The Untouchable (52 page)

He heard the room door open.

'You're back?'

'Yes.'

'A good day?'

'A useful day,' Joey croaked.

'I needed a new pair of knickers and clean tights.'

'Good'

There must have been a sob in his voice. He held tight to the support She was in the bathroom doorway. The curtain wasn't drawn. She was looking at him. The water ran in rivers across his spectacles.

'What happened to you?'

Through the lenses her face was blurred. He didn't know whether she cared, or not. He grimaced, but that hurt his mouth, his jawbone, his cheeks and his brain.

'I walked into a door.'

'Did the door have boots and fists, or just boots?'

'If the door had had a gun I think it might have been rather more serious.'

She came into the bathroom and knelt beside the shower. The waler splashed from his body onto her.

'Packer?'

He nodded.

She untied his trainer laces and pulled them off his feet, then the sodden socks, then his underpants and his trousers, and threw each of them into the bath, the water had plastered her careful hair and had made streams of her more careful makeup. She sat on the bath edge, pulled a towel off the rack and rubbed her hair and face.

'You're not the world's most beautiful sight - is there blood in your urine?'

'Don't know.'

'Are you going to live?'

' I hope so.'

'There's a Russian coming.'

'Coming where?'

'Coming for a meeting, for tomorrow's meeting.'

'Where's it to be?'

' I don't have the location . . . Clean tights don't matter, not like knickers. I've got to get back. Do you want a doctor?'

'Tomorrow, then, I follow where he leads. My bloody bumper against his exhaust - no, no doctor.'

'We go mob-handed, Joey. I'll not take argument on it.' She said it as if she were his mother, his aunt, or his teacher.

'It's my show.'

'We go in numbers - it's not about whose show it is.'

'Yes, ma'am, three bags bloody full, ma'am.'

'Mob-handed, hardware, protection - safe. I wouldn't want to look like you look . . . Just so you know - the woman, she's Monika Holberg. She's a Norwegian tree-hugger. She does good deeds for unfortunates, out of UNHCR. You'll find her in Novo Sarajevo, third floor, apartment H, Fojnicka 27. Be a shame, wouldn't it, Joey, if she didn't know what Mister was, what he did? Wouldn't be a shame if, when she's learned it, she kept her legs together and Mister didn't get his over You up for that?'

'Could be.'

'You want me lo dry you?'

'I'll manage.'

She closed the door after her.

Joey staggered to the bed. He was dripping wet. He collapsed onto it. He might have passed out but for the pain and the memory. He was back on the ground, squirming on the ice the Tarmac to make himself smaller, as the lists and boots rained in on him. That was a mistake, Misler, a mistake. The hammering, in his body and his head, was on the door.

He shouted, 'Yes?'

'Are you Cann. Customs and Excise?'

He crawled off the bed, leaned on the wall and then the wardrobe to steady himself, held the towel across his privates and opened the door. The man wore a grey suit, was five or so years older than Cann, had a good shirt and a nice tie. He looked at Cann with contempt, a replica of the sons of the landowner his father managed for superiority buried under a caked veneer of politeness.

'Sorry to disturb you, Mr Cann - by God, you've been in the wars. Don't tell me, let me guess, tripped down some steps, did you? I'm Hearn, from the embassy. I've been asked to pass to you a message that came to us via the Ministry of Justice. I do apologize for the inconvenience of calling on you so late, but we thought it the sort of matter that should not have been passed, for fear of misunderstandings, by telephone.

You had written authorization from Judge Zenjil Delic for "intrusive surveillance" of the UK national Albert William Packer during that gentleman's visit to Sarajevo. You can go home now, Mr Cann, which might save you another accident. Judge Delic informs us, through the Ministry of Justice, that he has with drawn such authorization. He's cancelled it. There's no mistake. I have it in writing, couriered to the embassy, over his signature.'

Joey gagged,'But that's impossible.'

' 'Fraid n o t . . . ' He paused. 'We do have a list of doctors, should you wish for medical attention. If you'd gone through us in the first place then things might have been different, but you chose not to . . .

The authorization for you to operate here is withdrawn. Good night.'

The X-ray machine had gone, and the metal detector arch. They walked, flanking Mister, across the empty atrium bar.

Mister said, again, 'I don't want to talk about it.'

Atkins persisted, 'His place has been turned over, searched, so's mine.'

' I'm not talking about it. Don't you listen?'

He gestured with his hand, into Atkins's face, made a cutting motion across Atkins's throat.

They went out through the doors, and the night frost's blast, carried in the wind, caught them. They went along the side of the hotel heading for the city and the old quarter.

'He was my friend,' Mister said. 'We don't ever forget that he was my friend.'

The Cruncher hadn't been the Eagle's friend, and Atkins hadn't known him. Small matter, the Eagle thought. It was enough that the Cruncher had been the friend of Mister. Atkins wouldn't have understood, was frightened, wouldn't have known when to close his mouth and keep it tight shut. They were walking briskly, filling the pavement of an empty street. Atkins would have seen the cuts on the knuckles when Mister had his fist near to his throat.

'What have you done to your hand, Mister?'

'I've done nothing to my hand.'

'The skin's all broken, it's '

Mister stopped. He turned to the Eagle. He held his hands under the Eagle's nose. The scars were angry, weeping, where the skin was split. 'Do you see anything wrong with my hands, Eagle?'

The Eagle said quietly, 'I don'I see anything wrong with your hands, Mister.'

He was Mister's man. He did not then and had not ever dared to be anything else They walked past the shops with the steel shutters down, and the benches where couples cuddled hopelessly in the cold, past the cafes where the waiters sluiced the floors and lifted the chairs onto the tables They came to the small park. Round the grass were thick bushes, bare of leaves but heavy enough to loss shadows on to the grass. They saw the boy. He had the earphones on his pretty head, and was gyrating with the music he listened to. The dogs smiled the grass, meandered between the shadows Their leashes were hooked to their collars and trailed on the ground after them. He was watched and he did not know it.

Atkins veered away to the right. The Eagle followed Mister to the left, to be behind the boy, as he had been told. He always did what Mister told him. It was about the Cruncher, whom the Eagle had detested, and about the Cruncher's honour, which there had never been any.

They closed on the boy, Enver, who was lost in his music.

C h a p t e r S i x t e e n

He walked, each step laboured, in agony. He could have taken the blue van

The excuse Joey gave himself for walking was that exercise would loosen the joints at his hips, knees, ankles, would dull the bruising on his ribcage, the wheeze in his lung's, and soften the ache behind his eyes. The excuse was merely a delaying tactic. He walked because he was in no hurry to reach his destination He had gone first to the third floor, apartment H, of Foinicka 37. A young woman had answered, draped in a long tailed man's shirt, and he'd asked lor Miss Holberg. She'd come to the door, wrapped in a heavy dressing gown, and she'd used her fingers to squeeze the sleep from her eyes, joey had betrayed her dreams, had told his story. When he'd finished, had demolished her, she'd stuttered questions at him Who are you? How do you know this? Why do you come to tell me it?' Without answering, he'd slipped away down the stairs, and back to the night.

The darkness and the chill of it were close to him.

From Novo Sarajevo, he had tracked alongside the Miljacka river going past the black towers of apartments, the snipers' homes, then had crossed the river at the Vrbanja bridge. It was where she had been shot where Jasmina and her boy had been, in their turn betrayed. Cars crossed where she had lain. Oil grease was smeared where she had bled. He was drawn towards the hill, the steep climb, a place he had no wish to be.

He had said: But that's impossible. He knew their stories, what they had suffered, and their strength . . .

It was not possible.

There were no more cars now, no people scurrying for home up the unlit road. The faster he went up the hill, the sooner he would know the truth of it. Without the moon, full and bright, he would have seen nothing after the last lit pool from the street-lamp. An owl shrieked from the cemetery. He went on. On his watch the hands were past midnight. It was already the day of the meeting. Without authorization for intrusive surveillance, signed by a recognized judge, any evidence accrued from the telephoto camera lens or the directional microphone carried in Maggie Bolton's steel-sided box was inadmissible in court. He could see the old, worn, condescending faces of the new men and the new woman who made the Sierra Quebec Golf team, and he could hear the criticizing merciless rasp of Gough's voice . . . He did not think it could be true, it was not possible.

Joey realized what was different.

Light spewed out at the end of the rutted, holed road from the windows of a house around which was set a skeleton of scaffolding poles. The light reflected on the sleek paintwork of a black Mercedes saloon, and danced back from the radiator screen. At the side of what had been only hall a house, captured by the light, were stacked piles ol concrete building blocks, and there were two cement mixers. The light, splaying from the window, fell on the slabs of a newly laid patio space between the scaffolding and the parked car, and was reflected up to show Joey the clean new roof timbers that peeped from under a spread tarpaulin.

Joey walked towards the light. He saw through the window the naked bulb hanging from new flex.

Before, there had been a grimy, unpolished, inadequate, smelly oil lamp in the room, humble but it had given out a glow ol pride. He went past the Mercedes and banged on the door with his clenched fist, hit it until the pain ran in rivers through his body.

The Eagle hung back. He was, of course, too experienced in the matters of criminal law to believe that staying back, not actually taking part, would in any way mitigate his guilt. The books to prove the guilt lined the shelves ol the office over the launderette; principal among, litem was Archbold, three inches thick of thin india paper and close print, with a leather cover, selling him back each January three hundred and twenty-five pounds. He would be accused, even if he pleaded he'd stayed back of 'acting in common'

with Mister and Atkins. If he snivelled that he had not known what was to happen, he would still be guilty as an 'accessory to murder' For 'acting in common' or for being an 'accessory to murder' the sentence was the same life imprisonment. But that was semantics

. . . God alone knew the penalty in Sarajevo, most likely bollocks defenestration then filleting . . . It was his squeamishness, which Mister despised, that caused him to stay deep in the shadows. They didn't need him. God's truth, they hadn't needed him at a l l . . .

Atkins had done the dogs. All show, all piss and wind, the dogs had been. His dogs, at home with Mo could make a pretence of ferocity but embarrassed themselves with it. Atkins had slipped into the bushes by the grass, had sat down, had cooed at them, and the brutes had shown that their teeth and menace were a sham. Atkins had held the dogs, and Mister had chopped the back of his hand on to the pretty boy's neck, felled him, stuffed the gagging handkerchief into his mouth and wrenched his arms behind his back. Atkins had hooked the dog's leashes to a park-bench stanchion - which would hold them for a few minutes before they broke free - then had run after them, past the trailing Eagle, to help Mister drag Enver down the side alley that led to the river from the park. There was a dribble of moisture on the pavement, and the smell. The bladder had gone first, then the sphincter. The last few paces, from the alleyway to the bridge, the boy had known what was coming to him and had struggled for his life. Atkins, in that final stampede, had hissed, 'Don't you bloody bite me, you bastard.' The struggling and the way his arms were held up behind his back would have meant they were half dislocated out of the shoulder joints.

The Eagle winced. At the end, he couldn't help himself but watch. Mister raised his arm and chopped again, full force, on the back of the boy's neck. They were in the middle of the bridge. A car was turning on to it, but the lights hadn't yet come far enough round to light the rail. The boy slumped under the force of the blow. Maybe he was unconscious, maybe just dazed. It was all one movement. Mister and Atkins had him up, like he was dead weight, and over, like he was dumped trash. There was the splash. The car's lights illuminated the the of them as they walked back to where the Tagle waited. The boy would have been incapable of survival when he went into the water that flowed last, dark, deep, under the bridge's rail. They came towards him. The boy would drown. The drowning wouldn't help the Cruncher, nor the Cruncher's rent boys, nor the Cruncher's parents in their Torbay bungalow. It was about Mister's sell respect and Mister's dignity. As they reached him, Atkins was pulling off his glove and looking at his hand The Eagle heard Mister say,

'You're all right, didn't break the skin-nothing like a good pair ol gloves You did well, Atkins, brilliant.' At worst it was 'acting in common', at best it was

'accessory lo murder.' They didn't wait for him.

The Eagle bent over until his head was down at his knees, and vomited up his hotel dinner.

' I am not Falcone'

Joey shook his head, 'I don't know who is . . . '