by PJ Adams
And it was in the way, when he met my look with that giveaway one of his own, he said, simply, “I’m sorry, Owen. There’s nothing I could do.”
I’d arrived alone at a club in the East End where we’d arranged to meet – in fact, it was a club the Baileys had owned since the 1960s before the boys and I decided to wind down the family business earlier in the year. We’d sold the place on the cheap to the guy who’d been running it for us and now, I saw, he hadn’t hung around long before selling it on – either at a tidy profit, or to save his own skin when the wolves had closed in.
Say what you like about a family like mine, but when we were in charge there was a semblance of order on the streets, and places like this could run without intimidation and threats from anyone but us.
The club’s name had changed to Shakers, picked out in neon over the black-glass entrance. It wasn’t even midday but the place was already nominally open for any lunchtime trade, although I knew this kind of joint rarely came alive until well into the evening.
The guy on the door, a good head taller than me, had looked me up and down and then nodded me through. The next guy, on reception, tried to charge me a cover but I just looked at him and walked past and nobody did anything.
Reuben was just inside the next set of doors, in his battered old Marks and Spencer suit, and I took one look at that expression on his face and knew it was a set-up.
Before he’d said those few words of apology, I’d taken the place in, the old instincts kicking in automatically. Some people can just walk into a place like this and all they see are the table they want to sit at, the menu, and the bare tits of the dancer on that small stage at the rear. And then there are people like us – coppers, gangsters, secret agents or whatever – who make a very different assessment, of escape routes, people, risks and threats. It becomes a habit everywhere you go. It has to be like that.
The bar was to one side, a couple of guys sitting on tall stools. Heavies. Russian, by the look of them. Not doing a very good job of looking like genuine customers.
Another guy stood by the fire escape, not even pretending to hide the way his jacket hung slightly open to reveal a glimpse of shoulder holster.
The fact that no-one had patted me down for my own shoulder holster showed just how confident they were, that they didn’t have to bother. A statement of my own insignificance.
Another table by the stage: two more thugs nursing clear drinks, water no doubt. Not even bothering to pretend to stare at the semi-naked girl going through the motions before them.
Reuben was studying me closely.
“Don’t be pissed off with me, Owen,” he said. “I’m not the bad guy here.”
“Then what are you?” Trying to read him. Trying to work out if my oldest friend really had turned.
“I’m the middleman, a neutral.”
“Since when have you been neutral, Reub? You’re one of us.”
“I’m a fucking cop, Owen. I’m not supposed to take sides.” Then: “I’m your insurance, Owen. I’m here to keep the peace. Don’t fuck with that. I’m your get out of here alive card.”
I looked around again, and that’s when I saw Salko over in one of the booths with a guy I didn’t recognize.
Salko watched us approaching. The other guy sitting with him I now saw was Maliakov. I remembered him as the cage-fighter who had once nearly killed my kid brother, Lee – a big guy with a mohawk that was mostly trimmed back and grown out now, and a body covered in tattoos, although today that was covered by the suit he uncomfortably wore.
I nodded in greeting at Salko, ignored Maliakov. Normally quite formidable, Salko looked slight compared to the fighter at his side. His hair was thinning, the same steely gray as his suit. He was smiling, and I didn’t like that: it either meant he was stupid or confident, and I knew he was not the former.
Not so long ago, Salko had been part of a triumvirate that had been trying to take over territory run by the Baileys for years. Then there had been that little stand-off, and the three Russians had become two. I don’t know how much he minded that his partner, ‘Putin’, was dead, but I was pretty sure he and his surviving partner, Davydov, minded that it was me who’d been responsible.
“Mr Bailey, DI Glover. Please, sit.”
Reuben slipped into one of the red velvet seats beside Maliakov, but I remained standing.
“What’s the game, Salko?” I said. “I’m a busy man.”
That smile didn’t shift.
“You hide yourself well,” said the Russian. Was he bluffing? North Norfolk was remote, but not a huge distance away. I’d covered my tracks, but I was never convinced that I could be that hard to track down. Maggie had found me, after all. Maybe the Russians just hadn’t looked very hard – perhaps I was less important to them than I had believed.
As if reading my thoughts, Salko said, “You are an irritant, Mr Bailey. You are not welcome here.”
“I didn’t choose to be here.”
A raised eyebrow, perhaps making the obvious point that I was the one who had driven all this way to get here today.
“You need to go back to wherever you were hiding,” said Reuben. “And not return here again.”
“I thought you wanted me back here, Reuben? In control again. Thought you didn’t like the way things were going with the Russians in charge.”
Reuben shrugged. “Change of heart.”
“They got to you...”
“We get to everybody,” said Salko, with a tone like ice. “What your friend says is true. We do not want you here again, sniffing around and getting in the way. We do not like it when you send people in, asking too many questions, either.”
I studied him, trying to work him out. Then followed his gaze towards the stage.
The bored-looking dancer who had been there when I arrived had departed and now...
Maggie.
Standing there, in jeans and a t-shirt, leaning on the pole. No, not leaning... handcuffed to it, her arms forced up above her head.
And standing to one side of the stage was Freddie the German, her brother.
I met her look. Held it.
She held herself strong, despite the awkward position forced on her by the cuffs. No visible bruising. No damage to the clothing – stains or rips or open buttons and zips. She looked angry, which at least was good.
That thing... This morning, when I’d started to sense that something had gone wrong. When the percentages had started to shift from the likelihood that I’d merely scared Maggie away towards the possibility that shit was starting to hit the fan.
The self-control. The iron resolve that had made me slow down, not rush in, the discipline that had allowed me to take time to think things through.
That.
Every response in my body, every nerve firing, told me to lash out. Rush to her. Take on whoever got in the way.
Everything in me.
But that instinct kicked in. The ability that had allowed me to survive a lifetime of this...
A glance left, a glance right.
Freddie had a hand at his hip. I knew he favored a holster concealed inside his waistband, and that poised hand of his meant business.
The guy by the fire escape – he was no longer leaning casually against the wall.
The two guys at a table by the stage. They were watching closely, eyes fixed on me.
The two guys at the bar...
Even the barman was watching, waiting.
I was utterly powerless, and they knew it.
If I even twitched they would take me down, and Reuben would be no protection.
And what could I realistically do? Even at my peak, I could never take them all on in a situation like this.
All I was left with was the rational choice, the percentage.
All I could do was clamp down on my natural response with every last sliver of willpower I had.
Not do anything.
Not react.
Not show even a hint of what was going
on in my head.
I turned back to Salko.
It could only have been a second, no more, that glance at Maggie, the assessment of risk, the choice I made.
I really could have done nothing else.
And not a single thing could ever have prepared me for how much that simple, rational choice could hurt.
“You have my cleaner?” I said, calmly.
Salko was good, too. No response. No betrayal of his thought processes.
“You sent her.”
I shook my head.
“She left,” I said. “She was looking for her brother. I see she found him.”
“I have a proposition for you, Mr Bailey.”
“I’m all ears.”
“You leave here today, Mr Bailey. Go back to your hiding place, and never come back. And never send anyone else, either. Just go, Mr Bailey, and we can forget you even existed. And when we are sure you have done that simple thing, we will even send your ‘cleaner’ after you as a gesture of goodwill.”
“I thought you wanted me dead.”
“You do not matter that much to us. We simply do not want you here, complicating matters, and your friend here, Detective Inspector Glover, would like us to spare you. Be grateful to him.”
There are tricks you learn. Discipline. Control the breathing and you can control your heart rate. Drive all distracting thoughts out of your head as they rush in, bat them away like stray tennis balls. Concentrate on a foot or a hand and relax every tiny muscle, put all of your being into that process.
Anything to keep that calmness, that ability to focus and be objective.
Sometimes it’s so fucking Zen being me.
“Let the girl go. She really is nothing to do with this. Just a kid looking for her brother.”
Salko didn’t buy it. Even if he did, the act of me lowering myself to ask made her a part of it now, and we both understood that. She could be nobody, but I’d asked that favor. I’d betrayed that I cared.
“We will let her go,” said Salko, “when you have gone.”
I looked at Reuben and he gave a slight shrug.
I breathed in, held it, let it slowly escape.
I batted stray thoughts away, even though they came like moths to a flame.
I clenched a fist tight and then let the muscles relax, one by one by one.
I stood.
“I’m going,” I said. “I don’t want this. Any of it.”
I turned, and started to walk. Focused on the exit sign, the path between the tables, focused on anything but her. Maggie.
I walked out and left her cuffed to that pole, as if I didn’t care at all.
§
I waited in the street, daring Salko’s bouncer on the door to do anything, to even meet my look.
Reuben emerged half a minute after me, blinking in the bright sunlight.
He saw me, about the time my fist closed on his shirt and tie and I barreled him against the gray rendered wall by the blacked-out window of the club.
My face up against his, my spittle spraying him as I spoke, I hissed, “You fix this, Reuben, you hear me? You fucking fix this.”
His hands had come up against my chest, but he was powerless to push me away.
People skirted around us, giving us a wide berth, but otherwise ignoring us, as if this were an everyday sight in this part of London.
“What are you hoping I’ll do, Owen? Eh?” Reuben’s voice kept breaking high, like an adolescent boy’s. “What the fuck are you expecting?”
“Whatever it takes, Reub. That’s what I’m expecting.” I eased my grip. I’d been starting to choke him, but he was clearly too polite to say.
I let go of him. Turned away. Then back to face him.
“I know you think I owe you, Reuben. For all that shit with Putin. For making it go away.”
The cover-up of my role in killing the Russian – I’d had no choice, but I’d still have gone down a long time for it – and the breathing space for me and the boys to tidy a few things up and then disappear. We owed Reuben big time for all of that, it was true.
“And I do,” I went on. I’d never thanked him because, well fuck it, we don’t, do we? “But just you remember, Reuben. All those years. I owe you for Putin, but you owe me for a fucking lifetime, and don’t you ever forget it.”
The years growing up together. All the times when Reuben’s family was blowing up around him and he’d virtually moved in with the Baileys. All the stuff we’d learned together, how to get in and out of trouble, how to not only survive but to come out on top. How we’d stood by him when we’d gone one side of the line and he’d gone the other and joined the bleeding police.
I didn’t say any of that, though. I shouldn’t have to.
I just met his look and held it, stood strong and waited a second, two, and then hugged him back and slapped him on the shoulders when he stepped forward and hugged me like we were at a fucking funeral or something.
“Just fuck off, will you, Owen? Fuck off right out of here again and don’t look back. Go and play your piano and walk your dogs or whatever it is you’ve been doing, and I’ll do everything I can.”
I nodded, stepped back, two blokes awkward now in the street where they’ve been hugging and people have been looking and nobody else has the faintest idea what’s just happened.
“Do they really not care if I’m alive or dead?”
He smiled, shook his head. “The world moves on, Owen. The Bailey Boys left the building.”
I nodded, not allowing myself to be convinced.
“You’ve got my number, Reuben. Call if you need me for anything.”
“And you’ve got mine.”
I turned, and walked away, not looking back.
Powerless and absolutely, heart-wrenchingly, hating it.
§
I sat at the wheel of my Range Rover where I’d parked it a couple of streets away, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Thinking.
Reuben had double-crossed me by letting me walk right into that stand-off with Salko, it was true, but I also accepted that his presence had saved me, too. As ever, my copper friend was treading a precarious line and I didn’t envy him.
Did I still trust him?
Yes. No hesitation. I didn’t doubt he’d cross me again in a similar way if circumstances led him to do so, but he was still one of us. His heart was, if not entirely in the right place, in at least roughly the right neighborhood.
But did I have confidence that he had any sway over Salko and his mob, and that I could rely on him to get Maggie out safely?
Not in the slightest.
§
I’d promised I would leave, but I hadn’t said when.
I knew the layout of that club well, going right back to when it had been much more of a dive and I used to play pool with the boys at a table in the corner, teenaged eyes flitting between the spots and stripes on the table and the naked flesh on display on the small stage. Bailey boys always had grown up fast.
I went round to the yard at the back but there was a guy on the kitchen door, another on the back door, and one more on the fire escape.
Not that I was predictable or anything, but they’d known I could never simply leave things without at least looking.
I went back to the car and waited.
There was nothing I could do here, so it was back to Plan B. I’d given things a lot of thought, come to some conclusions. And before I went home tonight I had a couple of personal calls to make.
But for now, all I could do was wait. Wait and try hard not to think too much.
I’d never felt anything like this. A genuine physical thing. Like an illness. A cancer. Pressure in my head, like it might explode at any minute. A clenched fist in my chest. A medicine ball in my gut.
A tumor that might be love.
I slowed my breathing, batted away those stupid fucking thoughts, clenched and relaxed, but it was no good.
Does adrenaline speed this shit up? Make you fall faster a
nd harder, for fear of what you might lose, of what might never be?
And if that was the case, if what I was feeling was a chemical response to danger, did that make it a less genuine thing?
Maggie and I had only shared one night. An evening over dinner where we’d talked forever about all kinds of things. And before that, only two or three weeks of interaction, of connection, of gradually acclimatizing and realizing how natural it felt to be to have someone like Miglë Petrauskė sharing my space, making it at least partly her space as well as mine. Those disjointed communications, the picking up of half-finished jobs where she had worked during the day and I took over for the evening.
I didn’t get it.
Didn’t understand what I was feeling or why I was feeling it.
Didn’t really believe that this was a normal thing, something other people experienced. Something I should have experienced long before now with someone, if only I’d ever let anyone in.
I couldn’t accept that what I felt was anything more than a sense of responsibility for Maggie’s predicament.
I couldn’t accept that I might be in love with her, for God’s sake.
§
In a movie there would be a dramatic click breaking the silence as I released the safety, and the guy’s eyes would widen as he abruptly realized there was a handgun millimeters from his skull and he was only a muscle contraction away from instant oblivion.
In reality, my Glock didn’t have a safety catch – it had other internal mechanisms in place to prevent accidental discharge. A loaded Glock was always ready to fire. All I would have to do was pull the trigger.
And he knew that.
Freddie the German knew that.
So there was no click to warn him, just a glimpse from the corner of his eye, an awareness that someone had stepped out of the shadows behind him.
I’d waited until he was alone. Just about to slip the key into the lock on the front door of a flat in Poplar, a couple of streets from where he’d used to live. Maybe he’d moved, maybe he was here on business – a pick-up, a bit of intimidation, a pay-off.
I didn’t care. I didn’t need to take up much of his time.
“Family,” I said in a conversational tone. “I don’t know what that means to you, Freddie. Is it important to you? Because it is to me. It’s something I’ve come to realize in the last few months, while I’ve been distanced from my own. Family is the most important thing in the world.”
