“The Gilchrist clan and the Maxwell clan,” he continued, “go way back to a time when drugs were too dirty a business for our hands, to the days when prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking represented ninety percent of our income. And the other ten percent was derived by collecting items fallen off of trucks.”
The doorbell rang. Ashdown and I exchanged nervous glances as the Chairman rose from the table.
“Nothing to fear, boys,” he assured us.
I watched Gerry Gilchrist step through the family room, nodding to his bodyguards along the way. I waited for him to stop, to step aside, to allow one of the guards to open the door so that he was well out of any potential line of fire. But as Ashdown said, gangsters do things differently in the UK. Gilchrist walked right up to the door and opened it wide without so much as a glimpse through the peephole. On the doorstep, he greeted a ragged middle-aged man with a mop of red hair and invited him inside.
The guest stumbled over the threshold but caught himself in the nick of time.
“Did I catch you on the piss?” Gerry Gilchrist said to him.
“’Course ye did. But it’s naw a surgery, is it?” His Scottish accent was thicker than most I’d heard since arriving in Glasgow.
“It is though. My boy’s willy got nicked.”
A horrified expression washed over the guest’s face. “Dae talk shite.”
“I’m telling you,” the Chairman said with a straight face, “Kinny was at the Old Soak, jaked on lager. At chucking-out time, he solicits a gobble from some weegie hoor. Only afterwards, he cannae find his wallet. So she pulls out a chib—and snip—takes his knob in lieu of payment.” He motioned to his guards. “I had to send the boys here to retrieve the organ.”
“Well, bugger me,” the guest said. “He’s lucky she left him his bawbag in case he wants bairns.”
The two men stopped in the entryway to the dining room. The redheaded guest stared at Kinny, said, “Ye still have your willy, mate?”
The Chairman slapped the guest on the back. “Of course he does. It’s just a wee thing, isn’t it? The hoor would have required some serious tools; I’m talking precision medical instruments.”
While the host and his guest howled, Kinny looked over at Zoey, shook his head. “My auld man’s just having a laugh.”
Finally, the Chairman settled down and made the introductions. “This, gents and lady, is Dr. Rory Lochhead.”
“Well,” Lochhead said, “nae really a doctor naw more.”
“Bullocks,” the Chairman said. “You’re more of a doctor than anyone else in this room. And that’s good enough for me.”
Christ, I thought, looking down at the bloody T-shirt wrapped around my hand. Maybe I should have taken my chances at the prison infirmary after all.
* * *
“Aside from your gammy hand,” Lochhead said to me, the odor of cheap Scotch coming off him in waves, “do ye have any other health worries, like say, the HIV or AIDS, the diabetes, ye ken? Crotch critters? Anything like that?”
“My health’s fine, doctor.”
He chuckled. “All my mates just call me Doc.”
“That’s generous of them,” I said.
Doc was examining my hand from his knees at the dining room table. He’d already seen to Kinny’s wrist. After icing it and elevating it and icing it again, Doc had recommended Kinny take a trip to the hospital. When he was told the hospital wasn’t an option, Doc iced the wrist again, then wrapped it in a makeshift splint. Kinny bitched and moaned until Doc finally handed him a bottle of dihydrocodeine. Kinny popped a couple of tabs, washing them down with three fingers of Dalmore, neat. He’d been quiet ever since.
Ashdown set his own glass of Scotch on the table, said to the Chairman, “So Tavis Maxwell put a hit out on your boy?”
“Aye,” Gerry Gilchrist said, stroking the sides of his neatly trimmed snow-white beard with one massive hand.
“But Maxwell’s son, Ewan, caught the bullet meant for Kinny, right?”
“That would seem to be the course of events, Mr. Ashdown.”
Ashdown, Zoey, and I had just listened to the Chairman’s tale of how the Gilchrist-Maxwell feud came into being and I’d begun to regret turning down Gilchrist’s offer of whiskey.
Gerry Gilchrist and Tavis Maxwell were once best mates. They’d grown up together, swiped the local churches’ donations together as tykes, raided post offices together as teens. They’d served as best man at each other’s weddings, Gilchrist’s in Glasgow; Maxwell’s in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Inevitably, as adults, they became partners in crime.
Built an empire.
Struggled for power.
Split but remained allies in the drug trade, exploiting Scotland’s heroin epidemic of the nineties.
“Then I got robbed,” Gerry Gilchrist said. “A shipment of high-quality smack was diverted to a small group of Yardies in Manchester. All well and good, right? The price of doing business. But then, who goes and buys the product from those Manchester tossers? Tavis Maxwell is who.
“No big deal, you’re probably thinking. And you’re right; it wasn’t. Sure, I had a head of steam for a while. I made some threats. But in the end, I was willing to let sleeping dogs lie. But then, just weeks later, my top lieutenant gets pinched. So I pay a visit to a mate who works with the bizzies.”
“The bizzies?” I said.
“You know, the polis. The fuzz. The filth. Whatever you want to call them.”
I refrained from glancing at Ashdown, who’d earlier told Gilchrist he was a used car salesman in North London. “Certified pre-owned vehicles, we prefer to call them,” he’d said to help prop up his backstory.
“You don’t say,” Gilchrist exclaimed. “I own a dealership next town over.”
Ashdown froze but Zoey quickly came to his rescue, explaining that the three of us were in Glasgow on holiday and hoped to pay a visit to a young girl Zoey had recently met in rehab in Essex. “Unfortunately,” she added, “all we have to go on are a few photos on our mobiles. Rehab’s bloody anonymous, you know. I can’t even guess at her first name.”
“Anyway,” the Chairman said, continuing his story, “I asked my mate what the hell happened. Turns out, Maxwell’s son-in-law, an eejit named Lorne Trask, had got himself pinched a few months earlier. And, what do you ken, the sod had turned informant.
“So, I went to Tavis and told him what had happened. Warned him that if he didn’t take care of the problem, I would.”
We waited as Gilchrist took another hit of whiskey.
“Well, let’s just say, he didn’t take care of the problem. And so I had to.”
Chapter 19
The Chairman said, “Clan feuds like ours are nothing new, of course. You’ve probably heard tell of Arthur Thompson, another son of Glasgow. Another son of Springburn, in fact.”
Ashdown nodded. “The Godfather, they called him.”
“Before there was a book and movie by that name, if I’m not mistaken. Thompson made his mark in the fifties and remained on top for thirty years. Began as a simple money lender. Only he crucified those who failed to pay their debts. Literally, crucified them. Nailed them to doors or floors and watched them die slow, painful deaths.”
“Christ,” I said.
The Chairman nodded. “Exactly. Next Thompson went into the protection rackets. Even invested in some legitimate businesses. Ironically, it was those legitimate businesses that made him a wealthy man. But where’s the bloody fun in that?”
Ashdown said, “He had a son, didn’t he?”
The Chairman nodded again, this time staring down at the table, reflecting. “Thompson’s son, Arthur Jr., he took over the drug trade in the eighties. Junior, of course, was his father’s pride and joy.”
Kinny lowered his head. Gilchrist didn’t so much as glance in the kid’s direction as he said it.
“Thompson’s rival was the Welsh clan,” the Chairman continued, “two members of which one day planted a bomb under Thomp
son’s car. Only the goons planted the bloody explosive under the passenger seat instead of the driver’s. Fucking thing blew and Thompson escaped without a scratch. Killed his mother-in-law though. Killed her to fuck. Which I suspect would be a blessing for most of us.”
He cackled at his own joke. This time Zoey joined him. Purely, it seemed, in order to irritate Ashdown.
“But Thompson didn’t have much of a sense of humor when it came to attempts on his life. So when he saw the two men he suspected of planting the bomb—Patrick Welsh and James Goldie—together in a van, he drove his car directly at them and ran them off the road. The van went straight into a lamppost killing them both instantly.
“As for Thompson’s wife, Ruth, she was naw too pleased with her mother exploding. So a couple years after the incident, she forced her way into the Welsh home and stabbed Patrick Welsh’s wife in the chest. Did a few years for her efforts.
“Of course, that was only the beginning. Junior, who everyone knew as Fat Boy, had taken his earnings from the drug trade and converted his council house into a luxury palace, a fortress he affectionately called The Ponderosa. That raised some brows, of course, and the polis started nosing around. Wasn’t long before they caught Junior in a massive heroin bust.
“Junior served some eleven years. Of course, that kind of time isn’t good for business. While Junior was inside, his men fell in with another clan and attempted a hostile takeover.”
“Hostile how?” I asked.
“Junior got himself shot in the crotch. Just hours after he got out of prison. Right outside his beloved Ponderosa. He did the smart thing though. He checked himself into a private clinic and told the filth he’d accidentally hit himself in the dick with a drill bit.
“But Junior’s luck at the Ponderosa never got any better. A few years later, someone ran him over on his own sidewalk. He survived the attempt and again he did the right thing. When the polis started asking questions, he told them to bugger off. And bugger off they did.
“Then a couple years later, Junior was back in the joint. Came home from prison on a furlough one weekend. Was home just six hours when he got himself gunned down. Died right in his father’s arms. Outside the Ponderosa.” He looked up at me. “If you’re a father, it’s a thing you can only imagine. The worst pain in the world, losing a child, and it’s a pain you know will last forever. Right up through the day they put you in the ground.”
On the table, the Chairman’s cell phone started buzzing. I couldn’t tell for certain, but it looked to me like a burner, a prepaid hunk of plastic that you can get for cash at your local convenience store.
“Aye,” he said into the phone. “Well, that’s naw much of a surprise now is it?”
When he ended the call he looked directly at me, said, “It seems you’ll be spending the night with us, laddie.”
I shook my head. “That’s not necessary.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t presume to tell me what’s necessary and what isn’t. The three of you, you’ll be bunking here tonight. End of story.”
“And why’s that?” I said.
“Because Tavis Maxwell has predictably lost his bloody head over the death of his boy. He’s got dozens of men on the streets of Glasgow just waiting for you to show yourself.”
Ashdown said, “Then it’s best we leave Scotland altogether.”
The Chairman shot him a look. “Naw, Mr. Ashdown. I’m afraid that’s impossible at the moment. See, Maxwell’s got men surrounding South Lanarkshire as well. They ken you’re here. They don’t dare approach my house; it’s part of the pact we have with the old bill. But as soon as you walk out that door, you’re fair game, all of you, including the lass.”
Ashdown rose. “I think we’ll take our chances.”
Gerry Gilchrist slammed his fist down on the table. “Look, I don’t need this aggro. I’m doing you all a bloody favor, and I expect some fucking gratitude for it.” He turned to me. “Now, I’m sorry if I’m pissing on your strawberries. But you saved my boy. Which means, like it or dislike it, you’re under my protection tonight. You three get yourselves killed, it’s my reputation that’s at stake. And I don’t intend to be perceived as weak. Because when you’re perceived as weak, that’s when they come for you, the fuckers.”
The Chairman stood from the table and stepped out of the room.
Kinny Gilchrist, who’d sat silently the entire time, shrugged his bony shoulders. “Guess that means meeting’s adjourned. My father’s mates will show you to your rooms.”
Chapter 20
I was too wired to sleep. So was Zoey, though for an entirely different reason, I suspect. Following our discussion with the Chairman, she had gone off to another part of the house with Kinny, who’d hinted at having an ample and varied supply of party favors.
“So,” she said as we sat alone in Gerry Gilchrist’s sizeable library, “we chatted a bit about our adult lives back in Dublin, but neither of us really touched on our childhoods.”
“We reminisced some,” I said, leafing through a hardcover copy of Madame Bovary. I was searching for a quote I was fairly certain wasn’t within the pages of any of Flaubert’s works. Despite a poor memory for such things, these words had remained emblazoned in my mind since the day I’d first read them:
“One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”
“I’m not talking about the part of our childhoods we spent together, Simon. I’m talking about our childhoods after we’d separated.”
I sighed, my eyes pinned to a random page. “When it was just me and dear old Daddy?”
“And me and Mum.”
Her newly pensive tone unsettled me. I’d just gotten used to Zoey as she was, just hours ago completely erased from my mind the sister I’d expected her to be. Now she sounded like someone else entirely. Someone sober, figuratively if not literally. Someone earnest with serious questions that demanded serious answers. And my childhood, my years spent with Dr. Alden Fisk, weren’t something I readily spoke about with anyone.
I glanced at the door, suddenly wishing Ashdown would materialize in its frame. But he was upstairs, asleep by now, or at least close to it. He’d looked exhausted (and more than a little intoxicated) when he wished us good night a half hour earlier.
“Did Daddy ever remarry?” Zoey asked.
I shook my head as I gazed up at the spines of the hardcover classics lining the Chairman’s bookshelves. Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe never failed to remind me of college at American University, of lying in the grass on the edge of campus reading stories alongside Tasha. My favorite had been “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
“How about Mum?” I said
“She had someone for a time. During my primary education. He lived with us for a bit.” She paused. “Was very clingy, like.”
I looked at her and saw the little girl I’d played leapfrog with, the child who used the threat of brute force to persuade me into games of hopscotch and jump rope and tea party and dress-up when none of her darling girlfriends were around to entertain her.
“Not in that way,” she said. “He was affectionate, he was. Not sexually though, not with me. More … fatherly, I suppose. More fatherly than Father ever was at least.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t entirely recall. I know he’d done time. I remember us visiting him in the nick. Shortly after you left.”
My brow furrowed. “In prison?”
Since our chat at the Radisson last night I hadn’t thought anything my sister said from then on could surprise me.
“He was a violent man,” she said. “Although, as I recall, I was only occasionally on the receiving end.”
“He beat Mum?”
She winced. “Hit her, sure.”
“Often?”
“Often enough for her to take me and run.”
“Run? Where did you run to?”
She shrugge
d. “Not far, actually. We remained in London. Mum could never have left London, not in a million years. I guess ‘hid’ is a more accurate term. We didn’t run. We hid. Hid from him.”
“How so?”
“Well, we did move for one.” She rolled her eyes. “To Leyton of all places. And Mum changed our names.”
“She did.”
I thought about our exchange outside the Old Soak, when Zoey made a dig about how it wouldn’t be much of a challenge for her to act as though she didn’t know me.
I said, “You know, I tried to find you once.” The words I spoke sounded far more defensive than I’d intended.
“Did you?”
I nodded but said nothing.
“I suppose changing our names didn’t help in that respect,” she said. “When was this?”
Two years ago, I thought. Only two years ago. And only after a woman I fell in love with, the Warsaw lawyer Anastazja Staszak, convinced me it was “terrible” that I hadn’t searched for my mother and sister before.
I was ashamed to tell Zoey I’d waited all those years, couldn’t bring myself to form the words. So I changed the subject. Or, more accurately, returned to the previous topic, which continued to sting.
“This man Mum dated, he was in prison before he moved in?”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the plush carpet as though in deep thought. I was trying to piece together the timeline, but I needed more, and I could tell she wanted to move on from that particular subject. So I didn’t probe. Instead I viewed her silence as an opportunity to escape the conversation altogether. Cowardly, sure, and I would deeply regret it later. But at the time I seized it like a junkie seizes the chance to get his hands on a fix.
“Speaking of prison,” I said, setting the book down and rising from my chair with a theatrical stretch, “I have an early day tomorrow.”
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