Twist

by Tom Grass

  Exhaustion had dogged him all afternoon, finally sinking its fangs in at a quarter past six. With just forty-five minutes left to zero hour he had slipped on an empty crisp packet and fallen hard on the floor of his office. It was getting to be a habit, he thought, lying there, his head resting on a 1994 edition of Lyle Antiques, until Red had come in looking ten million dollars and scooped him off the floor and propped him up with his back to the wall facing his desk.

  From there he’d instructed her to take the secret key from around his neck and open the bottom drawer and bring him his ziplock bag that contained his medication, so that just ten minutes – two modafinils, a Dexedrine and a beta blocker – later he’d been back on his feet, suited and booted, and marshalling the troops into the back of the Bedford which had taken them across town to the lock-up where, beneath the shadow of the sheltering wall, Sikes had sat waiting.

  * * *

  He looked from behind the tinted glass at liveried servants straight from the pages of Barry Lyndon who stood bowing as they offered the glitterati a glass of wine as they stepped from their chauffeur-driven cars into a blizzard of camera flashes and the din as celebrities were recognised and fêted by the crowd penned in by steel bars on either side of the red carpet.

  He sat up and looked at Red as she wrapped her white ermine tighter round her neck, preparing to meet the night air. She was more than Sikes deserved and that is why he would lose her. He was no longer the precociously talented young gymnast Fagin had taken under his wing. He was unrecognizable, having chosen the wrong path. And Fagin wondered if he’d even had a choice at all. If his path hadn’t been predetermined, the damage done long before the fall, during his childhood. So that when misfortune had happened, he’d had no reserves to fall back on, deciding to take by force what life had never given him, to be a hammer not a nail, a wise guy not a mug.

  Fagin watched the black fabric stretch tight across Sikes’s shoulders as he stepped out from the passenger door, the crowd murmuring as Red emerged and turned her back on him. She was Cinderella come late to the ball and the paparazzi knew it. The flash of their cameras dazzled Fagin as he stepped out to take her arm and lead her up the red carpet, believing what Sikes never would: that she belonged to no one and that her only commitment was to the score.

  ‘Stay, Bullseye,’ Sikes snapped at the dog as it turned and whined in the footwell in front of the passenger seat. He slammed the door and the limousine pulled away with Cribb in his cap behind the wheel.

  But Fagin could see that was not going to stop Sikes from trying to hold on. To the one good thing he had left, stepping forwards to whisper in Red’s ear, oblivious to Dodge and Twist who were working their way against the steady flow of caterers, brandishing their e-tickets along with the ID tags that identified them as card-carrying gentlemen of the press.

  47

  The reception was taking place in the open plan Gˇong bar of the Shangri-La hotel on the fifty-second floor of the tower. A chosen few had been invited to spend the night after the launch party, of which the auction was a part, in one of the luxuriously appointed suites.

  Red let herself be led by Fagin. Her fears about his purple suit and Borat moustache soon disappeared as they rubbed shoulders with dissipated artists, B-list celebrities, rock stars and the Qatari sheik who had financed the construction of the tower.

  Sotheby’s, who were running the auction, tipped him to lead the bidding but there were other speculations, most notably about the identity of the gang who had stolen the missing three paintings in broad daylight in transit from the Losberne Gallery.

  There were rumours that the infamous Kosovan jewel thieves, the Pink Panthers, were at work while others suggested that the theft had been an inside job, deliberately designed to drive up the price of the three paintings that were about to go under the hammer. A sensational PR stunt which could well be followed with an equally audacious tower heist.

  ‘Of course, there is no knowing what these ninjas will try next …’ Red heard a grizzled art hag opine to her Chinese collector friend who nodded his agreement.

  Red turned to Fagin and nodded to the ladies loo, but when she started walking towards it she felt herself held fast around the upper arm. She didn’t have to turn round to know whose fingers were bruising her as she kept smiling sweetly at the hag.

  ‘I need the toilet,’ she whispered, recoiling as his breath entered her ear.

  She felt him kiss her ear then her cheek and then down her neck to her halter line.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said, and she felt herself being pushed against her will away from the crowd and the Ladies into a corridor.

  There was the overwhelming urge to scream out loud. Not just because the points of his fingers were digging into the pressure points in her deltoids, sending electric bursts of pain up her arm and into her neck. She knew it was irrational not to fear him. He knew now that he was losing her and this made him more dangerous than ever. But his behaviour, dragging her around, unable to leave her alone, demeaned him. It was pathetic.

  It was an angry scream. It wanted to escape from her. Not born of fear but rage that this man had killed two boys and would kill again. That was a fact. And it jarred with the scene. These silly people, high up in their glass tower, staring at life and death and saying it was beautiful.

  But Fagin reached her as she opened her mouth and wrapped his arm around them, embracing them both. He hissed something quietly in Romanian as he drew them into the disabled toilet and stared into Sikes like a publican reasoning with a drunk.

  ‘Bill, don’t make a scene, you’re supposed to be a bodyguard,’ he said.

  She felt Fagin’s hand on her bare shoulders as he tried to prise Sikes off her but the strength remained and the pressure increased, drawing her closer as he stared blankly back at Fagin like he was a stranger whose face he had never seen before.

  ‘You think I can trust her to stick around?’ he asked, at last.

  * * *

  They slipped away from the tourists and slid over a railing to a secure door that was marked No Entry and Twist watched as Dodge pulled the counterfeit fob from his sleeve, the tip of his tongue edging from the corner of his mouth as he punched in the four digit code and the door clicked open.

  As they raced down the service stairs they peeled off their thick clothes, transforming themselves in one-footed hops, pausing only briefly on landings until Twist was wearing a harness and rope coiled round his midriff and Dodge was wearing the policeman’s uniform and they were standing next to the service elevator on the twentieth floor.

  A red light began flashing when Dodge swiped the card. It was indicating that there was no elevator on the far side of the steel doors, just a chasm that dropped some three hundred feet beneath them into the bowels of the earth.

  Twist stuck his neck out and looked down into the abyss.

  ‘Rather you than me, mate,’ Dodge said.

  48

  Inside there was a buzz of anticipation as the crowd filed into the hotel’s dining room. The auctioneers had covered the three hundred and sixty degree windows with red cloth to keep the focus on the paintings which were stood, covered, on three stands on a small stage at one end of the room.

  There were probably twenty rows and there were twenty chairs in each row, divided by a central aisle. The first five rows were all reserved but Fagin, true to form, had managed to secure himself a seat in the third row where he could cover both the exit and the action on the raised podium at the front.

  As they’d agreed in the plan, Red was seated behind him in the cheap seats, again close to the end of the row and partially obscured by a pillar from where she was still able to see Fagin as he turned and winked back at her. She then glanced over to where Bill was using the cover of the crowd milling in through the entrance to reach behind the red fabric to its left to ensure that the fire alarm was also exactly where it was supposed to be.

  Two porters in lab coats pushed a trolley from the service elev
ator to the right of the stage. They lifted its protective cloth to reveal the three paintings. There was a hush, reverential, as the auctioneer appeared, a neat, unremarkable man in a grey suit distinguishable only by his wooden hammer and the reading spectacles that he pushed onto his nose as he stepped up to the lectern and began.

  ‘Lot 146. Three paintings, numbers four through to six from William Hogarth’s six painting series A Harlot’s Progress. Oil on canvas. 1731. Hogarth was the greatest satirical artist of the early Georgian period and these paintings have attracted interest today due to the controversy surrounding the alleged reappearance and theft of the first three in the sequence from a well-respected central London gallery two weeks ago.’

  Red looked at the pictures standing on the trestles at the front and shivered. They showed the descent of the girl, Moll Hackabout. Red knew the pictures they had stolen from Losberne by memory and so could pick up the narrative without listening to the auctioneer who began the story from the top with the assistance of a projector operated by a colleague at the rear of the circular auditorium:

  ‘After arriving in London from the provinces the pretty but gullible girl Moll is met by Mrs Needham, the pock-ridden madam who procures her for the wealthy Jewish merchant who in turn casts her out for cuckolding him with a second lover, forcing her to become a common prostitute. She finds herself arrested in the third picture by Sir John Gonson, who stands staring at the wig box of the notorious highwayman, James Dalton, possibly one of Moll’s lovers, which hangs above her only piece of furniture, her bed.’

  Red turned and saw Sikes’s eyes, blank and emotionless staring back at her, refusing to answer the question, implicit in her glance at this moment as the auctioneer switched the audience’s attention to the pictures that were on sale.

  ‘The fourth plate on display here today shows Moll inside Bridewell prison, beating hemp for hangman’s nooses while the sadistic jailer steals clothes from her, who stands next to a card sharp, a Down syndrome child, a pregnant African lady and Moll’s servant who appears to be wearing Moll’s shoes.’

  The auctioneer paused while the spotlight shifted to the second in the series, picture five.

  ‘In plate five Moll lies dying of syphilis as Dr Richard Rock and Dr Jean Misaubin bicker over the relative benefits of bleeding versus cupping the patient while the heroine’s addled infant son picks lice or fleas out of his hair as Moll’s clothes hang down from her, almost like ghosts drawing her into the afterlife.’

  Red glanced up at the security guards who were positioned at each of the six pillars. The pillars formed a circle, within which the chairs formed a square. It was like a holding pen, containing the high rollers, but it was still hard for them to keep track of the partygoers who weren’t going to bid and who were standing alongside her, hugging pillars, sipping their drinks.

  ‘The sixth and final plate shows Moll at her own wake, dead aged just twenty-three years of age, surrounded by scavengers. Here, the parson spills his brandy and has his hand up the skirt of the girl next to him, who appears pleased. Here, Moll’s madam drunkenly mourns on the right with a jug of “Nants” brandy, appearing to be the only one upset by the treatment of the dead girl whose coffin is being used as a tavern bar. And here Moll’s former colleague, a mourning young whore, steals a handkerchief while another checks her appearance even though she too shows signs of a syphilitic sore …’

  Red watched the guards scan the crowd and turn as one, their eyes refocussing upon the tip of a pink newspaper in the third row. The auctioneer’s voice rose in tone, expressing his surprise at the speed with which the bidding had begun.

  ‘Two million pounds …’ he said, pointing at the man in the revolting purple suit who leapt up, bang on cue.

  ‘I can smell burning!’ Fagin yelled.

  She watched the high rollers raise their noses to sniff the air, turning impatiently to look around them, some looking to the security guards who were doing the same.

  ‘Sit down!’ a dark-haired man in the second row snapped.

  But Fagin didn’t. Instead he found inspiration.

  ‘I won’t sit down! I am a nose. A professional perfumer and I tell you this is an emergency …’

  And that was a claim no one could deny and the sign that she had been waiting for. Her fingers prised open the clasp of her handbag and reached inside for the ring of the smoke bomb which she pulled inside the bag, half closed and let drop to the floor.

  ‘Sir, if you could kindly just …’

  But the auctioneer could not compete with her scream, the one that had been building in her all afternoon but which she could now release full force at the top of her voice.

  ‘Fire!’ she cried, her hands clamped to her mouth watching as people jumped to their feet and Bill calmly elbowed the fire alarm and the stampede began.

  ‘The fire’s in the lobby. Not this way!’ Bill shouted.

  The voice of authority, cool in a crisis and in full possession of the latest information, standing arms outstretched in the doorway. Pandemonium broke out. The front runners, the cowards and the most able-bodied turned back into the room, colliding with those who came behind them as the auctioneer gestured desperately to the porters to get the paintings to safety.

  ‘Get them back to the vault!’ he shouted.

  The two porters were quick. One took the paintings from the stands while the other unfurled the covers and dropped them over each picture. It was something they had practised before many times at Sotheby’s. But they were nervous now, working in a strange environment, wondering how wise it was to go down in the lift when the fire on the ground floor would be drawing the oxygen down the shaft like a vampire sucking on a carotid artery. Red watched a buyer shout across at them as they ensured the paintings were ready for moving downstairs.

  ‘You sure you want to do that?’

  It was the same guy, the dark-haired one with the big mouth. Either he still didn’t buy there was a fire or he was just saying what the porters were thinking. But hearing their thoughts stopped them and they looked to the auctioneer to take the tough call and shoulder the responsibility.

  ‘The vault’s completely fireproof, I can assure you. Nowhere safer …’

  The porters wheeled the Hogarths out along a corridor towards the service lift which would take them all the way to the basement if it wasn’t already being used to evacuate human beings. Swiping their card, they punched the code into the keypad and when the lift doors opened they pushed the trolley ahead of them into the elevator sniffing the air like a pair of beagles.

  ‘Wait!’

  They turned to see a young policeman running along the corridor after them.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

  ‘No one goes down there but us,’ the older porter said.

  ‘We’ve had a tip-off,’ the policeman said. ‘Robbery in progress …’

  The porters stopped and thought about it, looking around for the auctioneer, but he was long gone, panting up the stairs to the roof, speed-dialling his investment-banker friend who knew a guy that rented out helicopters.

  ‘We have our procedures …’ the younger porter said.

  ‘And I’ve got orders. Those paintings aren’t going anywhere without me,’ the policeman replied.

  Only the policeman had anticipated this impasse. He knew only too well what their procedures were and why they had them. They were in place to prevent thieves wearing Prince Harry masks abseiling down lift shafts, opening hatches and stealing the paintings from under their noses.

  The doors slid shut behind the porters who turned gobsmacked to see the light on the panel pointing down. The young porter lunged for the closing door like a striking fencer but was too slow. They shut with a clunk and when they turned to look for support from the policeman they saw that he was already running for the stairs.

  49

  As the lift began its descent, Twist was still dangling from the hatch inside, his rope still fastened to the rung of the service
ladder one floor above. His back hit the roof at the speed the lift was going down and he was dragged back out through the hatch, bent double at the hips like a puppet on a string.

  But he had reflexes faster than a marionette’s and he used them to catch hold of the edges of the hatch as his feet disappeared above his head and the rope began to whip through the karabiner at his waist.

  He could feel the friction through the harness as the lift pulled him down and the rope spooled out in a straight line above him. He watched as the length at his waist shrank to nothing and then felt gravity take control once again and he fell back down through the hatch to the floor of the lift.

  He hit the emergency stop button and the lift ground to a halt between the eighteenth and nineteenth floors, the light flickering as he reached inside his rucksack and pulled out a can and shook it three times, always three, for good luck. Then he took aim, depressed the nozzle and covered the CCTV camera with matt black paint.

  He yanked his mask off and took a deep breath. Then he reached inside the rucksack for his craft knife, pulled the cloth cover from the paintings and went to work, cutting the canvases from their frames with the respect they deserved.

  * * *

  The buyers were streaming out of the reception and onto the street, like rats scurrying to the tune that Fagin had piped for them. Red would have joined them but there was no chance. Bill might as well have handcuffed himself to her as he pushed her down the rear fire stairwell until they’d reached street level, followed by Fagin. And then there was Oliver to think about. If he succeeded and returned with the paintings and she was not there, Bill would kill him and take them without a second thought.

  She looked across at Fagin. His moustache was hanging loose on one side and she watched him reach up and cover it with his hand. The plan was working. Cribb, their getaway driver, had the easiest job of the entire team. He was parked in a limousine fifty yards along the road. She could see its bonnet visible at the end of a slip road as it nudged forwards, the engine idling, Cribb in the driving seat still wearing the chauffeur’s hat.