‘Under the desk, you upper-class slut. Unzip me with your teeth.’
Caroline sat down. She had to tough this out. ‘I thought your generation still had button-ups,’ she said. ‘Button-up flies are hard on teeth. All I need is the benefit of your experience.’
He smiled, thin lips, yellow teeth. ‘All? Took me thirty years to get where I am. Cost me my liver and my hair, most of my brain. You ruling-class gels walk in, you pout and shake your little tits and they make you editor of some new fucking rubbish section. Grovel to me.’
‘I’ve just seen a film. Soldiers killing civilians. White soldiers killing blacks. A man wants to sell it.’
She told him about Mackie, about the tape labelled 1170.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘probably South Africans, won’t surprise anybody.
Killed blacks like flies. That’s not news anymore.’
‘He says the soldiers are American. They’re shooting people lying on the ground. Seems like a whole village. It’s like an execution. Kids too.’
Colley moved his head around, light catching his dirty glasses. ‘What was the name again?’
‘Mackie.’
‘And he says people tried to kill him in his hotel in London?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s he want?’
‘Twenty grand.’
‘That’s it? Comes in, shows you the film, says he wants twenty grand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Generally, there’s a bit more mystery and foreplay. What’s your feeling about the film?’
‘Real. And awful. Some of the people might be identifiable.’
‘Soldiers?’
‘There’s a group near helicopters. Might be two civilians. He says someone who wanted to buy the film tried to kill him. When I said I needed time, he walked.’
‘Bluff.’
‘He was walking,’ said Caroline. ‘He was going. No doubt in my mind.’
‘Well, the walk. I’ve had walkers. Let them piss off, get to the lift.
Where’d you let him get to?’
‘Okay, I’m learning,’ Caroline said. ‘He’s ringing at one, he wants a yes or no. Should I take it to Halligan?’
She watched Colley scratch his head, a delicate operation. He’d had two kinds of hair transplants and a surgical procedure involving strips of his scalp being moved around, with strange results.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My view is that the proper thing to do is take this to Halligan immediately.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if that’s your advice.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. Twenty grand’s nothing. Is this a joint venture then?’
‘It is.’
‘Give me an hour. We can deliver this without Halligan and the fucking lawyers.’
21
…LONDON…
Niemand found a car hire firm in Clerkenwell, used his passport, the international licence, paid for seven days in cash, a ridiculous sum. He would be gone much sooner, but his instinct said to leave a margin. Hired killers had come for him in the night and he didn’t know how they found him.
He drove around for a few hours, places he knew from his runs. He wanted to be gone, London was full of rich people, he didn’t care about that one way or another, but the poor and the desperate were shamefaced, hiding in alleys and under bridges when they should be in the open, shaming the rich.
He parked and waited for 1 p.m., mobile on the passenger’s seat. He would go to Crete and stay with his cousin. Dimitri was like him, they looked alike, all the relatives said that when they’d come to look at him and his mother after their arrival from Africa. It had been late afternoon when they reached the village in the hills. The taxi dropped them in the square. His mother went somewhere and came back with two men, who took their suitcases. They’d all walked down some narrow broken streets and then it was all old women in black, men with moustaches, staring children, everyone seemed to pay more attention to him than they did to his mother. They didn’t look at her in the way they looked at him. He knew now they were looking at the other blood in him, they didn’t see a lot of strange blood.
Dimi became his friend quickly, in hours, no one ever wanted to be his friend before. Dimi had to be dragged away that evening, was at the door the next morning to take him away, show him things. Dimi taught him how to fish, taught him the Greek swearwords, how to deal with the bigger boys at school, and how you could see the woman undressing if you crept out late, went over the roofs, dead quiet, like cats, and leaned dangerously over a parapet, holding on to a television aerial. He remembered the wait, the agony, the way she came and went, and the final delirious moments when she stood in their full sight, the pull of her petticoat over her head, the slither, the release of her big breasts, their lift and sag, the long dark nipples and the loaded bottom-heavy swing as she turned, tossed her hair, black hair, coffin-black and shiny.
Did she know they were watching?
He looked at his watch, his mind still on Crete, a boy leaning over a parapet in the warm barking night, engorged, pulse beating in his head, erection pressed against the rough surface like a spring-painful, pleasurable.
It was just on 1 p.m. He considered his plan. Careful was seldom wrong, everything he’d been through told him that. He found the piece of paper with the number, switched on the phone, and dialled.
‘Yes.’ The woman, Caroline Wishart.
‘It’s Mackie,’ he said. ‘Yes or no.’
‘Yes.’
‘Cash. I’ll need cash. Today.’
‘That’s very difficult,’ she said.
His didn’t like the sound of that, his hand needed something to do, opened the glove compartment. A McDonald’s packet, scrunched up, greasy. They had rented him an uncleaned car. He would buy a roll of shitpaper and block the air intake before he gave it back.
‘I’m going. Yes or no?’
‘Mr Mackie, the answer is yes but you must give me until tomorrow to get the money. I will get it, I promise you but I can’t until tomorrow. It’s very difficult to get a sum like that quickly in cash. But I will. I will. Please bear with me. Will you?’
Niemand hesitated but he believed her. ‘Okay, I’ll ring you tomorrow at twelve, at noon. Have it in a bag, a sports bag. In fifties.
Give me your cellphone number.’
She gave it to him.
‘Mr Mackie, how can we be sure…’
He told her where to be.
22
…WASHINGTON…
Above the tree line, the mountain was a cone of purest white and the sky behind it was grey, grey with darker streaks, the colour of the puffs of smoke that issued from the trees-a ragged line of puffs, one, two, three, four, five. When the sound of the incoming shells came to the ears of the men and boys watching in the village, they
