For Those Who Know the Ending

by Mackay, Malcolm

  Usman had put together a list of alternatives, none of them any more appealing than the foreigner. He needed a second pair of hands and they had to be willing to hold a gun. There was a couple of names on the very short shortlist, but he didn’t trust either one of them. Freelancers, men that Usman had learned about through various stories of doubtful truth, and he was unhappy with them both. He knew nothing about the foreigner, and that ignorance put the little guy a step ahead.

  The phone rang, Usman looking at the screen and seeing an unknown number. He had almost given up on hearing from the foreigner at that point.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Usman?’

  ‘Yeah.’ A slight pause, working out the accent. ‘Is that Martin?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought it was. All right, cool, brilliant, you want to talk about the job, huh?’

  ‘I do want to talk about the job. I am not saying I will do the job, but I want to talk about it. Not over the phone.’

  ‘Nah, nah, not over the phone, obviously. We’ll meet. You want to pick the venue?’

  A little, gentle piece of reassurance. Usman smart enough to offer Martin control of the meeting. And it was instinct too, he asked it quickly and naturally, which should impress Martin.

  ‘You tell me somewhere, I don’t know,’ Martin said. Keeping it deadpan, all the way, accepting that he didn’t know the city well enough to pick a location.

  ‘Right, sure, no bother. There’s a flat above a Chinese takeaway in Mosspark, that’s not too far from you. There’s, like, a doorway sort of thing with steps, like a passage. Go in there and I’ll have the door up to the flats open for you. I’ll go in the back so we won’t both be seen going in the same way. We can pretend we never met if we don’t like the smell of each other, right?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Martin said.

  Usman could hear him writing the address as he recited it. They said their goodbyes, Usman grinning in triumph as he did. The gunman was halfway into the job.

  It was only after he had hung up that Martin thought about what Usman had said. Not far from you. So Usman knew where he was staying. Knew where Joanne lived. Martin’s first instinct was to be angry. When someone in the business lets you know the extent of their knowledge it’s usually some sort of threat. Work for me or else. But not this time. He calmed quickly, realizing what it was. The kid was showing his professionalism. Showing Martin that he could find things out, set things up. Trying to make himself seem like the sort of person Martin would want to work with.

  They had arranged to meet within the hour, better to get this done quickly. Better for both of them. If Usman couldn’t win Martin round then it put an end to it quickly, let both of them look for alternatives. Usman could find someone else to help him; Martin could try and find another way of earning a living. If Usman was persuasive then it let them get started on the job straight away. Preparation time was always key; whatever the job was, you needed to plan it well and that meant taking your time.

  He found the Chinese takeaway, found the passageway with the few steps leading up it that Usman had described. Martin looked up and down the street before he went in. A first meeting, always nervous, always paranoid. This could still be some sort of a set-up, although it wasn’t entirely obvious what anyone could gain from setting him up round here.

  He walked slowly along the passageway, feet scuffing a little to make some deliberate noise, kill the silence and alert Usman that he was close. There was a door on his right, ajar. He reached for it, and as he did, it pulled back. Usman was standing there, grinning when Martin stepped quickly back, ready to go on the offensive.

  ‘Don’t look so nervous, wee man. Come away on in.’ He held the door open, dressed marginally less stupidly this time. He had a T-shirt on over a long-sleeved top which looked daft to Martin, like the boy didn’t know what order to put his clothes on, but otherwise just a normal pair of jeans and trainers. No headphones or jewellery or anything else that made him visible from space.

  They went upstairs, into a dingy little flat that didn’t match the flashy style Usman had been trying to present to the world outside. As they entered the living room, Martin made a show of looking around.

  ‘This is yours?’

  ‘Nah mate, this dump isn’t really anyone’s. Guy downstairs owns it. Loads of people use it for, you know, meetings, stuff like that. Nice wee place nobody pays attention to, you know what I mean. Sit down, sit down.’

  Martin sat on one of the chairs and regarded the remarkably cheap furniture around him. A place for a meeting, but not a place you’d stay any longer than that. He looked at Usman and shrugged a little. It was up to him to start the talking.

  ‘Right, yeah, the job. Here’s the detail. I’ve known about this one for, shit, how long, couple of years at least. Had my eye on it that long, so there’s nothing I don’t know about it. What I haven’t had before now is anyone that would do the job with me. See, I mostly don’t work with people like you. Gunmen, I mean; not, like, foreign people. So I don’t really know any gunmen properly, or anyone who could do a good impression of one. The few I know of, I wouldn’t trust to do this. Got to pick the right person for a big thing like this, got to be done the right way. So I’ve been sitting on it, waiting for someone like you to come along.’

  He had that gangster trait of being able to talk about a job without ever telling you anything about it. Spend enough time building fences around the details of the bad things you did, it becomes hard for anyone to get in the gate.

  ‘You found me,’ Martin said impatiently.

  ‘Aye, yeah, so I did. So, right, the job itself. It’s a bookies. You know what a bookies is?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Good. It’s in Coatbridge. You know where that is?’

  Martin frowned a little, tried to conjure a facial expression that made it clear he could learn quickly. It would take another few months for him to learn where the places whose names he heard were in relation to each other.

  ‘Never mind, doesn’t matter, I’ll show you it anyway before we do the job and you’ll probably only go there again by accident. So there’s this bookies, and it makes enough money, they all do. Never see a poor bookie, do you? Anyway, yeah, this place makes okay money from its proper business, but that ain’t what we’re interested in. It’s been used to store and clean money for a criminal organization for a few years now. You heard of the Jamieson organization? Big bastards, their boss is in the jail?’

  Martin nodded, this one he’d heard of and remembered. ‘I know of them.’

  ‘Cool, right, well it’s them that are storing cash there. See, they make all this dirty money and sometimes they need to store the actual hard cash. Just for a wee while though, you understand, they don’t sit on dirty cash long. They have a good operation for cleaning their dirty cash as well, but a big organization like that, it’s going to get money it didn’t expect. There’s going to be money that comes in before their people have worked out how to clean it. You keeping up?’

  ‘Yes, I understand this.’

  He did understand it, seen it before. Any good criminal gang has more than one way to clean dirty money, but even the best ways have limits. You clean only the amount you can without drawing attention to how much money is flowing through the legit company doing the cleaning. And you keep the amount you clean through each legitimate business consistent over a period of months so that there are no dramatic spikes or falls in numbers. Common sense.

  It could come from any number of places. A business agreement that comes quickly, a sudden payment of a debt you thought would be paid gradually. Maybe someone owes them fifty grand and sells their house to pay it in one lump, leaving them with fifty grand to clean at once instead of fifty payments of a thousand pounds over the course of a year. So when you make a good amount of money you haven’t planned for, you have to stash it somewhere for a while, filter it into the system gradually. In the meantime, the actual ca
sh has to go somewhere. Not into a bank account, because that leaves a paper trail. You find somewhere safe to store it. A bookies would be a decent enough place, a legitimate business with a safe of its own.

  ‘Good, right. So this place, it’s run by a guy called Donny Gregor. Been in with the Jamieson organization for a good while, right proper bastard he is. Has a guy called Gavin Gauld that does a lot of work for him as well. They’re the only two there that know the place is part owned by the organization and Gauld might not even know that Gregor keeps money for them. I wouldn’t tell that arsehole anything of the sort. I have a list of all the other staff that work there but none of them are involved. We’ll keep them well out of it. If we time this right, when we hit the place Gregor will be the only one there.’

  Martin was already shaking his head angrily. This was full of holes that he could see, and probably a few more that he couldn’t.

  ‘No. You said you knew how much money would be there. You cannot know. You said there would be a lot. You don’t know that.’

  ‘Whoa, whoa, calm yourself down. I ain’t finished yet. Hear me out, right. I don’t know how much money exactly is in there right now, sure. And I won’t know exactly how much money will go in there when they make a delivery. But I know how big the Jamieson organization is, right. And I know that when they get unexpected scores, that’s where they put almost all of them in the first twenty-four hours. I think they move some of it afterwards so that it ain’t all in the same place, yeah, but they can’t do that for a while. Thing is, I know who moves the money, right. I know who delivers it there. All we got to do is wait for him to show up with the cash and that night we hit the place, clean it out.’

  He was looking at Martin with a smile on his face, trying to encourage a response. Martin just nodded. There was still uncertainty about how much money there would be, but he was probably right to assume it would be a lot, even if the amount fluctuated week to week. Certainly would be a lot if they waltzed off with the bookies’ clean money as well. And if Usman really knew who delivered the unexpected cash then they could be sure there would be something worth stealing when they went in. Watch the money arrive and move quickly.

  ‘I get you there,’ Usman said. ‘You go in the back, I cover the front. You get Gregor to hand over the cash. I can supply you a weapon, don’t you worry about that. We keep ourselves covered up at all times, obviously. Maybe write a note or something, because I don’t want you having to talk with your funny wee accent tying up your tongue in there, that’ll give the game away. But yeah, we can clean them out. Split fast, divvy up the dough and start to plan our next big score. Huh? Come on, it’s great, right? Foolproof.’

  Martin was silent for twenty very long seconds.

  ‘He can’t complain,’ Usman said, cutting in. ‘He can’t go to the cops. We leave his clean money the fuck alone, only take the Jamieson cash, then he can’t even mention it to his own employees, see?’

  ‘I see,’ Martin said slowly. Then said, ‘No.’

  ‘No? What d’you mean no? No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aye, I got that. But why not?’

  ‘You know this city well, yes?’

  ‘Course I bloody do, this is my town, this is. Don’t let the exotic good looks fool you, wee man, I was born and raised here. Don’t doubt my knowledge of this place.’

  Martin nodded. ‘I don’t doubt it. So you know this organization you will steal from is dangerous. This man, this Gregor, doesn’t complain to the police. Of course he doesn’t, because he doesn’t need to. He complains to Jamieson, or whoever runs Jamieson’s business now that this man is in jail. I know these things. Trust me. These big organizations, the safety of their money is the most important thing in the world to them. They will do very bad things to make it safe,’ he said solemnly, speaking from experience. ‘Money is more important to them than people. They will kill you for stealing from them. Trust me. I know. I have done the killing.’

  Usman looked at him, frowning. That easy grin was finding it hard to surface now. ‘I know that. Listen to me, Martin, right. I know about this job. You know about this job. Nobody else knows about this job. Even my own fucking brother I haven’t told. My own brother, you understand that. I tell him everything. Haven’t told him about this one, because I get it. You and me are the only ones who can know if we’re going to get this done right. You go in through the back and you clean it out. You don’t talk a word. Maybe, I don’t know, you wear wedges or something to make you look taller. No offence, but you’re wee enough to get noticed for it. Don’t open your bloody gob either. You get the cash, I drive you away. That’s it, wee man. That’s it all. They think you worked alone. They don’t know who you are and they got no way of finding out, if we both keep our traps shut. You hide the money properly; only start spending any of it a few months from now. We play this careful and right and we’ll walk with good money. You know it.’

  Martin didn’t say anything. Usman was already working out how much the little Czech liked to use silence. It wasn’t a lack of language skills. Well, not entirely. Martin knew that silence was unnerving, kept the other half of the conversation on their toes. You talk about killing people, you talk about robbing a place, and most people get chatty. Nerves make people talk. Silence is scary in this setting. Use it. Usman got that.

  ‘I still think no,’ Martin said quietly. ‘I am new here. The risk . . .’

  ‘You won’t do a job in this city that doesn’t have risk,’ Usman told him. Not pressing him, not being aggressive. He was good at keeping his tone conversational, even when the first chance at nailing a lucrative job he’d been eyeing for so long was wriggling out of his grasp. ‘I don’t know what it was like back in . . . wherever-the-fuck-avakia, but round here there ain’t one safe person to work for. You work for Jamieson and you piss off a bunch of other people that don’t like Peter Jamieson. You work for Alex MacArthur and you piss off a big bunch of people who don’t like him. You work for James Kealing and you piss off a whole other bunch of bastards you don’t want to piss off. You work for the people you’ve already been working for and you’ll have pissed off someone along the way. In fact, I’ll tell you exactly who you pissed off. You heard of Chris Argyle?’

  Martin shrugged and nodded. He had heard the name being mentioned. He knew that Argyle was the man from whom the hairy Pole and his people feared reprisal. They were treading on Argyle’s toes, and Argyle was very protective of those tootsies.

  ‘You worked against him. If he knows it, then you already got yourself an enemy you don’t want in this city. Him and all the wee tough nuts he’s got working for him. All that work you do, man, anything for organizations, that’s a real good way to make enemies. Good way to make yourself a target for people with a good aim. You pull a job like this and nobody knows it was you, nobody can pin anything on you, right. So you make no enemy. Means you don’t boost your reputation round here, but you don’t need reputation for a gig like this. Man, there’s less risk doing this than doing the shitty wee jobs you been doing since you got here.’ Usman finished with the sort of satisfied shrug that suggested he had created an argument that couldn’t be countered.

  Martin fell back into silence. Not to try and unnerve Usman, this time, just because he couldn’t think of anything to say. The arrogant bastard was right, there was nothing left to argue with.

  3

  That wasn’t the only attempt at recruitment going on in the city around that time. The criminal industry was always changing, people coming and going. New blood needed after old blood was spilled. Occasionally some very old blood was lured back to the life, and that’s what the second meeting was about that day.

  Nate Colgan had been careful with the phone call. He wanted to talk to Gully; he didn’t want to talk to anyone else. Least of all did he want to talk to Gully’s wife, Lisa. She was one of the few people in this world that Nate was in any way afraid of. Afraid of her sadness, afraid of her decency. She was to be avoided at all
costs. If he called and she answered, it would upset her. The last thing she wanted was Gully working with people like Nate again, so the last thing Nate wanted was her finding out.

  Stephen ‘Gully’ Fitzgerald was, to put it simply, the best. Just the goddamned best. There was no one, for a good few years, that could touch him when it came to being muscle in the criminal industry. He was tough beyond measure, ruthless and smart. He was also trustworthy and likeable, which was why Nate was calling. Must have been more than ten years since he was at the top of his game, sure, and people’s memories are short. Now Nate Colgan was just about the best in the city, adorned with a skill-set Gully would have found familiar. There were people like Mikey Summers, Conn Griffiths and Jamie Stamford, too. Reputation belonged to them now because reputation was fickle, but for a while, Gully Fitzgerald was the undisputed king.

  The reason he was the best was because he understood the business properly. He knew how to hurt people, how to terrify people, obviously, but he also knew where to draw the line. Gully never went too far, but he always went just far enough. Gully never had any little accidents. If he did you serious harm it’s because that’s what the job was. You took all that experience, the intelligence and the charm, and inevitably people learned from him. It was no coincidence that some of the best muscle in Glasgow in the last ten years had worked under Gully’s wing when they were learning the business. Alan Bavidge had, and he’d been damn good at the job. Hadn’t kept him out of his grave, but you needed to be more than good to avoid that. Nate had worked with him as well, modelled some of his work on Gully. Nate was a darker personality though, which was why his reputation was maybe even more fearsome and why nobody ended up learning from him.