“You sound like someone I know,” he replied.
“Your mum?”
“Nah, he’s a friend of mine.”
“Why don’t you listen to him?”
“Because he’s not good at following his own advice either,” said Louis. “I know what you’re saying, but what am I going to do? Knock around with high society here and pretend I am one of youse?”
“I don’t think that’s the reason. I think you love it. I also think you might be fatalistic. That you think this is all there is for you.”
“What do you suggest?” said Louis. “I can’t rap.”
“Royal Marine turned solicitor has a ring to it,” she said.
Louis laughed. “Maybe you’re right. Getting shot or incarcerated doesn’t sound like fun.”
“The quicker you’re out, the quicker you can start doing some good.”
“How do you know that I am not already.”
36
Crowder walked down the street, deep in thought. It had been five days since that horrific e-mail. He had just left his apartment having sent a re-written article, much to his editor’s chagrin. He left out any mention of the AGI corporation or the Ann Walker story. His mind had been in turmoil since; a psychologist he’d once interviewed had described it as mental dissonance. The psychologist said a human brain would rationalise a decision made in a way that would keep that person’s self-image intact. Still conflicted that his journalistic integrity had collapsed, he was waiting for that to happen.
He headed to Baxter’s bar. He knew daytime drinking in a crisis could exacerbate the situation; however, he needed a drink.
He sat down and briefly considered a pint of XXXX Gold before thinking better of the alcohol content and opting for a Tootheys Extra Dry instead. He took a sip, savouring the cool, crisp liquid for a moment before a tall gentleman took a seat next to him,
“I’ll have the same,” he said with a trace of an accent Crowder knew to be Scottish. The man then turned to him and said, “Michael Crowder I believe.”
Crowder’s heart began beating hard, but he still took the outstretched hand and shook it in reflex. The man smiled. “Relax Mr Crowder, I am not someone seeking to harm you in any way. We may have some mutual enemies in common.”
“Like who? Who are you?”
The man sat down and sipped his beer before answering. “I am a man tasked with the protection of British citizens in an official and unofficial capacity. A while ago it had been brought to my attention that an unknown group had taken to kidnapping homeless people off the street—for their organs. Something that you seemed to have touched upon on journalistic investigations.”
Crowder blinked a few times, before asking, “How can I trust you are who you say you are? And how would I know you’re telling me the truth, mate?”
“To answer the first question—you don’t. Although, after a twenty-two-hour flight, I hope you will. To answer the second, I have a very talented computer technician who can pick up certain algorithms over the internet concerning keywords and phrases. It’s a little above my expertise, but some of the traffic coming to and from your system caught his eye, including the ominous email you received five days ago.”
Crowder breathed deeply before replying, “This begs the question mate, that you could be one of the sick bastards that sent me the fackin’ heinous thing in the first place.”
“Why would I need to show myself to you? I already know you’ve edited the article you’ve handed into your editor. If I were ‘one of them’, then you wouldn’t see my face.”
“What do you want?”
“I want information. Because I want these people even more than you do. Except it won’t be through the medium of the law—or a newspaper article.”
Crowder sipped his beer and nodded to himself, “Strewth mate, then looks like you’re buying.”
Connor and his Uncle Ryan sat in the Wapentake Café in the Leeds City centre. Connor sat facing the entrance as was his habit, and his uncle sat at a ninety-degree angle to him, with full view of the exit. They had finished their breakfast; his uncle a fry up and he some scrambled eggs and bacon. They had a full pot of coffee in front of them.
“Do you have to be anywhere anytime soon?” asked his uncle.
“Not for the next few hours. I have made an appointment to visit Uncle Michael this afternoon. It’s out of visitation hours, but I am now his ‘solicitor’s assistant’ so will be allowed to see him.”
“I see,” said Ryan. “You know your dad was in Armley for a stretch don’t ya.”
“Yeah I heard, possession of a firearm.”
Connor could sense his uncle had brought him to the café for more than breakfast. He hadn’t invited anyone else.
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Do you know who’s it were?”
“His wasn’t it? I thought he carried it in the aftermath of taking vengeance on those who hospitalised Grandad and shot Derek?”
“Nah, that was over as soon as your old man walked into The Crown and tipped out Joe Mason’s hand and foot in front of his scallies.” Ryan took a deep breath. “It was my gun. The coppers pulled me over when I ‘ad your dad in the car with me. Without a second’s thought ‘e took the rap for it on account of me having young Tom and having a wife.”
Connor just stared at him for a moment. “He did that?”
“Yeah he did,” said Ryan, before dabbing the corner of his eye with his thumb. “He never wanted to get into this life in the first place. I know how it sounds, but it’s true. None of us were in major trouble with the police before my dad got attacked. Not really.”
“What happened then?”
“Your dad went away for two years, didn’t he. In the meantime, certain characters came to the rest of my brothers and me, offering us work. Big money for very little graft. Things like, show at this meeting, could you look after this club, that club. Then drugs—then guns. All of a sudden we’re driving around in expensive cars, eating for free, taking holidays to exotic places. I guess we all got a little high on it. Dad knew there was no stopping it and went to see Greg inside. I think your dad still had ambitions of going pro when he got out, but I don’t think he’d have got a boxing license back then with a record for that.” Ryan took a sip of his coffee, and Connor didn’t ask any questions—he knew his uncle wanted to offload. Ryan continued, “To be honest Connor, your dad was always the leader amongst us brothers even though he was the middle kid. I think that stuck in Derek’s craw sometimes, especially as Derek got shot an’ it was Greg who sorted that out. He was dead smart wasn’t he, an’ he was a good-looking bastard, hard as fuck but he had something that Dad—your granddad—had, a sort of way of making you feel at ease. You remind me a lot of ‘im.”
Connor felt a pride in his chest and asked, “What happened then?”
“Well, Greg was Dad’s favourite like, Dad would never say it, but you could tell. Anyway, he went to see ‘im in Armley gaol. Told him he wanted Greg to take over ‘the family’ if you know what I mean. Don’t think Greg was that keen but what else was he going to do? He fucked off getting a trade when he was a kid when he won the ABAs an ‘ad promotors hanging off ‘im. So he comes out and starts getting us all in line, disciplined. We all had to get day jobs, fronts. I became a binman! Loved it. He’d been rubbing shoulders with all these convicts in the nick, so he knows more of the do’s and don’ts. Proper codes when speaking—this was in the mid-nineties, so we even used codes on pagers then we’d fuck off to a pay phone. He ‘ad met Zain Aziz inside too, you know of ‘im?”
“Who was he?” Connor had heard the name but hadn’t known that his dad knew him. He wanted to hear his uncle’s description of him.
“Aziz was this big-time gangster from Bradford—huge cunt. Half Jamaican, half Paki so I don’t know how that happened—”
“It happens when someone of Jamaican ethnicity has sex with someone of Pakistani ethnicity.”
“Shut it you cheeky get,” replied Ryan smiling. �
��Anyway, apparently Aziz is the one who taught your dad Punjabi in the jail. So Greg ‘ad links with the lads in Bradford and he could always settle down trouble there. They reckon that’s why, when there was all that bovver in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and even Newcastle a bit, no one thought of Leeds as a crime capital or anything like that. There weren’t a heavy amount of guns knocking around for one thing, apart from maybe in places like Chapletown, an’ some in Seacroft. Another thing he did was to take advantage of the Hawala banking system they have in Bradford.”
“Go on,” said Connor, wanting to hear his uncle’s take on this monetary system.
“It’s like a side thing some local Asian businesses have. Think one lad he used was a jeweller. Now there’re loads of these Hawaladars dotted everywhere across the globe. It’s a system built on trust and it’s been around for donkeys’ years, before western banking like. The Hawaladars charge som’mat like two percentage and delivery is free—nothing official is written down. Say you want to transfer a hundred grand to someone in the US, your Hawaladar tells the Hawaladar over there, and that one gives your man the hundred grand. He—the Hawladar who made the call for you—now owes that US Hawladar the hundred grand, but that’ll get sorted out in the future when the US one has a customer who wants to transfer knicker to someone over here. And so on. That’s how Greg handled a lot of transactions for overseas. There was a big clamp down on it after nine-eleven an’ that, as the government was saying that’s how terrorists moved their money. I reckon it was more that the bankers—the proper ones—knew they were losing money to it, and the government with tax too. Anyway, that’s why it was sound between our lot and the Bradford lot for years.”
“So there wasn’t any kicking off during that time?”
“Not that much, a few skirmishes like but nothing major. You got to remember, that as reasonable as your dad could be, he could also be a ruthless cunt. People knew how far he’d go like, I mean Joe Mason still limps around with the sleeve of his jacket flapping, doesn’t he? In the late nineties, the Triads tried to take over Leeds, and us and the Bradford lot managed to get ‘em out.”
“The Triads? How did you manage that?”
Connor had heard rumours but never fully believed it.
“It’s like your old man said, they can’t have the entire organisation in the one place, plus we lived here all our lives and had the coppers on side—they didn’t want naughty chinks setting up sticks here anymore than we did. We were like those Mujahedeen against Russia. Our police contacts would tip us off. Another thing was that the leader was stepping out of his bounds really, so after a few months guess what happened?”
“What?”
“The Triad leader of London, the Dragon Head as they call ‘em, requests a meeting with your dad, we’re all there like, proper itchy trigger fingers. This Godfather chink gets out a box, opens it, and there’s the head of Huang Lee, the little bastard who kicked it all off in the first place against his boss’s orders. It was weird because when it first kicked off everyone was running around shitting ‘emselves, and Greg was just like Churchill—‘do this, do that, this is what we’re going to do’, it just calmed everyone down. Check the internet, you’ll see that there’s Triad’s in almost every major city in the UK—keeping a low profile but they are there—but not West Yorkshire.”
“How did dad get the Police on side then?” asked Connor. He braced himself for the answer.
Ryan laughed. “You think your dad might have stitched people up don’t ya? Nah, he wouldn’t grass on anyone, it was more like, he’d let them seize drugs in an empty warehouse to let ‘em have a win. Our Tom does that now, he learnt it off him. This is another thing he used to do—he’d skim a lot of money off the profit margins, and somehow he’d make arrangements for the money to go to drug addiction clinics, homeless shelters and police awareness schemes. He’d say to us, ‘we can make good money over a long time, or obscene money in the short time’, som’mat like that, or maybe the other way ‘round. What he meant was, that if we’re living in massive houses and supercars, then it’s going to piss off the locals and the police. When your dad ran the family, we had hardly any bother off the coppers, and everyone respected us. Ya old man used to clamp down on cutting the drugs too much like and—oh, get this like—when anyone said, ‘look, I want to kick drugs now’ Greg’d pay for their rehab and maybe get ‘em a job. That’s why everyone loved ‘im; your mam loved ‘im too, that’s why she never really settled with anyone else. Now its—fucksake,” he said, stopping the narrative.
“What is it, Ryan.”
“Nah nothing. It’s just not like that anymore. Michael and Lee are in the jail now. We have trouble with the Bradford lot more now. Our relations with the police is going downhill—”
“Why don’t you take over the family then Ryan? If things are as bad as you say? Tom will be behind you—”
“I won’t make a move against my own brother. He is what he is, but he’ll always see me as the youngest. Besides, me, Tom and everyone else knows who should be running this family. You are the heir apparent.”
“Crime families aren’t like a Royal family. There is no succession based on bloodline.”
“You haven’t worked with the family for years, and already you’re respected down south. You have links with the SUG down there in London, and everyone knows about your dealings with the big man in Holland. And Tris Dixon—you’ve done all that on your tod. And you’ve been a Royal Marine, been to war and that. You need to be here where ya belong, cos it won’t be that much longer until there are fiends and anarchy everywhere here.”
Connor looked at his uncle. “Uncle Ryan, I am not what you think I am, the things I am involved in, I can’t take up here and—”
“I know exactly who you are. You’re ya father’s son, and all your cousins look up to you like me, and my brothers looked up to Greg. Now, am not saying you hav’ to come back right away. But you gotta come back—this is where ya belong, not down there with those southerners, ya missus excluded obviously.”
Connor sipped his coffee, “Maybe one day.”
37
Frank Schwimmer enjoyed the views of the Serengeti plains from the hot air balloon. At 2,000 feet he could see for miles.
The hot air balloon trip with the requisite champagne was fine, but he was here for the big game hunting. The arguments against hunting were amusing to him. It had been Roosevelt that said, ‘In a civilised and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all, when preserved by sportsmen’. Besides, all the money paid for the privilege more than compensated.
He understood the notion that death can advance the species. Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of his pals on the hill in Washington might agree if it were not political suicide to do so.
Schwimmer stroked his black designer goatee which contrasted with the grey of his head hair. The plastic surgery had knocked around ten years off his forty-eight years, although he had acquired a faintly oriental appearance from it. He wore cargo shorts, a linen shirt and a straw hat.
As he absorbed the vastness of the plains, he pondered what had led him down this road—this so very precarious philanthropic business. His mother loved life, she loved people and parties, and people and parties loved her. She adored eating, drinking, smoking and dabbling in drugs. One day her diseased liver began to develop cirrhosis and fail her at the age of sixty-five. The doctors said a transplant would take a maximum of five months to locate, and in the meantime, he should keep his mother as healthy as possible. He had known that the likelihood of his mother abstaining from drink, and adhering to a healthy diet would be slim. He had offered to pay for a complete refurbishment of the hospital, only to be told that it was not possible to accelerate the process.
His mother died in her fourth month of waiting.
Schwimmer had been angry—a burning frustration that he had all the money and influence that he thought he’d need, but he had been powerless to save his own mother.
The bureaucracy exasperated him, but he persevered with his lobbying. Weeks and months went by, and as he spent more and more time in the hospitals, listening to the anguish of the patients, and the relatives of the patients, in need of organs only to watch them die, his determination grew into desperation.
One day he witnessed an incident that infuriated him and made him sad in equal measure. He had been in a private hospital in London discussing potential improvements to the efficiency of organ donation, of which he would be funding at considerable cost. The benefactor then took him on a tour of the hospital. It had been then he had met a teenaged girl lying withered on the hospital bed. It had been explained to him that she had been a talented ballerina; indeed a quick Google search of her name had confirmed as much. She had been suffering an extremely rare and aggressive form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). A suitable donor had been found weeks ago, as a card-carrying donor patient had died on the surgery table in an NHS hospital.
Schwimmer had been aghast to learn that the donors family had vetoed the donation. He asked for what possible reason could they have done this, and none of the answers he received could justify allowing this young, talented girl to die.
That was the day that set him on this course. Why should the stupid and inconsiderate deny the gift of life to the talented and innocent?
He had considered some kind of money for organs scheme before quickly realising that projects like this could not even be mooted in public—the liberals would have a field day in Congress. But Schwimmer knew that some lives were worth more than others, and he was prepared to do whatever it took to preserve those lives. He employed thousands of people, and the type of tax he paid supported thousands more—supported some that were a drain on society and this could be their way of doing good.
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