by Jack Rylance
John buzzed the fancy bronze bell to the apartment building. It was an impressive edifice of clean white stone. Similarly, the porteiro was well-dressed, official-looking, also suspicious. He eyed John up from behind his desk and spoke through the intercom. “Sim?”
“Frank,” said John. “I’m here to see Frank.”
The porteiro rang the American to confirm that this was true and then grudgingly allowed John to enter. An ornate lift carried him up to the sixth floor. John stepped out and turned right and saw Frank standing just outside his front door, beckoning him forward.
The apartment was a lot bigger than John’s or Pete’s own, and a hell of a lot brighter. The windows were large, welcoming sunlight into the long room. On the pale walls hung a series of vibrant paintings portraying Rio de Janeiro. They were colourful, slapdash, as if they’d been composed gleefully in a race against the clock.
“Can I get you a drink?” Frank asked.
“I’m alright.”
“You mind if I have one?”
John gave a testy shrug.
“So what’s the problem?” Frank asked, disappearing into the kitchen.
“Pete’s missing.”
“And when was the last time you saw him?”
“Last night.”
“So why the panic?”
John was irritated by Frank’s sense of calm and his absence from the room. Both elements struck him as evasive, calculating. “Something is definitely going on. Are you telling me you don’t know what it is?”
Frank returned now, pouring a can of Brahma into a tall glass. “Why do you ask?”
“Why do I ask? Why do you fucking think? Because I want to know.”
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t.”
“How the fuck would you know what’s best for me. Just tell me what’s going on. This is all my fault.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“I don’t care what you think, just tell me the fucking score.”
Frank set the can down and took a drink of his beer. He looked at John closely, hopefully, as if the right answer might be found in the boy’s face, but he found no such answer present. Frank would need to rely on guesswork – the rhythm of every human life. It remained a question of heads or tails. “Your friends have arrived from England. Pete’s arranged to meet them.”
John shook his head repeatedly. “That’s not what I want.”
“I understand, but that’s how it is.”
“He’s going to give them the money?” John asked, straining for a glimmer of hope: that somehow this would prove a straightforward handover, followed by a clean break.
Frank said nothing in reply.
“Is he going to give them the money, Frank?”
Frank shook his head. “No. The money is here in my safekeeping. And in time, this money will be handed on to you.”
“Ah, fuck.” John’s face crumpled up. “You’ve got no idea what these fuckers are like.” Tears started down his face.
“Look, this is something he insisted on doing, John. This is what he’s always had in mind. For a very long time now.”
“Is that right? Well you know what I’m insisting?” John took a step towards Frank and then stopped. Frank doubted whether John had ever issued a successful threat in his life. The kid wasn’t capable of menace. He was still only pleading his case.
“You’re insisting that I give you the money right now,” Frank said.
Chapter Twenty
Pete had gone out that morning – just as planned – and acquired the pistol which was now on the coffee table, facing away from him. He looked down at it as he spoke on the phone. “You better come round,” he said.
“What?”
“I said you better come round here.”
There was a long pause from Vincent. “And why is that, Peter?”
“Because I can’t find John. I don’t know where he is.”
“Well that’s your problem.”
“Yes it is, which is why I’m proposing a solution to it.”
“And what would that be?”
“Come here and you’ll find out.”
“It all sounds very mysterious.”
“Not really.”
“So you want us to come round there?”
“Unless you’ve got something better to do.”
“No.”
“You know that money he took. Well it’s still here, down to the last pound note.”
“We don’t have pound notes any more, Peter. We have little gold coins.”
“Well the money is here, like I said. All two hundred thousand pounds of it.”
There was another pause. He could hear Vincent’s voice, away from the phone, informing Totsy. “And what is it you want?”
“I want to be left alone.”
“Fucking hell, listen to Gretta Garbo here. He says he wants to be left alone, Totsy.” There was noise in the background, definitely sarcastic.
“Look, I don’t want trouble,” Pete said. “If that was what I wanted then you know I could bring it down. You talked about those services rendered for five grand. Imagine what I could get for two hundred.”
“What do you get for two hundred, just out of interest, Peter? An air-strike?”
Again Totsy spoke in the background.
“Alright, lad,” said Vincent. “We’ll be there in half an hour. Let’s make it two on the dot.”
After the phone call, Pete felt a curious sense of relief, as if this bravery of his was a form of laziness: he would do this thing and then afterwards life would resolve itself quickly and categorically. There would be little room for manoeuvre any more. He had foisted a decision upon himself. It was finally too late to back down.
As he started counting down the minutes, Pete tried seeing himself as the agent of everybody who had suffered at Vincent and Totsy’s hands. He recognised that this number was great. The two of them had spent a large part of their adult lives causing irreparable damage to people, defeating an army of individuals in their ones and their twos. Those who’d had it coming and those who clearly had not. There was no real need for Pete to add up these men’s crimes. He already knew them off by heart.
*
After beating the man to a pulp, they had all got into Totsy’s Land Rover, parked half a mile away, and driven over to Wardle’s place. Wardle wasn’t there but Vincent had a spare set of keys.
The two of them went directly upstairs. Pete stayed in the lounge, staring at one of its walls, seeing nothing of it until they called to him from the bathroom. Even then Vincent and Totsy had wanted to keep Pete close, a witness not only to their deeds but also the aftermath as well – the shockingly casual way in which they had already moved on. “Do us a favour, Pete. Go and get us another towel from the downstairs toilet. This one’s fucked.” Vincent held it up for Pete to see. It was no longer white at all. You would have had the devil’s own job making it white ever again.
He could still picture that bathroom in detail. Totsy was stood in the shower, whistling a tune, while Vincent used the sink, dressed down to his boxer shorts, wiping his forearms with a ruined flannel. There was blood everywhere. Mostly their victim’s, a little of their own. It was the price of what they had done. They were cheerfully scrubbing it off. The blood reacted with the hot water and took on different hues. From being dry and dark and crusted, it became wet and started fading to pink and ultimately disappeared. Meanwhile the steam rose about them.
“Wardle’s gonna have a fit when he sees this place,” Totsy laughed, speaking from behind the shower curtain. They both had the cheerfulness of professionals finished for the day, with the night still to look forward to.
Once both men were clean and dressed, they’d insisted on Pete joining them in a visit to Starlets, a local lap-dancing bar. It was not even midnight.
“I really don’t want to,” Pete said.
“We know you don’t want to, Peter,” said Totsy.
“Look, I’ve never on
ce let you down…”
Vincent laughed, looked at Totsy, who laughed as well. “I think he’s angling for a reward for all these years of good service.”
“Didn’t you get him that silver carriage clock, Vin?”
“You know what, Totsy, I plain forgot.”
“Tell you what, we’ll sort you out with a dance and a fuck if you like. You can get one of the birds alone in the back room. That’s more your style.”
“I’d rather go home. I’m not feeling up to it.”
“I know you’re not feeling up to it, Peter, but you’re coming with us.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Vincent. “This is the very last thing we’re going to ask you to do. Come tomorrow, you’re a free agent.”
They would not hear of Pete saying no. He was a hostage with a few hours of captivity left. He had to push on, give in entirely. Pete had behaved correctly towards them all these years and this was the end result of all that grubby compliance: the rampant destruction of his peace of mind.
Starlets still looked like its last incarnation: an ailing nightclub which had seen better days. The burgundy carpet was tacky with gum. The vinyl seating booths had rips in them. The lights were kept down low to spare the blushes of the establishment and the place was near enough empty. A dozen or so young women were working that night, dressed to earn a living wage. Fluorescent bulbs reacted to the colours of their skimpy attire and turned up the volume on them. Sheer white, canary yellow, lime green, electric blue.
Once inside the club Vincent and Totsy started to throw their money around, as if to celebrate. Champagne was brought over to the table. All the while Pete was made to sit between the pair of them like some kind of mascot; the emblem of his own defeat.
Along with the drink, Vincent produced a couple of grammes of coke and inserted them into Pete’s breast pocket and patted that pocket three times. Pete recognised that the gesture was intensely patronising but this was no time to lodge a protest or try to go straight. Almost at once he was carrying the drug off to the toilet, tipping it onto the water cistern, and snorting up a large line. The first of several indulgences. Each time he left the cubicle behind, Pete caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror opposite and stepped forwards for a closer look: approaching the pane of glass and staring hard at his own reflection as if it had cursed him out, called him all the names under the sun.
Starlets had its own currency which was used to buy dances. The exchange rate was one of these flimsy green notes for every ten pounds sterling. Vincent and Totsy took turns handing out the fake currency to every one of the young women on show, instructing them to keep Pete entertained. A succession of them tried to do so, auditioning for an encore, draping themselves all over his body.
But Pete was elsewhere as much as he could be.
Towards the end of the night, he dimly remembered one tall blonde writhing on his knee, refusing to be ignored, trying to hold his eye for more than a second. But he was far gone with drink by then and Pete’s eye slipped away from her and fell back to the floor. He was ridding himself of consciousness. This was his first taster of trying desperately to forget.
Finally Pete blacked out.
He had woken the next afternoon in his own apartment, still in the same clothes. Shifting onto his side, Pete felt something fall away from his body. Forcing his eyes open, he looked about him and realised that he was covered in hundreds of slips of paper. They littered the entire bed. He took hold of one and brought it close to his face and recognised its origins – fake money from the lap-dancing club. All his pockets were likewise stuffed. Trousers, jacket, shirt, they all bulged with this meaningless currency, loosely based on a regular dollar bill.
This was the black cloud Pete had left under. The fulcrum of his rage. What he had done. What he had not. These were the memories which pushed his buttons when he was drunk and high and roaring around Rio de Janeiro, pleading for amnesia. But the night of that murder had stayed put. It would only stray so far. And it was this fact, as much as anything, which had helped him reach a decision at last – to meet them both head on and do what needed doing.
Chapter Twenty One
Three minutes before Vincent and Totsy were scheduled to arrive, Pete picked up the pistol from the arm of his chair and removed its safety catch. He rose quietly and walked over to the entrance in his stockinged feet and peered through the spy-hole. He felt certain that they would come for him on the stroke of the hour, as if honouring the fact that there was nothing to fear in the slightest.
Just after the stroke of two, as predicted, Pete heard the ding of the elevator and its doors opening, followed by the sound of two parties stepping out into the corridor at its furthermost end. Footsteps followed and he knew that these footsteps belonged to Vincent and Totsy simply because of their pace. The calmness of their progress. That self-assurance. They did not believe Pete was capable of murder. That was the thing. Not with all the justification in the world. And so, even as he listened to the two men drawing ever closer, Pete tried focusing on this same confidence of theirs, and the way in which it gave them free rein (hoping, in the process, to activate the vengeance in his heart so that it would allow him to pull the trigger, again and again).
It was Vincent who knocked at the door three times and then took one step back. They were both stood there at the ready, Pete could see. Totsy in particular. He was swaying with intent. Undoubtedly both of them were armed. There was no way to open that door and retain any kind of advantage.
“Who is it?” Pete asked.
“Fuck off, Peter,” said Vincent. “Just open the door.”
“I need to know that once I hand this money over, we’re all going to walk away.”
“You need to know that if you don’t open the door, the door will be opened for you,” Totsy answered.
“That’s not exactly the guarantee I was looking for,” Pete said, sick to his stomach. He was now stalling, playing for time. It was plain ridiculous. He looked down at the pistol in his hand. The crook of his finger was frozen against the trigger. It refused to relent and fire the gun.
“Just do as you’re told,” Totsy added. “I’m not going to ask again.”
Pete hesitated further, said nothing.
“Fuck this,” Vincent muttered. He backed up against the far wall and, as Pete registered this fact, launched himself forwards and tried putting his foot through the door. It shuddered violently in response, splintered at the midpoint, barely remaining on its hinges. Pete took two steps backwards, flinching from this damage, but the attack had freed him up as well. He answered it instinctively by pointing the pistol away from his body and firing it repeatedly through the door, emptying the gun’s chambers, moving the weapon slightly to the left and then the right, intending to kill both men. The bullets knocked great holes out of the wood, causing untold damage. The sound of gunfire disrupted the afternoon and the echoes of these shots extended onwards and outwards.
His ammunition exhausted, Pete stepped forwards and pressed his eye to the spy-hole to try and see if both men were dead. They were both lying on the floor. One of them was making a lot of noise now. He thought it sounded like Totsy.
Pete kept the gun in his right hand and with the left he opened the front door outwards until it caught against Totsy’s leg. Then he peered through the gap and saw that Totsy was done for already. He had been shot through the chest, maybe the heart. Blood was pouring from this large gaping wound, pooling onto the floor. It now stretched for a couple of metres towards the staircase.
Cautiously, Pete stepped into the hallway.
Vincent was facing in his direction. He had his back against the far wall and was slumped against it, half propped up. He was moaning, coughing up blood, and didn’t have the strength left to direct his attention upwards towards his killer. He was dying rapidly and looked astonished by this fact as it became ever more clear to him.
There was a loud hysterical female voice from the apartment across the way. And then
another voice, strict and serious, telling the first one to keep quiet. All the doors stayed shut.
The gun remained in Pete’s hand. He still gripped it, felt the heat it gave off, found that he could not let go. Vincent started to make a rapid clucking sound as if a word had caught in his throat and he was stuttering its first syllable. His eyes were full of fear, lashing out, lacking any direction. Then his terror peaked and Vincent was gone also and Pete found himself surrounded by bloody lifelessness. He stood there agog, horrified by what he’d done. It was never going to leave him either.
Pete felt the urge to keep watch over the bodies, hovering about the crime scene, clearly at fault. He did this for several moments but it quickly came to feel stupid and instead he walked back inside his apartment and waited for the police to arrive. He sat himself down on the sofa. His fate was irretrievable. He was telling himself that the worst of it was over. He could hardly imagine what would happen next. He had purposely given it little thought, beyond the fact of his arrest. He had only been able to accomplish these killings by staving off the future, briefly constricting time. Now time had cut loose again and was branching out and Pete was full of its lamentable resurgence.
While he waited for the police, Pete heard one of his neighbours come out of their apartment and enter the hallway and approach the two corpses. It was not clear what they were doing and nothing was said. Shortly afterwards they went back inside again.
It took the police fifteen minutes to arrive. He heard them in the corridor outside, trying to approach him on the quiet. They stayed hidden for a minute, just outside the ravaged door, consulting with one another via a series of whispers. Then a voice shouted out. “Hello?”
“Yes,” Pete answered.
“Are you armed?”
“My gun is on the table,” Pete answered.
“Then throw it out.” He got up and did as he was told. The pistol skittered over the floor, left Pete’s apartment, knocked against Totsy’s corpse. “You’re a gringo?” The policeman asked.
“Yes.”