Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  No warning – pain creased his shoulder and back. The blow, from a lead-tipped cosh or wooden truncheon, had come down with full force on the bone between his neck and his shoulder socket. He swayed, lost balance and wheezed out a small cry. The second strike was to the other side of his neck. He went down and the kicking started. One had builders’ boots, steel-toe-capped, another had conventional lace-ups and a third wore light leather shoes – they might have been snakeskin or crocodile. The blows caught his stomach, testicles, kidneys and the base of the spine. His face was not touched. Nothing was said.

  Nothing was taken from him except his police pistol, the CZ 75, locally manufactured with a good reputation. One said, ‘Enough.’ They walked away.

  No one came near him. A man approached with a torch, identified his shape, then crossed to the far side of the street. He lay there and the pain soaked through him, then the disgrace that he had been so vulnerable. He recognised that he had been warned. One word only had been spoken: Russian language, European dialect.

  It might have been an hour later that he started to move. He crawled, a great effort, and found the pistol in the gutter. He used his phone to call his girlfriend. She came for him in her small car. Its lights found him because he had talked her there on the phone. Her shock: had he called an ambulance? He didn’t want one. Where were the police? He hadn’t called them.

  How had a target, moving late at night between cafés and bars, spreading word of deals done and arrangements pending, known that a single officer was on his tail? He hadn’t shown out – he was certain of it. Who in his office, in his unit, had taken money in an envelope? A target could be untouchable. Which senior officer nurtured hopes of a villa in the countryside, with forests, quality fishing and early retirement because a meagre police pension had been augmented?

  She took him home and helped him up the stairs. Then she phoned in to the detective unit on Bartolomejska. He had influenza, a nasty strain. He’d had to leave work early the previous evening and apologised for not completing his shift. The influenza had taken a week to clear.

  He told the story quietly.

  ‘And you went back to work?’

  ‘Yes, Danny. No mark of what they had done showed on me. It was assumed I had learned a lesson, would know my place.’

  ‘What did you learn?’

  ‘I learned that the day would come when I would fuck them and the codes we were taught at the academy would go out of a high window.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Twenty months. It was never mentioned in the office – as if nothing had happened. I was not transferred. I did my job, and was sidelined whenever they could assign me elsewhere. Now, it’s liaison on an Irish matter. That’s good. What harm can I do on an Irish matter?’

  ‘It’s filthy work, Karol.’

  ‘I think so – and for me it is necessary.’

  They were on the third or fourth circuit of Wenceslas Square. They walked at a measured pace, the rain stayed off, and the only eavesdroppers were the homeless people in doorways. The clubs and restaurants were shuttered.

  Danny said, ‘It’s what we’re asked to do that people don’t want to know. We’re outside any world that has rules and conventions. The people on the streets, who pay us through their taxes, are happy to know that an element of criminality has been nicked. They’re unhappy to know what had to be done to achieve it. We don’t expect thanks, and if we get hurt we shouldn’t expect sympathy. We’re out of sight. Good to work with you, Karol.’

  ‘I want to destroy them.’

  ‘Stick around.’

  ‘You want a drink now?’

  ‘I want to get to my bed. They’ll be hurt, and one day you might learn why. Go back to your girlfriend.’

  They hugged, maybe too tightly. Karol Pilar gasped, but said nothing about old wounds and pain. Danny Curnow watched him walk away till he was past the museum. He expected no thanks and no sympathy.

  Chapter 10

  He thought it as pretty a town as he had ever seen. The spook was from the embassy and had driven Danny Curnow and Matthew Bentinick across country along winding roads flanked by fast streams and steep-sided valleys where the trees had turned gold. After a dawn start, they’d made good time in the Freelander. What did he want, Bentinick had been asked. A rough reply had made the spook chuckle: Bentinick wanted only to see the man. They were there by eight, parked the vehicle and walked.

  They had gone to an apartment block where the spook had rung a bell and spoken quietly to the grille. Bentinick had lit his pipe and Danny had gazed around at the fine buildings of the spa against the autumn colours. It looked to him like Paradise. The door opened, an elderly woman passed out through the gap with a straining dog on a tight lead. The spook took the dog, a spaniel, and the woman closed the door behind her. The spook said that her father had been at Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, with the Czech government in exile during the Second World War and that the dog was useful. It was not trained but it led them at speed.

  They went past clinics and the spa buildings, saw magnificent old homes and streets from the days of Austro-Hungary. The flowers were in bloom, the river ran clean and the dog led them. Danny approved. The best surveillance people always said a dog was a jewel. He saw the Russian names on the shops, restaurants, mini-marts, and the logos on delivery and builders’ vans. The gold of the orb on a church roof glowed in the first low sunlight. The spook talked to Bentinick – Danny caught snatches. They spoke of ‘endemic corruption’, ‘fear of the Russian bear and its corrosive influence’, the ‘energies, expectations, of young people’, the ‘hold of organised crime’, and ‘. . . no cull happened for the old counter-intelligence men of the Cold War. They’re still around, fêted by the Russians . . .’ He heard what was said, had no interest in it. They went up a road and to their right were huge villas, splendid in their preservation. There was a small park, and they sat on a bench.

  Bentinick’s pipe was lit. The sun rose steadily and the shadows shortened. Opposite, there was a detached villa, and a quality Mercedes was parked in front of the steps up to the door. The spook and Bentinick faced it, and Danny was left side on. The spook would have been mid-thirties – moderate height, moderate build, moderate brown hair – and was dressed in jeans, a battered waxed coat and a sweater with loose threads. Bentinick, true to form, was suited, with a waistcoat and his watch chain across it.

  The spook said conversationally, ‘The Ivans think we’re yesterday’s stuff. That’s what I find here. We don’t matter and therefore can be ignored. They don’t change, which sort of goes back to Joe Stalin and the Vatican – how many tanks does the Pope have? They have people based on the top floor of a block over there, behind the St Mary Magdalene church, and keep a weather eye on the millionaires and billionaires who favour the town. To the Ivans we’re ready for the scrap heap. I don’t think the Chinese – they’re here – even know we’re still on the planet. The Americans are down by the river. I’m sometimes taken for a coffee, but nothing’s shared. It’s a bit lonely, really, to be a Brit here. Trouble is that it’s a melting pot of views and intelligence gathering. It’s a place where you can, just about, see the changing status of people – whether they’re officials from Moscow or the hoods, the parasites of the siloviki, but I only get down once a week. What are we hoping for the end result – not just the sighting to-day?’

  Smoke billowed from Bentinick’s pipe. He said, assured, ‘To demonstrate we’re capable of administering a sharp kick to the shin, where it hurts.’

  ‘You can achieve that?’ Doubt, but respect.

  ‘I like to think we are still able to direct a steel toecap in the right direction. Cause a bit of grief.’

  ‘They’d be powerfully angry. There was a charity bash the other night for the nobs of the Russian community. The ambassador had an arm round him. He has status . . . And where does the Irish angle come in?’

  Bentinick gave a light laugh, then stiffened: the dog was alert. Danny saw the d
oor open across the road. The spook had pulled his scarf high over his face, natural in the chill. A man came down the steps, two dogs with him, and walked past the Mercedes towards the pavement.

  Bentinick mouthed: ‘There’s no traffic. Let the dog go.’

  The spaniel, a roan, was across the road and sprinted. Bentinick called it – didn’t stand a chance. The spaniel charged at the other dogs, then danced round them on the pavement. They joined in and their leads were round the man’s legs.

  ‘He’s Timofey Simonov, there so his shin’s measured,’ Bentinick pushed himself up.

  Another man was behind Simonov.

  The spook murmured, ‘That’s a former brigadier of GRU, Nikolai Denisov, his chauffeur, butler and bodyguard, with a legally held firearm, I fancy he’s carrying it now. He was once considered a formidable opponent but, as they say, nothing is for ever. He’s a sort of trained chimpanzee now.’

  Danny watched. Bentinick was across the street, scrabbling for the loose lead, spinning it out, close to a high-value target. Nothing more natural than a bumbling Englishman, incapable even of catching his dog. It lay down, seemed to know the part it was playing. Danny heard Bentinick ask the ages of the dogs that licked at the spaniel and pranced round it. He heard him praise their fine coats and excellent condition. Danny didn’t need to be closer. He could see the man, each wart and blemish on his face, his build and the slouch of his shoulders. Then not overstaying his minimal welcome, Bentinick had the lead and had pulled the spaniel to heel, made an apology and was back across the road, the spook tailing him but inside of the target’s eyeline. Danny Curnow understood that a sighting far outweighed the value of photographs.

  Bentinick and the spook returned, neither glancing back at the two men going up the hill with the dogs, then turning into a side alley and disappearing.

  They reached Danny. Bentinick asked, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Insignificant. Ordinary enough.’

  ‘They don’t get to live in a home like that on charity handouts. Don’t undersell.’

  And that was it. Back to the car park. He locked the memory of the two men’s faces into his mind. They were often like that, insignificant and ordinary, and he had seen enough of them in his time, enemies and assets. Bent in the back and with a pale, pinched face, no indication of the brains required to put together a personal portfolio that might hit a half-billion American dollars. It had begun, in Danny Curnow’s mind, to take shape, and he understood the role, valued, that Malachy Riordan had been awarded. The spaniel was dropped off, then the spook drove away fast. He had a plane to catch.

  Malachy Riordan woke up. It was extraordinary that he had slept. He stretched and yawned, then felt the ache in his stomach.

  After he’d been dropped, he had used the map to cross the city. He had been through smart and cheap residential areas, then the business quarter and the tourist sector, where the big squares were and the monuments. He had gone on past the railway station, quiet and shut down, then the darkened bus terminus. He had paused every two or three hundred yards to check the map, and if he had gone wrong he had doubled back. The porter had giggled when he had asked for the red-light district where the girls could be found. He passed girls on the streets, and their pimps. He hadn’t been with another woman since he’d married Bridie – these girls frightened him and he pretended not to hear them as they called to him. There was a cross on the map for the street the porter had suggested. He had reached Prokopovo Square, and had seen the turning. He could have chosen six or seven hotels or guesthouses. He could not have said why he had chosen this one. He had beaten on the door, fist clenched, until a guy had opened it, half dressed, foul-tempered. How many nights? He had paid for four, with an additional fifty euros, and had not been asked for identification. He had climbed three flights, stripped and slipped into the bed, between sheets that lacked crispness. It was where he wanted to be.

  His mind had churned: the journey and the future. He had tossed and turned: the driver and his contempt, the girl in the hotel lobby, her flustered anxiety as she waited. A couple had begun above him. When they had finished, another pair started across the corridor and the woman squealed.

  There was a cubicle with a toilet and a shower that he needed to contort himself to get into. The water dribbled. He had only gone to sleep when exhaustion had cleared the worries from his mind. He could not be followed and found here.

  When he was dressed, Malachy Riordan went down the stairs, with his bag, leaving nothing personal behind. There was a breakfast room. A couple were bickering in German. He went to the desk. His story was that his mobile’s battery was flat. He asked to borrow a phone. A drawer was opened that held a dozen, or more, and the man gestured for him to take his pick.

  He rang the girl. He had the map in front of him and told her where to be and at what time. She might have wanted a conversation, but he rang off.

  He handed over another note, was rewarded with a smile, and pocketed the mobile.

  He went out into bright sunlight. Later he would find a bar with satellite TV and learn of the death of a policeman. The warmth felt good on his skin.

  A core had stayed on, three cars.

  They moved late.

  Pearse’s idea was that they could get it done in darkness by touch.

  A wet grey morning had replaced a wet black night.

  Twice they had been about to leave the trees to crawl across the field and down the last part of the hedge to the gate where the device was laid. Each time, the door had opened, people had come out and there had been shouting and laughter. Kevin said that it was because they’d been at the whiskey. The three had gone, no more cars. But the O’Kanes didn’t sleep in. He was outside early with the dog and his first fag, and she brought black bags out of the back door to stack them around the wheelie-bin. There was a mist over the grass.

  Pearse had said that the caterers would be back early to clear up and shift the stuff they’d left overnight, and Kevin couldn’t deny it. Then Kevin had said they might leave the thing in the hedge till that evening and come back for it at next dusk, but Pearse had disagreed: they’d get the thing now.

  They began the crawl across the field, both already sodden. Pearse knew it was no different for Kevin, that they shared the hunger and thirst, the weakness and exhaustion.

  Then, Christ, they had some luck and perhaps they were owed it.

  There must have been places on the lane where anyone looking from a car window would have seen the two of them, in the crap camouflage tunics, crawling through the cow muck and thistles. But no one did. More luck: no one came out of the O’Kane house – if they had stood on the raised step by the door and gazed towards the big lough, they would have seen the kids.

  They went fast on their knees and elbows. Pearse led, and Kevin was breathing like an old pig. Was Kevin all right? He mumbled that he was.

  They made the hedge, leaving a trail of bent grass. He would have liked to take out the cable, maybe a full hundred metres of it. A sprig of the hedge caught his cheek and ripped it. He wiped it with his hand and saw blood on his fingers. He had forgotten to do the proper clear-up search of where they had been in the trees. They might have left a sweet paper or a bus ticket. For that, he reckoned, Malachy Riordan could have trashed his balls. Through the hedge he could see the gatepost, and the light now was strong enough for the lamp on it to have been switched off. More worry: their car was parked where it could be seen from the road. It was a good enough place when it was dark, but not in daylight. They needed to get the job done fast and be gone.

  They’d half buried it and couldn’t find it. He felt a pinch and turned.

  ‘What you doing?’ Kevin hissed.

  ‘Looking for the fuckin’ thing, what else?’

  ‘Can’t you see it?’

  ‘If I could, I’d have it, you eejit, wouldn’t I?’

  He found the can. He had his hand on it. He groped for the end where they had connected, last evening, the cable to the
maroon charge that activated the detonator. He found the contact point and eased the can back. He reached for the connection and remembered that it had taken effort to slot it. Again he felt the pinch.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Kevin, what you think—’

  He twisted round. Kevin didn’t speak but held up the cable close to where it had been cut. Cut. Not ripped apart by a fox or gnawed through by rats, but cut, left with clean, not frayed edges. Kevin gaped at him. Pearse understood that they had been touted: the weapon had never been live so no plug of molten copper would have hit the car driven by the policeman or his wife. The urine ran hot over his thighs and he was shaking. His hands were stiff, the fingers unresponsive. He felt the scream well in his throat. He dropped the can. He snatched at it, missed and—

  He would not have heard the crows rise and scream. Neither would Kevin. They would not have seen the smoke that hazed over them.

  ‘It wasn’t very good.’

  She had come to his door. He was mostly dressed, using an electric shaver and sitting by the window.

  Ralph Exton mimicked her: ‘What “wasn’t very good”?’

  Gaby paced, her hands fidgeting. He saw how stressed she was and that she could barely control her temper. He knew how to play it.

  ‘Don’t mess me about, Ralph. I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Serious stuff.’

  Fight back, deflect and provoke. He knew the big card he would play. Trouble was, she was a lovely kid. He fancied her and it might have been mutual. He reckoned it was time to hit hard.

  ‘I want answers, sensible ones. Has it crossed your mind that I’m trying to protect you as well as myself?’

  ‘I tell you as much as I know.’

  ‘Ralph, are you being honest with me? Because if you’re not, I’ve got a big problem.’

  ‘Can I tell you something?’