Double Kiss

by Ronnie O'Sullivan

  ‘We’ve put a call into his room, but he’s not answering at the moment. What time did you say your appointment was?’

  ‘I didn’t. But it’s . . .’ Frankie made a show of checking his watch, making sure the geezer saw the weight of it too and the make. ‘. . . oh, actually, I’m half an hour early. Hmm, what to do . . . ?’

  ‘Perhaps a coffee?’

  ‘No, it’s not good for my heart,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what. I’m only just fresh off the plane from London. Do you mind if I stretch my legs and take a walk round the grounds?’

  ‘Of course not, certainly, sir.’ The waiter smiled. ‘And if you’re interested in botanicals, you’ll find a small information guide over there with a map listing the various rare and exotic flora we’re lucky enough to have.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Frankie, trying not to smile too hard. The last time he’d heard the word ‘botanicals’ was when Spartak had rolled a big fat one for him on Christmas Eve.

  Round the back of the hotel, that’s what Isabella had told him, right? Where the family lived. He grabbed a copy of the guide and headed out. The only problem was it was kind of hard to tell exactly where the back was. The hotel was one of those sprawling affairs and the deeper he delved into the maze of neat gravel garden pathways, the more lost he got. Of course, it would have helped if he could tell his indigenous flora from his fauna. But there’d never been much call for those kinds of skills back home. Another thought had started bothering him too. If even the front of the hotel felt like a fortress, God knows what the geezer’s family residence was going to be like.

  But then – oh, yes – right there, out of nowhere, he found it. A hard concrete driveway, lined with tall, shady trees, just the other side of a fence with No Passado, Prohibido written on it with a red circle around. He didn’t need Xandra’s help to guess what that meant – keep the hell out. And, yeah, normally, on any other little sightseeing trip, botanical or otherwise, Frankie would have heeded its message. But not today.

  The fence had barbed wire on the top and was well strong-looking too, some serious shit designed to keep serious people out. But Frankie’s bag was plenty strong enough and wide enough to deal with that, there was no point in messing around. The more he thought about it, the more likely he reckoned he’d chicken out and he couldn’t do that. It was now or bloody never. He had to find out. Not finding out wasn’t an option. It would just chew at him, eat him away.

  He hit the fence at a sprint, half expecting to knock it over, but it was every bit as strong as it looked. It held firm as he scrabbled and clawed his way up.

  There were dogs barking somewhere over to the right, shit. He used his bag to cover the barbs and hauled himself over, dropping down into a crouch on the other side.

  He peered carefully up the driveway towards another house, every bit as beautiful as the hotel itself, but probably around half the size, perched on the hillside a hundred yards to the right. Frankie stepped out onto the drive, trying to get his bearings. He could see the hotel and the town back over there further down the hillside to the left with nothing but gardens and fences in between.

  OK, sod it, just do it. Time to get himself that face-to-face. He was just hoping that Señor Vaccaro was here and he didn’t get intercepted first. So he set off up the driveway, with his shadow stretching out ahead of him, the sun beating down on his brow and sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

  He tried to push his nerves back down. After all, this Señor Vaccaro might be really nice. Frankie forced himself to remember why he was doing this. Because that postcard, it might have been from her . . . bloody hell, she might even be here. Now, there was a thought. Christ, it all suddenly felt so immediate. So horribly real.

  Up ahead the dogs were still barking and he saw them then too. Not just them. Their handlers. Three of them. Shit. Marching right towards him, being half led, half dragged. Dobermans. Great. Why was it always Dobermans?

  Then one of the handlers pointed right at him and let out a shout.

  32

  Should he run? No, screw that, he’d look guilty. Run and they’d let these bloody crocodiles in fur off the leash and that would be that. Because no way was he outrunning them or outfighting them either. He wouldn’t stand a chance.

  The first of the handlers stopped about two yards from him. His dog was snarling, spitting, looking like it hadn’t had a proper meal in months. Frankie willed himself to keep cool because dogs could sense fear, couldn’t they?

  The bloke started shouting at him in Spanish, pointing into the bushes.

  ‘You what, mate? No comprendo. I do not understand.’ Frankie glanced back, to where he’d been pointing and, shit, he saw it then. The CCTV cameras covering the whole area up on top of a mast. There was another one sticking up back there in the botanical gardens. Bollocks, he’d probably been watched every step of the way.

  The other two blokes pulled up alongside the first, each with different haircuts – one short, one long. Same faces, they were bloody twins. Frankie stayed exactly where he was. Please, don’t let the dogs off. Those bastards would tear him apart. More shouting followed and then the first bloke started pointing at his bag.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sure, mate. You can have it.’ Frankie placed it carefully on the floor and stepped back. The guy moved forward and snatched it up and began rifling through it, tipping its contents out on the ground.

  ‘See, mate,’ Frankie said. ‘There’s nothing in there dodgy at all.’ What did they think he was, a burglar?

  The guy picked up the envelope and tipped that out too. Photos of Frankie’s mum fluttered down onto the ground, before the bloke snatched one of them up and started shaking it at him furiously. What, did he recognize her? No, it was something else. ‘Paparazzi, paparazzi,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Oh, shit. He meant like those bastards who were always hassling Princess Di. Maybe he thought he’d come here to spy on some of the celebs. Jesus Christ, having told them back at the hotel he was a journo suddenly didn’t seem like such a smart idea.

  ‘No.’ He held up both hands. ‘No paparazzi. No even got a camera. Look.’ He pointed at the bag.

  The roar of an engine. The three men turned round. Only the dogs’ eyes stayed locked on Frankie. A car was coming their way from the house, kicking up dust in the air. Frankie’s heartbeat started racing even faster. Great, reinforcements, like the odds against him weren’t already horrific enough.

  ‘Inglés?’ one of the twins said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Inglés?’ He pointed at him. ‘Inglés?’

  ‘Yes. Sí. In-fucking-glés. Me. English.’

  ‘Inglés,’ the guy shouted back excitedly at his two mates, and then some other stuff that Frankie didn’t understand. The other guys started pissing themselves, in fact.

  ‘I fuck your sister,’ the first guy said, turning back to Frankie.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I fuck your sister, motherfucker,’ he said, his smile stretching into a grin.

  ‘You what?’ Frankie couldn’t believe he was hearing this right.

  The twin with the buzzcut laughed even louder and said something to the others in Spanish, who both started laughing again. The open-backed four by four was getting closer by the second, fifty yards and closing. The buzzcut twin turned back to Frankie.

  ‘I cut off your head and shit down the hole,’ he said.

  What the hell? Frankie didn’t even know what he was meant to say to that. Cut off his head? Don’t tell me these bastards were carrying knives as well? The twin said something else to him, but it got swallowed up by the noise of the engine.

  Frankie gulped. A bloke on the back of the Jeep looked horribly like he had a shotgun strapped to his back. The Jeep crunched to a halt on the gravel and the engine cut.

  ‘I’ve come here to kick ass and chew bubblegum – and I’m all out of bubblegum,’ said the twin.’

  Frankie just stared at him. ‘Whuh –’

  ‘Enough.’


  The Jeep’s passenger door opened and a sturdy-looking, mustachioed little bloke stepped out. Older than the handlers. Thick grey hair swept back from a wide, furrowed brow. He marched straight up to Frankie. Right past the bastard, barking dogs. One by one they all fell silent. Worse, they even looked bloody scared. This was not good. Not good at all.

  ‘You,’ he said to Frankie. ‘You do not look very happy.’

  ‘Er . . . well, that is because,’ Frankie said, ‘your mate here just threatened to cut my head off and . . . well, do something pretty unspeakable, in fact . . .’

  The bloke said nothing, just frowned.

  ‘And that one,’ Frankie said, ‘he said something about kicking ass and chewing bubblegum . . .’

  ‘Bubblegum? Ah,’ the mustachioed guy nodded, the trace of a smile suddenly showing on his face, ‘entiendo. He and his brother, they spent a summer hiding in an old finca up here in the hills, where the only entertainment was American eighties action DVDs . . .’

  ‘VHS,’ the nearest twin corrected him, with an apologetic shrug.

  Well, OK . . . Frankie tried to smile too, at what was clearly their idea of banter. But it was the word hiding not bubblegum that stuck with him, so to speak. Because who the hell needed to hide in a house up a mountainside unless they’d done something very, very wrong?

  ‘What are you doing here? Why are you trespassing?’ Señor Mustachio asked.

  The man behind him with the shotgun slowly clambered down and came to stand by his side, the weapon now held firmly in his hands.

  All right, sod it, Frankie had no choice. It was time to come clean.

  ‘Vaccaro,’ Frankie said. ‘Señor Vaccaro?’

  Señor Mustachio just glared. ‘What of him?’

  ‘I’ve come here to, well, to try and speak to him.’

  ‘You have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And yet you decided to break into his property?’

  ‘Because I didn’t think you’d let me in if I just waltzed up and bloody knocked.’

  ‘Waltzed?’ The man looked confused. ‘Like the dance?’

  Frankie tried again. ‘Because I know he’s an important man. Because . . .’ What was it Isabella had called him? ‘. . . because he’s influente.’ Frankie swallowed. ‘And because of her . . . the woman in the pictures . . .’ Frankie nodded at the twin with the buzzcut, who still had hold of one of them.

  He handed it over to Señor Mustachio, who put on a pair of reading glasses and slowly studied it. Frankie spotted a tiny flicker right there below his right eye, it was enough.

  ‘You know her . . .’

  ‘You will wait here.’

  ‘You do. Don’t you?’ Frankie took a half-step forward. Big mistake. Because the dogs were up and at him in a flash, fangs out, snarling.

  ‘I said wait.’ Señor Mustachio snapped something in Spanish at the nearest twin, who handed the leash of his dog over to his brother, before quickly gathering up the rest of the photos and stuffing them back into his bag.

  Señor Mustachio took it and got into the Jeep, screeching it round and racing it back the way it had come. The guy with the shotgun stayed put.

  ‘Yippee-kay-yay, motherfucker,’ said the twin, kneeling on the ground beside his dog and slipping what looked like a piece of salami gently in between its glistening white teeth.

  The next ten minutes didn’t exactly fly by. More like limped. Sweat bled down Frankie’s neck as the sun beat down. His companions kept up their insane quotations competition. It might not have exactly been improving Frankie’s Spanish, but if they kept this up much longer at least he’d be fluent in Chuck Norris.

  Frankie tried to stay focused. Did the bloke heading back to the house mean Vaccaro was there?

  Then the pickup truck sped down the gravel path faster than before. Had his hunch been right? That his mum and this family really were somehow linked after all? That his luck had finally changed?

  It took less than a second after Señor Mustachio got back out for Frankie to suss that the only change in his luck was its going from bad to worse.

  Señor Mustachio started shouting at the others in Spanish. Jesus. Frankie felt his guts turn to ice. It was five against one, er, against eight, if you were counting the dogs. Which he was because already they were up and yelping for his blood again. Frankie’s eyes flicked around, searching for a way out, because already he knew it – he was going to have to run.

  Señor Mustachio marched up level with the three handlers. He was holding Frankie’s phone and dropped it on the ground and stamped it into pieces with his heel. Reaching inside his jacket pocket, he pulled out a pistol and pointed it right between Frankie’s eyes.

  ‘Señor Vaccaro wishes to send you a message . . .’

  Frankie said nothing.

  ‘If you’re lucky enough to leave this property in one piece, then you are to tell whoever sent you . . .’

  Whoever sent him? ‘But wait –’ Frankie started to protest.

  ‘. . . that the next person they send will end up with a bullet in their brain . . . Now run, asshole,’ he said. ‘I will give you a twenty-second head start. And then I release the dogs.’

  33

  The cabby wasn’t nearly so talkative on the way back into Palma. Picking bits of gravel out of your face whilst dressed in a ripped suit and with only one shoe on will have that effect on a man.

  What was it he’d asked Frankie on the way out here from the airport? If he was a film star or a famous DJ. Didn’t look like either one was the first question on his mind now as he kept glancing at Frankie in the rear-view mirror. More like – what the hell happened to him to turn him into this vagrant? Just as well Frankie had given him his fare earlier, because no way would he have stopped for him now.

  As well as his bag, which the boss man back there, Señor Mustachio, had nicked, Frankie had lost his plane ticket, just as he’d been scrambling over the gates at the end of that driveway, with those hounds from hell all snapping at his heels. His bundle of cash had fallen out of his pocket during his flight, and was probably halfway through being turned into Doberman shit by now.

  At least he still had his passport, thank God, here in what was left of his other jacket pocket. Not that it was going to do him much good, but, still, he had another eight hours before his flight back to Ibiza and, on a day like today, who knew what might turn up? But first he’d got something else to do.

  The cabby switched lanes, following the sign for the airport.

  ‘No, mate,’ said Frankie, unfolding the one crumpled photo he still had left of his mother, along with the postcard. ‘Change of plan. I want you to drop me off in Palma Old Town at a little Italian restaurant there by the name of Al Duomo.’

  *

  ‘Frankie?’

  ‘Er, yeah. Surprise, surprise.’ He even said it in a Cilla Black kind of a way. Didn’t exactly help clarify matters much, it had to be said.

  ‘Oh, my God. What happened?’

  ‘A long story.’

  ‘But your face . . . your clothes . . . your shoe . . .’ She reached out and touched his black eye gently with her fingertips. ‘Quick. Come in. Let me clean you up.’

  The restaurant was calm inside and deliciously cool. Frankie sank down at the table Isabella ushered him to in a nice dark corner. It was out of view of the few people left over from the lunchtime service, two large families chatting merrily away over coffees, and a smaller group, an old lady and a much younger woman, probably her granddaughter, he guessed. A good thing too that they couldn’t see him, the state he was in. He’d probably put them right off their food. Christ, he could fall asleep on a pin. Every muscle in his body ached.

  ‘Here,’ Isabella said, sitting down beside him. She’d brought a bowl of warm water and a sponge and set about cleaning him up. ‘Who did this to you?’

  He was still in two minds about whether to tell her the truth. S
hould he let on about his little trip to visit Señor Vaccaro and the only reason he’d known where to go looking for him was because of her? It would be easier not to tell her anything, to stop digging into the Vaccaros and get the hell out of here instead. Perhaps he could just bullshit and tell her he’d been mugged and needed to borrow enough money to make his way back to Ibiza and then get on with the rest of his life.

  Because, yeah, that might be safer for them both. But he couldn’t get Señor Mustachio’s expression out of his mind. What if he really had recognized his mother? What if Frankie really was that close to finding out what had happened to her? Could he really turn back now?

  ‘Your boss?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Señor Vaccaro?’

  ‘He . . . he hurt you like this?’

  Boom. So there it was. An easy possibility, right?

  ‘No, or not personally,’ he said. ‘He ordered it . . . told his people to do it. Another guy who works for him . . . a short, squat man with a big moustache . . .’

  ‘Giovanni.’

  ‘That’s his name?’

  ‘Yes . . . he’s his . . . I don’t know how you say this . . . deputy?’

  ‘Consigliere. Yeah, that’s what I figured too.’

  The last of the other two families got up and left, leaving Frankie and Isabella the only ones in the restaurant, apart from the old lady and her friend.

  ‘But how? Where did this happen? What are you even doing back here on the island?’

  He explained to her, as quickly and clearly as he could. About how he’d suddenly – he spared her the drunken, narcotic details – made the connection between the name of the man who owned this restaurant and the name of the family his mother had used to stay with in Sicily before she’d got married.

  ‘My God. I had not yet had a chance to show him the photo you gave me. But this is what you think? That she and Señor Vaccaro are related? That you are related to him too?’