Dead Lions

by Mick Herron

  Louisa flashed him the eyebrow equivalent of a kick in the shins, and said, “It’s pretty basic stuff. Like you say, our turf. And we really can’t have you walking round with guns. I’m sure you understand that.”

  Piotr was politeness itself. “Guns?”

  “Like those you’re carrying now.”

  Piotr said something to Kyril in, Min assumed, Russian. Kyril said something back. Then Piotr said, “No, really. Why would we be carrying guns?”

  “It’s you I’m worried about. London’s more savvy than it used to be. You’re one phone call away from an armed response.”

  “Ah, an armed response. Yes. London has a reputation for that.”

  Oh, here we go, thought Min. You shoot one plumber.

  “But I assure you,” Piotr continued, “nobody’s going to mistake us for terrorists.”

  “Well, if they do,” Louisa said, “it’s Mr. Harper and I who’ll have to clear up the mess. It’s all right for you. You’ll be dead. But we’ll really be in the shit.”

  The look Piotr gave her was intense and blue-eyed and utterly humourless. And then the clouds cleared, and he showed big white teeth more American than Russian. “We wouldn’t want that, would we?” he boomed. He turned to Kyril and rabbited on for a bit. Min counted three thick sentences. Kyril laughed too, making a noise like a bag of marbles. When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.

  Min shook his head and swallowed his last mouthful of coffee. It wasn’t a warm day but was bright and clear, and had felt fresh enough when he’d cycled into work. Cycling was a new thing for Min; something to cancel out the smoking. Accepting one of Kyril’s cigarettes in front of Louisa would have been tantamount to confessing he had no plans for a long-term future.

  Louisa said, “So we’re agreed.”

  Piotr gave an expansive shrug, taking in not only Louisa’s question but the general surroundings, the sky above, the whole of goddamn London. “No guns,” he said.

  “We can get down to business, then?”

  He gave a gracious nod.

  Nobody took notes. They talked dates and places: when Pashkin was due, what transport he’d be using (“Car,” said Kyril at this point. That was the one word of English he came up with. “Car.”). And they talked about the Needle, where the meeting would be taking place.

  “You’ve seen it, obviously,” Louisa said.

  “Of course.”

  It was over her shoulder, in fact. Its tip could be seen from where they sat.

  “It’s … cool.”

  “It is.”

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled.

  Jesus, thought Min. He’s coming on to her.

  “Where are you staying?” Min asked.

  Piotr turned to him politely. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Ambassador. On Hyde Park.”

  “Already?”

  Piotr looked puzzled.

  “I mean,” Min said, “I can see your boss might want to stay there. But I’m surprised he’s checked you two in a fortnight before he arrives.”

  Kyril was watching him with a mildly interested expression. He understands every word I’m saying, thought Min.

  Louisa said, “Good boss to have. Can’t see ours doing that.”

  “He’s okay,” Piotr said. “But no, we’re not actually there yet.”

  He nodded at Min. “I misunderstood. I thought you meant where we’ll be later. Once Mr. Pashkin arrives.”

  Course you did, thought Min. “So you’re … where?”

  “Near Piccadilly. Off Shaftesbury Avenue. What’s its name again?”

  He rattled off some more chunky vocabulary at Kyril, who grunted back. “The Excelsior,” he said. “Excalibur? Something like that. Forgive me, I’m stupid with names.” His contrition was aimed exclusively at Louisa. “Maybe I should call you later. Confirm the name.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “We’d hate you to get lost.” Fishing a card from her bag, she handed it to him.

  And it seemed they were done, because the Russians were standing, offering their hands. Piotr held onto Louisa’s while saying, “This could be a good thing. An oil deal between our nations. Good for us, good for you.”

  “And wonderful for the environment,” Min added.

  Piotr laughed, without letting go of Louisa’s hand. “You,” he said. “I like you. You’re funny.”

  Louisa freed herself. “You’ll let us know your hotel.”

  “Of course. We can get a taxi from here?”

  “That way.”

  Kyril nodded at Min very seriously, and the pair rolled off. People heading their way, Min noted, swerved round them. Louisa said something, but he didn’t catch what. “Take this.” Slipping his jacket off, he hurled it at her.

  “Min?”

  “Later,” he called, but it wasn’t likely she heard him; he was already twenty yards away.

  It cost her a second tenner, but by 7:15 that morning Shirley Dander had had numbers for all the station’s pick-up drivers, by 7:30 had deeply annoyed three of them, and by 7:40 was talking to a fourth, who’d been working the previous Tuesday evening, the night the westbound trains were late. And yes, he’d picked up a bald guy, and no he wasn’t a regular. And what was this, some kind of wind-up?

  It’s an opportunity, Shirley told him. She’d buy him breakfast.

  She was still jazzed from last night’s raid on DataLok, where the train company’s onboard-CCTV footage was stored. Subduing the infant on security hadn’t proved taxing, and chances were the morning shift would have unwrapped him by now: the kid had thought she was going to kill him. Finding the right files had taken longer, but the system wasn’t a closed book, not after four years at Regent’s Park Comms, and she’d uploaded everything and more to a website she’d created yesterday and had since taken down. Then she’d gone home, woken her lover, and committed a borderline act of rape. Lover had justifiably collapsed afterwards, but Shirley had taken a twist of coke then gone piledriving through the data, decoding the filing system in minutes: date, time, train number, destination, carriage. Recording was on, she estimated, a seven-second stutter, though that might have been the coke talking. The thought inspired a second hit: if this was going to take all night, she’d need all the help she could get.

  It had taken a shade over two hours.

  Two hours’ clock-time, anyway. Shirley was flying to her own schedule by this point. Coke, yes, but also an adrenalin high from the raid. Each seven-second onscreen jump echoed the beat of her heart. She registered plenty of bald men, baldness being as much fashion statement as male tragedy these days, but she had no doubt when she found the one and only Mr. B—there he sat, oblivious of the camera at the end of the carriage, and yet so square on to its field of coverage he might as well be mouthing cheese … He sat alone, staring ahead unsmilingly. Not even blinking. Except he probably was, amended coked-up Shirley Dander, was probably blinking in the six seconds spare he had out of every seven. But it was odd, nevertheless, that all around him was a funhouse of jerky movement, as his fellow-travellers conjured instant shapes from newspapers, or produced handkerchiefs out of nowhere, as if this were a magicians’ convention—and Mr. B alone remained stock still: a cardboard cut-out who didn’t even roll with the train’s movement. Or that’s how he’d stayed until reaching Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswolds. Which boasted, among other attractions, a nice little café, open early.

  Kenny Muldoon turned out quite the breakfast fiend: sausages, bacon, egg, beans, tomatoes; buckets of tea. Enough toast to carpet a barn. Shirley, no appetite, still had raw energy pulsing through her veins. But her last twist of coke was hours ago, and she had an unbreakable rule about never leaving home while carrying, so knew she was going to crash soon, with a long drive ahead of her … She nibbled a piece of toast, but swallowed a whole cup of te
a without pausing, then poured another. Then said:

  “So you collected a bald gentleman from the station last Tuesday, yes?”

  “Don’t know about gentleman. Seemed a bit of a bruiser.”

  “We won’t argue details. Where did you take him?”

  “This some sort of romantic contretemps?” Kenny Muldoon rolled contretemps around his mouth like it was his last piece of sausage. “Sugar Daddy done a moonlit flit?”

  Plucking the fork from Kenny’s unsuspecting grip, Shirley Dander impaled his hand with it then leaned on it heavily. Felt its tines scrape and pop through gristle; watched blood squirt like ketchup over the ruins of his full English.

  “Heh, heh,” Kenny added.

  Shirley blinked, and the fork remained in Kenny’s hand. She said, “Something like that. Do you remember where he went?”

  Kenny Muldoon’s drooping eyelid was as much response as he was prepared to give at this juncture. Taxi drivers, thought Shirley. You could squash them into the same box holding all the bankers in London, and nobody would mind if you dropped it off a cliff. Her watchstrap had long been relieved of its bounty. She produced another tenner from her pocket instead. “I didn’t realise country life was so expensive.”

  “You city folk don’t know you’re born,” he assured her. He put his knife down, took the money, slipped it into a pocket. Picked up his knife again. “Course I remember,” he said, as if everything that had happened between her question and this reply had been invisible business. “Couldn’t hardly not, he made such a fuss about it.”

  “What sort of fuss?”

  “Didn’t know where he was going, did he? Starts off saying he wants to go to Bourton-on-the-Water. Got halfway there, and he shouts out like he’s being kidnapped. Nearly took the car into a ditch, didn’t I? That’s not what you want in hard rain.”

  His tone of voice made it clear that the incident still rankled.

  “What was his problem?”

  “Turns out he doesn’t mean Bourton-on-the-Water at all, does he? Turns out he means Upshott. And tries to make out that’s what he said in the first place, and I’m an idiot for not hearing properly. How long do you think I’ve been doing this job?”

  Like she cared. “Fifteen years?”

  “Try twenty-four. And I don’t mishear place names, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

  In which case, wasn’t she due some change? “So what did you do?”

  “What could I do? Turned round and took him to Upshott. He made me restart the clock too, on account of how he wasn’t paying a fare somewhere he didn’t want to be in the first place.” Kenny Muldoon shook his head at the sheer bloody injustice of a world where such outrages occur. “You can probably guess the size of the tip, too.”

  Shirley made an O-shape out of finger and thumb, and he nodded gloomily.

  “So what’s Upshott?”

  “Upshott? It’s hardly anything. It’s a hundred houses and a pub.”

  “Not got a railway station, then.”

  Muldoon looked at her as if she’d dropped in from another planet. Fair play to him though, she was beginning to feel that way herself.

  He said, “It’s not got hardly anything, but that’s where I left him. Zero gratuity on a twelve-quid fare. Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.”

  Spearing the last morsel of sausage, he used it to mop up the last of the yolk, then transferred it to his mouth. From the look on his face, it was evident he found some small consolations in the role life had concocted for him.

  “And that was the last you saw of him?”

  “I drove away,” said Kenny Muldoon, “and I didn’t look back.”

  In London, the Highway Code applies on a curve: for motorists, it’s a rulebook; for taxis, a guideline; for cyclists, a minor inconvenience. Min swerved into City Road without pausing, and a southbound lorry missed him by at least a yard, but blared its horn anyway. Ignoring it, he threaded through the gaggle of tourists on the crossing, scattering them for the safety of the pavement, little red rucksacks and all …

  His bicycle had been chained to the rack on Broadgate Square, and now, helmet on and jacket off, Min was as close to being disguised as he’d ever been. Even if the Russians were looking out their taxi’s back window, they wouldn’t cop to him. He was just another maniac on two wheels.

  Why are you doing this?

  I don’t trust them.

  You’re not supposed to trust them. That’s part of the game.

  It was weird the way the voice of common sense sounded like Louisa.

  The taxi was heading for the Old Street roundabout. This offered a variety of directions, in any one of which it might vanish, but for now it was pausing at pedestrian lights a hundred yards ahead and in the process of changing. Min, pedalling as fast as he’d pedalled in his life, pedalled faster; pulled out to overtake a slowing bus, and banged his left elbow against it as the back-draught caught him. Briefly he was suspended in a perfect, gravity-free moment … The bus honked madly, and here were the traffic lights, and there they were behind him, and a taxi was kerbing twenty yards ahead, and that damned bus was gaining, and Min had no choice but to brake hard, or be smeared against the front of one or the back of the other. He left rubber on the road’s surface. His teeth clenched so hard, he didn’t recognise their shape.

  This is because of the way he was looking at me, isn’t it?

  Don’t be stupid. It’s because he didn’t want us to know where they’re staying.

  So you plan to chase them home on a bicycle?

  The bus passed. Min hauled his bike round the parked taxi the way he might an unruly horse, and shouted something filthy through the driver’s window before starting to pedal again. His legs were cooked spaghetti, and the bike a torture device, until, with an inaudible click, they became one again, man and bike, Min and bike, and he was flowing into the Old Street roundabout, which boasted yet more traffic lights at its first spoke. Beyond them, four cars ahead, was a black cab, and Min was almost positive that the two heads conferring in its back seat were Piotr and Kyril—his legs were moving faster, the ground whipping away beneath his wheels, and there was a whole long stretch of Old Street, four hundred yards of it, before the pedestrian crossing—he’d never noticed before how many obstacles to free-flowing traffic littered the city, and would have been glad of it now, had the taxi not blown through the lights on amber, and sailed away towards Clerkenwell.

  Of course, if there’s one thing worse than acting like a jerk, it’s acting like a jerk and still coming up empty-handed …

  Min didn’t even decelerate. He clipped someone’s bag as he scythed through pedestrians, and shopping scattered in his wake, a welter of apples and jars and packets of pasta. Someone screamed. The cab was way ahead of him now, might not even be the right cab, and Louisa-in-his-head was gearing up for another verbal onslaught—Getting killed will prove what, exactly?—when Min’s heart stopped as a big white van emerged from his left, directly in his path.

  The Russian opened a drawer and found cigarette papers and a packet of tobacco, embossed with rich brown curly writing. Rolling a prisoner’s pinch into a thin smoke, he asked Lamb, “You here to kill me?”

  “I hadn’t given it any thought,” Lamb said. “You deserve killing?”

  Katinsky considered. “Lately, not so much,” he said at last. Then, “There’s a shop on Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff.” He scratched a match, and held the flame to his tightly-rolled cylinder, starting a small fire he swiftly sucked out of existence. “At any given moment, half its customers used to be spooks. You’ve been described to me on many occasions.” Match extinguished, he replaced it in the box. “So, what do you want with me, Jackson Lamb?”

  “Little chat about old times, Nicky.”

  “There are no old times. Don’t you keep up? Memory Lane’s been paved over. They built a shopping mall on it.”

  “You can take the man out of Russia,�
� Lamb observed, “but he’ll still reckon he’s some kind of tragic fucking poet.”

  “You think it’s amusing,” Katinsky said, “but not so long ago a mall was what the queen rode down on her horse, and there was only one of them. Now everywhere you look there’s a mall, and they’ve all got cookie stores and burger joints. So I’ll tell you what’s really funny, what’s really funny is, you still think it was Red Russia the Americans beat.” He spat into the wastepaper basket. Whether that was additional comment or a smoking-related necessity wasn’t clear. “So you want to take me down Memory Lane,” he continued, “it’ll be a forced march, you understand?”

  Lamb said, “I get the feeling making you shut up is gunna be the hard part.”

  He waited while Katinsky locked up, then followed him down the stairs and onto the street. Katinsky led Lamb past six pubs before reaching one he approved of. Inside, he stopped to take bearings before heading for a corner, which either meant he was new here, or hoped Lamb would think he was. He wanted red wine. Lamb might have been surprised about this, if he was capable of surprise at another man’s drinking habits.

  At the bar he ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch. Memory Lane stretched in both directions. He deserved a drink. Because his scotch came first he drained it in two swallows while the wine was poured, then ordered another, and carried them back to the table.

  “Cicadas,” he said, sliding Katinsky’s wine in front of him.

  Katinsky’s reaction was behind the beat. He lifted his glass, swirled it as if it were something to savour and not just crappy house red, and took a sip. Then said, “What?”

  “Cicadas. A word you used in your debriefing. At Regent’s Park.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did. I watched the video.”

  Katinsky shrugged. “And? You think I remember everything I said in a debriefing nearly twenty years ago? I’ve spent most of my life trying to forget stuff, Jackson Lamb. And this, this is ancient history. The bear is sleeping. Why poke it with a stick?”