She said, over her shoulder, to Kenny, ‘You remember what I said when we were bringing that boy home. I said, ‘‘My promise to him. I’ll nail those who did it. Believe me, I will. As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’’ I failed to honour my word. Fucking hurts, Kenny.’
‘You did what you could, Boss. It’ll be the dagoes that field the blame – couldn’t stand up when we needed them to. Folded at the first whiff of grapeshot, like always. None of it’ll be at your door.’
Dottie said, ‘Can’t do more than your best, Boss.’
That the strength of her team was a delusion came hard to Winnie Monks.
‘I owed him more. When we get in we should damage a litre of something. Soften the pain. Sorry for the maudlin stuff.’
‘. . . but it was a long time ago. It has served me well and enhanced my reputation.’
The Major smiled thinly. He was relaxed and comfortable in the car and the lawyer drove smoothly. The man once known as the Tractor had coaxed from him the story of the missing fingers. He had told it factually, using the language of the military to describe the malfunction of the supposed recoilless weapon. He had grimaced when he added that the pain of a lost finger was as nothing in comparison to the pain if the position had been overrun by those savages – ‘Wonderful fighters, the best, heroic’ – and they had been taken alive. ‘I think what did me most good was what I said to the senior man. I was dosed with morphine, should have been on my back, and delayed shock had set in. I was told afterwards that my voice had dripped contempt. What I said to that idiot, with an army of juniors listening, cemented the legend about me. It’s the way of life. You have no idea what’s hidden behind a corner. I had no idea that I would bawl at a veteran commander and ridicule him.’
‘Your reputation has travelled, but the story was the better for coming from you.’
‘Rarely done. I don’t care to live in the past.’
The headlights were on, and he saw the rows of white-painted villas, the flowers in tubs and baskets, signs on walls and balconies. The lawyer had said that half of the coast was now for sale at idiot prices.
‘But from the past you have a good roof and solid protection.’
A girl was walking in the road ahead, going slowly up the hill.
The Major snorted, almost derisively. ‘Because I’m a whore, do whatever is asked of me, and am paid. I have my own life, but I belong to them, and am not allowed to forget it.’
She was a young girl and did not turn to gaze into the lights but edged off the tarmac on to the verge. She tripped and the weight of the rucksack almost toppled her. The lawyer pulled out to give her room as she regained her balance, then the car powered ahead, but the Tractor rapped on his shoulder. He trod on the break pedal and the car stopped.
The Tractor leaned across him. The window was down, an offer made. The lawyer reached to the passenger door in the front, pushed it open and gestured at the empty seat. Would she accept a ride up the hill? The Major was told that the girl was British, staying close to the villa on holiday. She looked inside and seemed, for a moment, to weigh her options.
Her eyes caught his. There was an old irritation at the side of his nose. He rubbed it, then dropped his hand. He stared back at her. Most people, when his gaze locked on their eyes, averted them. She stared through him, then stepped back. She said, ‘Thank you, no. I prefer to walk, but thank you for the offer.’
She was walking again. The lawyer pulled the door shut, and the Tractor raised his window.
They went on up the hill and the girl was forgotten. The Major saw the distant sunset on the mountain and across the sea. The wind had died and the cloud had broken up. Small lights were sprinkled below, then the lines of the main highway showed clear, and the town, and there was a straight slash where the lights ended and the sea began. Perhaps the Tractor caught his mood. He told the Major that the house, where they would talk, eat and sleep before the morning’s drive into Portugal, was named Villa del Aguila. It had an eagle’s view of the coast. On a small adjacent plot there was a collapsing bungalow, notable only for its name – Paradise. It was where the girl was going, where she was staying with her boyfriend. No one wondered why she had with her a bulging rucksack.
Another bend. He asked if this were the only route to the villa. It was. They straightened, surged again. The next bend was sharper, and the lawyer slowed to work his way round it.
In the lights, a couple sat on a stone that had been cut into a rough cube. They twisted away from the glare. They were, for their age, smartly dressed. She wore a coat that would have been suitable for a slow walk in the evening chill on the Paseo Maritimo, and he had on a raincoat. Then they were gone.
They came to the gates. He saw the wire, and the camera followed him. The wall was high, well built, and arc lights had come on. The gates opened.
The lawyer took the car up the last slope.
The Tractor told the Major he was welcome.
He was out of the car, stretched and drank in the view of the night lights of Marbella below. He could smell the flowers on the bushes. This was not a hotel, as they had had in Nouakchott or Baku, or a hovel like the one in the mountains of Morocco, but a home. His own in Pskov was at the edge of the marshes. Pskov had been ravaged by Estonian police battalions following the main armoured and infantry units in the Great Patriotic War. It was a backwater, where central government’s money seldom reached. The thought of home made the Major feel melancholy. Images flitted: his wife, who was indifferent to him, the Romanian whore, who had partially amused and partially excited him. An argument and an accusation, the glitter of diamond earrings. The face of the boy he had trusted, and the howl of the slipstream when a door was opened. . . . They raced in his head.
The Tractor had told him he was beside Paradise. The Major believed it.
The lawyer took his hand and shook it. There was barking at the back. The lawyer drove away and the gates closed behind the car.
Why did a young woman refuse a lift when she was struggling up a steep hill? Why did an old couple, dressed in their best, sit in the darkness on a road that led nowhere? He didn’t know, didn’t care. He thought the place he had come to was an island of safety. He paused while the front door was opened and one of the Tractor’s men darted inside to silence the howl of the alarm system. Guns were produced from his hosts’ belts and made safe, then were dumped noisily on the glass surface of the table nearest the door. He saw an anteroom off the hall with a bank of TV screens inside it. He heard the dog again. Around him the furnishings were not those of a palace or a hotel. They were decent and used. They were what his wife might have chosen and . . . He could not wipe away the melancholy.
‘Did you mean it that the boy was the best? Were you joking? Or was it true?’
‘You didn’t. Why didn’t you?’
‘There wasn’t a shot.’
‘He was out of the car. He stood there, looking around. The photograph was in front of your face.’
‘And he was moving. There were others in front of him.’
‘The head was clear,’ Jonno protested.
‘It’s my decision when I shoot.’
They were in darkness. Sparky was back from the table, behind it. The rifle was across it, but he had not picked it up. Twice his hands had wavered towards the stock but they had not lifted it and aimed. At first, when the men had pitched out of the lead car, Jonno had stared down at them. He’d expected the rifle to be at the shoulder, and maybe that the cocking would have been done. He’d seen the faces. The picture was on the table. Recent enough, three days old. Same shirt, same lightweight jacket, same stubble on the face, same brush moustache, and the hair hadn’t grown across the scalp. He recognised him. And Sparky hadn’t lifted the rifle, let alone armed it.
They had gone inside.
Marko had led, the target had followed, and the Russian had been a pace after them. He had dropped the photograph on the table and done circuits of the room. What bloody business was it of Jo
nno’s? Who was Jonno to judge the man? He had jumped in and attacked. You didn’t. Why didn’t you?
‘It’s what you’re here for.’
He wished he hadn’t spoken. Sparky’s eyes held a haunted look, like those of a hunted animal . . . or of a man edging back from the medical condition that affected more soldiers than wounds from roadside bombs. The woman in the photograph had put him in this place, given him this theatre to play his part. He wished he hadn’t said it and hesitated . . . The front door closed. He heard it. As Sparky did.
Then there were steps on the stairs and the creak of the two loose boards, one at halfway, the other near the top.
Now Sparky had the weapon in his hands, dragged back the lever, and lifted it to his shoulder, aiming the barrel at the door.
Why was Jonno there? It seemed a good time to come up with an answer. Why was he not struggling for a train on the Central Line with all the other morons who thought it a life worth living? The door might fly open, and a man’s shape might be silhouetted against the light. He would be as helpless as the man carried, trussed, to the chipper.
Something about being a little man, about being kicked from dawn to dusk by the barons of the world. Something about staring into the face of the big player and not backing off. Something about being his own man . . . He gripped the chair Snapper had used and lifted it.
The handle turned.
Jonno heard Sparky’s sharp intake of breath, and from the corner of his eye he saw the finger flick from the guard to the trigger. He had the chair’s feet off the carpet and held it up. He could plough forward into the doorway and be a little protected by the seat.
A sliver of light ran under the door.
Jonno saw Sparky’s thumb move to a lever and depress it. He assumed it was the safety catch and that the weapon could now be fired. The finger hovered on the trigger guard. Their backs were to the window.
Her voice came through the door. ‘It’s me. I came back. Try not to shoot me. I’m coming in. Like I said, don’t shoot me.’
It opened and she came in.
Sparky cleared his weapon, ejecting a shell that hit the table, cannoned across the floor and stopped by Jonno’s feet. The chair fell from his stiffened fingers and barked his shin. Sparky might have shot her. Jonno might have battered her.
Jonno struggled to know why he, himself, had stayed. He could not imagine why she had come back – and he could not have formulated the question.
She dumped her rucksack on the floor.
Jonno thought she looked good, sweaty and grimy. In London she would have curled her lip at any vagrant stuffed into a doorway, looking half as destitute as she did. Posie said she would make tea. Sparky said no, the kitchen was clean and they had a water bottle. They wanted nothing.
Posie said, ‘And you’ve company, competition. They’re down the road having a cigarette, waiting for the dark.’
18
‘You could have had the shot and you bottled it.’
Too dark now for Jonno to see Sparky’s face.
‘At that range, still with some daylight and arc lights – and the sight on it – you could have counted the hairs in his moustache. But you didn’t fire.’
Jonno didn’t know whether his words hit, as intended, or were deflected, or to what limit of control he pushed Sparky.
‘The woman backed you. She reckoned you’d shoot.’
Posie had been in the bathroom but was now standing by the door.
‘Did she rate you? Or were you just the easiest man for her to lay her hands on?’
She didn’t intervene, but he heard her shift her weight. Jonno had a postage-stamp knowledge of psychiatry and knew no one who had had an incapacitating mental illness. Frustration and fear drove his attack.
‘They had this guy, years back, who was kicked to death – so the photographer said – and the great plan was screwed up. She knew it probably would be and put the rifle into the equation, but it depended on your nerve. She built on shifting sand.’
His instinct was to attack and draw out the anger. Then Sparky would take the bloody shot and they could bug out.
‘Are you going to go home and tell them, “Sorry and all that, didn’t fancy it. Never knew the guy who was murdered. You picked the wrong man”?’
He had been ready for the sound of the shot to batter the walls and beat in his ears. The target would have collapsed, maybe head gone like JFK’s in the Dallas cavalcade, then the slamming of the window, the charge down the stairs, out of the front door, and dumping the weapon as agreed. They’d have gone down the slope in front of Villa Paraiso’s gates, taking a route where the camera wouldn’t show them. It was all worked out. He had been ready, tensed, and the shot had not come.
‘Why not go now, Sparky? Get it over with, hit the road.’
A fraction of light came into the room from the window and caught the dulled metal of the barrel but the lens of the sight was jewel bright. He had won no reaction. Theatrically, Jonno hissed through his teeth.
From the door, she said, ‘Leave it, Jonno.’
Posie came towards them. She glided past him, didn’t touch him but stood close to Sparky.
Posie said, ‘They’re Myrtle Fanning and Izzy Jacobs. She has swollen feet and doesn’t walk well, and he has blood-pressure problems. I think they’re from career-criminal families. They were on the road coming up, sitting on a stone and staring out over the coastline. There were ships for them to watch. They were smoking. They’ve come for Pavel Ivanov, next door. Why? Because Myrtle’s husband was Mikey. Used to do wages snatches and jewellers. I talked a bit. They talked more. Mikey’s life, blagging and thieving they called it, was a long time ago. Izzy described himself as a trader, and I suppose he “lost” stolen stuff for them. Mikey had a nephew called Tommy King. Tommy King had an issue with Pavel Ivanov and came here to sort it out. Tommy King was – in their words – an arrogant little chancer, a rat but family, and they haven’t seen or heard from him since. I said he’d gone into a chipper. They took it pretty much in their stride. “Respect” is important to them. They felt Mikey Fanning should have had respect when he came to find out what had happened to his nephew. They knew he’d had his legs taken off, that they were dumped on a beach down the coast, and that the rest of him was in a car abandoned in a quarry, then set on fire. I reckon Myrtle’s about seventy, and Izzy Jacobs may be two years older. He was Mikey’s best friend. Izzy showed me what he’d hired from a friend, on a twenty-four-hour rate, and he had to put down a deposit as well as the rental. It was a Jericho 941, a pistol manufactured in Israel, they told me. They wouldn’t consider going to the police to report Mikey and his nephew as missing persons who had each set out to visit the Russian. She said that would be “snitching” and he said it would be “touting”. They haven’t brought food with them, but Izzy has a silver hip flask with Scotch in it, ten-year malt, wasted on me. They didn’t ask how I knew what I’d told them. They’re pretty calm. I don’t think they have a plan – they were just going to see how things worked out. Their intention’s clear enough, though. They want to kill him.’
Neither Jonno nor Sparky said anything. They didn’t ask why she’d come back.
She said, ‘You’re two big boys. Are you going to leave the heavy lifting to the pensioners?’
He was entranced. Outside, at the front, there was the view down to the coast – lights, serenity, beauty and isolation. At the back, there was the tended garden, the dark outline of a cliff, no lights beyond the trees and an impression of total privacy. A word came back to him: ‘home’. He had been led into the kitchen, where it was explained that the wives of Alex and Marko were in Serbia, visiting family, that there were ‘issues’ that made it ‘difficult’ for the men to travel with them. The Serbs would cook – they would attempt a pork dish that was traditional in their country. There were plastic toys on the floor but shoved into corners, and the wives’ aprons hung on the back of the door. Beers had come out of the refrigerator. He travelled wi
th hard men, and met hard men in conference where deals were done; he enacted a sentence of death on other hard men, and he saw the way that his warrant officer and his master sergeant relaxed in the warmth of the kitchen, and drank from the bottles’ necks. It was the toys that captivated him. When his own children had been small he was still the veteran from Afghanistan, with the mutilation, and employed inside the organ of State Security. When they were a little older he had been sacked without warning or reason and had had to fight and claw himself into niches, to kill for new masters and run errands for oligarchs.
When they had gone to Afghanistan, Grigoriy had been married with twin daughters. The week after he had lost his finger a letter had reached Jalalabad: his wife was now with an officer and wanted a divorce. He had told the Major and the master sergeant, then shrugged. They had no contact.
Ruslan told of coming home after dismissal from State Security and finding his wife being fucked by a gas-meter inspector. It was known the official had spent the subsequent seven weeks in a hospital in Novgorod, but the master sergeant had seen his rival into an ambulance with his wife clinging to the stretcher, then had taken a coach to Pskov and joined his commander.
There was laughter. More beers were opened and more aprons dug from drawers. Grigoriy would peel potatoes in the sink while Ruslan would chop herbs on the kitchen table. An assault rifle had been left near to where Ruslan worked. If the children had been there, his men would have been on the floor and building tracks for trains. Later they would talk business . . .
He thought about the strain of recent events – the travel either side of the return to Pskov, the cementing of the routes across the Black Sea, the Caucasus and into the Danube hub, the heat and baked-goat-shit smell of west Africa, the trauma of the suspicion thrown up by the Gecko, and the crossing of the strait in the storm – they might have drowned . . . He thought the Tractor read his mood.
His glass, a vodka shot, was refilled. The Serbs had weapons in their belts, but the Tractor did not.
The Outsiders Page 36
