Revenger

11

Funny how old habits refused to die even when the reason for having them had long gone. As he sat in the cab taking him to his drink with Schultz, Carver was wearing a favourite old jacket, made of heavy, caramel-coloured suede, that was really more like a short coat. He had a zip-up black body warmer under it and a long-sleeved T-shirt that looked like regular cotton but was actually superfine merino wool, a far superior regulator of body temperature.

Carver had no interest whatever in fashion, but he had always paid very great attention to detail when it came to the function and quality of everything in his life. When the slightest malfunction could make the difference between life and death these things mattered. So he’d long been as picky with his clothes as he was with his weapons, and when he found something that worked, he stuck with it. Even so, he was having a hard time understanding why the same old money-belt was still wrapped around his waist. Its pouches contained passports and credit cards in three different identities; a selection of random IDs picked up on various previous jobs; half a dozen anonymous, prepaid SIM cards; and two thick wads of hundred-dollar US bills. He’d worn it every day for the past twenty years and for much of that time it had been an essential insurance policy. Wherever he was, there’d always been the chance that he’d have to get out fast, and the belt gave him the means to do so.

But why now? The secret store in his Geneva apartment where he kept all the gear he’d used to create fatal, unattributable ‘accidents’ hadn’t been opened in more than two years. He’d not even picked up a gun in that time, let alone fired one in anger. But his weapons were all still there; he still spent a fortune every year on the increasingly complicated systems required to keep the location of any phone he was using untraceable; and his belt was still round his waist this evening, even if it did feel a little tighter than it had in the old days. Wasn’t it time to let it all go?

They were over the river now, driving south towards Netherton Street. Carver looked at his watch. He was going to get there a few minutes early. On a whim he tapped on the glass that divided the passenger compartment from the driver and said, ‘Stop here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

The cabbie looked up and caught his eye in the driver’s mirror. ‘You sure you want to do that, guv? Not a good idea round here.’

‘I’ll manage.’

The driver shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Just hope the next bloke that picks you up isn’t driving an ambulance.’

Carver paid him off and started walking. Within a couple of minutes he’d begun to wonder whether he’d made a stupid decision. It had less to do with the run-down drabness of so much of the cityscape around him than the steady drizzle in the air, which seemed to be seeping down past the collar of his jacket and up through the soles of his shoes, chilling him to the bone. Carver looked around. He couldn’t be too far from Netherton Street now. There was an old council estate up ahead: the pub should be just the far side of that.

He turned down a road that led through the estate. One entire side of it, at least two hundred metres long, was taken up with a single, gigantic concrete chunk of brutal sixties architecture. It was seven storeys high, and walkways ran the full length of each level, like streets in the sky, one above the other. Carver could hear children’s shouts and mocking laughter echoing from somewhere high among the walkways, but when he looked up there hardly seemed to be any lights on anywhere — half a dozen at most across the oppressive, Stalinist bulk of the place. Peering through the drizzle, he realized he’d made a mistake. You couldn’t cut straight through the estate. There was a dead end up ahead where another, smaller pile of concrete barred the way, looking even darker, more lifeless and yet more menacing than the one beside him.

The estate’s architects must have planned it like this specifically to prevent drivers using the road as a rat run. Instead they had created a rat trap, a dead-end community that had taken the hint and died. But even these architects had to have allowed the inhabitants of their oppressive schemes some way of walking out. A peeling, faded sign beside the pavement showed a map of the estate, and Carver saw that if he made his way to the right of the block at the end of the cul-de-sac there should be a path that would lead past a further set of buildings, arranged around an open central space, towards another road that would take him to Netherton Street.

With every step Carver took it became more obvious that the entire sprawling estate was virtually abandoned. He could imagine the drawings and scale models that had been produced when the place had first been proposed, with their sunny skies, green-leafed trees and happy families living, playing and working in a modernist utopia. Now it looked like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or the set of a zombie movie. Carver wasn’t given to shivers of apprehension, but even he prickled a little walking through the unlit shadows of the alley that led past the dead-end block to the promised open space beyond.

The first thing he saw when he came out the other side was a bonfire of old bits of furniture and building materials in front of yet another unlit building with glassless, dead-eyed windows. Three men — two black and one white — were sitting on a low brick wall just next to the fire, a scattering of empty beer cans at their feet, having themselves a party with the crack pipe that the white one had in his mouth. He was sucking hard, pulling his pitted, acne-ridden skin between his rotting teeth. His hands were cupped round the bowl of the pipe, making sure that the rain didn’t put it out. The other two were watching him hungrily, the way addicts do when they see someone else taking their share — possibly more than their share — of the stash.

It was only when White Boy looked up that he saw Carver coming towards him. He took the pipe out of his mouth and gave a wordless grunt that alerted his mates to the presence of a passer-by.

They turned their feverish, sunken eyes in Carver’s direction.

He knew perfectly well how he must look: a little over average height, but with a lean build that was unlikely to intimidate anyone. He wasn’t the kind of man who stood out in a crowd or attracted attention by virtue of his size. In his line of work, anonymity had always been a necessity. He’d never wanted people to know just how dangerous he could be.

Of course, this had the drawback that people didn’t actually know how dangerous he could be. People like dumb, brain-fried crackheads who were always looking for easy money and who, right now, were pulling out knives, getting down off the wall and closing the few metres between themselves and Carver with scuffling, unsteady steps.

They were drunk and stoned, so their reactions would be treacle-slow and their motor skills shot to pieces. On the other hand, they would also be irrational, incoherent and lacking in any sort of impulse control. Carver really didn’t want or need a fight tonight, but negotiation wasn’t an option.

‘You stay ’ere, don’ fuckin’ move!’ White Boy shouted, stabbing his knife in the air. He still had the crack pipe in his other hand. He wasn’t going to let that out of his sight.

The other two spread out to either side of him, blocking Carver’s lines of escape. But they didn’t make any further move to attack him, so he just stayed where he was, waiting to see how this would all unfold.

To his surprise, White Boy had actually broken into a feeble imitation of a run and was heading across the open space. Carver watched him scramble across the broken, debris-strewn ground and it was only then that he realized that there were more people, maybe as many as a hundred, gathered around another set of fires that had been lit on the far side of the space. And by the looks of them, they weren’t there to toast marshmallows.

White Boy disappeared into the crowd, only to re-emerge a few seconds later with another man in a black leather jacket and a beanie hat. This one was a very different specimen. He was squat and barrel-chested with the concentrated raw strength, broken nose and cauliflower ears of a rugby front-row forward. He walked straight up to Carver and asked him, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?’

‘What does it look like?’ Carver replied. ‘I’m walking.’

‘Well, fuck off and walk somewhere else, then.’

‘Get out of my way, and I will. All I want to do is go through this estate and out the other side so that I can have a nice, quiet drink with an old friend.’

‘I wouldn’t do that if I was you.’

‘Thanks for the advice, but I think I will anyway.’

The big man in the beanie hat knew a lot about intimidating people, and he couldn’t help but notice that Carver wasn’t in the least bit frightened. He was also sober and streetwise enough to have picked up on the calm, methodical way that Carver had been assessing the situation around him as they’d been talking. He could not have known just how precisely Carver had worked out the sequence with which he would disable the big man, take White Boy’s knife, place it against the big man’s throat and inform him that it was going to get cut to the bone if he didn’t tell everyone else to back up and let Carver through. But still, the big man got the clear impression that there was a risk attached to starting a fight with this apparently innocuous new arrival, so he took a step back, swept his arm like a traffic cop letting the traffic through and said, ‘Suit yourself.’

‘Thanks,’ said Carver, ‘I will.’

And he walked away towards Netherton Street.