Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood (3 page)

‘Max,’ she said. ‘How’s your friend?’

‘Better,’ I said.

I had seen Curtis at the hospital on my way to Chinatown. He had not said much but for the first time in weeks, he had not asked me to slip into his room one night and put a pillow over his face.

‘He liked her,’ I said. ‘Jana. I can tell.’

‘Sweet kid,’ she said.

Ginger’s company placed wealthy men in contact with beautiful women.

Despite the big iMac on her desk, Sampaguita had no online presence. Ginger found the men in the swankier bars of London hotels – the Coburg at the Connaught, the American Bar at The Savoy, The Rivoli at The Ritz and The Fumoir at Claridges. I had no idea where she found the women who worked for her, but there always seemed to be new ones arriving in our city.

I slid an airmail envelope across Ginger’s desk.

‘I’d like to book Jana again,’ I said.

She raised the envelope in thanks, and put it in her desk. ‘Does it have to be the middle of the night? It’s a bit awkward, all this wee small hours stuff.’

‘His family are there the rest of the time. They’re very religious people. I don’t want them to think someone’s paying for sex.’

‘Even if we know that’s not happening? My girls just go in there and hold the guy. And besides – nobody actually pays for sex, Max. What my clients are paying for is a woman who will go away when it’s all over.’

‘Well, Curtis must have liked the way she held him.’

‘That poor guy. Is he going to be all right?’

I shrugged. I could not imagine a future where Curtis Gane would ever be all right again.

A young Somalian man walked in and placed a carton of coffee on Ginger’s desk. It was from one of those coffee shops where they ask you for your name. The cup had ‘Ali’ scrawled on the side. I watched him take up a position just outside the entrance.

‘Security?’ I said.

‘There have been some threats,’ Ginger said.

I looked out of the first floor window. Chinatown was still adorned with the red lanterns of Spring Festival.

‘Locals?’ I said. ‘Triads?’

She shook her head. ‘The Chinese leave us alone. These are white boys. I didn’t see them. They had a word with Ali.’

I didn’t like it.

‘Get him in here, will you, Ginger?’

She called him in.

‘This is Max, Ali. He’s a friend. Tell him about the men who came here.’

Ali was a tall, skinny kid. Big but raw. And I saw he was very frightened, as if the gig as Security Director at Sampaguita was a touch harder than he had bargained for.

‘They came yesterday,’ he said. He struggled for the words. ‘They were young men who dress like old men. Like men from the past. Men from photographs.’

‘What did they want?’ I said.

He indicated Ginger. ‘To talk to Mum Ginger,’ he said. ‘They want money for protection.’

‘Did they threaten you?’ I said.

He took a step into the room and ran his fingers across Ginger’s desk. There was a deep cut in the surface.

‘They did that?’ I said.

Ali nodded.

‘One of them had one of those knives,’ he said. ‘No – not a knife. What do you call it? A sword. Like Johnny Depp in that movie –
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
. Did you see that movie?’

‘I’ve seen all of Johnny Depp’s movies,’ Ginger said. Unlike Ali, she did not seem frightened by the shakedown. Perhaps she was used to it. Occupational hazard. I looked at the mark on the desk and ran my index finger across it.

‘What do you call that sword?’ Ali said.

‘You call it a cutlass,’ I said.

The three of us stared at the scar and we only looked up when the door opened and the Kray twins walked in.

Everything about them was perfect.

The tight grey suits. The skinny ties. There was even grease in their neat, short-back-and-sides haircuts. But the respectability of their clothes was offset by the violence in their eyes. They considered the tiny room and the three of us with sullen, blank-faced hostility, like creatures about to feed. And in those moments I saw that they had not quite got the look down perfect.

They were not twins. They were not even brothers, despite looking as though they had been dressed identically by the same doting parent. One of them, the one who came in first, was short, hard, lean. Ten stone of barbed wire. The other one, hovering at his shoulder as if trying to create David Bailey’s iconic photograph of the twins, was much larger, and his skin was darker. The one in front was pasty to the point of anaemia.

‘My name’s Oscar Burns and I’m here to collect the tax you owe,’ he told Ginger.

She slowly took off her glasses, as if she was considering a serious business proposition.

‘What tax is that?’ she said.

‘The tax on this place,’ he said. I watched the steam building up in him. It always fascinates me, how these little thugs have the ability to whip themselves up into a frenzy. ‘The tax for being a cock-sucking, whore-selling, disease-spreading pimp in my neighbourhood.’

Ali stepped in front of them and I expected an immediate eruption of violence. But instead they smiled. It seemed like genuine amusement. The young Somalian was visibly shaking.

‘You smoke, mate?’ Oscar Burns said. ‘Give him one, will you, Big Muff?’

They smiled secretively at each other and then Big Muff slowly pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his North Face backpack. That was another thing that was slightly off. They both had backpacks. I don’t recall the Kray twins carrying man bags. I wondered what else was in those backpacks as Ali reached for a cigarette with trembling hands.

‘Don’t, Ali,’ I told him.

Because I already knew exactly what was going to happen next.

Oscar Burns and Big Muff frowned at me.

‘I smell pig,’ Burns said.

Big Muff narrowed his eyes and it gave him that knotted brow that Ronnie Kray had, the one that made him look like a wounded buffalo about to charge.

‘Really?’ Big Muff said. ‘Pig in here?’

‘Smell it a mile off,’ Oscar said. ‘Smelt it coming up the whore’s stairs.’

Big Muff gave Ali a cigarette and Oscar held out his lighter.

‘Ali,’ I said, and as he drew on the cigarette Oscar smashed his free fist into the young Somalian’s jaw. There was the sharp snap of a breaking bone and the young Somalian went down with a scream of pain and the roar of their laughter.

I bent over the kid.

‘You run a knocking shop,’ Oscar Burns was saying.

‘Sampaguita is a social introduction agency,’ Ginger said, and for the first time she sounded scared.

They had a laugh at that.

‘Call it what you like,’ Oscar said. ‘From now on you’re paying tax. One of us is going to come in here every week and you are going to hand over an envelope with the words, “Here’s that £500 I owe you.” Can you remember that?’

Ginger hung her head. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘And there’s a tart I’m interested in,’ he continued. ‘Her name is Jana. She’s going to be taking care of us tonight. I’m going to give you the name of a pub and I want her there at ten sharp.’

I stood up.

They took their time looking at me.

‘You broke Ali’s jaw,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ Oscar said. ‘You’re a very clever pig.’

‘That’s a good trick,’ I said. ‘But it’s also a very old trick. I’ve read about that trick. It’s a trick that Reggie and Ronnie Kray used, right? Breaking a man’s jaw while he’s lighting a cigarette. It’s why boxers are taught to bite down hard on their gum shields. Because it’s easy to break a man’s jaw when he has his mouth half-open. Any idiot can do it.’

I helped Ali to his feet. He was having difficulty standing. I eased him into the seat opposite Ginger and then turned to face the Kray twins’ tribute band.

‘Now, shall I show you my trick?’ I said.

They looked at each other. Then Oscar Burns stepped into my face. He smelled of e-cigarettes and too much cologne.

‘Why don’t you sit down and shut your cakehole?’ he hissed.

‘Why don’t I show you my trick first?’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

I stepped around him so that I was facing the one called Big Muff. Everything stopped for a second.

And then I punched Big Muff in the heart as hard as I could.

He was wearing a little snatch of red silk in his jacket pocket and that was what I aimed for with a punch that started down in my feet and came up through my legs and my back and my shoulders as I twisted into it, the force coming from the pivot of my body, so that all of my body strength exploded in the first two knuckles of my right fist as they crashed into the red silk handkerchief he wore as if to mark his heart.

He reeled backwards, shocked more than hurt, although the sudden pain gave him something to think about, and I stepped forwards, maintaining the distance between us.

And I punched his heart again.

He had his back against the wall, nowhere to move back to now, and I did it again. And again. Repeatedly punching his heart with my right fist. Not winding up as well as I did for the first punch, but still getting plenty of weight behind it, still hitting his heart with as much force as I could summon. And I knew that whatever happened next, this wouldn’t last very long. It is only in movies and on TV that fights go on and on. This would all be over in sixty seconds at the outside.

I kept punching him in the heart. Waiting for his friend, Oscar Burns, to attack me from behind. But he didn’t.

So I grabbed Big Muff by the skinny lapels of his tight grey suit and dragged him towards the door. You would have to be made of strong stuff to withstand being repeatedly punched in the heart. Big Muff wasn’t made of that strong stuff. It is a shock to the system to be punched in the heart, it creates the trauma of chest compression – quite literally a shock to the heart. The repeated blows had collapsed Big Muff’s sternum just enough to induce tachycardia, an abrupt increase in the heart rate that makes you feel as if you are dying.

‘He’s killing me!’ Big Muff screamed.

I dragged him out of Sampaguita and positioned him at the top of the rickety Chinatown staircase. Then my right fist smashed into the silk handkerchief for one last time.

Gravity did the rest.

He went down like a Greek bank.

I moved quickly down the stairs, all the while expecting something to crack across the back of my head or stab into my back. It did not happen. A street fight is not really about who hits the hardest. It’s about who hits first and then has the nerve to keep on hitting.

Big Muff was flat on his back at the bottom of the stairs. I placed my heel on the silk handkerchief. Oscar Burns was standing beside me, his hands in his pockets, and he seemed to be looking at me for the first time.

‘But what are you doing here?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. Why does a pig help a pimp? Friends with benefits, are you, mate?’

‘I’m not your mate,’ I told him.

Big Muff grunted under the weight of my heel.

Oscar chuckled to himself.

‘You going to arrest me, copper?’ he said.

He saw my hesitation and he laughed again.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘You’re protecting a whore.’

‘She’s not a whore.’

‘How about pimp? That a fair job description?’

I said nothing.

‘You’re protecting her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why but I can guess. Toss you the odd freebie, does she, just to keep the Chinks with the machetes from the door? And what I reckon, pig, is that it’s all off the book. It’s unofficial. You’re a policeman who – for whatever reason – has placed a dirty pimp under your protection. And I think that if your superiors learned about you protecting a pimp then your career would be down the toilet in a Chinatown second. And you know what that means?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ I said.

‘It means I can do whatever I like to her,’ Oscar Burns said, his eyes shining with violence. ‘And you can’t do a thing about it.’

‘Jana can’t come tonight,’ I said and Curtis threw the TV’s remote control at the wall.

Then he leaned back in his bed and closed his eyes, his mouth twisting with emotions I could not even guess at.

‘I’m going to sort another visit soon.’

No response.

‘Okay, Curtis?’

‘Yeah, I bet she can’t wait to come back to cuddle a cripple,’ he said.

I picked up the remote from the floor and gently placed it on his lap, in case he needed it later.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘She liked you. You liked her.’

‘She liked getting paid.’ He laughed, choked and bitter. ‘She didn’t even have to have sex with me. Nice work if you can get it. Let’s stop this farce, Max. I know you’re trying to be kind. But I would rather be alone. I mean, exactly how pathetic am I? That you have to pay hookers to come and hold my hand!’

I sat on his bed.

Somebody had given him a shave, someone who wasn’t very good at it, and his handsome face was marked with bloody little shaving nicks.

‘When you’re up for it, we could get out of this place for a day.’

He looked at me as if I was insane. ‘And what would we do?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s London. We can do anything you want. We could go look at the Turners in the Tate.’

He frowned at me, as if I was speaking a language he had never learned.

‘The Turners in the Tate,’ I repeated.

‘What? Paintings?’

‘More than just paintings.’ I didn’t have the words to explain them to him. ‘Great torrents of light and colour that make you look at the world in a new way. I go there sometimes and look at the Turners when my head’s full.’

He laughed at me.

‘My head’s not full, Max. It’s fucking exploding. I don’t want a day out in some museum. And I don’t want some high-end hooker pretending she can see into my soul. I just want to be left alone. I just want it to be over. I just want to die, Max. That’s all. It doesn’t seem like much to ask.’

‘Curtis—’

‘Are you going to tell me you know how I feel? Nobody knows how I feel. All I’ve got waiting for me is a wheelchair and fifty years of having my bottom wiped for me.’

‘I’m just trying—’

‘You know what I want!’