'I wonder what Rooker is doing?' Zarif asked.
'If he's got any sense, he'll be watching his back. You're not fond of leaving loose ends lying around, are you?'
Zarif looked genuinely hurt. 'You've got it wrong. Rooker has nothing to fear from me. We had an agreement, we had shared interests.'
'Right. He helps you deal with Billy Ryan and in return you look after him once he's out. What are we talking? Money, I presume. Protection?
Something above and beyond what we can provide.'
'An agreement, which I fully intend to honour.' Thorne ran his hand along the surface of the table, scraped salt into the palm of his hand. 'Honour, right. That's important, isn't it? I remember you touching glasses with me and drinking to it. How much honour was there for Marcus Moloney? Sliced up and shot in the head in his car.' He dropped the salt on to the floor. 'Was that an honourable way to die, do you think?'
'Did he behave honourably?' Zarif asked. 'Doing what he was doing?' He flicked a fingernail against his glass. 'Have you?' Another question Thorne had asked himself, and answered, a thousand times in the previous few days. 'When I came down to your level, no.'
Zarif looked up at the sound of his daughter calling to him from the top of the stairs. He answered her, watched her go, then turned back to Thorne. He emptied the last few drops of wine into his glass. 'Time for you to leave.'
Thorne reached across the table, grabbed the wineglass and pushed it hard into the old man's face. He felt the glass break and ground it through the soft hair of Zarif's moustache, blood springing bright to the surface and running down as Thorne twisted and pressed.
'We need to lock up.'
Thorne blinked away the fantasy and stood up. He walked to the counter, leaned back against it. 'You got the message I gave to Memet about retaliation for the shooting?' He pressed on before Zarif could answer. 'Of course you did. Hence the message of your own on my front door.'
Zarif spread his arms wide. Sweat stains darkened the white nylon of his shirt. 'I'm sorry for that, really. That was Hassan's doing.' This was a genuine surprise. 'Hassan?'
'He is normally the most cautious of my sons, but you upset him.'
'Well now he's upset me.'
'I will be sure to tell him.'
'Do that.'
Zarif grunted, began to slide his bulk along the seat. 'Have you replaced your door?'
Thorne shook his head.
'Please' – Zarif gestured casually towards the counter 'take some money from the till.'
He got to his feet and fixed Thorne with the same expression of vague amusement that had recently been on his daughter's face. 'Go ahead, help yourself.'
Thorne wondered if perhaps there was more on offer than just a few tenners to cover the cost of a new door. Zarif had already admitted that Thorne was not the man he'd thought he was. Was he pushing a little, perhaps, trying to find out just what sort of a man Thorne really was?
Zarif's smile was returned with bells on. 'I think I'll let you owe me,' Thorne said.
Zarif shrugged and stepped towards the door. He held out a hand in front of him, beckoning Thorne to leave. Thorne pushed away from the counter and walked slowly back the way he'd come in. He felt the faintest flutterings of pride, but at the same time knew that he was kidding himself. He guessed that the feeling would probably not last as far as the pavement.
'Blood and money,' Thorne said.
'What?'
'You told me that you came to this country for bread and work. Blood and money. I think that's closer to the mark.' Zarif stepped around Thorne and opened the door. The breeze began to stir the lanterns above their heads. Diamonds and stars of colour danced gently around the walls. 'That first time, when we talked about names, about what they meant, we talked about yours also,' Zarif said.
'Thorne. Small and spiky, and difficult to get rid of.' Thorne remembered. 'It depends on how seriously you take that kind of thing.'
'I take my business very seriously.'
'Good, because I'd rather not see your face again, unless it's in a courtroom. I don't want to come back here, however good the food is.'
Zarif nodded. 'We understand each other.'
'Fuck me, no,' Thorne said. He caught Arkan Zarif's eye, and held it.
'Never.'
Thorne turned towards the street, opening his mouth to suck down the fresh air. A few seconds later, he heard the door close behind him with a gentle click.
He'd been right about the pride not lasting very long. It was a warm night, but Thorne was shivering as he walked back towards his car. He imagined it… he felt it, as a frenzy of metal wire, tangled and tightly wound somewhere deep inside him. Each time he'd managed to work a piece of it loose, he would pull at it in desperation, succeeding only in winding the coils even tighter, making the snarl that much harder to unravel.
Thorne had put some music on, then turned the volume down. He'd opened a bottle of wine and left it untouched. Nothing made it easier. Nothing helped him make sense of the mess, or understand his own part in creating it. There'd been so many bodies and so much grief, and so little to show for it.
He asked himself what else he could have expected. Hadn't he always known that the likes of Baba Arkan Zarif were fireproof? They had complex mechanisms in place that protected them, soldiers who would sacrifice themselves and any number of men and women on the right side of the law who would keep them untarnished. Still, the knowledge that nobody was answerable, that no one would pay for a fraction of the carnage, was horribly corrosive.
A few of Ryan's people were dead and a couple of Zarif's. Business had been hit on both sides. Life moved easily on, but not for Yusuf Izzigil, who'd lost both parents. Nor for the family of Francis Cullen, nor for Marcus Moloney's widow, whose name Thorne had never even bothered to learn.
And there were the other deaths, those for which, for good or evil, Thorne himself would always be responsible.
Billy Ryan and Wayne Brookhouse.
Thorne felt the knots inside tighten a little further. He thought about where lines were drawn. He wondered whether his had just moved further away, or if he'd long since overstepped it and was moving on. Moving to a much darker place where people couldn't quite make out his face and the lines had disappeared.
He looked at the telephone.
He closed his eyes and saw the face of Gordon Rooker. It was starting to regain its colour, the smugness reddening in the fresh air. Thorne saw the gold tooth catch the light as Rooker bought fruit from a market stall. As he sat with other men around a pub table. As he smiled at something he was reading in a magazine.
And there was always the burning girl.
Her arms windmiling as she tumbled through blackness towards the street.
Her face in the photograph her father had given him; the features ravaged, the smooth skin overwritten by rough, discoloured ridges. Her voice in the diary. Funny and furious. Deserving to be listened to.
He got up from the sofa and walked across to the table near the front door.
He dialed a Wandsworth number and exchanged a few cursory pleasantries with the man on the other end. He made arrangements to return a diary and some photographs. Then, he told him to get a pen. Gave him an address.
Thorne turned the music up then, and poured himself a drink. He sat back down on the sofa, pulled his feet up and considered the weight of his soul. He wondered if it might be possible to exercise it, to beef up the soul, to strengthen it by working out spiritually. If so, then bad deeds would surely cost you weight. Those who were truly wicked would wind up with souls that weighed next to nothing. He reached for the wine bottle.
Wondering, in light of the phone call he'd just made, if his soul had gained a little weight. Or lost it.
