The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (15 page)

       
‘Yes, he is,’ said Shona. ‘Have you been to Scotland before?’

       
‘No, this is my first time,’ Sammy replied. ‘But I love it, the air is so fresh, the hills have a rugged beauty that you simply don’t see down south, and the people are so friendly. I’ll be back.’

       
‘I’m sure you will,’ said Shona. ‘I’m sure you will,’ she repeated, quietly and thoughtfully. I felt like a sick pigeon being fought over by a couple of alley cats, but I couldn’t understand why their claws were out, they weren’t a threat to each other and I wasn’t playing favourites. Or maybe I was, perhaps that was the problem.

       
‘Sammy’s a friend of Tony’s,’ I said, and Shona raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘I just bet she is.’

       
‘Do you work together?’ she asked.

       
‘You mean Tony and I? Yes, sort of. I’m in public relations.’ Which was, of course, absolutely true but I still grinned and stopped worrying. She was a big girl and could take care of herself. They fenced for a while but Sammy had the edge because I’d talked to her so often about Shona, and after half an hour or so the conversation eased and they discussed clothes and shops, diverting the rivalry into a friendly argument about the merits of their two cities, a dispute about cultures and not personalities. They parted as almost friends and I knew that next time they met they’d peck cheeks like old school chums but they’d never be close, never have heart-to hearts or cry on each other’s shoulders. I could live with that.

       
‘You’ll be back soon?’ Shona asked me in the pub carpark and I said yes, a couple of weeks at the most, I promise, maybe sooner. We took the same road back to Edinburgh but Shona had her foot hard on the accelerator and she soon left us far behind.

A couple of days after Sammy and I got back from Scotland McKinley fixed up the meeting with Davie Read. To fit in with the cover story, we arranged an appointment at Salisbury House in Finsbury Circus, the London headquarters of the National Bank of Detroit. One of the biggest blocks in the area, its face of light brown sandstone and window boxes bursting with purple and white flowers looked down on four games of bowls being played by shirt-sleeved office workers on a tiny green in the centre of the Circus gardens.

       
I waited close to the polished granite steps leading up to the main entrance foyer until I saw McKinley and Read arrive in the Granada, the rear wheels catching the kerb as they turned into the Circus looking for an empty parking meter. I walked quickly up to the reception desk and asked to speak to Mr  Kolacowosky and hoped to God they didn’t actually have anyone of that name in the building. I kept one eye on the glass doors as the girl behind the desk looked through her internal telephone directory, shaking her head and saying yes, she had heard me say the name but how on earth did you spell it?

       
As McKinley and Read started up the steps I told her not to bother and that Mr  Kolacowosky had obviously moved on to better things and I headed for the door. I met them halfway down and steered Read round, my arm on his shoulder, thanking him for coming and saying to Get-Up that, with the sensitive nature of the arrangements, it might be better if we spoke in the open air and not in my office where we never knew who might be next door with his ear pressed against a glass tumbler.

       
McKinley nodded and said he understood and Read said what a good idea, and all three of us were nodding like those little dogs you see in the back of resprayed Ford Cortinas with large fluffy dice hanging from the driver’s mirror.

       
I herded them over the road to the Circus gardens like a collie with a couple of wayward sheep, encouraged them past the bicycles chained to the black railings, through the gateway and down the tarmac path which circled the bowling green.

       
It was two-thirty pm so most of the lunching office workers had gone back to their desks and computer terminals, but several of the wooden benches were still occupied by men in suits and women in smart summer dresses eating Marks and Spencer sandwiches, salads from Tupperware containers and doughnuts from brown paper bags as they stretched out their legs and enjoyed the waning warmth of the afternoon sun.

       
The air buzzed with the sound of traffic and the two-way radios of the motorcycle messengers. Through the trees came the sound of drilling and cutting and hammering from the repair and refurbishment that’s always a part of the City background noise, standards and rents leapfrogging each other madly behind miles of dust-covered scaffolding.

       
Davie Read was about forty years old and a similar build to McKinley – as I walked between them I felt like a slice of corned beef in a roll. He was clean shaven and sweating slightly, either through nervousness or the heat, and in his large brown checked jacket and beige trousers he could have passed for a middle-ranking insurance salesman with a three-bedroomed semi in Ealing and a two-year-old Sierra in the drive. He wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and as we walked he pulled out a green handkerchief from his top pocket, mopped his wet forehead and blew his bulbous, slightly red nose. With his nose and girth he could have been a heavy drinker, but his breath smelt fresh so he was either a gin and tonic or vodka man or he was on his best behaviour. Whatever, he was all I had and McKinley said he could be trusted.

       
We passed four building workers lying shirtless on the grass, sunning themselves and looking up the skirts of anything aged between twelve and fifty that walked by.

       
‘Get-Up’s told you what I’m after?’ I asked, as Read returned the damp handkerchief to his pocket, the sweat already reappearing on his mopped brow.

       
‘Cocaine, a quarter of a million pounds’ worth. That shouldn’t be a problem, but he was a bit vague about why you wanted it – that’s one hell of a lot of sniffing.’ The glasses slipped slightly down his nose and he looked over the top of them like an admonishing professor. Hurry up, boy, explain yourself, except if I did this professor would be off like a scalded rabbit. My feet tingled as a Tube train ran through the tunnel below us from Liverpool Street to Moorgate, and the back of my neck tingled because if he didn’t believe me I could end up buried beneath the earth at a similar depth to the train.

       
‘I need to make a lot of money, and fast,’ I said. ‘I represent a group of investors who borrowed heavily to invest in the commodity markets, coffee in particular. We were banking on a heavy frost this year but it never materialized and instead there was a bumper crop and prices fell like a stone. We weren’t alone, a lot of people have got their fingers burnt, it took everybody by surprise. Unfortunately we’re not in a position to pay back the money we borrowed and we’ve only got a few weeks to make good the loss.

       
‘We’ve decided that the most effective use we could make of our remaining capital is to go back into the commodity market, but in a different way. If we import £250,000 of cocaine we can realize it for close to two million pounds and recoup our losses.’

       
I spoke slowly and clearly, like a marketing director revealing his strategy for the forthcoming financial year and hoping that nobody would spot any flaws. From where we were standing we could just see the top of the National Westminster Tower, rising a head and shoulders above the rest of the City office blocks. If you could find a very large lumberjack with an axe the size of a bus and persuade him to hack away at the base of the tower long and hard, and if he pushed it in our direction and it began to topple then the top two floors would crash down onto the three remaining games of bowls being played on the green. My mind was wandering, tension does that sometimes, and I brought myself back to reality. This was no time to be daydreaming. McKinley had already told Read the tale of woe, how a group of would-be City whizz kids had got their fingers burned gambling on the commodities market with other people’s money and how those singed digits would be caught firmly in the till when the auditors came a-calling next month. And to make the cheese in the trap look even more tempting he’d told Read that I was so desperate that he’d be able to cut himself a slice of the action.

       
Read started to nibble. ‘How do you plan to get rid of it?’ he asked.

       
Down boy, don’t get too greedy. ‘That’s my problem – you can leave the distribution to me. All I want from you is the stuff wholesale. I suppose I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know if I point out that coke is a rich man’s drug. It’s served up at all the best dinner parties instead of liqueurs, it’s used widely in the City, everyone from advertising executives to merchant bankers is trying and enjoying it. And it isn’t bought on street corners. The middle classes have their own distribution system and it’s very well protected, believe me. It’s not heroin, after all.’

       
We walked on in silence, Read with his brow furrowed as if he had a difficult decision to make but he’d already decided to bite. The only thought in his mind now was how much of the cheese he could grab before the trap clamped shut.

       
‘What’s in it for me?’ he asked, and he looked across at McKinley who was busy trying to scratch the middle of his back, shoving his left arm down his shirt collar and grunting. McKinley had already told him he could stick out for ten per cent of the gross if everything went smoothly, so when I offered him three thousand expenses up front and five per cent he sucked air in through his front teeth as if he was testing for cavities.

       
‘Not enough,’ he said. I pressed him.

       
‘I’m offering almost sixteen grand for setting up one deal. I put up all the cash, McKinley and I will collect the coke, you don’t even have to be there. All you have to do is make a few phone calls.’

       
He gave me the sort of look the wolf gave Little Red Riding Hood and he damn near started rubbing his hands together, pound signs rolling up behind the gold-rimmed glasses.

       
‘Look, squire, if it’s that easy you don’t need me. And if it isn’t that easy, and you can take it from me that it isn’t, then I want more than a lousy five per cent.’

       
‘I could find somebody else.’

       
‘Sure you could, sure you could,’ he said. ‘Except we both know you’re running out of time, don’t we?’

       
I gave McKinley a withering glare for Read’s benefit and fingered my watch. ‘I suppose I can go as high as ten per cent.’

       
He positively beamed. ‘That’s more like it. But I’m still going to want the three grand expenses.’

       
I had the money ready and I handed it to him. ‘You’re quite happy taking the rest of your fee in cocaine?’

       
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ he laughed, because twenty-five thousand pounds in white powder would be worth ten times as much on the streets. He wouldn’t be pushing it to estate agents and record company A and R men, he’d be selling it in little plastic packets diluted to a fraction of its original strength.

       
‘I’d like to talk specifics,’ I said. ‘How do you plan to make the delivery?’

       
He took the handkerchief out of his pocket again, and snapped it open with a flourish as we started our second circuit of the garden.

       
‘The people I have in mind usually bring it over from Ireland by sea, and I’ll arrange to collect it, probably somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. I’ll let you know where. But if you like I’ll bring it right to your door. At no extra cost.’ He smiled, just sign on the dotted line, sir, you won’t regret it.

       
‘I want to be there when the stuff is handed over and when my cash is counted. And when you take your percentage.’

       
‘That’s fine by me,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Get-Up with the arrangements.’

       
‘Don’t leave it too long,’ I replied. ‘I’d like to get this over with as soon as possible.’ And that was that. Easier than ordering a three-piece suite from Harrods.

       
We turned back and walked out through the main entrance and threaded our way in and out of the Circus traffic. At the bottom of the steps to the bank I shook Read by the hand and said I looked forward to doing business with him. As he and McKinley returned to the Granada I went up the steps, through the double glass doors and back into the reception area. The girl’s face fell as I gave her a cheery smile, put my palms down on the teak-veneered desk and asked her if, by any chance, Mr  Kolacowosky had left a forwarding address?

Read got back to McKinley two days later, on the Wednesday. Yes, the deal was on, the cocaine would be brought over from Ireland in ten days’ time on a fishing boat which would be anchored in the Firth of Lorn, a few miles off Minard Point on the west coast of Scotland. The delivery would be taken the rest of the way in a dinghy which would cut into Loch Feochan (McKinley pronounced it ‘Lock Fuckin’) and land a couple of miles from a small village called Cleigh.

       
The drop would be at night and there was a complicated series of signal light sequences so that both sides could recognize each other, but McKinley and I wouldn’t have to learn them because Read would be with us to make sure the handover went smoothly and to make equally certain that he got his cut. We arranged to meet at a hotel in Oban, about five miles from Loch Feochan, on the Saturday evening two hours before the drop.

       
Later that evening, with McKinley back in his hotel room, I made two telephone calls, one to Dinah telling him where and when I’d need him, the other to Iwanek for almost thirty minutes during which time his fee doubled. Yes he had the gun, yes he understood exactly what I wanted him to do, yes he would be in Oban to meet me, yes he was sure it would all go smoothly and yes he wanted his fee in cash. Always be careful of yes-men, my father had told me. Yes, dad, I remember.