Those Who Feel Nothing (6 page)

Paradise was in shadow. Of course. He gave you twenty seconds then cut you off.

‘Stop, for Christ's sake,' he snarled. ‘A grown man begging turns my stomach. You never get anything with begging.'

‘The person I'm talking about is someone I care for very much.'

You couldn't see his face but you could hear the grimace in his voice.

‘More fool you,' Paradise said. ‘We're not going to get along if you carry on like this. First thing you need to learn is that emotion is pathetic and useless. Look around: the world belongs to those who feel nothing.'

‘Just let me know the whereabouts,' you said. ‘I'll do the rest.'

‘It doesn't work like that in my country.'

‘I'll pay.'

‘That was a given.'

‘A lot.'

‘That's where we begin to diverge. What constitutes “a lot” for you and for me are, I fear, two quite different things.'

‘Payment doesn't have to be in money,' you said.

‘I don't want your arse, thanks very much.'

‘I didn't mean that,' you said. ‘I have skills you could use.'

Paradise was silent for a long moment.

Now the cockney outside the bar is looking you up and down. You can see behind him that his friends in the bar are huddled together.

‘What's your name anyway?' he says.

You tell him.

He eases away.

‘Well, brother, if I come upon this Mr Paradise I'll be sure to mention your name.' He glances around you. ‘In the meantime, why don't you stick that glass up your arse?'

The two women aren't there any more. You point the glass at the cockney but not in a combative way.

‘What's
your
name?' you say.

‘Neal.'

‘Cassady?'

He laughs so you know he understands the
On The Road
reference. And that means he is tipping you to the fact that he knows Paradise.

‘Just help me get started with him,' you say. ‘You can't do whatever it is you do without his say-so. Give me a number.'

Neal gives you the once-over again. Frowns.

‘You look like a stiff wind would blow you down. Why do you want to mess with Paradise?'

‘That's a long story,' you say.

You're aware that Neal has shifted a couple of feet away and changed the angle between you. His stance is casual but you know he's getting ready.

You've been having problems with your temper lately. A lot of stuff coming up that you can't always control. There's been a lot of yin and yang going on. Mostly yang, unfortunately. Yoga and deep breathing exercises on the one hand; wanting to pummel people to death with your bare hands on the other.

You have the glass of neat vodka in one hand and your lighter in the other. You're tempted to throw the vodka over his head and touch the lighter to his hair.

But you've also been trying hard to be mellow. You drain the vodka, acutely watchful for any move from him to ram the glass into your teeth.

He's focused on you but is still caught off guard when you swing the glass away from your mouth into his left eye socket.

He stumbles back, instinctively putting his hand to his eye. You put him down with an elbow driven hard into his collarbone and another whack of the vodka glass, this time to his temple.

You walk back inside. You approach the table where the three men are sitting having a desultory conversation.

‘I'm looking for Sal Paradise,' you say.

In the sudden silence Neal shouts something groggily incoherent from outside. They jerk around to look towards the door. You hit the two overweight men first and enjoy doing it. The other guy, the one who arrived with Neal, sits back.

‘What have you done to my friend?' he says, working his jaw and starting to do something under the table.

‘Pretty much what I'm going to do to you unless you tell me where I can find Sal Paradise,' you say.

The other guy sits back in his seat. ‘Don't know the man,' he says, his body still.

The two creeps are bleeding worse than they're hurt but they're not thinking about anything other than their injuries. The barman is standing perfectly still behind the bar but his hands are concealed. He's up to something.

You look at the guy sitting at the table and gesture to Neal outside. ‘Wuss.'

There's a hint of a smile then the man hurls himself out from behind the table, a knife in his hand. The problem is the table is screwed to the floor so hurling is a difficult thing to do.

You have time to hit him in the face with the glass in a hammer blow before he can get near you with the knife. It's a tough little fucker of a glass.

It's weird to watch the man's forward momentum almost immediately reverse. You wish you knew the physics. He falls back, a glass-rim size impression on his forehead.

You figure it's about time you paid attention to the barman. You look at him and whatever it is he's bringing out from below the counter. You wag your finger and step towards him.

‘How do I get hold of Sal Paradise?'

Watts had polished off his seafood and was thinking about his first official meeting as the new PCC when an Asian woman in an expensive-looking cashmere coat came into the pub. Chinese? Korean? Vietnamese? He really couldn't tell and that embarrassed him. At the bar, she bought a pint of beer and carried it carefully over to a table in the corner. A table Watts always liked to imagine his father drank at, back in the day. She sat, a look of misery on her face. He turned away from her grief.

The meeting had been with a contractor looking to sell the force Incapacitating Flashlights.

‘Which are what?' Watts said.

The man was slick-suited, mid-thirties, a military background overlaid with a salesman's spiel. He placed what appeared to be a bulky-looking torch on the edge of the desk. Watts reached for it but the man shook his head.

‘Handle with care. This is the next generation Tasers. A better non-lethal weapon. Homeland Security in the US developed it. It flashes intense beams of light to blind targets and make them vomit.'

Watts nodded slowly. ‘What happens if they close their eyes?'

The contractor laughed. ‘Then you go old-fashioned and kick them in the goolies.'

Watts smiled. If he had to see the salesmen Hewitt was clearly intending to sick on him then those with a sense of humour would work best for him.

‘It's part of a range of next generation law enforcement aides,' the man said. ‘We also have the Active Denial System. That heats the skin of a target individual in two seconds to fifty-four degrees centigrade, causing intolerable pain. Our acoustic bazooka – a sonic cannon – delivers a pattern of sound that is excruciatingly painful and incapacitates the targets by making them vomit.'

‘How are they with seagulls?'

The man looked puzzled. ‘Police Commissioner?'

‘Just kidding,' Watts said. ‘Is vomiting a common factor with these new generation weapons?'

The salesman shrugged. ‘Vomiting is certainly a disabler.' He started rooting in his bag. ‘I'm going to leave you a sample to test.'

The Asian woman abruptly rose and hurried out of the pub, still looking miserable. The pint was untouched so Watts assumed she had gone out for a cigarette, but the barman started to clear the drink away.

‘You're sure she's not going to come back,' Watts called.

The overweight man snorted. The barman turned to Watts and shook his head.

‘I wish she would. Waste of a good pint. Plus it might do her good – she looks so miserable.'

‘She's done it before?' Watts said.

‘She's been doing it for months,' the barman said. ‘Same day every week. She buys a pint, sits there for a bit muttering to herself, then leaves without touching it.'

‘Same seat?'

‘Exact same seat. If it's taken she loiters and puts the pint down on the table when she leaves.'

Watts frowned and thought about that. ‘All sorts,' he finally said.

The barman gives you the name of a nightclub Sal Paradise may or may not own. He is occasionally seen there. In the evening you search it out. It's more bar than nightclub. The few bored women scattered around are there for business purposes only. Various desperadoes are sitting around the room, in groups or alone.

The women assess you as you walk to the bar, dismiss you as a potential client. The desperadoes watch for longer.

‘Sal Paradise?' you say at the bar.

The barman looks at you but says nothing.

‘Doesn't he own this place?' you say.

The barman shrugs thick shoulders.

You ask for a bottle of Polish vodka and examine the seal before you hand over your money. It's cold enough. You take it to a table in the corner by the window. For the next hour you drink steadily, watching the street outside and the action in the bar, trying to ignore the rattle of the old fan above your head as it makes its wobbly rotations.

The drinking is unwise. This is not like you when you're on an operation. But then you're not like you and you haven't been for a long time.

Sal Paradise always had his fingers in a lot of pies. Prostitution, of course. He brought in girls from Vietnam. Doubtless he is now into people trafficking in a much bigger way. You've heard he is in the illegal organ trade. His people are skilled at filleting for all saleable organs some dope they've drugged in a bar and left bleeding out in a cheap hotel room. He is also heavily involved in the heroin trade. The fact he smuggles antiquities, either fake or real, seems almost benign, except that he uses the same distribution routes.

The custom in bars in Cambodia is that the waiter doesn't remove the old bottles from the table when he brings the new because he will count them up when it comes time to pay the bill. He sticks a paper napkin in the dead ones. There is a table in your line of sight with probably twenty bottles on it.

A western man in a sweaty T-shirt and stained shorts, his thick, hairy legs stretched out into the aisle between the tables, has his tongue down the throat of the tiny local woman in a red polka dot dress sitting beside him. He is pawing at her breast none too gently.

You look away to check on the three men in the street who turned up ten minutes ago. One of them is Neal, the mean man you glassed yesterday. Here on his own account or doing a job for Sal Paradise?

The sour taste of vodka comes up in your mouth. For a moment you think you are going to vomit. You breathe heavily through your nostrils.

Neal is lounging directly opposite the bar, the other two are at either end of the street. But is there someone round the back too?

Your plan, such as it is, involves getting behind them, letting them think they've lost you then following them to Paradise. Of course, if Neal is here on his own account, they'll just lead you back to the bar where you first met him.

You're pretty certain you can beat the bejesus out of any of them one on one and with the advantage of surprise. You're pretty sure they'll be carrying, but whether it will be knives or guns you don't know. You've got your own little helper in your pocket.

As you get up to go to the bathroom you catch the slightest of movements at the bar. A tattooed, thick-set guy not exactly looking your way but, by some slight adjustment of his being, tying himself to your movement. The barman is busily and pointedly polishing glasses. A woman in a tight black dress looks at you hopefully.

You were thinking maybe they wanted to take you in the street but now you're wondering if they want to do it here.

Well, you're on your feet now. You have to do something. You don't look at the guy. You stumble a little as you head over to the door marked
Toilettes
. You're putting it on, but only by a fraction.

You push open the door. It leads into a short corridor with another door to the right. Through that is a small room with washbasin and, facing you, two doors: one for women, one for men. You push open the one for women. It's a narrow cubicle with no window. You push open the men's door. The same.

You close both doors and squeeze behind the outer door. There's just about space between you and the side-wall. You're pretty sure that as the door opens, a pursuer won't be able to see you in the mirror above the washbasin on the opposite wall.

In your inside pocket you have a cosh. Sand in a leather pouch. It is about sixty years old but it still does the job it was intended for when your father made it. He had a set of brass knuckledusters too but they went missing years ago. Tough guy, your dad. Especially when it came to women.

Your problem is the confined space. There isn't going to be much room to get a good swing.

The door handle rattles and you raise the cosh to shoulder height. The door opens against you, obscuring the person coming in. A hand reaches round the door and pushes it closed just as you start your swing. You would normally go for behind the ear but you're not sure of your aim so intend just to whack him as hard as you can on the back of the skull.

Except it isn't the man who was sitting by the bar. It isn't a man at all. You grab the woman in the polka dot dress as she folds. You kick at the women's toilet door and drag her in, lowering her on to the toilet seat. She slumps to the side. You wedge her against the wall, trying not to notice the lump rising on the back of her head like a soufflé and the blood streaking her dyed blonde hair with red.

‘Sorry, love,' you whisper as you pull the door closed behind you.

You are turning in the confined space in front of the sink when the outer door opens again. A bulky male edges through. You let him get the door partway open then, just as he sees you, you shoulder the door shut in his face. You have your full weight behind the door and you feel it hit him hard.

You pull the door open. The man who was sitting at the bar is coming off the opposite wall. You go for the nose, swinging the sap in a tight arc then flicking your wrist to bring it down hard on the bridge.