A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  But that wasn’t it.

  I was watching a man and a young child, little more than a toddler, play on the sand with a lightweight football. They were using a pushchair and an icebox as goalposts, the child running up unsteadily to take a shot as his father crouched in the centre of the target. The child connected, giving it a clumsy but firm toe-ender. The ball wobbled in the air as it flew, lending plausibility to the man’s transparent attempt to appear wrong-footed. He collapsed to the ground, flailing an arm as the ball bounced past him. The child jumped, hands raised. The man thumped the sand, feigning the anguish of defeat.

  Sitting in the bar, there was no need to fake it. I had lost all that I had lost because I had been – and I was – defeated. In my line of work, you didn’t lick your wounds then return to the fray with renewed determination; not when defeat meant that the world knew your true name and your true visage. In defeat you may live, but not to fight another day. You may live to become faceless, to drink beer in a reassuringly crowded holiday resort, and to contemplate the person you will never again be.

  The sting of humiliation fades with time, but the loss remains, joined soon by a colder, more sober process of recrimination. The apportioning of blame – so often an opportunity for deflection and plain old denial – was simplified for me in that none of my comrades survived. That only left myself and the man who laid me low: Larry the Little Drummer Boy. As my adversary he was responsible for my defeat but not for my failure, so, much as I detested him and much as I resented what he had done to me, I knew it would be foolish and unhelpful to focus my anger upon him. Sitting in that bar, on that beach, I had come to understand that there were occasions when the pursuit of vengeance was simply undignified. Yes, I could kill him, but what would that prove? That I was the bigger man? That he was wrong to cross me? No. Because the truth was that I crossed him and, no two ways about it, I got my arse felt. Twelve of us, professionals, armed and prepared, against... well, best not dwell upon the details. When you lose despite such odds in your favour, you have to accept that you humiliated yourself. Seeking vengeance only compounds it. Let’s be honest, there is no retribution for a humiliation of that magnitude. Nor is there possible reparation to those who were counting on you.

  I failed. Me. I was gubbed. I was humiliated. My reputation was effectively erased, as surely as I knew my identity would have to be also. Even my memories were all but stolen: when I looked back upon the things I had done, I could no longer view my victories as anything other than a prelude to my ultimate defeat.

  But believe me, that was still not it.

  My nemesis, my embarrassingly improbable nemesis, did all of this to me. He destroyed my great scheme, wiped out my crew and even cast me down to what he reasonably assumed would be my death. However, my greatest wound, the strike that had me reeling ever since, he delivered with mere words.

  There were four teenage males running along the sand, lanky and awkward, suffering that phase nature has the decency to hide inside a cocoon in other species. They bellowed guttural laughs as they bore down obliviously upon the man and his child. The child instinctively moved closer to the man as the group approached, seeking security, protection. The man smiled down, offering reassurance with a ruffling of the hair, but his eyes remained vigilantly upon the teenagers, positioning himself to deflect any accidental contact.

  The man was about my age, I estimated. He looked younger when he smiled, but his true years were revealed as his face sharpened in ready defence. The child resembled him facially; I could see that even from the bar. Even if he didn’t, there’d be no questioning the relationship: the man was alertly attendant upon the child, but the clincher was that the child looked up at him as though the world was his to command.

  ‘How does it feel to know you’ll never see your son grow up?’ I asked him, Raymond Ash, my improbable nemesis, when I thought I still held the power of life and death.

  ‘You tell me.’

  Now, I analysed and deconstructed this little exchange many, many times, in order to exhaust every avenue of interpretation, but even as I did so I knew I was merely trying to find an escape clause in the small print. I had a gun pointed at his head, so he had to say something to buy himself some time, surely? Granted, but it was still a hell of a thing to just pull out of your arse at zero notice. And as he said it, there was a cold sincerity about him, a conviction that couldn’t be entirely accounted for by mere anger or hatred. Under the circumstances you could hardly have described it as smug, but it was definitely the look of one who knew he had something on me; he wasn’t only telling me I had a son I’d never met – he was telling me he had.

  I had a son.

  Through simple deduction and arithmetic I knew who by, I knew where and I knew when. But I did not know him, not even his name, and there were insurmountable reasons why he would never – let’s face it, must never – know me.

  So how d’you like them apples?

  I didn’t want a child. Like that needs to be said. Hard to imagine fitting much in the way of family life around a busy schedule of assassination and wholesale slaughter. But discovering, knowing he was out there...oh Ray, Ray, you really stuck it to me, didn’t you? He was loose in my head, toddling around, opening lids and doors and closets, and I seriously didn’t want him to see what was inside any of them.

  That, in case you haven’t guessed, was it. He was in there, and he was running the show, whether I liked it or not.

  I had in the past transformed myself, or at least attempted to do so: cast off old trappings and emerged as what I imagined to be something new. But whether it was swapping my Queen records for Bauhaus or my Stratocaster for Semtex, the person inside never changed. Larry the Little Drummer Boy called that right. This, though, this truly felt like a transformation by some ancient power far beyond my control. This, as Freddie and the boys put it, was a kind of magic.

  I was forced to see the world through my son’s eyes, as though new to me, my perspective involuntarily transferred. It was an attempt, if not to feel him, then at least to feel what it was like to be him. Then I saw it once more through my own, and I felt a dread darker than anyone else could know; well, maybe not anyone else, but we’d be talking about a very short list. I felt a dread because I knew what kind of men were sharing this world with my son.

  Evil men. Men like me.

  I was feeling a new, alien emotion. Maybe it wasn’t alien, maybe it wasn’t even new. Maybe it was an instinct that had always been there, dormant, only recently activated. I felt a drive to protect, an anxious concern for this child of mine whose face I had never seen and whose name I did not even know.

  I sensed his vulnerability. That was something for which I’d always had a facility: I sought out the undefended, probed for weakness, then gleefully exploited it. This vulnerability instead put me on edge, compelled me to vigilance. I considered the carnage I had strewn about me, and I was appalled to think of him getting caught up in something like that: among the gormless, faceless lemmings who just couldn’t help but find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was worth more than that, more than them. Far more. He was flesh of my flesh, my son, and the thought of someone harming him did not merely worry me – it offended me.

  Deeply.

  It was for that reason, therefore, as I sat there watching another father tend and protect his offspring, that I felt unexpectedly inclined to act upon certain information which had, that day, become pressingly pertinent, but to which I would previously have been utterly indifferent.

  A four-year-old English boy had gone missing from one of the big villas on the other side of the Old Port. It was all over the island that morning; everybody knew about it. That was why the father on the beach, like every other parent there, was staying that bit nearer to his precious child, watching that bit closer, grateful he has not been punished for lacking the same vigilance twenty-four hours ago. The kid’s face was on the front of the local paper, and the police, plus dozens of volunteers,
were combing the area. Divers would be brought in too, inevitably, but only if the parents were smart enough not to tell the cops about the ransom demand they were about to receive.

  I knew this because I knew who had done it.

  All life passed that bar, there in my sun-kissed purgatory, and it didn’t have to be wearing a bikini to catch my eye. It therefore failed to escape my attention on either of the occasions that Risto Balban and his moron brother, Miko, sauntered conspicuously along the boardwalk, having evidently travelled to the resort in the past month with Club Thug. Risto used to be a big noise in the Kolichni separatist rebel movement, which employed his kidnapping and extortion skills to political and fundraising ends. Some of those funds ended up in my pocket for services rendered, which is why I knew his face. But this was before his political convictions waned in the face of his realisation that he could get up to the same hi-jinks independently, without having to hand over the resultant cash to any pompous ideologues in balaclavas.

  It was common knowledge within certain less-than-exalted circles that he and Miko had been busying themselves around southern Europe ever since. They targeted the most upmarket holiday residences (not much ransom to be got out of the Sun-reading classes) and went for kids of four years and under because they didn’t tend to be much cop when it came to giving the police descriptions. That was the ones whose parents kept it shut and paid up in time, of course. But despite their industry, you wouldn’t have heard about any of this, because the authorities in tourism-driven economies could bring rather a lot of pressure on the local plods regarding their after-the-fact interpretation of such events. Who’s going to go down to Lunn Poly and book up for ‘that resort where the wean got kidnapped last summer’? So the local kiddy-fiddler gets fitted up for murder, the ‘isolated incident’ is solved, and the Balbans move on. They’d worked Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, moving from island to island, coast to coast.

  And now they were here. Risto, the brains of the operation: lithe, sharp-featured, canny, paranoid. Miko: tubby, thick, obedient and loyal, as proven by the metal holding his legs together since a mutually unsatisfactory interrogation at the hands of the Russian military. I knew what they were here for, I knew what they would do, and at the time it didn’t seem to be of any import. I had always considered their activities vulgar, but none of my affair; indeed my principal concern when I saw them was whether my surgery would pass the eyeball test. However, now that they had actually carried out their work, I found myself experiencing an unaccustomed outrage that I knew I would not be able to contain.

  I sat in my car and watched the villa, easily identified by the police cars at the gate. I waited. I would give it an hour, I decided. This particular exercise was to ensure that my good deed went unpunished, but there were other ways of doing that if an opportunity failed to present itself that morning. After twenty minutes, however, it did. I saw the father walking out of the driveway with a pushchair, occupied by a tiny infant. He stopped briefly to exchange words with one of the cops, gesticulating towards the buggy. He was telling them he was just taking the little one for a walk, but his other hand looked like it was the only thing holding his head on, so I knew differently.

  I got out of the car and paced myself to catch up with him out of sight of the police. He stopped at a bench overlooking the water and sat down, offering the infant a bottle of water. The infant smiled at him and he smiled back, trying to hide how he was really feeling. I didn’t know whether the baby was buying it, but I certainly wasn’t.

  I sat down next to him and spoke facing out to sea. I wore large shades and a hat. Not an impenetrable disguise, but it concealed enough to blur any future picture.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I told him. ‘And the answer is no. Don’t tell the cops.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Ransom demand. Phone call. Voice disguiser, right?’

  He stared at me, standing up. I remained seated, looking out to sea.

  ‘Who are you? How do you know this?’

  ‘If they even think you’ve told the cops, they’ll kill the boy and move on. To them, it’s not worth the risk; they can start again elsewhere tomorrow. You can’t.’

  ‘Listen, tell me who the hell...’

  I turned to look at him.

  ‘I’m going to bring him back.’

  ‘You’re going to . . .’ Confusion and indignation gave way to desperate hope. ‘How?’

  ‘That’s my concern.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m in a position to help, that’s all. I can’t say any more.’

  ‘And what’s in it for you? What do you want, money? How do I know you’re not part of this?’

  ‘I’m not. And I don’t want money. But I do need two things from you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘First, that you follow my advice and don’t tell the cops.’

  ‘Christ, I haven’t even told my wife yet.’

  ‘And second, that when I return your son, you forget I ever existed.’

  ‘If you return my son, I’ll remember you for the rest of my life.’

  ‘No doubt, but you don’t need to tell anyone, do you?’

  In tracking kidnappers, knowing whodunit is far less crucial than knowing where they are, but if you know enough about the who, ascertaining the where is a straightforward – if sometimes necessarily messy – process. In this case, it was enough that I knew that the Balban brothers, not having much of a portfolio, preferred to invest their disposable income in concerns yielding a more immediate dividend: to wit, sex and charlie; or more accurately, hookers and charlie, given that the concept of Risto or Miko getting laid without paying for it was known in most cultures as rape. I knew also that they were unlikely to be indulging in the former vice while they had a houseguest, so consumption of the latter was bound to increase by way of compensation.

  I called several local suppliers, with whom I had, shall we say, a rapport, and ran message-boy Miko’s description past them. Arturo at the casino (where he was by far the busiest dealer), confirmed a portly source of much recent custom. I made a business proposition and we arranged to meet within the hour. Upon my instruction, Arturo rang the mobile number Miko gave him and offered him the drugs equivalent of a fire-sale: he told him he was having to get off the island in a hurry, and as he couldn’t take his stash with him, the whole lot was available at a knockdown price, for a limited time only. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Miko went for it with all the restrained dignity of a piranha, agreeing to a meet early that evening. I paid Arturo the shortfall in the price arranged with Miko, plus a little more for his trouble, then headed for a tool-hire outlet in the industrial area of town.

  I watched Miko emerge from a BMW and approach the casino, walking as ever like a gorilla bursting for a shite. He was dressed in an evening suit in an attempt to look inconspicuously respectable, but given that primate gait and his mangled features, the jacket and tie in between looked sufficiently incongruous that he might as well be wearing a t-shirt stating ‘In-bred gangster trash’. I watched him enter the casino, then tried his car door and found it unsurprisingly open. It’s a common conceit among these criminal also-rans that people – especially their fellow crooks – are somehow aware of how baaad they are, and would therefore never dare fuck with their person or their property. I lay down in the rear footwell and prepared to disabuse Miko of both presumptions.

  He returned inside ten minutes, giggling like a kid who’s raided the candy shop. I waited for him to place his prize in the glove compartment and reach for the ignition, before spiking him in the neck with a hypodermic full of thiopentone. He reacted reflexively with a slap, thinking the jab was an insect bite, by which time the agent was already in his blood and my silencer in his face.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ I told him.

  Miko awoke to find himself strapped securely to a steel table in a low-ceilinged, windowless room. We were in the cellar of my villa, in the hills overlooking th
e port, but Miko didn’t know this. Nor did he know that he was about to become nostalgic for the hospitality of those Russian soldiers.

  He came round slowly, groggily at first, but sharpened up very quickly as he took in his surroundings and realised the circumstances. I remained behind him at the head end of the table. If he strained his neck muscles he could see me, but for the moment he was scanning the cold stone walls, bare apart from cobwebs and the ancient, dustbound workbench to his right. On it sat a rusted but serviceable vice, a power drill, an electric paint stripper, a hacksaw, a boombox and a feather duster. His breathing accelerated and his arms tested the restraints. I guessed it wasn’t the duster that spooked him, but some people do have awfully ticklish feet. You never can tell.

  Predictably, he asked who I was, trying it in French, English and Spanish.

  ‘Let’s save time and just lay our cards down on the table, Miko,’ I said. ‘I want to know where Risto is holding the boy.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I know a lot more than that. Most relevantly, I know that I would be insulting you to assume you’d give up your brother without first undergoing some quite unnecessary prolonged and excruciating pain. Equally, you would be insulting me if you thought I’d believe anything you said before that, so allow me to treat us both with all due respect.’

  His eyes flitted to the workbench again and he swallowed, a look of determination fixing upon his features. Then I wheeled the gas tanks from behind the table, into his line of sight, which is when he started to squirm and whimper. I flipped down the visor on my protective mask and pressed Play on the boombox. The sound insulation in the basement was fine, but I find screaming to be very disconcerting while I’m trying to concentrate. I fired up the torch as the music started. It was Neil Young and Crazy Horse live: not strictly my cup of tea, but I thought it appropriate, though I doubt Barry Sheen there got the gag. The album was called Weld.