Old Enemies (41 page)

It was to be a day of reckoning, a day that must inevitably result in someone’s death, yet for Sean it got off to an inauspicious start as he tapped his uncertain way through the streets of the Old City, hoping to see by daylight something he had missed the previous night, and gratified that as he moved his knee seemed to ease a little. But still he found no clue. They were here, somewhere, buried inside this maze, but he had no idea where.

It was the troubadour in the Via San Sebastiano who gave him his first gleam of inspiration. The man was dressed in a simple dark suit of many stains and had bells on his hat, drumsticks strapped to his feet, cymbals on his elbows, a horn at his lips and a stringed instrument in his hands. The level of noise he made was extraordinary as every sound bounced off the nearby walls before running off into the surrounding streets. Sean sipped coffee as he watched the man’s pointed beard twitching and marking time to every beat. After he had finished his repertoire he moved on to a different pitch, and soon Sean could hear the clash of the cymbals and beat of the drum once more snaking through the town.

When he was young Sean had possessed an exceptionally fine voice. Even while the Christian Brothers had been beating him for using his left hand, and four-fold when they found him using it beneath the covers, they’d allowed him to sing solos in the school chapel. ‘And you just remember, while you’re being at it, lad, that Jesus sits at God’s right hand, not his left,’ Father Benedict had told him as he had whipped him yet again. Sean’s voice had been a beautiful, soaring treble that deepened to a bar-filling tenor with age. Now, as the coffee warmed his throat, he was well aware that he hadn’t used it for a while, like so much else, he reflected ruefully, but it was never too late. ‘Time to dust it down and give it a bit of an airing, Sean, me boy,’ he muttered to himself. So he took up the pitch in the doorway of the abandoned building, recently vacated by the troubadour, and began. He looked every bit the street singer. His trousers had been through several adventures, his shoes had lost their shine, the eyes were raw, he had two days of grey stubble on his chin and he was leaning on his stick. But when he dropped his jacket to the pavement in front of him and started to sing, his voice reached into every corner of this narrow square. He began with ‘Danny Boy’, following it with ‘The Wearing o’ the Green’, a rebel ballad, with its searing expressions of hatred for the English, and soon he was back home, many years younger, and far away from this strange and dangerous place.

By the time he finished he had collected several euro coins. He sang another song, then moved his pitch, and did the same several times over in the ensuing hours. He couldn’t linger in any one place, didn’t have time, not if he were to have any chance of covering the troubled streets in this part of town. No one had time, not today.

Harry still clung to a distant hope that he might be able to bluff his way out. When Cosmin appeared, rubbing his finger around his gums and sipping from a mug of coffee, Harry confronted him. ‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded, waving his manacled wrists. ‘You don’t understand.’

He got nothing in reply but the toe of Cosmin’s boot aimed expertly between his ribs.

‘I came here to help you,’ Harry gasped, doubling up with pain as the other man passed nonchalantly by.

Cosmin continued picking his teeth until suddenly he seemed to have found something that surprised him. He stopped, stared suspiciously at his finger, then turned. ‘You want to help? OK, you help. Nelu!’ he cried, summoning the computer operator, who came tumbling out from the next room. ‘We talk. With Little Shit’s mummy and daddy.’

In Notting Hill, Hiley had moved into a spare room of the Breslin home. With the deadline approaching and the money at last in place, they would need his expertise to nail down the final details, and it was he who answered the summons of Skype. J.J. and Terri hovered close at hand. They were surprised to see that the kidnappers had activated the video link, and their surprise turned to alarm when they saw Harry’s bruised face, with his mouth gagged, emerging from the screen. The picture was very tight, offering no background except a meaningless wall.

‘Have you got my fucking money?’ Cosmin began. No preamble. Just aggression.

‘We must have proof of life, that was the deal,’ Hiley replied, struggling as he watched Harry, knowing what he saw implied disaster.

‘Proof of life? I give you proof of life,’ Cosmin snarled.

They could not see, could only hear, a boot being buried in Harry’s ribs. His face contorted in agony.

‘See! Alive,’ Cosmin mocked.

‘The boy. What about the boy?’

‘He’s here,’ Cosmin replied. ‘Isn’t he?’ He jerked up Harry’s head by the hair until he was staring directly into the camera.

Harry, with his mouth bound, could do no more than wince and nod.

‘We still need to see him,’ Hiley insisted.

‘When I see my money.’

Hiley turned to J.J. and Terri. Whatever hope there had been of Harry releasing Ruari was now gone. They had no option. Slowly J.J. nodded.

‘We have your money. Five million euros,’ Hiley said.

‘Good. But that five million is for the boy. We now have your friend, too. Another million. The price is now six million.’ And he laughed. Sure, this Harry Jones could help all right, by getting them more money. Now they had Simona on board they had to find an extra share, and six million split so neatly between them all.

‘The deal was five million!’ Hiley protested.

‘Now it is six.’

‘We can’t! We simply cannot. It’s not possible,’ J.J. gasped from the background.

‘That’s what you said before, about five.’

‘But . . .’

‘I give you time. Until this evening. You have many friends. Call them.’

‘Listen. We cannot do this.’ Hiley’s voice was adamant and slow, hitting every syllable, hoping it might get the message across.

‘This evening. Tonight,’ Cosmin repeated. ‘If you don’t . . .’

Suddenly Harry’s head had been jerked up again, exposing his neck, and a large blade was being drawn slowly across his throat.

‘Mr Jones will show you tonight what happens to the boy on Christmas Day. Unless you pay. You understand?’

‘I understand you very well,’ Hiley said grimly.

The connection went dead.

As the hours passed, the guards relaxed, sent out for pizzas – another benefit of being in the inner city, they no longer had to put up with the malevolent muck Sandu passed off as cooking. Even the prisoners got a slice. And when the pizza was finished and the cartons thrown into a corner, Cosmin led the other Romanians off for a game of cards, leaving just one, Puiu, the electrician, on guard. Harry spent the time inspecting his manacles, but they were secure and firmly locked. No way out. As the hours drew on towards evening, he sat propped against the wall, looking across at his unknowing son, feeling the bite of fear.

When Puiu began to look bored Harry tried to talk with Ruari, but all he got for his efforts was a Romanian curse and another kicking. So they sat in silence. The two windows at either end of the room remained closed, the sounds of the city muffled, but they could hear the bells, the buzz of noisy scooters, and occasionally even make out shouts from the streets below, yet up here in the attic it was a one-way process; Harry could have screamed his head off and it would have been heard by no one but pigeons and seagulls.

Then Harry heard the strains of the song.

‘
Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
. . .’

He stiffened. He’d never heard Sean sing, but how many other daft bastard Irishmen were out there on these streets?

‘
But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow
. . .’ The words bounced off the walls of the Old City ghetto, echoed upwards and crept into the room.

Sean had chosen his moment well, Puiu was taking a leak. Harry searched around desperately; he had to find some way of letting Sean know where they were, some means of making a racket, but there was nothing within reach, even of his feet, except for a couple of discarded takeaway boxes and a broom. On the workbench there was any number of useful items, a hammer, a bucket – God, he could have marched to war behind their noise – but they were hopelessly out of reach. The nearest tool was a scaffolding clamp, lying discarded on the floor and well beyond his grasp, the sort of thing he would gladly have used to beat out Cosmin’s brains, if only he could stretch that far.

‘
And I am dead, as dead I well may be, You’ll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say an “Ave” there for me
. . .’

He could hear Puiu pissing in the bowl; Harry doubted the man would stop to wash his hands. He was running out of time.

He was a good two feet short of the clamp, but by stretching himself full length on the floor he was able to hook his foot around the broom, which came tumbling towards him, and by grasping the handle between his knees and feet he was able to reach behind the clamp and sweep it towards him. But the bloody thing was heavy, obstinate, the broom kept brushing over it, and Harry could hear Puiu finishing in the bathroom. Yet with every awkward jerk of the broom head, the clamp scraped and inched its way across the bare floor, until at last, stretching to his limit, he hooked his toe inside it. Even as the figure of Puiu appeared in the doorway, Harry swung his leg and hurled the clamp across the room. It smashed through the window, accompanied by an explosion of glass that went clattering down into the street below, followed by a waterfall of splinters that sang out like wind chimes in a gale.

Harry knew he was taking a terrible risk with the retribution Puiu would inevitably wreak upon him, but what had he got to lose? Cosmin was planning to slit his throat in a few hours’ time, and the man was a psychopath who took pleasure in keeping to his word. In any event, Puiu’s wrath was tempered by concern; this screw-up had happened on his watch, while he wasn’t watching, and he was all too aware that Cosmin’s temper was best avoided. So Puiu decided he would play the whole thing down, explain it away as an accident, a stumble over all the crap that others left lying around the floor. After all, what did it matter, it wasn’t as if anyone was storming up the stairs. For the moment, he decided, it would be enough to remind this English prick of the pain that came with screwing around with a man like him. He started swinging his boot.

Harry had taken beatings all the way around the world, from West Africa to Afghanistan, some on home turf and even from Irishmen outside his own home in Mayfair, but never had he taken a bloody good kicking with such a sense of satisfaction.

It was a broken window, no cause for alarm, just one of many minor distractions in the Old City that disappeared as quickly as they came. But Sean heard it, the clatter of falling iron and the singing of tell-tale glass shards. Only trouble was, he couldn’t find them. The maze of passageways was too confusing, filled with derelict homes and reconstruction sites where broken glass lay scattered on all sides, and where some of the alleys were so narrow it was impossible to see up to the windows on high. He knew that the sound could have come from only a handful of nearby streets, but although he hobbled back and forth and through them all, he couldn’t be sure. So when he had exhausted himself foraging for signs that would not be found, he sat himself down in a derelict doorway at the heart of these cramped streets and alleys, rolled himself a cigarette, and waited. An old woman in threadbare woollen tights passed by and tried to sell him some mistletoe, but otherwise no one disturbed him.

But what did a kidnapper look like? Sean had seen two of them in the bar when they picked up Harry. Young, dishevelled, like a million others, and all male, he guessed. So he sat patiently, trying to translate the meanings of the graffiti on the walls, studying the little spirals of rubbish picked up by the wind, and casting a builder’s eye over the half-finished streets around him.

It was Sandu he saw, one of the men from the bar, who had suddenly appeared through a fug of tobacco smoke and was walking down the street towards him. For a moment Sean was anxious – would Sandu recognize him, too? But Sandu was young, with all the arrogance of his few years, and to him Sean was nothing more than an old man on a doorstep, someone of no consequence. He strode past.