‘DO. YOU. KNOW. THIS. BITCH?’ He punctuated each word by banging the muzzle of the gun against Katherine’s head.
‘She’s my sister,’ Katherine roared, straining away from the gun.
‘Well, this is easy, isn’t it?’ the gunman said. ‘You open the safe like a good little girl and—’
‘I can’t,’ Katherine shouted at him. ‘I can’t override the system.’
‘You fucking CAN,’ he screeched, and he pushed Katherine away from him, reached for Tara, forcing her onto her knees, pressing the gun into her neck where a pulse was visible, pumping against her pale skin like it was trying to jump free.
‘Or I’ll rearrange your sister’s pretty little face for her.’
‘No,’ screamed Katherine.
Martha launched herself at the gunman. It was not a conscious decision. The action seemed to happen outside of herself. Outside of her control. She reached for his neck, raking her nails along the bare skin where a line of blood now bloomed. The surprise of her attack made him stumble backwards. His gun flew out of his hand, slid across the floor. The second gunman ran towards it at the same time as Martha dived for it and, for a moment, she felt she could reach it, could maybe even shoot it. Briefly, her mind registered a boot – ankle boot, silver buckle on the side, pointed toe, block heel – as the gunman lifted his foot, drove it into Martha’s ribs. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming or if it was somebody else. The next kick was to her face, close to her eye. The sound was a wet crack. For a moment, light blared all around her like she was looking directly at the sun, then it dimmed and blurred. She didn’t feel the pain of it. Not then. She thought she might throw up.
‘You fucking bitch.’ The gunman stood beside her now, leaned towards her. Martha felt something warm and sticky on her face. It hurt to breathe. She heard somebody crying and she closed her eyes against the hopelessness of the sound.
‘I have cash. In my safe deposit box.’ The words were low, precise. Martha opened her good eye. It was the old man. The one in the wheelchair.
‘How much?’
‘A large sum.’
‘How large?’
‘I’d rather not discuss my personal business in front of strangers.’
The gunman snorted. Then he pointed the gun at the old man’s head. ‘How about now? How about you tell me now?’
The old man shook his head with slow deliberation. ‘I do not care about your gun, young man. But I will give you my money if you let these people go.’
Now there was a throbbing coming from deep inside Martha’s head, like a drum in a marching band, moving closer.
The boss leaned towards the wheelchair. ‘I fucken decide what’s going to happen here, understand?’ The old man lifted his right hand and wiped the gunman’s spittle from where it had landed on the side of his face.
The gunman straightened, looked at Katherine. ‘Where are the safe deposit boxes kept?’
She pointed to a room just off the foyer. ‘It’s locked,’ she said.
‘Unlock it.’
When Martha sat up, she felt blood drip down the side of her face.
‘Stay out here and watch them,’ the gunman told his accomplice. ‘Especially that one.’ He pointed at Martha.
‘You!’ he shouted at the lookout. ‘Wheel the auld fella in here and keep the bead on him while I open the box.’
The three of them entered the room and the door closed. The others were ordered to lie face down on the floor with their hands behind their heads and their mouths shut. Steroid – as Martha had dubbed him – paced up and down the line they formed on the floor.
The position brought the pain in Martha’s ribs into sharp focus and she pressed her face into the carpet to stop herself from crying out.
It was difficult to know how long they were there. Martha tried to count in seconds but she kept losing her place. She estimated that maybe as much as five minutes passed before it happened.
Before the shot was fired.
Afterwards, there was a brief moment of absolute silence. The silence was like a sound in itself. A white noise into which images bled. Martha saw the silhouette of her father, leaning against the door of her bedroom, the clink of ice cubes against the glass in his hand like a lullaby. ‘Lights out, kiddo.’
She saw Tara, her hair gathered in pigtails, her eyes glaring from behind thick-lensed glasses at a group of kids on a green. ‘If you won’t let Martha play, then I’m not playing either. And I’m taking my kite with me.’
She saw the note Cillian had left for her. Before she tore it up. After he left her apartment for the last time.
I love you. We can sort this.
Now there was shouting. Now there was screaming. The tinny insistence of an alarm sounding somewhere. Fists pounding on the main door of the bank.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Steroid roared, pointing the gun at each of them as he paced up and down. Martha heard the fidget of his finger against the trigger, the crack of his neck as he snapped his head towards the room containing the safe deposit boxes just as its door was thrown open. Martha glanced up. A boy stumbled out. The Lookout. Martha reckoned he was about fourteen. The skin of his face was flushed. In his hand, a gun.
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ The gunman – the one in charge – ran out of the room, the boy’s balaclava in one hand, the Nike bag – bulging now – in the other. From the corner of her eye, Martha saw the wheelchair inside the room. It was empty.
The gunman didn’t wait for the boy’s answer. Instead, he ran towards the front door, yanked it open and disappeared outside, his accomplice running after him.
‘Roman.’ The boy’s head jerked at the word. The woman who said it was the one who’d wheeled the old man into the bank. She said his name again and again and the word was a cry now. A wail. Her small, reddened hands clenched against her face as she shook her head, repeating his name, louder each time, until it seemed as if the building itself was flooded with the word.
In the distance, Martha heard the sirens.
Two
Roman ran out of the bank, struggled through a crowd of people who had gathered outside. He heard the roar of an engine and glanced down the road, saw Tommy behind the wheel of the car Lenny had stolen driving towards him. Jimmy was in the front passenger seat, slumped low, a peaked cap casting his face in shadow. The car slowed, the back door opened. Roman hesitated.
‘Get in,’ Tommy hissed. ‘Now!’
Lenny, in the back seat, pushed Roman down until he was lying on his stomach across the floor, his face scratching against the rough carpet. Lenny threw a blanket over him.
Roman closed his eyes, felt the hum of the engine vibrate through his body, tried not to think about where they might be going or what might happen. Tommy drove without speaking. He never said much. Jimmy and Lenny said little either. Roman was grateful for that. Maybe he could come up with a plan.
Instead, he thought about his mother. Saw her pale face, her grey eyes, her reddened hands. The way she had looked at him in the bank.
Everything was supposed to have been different in Ireland. Better.
‘A new start,’ Mama had said that day. She showed him how to fasten his seatbelt. It had been his first time on a plane. They had ordered chicken curry from the air hostess even though Mama had made sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. She said the curry smelled too good. She bought Roman a can of Coke. He remembered the crackle of the fizz when he pulled the tab. How it went up his nose when he bent to listen to the sound. Afterwards, Mama fell asleep but Roman did not. He looked out of the window and tried to guess which countries they were passing. Germany, Netherlands, England.
Uncle Lech’s house had three bedrooms. One for Roman, one for Mama and one for himself. The master bedroom, Uncle Lech called it. Because of the en suite, he explained, when Roman asked why.
Roman remembered lowering himself onto the edge of the bed in his new room. His own room. Spreading his hands across the Harry Potter duvet cover.
He bounced a little but the springs made no sound. It was a new bed. He closed the bedroom door to see how quiet the room could become. The sound of his mother laughing muted. He opened it again. She was talking now, her voice high and breathy, the way it got when she was happy. Excited. He left the door open.
It wasn’t a house: it was a duplex. That’s what his uncle called it. His uncle had Sky. And the television screen was nearly as wide as the cinema screen back in Puck, a village fifty kilometres north of Gdansk where Roman had lived until he was nearly twelve. There was a Blu-ray player and the cupboards were crammed with food. ‘I asked your Mama what you liked,’ Lech said when the light inside the fridge spilled across Roman’s face. ‘You can have whatever you want. This is your home now.’
Poland seemed a long way away: the top bunk in the room he’d shared with Mama in the apartment where she had grown up; his aunts in the next bedroom, sometimes squabbling, sometimes laughing, sometimes exchanging gossip through the thin walls; his grandmother – Babcia – crooked and swollen with arthritis, bent over a pot of bigos on the stove, stirring and tasting and stirring again, all the while talking about her father, Roman’s great-grandfather, even when no one was listening.
A hero. That’s the word his grandmother used.
His great-grandfather had been a war hero.
The duplex had seemed a million miles away from all of that.
Uncle Lech was born almost exactly nine months before Aunt Arianna, and no more than a year separated Arianna from Aunt Nadia. His mother came last, two years later. Nineteen years later, Roman arrived. Even when his grandfather died and his uncle left for Ireland, the house still seemed full of noise and people.
‘I can’t hear myself think,’ Babcia sometimes shouted over the din.
You could definitely hear yourself think in the duplex.
Mama told him not to sit too close to the television screen. His uncle handed him a box and inside the box was a pepperoni pizza and he didn’t even have to share it with anyone. He found a Harry Potter movie on Sky. It didn’t matter that it was in English with no subtitles. He’d read the books that Uncle Lech had sent him. There were some passages he knew off by heart.
From the kitchen, the low hum of conversation between his mother and her brother. It had made Roman feel good. As good as warm pizza on an empty stomach. He knew how much Mama had missed Lech when he’d left for Ireland five years before.
His mother had always told Roman things. Confided in him. ‘It’s you and me against the world, my Roman,’ she whispered into his hair before she hugged him or kissed him or tickled him or pushed him higher on the swing in the playground.
He knew about the names Babcia had called Mama when she’d told her about Roman. Except his name wasn’t Roman then. He didn’t have a name then. He was just a blob on a scan. Rosa had shown him the grainy black and white photograph they had taken of him at the big hospital in Gdansk.
When the film was over, he’d dropped the empty pizza box in the bin and put his glass and plate into the dishwasher. Uncle Lech showed him how to turn it on. It looked like it had never been used, it was so shiny inside.
In the hall, he listened to the clip of his shoes against the ceramic tiles. When he inhaled, he could smell the paint on the walls. Everything was brand new. Even their lives, Roman felt.
It had taken Roman less than ten minutes to unpack. He folded his jeans before he put them in a drawer and even put his two shirts on hangers in the wardrobe. He decided, in that moment, that he was going to be a different person here, in Ireland. Someone responsible, who tidied up after himself, put stuff where it was supposed to go. Mama would be working for Lech, who had his very own company. He said Ireland was a place where you could make a million euros if you worked hard enough.
A million euros!
Back in Poland, Lech had worked as a chef in a cafe. In Dublin, he supplied hospitals with catering staff. Mama didn’t have any experience in hospitals or in catering. But she knew how to cook the best pierogi in the world and she was a hard worker. Maybe the hardest worker in the world, Roman thought.
Lech had promised her a job, a good salary, a place to stay. ‘But I’ll only go if you want to go,’ Mama told Roman.
‘Will there be a cinema in Ireland?’ he’d asked.
‘Of course.’ She’d smiled. ‘And I only have to work Monday to Friday so we can go at the weekends. Twice, if you like.’
There had been no toothpaste in the bathroom so Roman knocked on Lech’s bedroom door and, when there was no answer, he went inside and opened the door into his uncle’s en suite. Lech was sitting on the lid of the toilet, holding what looked like a small square mirror. On the mirror’s surface was a line of white powder.
‘What are you doing? Sneaking into my room?’ Lech shot to his feet, careful not to drop any of the powder when he placed the mirror on top of the cistern.
‘Sorry, Lech. I just ... I was looking for toothpaste. That’s all. I knocked first.’
‘What’s going on?’ Mama climbed the stairs in a hurry.
‘Nothing, Rosa. The kid walked in on me.’ Lech hurried out of the en suite, closed the door behind him. ‘No harm done, eh?’ He put his hand on Roman’s shoulder. Smiled. Roman nodded.
‘You’re not getting too big to kiss your mama goodnight, are you?’ Rosa stood in front of his bedroom door with her arms spread, barricading it. Roman kissed her cheek. Mama still smelled like Babcia’s house but her skin was soft, tickled his lips.
It had taken Roman a long time to fall asleep that first night. Everything was strange but in a way that made him feel excited. He thought about what had happened in Lech’s en suite. He had a vague feeling that it hadn’t been a good thing but he didn’t know why. Still, he supposed Lech was right.
There was no harm done.
That’s what he had thought back then. Back when he hadn’t had a clue. Back when he’d been nothing but a stupid kid.
The car jerked to a stop. Tommy killed the engine. Roman’s heart hammered against his chest, loud as a ticking bomb, waiting to explode. One of the front doors opened. The crunch of gravel now. Then a surge of cold air as the back passenger door was pulled open.
‘Get out.’ Jimmy’s voice was dangerously conversational.
Roman crawled out. Glanced around. They were down a lane. Surrounded by fields. A body of water in one field. A lake, maybe. Or a reservoir. Roman thought about the kittens Babcia threw into the bucket every spring. She’d fill the bucket with water, throw the fluffy creatures inside, put a plank across the top and sit on it till the job was done. ‘Enough mouths to feed,’ Babcia had said when Roman asked her once.
Lenny stood beside Jimmy. Without the benefit of his balaclava and gun, Lenny looked harmless, with his wide-apart chocolate-brown eyes and hair that was losing both its grip and its colour. He had a sideline in window cleaning that was moderately successful, mostly because of his brown eyes and open smile that allowed housewives to believe their windows were in good hands as Lenny cased their homes, making a methodical inventory of valuable items he saw through their – now gleaming – windows.
The black jeep – Lenny called it the getaway car – was one of those valuable items. Lenny had assured Jimmy that the woman who owned it – with the recently cleaned windows in River Valley – wouldn’t report it as stolen until she returned from holidays the following week.
Roman glanced at the jeep. Tommy had stayed behind the wheel while Jimmy, Lenny and Roman had gone into the bank. If things had gone to plan, they’d all be in the jeep. Watching Jimmy count the money maybe. Roman would have said no if Jimmy, in an unlikely fit of generosity, handed him a few notes. ‘We’re quits now, Jimmy, yeah?’
That’s what he had planned to say at the end. That’s what Jimmy had promised if Roman helped him with the bank job. ‘You owe me, Romeo,’ Jimmy had said. ‘Two grand. That was the value of the package that you claim you lost, remember?’
‘It fell out of my pocket, Jimmy, I swe
ar.’
‘So you keep saying. Don’t look so worried, Romeo. I’ll come up with a way that you can pay me back. You can bet your sweet little Mama’s life on it.’
And Jimmy had come up with a way. And Roman had agreed. Nobody said no to Jimmy Carty.
If things had gone to plan at the bank, Roman and Rosa could have parted company with Jimmy and his colleagues, as Jimmy called them.
Wiped the slate clean.
Started again.
Tommy must have felt Roman looking at him as he stood there, wishing things were different. He turned in his seat so that he could see Roman, shook his head, smiled a small, knowing smile without opening his mouth.
‘Jimmy, I—’ Roman said. He didn’t realise how afraid he was until he heard the sound of his own voice.
‘Shut your fucken trap,’ Jimmy said. Then he nodded at Tommy, who got out of the jeep, opened the boot, hauled a large plastic container out of it and emptied its contents over the bonnet, the roof, inside the boot, on the dashboard, all over the seats. The smell of petrol rammed up Roman’s nose, made his eyes sting. He wondered how long it would take to be burnt to death.
Jimmy took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, slid one out, tapped the filter against the face of his watch as was his habit.
When he looked at Roman, he smiled his gold-crown smile, but his pale blue eyes, boring into Roman’s, never blinked. He opened a book of matches, pulled a match out. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. Almost gentle. ‘The problem is, Roman, the witnesses at the bank, they can identify you.’
‘I’ll go away. I’ll go really far. The guards won’t find me.’
‘But if they do, my little Polak?’
‘I won’t say a word. I swear to God, Jimmy.’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘I can’t take that chance, I’m afraid.’
Roman clamped his mouth down on all the words he wanted to say. There’d be no point. Not with Jimmy. He’d seen him in action before. Tommy and Lenny called him a psycho, like it was a compliment. Still, they made sure they didn’t get in his way. Roman knew they wouldn’t help him. The feeling – that he was alone, that he had nowhere to run, no choices left to make – brought with it a strange sense of quietness inside Roman’s head, almost like calm. He wondered if this was how his great-grandfather had felt before he had gotten shot by the Germans in the war. A calmness, just before. A resignation.
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