‘So!’ said the Oriental type, talking past his knife like a tycoon with his cigar, ‘we will go, then. But hearken to this, lord Maxie! You do not believe in us because you do not believe in yourself. We know a born leader when we see one.’
‘Arhar! We need
you, an’ we’ll not let ’ee waste thyself thus, no, me bold heart!’
The women, who’d sunk
down on their knees by my side, slid gracefully upright. One of them lifted her curly hair high, with a mocking giggle. ‘The offer is still open, Maxie.
E altro infortunio
, it brews for you!’
The other one, turning away, shot a glance back over her shoulder. ‘
Verdad!
And when that trouble boils over, you have but to call,
mi corazon!
’ Her eyes glittered in the gloom, and she snapped her long
white teeth like a trap.
‘Estaremos alla!’
‘
Away!
’ said a harsh voice. They trotted towards the water’s edge, leaving me swaying, panting, mired deeper than I had been before. Darkness drifted across the water, and in it I suddenly saw the faint outline of the lugger’s mastheads as the sails soared up and billowed, and the bows swung out from shore. A distant voice drifted back to me as the shadow
shape glided slowly out into the estuary, a shifting sketch in pale chalk on black. ‘Trouble comes, remember – and so do we!’
Then there was silence, and the splashing of the waves. Oh yes, and me whimpering.
The mud had eaten one of my trainers, and I had a fine time delving around for it. No sign – and I almost dropped the envelope. Hastily I caught it, and looked inside; and I began to sweat
again, though I was freezing. Fifty grand in hundreds, if it was a cent; Ahwaz’s fifty grand. He’d seen his big deal bushwhacked, and he’d had to do the runner of all time, and he’d lost his money; and I had it.
I gibbered at the
thought. The phone he’d accepted, but this – not a cat in hell’s chance, and I’d be the cat.
I hugged the bills to my chest, but newspaper is better insulation. I had
to get out of here. Ahwaz might even come back now. But I was miles from anywhere with only one trainer, and for all the big notes I could brandish, I hadn’t nearly enough small ones to get back. Try giving a cabbie a hundred; chances are he’ll run you straight to the nearest cop shop. Unless he’s one of the East London minicab boys, in which case he’ll probably roll you on the off-chance there’s
more.
I swallowed painfully. There was money here, and maybe shoes, too. Wading in could only improve my jeans, so I clambered over the squidgy slickness of the inflatable and its horrid cargo. One I couldn’t touch, and anything he’d had would have been spoiled anyway; but the other had a heap of Dutch guilders and about a hundred in English cash, and his trainers were better than mine, though
not such a good fit. Then, looking away and making little mewing noises, I managed to rifle some of Fallon’s pockets for more.
About five hundred in all, plus more guilders. More money than I’d set eyes on in a few years; but it felt cold and clammy as death in my fingers. There was something else about it, too, but I couldn’t think what, and I wasn’t about to hang around. I had a long walk ahead,
especially as I didn’t dare go back to the road where we’d left Ahwaz’s van. Maybe I should have hopped that lugger and all, right enough.
And then
that nagging thought hit me clearly at last – the brigands or whatever they were, why hadn’t
they
rifled their victims? They’d chucked the drugs away. They’d left me the money. They hadn’t come for the cash, nor out of sheer public spirit either.
So what had they come for?
Me?
A
LL
THAT MONEY
, though, all that dosh. That was what really got to me, so badly I couldn’t worry about much else.
Who’d it belong to? Who wants to know?
I plodded across the marsh, almost blind, brain clacking away like a jet-propelled hamster wheel. Fallon wasn’t very likely to come back asking for it; mind you, if he did, he’d get it. No arguments,
at all
.
Ahwaz
– well, what I say is, when you run away from a dodgy investment you’ve got to take your losses. Sooner or later, of course, he’d stop running and start looking around for somebody to blame it on, and he’d probably start with me. Only he’d have to find me first.
Fifty grand can take you a long, long way. He owed me it, too. All those jobs I’d done for him, all those lovely motors lifted – the
peanuts he’d paid me. A complete bloody thief, that’s what he was – a thief.
And that brought me back to these thugs or bandits or whatever they were. They could have taken the money right out of my hand. Or the hand with it, for two pins. They had a claim, and they were pretty good at getting straight to the point, and the edge too for that matter. I couldn’t make them out. Every time I thought
about them my head ached and my mind blurred. It must have been the dope floating about. They couldn’t really have been the way I saw them. Almost like the ghosts of the old-time smugglers or pirates who’d used the marsh, who’d maybe been sunk in it often enough, by the revenuers or their rivals. Or strung up on lonely marshland gibbets to rot away, bit by bit, tarred so they’d last as a warning,
creaking in the icy sea breeze …
Actually
it was quite warm. I still shivered and looked behind me, not eager to see a dangling silhouette against the baleful skygleam. I didn’t, and what’s more I didn’t see the smelly boghole in front of me either, before it swallowed my foot to the knee and threw me flat in some brambles. It bred a healthy scepticism.
I was being paranoid, that was all. Ten
to one they were just a raggedy-arsed gang of wild men, diddyboys or travellers or something, who’d come in to bust up a big dope deal – for the cash, not the dope, which is risky to market. That would explain why they kicked the stuff around – and got themselves and me an incidental high. I got some crazy ideas, they forgot the money. I didn’t; but then I was just a bit saner to start with, maybe.
So, tough titty on them. To the victor, the spoils – especially if the victor doesn’t leave a forwarding address.
Trouble was, the victor didn’t know what to do next. I couldn’t go anywhere like this, not without somewhere to dry off and warm up and get a few hours’ rest. I’d be conspicuous, I’d be remembered, leave a trail. Did I dare go home? It was a risk, but then so was anywhere, the way
I was now. I was rationalising, the rat heading back to its hole; but I didn’t see that at the time.
The envelope
was getting battered, so I tucked it inside my shirt, giving myself a chest for a change. All the long way home it crackled and creaked against my heart. It was a bloody long way, too. By the time I got off the marsh, after much slipping and sliding and falling in pools of God knows
what, it was nearly two. No buses running, not much traffic, no cabs and no free rides, at least when they stopped and caught the pong of marsh all over me. The Gollum look was not in that year.
For that matter there weren’t many shifty little marsh-sodden characters wandering around with a small fortune up their jumper, traces of powdered heroin all over them and four drug-runner corpses some
way back along their tracks. It made me feel a tiny bit conspicuous. So I had to be very careful about hitching. I mean, suppose I happened to thumb down a cop car—
It didn’t bear thinking about. And I even had to make myself pass up a nice little MG I found down a back road, standing empty suspiciously close to a cosy hay barn. I didn’t dare risk getting nicked with this much on me, not to mention
the traces of snow, and with my luck I probably would.
Mind you, I was already inside and fiddling for the ignition leads before I thought twice, but that’s the force of habit for you. I was strong, though, and left the hayloft lovers to wonder why someone had filled the driver’s seat with slime and frogspawn during their little passionate interlude. Another one for the X-Files.
Eventually I
slopped and squelched my way to a late-night garage, stuck a coin in the carwash and hopped through it. I came out the other end soaked and foaming at the ears, but at least I didn’t smell, except of low-grade car shampoo. I really was Waxie Maxie now.
Wet is pathetic when ponging is not, so a kindly soul gave me a place in the back of a car transporter and eventually dropped me off not five hundred
yards from home. Round there five hundred yards could mean about five potential muggers, but it was near four now, probably outside their union hours. Either that, or the Turtle Wax made me look too slippery.
The neighbourhood I was favouring just then wasn’t so much the wrong side of the tracks, it practically was the tracks, a railway freight junction embalmed in thick layers of authentic Industrial
Revolution soot. By now the roof would have stayed up if you’d taken the actual bricks away, and chances were my landlords had. My street was like that. The local ethnics were always complaining we lowered the property values.
All the same, I got back to my door with only a minimum of ducking and dodging. It wasn’t the most welcoming sight, a massive Victorian affair in about the same state as
the British Empire and patched up with rough-nailed sheet steel and spray graffiti. If there were ever a name on that sort of door you just knew it would read
Dunlurkin
or
Sticky End
.
Or possibly just
No Fixed Abode.
I stepped over
the usual ammonia-rich body snoring among the dustbins and slunk up to the opulent penthouse apartment I rented, or rather owed rent on. I slid the door to behind
me, shot the bolt, turned the key, kicked in the scrap-wood wedge, put my back to it and slid down to the floor, groaning. The floor groaned back. Then I made a wild grab for the envelope, shielded by my leather jacket, and tore at the wodge of notes inside.
Fifty grand it was, new notes but none of them dodgy as far as I could tell. The marsh had got to it, a little, and the carwash too – laundered
money, ha ha ha – but it was deep and crisp and even still. I stared at it, giggling feebly. This was luck. This was the break, the moment I’d been praying for. This was the ride out, the getaway. I started cackling like Scrooge. This was the way back. This was – the light went out.
Hastily I shoved another coin in the meter, tore off my trousers and trainers and thrust them into the cracked
little handbasin. There was still a lot of mud in there, and car shampoo as well, so they turned into a sort of horrible pink frothing slough. But eventually I hauled them out much cleaner, stuck them on the window line to dry and retreated to bed to keep warm. I couldn’t sleep. The sheet and mattress felt cold and clammy, but then so did I, and I was used to that, anyway. The blankets were better,
so I rolled up in them as best I could, trying to enjoy the friendly tickle, and dug my head into the pillow to cool my jittering brain. Did the bloody thing always stink of stale vomit? How long since I’d changed it, anyhow?
Fifty grand! My
old man would have laughed at that, once. How much had he pulled down? Maybe eight times that a year, maybe nine. Laughing with his hearty City cronies –
that was how I remembered him. Laughing with them, scowling at me. Scowling whatever I did, but most of all when it started with the cars. Me standing there shivering in what he called his study, my ears ringing where he’d boxed them, and him stalking back and forth in front of me.
Stealing! A son of mine stealing! What would your poor mother have said if she’d known you’d turn out a common thief!
A joke? D’you know just how much keeping this bloody little joke of yours quiet has cost me?
Always the same – the lines, the reproaches, the blunt
Get out!
that finished it. Until the next.
Laughing with his friends – the jolly, avuncular types who dug me in the ribs and slipped me cigars and took me off to clubs on the quiet.
We’ll see you OK, Max! College? Well, if you must, but remember,
your desk’s just waiting! Me and your old man, we’re like that, eh? Like that!
And then the grey days beginning. The vintage Bentley, with that colossal outside handbrake I could hardly work, and getting sent down in my second year, and finding the old man away in the City and all the jolly uncles somehow never around and impossible to reach on the phone. Then the quiet grey men at dawn, tramping
all over that precious study, piling the papers high. The arrest, the front pages, the first remand and soon after that, on bail he could barely manage, the massive coronary in the private clinic. On a public ward the resuscitation trolley might have reached him in time; but the old man liked his privacy, and had scared all the nurses away. Maybe deliberately. He had been cheating, all this time,
stealing from his clients, his shareholders, finally even his fellow directors. Now he could cheat justice, too. I think he might have liked the idea. After all, he was never a common thief. It was always different, because it was him.
Not that he left me
destitute. Far from it. He hadn’t provided for me as such; I think he thought he was never going to die, and even his will was mostly a neatly
trimmed tax hedge. But he’d got me really well snared up in his highly creative accounting. I found that all this time I’d been owning and selling things I’d never even heard of – stocks, shares, assets, mostly other people’s. All along I’d even owned the house he kept threatening to throw me out of. The house and a lot else went in damages and back taxes, of course, and on the bills of his helpful
lawyers and his devoted doctors and about half a million agents and fixers and hangers-on. But the lawyers had to leave me something, for the look of the thing, and there was a residue transferred too long ago for the taxmen to repossess; so when the dust settled I had a modest capital.
What do you think I did with it? I don’t know. I can barely remember. But one day the bank didn’t want to know,
and from then on it was the down escalator only. When I came out of jail they stopped even trying to sue me.
So here I was. But for once, just this once, I didn’t need to stay.