‘It’s fine, mate. Just some stuff at home. You know how it is.’ He waved his hand and shrugged. Embarked on his henpecked Jewish husband routine, which he knew Tariq loved. ‘Sandra’s got some people coming for dinner. The caterer hasn’t delivered. You know. A big disaster, and it’s all, “Jonny, my life is in ruins” this and “Jonny, I blame you for the dry chicken” that.’ He grinned as convincingly as he could, gripping the arm rests of his typing chair, willing his business partner to get out and go stick his nose in someone else’s business before the Fish Man got there.
Tariq chuckled. ‘My Anjum’s dragging us to some auntie’s house in Bradford, God help me, for her second cousin’s mehndi thing this weekend. I’m just going to eat myself into a meat stupor and sit in the front room, praying I get forgotten about. Bloody women, am I right?’ Fist bumps, to show brotherly solidarity. ‘Well, listen. I’m taking my dad to the mosque, now. You need me, give me a shout, okay?’ He pulled on a white crocheted mosque hat and left.
Breathing a heavy sigh of relief, Jonny watched the two men climb into Tariq’s Mercedes CLS. The younger man an upright version of the almost bent-double elder. The older man an upstanding version of the crooked younger. He watched them pull away to seek solace and forgiveness from their God. Good.
Only three minutes later, a battered, dented people carrier pulled onto the forecourt. A tall man wearing no coat but otherwise dressed in the garb of a Hassidic Jew got out of the car, long legs and big homburg hat emerging simultaneously, reminiscent of some strange creature hatching from a steel egg. Jonny counted the seconds.
The knock at the door finally came. Asaf Smolensky entered without waiting to be asked, looking dishevelled in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves. He brought in with him his usual pungent aroma.
‘Close the door and sit down,’ Jonny said.
The Fish Man raised an eyebrow and did as he was asked. Sitting bolt upright in the chair on the opposite side of Jonny’s desk. ‘This is an unscheduled meeting, Jonny. You know Friday morning is a busy time for me in the shop.’
‘It’s an emergency.’
‘Oh?’
‘And I want you to keep it under your hat,’ Jonny said, staring at the wide brim of the black felt homburg. ‘In fact, bugger that. I want you to keep it under your yarmulke. Understand? This is between me and you.’
The Fish Man frowned. Tugged at a sidelock and studied Jonny’s face. ‘What’s so bad that you need to keep it to yourself? You know I work on contract for you and Tariq on equal terms. By rights, I should tell him—’
‘You can’t. It’s personal, Asaf. This is my honour at stake.’
By the time remorse and doubt had started to eat away at Jonny’s resolve, Smolensky was no longer answering his phone. Too late to refine his instructions. He realised his impulsive actions might have deadly consequences that would go far beyond the fate that awaited Jack O’Brien.
Chapter 14
Jack
‘You get off, Suze,’ Jack said to the manageress of the bar. He looked at his Breitling watch. Gone lunchtime. Looked back at the middle-aged woman, clutching a pile of towels with arthritic, gnarled red hands.
‘I don’t mind, cocker,’ Suze said, smiling. Nicotine-stained teeth matched her nightclub tan – a fetching shade of pale primrose. ‘I’ve got a stock take to be getting on with. It’s no bother.’
Never seeing the light of day was hard on an ageing woman who had a family to feed and couldn’t afford choice, Jack mused. Poor old cow. He looked swiftly away from her swollen ankles, lest she feel self-conscious.
‘Go home. See your kids, for Christ’s sake. You need some rest. God knows, I bloody do! I’ll catch you tonight.’ He winked and was rewarded with a one-armed hug. Suze smelled of strong washing powder, cheap perfume and Murray Mints to mask a whiff of stale cigarettes. It was a maternal smell. A pang of emptiness reminded him that he missed his own mother, perished many years ago in a Harpurhey squat because she had never been able to resist the pull of the brown. Jesus. What a legacy.
Jack liked it when the club was empty and he could sort through the playlist for that coming evening. He was sober. He was clean. No girls. No ego. No sycophants. No distractions. No Conky McFadden and Uncle Paddy swanning in when they felt like it, reminding him and Dad that M1 House was an O’Brien crew stomping ground and drugs market first and foremost, rather than a temple to music and dance.
Sifting through the vinyl he had selected and placed into his DJ’s storage box, he started to make notes. Momentarily distracted by the memory of the call he had taken only that morning, asking him to headline at the new, hot nightspot, Fuentes in Ibiza. A massive fee for a few hours’ work, beating several top name London DJs to the gig. He was on the map with a big pin, now. Dad would be proud when he heard that bit of good news.
Lost in optimistic thoughts, humming a new deep house tune he had just discovered, Jack didn’t even register the sound of the main door squeaking as it opened. Clanging shut. The noise must have reverberated through that enormous, lofty space, but he was neither aware of that nor the footsteps, click-clacking on the polished concrete floor towards him.
When Jack looked up and saw the tall figure of Asaf Smolensky, dressed from top to toe in black like an impersonator of Death himself, he only had time to frown through lack of comprehension. Then, as if someone had violently removed the stylus from the vinyl soundtrack to his life, there was the sharpest and deepest of scratches, followed by silence and the eternally spinning blackness of God’s own celestial turntable.
Chapter 15
Paddy
‘Did you see that bastard’s face? Did you?’ Paddy screamed at Conky. He could feel the fire in his cheeks. Venom coursing through his clogged arteries at a BPM that would make the house music in Frank’s club seem like one turgid ballad. Only vaguely aware of what the doctor had said about keeping calm. Sod the doctor!
‘He was smirking.’ The memory of Ellis James … that gnome-like detective who had a hard-on for the O’Brien empire. A sly smile in those squinty copper’s eyes that saw everything. Paddy had registered the naked glee at the sight of his dead nephew, lying in a pool of his own blood, and the sound of bereft wailing from his poor bastard of a kid brother. ‘Smirking, Conks!’
Conky stood with his head bowed in the empty back office of the builders’ merchants. Hands held behind him like the Duke of Edinburgh. Already dressed in a black overcoat and suit, as though the funeral was imminent. That was respect. That was how someone should behave when royalty was assassinated.
‘I know, boss,’ Conky said. ‘Let me count the ways in which I hate the fecking peelers. Especially that moronic little shite.’
‘He was enjoying every minute!’
Paddy, already aware of a pink-orange haze of agitation surrounding him, felt the red mist descend in earnest. Flickering images in his mind’s eye like bad footage from an old home movie: Jack, the victim of what the forensics wankers had described as a ‘frenzied attack’, punctured like a pin cushion and all bled out. Coppers everywhere. Frank’s thin face, contorted in horror. Screaming like a woman. Dropping to his knees. Having to be carried out to an ambulance. Cameras flashing. The hiss of police walkie-talkies. His own phone nagging to be answered. But that fat little bastard, Ellis James, savouring every tormented minute.
As though it was a sentient entity separate from him entirely, Paddy’s Rage spotted the pickaxe leaning up against the wall in the corner of the office. The Rage picked it up, hardly registering the weight of the thing. The Rage flung it through the window. A deafening bang, as it made contact with the glass. An explosion of crystalline shards, and the damp Mancunian wind was suddenly whipping the Venetian blinds in and out of the jagged aperture.
‘Boss!’ Conky’s voice was calm but seemed to come from another time and place. ‘Boss. Take a deep breath. Count to ten.’
But the Rage hadn’t finished. It picked up the typing chair with the strength of Goliath and swung it into the
air as though it were an Olympian tossing a hammer. The chair sailed across the office, where it found its mark in the dead centre of a shelf full of files. A strange rain of paperwork fell to the ground, covering the grey carpet in legitimate business records. The chair lay on its side, broken and split open like Jack. Dislocated shelving hung at an awkward angle, still clinging to one lever arch file, which slid slowly down to meet its erstwhile companions. A dent in the plaster that the Rage could fit its fist into, which it did. Repeatedly.
‘Patrick O’Brien! Stop! You’re going to give yourself another heart attack, man.’
The Rage acknowledged Conky’s voice but connected hearing Paddy’s full name spoken in a castigatory tone with Paddy’s mother. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Patrick O’Brien! What have you done this time? You just wait till your daddy gets home! I can’t protect you, son. He’s going to give you the beating of your life. Mam in a starched white pinny, carrying him under her meaty arm like a bed-roll, up the stairs to his and Frank’s room. Anger and fear and regret in her eyes. She would cop it too, once Dad had finished with him.
Paddy stood in the middle of the office. Red mist subsiding now, taking the Rage with it. Heart still racing, panting, he was at least himself again. He peered round at the devastation, frowning with confusion at the sight as though some other person had caused it. Conky was setting the typing chair back in its rightful spot. Gathering the paperwork from the floor. Paddy felt his heartbeat begin to slow a little. Salient thought was once again within his grasp.
‘We need an internal investigation into this, Conks,’ he told his enforcer. Some satisfaction in watching the big man clear up at his feet. ‘Jack is family. Was family. I want you to find the bastard that did this and end him.’
Conky straightened up, with an audible click somewhere in his lower back. ‘Of course. It’s a downright disgrace, so it is. I feel like I’ve lost a nephew myself.’ Was that a tear that Paddy observed rolling from beneath one of Conky’s black lenses? ‘All of his life, I knew that poor wee boy. Cut down in his prime. Poor bloody Frank. A father should never bury his son. It’s not the way of nature.’
‘Who do you think did this?’ Paddy asked, wondering why he couldn’t cry over the death of his own flesh and blood. Or maybe he was just a harder, better man than Conky McFadden. He suddenly felt disgust towards his henchman. ‘I’m supposed to be out of the game. What arsehole would come after me and start something, just as I’m about to disappear off into the sunset?’
Wiping the tear away on the tips of his fingers, Conky sniffed. Looked towards Paddy, though with those glasses it was hard to see if he was staring directly at him or just in his general direction. ‘Maybe this isn’t about you. Jack’s a prominent public figure and a big boy. Maybe he had enemies of his own.’
Paddy wasn’t sure about that. Everything always led to him because he was the head of the family. It was all he could do to stop himself snorting in derision at Conky’s theory. ‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Leave it to me, boss,’ Conky said, pushing his Roy Orbisons up his nose. Prodding his stupid fucking pretend hair. ‘I’m all over this like a rash. And I’ve already got a few theories.’
Chapter 16
Lev
‘Shit. It’s Mum. She’s home,’ Mia said, backing away from the window of the TV room in a near-crouch, wearing only her knickers.
‘Get your stuff and get out of here before she sees you,’ she whispered. Hastily switching off her father’s vintage porn DVD, which she’d liberated from his ‘secret’ home-office collection, she snatched the disc out of the machine. The skin on her face was still blotched red from crying, but a glint in her eye said that Lev wasn’t the only one feeling a whole lot better for her having made the call to Daddy Dearest.
‘My clobber’s upstairs,’ Lev said.
‘Come on, then!’
The two scrambled up the staircase to Mia’s room, all thoughts of sex long gone. Downstairs, the bing-bong of the contact alarm on the front door heralded her mother’s entry. Metallic rattling, just about audible as she presumably tossed her door or car keys onto the table in the hall. Humming a happy tune. Lev didn’t want to be around when Mia broke the ‘news’ to her mother that Jack had raped her. Lev didn’t want to be around, period.
‘I’m gonna shoot, babe,’ he said, backing into the en suite, blowing her kisses. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ Closing the door, he pulled on his clothes hastily, already thinking through his fast getaway. Through the door he could hear the voice of another woman. Marginally deeper. Full of enthusiasm. Then, Mia’s. Would the mother spot the bed, still dishevelled from their morning session and come looking for him? Raised voices, suddenly.
‘What? He did what?’
The sound of weeping and hysterical babble. Mia, getting herself worked up all over again.
Get the hell out, Lev.
His heart was thumping. Adrenalin flushed through his body. He could hear the mother’s voice getting louder.
‘Have you had a man in here?’
Easily audible through the door, now. Pulling on his shoe. But where was the other shoe?
‘Whose is this shoe? Mia! You have had a man in here! Are you hiding him? Is he in the bathroom?’
As the handle was depressed on the other side, Lev opened the window. Knocking some shitty nick-nack or other into the garden as he clambered through. Perching on the sill, his taut, tense body flooded with relief when he spied the wrought iron fire escape that descended from the loft conversion above past the en suite window. It was more or less within leaping distance.
More or less.
He looked down at the substantial drop into the side garden. Only wheelie bins to break his fall. But through the obscure glazing, he saw the dark figure of Mia’s mother emerge through the door. Gripping an overflow pipe that protruded from the brickwork above, his feet barely accommodated on the thin ledge – one shoe on, one shoe off – he had a split second to decide.
‘Hey!’
She’d spotted him.
He leaped across the breach, praying in that split second between life and probable death to a God that didn’t give a shit. Caught hold of the banister … just. Fingers slippery with sweat. Little Jay needs you, man. Clinging on for his son’s dear life. Legs flailing, he flung himself onto the steps and scrambled downwards to safety. Sprinting away. Willing her not to follow.
‘I saw you, you cheeky little toe-rag!’ The angry words of an over-protective mother still rang in Lev’s ears as he reached the bus stop.
As Lev boarded the bus to Sweeney Hall with one wet foot, he didn’t notice the dented old Toyota Previa pulling away from the kerb on the other side of the road. When he alighted at the mouth of his estate, his head was too full of plans to collect his six-figure bounty and book a flight to the US for him and Jay to notice the Previa sliding out of sight behind the ramshackle one-time Scout Hut that was now a needle-exchange.
Limping to the door to his block of flats, he pressed his fob against the automatic lock. Peered over his shoulder, feeling that he was being watched, but saw nobody apart from a giant of a woman moving very slowly along the pitted, rubbish-strewn pavement on a mobility scooter.
Ten floors up, closing the door behind him, Lev considered his options. He pulled off his clothes. Stood under a hot shower in the mildewed bathroom. Tracked the blackened grout with his thumbnail, wishing his shitty flat smelled less of damp and more of clean and new, like Jonny Margulies’ mansion. His stomach churned at the iniquity of one man having so much and one man having so little. Spoiled Mia. A pampered princess. Why did she deserve such good fortune when his own son had been cursed at birth with a bad mother and a short, brutish childhood spent walking the thin blue poverty line?
Lev shook his head. Turned off the shower. Counselled himself not to compare his sad lot with the fortunes of others. He was young. He would make his own way. Somehow, he would save Jay. Bitterness and envy were acidic, rotting people from the inside out. It had fuelled his
mother to be the prize bitch that she was, but he didn’t have to be that guy. He plugged his discontent with a slice of Warburtons toast. Ravenously hungry, now the adrenalin had subsided.
Booting up his tablet, he checked the Manchester Evening News for signs of an almost certain aggravated assault on Jack O’Brien. Had he correctly anticipated the incendiary links in the chain of events that lighting a fire under Mia would spark? He knew Jonny. Not such a cuddly teddy bear. Should he go straight to his new benefactor and claim the money or wait until it was a sure thing? Poking, clicking on the screen. He could see nothing in the web-pages … yet. But then even if Jonny had ordered the Fish Man to pay the DJ a visit immediately, it was unlikely the press would have got wind of anything only six hours after Mia had made the call. Or perhaps his plan had backfired.
‘Stop this negative shit, man!’ he chided himself, turning the tablet off.
His heart swelled at the thought of being a hero to his infant son. Seeing the boy grow into adulthood, looking up to a caring, strong father figure. Unlike that twat, bio-Dad. Block the bastard out. But suddenly, Lev’s heart was pounding at the thought of jetting off to the hospital in Baltimore. Realised that he might not be able to handle a terminally ill boy and a pile of luggage on his own.
There was only one person who could realistically help him.
He had better tell the witch.
As Lev peered through the steamed-up hairdresser’s window on the corner of a Moss Side red-brick backstreet, he was unaware of the Previa pulling up to the kerb. Even if he had clocked the car, the reflection of the thick grey-white cloud that bounced from the windscreen would certainly have obscured the distinctive appearance of the driver.
‘Mam!’ He tapped on the window with his knuckles. ‘Mam!’
And there was the inglorious Gloria, wearing a red cape around her shoulders, having her hair braided by some young sister who looked like a black Marge Simpson. Gazing at her youthful reflection as though it were a portrait to rival Dorian Gray’s.
Born Bad Page 10