Personal

THIRTY-ONE

We went, and they drove us. In the minicab office there was a guy already on his way around the counter as we stepped inside. He was a version of the guy in the pawn shop next door, a little younger, a little straighter, a little heavier, but just as dark and unshaven. A cousin, possibly, or just a guy from the same little village in the old country. He showed us to a Skoda sedan at the kerb. A taxi. We got in the back, he got in the front. Behind the wheel. He started it up, and hit the gas, and we took off, and we heard the click of the locks, as we passed a certain pre-set speed.

There was no point asking where we were going. No way would we get an answer. A silent driver was all part of the theatre. Not that it mattered, anyway. We knew generically, if not specifically. We were heading north, clearly. We didn’t need the exact name of the next-but-one overrun manor that lay in that direction, as long as we could picture it. Or picture part of it. The important part. A storage unit, possibly, in a bland and deserted business park on the dismal edge of a blighted part of town, or a barn-like structure on open land near a tangle of streets, or maybe a real barn, way out in the country, an hour or more north of town. Maybe we were in for a long trip. By the sound of it the Skoda had a diesel engine. Which would be economical. I leaned forward and checked the gas. It was full.

Outside the window the traffic was slow and the view stayed suburban for a good long time, and then I saw the arch of the big soccer stadium, which meant we had made it to a place called Wembley. Still heading north. But we didn’t settle in for a long trip out of town. We turned pretty soon, and looped around a little, almost back on ourselves, and I saw a sign to a place called Wormwood Scrubs. Which was the name of a famous London prison, I thought, which gave me a clue about the kind of neighbourhood we were headed for.

But we didn’t go all the way to the prison. The streets we passed got a little darker and gloomier, but we turned off the main drag some ways short of the worst of it. We took a sudden left, and then another, through a gate in a brick wall, and then straight inside a large brick building, that could have been a streetcar depot a hundred years before, or a factory, back when people made things in cities, other than noise and money. Now the place was being used as an auto repair shop, by the look of it specializing in fast and dirty fixes for the minicab trade. There were piles of part-worn tyres, all grey and dusty, and every car I saw was similar to the Skoda we were riding in. Battered sedans everywhere, one of them up on a hoist, some of them with dented panels cut away, all of them presumably being brought back to whatever kind of code was demanded of telephone cars. We could lose our licence, the guy in Barking had said, and I guessed there were more ways of losing it than just taking the wrong kind of booking.

We came to a stop in an empty workshop bay, as if we wanted our oil changed or our tracking checked. The sound of our engine was loud against the walls. Behind us a guy came out of the shadows and walked across the floor and hit a big green button. A chain-driven security shutter started clattering down over the opening we had driven through. The daylight was sliced thinner and thinner until it disappeared completely, leaving us with nothing but the dim glow of electric bulbs, in fixtures slung from the rafters high above our heads.

The guy who had driven us turned off the motor and climbed out, and he opened Casey Nice’s door for her, either because of some old-world Balkan courtesy, or because he was impatient. Nice got out, and I got out on my side, and I stepped over tools and air hoses into clear space at the rear of the car. The guy who had closed the roller door came back, and two more guys came out of a boxed-off room, and we ended up in an informal little cluster, outnumbered four to two. They were all of a kind, not young, not old, all dark and unshaven, all a useful size, all silent and wary. There were no mechanics at work. No men with wrenches, in oil-stained overalls. Sent away, I guessed, temporarily, while the secret business was done.

One of the two from the boxed-off room seemed to be the main man. He looked us up and down, and said, ‘We need to know who you are.’

Casey Nice said, ‘We’re Americans, with money, who want to buy something from you.’

‘How much money do you have?’

‘Enough, I’m sure.’

‘You’re very trusting,’ the guy said. ‘To come here, I mean. We could take your money from you for nothing.’

‘You could try.’

‘Are you wearing wires?’

‘No.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘You want me to take my shirt off? Because that ain’t going to happen.’

The guy said nothing in reply to that, but his mouth got a little wet and mobile, as if he thought making her take her shirt off would be an excellent idea. I said, ‘You can take a look at our passports, and you can figure out how likely it is that the British authorities would employ foreign citizens for an undercover sting, and then you can take a look at the money, and then we’ll take a look at the merchandise. That’s how it’s going to go.’

‘Is it?’ the guy said.

‘Pretty much,’ I said.

He looked at me, hard, and I looked right back at him. The first staring contest of his day, probably, but one he was destined to lose. Staring isn’t difficult. I can do it all day long. Without blinking, if I want to, which is sometimes painful, but always useful. The trick is to not really look at them, but to focus ten yards beyond, on nothing, which produces a glassy effect, which makes them worry, mostly about what’s going on behind your empty eyes.

The guy said, ‘OK, show me your passports.’

I went first, with my stiff blue booklet, very new, but indisputably genuine. The guy flicked back and forth through it, and felt the paper, and checked the photograph. And the printed data too, apparently, because he looked up at me and said, ‘You weren’t born in America.’

I said, ‘Only technically. Children of serving military are considered born in America for all legal and constitutional purposes.’

‘Serving military?’

‘You remember us, I’m sure. We came and kicked your ass in Kosovo.’

The guy paused a beat, and said, ‘And now you’re a bodyguard?’

I nodded.

I said, ‘You better believe it.’

He handed my passport back. He didn’t look at Casey Nice’s. One was enough. He said, ‘Come in the room and we’ll talk.’

The room was a semi-tight fifteen-by-fifteen space, walled off from the workshop many decades previously, in a fairly arbitrary position, to do with power lines, possibly. The walls looked like single-skin brick, plastered smooth and painted with shiny institutional paint, dull green in colour, like pea soup. There was a window with a metal frame, with a desk under it, and three armchairs. No gun cabinets. No closets. Just a place for doing business, like a salesman’s office behind a lot full of ten-year-old cars.

The guy said, ‘Please take a seat,’ and when we didn’t he took one himself, going first, perhaps as an example, or a reassurance.

We took a seat.

The guy said, ‘What are you looking for?’

I said, ‘What have you got?’

‘Handgun?’

‘Two. We both carry. People don’t expect that.’

‘What do you like?’

‘Anything that works. And that you’ve got ammunition for.’

‘Mostly we have nine-millimetre. It’s easy to get in Europe.’

‘Works for me.’

‘You like Glock?’

‘Is that what you’ve got?’

‘It’s what we’ve got most of. Glock 17s, brand new, if you want a matching pair.’

‘And a hundred rounds each.’

The guy paused a beat, and then he nodded, and he said, ‘I’ll go get you a price.’

He got up out of his chair, and stepped out of the room.

He closed the door behind him.

And locked it.