Raucous (18 page)

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Rollin saw Parker flinch upon seeing his face.  He had heard people say he looked like a male Madonna.  But he was a man touching sixty with a bloated wrinkle-free expression.  Botox and stretched skin.  A man refusing to be old.  The work expensive surgeons had put into his face was matched by the work weights and pharmaceutical products had put in on his body.  A pumped up muscle man, looking like the 65-year-old Sylvester Stallone’s more articulate twin.  Rollin liked what he had become.

They were meeting, by mutual consent, in a hotel room, the kind where you paid for the night but spent an afternoon with a woman or man you were paying for favours.  The décor was bland, a pale green without design.  A single room, a double bed, no space for chairs. A door led off into a bathroom.  One whole wall was a mirror.  The two men stood in artificial light as the shutters on the single window were down.

“It’s been a long time, Mr. Parker,” Rollin said. 

Rollin hadn't entered immediately.  He took the opportunity to look around before stepping through.  Parker was alone, but that did not mean he had no back-up.

Parker had arrived first.  He had messaged the room number to Rollin.  Rollin had arrived quickly.

Rollin had thought about the reasons Parker called, he had hoped it was a complicated matter, a difficult thought.  But the logical step for Parker was to meet and see.  In a way, they had worked together for fourteen years.  He the fix-it man for a partner Rollin never saw but needed.  Jobs was the go between, the crossover.  But Parker was an old man, tired and no longer confident in his employer.  If there was an exit to be opened into a life free of men obsessed with money and power he had to take risks, calculated risks, but non-controllable.  This was one.

“Seventeen years,” Parker said.

They did not offer hands to shake, nor approach each other.  They stayed aware that they did not trust and that they did not know what to expect.  The room was used to such encounters, but the way in which clients broke through awkward introductions was not happening here.

“Fourteen,” Rollins said.  “We met once after.  Briefly, but it counts." 

"I remember that your face hadn’t taken shape.  You look very different now.”

Rollin reached up and touched both of his cheeks with the thumb and index finger of his right hand.  He smiled quickly remembering the reason his bone structure was different.  “A man like you started the transformation,” Rollin said. “Broke a few bones.”

“You survived.”

“The miracle of modern medicine coupled with the strong desire to succeed.”

“I apologize for your friends.”

“Not necessary.  You were under orders, a soldier doesn’t decide where and when to go to war.  Politician’s do.  And yours gave you the fight.”

“Yes, he did.”

“A good soldier would have carried out the orders to perfection.”

“I did.”

“I’m still alive.”

“Yes, you are.”

Rollin paused, looking at Parker.  He squinted.

“I don’t make those kinds of mistakes,” Parker said. “At least not back then.  I check.  And you were most definitely not dead, which is the way it needed to be.  Had my order been to kill, I would have killed.”

“Then why leave me to live?”

Parker shrugged his shoulders.

Rollin drifted, he knew it was coming.  The room blurred around its edges and he reassessed the past. 

Rollin pulled a metal bar from the bag he was carrying, a foot long, heavy solid steel.  He held it up and examined the surface like he had a hundred times.  Parker watched, and moved his right hand to his lower back.  He flipped the latch on the leather pouch and wrapped his fingers around the worn handle on his sharp knife.

“When the jeweler died, I knew the game was corrupt,” Rollin said.  “The jeweler could never be robbed.  There was no way of entering his shop without being known.”

Rollin stared at the bar, as if he were telling it the story.  Parker slipped his right hand to his side, the blade of his knife pointing up, the top of the handle resting on his curved fingers, the blade hidden by his palm, wrist and forearm.

“Do you remember him, Parker?  Johnnie something.”

“Johnnie Fischer,” Parker said.  “A friend of yours?”

“Never had a friendly conversation with him.  Strange man.”

“Loved his money.”

“He was a high-street knock-off, ring and necklace merchant, but he dealt in high-end goods.  The high-end goods that come into the market illegally.  He had a shop, three in fact, each on the high street of three different quarters of the city.  They were profitable, but not enough to support the luxury life he led.  And boy did he have some expensive toys.”

“Very popular with the ladies for someone so ugly.”

Rollin smiled. 

“Money sure can make up for some deficiencies,” he said.

Parker nodded, smiling like they were doing a nostalgia trip at an old friend’s wake.

“Where he worked, where he earned the big money was a lock up in an industrial wasteland," Rollin said.

“Is that so?” 

Rollin looked up, Parker stared back.

Parker had not moved.  There was a bed between them.  He could not be attacked quickly, but nor could he exit the room without going through Rollin.

“Precious metals melted down and made into the heavy gold chains that hard men loved to wear to show their wealth,” Rollin said.  “All those sovereigns and necklaces, medallions and the like.”

“Never was my thing.  A little too pretentious.  I prefer discreet.”

Parker waved a hand down his chest while fixing his eyes on Rollin.  Parker wore no jewelry, nor flash clothes.  His white shirt, and tweed clothes, all tight fitting on his wiry frame.  He was not a London caricature.

“I believed that the plan was genuine," Rollin said.  "He was dealing with the same people he had always dealt with but on a score he didn’t have the ability to manage.  The sample had been sent, the idea of smelting the lot into bullshit trinkets and charms and earning money back the easy way supplied.  Only no reply came, only the news that this jeweler was out of business due to death.  His workshop trashed, the contents gone and the body cut up bad.”

“I heard.”

“I have no doubt you did, Parker.  A man good with a knife put him away.”

“There is more than one in the world.”

Rollin heard a couple from the next room.  It was one o’clock so he figured an illicit meeting between work colleagues.  A lunch break in which they could release.  He thought about their lives sometimes and was happy he had never become them.  Parker heard their playfulness too, but neither moved their heads to the sound.

“I was young so I started to panic,” Rollin said. “The other guys were fools, real low-life morons.  Them killing each other, I didn’t mind at all, but when the jeweler got it, I knew I had to move.  Me and Hatcher were the last two.”

“Raucous and your boy were alive,” Parker said.  He was still, calm, relaxed.

“They were nothing.  A driver and his friend.  I got to Hatcher’s.  Walked there, avoided my car, and avoided the street.  Came round the long way.  Cost me a friend.”

“Maybe saved your life.”

“The car out front told me I was the second visitor of the day.  An old red escort.”

“They used to handle like a dream.”

Rollin stared at Parker, old feelings of anger and hate scratched at his calm.  He paused bringing himself under control.

“I circled the house at distance, moved closer, heard no noise nor saw any sign of movement.  I rushed to the back wall of the house in a crouch and pushed my back against the brown brick.”  Rollin paused, took a deep breath and shook his head.  “Seems like yesterday, I can still see it.”

“No one ever remembers the past how it was,” Parker said.  “You make assumptions on the information you have, but you never have it all.  The conclusions you draw without knowing it all, are always wrong.  And the desires you have distort them till they are no more.”

Rollin nodded slowly and slightly, a reluctant agreement with a philosophical insight.

“I waited and listened but heard nothing.  I remember I held my breath.  I was, I have to admit, scared.  But I think that’s what kept me alive.  I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew that everyone involved had signed up to be killed.”

“Plans go wrong,” Parker said, "People need to adapt.  People get greedy.”

Rollin snapped out of his haze.  He looked at Parker, and saw him, actually saw the details.  He was an old man, too much alcohol and too much stress.  He looked old.  He looked ill.  His eyes rolled down to the knife Parker held.

“Same knife as those years ago?”

“Family heirloom.” 

“You won’t need it.”

“Like you won’t need that bar?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

“I can imagine where it came from.”

They waited, silent and still.

“Why didn’t you kill me with it?”  Rollin asked.

“That’s a question you have to ask someone else.  I did what I was told.  And I was told not to kill you.”

Rollin tapped the bar on his open left palm.  He grabbed the bar with both hands, thinking of a long time ago.

“I need to know the truth.  I should let it go.  But it’s that event, that single moment in a life that just will not go.  Do you have that?”

“More than one,” Parker said.

“The haul was too big, too easy.  A seven man job and they escaped with too much ease.  They had loaded all the bars for an hour and no one had come.  No one.  The security there was poor.”

“You helped with that.  The inside man.  He let them in.”

“It was more than that.  The laughter, the big time, all those smiling faces when we turned up back on the estates.  The money we had made.  The slaps on the back.  We had all made it big.”

Parker yawned.

“Too much money for too many people,” he said.  “Causes tension and jealousy.  Men drink and men fight and they like to take more than they deserve.”

They waited in silence.  A knocking noise from the adjacent room as a headboard beat rhythmically against the thin plaster wall.  Neither held the other’s gaze, but they were watching all the same.  An old man with a steel bar, and an older man with a knife.  Rollin thought about ageing, about how he fought it, and about how Parker ignored it.  The same result.  They were both old and nearing an end of one type or another.  What they had was built on youth and passion.  They defended it now with experience and knowledge.

“I saw you do it,” Rollin said.  “With this bar.  I heard your voice.  Parker, the detective.  The man they had all met.  You had gone and seen each of them.  They had called each other with the doubts.”

Parker showed no emotion, like a kid without feeling at school, being taken down by a teacher they do not respect.  He stared unblinking with bored aggression in his face.

“I guessed you would call it a burglary gone wrong.  The papers would insinuate involvement in the heist.  The papers had been speaking of nothing else as the murder count rose.  But no one was finding the money.  People turning up dead or simply disappearing.  One day there, the next no more.  Not answering messages, nowhere to be seen.  The only point through the centre was you.  You arrived, you spoke, you asked and then the listener was silent because they were no longer there."

Parker shrugged and let Rollin continue.

“Hatcher had it planned.  Only he knew the place.  They wouldn’t kill because they couldn’t.  Twenty-Five million in bonds, cash, bullion and jewels meant his own murder would be the most expensive hit in history.  Christian was gone and only he knew.  No way they would do it.  I hid out and he’d call me in when it was all done.

“But you didn’t listen, Parker.  Five million gives me protection.  That’s what Hatcher said when he saw you, when he let you in.  You laughed, what you have is no protection at all.  Do you remember saying that?”

Rollin was back there in his mind, outside that window.  His face blushing, heart rate clicking fast. 

“The thump, the crack, the repeated hits,” Rollin said. “And then you were gone.”

“I had done what I had to.”

“I waited until you left, waited twenty five minutes.  Hatcher on the floor on his back, his face caved in, this bar resting on his chest.  I knew the police would come only once you were far enough away.  I ran North.  Got in a car with what I had and went.  Hatcher was the only man who knew where that score was and you killed him anyway.”

“Are you are here to kill me or take a trip down a nostalgic street?”

“I’m here, Parker, because I need to know. I took some bars, everyone did.  I wasn’t there but I got my cut.  I showed them to Johnnie.  Now, he’s an expert.  He offered me the money he thought they were worth.  Cash.  No questions.  He dies the deal folds.  Everyone dies.  And then they turn up in the hands of some Italian gangsters and turns out they are fake.  What’s the truth, Parker?  Even you didn’t seem interested in getting them back.  What’s the truth, Parker?”