Arms and the Women (51 page)

'And what did you see and hear, Uncle Paddy?'

'Well, I heard him ringing someone, you, I expect it was, and talk about hiding the stuff in the CP, which is here. And I saw him take his shirt off. Oh God, even in my condition that was a shocking sight to see, truly shocking.'

'Why?' said Kelly urgently, her eyes riveted on Popeye's face. 'And what did you tell Jorge?'

Popeye met her gaze blankly for a moment then smiled a slow sly smile.

'Why? It was such a terrible wound the poor creature had, a killing wound, I reckoned. I could hardly bear to look at it. That's what I told Jorge, that if your friend made it here, it must have been on willpower, and I couldn't see how he'd survive the trip. My bet is he died after he got here, and you wrapped the body in a blanket and weighted it down with rocks and tipped it into that sea out there. That's what I told Jorge. But he'll need to be persuaded. Think you can manage that, Kansas?'

Now it was Kelly's turn to peer into the Irishman's face as if in search of something she wasn't certain of finding.

Then she nodded and said gently, 'Thanks, Uncle Paddy. I think I can manage that. You take care of yourself now.'

It was like being at a play,
Cymbeline,
say, which was constructed like a wildebeest, no part matching any other, and you'd no idea of the plot, and you'd missed the first two acts, and you had a seat behind a pillar, and the people around you were coughing and eating popcorn noisily.

What the hell was going on here? wondered Ellie.

'Don't fret over me,' laughed Popeye. 'Harder to kill than a crab louse on a baboon's ballocks, that's what they say about me in the Vatican. Hello, looks like it's showtime.'

The two Cojos seemed to have reached a decision, and Jorge was beckoning Popeye imperiously to join them.

As he moved away, Daphne whispered to Kelly, 'Is he really your uncle?'

'Strictly speaking, no. But when one Irishman meets another he's going to do business with, first thing they do is try to establish a family connection. When my dada met Paddy years back, they worked out that their great-grandmothers had been second cousins or some such thing, and after that he became Uncle Paddy to me.'

'So no relation of yours, Miss Macallum?'

Feenie looked at her like a Fundamentalist confronted by Darwinism.

'Not many of my relatives have given me cause for pride,' she said sourly. 'But at least I can boast that I do not count Mr Ducannon amongst them.'

'Come on, Gran, he's not that bad,' said Kelly spiritedly.

'Then how come he's so chummy with those monsters?'

'Doesn't look all that chummy to me.'

She was right.

Popeye was making some point very forcibly, with Jorge and Luis looking pretty unconvinced.

They made some attempt to keep their voices down but as tempers rose, so did the sound level. Soon it became clear that Popeye had asserted his moral right to be identified as the owner of the coke and his legal right as one who has met his share of a bargain to move on out.

Wise move, thought Ellie. In the little red book of lawbreaking, it said that before a crime, time was your friend, but after a crime, time was your enemy. Or, more simply, plan very carefully, run very fast.

Hard to run fast when you had a lot of heavy crates to lug out of a cellar and load into a truck. Much easier when all you had to carry was a case full of coke.

Luis was objecting on the grounds that Popeye would need transport and their vehicles weren't going anywhere till they'd got the arms loaded.

Popeye responded that there were at least three cars parked around the house and he was quite capable of helping himself to one of these, thank you.

Then Jorge said, 'No. It's better that we stick together.

We need you to help us with the crates. Then we all leave together.'

Not much of rational argument here, but something about the way he spoke gave the message that beyond this, words would not be the medium of debate, and Popeye, with the wisdom of long survival, shrugged and smiled and said, 'OK. No sweat.'

'Bueno!'
said Jorge, suddenly very friendly. 'We are all partners here, agreed? Now, why don't you and Luis go to fetch the truck as close as you can get? I will start these two strong men bringing the crates up from below.'

'Doesn't need two to bring the truck,' objected Popeye.

'Not to drive, but this ground is not too safe and the weather is making things worse. It may need one to walk ahead making sure. To get bogged down now would be disastrous, no?'

'Good point,' capitulated Popeye. 'So let's be off then, Luis.'

The two men went out.

As if to signal their departure, a tremendous jag of lightning cracked the eastern sky and the window seemed to dissolve as the onshore wind hurled the first cataract of rain at the flexing glass.

Jorge went and stood against it, looking out, like some mad scientist in one of the old horror movies, trying to draw strength directly from the elements. When he turned, his gaze ran over the huddling women, then settled into a focused stare. Ellie had no difficulty pinpointing its object, and even less reading his mind.

Kelly Cornelius.

He'd got Popeye out of the way. Maybe he'd even fixed with Luis to get the Irishman permanently out of the way.

Now he was going to go to work on Kelly to discover the whereabouts of the elusive Chiquillo. And in the intensity of his gaze, Ellie saw that it wasn't just desire of revenge that was going to inform his questioning. There was desire of another sort there too. So far, God be thanked, in all the shifting mass of menace which had rolled across the terrace from the moment of the shot, there had been no sexual element. But that, she saw, from the shine of his eyes and the swelling of his crotch, was over.

For an irrational moment she felt a huge resentment directed at Kelly. Why the hell did she have to be so fucking attractive? Everything about their demeanour had said that these were men in a hurry, keen to get their loot loaded and be far away from this remote and frightening neck of the woods. To them Axness must look like a trap ready to close. Would Jorge's keenness to locate Chiquillo have kept him here long? Possibly not. Chiquillo, if still alive, would keep. But for Jorge, interrogating Kelly was going to be an absolute pleasure, not just a means to an end. Kelly would resist... he would want her to resist. She recalled the easy unthinking way he'd dealt with Daphne and Novello. When he'd finished with Kelly, chances were she'd be dead.

And once he'd killed one of them, what were the others but dangerous witnesses?

'You,' said Jorge to Little Ajax. 'Watch them. If they move, shoot.'

And to Big Ajax he said, pointing at Kelly, 'You, bring her.'

He set off to the door, confident in his commands being obeyed.

Big Ajax moved forward.

Ellie scrambled to her feet. Images were jumbling in her brain. Horatius jumping onto the bridge. Spartacus attacking the head of gladiator school, Lytton Strachey telling the tribunal that if he saw a horrid Hun about to ravish his sister, he'd try to interpose his own body.

Why did men get all the best stories?

She said, 'No.'

She didn't know what she expected, except of course support. Horatius got his two chums, Spartacus got an army of revolting slaves, even Strachey probably got a quickly suppressed laugh.

All she got was a headmistressly rebuke from Feenie.

'Ellie, don't be silly. Sit down!'

True, Daphne made a token effort to rise but when Feenie's hand pressed down on her shoulder, she subsided without much resistance. Woolly Wendy kept her head and eyes as low as a grazing sheep, Mrs Stonelady didn't even register that anything out of the ordinary was passing. Only Kelly stood up, looked at her grandmother, smiled, and said, 'It's OK, Ellie. I'll be fine.'

'Fine? No! We can't let this happen!' cried Ellie.

And as Big Ajax reached his arm forward to grasp Kelly, Ellie seized it, bent her head, and sank her teeth into the ball of his thumb.

She had some recollection from the sensational literature of her childhood that this caused such a distracting pain that a nimble heroine could usually find time to make her escape.

Big Ajax must have read other books. He dragged his hand out of her mouth and swung it at her face with a force that sent her crashing against the window. Then he took Kelly's arm and pulled her, unresisting, through the doorway.

Ellie removed her face from the glass. The storm outside seemed to be raging in her head. The now almost continual lightning flashes lit up the window with such intensity that the rain streaming down the glass looked red as blood.

Then as her head cleared a little she realized it
was
blood, hers, on the inside.

She put her hand to her nose, which hurt like hell, and turned to face her cowardly companions, expecting to see their faces dark with guilt.

'Now we're a matching pair,' said Daphne, not without satisfaction. 'Perhaps at last I'll get a little sympathy.'

xvi

a palomino pony

Uncle Paddy . . .

Popeye.. .

the Pop-Up Man . . .

Patrick Ducannon didn't mind what people called him, so long as they stayed a long pace short of the truth of him.

He was a great survivor, that was certainly part of the truth, but his famous hair's-breadth escapes from death were only a part of that part. It was good to be lucky, but early on in his career as a Volunteer, he'd decided that a man who relied on luck alone in this line of work was very soon going to be dead lucky. However, it didn't harm at all to let the world at large think that this indeed was what he relied upon, as it distracted their minds from other possibilities.

There was for instance the question of his linguistic ability. In fact, he had an excellent ear for languages and could speak good colloquial Spanish, but he saw no reason to let people know that he'd got beyond basic tourist level - not even when the people happened to be his 'niece' and her friend, Chiquillo, and certainly not when they happened to be Jorge Casaravilla and Luis Romea.

Hearing what people said, when they didn't think it mattered you could hear, was a very useful aid in helping a man spin out his good fairy's gift of luck. So he knew for certain what Kelly had guessed, that the two Cojos had no more intention of letting him walk away with the bag of coke than he had of joining the Orange Order.

It was simply a question of when and where they decided to get rid of him. Jorge would have shot him at the CP in front of the women, no problem, but Luis had argued that it was better if he simply disappeared, no witnesses, no body. Then no one could contradict their report that he'd taken off with the grip, and there'd be no question of sharing the money from the drugs with any of the innumerable
manazas
or big hands reaching out of the murky swirl of political protection surrounding the Cojos.

It was good reasoning and Jorge had been persuaded. But Popeye had a feeling that Luis, though no doubt ruthless enough in a good cause, i.e. his own profit and protection, lacked Jorge's total indifference to, bordering on positive enthusiasm for, the use of violence as a first resort. He guessed that if he took the chance now of having a quiet word with the man and saying, 'Look, I've been thinking, and on the whole, I reckon I'd be better off out of this, so what I'm going to do is help myself to one of the women's cars and take off into the night and you and Jorge can do what you like with the gear back there, OK?' he wouldn't get an argument.

On the other hand, he would be going home empty-handed when what he wanted to be going home with was his pension fund. This kind of stuff was very wearing and he'd been at it far too long now and he felt he deserved a few years in the sun some place where all the colours green and orange meant was leaves and fruit on the trees in his garden.

So, a quiet word with Luis or not? In fact, just at the moment it wasn't a real choice as the storm raging around them made any kind of word, quiet or noisy, a waste of breath. The only good thing was that the gale was at their backs, blowing them inland, like a pair of skiffs caught too far out at sea by a sudden tempest and driven landwards at such a speed and with such a lack of control the oarsmen do not know if the breakers ahead marking the shore signal their salvation or their grave.

Not a comfortable thought for a good Catholic boy to be having, especially a good Catholic boy who hadn't been to Mass for longer than a good Catholic boy in his line of work ought to regard as sensible.

The storm wasn't just affecting the way he was thinking, it seemed to have had a strange transmogrifying effect on the terrain they were crossing, changing it from the overgrown and extensive but nonetheless conventional garden they'd passed over not all that long ago to something more like an Amazonian jungle. Suddenly he recalled the Englishwoman, the policeman's wife, the one who'd taken a leak on the terrace, saying something about her little daughter being loose in this. He hoped to heaven the child had found shelter. Her mother must be worried sick. On the other hand, if she was a sensible woman, and she looked pretty sensible, she'd have the wit to work out that the little girl was a sight better off out here in the rain than in there in the warm with mad, bad, dangerous Jorge who was definitely one Ave short of a Rosary.

Through the driving rain and the surging shrubbery he glimpsed lights ahead and his heart hiccoughed in shock till he realized they must be the lights of the house. The women had been having a good time there, eating, drinking, laughing at the unimaginable kind of things women probably laughed at when left to themselves, then Jorge had come sweeping in like Cromwell and his Ironsides at Drogheda, and the laughter had to stop. There'd been a fine smell of cooking about the place and the memory made Popeye realize that he was extremely hungry. Maybe there'd be something left of the feast for them to forage. He plucked at Luis's sleeve and gestured first at his mouth then towards the house, but the Colombian shook his head and forked off right towards the outbuildings where they'd parked the Merc and the truck.