Written in Dead Wax (44 page)

He looked at the bottle of champagne. “Having a celebration?” Neither of us said anything. It wasn’t clear whether we were meant to. It was hard to know the etiquette of being held at gunpoint by a madman. “You can have a glass if you like. I’ll give each of you a glass.” He looked at us. “Straight up. I mean it. This is an unpleasant business, but if everyone just behaves professionally, in a civilised manner, we can get through it with the minimum of fuss.”

The doorbell rang.

* * *

The merest second after the doorbell rang, and long before any normal person could have even begun to answer it, the door popped open and a figure stepped in. “Greetings, groovers,” he said.

It was Stinky.

He ambled into the living room and looked at me and Ree and Heinz. And at the gun, which was now pointing at him.

“What’s going on?” said Stinky. But I could see by his face that he already had an all-too-clear idea.

“Sit down,” said Heinz. Stinky sat down. “You’re just in time, mate. We were about to open the champagne.” He looked at us. “You can all have a glass of bubbly before you go.” He smiled at us, friendly but firm. “But whatever happens, you
will
go.”

“Go where?” said Stinky in a small voice. Everyone ignored him.

“What are you going to do?” said Ree. “Shoot us?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Heinz. He nodded towards the front door. “The sound of all that building work should more than cover the noise.”

I said, “You can’t really believe you’ll get away with this.” My voice sounded strangely normal.

“Again, friend, I don’t see why not.” He reached into his jacket and took out a fat plastic package filled with white powder. It was as thick as an overstuffed sandwich. He slapped it on the table. “Cocaine. Very high-grade cocaine. You see, what I’m going to do is spread this all over the place. Just chuck it over everything. You’re thinking,
that’s a bit of a waste
. And you’re right. But here’s what it will do. It will convince the cops that there must have been even more cocaine here. So much that someone could afford to just leave this amount lying around. And they’ll deduce that this whole thing was some kind of drug deal gone tragically wrong.” He looked at me. “The millionaire crate digger got carried away with his newfound wealth and fell in with a bad crowd. I think everyone will buy that.”

“You’re going to kill us?” said Stinky.

“Yes, mate. Sorry.” He was polite, apologetic but implacable. I could see Stinky believed him. He visibly wilted, sinking down in his chair as if his body mass had suddenly dropped. “Actually, you know what, come to think of it,” said Heinz, “you could have some of the coke too. I don’t see why not. In fact it will help sell the whole thing. There you go. Cocaine and champagne. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? Takes the sting away a bit.”

“We’re going to die,” said Stinky.

“Yes, mate.”

Stinky gave a sharp, anguished intake of breath, then turned and looked at me. “Since we’re going to die,” he said, “I want to apologise to you, Chef, for ruining your career.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Your career as a DJ, as a broadcaster. Every chance I got, I did everything I could to sabotage it.” There were tears beginning to run down his face. “It was like that Bob Marley song. Every time you planted a seed I killed it before it could grow.”

“That’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’,” said Heinz. We might as well have been having a pub quiz.

Stinky was looking at me, big fat tears running down his cheeks. “It was because I knew you were so much better than I was. You had a better voice. You knew more about music. If you’d got started I never would have stood a chance.”

Heinz roared with laughter. His amusement was enormous and sincere and I realised that Stinky had inadvertently bought us all a few more minutes of life. “Will you listen to that?” said Heinz. He looked at me. “When his turn comes, I should let you do the honours, mate.”

Just then Fanny, who had been hiding behind the luggage on the sofa, jumped up and came streaking past. She raced through the room, as she always did when she was uncertain of the company, and went clattering out the cat flap. Heinz stared after her, the gun aimed at the door, distracted for an instant.

I picked up the bottle of champagne and swung it at his head.

Heinz swatted it aside, casually, as if it were a dragonfly. The bottle was knocked from my hand. It sailed through the air and bounced onto the sofa, landing soft and unbroken. Heinz turned and hit me.

His fist crunched into my face right beside my left eye and the room vanished in an explosion of white flame. I found myself lying on the floor. There was no pain as such yet. My face felt hot and numb. But the white flames were retreating from the periphery of my vision. I could see that Stinky was cowering in a corner while Heinz was turning in surprise to see Ree coming at him. Her arm was swinging, slicing at him with something in her hand that gleamed.

The clasp knife.

She must have carried that over in her checked baggage because they sure as hell wouldn’t have let her have it in her carry-on. These and other thoughts flashed through my mind in a vivid and leisurely fashion as I stood up on rubbery, wavering legs and tottered towards them.

On the way I stooped over the sofa and picked up the champagne bottle again. I continued on my endless journey to reach Heinz, watching helplessly as he laughed and grabbed Ree’s wrist and twisted it until she dropped the knife.

“Spunky!” he said to her. I suddenly found I was standing behind him, bottle in my hand.

This time I made no attempt to go for his head. Instead I hit his hand with my champagne bottle, good and hard—the hand that was holding the gun.

He had seen me out of the corner of his eye and tried to move to avoid the blow but it was too late. The gun went skittering across the floor, ricocheted off the base of a standing lamp and bounced into the kitchen. Meanwhile our sturdy friend the bottle rolled across the floor, still unbroken, and disappeared under an armchair.

Heinz slammed Ree against the wall, then turned to deal with me.

I saw the sledgehammer of his suntanned hand approaching my face in dreamy slow motion, like a distant train. I was careful to close my eyes before the blow landed.

The blow didn’t land.

I opened my eyes again and saw Ree had grabbed his arm from behind and was pulling it back. Stinky still stood frozen in the corner.

I started looking around for that unbreakable champagne bottle.

The back door opened and we all turned around to see Nevada standing there. My first thought was that she wasn’t wearing that fucking wig anymore. My second was that she was holding a gun.

She aimed it at Heinz, who promptly turned and fled. He went straight out the front door. It was so unexpected that we all just turned and stared at each other.

I was out in the square less than a second after Heinz, so I saw it all happen.

They were swinging a section of the boiler above us on the crane.

Its huge shadow swept across the plantings in the middle of the square, and then over Heinz. There was a shout and then a strangely musical metallic twang and the big shadow twitched and shifted and the boiler section came falling down out of the clear sky. Heinz was scrambling through the plantings, retreating in a straight line from my front door. He must have felt the shadow cut off the sunlight because he looked up and saw several tons of metal floating quietly down towards him.

He leapt to one side. His agility was astonishing. He jumped clear across the planter and landed outside it. The boiler component crashed harmlessly down behind him in a crunching shower of leaves and earth. The ground shuddered beneath me.

Heinz had landed just on the edge of the deep basin created by the excavation of the boiler house. He was staring back at the monstrous piece of metal that had so nearly crushed him. He was grinning at his miraculous escape. He saw me and winked. Then he turned to run.

As he turned he came down hard on his left leg, the one with the brace. The impact caused him to stumble a little and he fell to the side, towards the basin. He reached out to steady himself, to grab the safety rail. But the safety rail was gone.

He fell through the space where it used to be, and straight down.

Into the basin.

I ran and looked down. Hans was lying on a pile of building rubble twenty feet below. There had been no helpful trees this time. His face, suddenly pale, was staring blindly up at me. He had come to rest on a heap of concrete blocks, each one the size of a shoe box. His head—no longer quite the shape a head should be—rested on one of the blocks as if on a pillow. His neck was bent almost at a right angle. A dark stain spreading out beneath him was turning the grey concrete-dust brown.

Ree and Nevada and Stinky came running up behind me. They looked down. Below us in the basin, work was stopping as people gradually began to realise what had happened.

Stinky turned away and threw up. I didn’t feel sick at all. I felt something much worse than that. A deep evil delight.

I was busy trying out my new coffee grinder. The cats were watching me as I unwrapped the thing, set it up, and put in the beans. I said, “Now, this very expensive new coffee grinder is supposedly completely silent and won’t offend the sensibilities of cats. So I hope you like it. Did I mention how expensive it was?”

I put in the beans. I switched it on. There was a faint but discernible and very eerie high-pitched buzzing. The cats fled in mortal terror. I sighed, looked at the price tag and got on with making my coffee. It was just smelling great when the doorbell rang.

It was Nevada.

“My god,” she said. “Can I have some of that coffee?”

She came in and settled into her favourite chair. “There isn’t a half-naked American meretrix about to spring out at me is there?”

“No. Ree is out shopping.”

“Yes, I imagine she’s going to be doing a lot of that.”

“She’s buying presents for the boys back at Berto’s garage.”

“Yes, they seemed like a fun bunch. They were very eager to inspect the undercarriage of my Porsche. So to speak.”

“And, by the way, I know what ‘meretrix’ means.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I poured the coffee.

“My god, that smells wonderful. It didn’t come out of a monkey’s sphincter, did it?”

“A civet, you mean,” I said. “And that stuff is called
kopi luwak
. This is
ca phe cut chon
.” I was blinding her with science. They were one and the same. Anything to get her to shut up and try the coffee.

She peered into her cup. “I’m not sure I should trust you.”

“Likewise,” I said. That killed the conversation for a minute. We sipped our coffee.

Nevada said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. What happened to Heinz’s gun?”

“Call me sentimental, call me foolish. I dropped it off Hammersmith Bridge when no one was looking.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s now at the bottom of a rather large river. I hope you didn’t want it.”

“No,” she said. “Just curious. I’m much more interested in what happened to the cocaine.”

“Now, that
is
interesting. After Stinky puked—you remember, when he saw Heinz’s mortal remains—he went back into my house to clean up. By the time I got back inside he was hurrying off, looking pretty pale. He didn’t say anything, which was unusual for Stinky. It was only after he was gone that I realised the cocaine was gone, too.”

“Stinky took the coke?”

“He was never one to miss an opportunity.”

“My god. The little stinker.”

We sat and drank our coffee. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something. What I eventually said was, “How much did you know?”

“Know?”

“About all this.”

“About as much as you did, most of the time, I suppose. I knew that Mr Hibiki wanted this record and he was willing to pay a hell of a lot to find it.”

“You knew enough to carry a gun.”

“Mr Hibiki was pretty clear that other interests would be after the same item and that they would be, shall we say, highly motivated. And not above doing us harm.”

“The Aryan fuckers.”

“The late Aryan fuckers. I understand that something very final befell Heidi in LA?”

“It seems probable.”

“How sad,” said Nevada. She didn’t sound any sadder than I was. “Well, anyway, to answer your question, all I knew was that we were after the record, and so were these others. That’s what I knew. What I
deduced
, from the money being spent on the project, was that something of considerable value was involved. Of value to men like the good Mr Hibiki.”

“Who the hell is Mr Hibiki?”

“Well, he’s very senior at one of Japan’s largest music and media corporations. One of which occupies much the same market sector as American Music Industries—our old friends AMI. And you might say there’s a certain friendly rivalry between the two firms. The way there is between a snake and a mongoose.”

“So that’s as much as you knew when you met me?”

“That’s as much as I knew then. Virtually nothing. In contrast to Mr Hibiki, who knew essentially everything. Or at least he knew the essentials.”

“Which were?”

“That if he played his cards right, he could take advantage of a huge shift in the corporate structure of AMI.”

I said, “You mean, when it was discovered that Ree held a controlling interest in it.”

“Yes. Ridiculous name, that, by the way. Ree. Anyway, this would have big consequences in the global marketplace. And since he knew it was coming, Hibiki was well placed to take advantage of the consequences.”

“Profitable advantage.”

“Yes. Especially if he knew exactly
when
it would happen and could position himself to get the maximum benefit from it.”

“Basically he had to get his ducks in a row,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So he actually
wanted
Ree to discover who her grandfather was, and go after AMI for ownership.”

“Yes. But not until he was ready. Mr Hibiki wanted to sit tight and wait for the ideal market conditions, so he could make a killing with insider knowledge.” She looked at me. “That was pretty much the situation when we saw each other in Japan. At that point, Hibiki just planned to sit back and let his scheme mature. But unfortunately for his plans, your friend Ree was busy in Los Angeles putting two and two together herself.”