The gloves were good. Kid skin with hand-stitched evap holes.
He might even use them for golf some day.
He got back in the car, looked at the bottle of tequila he’d bought for Daniel, wondered how it would taste, shook his head. That was the way of fuck-up officers.
The road murdered the BMW’s suspension for ten Ks until the GPS said something in German and he saw the taverna.
He stayed in the car with the engine running, the air pumping and the music playing until they showed.
They were driving an old Toyota pick-up and wearing plaid shirts, crumpled cowboy hats and cowboy boots.
They flashed their lights. He flashed his.
Everyone got out.
Good morning, they said and in English asked to see his ID.
He showed them his American passport. They nodded and told him to ride in the back of the truck.
“What about my car?” he asked and they told him that they would look after it. The one with one eye pointed a grubby finger at the tailgate.
“I don’t do the back of trucks,” Markov said.
He sat next to the driver for half an hour on dirt roads in a cab stinking of aftershave until they came to a big house in a guava cactus plantation.
Men with AKs gave him the once-over and waved them into a shady interior courtyard with a fountain.
Kids playing. Women talking. A washing line.
Markov stretched his back. He counted guards until a man he recognised from Bernie’s info pack got up from a chair and shook his hand.
His count showed a dozen heavies and as many gardeners, maids, butlers and other auxiliaries. Hard to fight your way in or out of here.
The hand shaking his was covered with rings, the man was short and his breath had liquor on it.
“This way,” the man said and they went out a side gate into the plantation.
They walked a few hundred metres through the cacti until they came to a long shed with mud brick walls and an aluminium roof.
“In here,” the man said and they went into an empty barn.
Markov tensed as four men got up from a card table and walked towards him. Four ahead, one behind, in this nothing place. He didn’t like it. The men weren’t toting guns though, just beer cans covered with condensation. He was thirsty but he wasn’t going to say a word until they offered him a drink, which he knew they wouldn’t.
“He’s the one they brought from America?” one of the new men asked in Spanish.
“Yes,” the man with the rings said.
The card players looked at him sceptically for a beat but Markov didn’t have anything to prove to these putas.
“We should have got a retarded kid to do it for nothing,” another of the men said.
“Kids talk,” the man with the rings said.
“Where now?” Markov asked in English.
“This is it,” the man with the rings muttered.
Markov looked about him. The fuck was this? Some kind of cross? Where were the clients? “I don’t get it,” Markov said.
The Mex with the rings laughed, spat and pointed underground.
“The basement?” Markov asked.
“Is not okay?” the man with the rings asked.
“I need light. Can we work outside?” Markov asked.
The man with the rings pointed at the sky and shook his head.
“Planes?” Markov wondered.
“Satellites.”
They kicked straw and pulled the trap door.
The smell of shit was a trip back to the day. Ten thousand miles and ten years.
Down the ladder.
Flashlights.
The prisoners were chained up against a concrete wall. Some naked, some not. All of them lying in their own filth. All of them had been tortured, most castrated, the wounds cauterised with welding gear.
Markov had seen worse. But not recently.
“All of them?” Markov asked.
The man with the rings shook his head.
“Just one.”
“How?” Markov asked.
“Watch us.”
They went to a metal cupboard and unlocked it. They took out a chainsaw. This also was not a novelty, but again it had been a while. The man with the rings pulled the rip cord and the brand new machine snarled into life like a demon in a samovar.
One of the Mexes produced a video camera.
He’d known it was coming. “Keep that thing away from my face. Film me from the back only,” Markov said, pulling his hat down over his eyes just to be on the safe side.
There were half a dozen witnesses now and everyone was drinking. Tequila, but not from the plantation, home-brewed firewater that they passed around in a plastic milk jug.
They grabbed the first guy on the line, unchained him, shoved him to the ground and sat on him.
He began to scream.
The man with the rings applied the tip of the chainsaw to the back of the man’s neck and pushed it through the second and third cervical vertebrae, severing his venal arteries. He was killed almost instantly.
Almost.
The rest of the men, even the ones who had been blinded, began to yell. It was a terrible, desperate screaming that also fucked with Markov and sent him reeling back across the years to February 2000.
Maybe that’s why he’d come here. To trip on the sense memory. Bodies. Fear. Blood.
But this wasn’t the moment.
This was the moment to focus on the now. To build this memory.
“I’ll take a shot of that,” Markov said and drank while they held down the second man. He was a skinny, older character of some spirit who struggled and fought them and when the chainsaw entered his writhing neck it veered into his skull making a noise like steel grinding on a lathe. The man with the rings rings looked at him and shook his head. They were losing face in front of the Yankee. He barked orders and one of the others ran upstairs and came back with a cattle prod.
Markov remembered his nostril clamps. He fished them out of his pocket and put them on.
They electrocuted and pistol-whipped all the rest of the men to render them meek and it was easy after that. The last two victims had begged for their lives on their knees, crying, saying things about how they “were really sorry” and that they had “wives and children, beautiful children” but it didn’t do any good, they beheaded them just the same.
Eight people were dead.
All the prisoners.
All except one.
A formerly well-dressed young man, in a now filthy suit, chained separately from the others in the far corner. Markov hadn’t even noticed him until now.
They handed him the chain saw.
“This one’s yours,” the man with the rings said.
“What’s special about him?” Markov asked.
The man with the rings touched his nose.
Markov took the cattle prod and the chain saw and walked to the young man. The man looked at him; he had deep, intelligent brown eyes and a little smile. Markov knew immediately that he was a priest.
In Markov’s slum in Volgograd there were few Catholics. Even after the fall of communism it was the orthodox who’d had the power in that town. Fatherless Markov had a lot of respect for his local priest, a Pole called Korchnow, who had impressively survived every regime from Khrushchev to Yeltsin.
“Excuse me, Padre,” Markov said in Spanish.
“Is there any possibility that I could be released from here?” the priest asked in a whisper.
Markov shook his head. “Even if I wanted to there are too many.”
The priest nodded. “Well then, you must do what you do,” he said.
Markov took a breath and pulled the rip on the chainsaw.
It buzzed into life and before the priest had time to panic Markov swiped it sideways into his carotid artery, through his neck and out the other side. It was over in three seconds.
For a horrifying moment the beheaded priest blinked but then the life went
out of his eyes.
Markov turned off the saw and set it on the straw.
The Mexicans crossed themselves and muttered and spat. Death was all around but it was a hell of a thing to murder a priest.
The Mexicans gathered the bloody heads in a pile perhaps the way their Aztec ancestors would have done half a millennium before.
They videoed the pyramid of heads and since Markov’s work was done he went back up the ladder. He walked out into the guava plantation to get air.
The sun was setting and it was quiet. Someone in the house was playing on the piano. He stared at the blue flowers of the cacti and the dust whirls and the sky which had turned a deep desert magenta.
He breathed deep.
His arms felt weak and the new golf gloves were soaked with blood. He took them off and dropped them in the dirt.
The man with the rings patted him on the back.
He didn’t like to be touched by men but he was too fatigued to object.
“You’ll need to take a shower,” the man said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“This way,” they said and led him back to the house and showed him to a stand-pipe near a stable.
“Here?” he asked. “Fucking forget it. I need a shower.”
“You can’t go in looking like that,” they told him. And there were six of them and they were adamant.
He stripped and showered under the cold water and he heard the men muttering about his scars and tattoos. They gave him a change of shirt and jeans and finally he went inside to meet Don Ramon.
Ramon had a fully serviced bar set up in the dining room with a barkeep and a cocktail waitress. He ordered a double vodka and a freshly squeezed orange juice and ice. He mixed them following a formula of his own devising and drank.
He waited and waited until the sky was the colour of a black bull and the old paranoia and suspicion had risen to the surface again.
He drummed his fingers on the bar and refused the offer of more liquor.
The barman looked uneasy.
This, Markov told himself, was what happened to you as an independent operator. Without a crew or a family to back you up there was no possibility of retaliation. No possibility of a war. Anyone at any time could decide that you were expendable.
Markov began thinking of ways he could get out of here. Surely he could lose them in the desert at night. The barkeep was a kid, about nineteen. He could kill him in a heartbeat and—
The man with the rings came back and told him that with regret Don Ramon could not meet him personally but he had asked him to give him this.
Markov took the envelope and didn’t count it.
They took him to the truck and he rode in the back where he hoped the stink would be less. He looked at the stars and smoked.
They left him at his own car and he had to drive for forty-five minutes before he stopped shaking.
It was nine by the time he arrived at the Nogales Days Inn.
He just made the last meal service. He got the enchiladas and a pitcher of beer and tequila. He asked around at the bar and he was able to score a gram of coke. He snorted it in his room and lit a cigarette and sat on the balcony chair. The view was over the parking lot and the highway and the smell was of kerosene cooking fires and cheap corn oil.
When the coke started wearing off the memories came and now he realised he didn’t want them after all.
But it was too late. The smell of blood. The screaming…
He only ever flashbacked to three events in the whole Chechen War: the parachute drop, the OMON guy between the lines and this one: the two hours that followed the phosphorous shells hitting the municipal hall.
He went to the minibar and got couple of Modelos and drank and remembered it all with crystal clarity. The flames burning bright yellow through the grey rubble, Dmitri, the platoon sniper shooting at anyone trying to get out. The victims trapped inside, yelling at them in Russian as the wooden ceiling caught and the roof beams burned. Finally, of course, the women who had taken to hurling babies and children out the windows. Not that that did them any good. Their orders were clear. No survivors. No witnesses. Perversely too, of course, it had all been so lovely: the bear mother in her sky, the phosphorous fire burning gold, red tracer from the AKs arcing like fireworks. When Captain Kutzo said it was sufficiently safe for their platoon to go in they went in. There were half a dozen still alive. They killed four and saved two women to rape. Two women who ultimately survived the entire war and ended up telling their story to a disbelieving foreign media. Yeltsin could get away with anything.
Markov clutched at the crucifix round his neck. A phantom crucifix that he had lost long before on his very first days in New York in Brighton Beach.
He was drooling. He had fallen asleep. The hotel phone was ringing.
He went back inside the hotel room, found his leather jacket and took out the red rubber ball he always kept there. He squeezed it and bounced it once off the carpet.
He picked up the phone.
“How was your day?” Bernie asked.
“Okay,” he said.
“I won’t ask you about money.”
“I tell you, anyway,” he said like some goddamn yuk just off the boat. He corrected himself. “I will tell you anyway. It was okay.”
“You’re wasted down there, brother. Marina called, I didn’t know whether you wanted me to tell you the hotel number or not, so I didn’t.”
“I will talk to her later,” Markov said.
“Anyway, bro, I got a real money job for you,” Bernie said.
“How much?”
“You heard of Michael Forsythe?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll give you the rec. Fifty thousand. There’s a catch, though.”
“What’s the catch?”
“It’s in Ireland. You ever been to Ireland?”
“No.”
“You object to the travel?”
“For fifty thousand I’ll go to fucking Mars.”
“That’s my boy. When can you get back to Vegas?”
Markov felt the car keys in his trouser pocket. He had a flight booked for tomorrow afternoon but if he drove the rental non-stop…
“Let’s talk at breakfast,” he said.
chapter 7
the tail
WHEN HE ARRIVED IN CARRICK HE WAS SO TIRED HE HAD just one pint at the Jordy Arms and went home and slept for thirteen hours straight.
He didn’t know what day it was when he woke up. It was raining and the halyards were clanging off the aluminium masts on every boat in the marina.
He lay in bed for a long time and thought about the forty thousand quid he had made in the New York trip. Rent on this place for two years or mortgage payment on the apartments for four months. Either way it was sweet.
And there was more money coming.
A fifty-thousand-pound retainer.
Four hundred and fifty for finding some wee lassie on the mitch. A wee lassie and bairns.
He lay and the longer he lay there the more claustrophobic he felt.
He sat up, walked to the window and swung it open. Gulped the sea air.
Sometimes the house felt a prison. Every house he had ever stayed in had, at times, felt like a prison.
But he couldn’t go back to a caravan, not now, not ever.
He stared through the open window at the rain and the boats in the marina and Carrickfergus Castle which was a grey presence through the mist.
Nah, he couldn’t go back to tinker life and he was trying to leave The Life too. Would leave The Life after this.
The rain was pouring on his head. It was mixed with sea spray and snow.
He let it all hit him.
“I’m a tough guy, see?” he said and closed the window and went to the bathroom. He had to bend down to reach the mirror. He was tall and pale and with a four-day beard he looked like the survivor of a long-term kidnapping. Some people said that they could tell that he was a tinker, but others said there
was no tinker look, except that tinkers seldom had grey hair: the oldest Pavee he’d ever known was Declan McQuarrie’s granny and she died at fifty-nine.
The cat came. How did it know that he was back? He’d have to write off a letter to the Fortean Times.
At least he knew how it got in now. Through the basement window and up the basement stairs and through the crack in the kitchen door.
He sat on the toilet, put the cat on his lap and continued to look at himself.
He looked harassed, stressed. He’d been keeking it for over a year now since Ireland’s economy had gone completely down the bog. In six months the unemployment rate had gone from five per cent to eleven and all over the island builders were dumping property. He was stuck with two luxury apartments overlooking the Lagan in Belfast. Half a million each was what he wanted, but the last offer he’d gotten was four hundred K for both, which would leave him at least three hundred thousand in debt.
Of course this money from bloody Dick Coulter would free him. He could sell the apartments, buy this house. Jesus. He could actually start living.
He didn’t like to think about it too much.
He feared the jinx.
“Let’s just see what happens, I mean you never know, eh, cat?”
The cat wasn’t used to long sentences. The old bird next door never talked to it and it stared at him oddly and cocked its head like a dog.
“You’re know where I’ve been? I’ve been all the way around the world, so I have, Kitty,” he said.
He called it Kitty, because when the old lady had told him its name a year ago, it had been something so dull he had forgotten it. Not that “Kitty” was a display of creative genius.
He got up and gave it some tuna from the fridge and ran the bath.
He read Rachel Coulter’s case notes and shaved. He dressed and went outside. He inspected the front of the house, a couple of times there’d been graffiti on the wall or the fence, once a wee mucker had even scrawled “Tinkers Out” but Killian had had a word with the local UVF commander and not only had the graffiti stopped but now someone came along and did his gardening when he was away.
The house looked fine. There was a letter in the hall. When he opened it he found a credit card statement that included a charge from the Fairmont Hotel for a missing hand towel.
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