort in Newbury. Which she had paid for in readies.

  I grinned. ‘I think I know of whom you speak.’ Hell. Whom at this hour of the day. Well, she’d used assiduous.

  ‘She said that you had had an interesting past, in the Chinese sense of the word interesting.’

  I said, ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Will you tell me about it?”

  ‘No.’

  She finished her coffee. ‘She also said you were a sensitive and caring man. I sense that as well.’

  I laughed and said, ‘So. Wanna talk about the merits of breast-feeding?’

  Jay was shaking her head as her mobile rang. She looked at the caller ID before diverting the call to her answer service and then switched the phone off. She shrugged at me.

  ‘And you seemed to know what women want. Whatever that may mean.’

  So Venice and Newbury had cropped up in the conversation.

  ‘Sure. A fitted kitchen with an Aga, plus an other-half-proof pension plan.’

  Jay said, ‘I’m reasonably sure that she was talking about something else. In a purely professional sense, of course.’

  We smiled each other out. I got up and levered us each a paper cup of water from the cooler, drinking mine in one gulp before refilling it.

  ‘So I check out. What can I do for you,’ I said, sitting back at my desk, my chin resting on steepled fingers.

  She leant across the desk with a paper napkin in her hand and wiped croissant flakes from my mouth, like a wife does.

  ‘I’m sure I was followed here today,’ Jay said. She looked around her to emphasise the point. She was dead scared.

  She waited awhile thinking about what to say next, looking at her hands clasped together, as I ran my fingers across my chin, checking that it was now free of debris. This wasn’t a my husband’s screwing the au pair preamble. And Jay didn’t seem to be a drama queen.

  ‘My husband was a very successful businessman. Unfortunately he died three years ago’. She paused, unclasping her hands and then resting them on her knees. ‘He had a business partner whom I detested. However it was generally possible to have little to do with him. Unfortunately now, that’s not the case.’

  I said, ‘What was the business?’ A place to start.

  ‘Nils was a very complex but loving, kind and generous man,’ she said, not answering my question.

  Jay was thoughtful and chose her words carefully, hanging them back a little before she spoke. I figured she would tell all in good time. So I angled back in my chair and waited.

  ‘He was a director of a London merchant bank and trading house. His work took him and often me all round the world. He was well connected. The company was bought by one of the big American banks. He couldn’t bear to work for ‘The Factory’, as he called the US company, so he took a good financial settlement and left. He was pretty well known, and it was news for a while,’ said Jay.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘2001. Just before the World Trade Center. He tried a few months of not working and it drove him and me mad. Then, that Christmas we were invited to the Ritz Hotel in Paris. All expenses paid. As the guests of some Saudis who were past business associates of his. And there was an ex-Tory MP there, who had also been a director of Nils’ bank’, said Jay.

  ‘Who?’ I said, as I tried to think of my 2001 Christmas. I doubted it involved either Paris or the Ritz.

  She said, ‘Charlie Sayers,’ after pausing a little.

  His name was vaguely familiar. Some sleaze allegations, bigger in the broadsheets than the tabloids.

  ‘By New Year, Nils told me he was setting up a new business. On New Year’s Eve we toasted the venture with his new business partners, the Saudis. On New Year’s Day I returned to London, and he flew off to the Middle East – on a private jet. His new life began and I was very happy for him. I had however big misgivings about Sayers,’ said Jay.

  I said, ‘What’d the new business do,’ steering the conversation.

  ‘Nils gave the company credence and connections. The Saudis bankrolled it and Sayers greased the political wheels in various countries,’ said Jay.

  I said, ‘Its name?’ hoping we’d get there in the end.

  She told me. I knew of them. Arms dealers and fixers, masquerading as Third World financiers. The sort used as middlemen by ‘respectable’ companies who wanted to be able to wash their hands of suspect deals when necessary. Its name had surfaced in Angola, Sierra Leone, Yemen and other places off the popular tourist beat, where I’d spent time. But never at a local Ritz. They had a good reputation – for delivering under budget and in plenty of time for the coup.

  A siren wailed, railing against the traffic jammed on the Fulham Road. The sound recoiled around the office before it lingered inside my head.

  ‘I know your husband’s company.’

  ‘I thought you might.’ She looked a little uneasy. Another impatient loud and off-key siren, with red and blue visuals for those too deaf to enjoy the noise.

  Jay seemed happy with the extra time to think. The racket subsided and she took the cue. ‘Since Nils’ death –’

  She turned to loud knuckle raps against glass. I looked past her shoulder and saw shadows silhouetted against the frosted pane of my office door. The door opened, and two guys looked around for a drum-roll.

  The one with the distended red cheeks was in his early sixties. They complemented his fleshy red lips, the lower of which curved downwards, distancing itself from his stiff upper one. The family crest on the English-upper-class-flash ring on his pinky told him he was better than me.

  ‘Jay darling. Good to see you,’ he said, with congenital insincerity. His right hand lingered in his suit jacket pocket because he’d seen the Prince of Wales do it.

  Jay nodded, visibly uneasy, looking at him and then back at me. She remained seated.

  ‘This is Charlie Sayers,’ she said to me, with congenital politeness.

  His flat-nosed minder stood just to the rear and side of him, near the open door. A store-bought East London heavy, his no-hair haircut did not suggest the submissiveness of a Buddhist monk, but emphasised a sallow complexion the texture and pallor of Dutch cheese. Tastelessly chunky gold rings partly obscured scars on his fingers where his prison tatts had been lasered off.

  ‘You must be Mister Milo,’ Sayers said, removing his hand from his pocket, but not offering it to me. I was expected to abase myself in his presence.

  I stood and played the insurance salesman trick of who talks next loses. It was why I wasn’t insured. I waited until he bought the policy. ‘This is Irish, my associate.’ He motioned toward his minder who stood there with the inherent glamour of a sewage inspector.

  ‘Now I’ve met you both, I can add you to my list of my life’s highlights. Right up there with dysentery in Manaus, and a subsequent visit to a proctologist in Porto Velho.’

  ‘I know all about you, smart-ass,’ Sayers said to me, his unintended pun impervious to my slander.

  ‘Well, if ever I write my autobiography, I’ll call you for details,’ I said. ‘The decade or so that I’m hazy about. When I musta been time-travelling.’

  We eyeballed each other until his lower lip quivered.

  ‘We need to talk to Jay in private. Leave us alone for a minute. It won’t take long.’ He thought I’d comply. So I put his insult in my pocket for now. I’d take it out and deal with it soon, I was sure.

  He said, ‘I want you out of here, now.’

  I said, ‘And I wanna hump J Lo. So what’s a man gonna do.’

  Jay stood up and faced Sayer
s. Irish impersonated a rottweiler by baring his teeth. His forearms and knuckles turned forward, uppermost and slightly bent, fists clenched at his sides. He was the missing link.

  Jay’s politeness deserted her. ‘I’m having a private meeting on a personal matter with Mr Milo. Will you please fuck off.’

  She moved to the window away from potential trouble, her arms folded tightly to stop her shaking. We stood and stared. I was Mr Pink in the Mexican stand-off in Reservoir Dogs. Sayers wasn’t Harvey Keitel. So I moved from behind my desk and put myself between Jay and Rottweiler. He stared at Jay and getting no response, looked at me.

  ‘What you want me to do, gov?’ said Irish in broad cockney, closing the door.

  ‘How about fuck off for starters. You’re pissing me off in a very big way. You in particular,’ I said, my body facing Sayers while cold-shouldering Irish, upstaging his raison d’être. The atmosphere in the room was so thick it could be tapped and poured into the rancid fat tray.

  I said, ‘Well gentleman, I can’t say it’s been a pleasure. But it’s time for you to go.’ It was body language time of which I was fluent in many dialects. I widened my stance with my feet level with my shoulders, and my hands limbering loosely at my sides. I put one foot slightly forward, standing on the ball of the other. Sayers looked apprehensively at me, then at Rottweiler. I walked around the rott, his fangs bared as I bumped him with my shoulder. He snarled. I opened the door.

  Sayers said something to Jay I couldn’t quite catch. She shook her head.

  She shouted, ‘Please get out of here.’

  I was now very pissed off indeed. That these pricks didn’t know that hell hath no fury like Milo defending the honour of a distressed damsel. For that read angry hungover Milo. I moved past Rottweiler towards Sayers then I quickly stepped back into the rott, bent a little, and rammed my left elbow into his solar plexus. My right hand pushed my left balled fist for extra force as I drove my right heel hard down onto his shiny crocodile shoe instep, happy I hadn’t worn trainers today.

  He wasn’t prepared because he was a bully, not a fighter. You win fights by preparing them in your head, but cerebral incontinence had crapped all over his dress rehearsal. And he’d never been taught in the soccer-dominant East End, rugby’s golden rule of doing unto others: you do it first.

  He doubled up in pain and I turned around to see him bent over, lunging towards me with a roar. He moved slowly, even for an imbecile. I connected the full force of my toe and instep with his crotch, twisting my foot as I felt his pain for him. The military front kick from basic training was like playing air guitar. Once learnt, never forgotten. My back arched, I jerked my knee into his face, my hands clasped behind his neck.

  He reeled through the door to the top step, still facing me as his left hand held his bloodied nose, while his right arm tried to grab the banister as his feet slipped backwards on the metal edge of the stair, assisted by my left-right combo. The upper half of his body fell forward as his legs went out from under him. He clattered feet first and belly down to the lower landing. I watched as he tried to stand up and then collapsed in a groggy heap again, his hands cupping his bloodied face.

  I turned as Sayers walked quickly through the door and on to the landing. He’d been nervously watching events from the perimeter. A tag wrestling team they weren’t.

  ‘And take your trash as you leave the building. The council don’t come again till Monday and the wheelie bin’s full. I try to keep a tidy house around here,’ I said, motioning to the woeful heap at the bottom of the stairs, legs outstretched, wiping the blood off its Armani sleeves. ‘And I doubt he’s recycle-friendly.’

  Sayers said, ‘You’ve just made one very big mistake.’

  He walked towards the stairs.

  I moved aside to let him pass, then changed my mind and stood in front of him, to savour the moment, my face a few inches from his. His upper lip, stiff no more, quivered involuntarily, as groans from his piece-of-shit cockney frippery added insult to his trauma.

  ‘Now. You want me to press the express button for you as well?’ I said. I was cooking with gas.

  He chose the sensible alternative and skipped around me like a square dancer at a hoe-down. Halfway down the stairs he turned, breathing deeply to regain composure.

  ‘You’re a fucking fool,’ he said.

  I gave him my forty-watt smile in reply.

  ‘You’re both fucking fools,’ he shouted, screwing himself together again as he moved down the stairs. ‘I won’t forget this.’ He pointed at me. ‘I’ll give you something to remember.’

  ‘I’ll remember a crap I had a month ago more than I’ll remember you,’ I said. ‘And the piss I had with it.’ It was obviously one of those lavatorial humour days.

  ‘That was ignorant, Milo – about your level.’

  I said, ‘That wasn’t ignorant. That was vulgar. Your level.’

  With difficulty, he stopped himself saying more. I watched him go down to the bottom of the stairs from where it was hard, even for him, to continue to talk down to me. I was now holding a cricket bat I keep handy. Sayers slowly helped the dazed rottweiler to his feet. Irish then steadied himself and looked at me, pantomiming his hand into a gun with the barrelled finger pointing at my head. He mouthed a bang as he pulled the imaginary trigger. Sayers pushed him outside. I went back into the office and watched from my window as they got into a cab.

  I said, ‘I can never get a cab here. How come they get one straight away?’

  Jay laughed. ‘Luck of the Irish – sorry.’

  I locked the door, to her obvious relief. ‘It’s at times like this I’m glad I smoke. You mind?’ I shook my head as Jay took out a packet of Drum, and deftly rolled-up.

  From the icebox of my refrigerator I took a flat bottle I kept for such purposes, and poured us each a large measure of scotch into two paper cups, making a mental note to buy an old-fashioned soda siphon. The sort of squirt gun Philip Marlowe might have used.

  ‘That was very brave of you,’ said Jay. ‘I loved seeing those bastards getting some of their own medicine. For a change.’

  She kept a watchful eye out the window as she talked and smoked. ‘Sayers’ minder, that cockney guy who calls himself Irish, is a nut case. And Sayers gets off by hanging out with him and his crim friends. His turn-on is having Irish sitting near to him in some smart restaurant in the city, to impress his mates.’

  I said, ‘Sayers still thinks he’s a prefect at Eton. His minder’s his hard on, when he’s out of Viagra.’

  ‘Well, I’m worried what I’ve now got you into. Irish won’t forget what you did to him.’

  I laughed, in a faux-reassuring way.

  ‘Listen. I’ve met lots of guys like Irish. He’s happiest with a half dozen hired-help with baseball bats to back him up.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that he has those. More huge thugs like him.’

  Huge thugs. I enjoyed that. ‘You reckon he thinks he’s so big he deserves his own postcode? How about SW1 NE?’

  Jay wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing. Well, it wasn’t that hot, so what the hell.

  ‘He’ll come after you. I’ve heard stories.’

  ‘Then I’ll be waiting.’

  We sipped our scotches for a while in silence. She was a little more at ease. I was feeling a lot better. Maybe it was the morning-after scotch. I hoped not. I’ve read about when that happens. To other people. Topping up to maintain the edge, the Calabrians say.

  I said, ‘I’ve got someone who’s going to help us. His name’s Jonah.’

  ‘Who’s Jonah?’ she said.

  ‘A coulda been light-heavyweight,’ I said.

  ‘Coulda been?’

  ‘Yeah. He’d have fought at the Barcelona Olympics, but for, uh – a slight misunderstanding about a urine sample.’

  Jay digested that as I called him on his private line. He answered immediately. I told him briefly about my morning. I doubted that Huey and Dewey would call again today but I wanted to be
prepared, just in case.

  ‘I have a lady in distress, who needs a chaperone. And a lift.’

  He said, ‘I’ll shave,’ and hung up. That was a long sentence for him.

  I said, ‘I wonder how your friends knew about me?’

  She thought a while. ‘I’ve been procrastinating about seeing you, and talking about that with my friend.’

  ‘So they’ve bugged your phone,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me about them.’

  I poured another couple of scotches. Jay didn’t object, and she rolled another smoke.

  ‘Sayers was Nils’ business partner. Irish is his dickhead. They’re the reason Nils was getting out of his business when he died.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Sayers is so shifty, if he’s going west he starts off south for a while, before he turns right. Just in case.’

  ‘I like the description.’

  Jay thought a little, a smile coming from someplace removed from here. ‘Nils provided very well for me in his life and his will. He left me all of his shares in the company. But Sayers claimed he had an agreement that if anything ever happened to Nils, they would go to him.’

  ‘In writing?’

  ‘Of course not. He would never have agreed to such a thing, in writing or verbally. I had the shares valued and they’re worth a lot of money, plus they come with voting rights. So now Sayers wants them for a pittance. The Saudi partners are also interested in buying them so they can vote Sayers out of the company. I’d be happy to sell. Nils liked doing business with them. It’s not so much the money. I just don’t want that bastard Sayers to have them.’

  ‘So why not sell to the Saudis?’

  ‘Because Sayers is blackmailing me.’ At last. A client who got to the point. ‘He says he can give chapter and verse on lots of dealings that Nils was in up to his eyebrows. That he was running with some Irish Republican splinter group, which is total crap. That he had monies paid offshore and not declared for tax, etcetera, etcetera. He’s been to see me a couple of times with share transfer forms to sign in return for incriminating papers he says he has. Then he won’t inform the Inland Revenue.’

  ‘You seen it? The documentation.’