Twist

by Tom Grass

  The Suits watched him as he took a left into a cobbled pedestrian zone demarcated by black cast-iron bollards. The van was nestled against the railings which protected an old Elizabethan era church. It was a shining aluminium van built around a 200cc Vespa. It had Forza written on the side. The security guard thought it meant ‘Strength’.

  The two Suits stayed ten metres apart from one another the whole way. The one in front reached the van first and joined the queue, stepping in close behind the guard. Close enough to hear him ask for his usual.

  ‘Two sugars with that …’ he said, fingering his ID which hung on a yellow ribbon around his neck, trying to summon up the courage, telling himself that this Italian girl stirring his latte didn’t want a condo in St Tropez or heli-skiing in Klosters. She wasn’t interested in marrying Tim, the captain of industry, or Ralph, the Derivatives whizz. She wanted a salt of the earth Englishman. She wanted him.

  But then something poked him hard in the left kidney. Hard enough to be deliberate, not a mistake. And certainly hard enough for him to forget about asking for her number and focus instead upon turning around, eyes blazing to confront the nearest suspect.

  Who, by the cut of his jib, was most likely a trader from one of the private equity funds high up in the sky above his work station. A suit who right now was staring at his girl, smiling, pushing to the front of the queue.

  ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I …?’ said the suit.

  The guard stood his ground but he didn’t want to be a dick about it. Not in front of the girl whose Cake Of The Day the Suit was eyeing wolfishly, set out so prettily on the little fold-out table at the front of her stall.

  ‘All right, gorge?’ the Suit said.

  He said it loud and it in an accent that made the guard resent him even more. Loud enough to muffle a faint beep that came from the breast pocket of his jacket as the suit pushed past him towards the girl who was laughing, looking at the interloper like he was something special, something she hadn’t seen before.

  * * *

  Twist took off the suit jacket and hung it on the back of his chair and took a sip of his tea. He’d only worn a suit once before and that had been during his appeal. He’d borrowed it from a mate who was three inches shorter than him. It had made him look stupid and he was sure the jury had held that against him, the big kid who’d grown up too fast and turned into a bully and needed to be taught a lesson.

  But this one felt different. It fitted him better around his chest and across his shoulders and right down to the polished black boots. And it was made in a fine, black wool and had no shiny patches on the knees or the elbows. It was the kind of suit he could get used to wearing. The kind of suit he could see that Red would like. No fancy stuff. Sharp but understated.

  He looked up from his tea and saw Dodge sit down opposite him. He was grinning like a jackal, sliding something across the café table towards him covered by his right hand. Twist looked down and saw a packet of red Marlboros next to his teacup.

  He shook his head but Dodge insisted so he took the packet and opened it. The seal had already been broken and there were only four cigarettes left in it. Which left plenty of space for a flat black metal device, the size of a bank card but fatter, about the width of his index finger.

  He pushed the pack back at Dodge, then pulled a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket, put them on then stood up and walked to the Gents to change.

  * * *

  The guard took his time getting back. They watched him cross the street from the café. He looked beaten and he frowned when he saw the tourist in the T-shirt and shades posing for a portrait slap bang in the middle of the entrance it was his job to police.

  ‘Scuse, mate,’ he muttered, reaching for the ID card which hung round his neck, drawing it through the swipe point and reaching for the keypad to punch in his four digit password.

  * * *

  They watched the man take his clothes off. First his jacket, then his tie, unfastening it and unbuttoning his shirt, turning it to pull it off his muscular shoulders and up from out of his belt where his abs had run to fat.

  It had taken ten minutes from the foot of the Shard to reach the basement changing room of the Fitness First off Chancery Lane. They had raced the entire route. On strict starter’s orders, a flat run, no fancy footwork but at a pace, a little over a mile through the City, through pedestrians and drivers moving impatiently towards lunch.

  They watched as the man stood up, turned and took the bait, looking around him to see if anyone else had seen it. They watched as he looked their way, at two young men sat leaning forwards, breathing heavily, wearing running shorts and T-shirts drenched in sweat.

  ‘Nope,’ Dodge replied, looking across at Twist who was similarly attired.

  ‘You must have dropped it,’ Twist shrugged, as he stood up and walked past the man across the changing room.

  By the time the twenty pound note was in the man’s wallet Twist had switched the padlock on his locker for an identical one and was halfway to the lavatory.

  Dodge watched the man put the wallet in the locker, turn the key of the new padlock then walk towards the stairs and up to his workout in the gym.

  When Twist came out of the lavatory cubicle he took watch at the foot of the stairs as Dodge unlocked the padlock, took out the police uniform inside, folded it carefully and slid it into his rucksack.

  Dodge allowed himself a smile but paused before closing the locker fully. Twist watched, quietly amused as he reached back inside, pulled out the man’s wallet, took back his twenty pound note then snapped the padlock shut.

  * * *

  The sun was hovering like an apparition above the jagged tip of the Shard as Twist and Dodge clambered up onto the roof of the red-bricked warehouse from the fire escape, Dodge telling him they had to get off the street and lie up until FBoss gave them the signal.

  Twist looked around at the rooftops, tracing its line across the horizon as if he was drawing it. It had been his idea to come back this way. To take the left-hand fork through Shoreditch past the warehouse and the wild party to the Russian’s penthouse which rose like an eagle’s eyerie above the streets of Bethnal Green below.

  ‘Strip.’

  Twist turned and saw that Dodge was ahead of him again. Somehow more focused and alert even now that they had completed the tasks allotted to them. He was stood in his boxers, pulling on a pair of jeans, wasting no time to beat the winter wind that blew against his back.

  Twist knew what he was looking for but in the daylight the grey sky sucked the colour out of buildings so that it was hard to see the shining half dome which had guided Red as she’d led him, illuminated, across the graveyard and along the church wall to begin the climb up to the penthouse and the pool a week ago.

  He stepped forwards, staring out to the north-east, and saw what looked like a dome on the horizon and strained his eyes until he was sure that it was their dome, in profile, calling him back again.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Dodge said, breaking the spell.

  Twist looked down at his feet. They had carried him twenty feet towards the penthouse across the flat roof.

  ‘Can you give me an hour?’ he said, looking back at Dodge, looking him straight in the eye.

  Dodge shook his head.

  ‘We’ve got to get back,’ he said. ‘You heard what Sikes said. Trust me, he’s serious …’

  ‘There’s something I need to do,’ Twist went on, crossing his fingers behind his back. Hoping that Dodge would have more sense than to ask and implicate himself but realising too late, when Dodge didn’t respond, that he had misjudged his friend.

  ‘You never …’ Dodge began, narrowing his eyes, battling to keep the lid on the ugly idea that now presented itself.

  Twist watched him freeze, his whole body tensing up, staring back, searching for some kind of reassurance that he would not be able to give him without endangering him.

  ‘What?’ Twist asked, but knew the question and began to
answer it, in the hope that his response would bring them closer, show that they were two minds, thinking alike.

  ‘No—’ Twist began.

  But Dodge cut him off. He just had to ask the question out loud. Twist could see that.

  ‘You been talkin’ to the pigs?’

  ‘No! I wouldn’t do that. Let’s call it – a gamble …’

  Twist watched Dodge’s brow furrow.

  ‘A gamble?’

  ‘A spot of Russian roulette.’

  Dodge now looked completely mystified.

  ‘Please, mate. Wait for me here. Please. We’ll tell FBoss the guard took his break late.’

  But Dodge didn’t like it.

  ‘Listen! You got me into this, man,’ Twist started, pointing his finger at Dodge who was shaking his head. ‘Red’s in trouble. More trouble than you know. You’ve got to let me go. It’s the only chance she’s got.’

  Dodge weighed this information. He prided himself on knowing everything, passing on his wisdom to newcomers, and this revelation hurt his pride.

  ‘Half an hour, tops,’ Twist went on, not waiting for approval but turning on his heel and racing back across the rooftop, retracing the way that Red had led him, the night she had wanted him to see and to understand the tie that Sikes had made and the promise that must be broken.

  * * *

  The drop was still perilous as Twist climbed up the glass wall of the apartment block and clambered over the trellis to drop down and land by the side of the pool. He used his hands to cat-walk in the half darkness towards the French windows, then stopped, peering in through the glass at Moll Hackabout, whose sad timeless story now hung on the low-lit walls inside.

  They had left her alone tonight. Moll, who had been sold short, seduced, molested, maligned, impregnated and infected in a story that was as old as the profession she had fallen into. First the mistress of a wealthy London Jew caught in bed with her aristocratic lover, then the brothel worker staring alluringly out, make-up hiding the small black spots, the sure signs of syphilis that left her swathed in sweating blankets as crow-like quacks profited from her final demise.

  He took a step back from the window and scratched his head, thinking, trying to figure out a way inside, but he was afraid. Afraid of the things that Red had told him that night, about the men who wanted the pictures, of her first encounter with them and the things they would do to her – that Sikes would let them do to her if they failed to deliver on time.

  He looked up, one storey up, where there was a crack, an opening in the narrowest of bathroom windows and he reached inside his kitbag and felt the cold rubber of the mask touch the skin of his face. There was a sunlounger beside the pool and he took the cushion from it then upended it and began to climb the mahogany cross struts until his fingers found the crack and pushed the window open.

  45

  The guard standing outside the Shard saw the van arrive. It was early on account of the two police outriders who had muscled through the City traffic and were now forcing a TV truck from the delivery bay outside the service entrance.

  He turned as his supervisor came marching out from the service entrance, flanked by two more guards. The four of them split into pairs and formed a corridor along which the two men from the vault strode to be met by the gallery’s guards who were unlocking the bar across the van’s rear doors.

  There was a satisfying sucking noise as the hydraulic ramp reached the floor. Then the men in the overalls lifted each crate in turn, sliding it into its own row on their trolley and wheeling it back towards the service entrance, up a ramp, along a corridor, down in a lift, along another corridor to a solid steel door.

  The guards stopped at intervals along the way, sealing doors behind them and positioning themselves along the route, bristling like pimps protecting Moll from the attention of suitors who could not afford her.

  The first guard listened to the sound of a click and the turn of a six-inch-wide screw deep inside the foot-thick circular steel door. He turned and stared back down the corridor, his hand resting on the leather holster at his side.

  He didn’t need to understand why the manager of the tallest building in the City had decided to host an auction of eighteenth-century art. It was way above his pay grade. All he needed to do was be extra vigilant in response to Scotland Yard who had confirmed the report of the robbery from the gallery that had held the missing three Hogarths.

  He stepped into the vault. There was a steel grille dividing an outer room filled with stocks and bonds from an inner room where several large safes stood at intervals around the walls.

  One of the men in white coats unlocked this door and motioned to his colleague to push the trolley inside. Then he turned and walked back out again, locking the grille and ushering him out so that he could turn and pull the solid steel door closed with a thunk.

  * * *

  Fagin had tried on sixteen suits before he had found ‘the one’. To his mind it was the perfect expression of the high point of 1980s power dressing in a colour consistent with the taste of a Russian oligarch hailing from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. It was dark crimson and double-breasted with shoulder pads so wide that the Emperor Ming might at any point order the invasion of Earth to recapture them. He turned, throwing his hands out to the sides like a peacock raising its fan, and stifled his irritation as Dodge smirked.

  Then he turned and took a good long look at himself in the full-length mirror at the far end of the dressing room. The Stalin moustache was a nice touch. It nestled beneath his nose like a forest at the foot of a mountain. Theatrical, no doubt, but authoritative and with his scar-faced bodyguard dressed in a black, tailored Armani suit behind him, it would be a fool who stared at it too long.

  Reminding himself to watch for viscous canapés that might get caught up in it, he heard the door open behind him and he looked up the aisle to see Sikes. Deathly quiet since the showdown and staring at Red, as Bullseye sometimes stared at him when the mutt couldn’t understand why he was being punished.

  And it wasn’t enough that Sikes was in the coldest doghouse in the world. Fagin knew Red’s moods and he had never seen her as silent and self-composed as she was now, so he worried as she stood there in a figure-hugging gold chiffon dress with faux diamonds glittering on a carapace of silver around her neck. Would she stick with the programme or deviate from it? He looked at her and she met his eye and nodded back at him. Concentrated and lethal beneath the Eurotrash veneer, she would sit on his arm like dazzle camouflage, drawing attention away from the play until it was her turn to shine.

  They stood for a moment looking at one another in silence. It was as if they were off to perform in the opening night of a play. Except that no one was smiling. And Red looked ghostly, ashen-faced. And it bothered Fagin deeply. That something was at stake, beyond the obvious. Something he was not party to and prayed now would not raise its ugly head until after the score had gone down.

  * * *

  Dodge had waited for Twist in a greasy spoon that serviced the workers on the building site that surrounded the old hotel. From there they’d run back together, opening the door to Fagin’s room late but with their mission accomplished.

  ‘Don’t even look at her.’

  Sikes glowered at Twist, certain he had caught him trying to catch Red’s eye from across Fagin’s office.

  ‘Purple Sergei’, as Dodge was now calling Fagin, was busy with his printer. Twist watched as the old man shielded the screen on his laptop from him and Dodge who were stood behind his left shoulder.

  ‘Sightseeing for you today, boys,’ he said, reaching for a pair of e-tickets which read The View From The Shard.

  In other circumstances Twist would have taken his camera, taken some photographs of the art hanging on the walls in the observatory. But times had changed. Fagin turned back to face Sikes and Red, and clapped his hands.

  ‘Round four,’ he said.

  46

  The approach road was blocked all the way back to Lo
ndon Bridge Street as the cars of the good and the great descended slowly into the underground beneath the tower. Maseratis, Bentleys and Porsches, all turning in a multimillion-pound corkscrew of steel, plastic and glass four floors below the red carpet where those with chauffeurs were met with the cameras of the paparazzi and the screams of adoring fans.

  ‘I am Renzo Piano and this was my vision, I foresaw it not as a tower but as a vertical city for thousands of people to work in and for millions of people to take to their heart and enjoy.’

  Fagin was reading the blurb in the programme. He felt strung out and bereft of the milk of human kindness as his gang warred silently with each other around him. Sleep had not come easily for three nights. It was the same exhaustion he’d felt stumbling along the jagged ridges of the Carpathian Alps. Hunted like an animal by the tyrant’s mountain troops, lying up in barns and beneath hayricks, too frightened to knock on the doors of strangers who might already be in thrall to the vampire Ceauşescu.

  The authority always haunted him on these nights before a job and as sleep came he returned, his long hands reaching out from the foot of his bed, scrabbling crab-like up his body as he lay prone in the darkness walking through each of the team members’ roles in turn.

  Dawn had seen him bleary-eyed at his desk, staring at a Russian phrase book while trying and failing to glue on his moustache, the day passing in final drills with the crew, each repeating in sequence the actions he or she would take as he clicked on his stopwatch like a track coach clocking laps.