I'd struck gold.
Foolish, big man. If I didn't get to him first, the insurance company would string him up. He had not only brought the telecine transfer he was using on the Lightworks with him to Amsterdam, but also the cans of master negative. They were all there together in that little room where anything could happen to them, particularly if some bitter hippie burglar happened to break in.
The room was soundproofed. So I smashed up the Lightworks and didn't mind how much noise I made. I hurled it around the room until I'd reduced it to little bits. There was no need for it, of course. I could simply have wiped the disks. But I enjoyed it. Maybe I was getting my anger and frustration out. Maybe it was the aroma. Maybe in amongst the rows of calming candles in the shop I'd accidentally picked out something made from mayhem berries.
When I'd finished I turned to the cans of film negative. They were not only heavy but awkward to carry. I went into one of the storage rooms and rooted about. I came up with a sack of discarded film scripts. From the titles and the few lines I read I guessed that Paralog had got its start by producing its own porn films. I emptied them all out and returned to Sean's room with the sack. I filled it with the cans of negative and then threw in the telecine transfer for good measure. As I pulled the sack up onto my back it jarred against the desk and knocked over the aromatherapy candle. It rolled off the desk and into a set of files nestling in the corner. As I left the room I saw that the files were beginning to smoulder. I paused, but then thought, fuck it, why bother, it'll burn itself out.
It had taken less than fifteen minutes. Master burglar.
I exited Paralog, sack on my back, and heaved it over the low wall. I started walking. As I stepped onto the bridge I saw that there was a young fella already crossing. He was meandering somewhat. Drink or drugs. He said something as I passed and I said sorry, no speako da lingo.
Moments later, back on solid ground, I was thrown up against a wall. The kid from the bridge, and another guy, bigger, out of nowhere, but brandishing a knife.
Muggers.
They were jabbering something and pointing at the bag. Robbing a robber. I had the Glock in my pocket, but there was a knife against my chest and my hands were pinned back by the bag.
'Look,' I said, 'there's nothing of value in here.'
They started to pull at the bag. I held tight.
'Look,' I said, pulling back, 'my uncle fought at Arnhem.'
The bigger mugger paused. 'What?' he said.
'My uncle saved your fucking life and all you can do is rob me!'
The other one, the smaller one, looked up at his partner and said something. The big guy spat back. He moved the knife up to my face. 'We are Turkish, what do we know about Arn-ham?'
'On the other hand,' I said, 'my grandfather died at Gallipoli, so you've had your fun.' I gave another pull at the bag. The big guy zipped the knife down my face and I felt blood begin to run. 'Jesus fuck!' I spat and pushed the bag out at him. He stumbled back with the weight of it and fell onto the cobbles. The bag came open and cans of film began to roll out left, right and centre. Several sat up on their rims and made for the canal. The muggers stared perplexedly at their booty as it made for freedom. As I pulled at it my gun snagged in the lining of my jacket pocket.
Across the canal the windows of Paralog Films exploded outwards with a deafening crash. Flames licked out.
My two muggers stood frozen for a moment, then looked from the fire to me to the cans of film scattered on the ground. Then they ran for it. My gun finally came free. I raised it. I aimed from one to the other, then thought better of it.
I was scrabbling around the ground trying to get as many of the cans as possible back into the sack when Maurice screeched to a halt beside me. His window was down and there were a thousand questions written on his face, highlighted by the glow of the rapidly escalating inferno across the canal. Thankfully he asked none of them. He jumped out and helped me gather up the last of the cans. Then we lifted the sack together and dropped it into the boot. We slammed it shut and hurried back into the cab. We could hear a police siren somewhere in the distance. Maurice kept his lights off as he began to negotiate the backstreets away from the canal.
We didn't speak.
I sat with my eyes closed and thought about my next move.
31
Sean came to survey the damage in the first light of dawn. In fact, he wasn't the slightest bit interested in the damage, but in the fate of his film. When he saw the state of the place he threw a fit. Paralog Films was a charred wreck. What was still standing didn't look like it would for long. Men in hard hats surveyed the smouldering ruins and tutted. As Maurice reported it, idling in the coffee shop across the way, smoking one of his new cigars and sporting another new jacket, Sean ranted and raved. He would not be consoled.
Understandable, of course.
Alice tried talking to him, but he marched about, tearing his hair out, which was a bad move for a middle-aged man marching down route Bobby Charlton. His security guards, many hundreds of pounds of solid muscle and sunglasses, stood helplessly, nervously fingering their ears for urgent messages over nonexistent earplugs. They had once worked for somebody important. Sean, clearly, no longer was. His chance for an Oscar was gone. He had just proved himself unemployable by breaking the cardinal rule of the film business: don't fuck with the insurance. He could lose as many millions as he wanted at the box office, that was to be expected; they could write that off; sometimes it made more sense for a film to bomb, depending on what part of the tax year it came out. But in the movie business, insurance was God. You couldn't write off something that didn't exist, and The Brigadier might as well never have existed. The insurance companies weren't going to pay up for something so patently stupid as keeping all of the negatives and their copies in the one room, a room next to a paint store, in a building that was equipped with neither burglar alarms nor a sprinkler system. Sean had thrown his lot in with independent films, and would never be able to raise a cent again. His name was mud. He couldn't go back to the big Hollywood studios, they didn't want him. He was past his best. He couldn't open a movie any more. He had once been on the A list but had long ago slipped to near the bottom of the B. With this disaster he would be automatically relegated down into the Ms and Ns, the nether world of showbiz; he'd be presenting weekly aerobic workouts on cable television or providing the commentary for videos like You Won't Believe These Crazy Golf Shots Volume 5. Within a couple of years he'd be shooting up methadone in a shop doorway on Rodeo Drive and telling everyone he used to be big in pictures and wailing a second-hand I didn't get small, the movies did.
Something like that.
Then the boy, not more than twelve, but already passing hash on the streets, slipped through the security guards and ran up to Sean. He was just about to swipe him away when the boy produced a can of film with The Brigadier written on the front from inside his jacket. And everything changed.
Sean hungrily opened it, realising already that it was too light to actually contain film, but suddenly hopeful that all was not lost. A light at the end of the tunnel.
A note. Love the movie, let's talk.
I had guessed he would think it was Michael O'Ryan behind the fire and wouldn't swallow the bait. No point in getting the film back if he was going to get killed. Posthumous Oscars weren't half as much fun. I had debated several ways to reassure him and settled on the simplest. Don't worry, I'm not the Colonel. O'Ryan, master of machiavellian plotting and dastardly deeds, would not have come up with anything quite so straightforward.
The note was in Maurice's handwriting, just to throw the curious off the trail. He volunteered willingly, and plainly didn't realise that doing so implicated him in blackmail, burglary, arson and murder, which just goes to prove that big tippers can be right cunts as well.
After the message, the instructions.
Alice was looking at him, the guards were looking at him, the boy had already slipped away, forgotten. Maurice was waitin
g in his taxi on the other side of the bridge. Sean said something to his wife Maurice couldn't hear, then walked straight across the bridge and climbed into the back of the taxi.
Maurice roared off before the door was closed. He saw the security guards scrambling for their own vehicle in the mirror, forgetting Alice, who stood stunned and abandoned.
I stood and waited on a bridge over Herengracht. It was only a few hundred yards from my base in the Ambassade Hotel. I had had enough of misty country roads at dawn. It was a fine bright morning and the canalside was already busy with bicycles and the first of the tourist barges were cruising past, their bug-eyed passengers blissfully unaware that I was contemplating murder.
Ordinarily I might have considered compromise. But it wasn't like I was dealing with a good guy, and, besides, the news from home was not good. In his time Mouse had dealt with some of the biggest scumbags in Ireland, and Sam was one of them, but between them they hadn't turned up the merest hint of a clue to my family's whereabouts. If the graffiti I'd pointed out to him in the Polaroid still existed, it wasn't in a location frequented by anyone with a criminal record.
They called in the police.
I exploded.
'Dan, we had no choice.'
'He said he would kill them if . . .'
There was nothing else we could do. We've tried everything.'
'You're condemning them to death.'
'No. You are. By not telling the police. They've promised nothing will leak out.'
'Things always leak out.'
'They won't. Dan, it's for the best.'
I sighed.
'How're you doing, Dan?'
'I'm on the point of murder, thank you.'
'You're going to go through with it?'
'What choice do I have?'
He shrugged. He was on the phone, but I could tell by the silence that he was shrugging.
'Okay then,' I said.
Mouse told me the police were searching high and low, but mostly low. Anybody who asked was told they'd been tipped off about an undeclared IRA explosives dump in a perilous state. Sinn Fein denied all knowledge, about the IRA, and the dump, but assisted in the search by sending out kids to throw stones.
It was their fifth day without food.
It was pleasant in the early-morning sun. I remained in black and, despite a shower, still smelt of smoke and mayhem berries. Maurice's cab pulled up and Sean got out. If he'd bothered to look, he would have found his precious cans of film in the boot of the cab. If he was surprised to see me standing there with my hands in my pockets, it didn't show. If he could see that one of those hands was shaking through the jacket as it gripped the Glock, he didn't say.
Sean walked straight up. Behind him Maurice parked the car, then stepped up onto the bridge; he nodded at me, then leant against the fence half a dozen yards away, and lit another cigar. He was smoking them like they were coming into fashion.
Sean smiled. 'I didn't think the book was that important to you,' he said.
'It wasn't,' I said.
'So what's the problem? Don't tell me you're hurt. Don't tell me you haven't been thrown out of better places than mine. Don't tell me you object to my little social addiction. Worst of all, for godsake, don't tell me you're a film critic.'
'Right on all four counts, actually, but it's not why I'm here.'
'Perhaps it's because you've been fucking my wife.'
'No, it's not that.'
'I don't mind. Habitual drug addiction routinely leads to impotence. She's young and she's beautiful but she'll never leave me for you, not in a million years.'
'I don't want her to leave you. I'm not fucking her. She's very concerned about you.'
'So taking the film, it's meant to achieve something, it's meant to encourage me into Betty Ford?'
'Michael O'Ryan is holding my wife and son hostage.'
He looked at me for a moment; his square jaw dropped a little. 'Oh. Shit.'
'Shit indeed.'
He gripped the guardrail and looked down into the canal. 'Are they okay?'
'I presume not. He says he's starving them to death.'
'Seriously?'
'Is there any other way?'
He shook his head. 'I'm sorry. The bastard. He'd go to those lengths to get the script changed?'
'No, of course he wouldn't.'
'I mean, I can do a lot in the editing, but even so . . .'
'It's not about the film, Sean. It's about the money.'
'Money? What money?'
'The three million you ripped off of him.'
'What?'
'Don't fuck me around, Sean. Don't give me any of your acting bullshit. You fucked him over, and O'Ryan's not the kind of guy you fucking fuck over.'
'I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'
'You're not making this easy.'
'I'm not making what easy?'
'The fact that I have to kill you.'
He straightened back from the guardrail. 'What the fuck do you have to kill me for?'
'So that my wife and son can live.'
He blew air up into his cheeks and out. 'Look,' he said, his voice softer, 'I don't know what bullshit Michael's been giving you, but as far as I'm concerned we've had a bit of a tiff about the interpretation of his character. That's as far as it goes, Dan. I don't know where that stuff about three million comes into it, and I don't know anything about your family. You think I can afford to have drug money in a picture about a gangster? Seriously?'
'No, I don't think you can, but what I think hardly matters. What matters is you ripped him off. I know what method acting is, and you probably deserve your Oscar, but not at the expense of my wife and child.'
'Dan, I killed three thousand aliens in Light Years from Home, I healed the sick in Messiah. I don't think there's life on other planets and I don't walk on water in real life. I have not ripped anyone off.'
'Well, I'm sorry,' I said, 'but I don't believe you.'
I removed the Glock from my pocket.
'Dan, I'm only an actor. You're not a murderer.'
'You're not, and I am.'
My finger was on the trigger. I thought of Trish and Little Stevie, and bending for the soap in prison. I thought of making love to my wife and a tiny white coffin and wondered how many it would take to carry it.
Kill him.
A car door slammed to my left. I glanced around. Three men getting out of a car. Another car on the other side of the bridge. More men. Sean took a step back.
Fuck it. Squeeze the trigger.
They were hurrying, but not racing.
They were still far enough away.
Sean's eyes were wide with terror. He had hidden it well, right up to the point where he would die.
So die.
But even as I squeezed the trigger, there was a gun at my ear.
Impossible, the men were still coming up onto the bridge . . .
A familiar voice, yet more coherent than before, hissed, 'Police! Put down your weapon!'
I turned ever so slightly.
Maurice, with a gun in his left and a badge in his right.
'Police! Put down your weapon!'
32
Those time-stands-still moments.
They can be as innocuous as a driving test decision or a bluff at poker.
Or as vital as a baby's first cry as long as an old man's last breath.
Pull the trigger, save my wife and child.
But die myself.
Or hold off, seek another way, live to fight another day.
Ultimately, we are all selfish.
I dropped the gun. Maurice said, 'Well done.'
'Your English suddenly got good,' I said.
'Better,' he corrected.
Sean O'Toole blew out of his cheeks and stepped back into the arms of the plain-clothes police officers. Before he could speak they bundled him back over the bridge and into one of the cars.
Maurice bent to pick up my gun. He opened it, show
ed me it wasn't loaded, smiled, then slipped it into a jacket pocket, and holstered his own.
I said, 'What's going on?'
'You don't kill movie stars in our town, Dan, that's what's going on.'
'But why . . . the gun . . . if you weren't going to t
'Because we wanted to see what you would lead us to, and you've done very well.' There was the merest hint of sympathy in his voice, but I was in no mood to appreciate it. 'We understand why you're here,' he said, 'but that's out of our control. You're a lucky man; if we wanted to we could put you in prison for importing heroin into Amsterdam. We've been following you since Dublin, Dan. You were the worst courier the Garda ever saw. We could add another ten years for burning down Paralog Films. But as it is, you've led us on to bigger things, so we're prepared to look the other way.'
'What bigger things?'
'It has nothing to do with you any more.'
'It has everything to . . .'
'No, it hasn't. I'm sorry.'
I sighed. I bent down and rested my head on the guardrail. A barge emerged from beneath the bridge. Tourists waved up. Maurice put a hand on my shoulder, 'Go home, Dan, back to Ireland, find your wife and child. You can't do anything more here.'
'You are killing my family.'
'No, I'm not, I'm doing my job.'
'They're starving to death.'
'I'm sorry. Go home, Dan. Sean's ours, you won't get near him.'
He turned and walked back across the bridge to his taxi. He opened the door and slipped into the driver's seat, then glanced back at me. He reached up and switched off the meter.
Shooting Sean Page 16
